Star Trek episode "The Galileo Seven"

"The Galileo Seven"

Season 1, episode 16.

This is one of those "Spock character" episodes.

There is a Commissioner Ferris trying to get the Enterprise to rendezvous with another ship to get medicine for a plague to some colony. The rendezvous is five days away and it only takes three days to get there, so Kirk, in all his infinite wisdom, decides to play for a couple of days and send a scientific crew of seven to investigate a quasar.

And, of course!, they get lost in space.

There is, of course!, some kind of ion storm (a phrase that writers use to say, "OK, we need a plot complication that nobody can define! How about an ion storm!") that makes all the sensors on the Enterprise useless.

So the shuttle crashes on type-M planet no less, and Spock is in command.

You just love watching this one to see Kirk squirm, knowing he made a really stupid mistake.

Mr. Boma, who we never see again in Star Trek, yells at Spock for his lack of emotion, driving home the Spock characterization of this episode.

Mr. Latimer gets speared to death by the giant caveman-like indigenous inhabitants of the planet and Mr. Gaetano gets his phaser knocked from his hand by a thrown rock and then gets killed by the creature. (Yet it is amazing that all the other "thrown" spears look like they were thrown by wusses and wouldn't stick to the side of a barn.)

Because of the lack of scanners on the Enterprise, Kirk launches another shuttlecraft, the Columbus, to investigate the planet. I guess he's not worried about losing another shuttle.

At one point, Scotty says that in order to achieve orbit (he is with Spock on the planet in the downed shuttle), they'd have to lighten the load by 500 pounds. Spock says, "The weight of three grown men." Boma yells, "Who is to choose?" And I am sitting here wondering why they couldn't come back for a few men, but this was before the creatures were out there killing indiscriminately. Yet I am also wondering how ill-equipped a shuttlecraft must be. Wouldn't there be emergency supplies, phasers, force field generators, in case of accident?

Another ensign of a search party, O'Neil, whom we do not ever see, is reported speared to death. How does a Starfeet landing party fall to cave-people with spears?

Yet, surprisingly, this is an entertaining episode.