[TAS] Season 1, Episode 13: The Slaver Weapon
Rating: WATCH (For The Animated Series we use a simpler Watch or Skip rating)
First off, this episode is written by Larry Niven! That’s kinda cool. I’m gonna give Larry the benefit of the doubt and assume there were a lot of constraints on what he was allowed to do. Or maybe he just didn’t care much. Anyway, this episode is kinda scatter-shot, but still fun to watch, and there are some cool ideas wiggling around. It’s interesting to see an episode that is not only showcasing Spock, Sulu, and Uhura, but doesn’t even show any other Enterprise crew members. Also, I think I’m on record as being a sucker for the crew stumbling onto the remnants of an “ancient extinct alien race” in Star Trek, and this episode has that.
Read more at Memory Alpha
Notes:
Spock, Sulu and Uhura are bringing back a box that belongs to an ancient race that is now extinct, the Slavers.
The box glows when it’s near other Slaver boxes.
They go down to a planet to look for the other box, but are cornered by Space Cats that are… gigantic? No that’s just lazy production.
One of them is a sad telepathic cat. He’s actually never of much consequence. It seems really hard for him to read minds. At this point you may be suspecting that this episode is kinda crazy. It is!
The cats have some weird ideas about Vulcans (because they don’t eat meat) and human women. The aliens think these two groups of people are too docile? Or dumb? The philosophy of these Space Cats isn’t very well defined.
They open the box and find a picture that they think is of a Slaver. Don’t worry, that doesn’t come up again.
And a weapon!
They go outside to test it out. It can change shape & function when a lever is toggled, which is a pretty cool idea. The purpose of each mode is kind of mysterious.
One of the modes is a rocket!
But then Spock drop kicks them and swipes the weapon.
They find the super powerful setting… and are surprisingly casual about basically setting off an atom bomb.
The explosion knocks them over and they’re captured again.
One of the settings has a voice asking for the pass code
The space cat asks how to get to the super powerful setting and the voice tells him, but it looks different than when Sulu had it! That’s a clever thing to do, Larry!
The space cats go outside to test it and they blow themselves up like suckers.
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