Star Trek - The Original Series, Vol. 35 - Episodes 69 & 70: That Which Survives/ Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

Star Trek - The Original Series, Vol. 35 - Episodes 69 & 70: That Which Survives/ Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

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DVD Reviews of Star Trek - The Original Series, Vol. 35 - Episodes 69 & 70: That Which Survives/ Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

DVD Review: Sensitive Trek
Summary: 4 Stars

By now, any Trekker can tell you that "Let that be your last Battlefield" was a thinly veiled cautionary story about racial violence. Not playing obvious favorites between the two antagonists - the fugitive Lokei, and his pursuer, Bele (Frank Gorshin) - the script quickly boils down their anamosity to pure hate. The script tosses in some references - Lokei's people were once held a tier below Bele's, but received less than sincere aid as redress; also we'd sympathize with Lokei who was running - but soon blurs them to assure us that nothing really compensates for their shared hatred. In the end, Lokei and Bele return to their burned world - with the camera uncharacteristically bleeding in imagery of burned out cities.

In "That Which Survives", the landing party (this is classic Trek, man - there are no "away teams") beams down to a strangely undynamic world. Unfortunately, the planet is actually a spaceship with its own built-in security system - one capable of flinging the Enterprise across the sector and marooning the landing party. The system also takes the form of Losira (Lee Meriwether), a the last of the race of aliens who built the planet. Both the landing party and the crew back on the Enterprise piece together the clues to the nature of the artificial planet and the ghost image that can inflict a very real death on anybody it finds (by "disrupting" every cell of her victims with but a touch; I've seen this episode a million times and I still don't know what "cellular disruption" means, but I'm sure it's got to be pretty bad). Yeah, this is another one of those episodes about an ancient or otherwise high-powered computer that achieves sentience ("ultimate computer", "Changeling", "Return of the Archons", "For the World is Hollow") and the end is again a bit of comedown (Spock to the rescue with a phaser) but the script creates one of the series's more intriguing example of artificial intelligence - you keep thinking that she'll cry before she has to kill somebody. The real Losira, the crew decides, must have been some woman. Luckily in recreating her, the computer copied her too well. (The same concept appears in the first Trek movie). Watch this trek, but make sure ypu've got something light and funny to back it up with Harry Mud or "A Piece of the Action".