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| A shrunken Kirk struggles with his communicator. |
The Enterprise receives an outdated radio signal with only one decipherable word: "Terratin." They follow the message to its origin source - a planet with substantial volcanic activity, whose surface is dotted with crystals and satellite dishes. No sooner have they entered the planet's orbit than the ship is hit by a strange beam that affects all organic matter. The crew is now shrinking steadily - and if something isn't done soon, they will soon become too small to retain control of the Enterprise!
CHARACTERS
Not much of interest here, though it's worth noting that the crew largely sympathizes with the Terratin people once they learn why they affected the Enterprise. Kirk gets a nicely ruthless bit in which he locks the ship's phasers on the Terratin city and threatens to destroy them if they don't respond. Otherwise, the characters are just pushing the plot through its somewhat labored paces.
THOUGHTS
There's a lot of Idiot Plotting in this installment. One example: Kirk discovers that using the transporter returns him to normal size. So he immediately orders all crew members to go to the transporter room... No, wait. He tromps around the ship for several minutes, threatens the Terratins (who have somehow kidnapped his bridge crew in the meantime), reaches an agreement with them, and then bothers returning his crew to normal size. On top of all that, it's mentioned right before he beams down that the transporter might restore Kirk to normal size. Which means the crew knew the transporter was a possible solution... and chose not to use it!
In fact, nothing is actually attempted in terms of solving the shrinking problem. They stand around and debate the situation, with Spock giving them a running countdown until they'll be unable to use the ship's controls. There's a bit of forced suspense with Nurse Chapel falling into a fish tank(!), before Kirk finally beams down. And outside of that very manufactured situation, the characters never even seem terribly concerned about their predicament.
Which is an incredibly pointless predicament, by the way. The ending reveals that the shrink ray was the Terratins' way of shrinking the Enterprise crew down to size so that they could communicate with them. We discover this when... a normal-sized Kirk hails the Terratin city and gets a response, allowing Kirk and the Terratins directly communicate with each other. I guess just contacting the Enterprise in the first place (something they're clearly capable of doing) would have been too much trouble.
Alternately padded and rushed, with so much Idiot Plotting that Cletus could probably write a better script, The Terratin Incident is another stinker in a series that has had a few too many of these already. It's clear that when the animated series is good, it's very good... but that a disappointingly large portion of its scripts were dashed off in a hurry to boldly fill airtime where no airtime had been filled before.
Rating: 2/10.
Previous Episode: Mudd's Passion
Next Episode: The Time Trap
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It's not a great plot, but it DOES make good use of the animated form to show us things that would have been impossible to show (or too expensive to show) in a live-action format. Seeing Spock stand on the Science console, using his entire hand to push a single button, seeing Sulu climbing a ladder to the helm console, seeing Kirk use an extension to trigger the electric eye that opens the doors to the turbolift -- all of those things make this episode worth the 20 minutes it takes to watch. It's not a fabulous episode, true, but I'd give it higher than a 2/10 just for the novelty of it all.
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