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Star Trek TAS - Season 1 - Episode 14

Star Trek TAS - 1x14 - The Slaver Weapon

Originally Aired: 1973-12-15

Synopsis:
When a rare artifact of the Slaver culture, a time-stopping stasis box, is being delivered to Starbase 25, it registers that another one is nearby. [Blu-ray] [DVD]

My Rating - 0

Fan Rating Average - 5.52

Rate episode?

Rating: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
# Votes: 17 0 2 3 4 2 7 3 2 9 16

Problems
- The Kzinti's supposed history with Earth is hard to rationalize. See comments.

Factoids
- This episode is a candidate for my "Worst Episode of TAS Award."
- Anti gravity technology was supposedly discovered via a Slaver stasis box.
- Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy are remarkably absent from this episode.
- The Kzinti's uniforms were not originally supposed to be pink. However, the director of this episode was colorblind, and did not notice the problem until it was too late.

Remarkable Scenes
- Spock offending Uhura.

My Review
This episode is controversial in that it was intended as a crossover between two science fiction universes. The repercussions are extensive. A supposed four wars were fought between the Kzinti and Earth, the last of which was about 200 years ago, in the time of Earth's early space travel. None of this, of course, has been validated on any other series, indeed it's been blatantly contradicted with Star Trek VIII: First Contact, as well as Star Trek Enterprise. This episode's biggest problem is that the plot logic is terrible. Random facts and trivia are inserted into this episode where they don't belong. Also, the behavior of the slaver weapon seemed completely random; why would a race build such a weapon? Why would the Slavers place random technology in little time capsules and spread them across the galaxy? Standing alone, this episode does not deserve a zero, it deserves a 1. But the rest of Star Trek has decided to blatantly ignore the events of this episode and no attempt has been made to do any kind of rationalization. So this episode gets a de facto zero.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From Frankie on 2015-02-06 at 9:08pm:
    As ridiculous as this episode is, I still find it hard to dislike. It was an interesting change to see Spock, Sulu, and Uhura on a mission. But for me, the Kzinti were the absolute best part of the episode, especially with their revulsion to vegetarianism, which produced several cheesy yet memorable lines: "The human… he's too alien. He makes me taste yellow root crushed between flat teeth."

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