Another fantastic episode tonight. Don't get me wrong, space-nazis was great, but kinda gimmicky. This one was everything about Trek that's made the show such a blast to watch.
s02e22: "By Any Other Name"Because they're not tired yet of people crying wolf, the Enterprise heads to SOME PLANET in a distant system and get taken over by a dude named Rojan and his open-back-shirted space-megahottie, Kelinda. They both have belts that when they press a button paralyzes people or turns them into blocks of salt that they say is everything about them distilled (they can be restored). They're from the Andromeda galaxy and are all like, "We're totally badass and we're going to put you in prison now and we're going to take over your ship and go home to Andromeda because it sucks being trapped in these human forms and don't defy us, because we totally have the Foreigner belts from Aqua Teen Hunger Force and we'll fuck you way up."
When Kirk, Bones, Spock and the two redshirts try to mount an escape by having Spock mindmeld with Kelinda through the other side of a rock wall (which knocks Spock off his feet and causes him to say something like, "Space-brahs, we're way out of our league," Rojan (apparently the dude who played him just died last month) finds them an turns the two redshirts -- one of whom was a bit of a space-hottie herself, though more in that space-hottie-next-door kind of way than that totally-unobtainable-turn-you-into-a-block-of-salt kind of way -- into blocks of salt. Then he says that only when the blocks are crushed do they actually die. He brings back the one dude, but crushes the female crew member's salt block. Actually, it's a cuboctahedron, according to Wikipedia:
Anyway, Kirk gets over it on the quick but is still pretty pissed about the whole Andromedans-taking-over-the-ship thing, and devises a plan to get back aboard, even though they're modifying the Enterprise so it can make it to Andromeda faster. He tells Spock to go into a Vulcan ultra-chill mode OR SOMETHING that's never been mentioned until now, and Spock does, and Bones says he needs to get to sickbay, and they start to modify the ship, but it doesn't work, and then they're deciding what to do and they figure out that since these things are human now they can succumb to human temptations and distractions.
THIS IS WHERE IT GETS GOOD.
First, Bones starts shooting up another of the Andromedans with some drug to make him all pissy, saying it's a vitamin -- ethically awesome.
Meanwhile, Kirk decides he's gonna teach this open-back-shirted space-megahottie to love, and though at first she doesn't go for his space-game, she comes around.
Spock is given the task of making Rojan insecure and jealous of Kirk, which he does by informing Rojan of the cold hard logic behind the fact that because he can't control a woman (i.e. Kelinda, whom he's told to stay away from Kirk already), he's not a man. FUCKING AWESOME.
But best of all, Scotty's getting plastered with one of the other Andromedans. One of the best scenes of the series, hands down. They get all loaded up and Scotty's going through his whole stash, which he has hidden around his quarters, and then finally he takes out a dusty bottle of whiskey he's got stored in a chestplate armor on his desk (because why not), and talks to it, all slurring, and that finally puts the alien on his ass.
This was an attempt on Scotty's part to get the Foreigner belt away from the Andromedan, but when he finally takes it, he's too drunk to use it and he passes out before he can leave his quarters. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure they never go back to him again. Let him sleep it off, I guess.
Kirk and Kelinda are making out though and when Rojan comes in and finds them after Spock yet again questions his masculinity on the bridge, he and Kirk fight. No belts, all hand-to-hand stuff, and only when Kirk puts him in what I immediately came to think of as the "choke-hold of truth" (see above) does Rojan come around to the idea of maybe not conquering the entire Milky Way galaxy, but instead just making a deal with the Federation and finding an uninhabited planet to live on in humanoid form, like the one they left.
The episode ends with them turning the ship around to go back to the Milky Way -- the scene where they left the galaxy and went through an energy barrier was pretty cool -- and though we never actually hear that most of the crew, which has been turned into salt cuboctahedrons, have been restored, Bones smiles, so we can pretty much assume it's coming.
Fucking awesome episode. Seriously. This one had it all. Fucked up gender relations, Kirk teaching a space-hottie to love, meaningless crew deaths, melodrama, ridiculous plot points and two or three killer eyebrow raises from Spock. At this point, I can think of nothing else I could ask from it. "The City on the Edge of Forever" may have been high art, but "By Any Other Name" was everything that made this show great.
I mean, really. I can't wait until all the touch-screen shit in the remake movie looks as silly as this: