For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky - & McCoy Is No Longer Afraid to Die
Look, I love Dr. McCoy. I'm always happy when he gets to be the star of an episode. He's tied with Spock for my favorite character on the show. Do I buy that a woman would fall in love with him at first sight and immediately dedicate her entire life to him? No offense to DeForest Kelley, but I do not! For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky is an episode that really struggles against the format of Star Trek. The story is too big and too consequential to fit into a 50-minute episode that absolutely, categorically has to smash the reset button at the end.
The Enterprise is attacked by a barrage of missiles, which they easily destroy. They follow the trajectory back to what looks like an asteroid, but is actually a ship which is on track to crash into a highly-populated planet in a little over a year, killing millions. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down and discover an interior exterior designed to look like the surface of a planet complete with a solid dome masquerading as the sky. Their sensors detected no life forms, but they are immediately arrested by the humanoids who do, in fact, live here. By the end of the episode, none of these things are explained nor do they have any internal logic. I'm not mad! (I'm slightly mad.)
At some point in the middle of all of this, we learn that McCoy has diagnosed himself with an incurable illness that will kill him in roughly one year. Oh no!
The ship/planet is called Yonada, and its people are led by a priestess named Natira. She takes them to an altar that she calls the Oracle, who tortures them with electricity as some sort of welcoming ritual, I guess? They are given quarters and food and drink and a warm welcome and, for McCoy, a new girlfriend. According to Kirk, she has fallen in love with Bones at first sight. I genuinely thought I had missed something, but I went back and confirmed that she does not look at him for even a second before this.
A kooky old man comes in, says that he climbed the forbidden mountains on the planet's surface. He drops the episode title and is immediately tortured to death by a chip in his brain, establishing that the Oracle does not want the Yonadans to know that they're on a ship and not a planet. Natira enters to propose to McCoy (seriously) while Kirk and Spock take the opportunity to sneak back into the Oracle room, hoping to find a way to redirect the ship. They are captured and sentenced to death. McCoy accepts Natira's proposal, but requests that his friends be allowed to live if they return to their ship and leave Yonada. Natira agrees. If it feels like things are moving extremely quickly and a hundred things are happening at once: yes!
There is a pathetically truncated farewell scene between McCoy and his friends, as the three of them presumably know that he'll be back on the Enterprise and cured of his terminal illness within the hour. It would be cheap to try to make us feel emotional about this goodbye, so why even bother?
McCoy gets a torture chip of his own and marries Natira. She shows him how to open an obelisk containing their holy book of instructions for what to do when they reach the promised land. He calls Kirk to tell him that the book may show them how to correct the ship's course, but the torture chip starts torturing him. Kirk and Spock return to Yonada, seemingly having been gone for three minutes. Kirk tells Natira the truth about their ship, and she runs to the Oracle for reassurance that her world isn't a lie. It seals the four of them into its chamber and starts cranking up the heat to kill them all.
Kirk retrieves the book, Spock opens it to Chapter 1: Opening the Computer to Turn off the Heat and Fix the Flight Path, and opens the computer to turn off the heat and fix the flight path. McCoy has an unexplained change of heart and decides to continue traveling the galaxy with his friends, hoping to discover a cure for his disease. Spock sticks his head out from behind the computer and announces that the people who built this ship had a cure for the disease and shoved it in a folder behind the computer. Convenient! McCoy says goodbye to his wife of ten minutes.
Back on the Enterprise, McCoy cures his disease. Kirk promises that they will join Yonada at its destination when it arrives next year. We know that this will never happen.
I have a lot of problems with this story. I think I've made most of them clear already. The pacing is absurd, with a feature-length plot compressed into an episode of TV that can't possibly sell us on the critically important emotions McCoy is feeling. Natira's perspective is even more difficult to buy into. I can let my imagination do the heavy lifting and convince myself that McCoy is in crisis and wants to spend what little time he has left with a beautiful woman, even if he barely knows her. What I can't accept is that Natira is so immediately taken with him that she chooses to exercise her high priestess right to choose her spouse (hey, why is so much of this "McCoy's Paradise Syndrome"?) to marry this guy she just met. Even after he tells her about his terminal illness, she says that to spend a day, a week, a month, or a year with him would bring her happiness. It's a lovely sentiment that could have made for a great scene if I believed in their love on any level.
I don't want to bang on about plot holes any more than I already have, but I'll treat myself to one more because I think it's a fundamental problem with the logic of the entire story. They've encountered a ship being piloted by a computer on a collision course with a planet. Why are they so sure that the computer isn't going to land the ship on the planet when it arrives? When Spock gets to the computer in the end and corrects the route, did he also program in a landing routine that wasn't there before? All vehicles are on a collision course with their destinations if you assume that they won't stop when they get there. I expect this sort of thing from Kirk, but Spock has no excuse!
The ideas here aren't bad, but there are just too many of them to develop in ways that are interesting and make sense. I like the concept of a sentient computer that has developed a dangerous, violent ego after being treated as a god. I like the concept of a ship disguised as a planet whose passengers don't know the truth. I like the concept of a lady wanting to kiss McCoy and not Kirk for a change. I like the concept of an advanced civilization whose descendants have been so reliant on the computer running their world that they've forgotten who they are. That's why Spock's Brain was a good episode!
The one thing here that I absolutely can't accept in Star Trek as it was in 1968 is the terminal illness storyline. The weight and the inescapable finality of terminal illness has no place in a show with such minimal continuity. Not for a main character like McCoy. Introduce a beloved family member of someone from the crew and I'll feel sad when they die at the end of the episode. Even if I've never seen them before and was never going to see them again, their death can still mean something to the characters who mean something to me.
On second thought, I remember Operation – Annihilate! where Kirk found his brother Sam dead in the form of William Shatner in a fake mustache and forgot about it two minutes later. Maybe let's just stick to killing redshirts. Oh, shoot! There goes Leslie again!