Some of the episodes from the original Star Trek
were memorable. A few even hit it out of
the park. They didn’t have a huge
budget, but the writing and acting were pretty decent. There was enough of a fan base to spawn a
sizeable franchise. Unfortunately, most
of the episodes weren’t that great.
Those like The Deadly Years were actually pretty thin.
A landing party beams down to a colony site only to
find everyone dead of old age. This
includes people who were in their twenties.
Checkov is the one who initially makes the horrifying discovery. When they beam back up, everyone in the
landing party starts to age rapidly…except Checkov.
It’s not passed on to other crew members, which is
good. The bad news is that those
affected don’t have long to live. If
McCoy, in his elderly state, can’t find a cure, that’s it.
To make matters worse, the ship is transporting
Commodore Stocker to his new post.
Stocker is one in a long line of powerful people who are ust itching to
get somewhere. Stocker uses Kirk’s
condition to commandeer the vessel and take it through The Neutral Zone.
When the Romulans catch them, they take this as an
act of war and attack the Enterprise.
It’s fortunate that McCoy is able to save the day and allow Kirk to
return to work immediately.
I could see this being a way of showcasing the
hardships that elderly people have.
Instead, it’s almost a way of poking fun of those crotchety
geezers. (Kirk is the only one to have
forgetfulness, for instance.) I’m
surprised that they didn’t have some kids on the bridge so that someone could
yell, “Get off my lawn!”
Also, I’ve noticed that the names of planets seem to
be a Greek letter, some word from Latin and a number. Here, it’s Gamma Hydra IV. I could just see some chart in the writers’
room for generating names. (Take the
first letter of your pet’s name and use the corresponding Greek letter…)
The episode comes off as unnecessarily campy. I wonder if there was some rush to get an
episode produced. It looks like the kind
of script that either wasn’t written well enough or went through way too many
rewrites. I don’t know that there would
be an ideal way to handle old age except maybe to tone it down a little.
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