I'd never considered "plato's stepchildren" to be a comedy.
It's not a comedy... no, I meant "like a parody". Face value, there are some serious elements to this. What will these aliens do to the crew? Will someone be killed? The episode NEVER trumped up enough tension to make me believe that the crew was really in serious jeopardy. At the very least, they could have left McCoy and come back with reinforcements to rescue him. But in any case, so much of the interplay between the characters is not very believable. The only real touching part of this is Alexander... how he gets relief from his tormentors and ultimately given a ticket to freedom by Captain Kirk.
Can't take it seriously? It's a total, obvious, flat-out comedy episode!! Do you need a laugh track? As for "parody", I think you might mean "comedy", though I might be wrong. A "parody" has to be a parody OF something-- another show, say, or a show could even parody itself. (This ep does a little of that, as I said earlier.) "Parody" doesn't just mean a funny story. I've heard fans use the word that way. So, "I Mudd", a comedy with a hint of self-parody in it.
You obviously didn't catch my "tone". It's not a flat-out comedy, as there is no laugh-track. It's just plain silly, to the point where it's inherently comedic. It's a
parody of a
Star Trek episode. A parody of itself. Get it?
"Plato's Stepchildren" is a serious episode. The scenes that some people think are supposed to be funny are really meant to show Kirk and Spock being humiliated.
Well yes, there is genuine humiliation shown. And at some brief points, there is tension. When Kirk is being twisted into a terrible form, his teeth come lose and roll about in his mouth, then he falls back screaming in pain--THAT was serious. That's probably the only point where I felt that it was. The rest of it wasn't so. Everybody was so calm about what was going on, except for Alexander. It was in his face that you really saw dread in response to what he witnessed happening to the crew. Anyway, the premise became just so damned silly. Some concentrated hormones extracted from fruit, injected into your system and there you have it--psycho-kinetic abilities. I would have much preferred this episode if McCoy came up with a
neutralizer, that
took away the power from Parmen and the others. With their weak pathetic bodies, Kirk and crew would've been able to restrain them with ease.
I understand your point [regarding I, Mudd], but i think they could have done so in a less lame/trite way.
they were not forced to act like buffoons, they chose too.. sure, it worked, because the script said it did, but to me it just came across as silly and unbelievable in a bad way
Yes, I agree with you. I appreciate the idea of introducing illogical ideas to try tripping up the androids, but when you pantomime objects that do not exist? I'm sorry, but considering the android achievements, they'd have seen right through this and realized it was an attempt to undermine them. The crew could have conceived of better ways to trip them up... a clever "computing the value of Pi to the last digit" kind of problem. Spock was not well leveraged in this episode.
Anyway, that's if the episode were to be serious. Because of the outlandish "solution" taken, it was a farce, a comedy.
