I've been trudging through season 3, ugh, and one particular moment had me shocked. Kirk orders two security guards down to the planet. He directs the transporter chief to beam them down and to retrieve the other security guards. What ends up happening is that the two guys were beamed into open space because the ship had left orbit. Kirk neglects a) confirming they are still in orbit, b) confirming the beaming coordinates, c) preparing the two guys on the planet for transport and d) safeguarding the lives of his crew (by directly killing two of them). With negligence like that, I can't fault McCoy, Pulaski and Barclay for hating the transporter.
Because those rotten kids made them think the planet was there. Those kids had mental powers rivaling Talosians apparently, thanks to Gorgan.
^Well, sure, that was the intention, but it doesn't hold up to analysis. For one thing, the transporter itself should have built-in sensors that would've alerted the operator if the target location was unsafe -- or not there anymore. Not to mention that Kirk should've called down to get a report from the team on the surface before beaming another team in blind.
Worse still, at the end of the episode THEY NEVER GO BACK FOR THE OTHER 2 GUARDS! They just go to another destination to drop off the kids. Terrible writing.
Let's just hope they didn't take shelter in the anxiety-producing cave that spooked Kirk. I can just picture the two guards clutching at each other whining, "It's going to be alright, It's going to be alright!"
And Sulu must have had a dozen things telling him there were no razor-sharp daggers in his path - not to mention a dozen alarms sounding that the ship had engaged warp drive when Sulu first leaves orbit. But that was the power of the children - to make people ignore the facts of the matter in favor of a fantasy. Let's recap the powers of the kids. We know explicitly that display screens don't show the truth (the planet stays in view, the daggers appear). We know that people don't hear what is being said (the kids conspire unnoticed). We know that people don't think straight (Uhura loses her wits). In light of this, it would be pretty weird for Kirk to be able to immediately notice that there's no planet down there... What's more mysterious is that Spock eventually figures out that the planet has disappeared! But the monster made the children take the ship to a distant location, not any of the "closer stations" it indicated would have been Kirk's preferred alternatives. Presumably, then, Triacus would not be the closest world to the starship when Kirk releases his ship from the clutches of the beast. Surely it would make more sense to drop off the kids first, then go to Triacus, than to go to Triacus with the kids and then double back to drop them off! Would the effect still linger there now that the beast had hitched a ride on the starship? Timo Saloniemi
The original two guards are Leslie and Lemli, and they are most certainly back on the ship later in the episode.
Excellent scene! Does Spock do some kind of telepathic thing to snap Kirk out of it, or is Kirk's own awesomeness just too powerful against the Gorgon's nasty spell?
Having watched Spock's Brain and this a couple days apart, I have to agree with you. Spock's Brain is shallow fluff. ATCSL is horrible on every level. ATCSL and The Way to Eden are way worse than Spock's Brain, IMO.
For the longest time, as far back as I can remember, Plato's Stepchildren was my least favorite episode, the absolute bottom of the barrel as far as I was concerned. This summer, I've been re-watching the entire series with my newly-hooked stepson (thanks, JJ Abrams!). Plato's has been officially replaced by And The Children Shall Lead, which seems to have no redeeming factors whatsoever. Plato's at least has Michael Dunn.
The real negligence in this episode happened off-camera. The shame of it is there's actually a decent story buried in this and one that could really have creeped people out if it had been done competently.
For me, the main points of interest in ATCSL are in the guest casting of the children, notably Pamelyn Ferdin and Brian Tochi. The two of them would later co-star in Space Academy from Filmation Associates, the producers of TAS. Tochi would go on to appear in TNG, as well as voicing Leonardo in the Ninja Turtles movies. Ferdin was the voice of Lucy in several of the Peanuts TV specials.
Michael Dunn was a wonderful actor who was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor only 2 or 3 years earlier. And the Children Shall Lead instead got a nationally famous attorney who usually played himself on screen as the guest star. He also managed to get his son on the show as one of the kids.