Spock's Brain - I Haven't Had Any Complaints
This feels like a good place to start this blog. I've been watching Star Trek: The Original Series for a few months now, and it's been a good time for the most part. Season 1 was an uneven mess that occasionally had some excellent episodes. Season 2 was more consistently good, but the clunkers were even clunkier than before. I was told to expect season 3 to be The Bad One: lower budget, worse writing, and a general sense that the show is running on empty and shouldn't have been allowed to continue for this long.
At time of writing, I'm seven episodes into season 3 and have currently ranked all seven episodes between "good" and "great", with the exception of The Paradise Syndrome which is probably going to need its own post. I'm not going to prematurely declare season 3 to be Good, Actually but I have been surprised at how much my opinion has diverged from the general consensus here. I try to avoid influencing myself by reading people's takes before watching an episode, but everybody knows about Spock's Brain. Widely considered the worst episode of TOS, the season 3 premiere is a ridiculous disaster of an episode that set the tone for an unfortunate end to the run of a beloved show. What's it actually about?
The Enterprise encounter an incredibly advanced alien ship which beams aboard a mysterious woman. Without a word, she uses a device on her wrist to knock the entire crew unconscious. When they wake up, McCoy finds Spock in sick bay, having had his brain removed with in an operation that would've required unthinkable precision. His body is still alive for now, but without his powerful Vulcan brain to regulate its biological processes, he won't survive longer than a day.
Kirk follows the ship by its ion trail, or whatever. They reach a solar system containing three potential planets where the woman could be hiding, and after a bit of detective work, Kirk's intuition leads them to the one with the fewest signs of technological advancement by its inhabitants. They encounter some of the locals, a group of unga bunga cavemen who seem to live in fear of the women who reside underground.
Ultimately, their investigation takes them to an underground base inhabited by women wearing the aforementioned wrist devices. (Spock's body has joined them, via a remote control that allows them to send electrical impulses to his muscles to make him walk around. It just works!) Everyone on this planet is unga bunga primitive, but the facility is as advanced as the ship and seems entirely self-sufficient. It must run on one heck of an operating system!
After some talking and fighting, they learn that the ancient people who built the facility left behind a helmet that would temporarily blast their advanced knowledge into the brains of its wearers, giving them instructions to follow to keep the place operational. The shelter requires a powerful brain to run its computers, but a brain doesn't last forever, and Spock is the latest person to be brain-thefted by a woman temporarily powered by the ancient brain helmet. Of course!
Having found Spock's brain, McCoy puts on the helmet to learn how to do the surgery to put it back. It works, but his incompatible human brain doesn't retain the information for quite as long as those of the locals. Realizing the knowledge is slipping away mid-surgery, he prioritizes enabling Spock to speak so he can coach him through the rest of the operation. Vulcans sure do know a lot about their own brains!
Kirk reassures the leader of the women that they'll stick around for some time to help them establish a new way of life, surviving and developing on their own as nature intended. Spock starts talking at length about how fascinating this planet's history is, and McCoy quips, "I should have never reconnected his mouth!" to end the episode.
I don't want to discount the opinion of anyone who hates this episode, or even loves it in a "so-bad-it's-good" way, but to me this is classic Good Star Trek. It's not Great Star Trek, but it's fun! Yes, the premise is ridiculous. Yes, they say the word "brain" five thousand times. Yes, it's absurd to see Spock wearing a little metal hat and being operated by a remote control. I don't think any of those things are bad. As I've watched TOS and read people's takes online, I've seen a lot of people recoiling from anything they consider cheesy, and I think that's a big part of why I disagree with the people who call this a terrible episode. Again: I don't even think it's good because it's bad. It's not bad! It's good!
Star Trek has been making cheesy episodes since its first hypnosis-obsessed season. Almost every episode features Kirk being mentally altered in one way or another, seemingly as an excuse for William Shatner to act like a weird guy. Cheese and quality are not correlated, in my opinion. The Doomsday Machine, one of my favorite episodes so far, is Moby-Dick in space. It's cheesy as hell and its Ahab equivalent (whose actor later said that he thought the show was a comedy show for children) is hamming it up severely, and it's excellent. Compare that to Court Martial, an incredibly grave court procedural that takes itself way too seriously. It's played totally straight, and I absolutely hated every second of it. Shore Leave, on the other hand, is a very silly episode about the crew being psychically treated to a fanciful vacation on a dream planet, and I didn't like it one bit!
All of this is to say that in my subjective opinion, cheese needs to be decoupled from quality (almost) entirely. Without remote-controlled Spock, we wouldn't have the hilarious scene where Kirk, Scotty, and McCoy are beating up two guys while Spock's body sits perfectly still three feet away, staring blankly at nothing. It's not a bug, it's a feature. Embrace silliness. Watch Spock's Brain with an open mind (ha ha.) It's fun! Have fun! Live a little!
It's also fine if you hate it. It is a pretty stupid episode!