The Changeling

Yeah, lots of plot holes and cheesy special effects but this is one of my favorites, and it's entirely due to Shatner's restrained (for once) performance. He actually seems to be acting and responding to the crew (mainly Spock) like a normal human being without any of his typical over- the-top hamming it up. Well, with the exception of the ending where, sadly, the writers reverted back to the cutesy crap. I can't really blame Shatner for that, either. When given decent dialog in the rest of show, The Shat did alright in this one, making it one of the most watchable episodes.

And a shout-out to user verbusen for noticing Lt. Leslie in his review. After rewatching these episodes many times, you start picking up the small things in the background, and Lt. Leslie at the helm next to Sulu, as well as wearing a gold tunic (as opposed to his typical red) is unusual. What isn't unusual, of course, is that Leslie has no lines. It's worth noting that the actor who played Leslie, Eddie Paskey, made a point of actually reading the scripts beforehand so he knew when an anonymous red-shirt was going to get offed, and made a point of making himself scarce during those red-shirt casting calls.

I know a writer takes his characters, their history, and then manufactures some kind of threat. It's sort of sitcom without the com. In this episode, a wandering probe that was to be used for benevolent purposes has collided with another device and its mission has changed. It is called "Nomad" because it travels from place to place. Unfortunately, it destroys anything with imperfections; that includes even modest things. In a ridiculous move, it finds Uhura to be imperfect and wipes her memory clean. She is put back in kindergarten. Does anyone see how stupid this is? Even if she is retrained, she has no experiences or data to do her job. Others are killed when they confront the thing. The only salvation is that the thing has mistaken Kirk for the creator of the device. It moves around the ship like an efficiency expert in the sixties (although the worst that could happen then was you got fired). As time goes along, the probe starts to put two and two together and Kirk's control of it begins to wane. Spock is able to figure out its skewed mission by doing the old mind meld. So what to do. The conclusion has to do with logic. Spock's kind of logic.

"This episode obviously inspired the plot of the first Star Trek Movie where the mysterious and immensely powerful and dangerously destructive evil force is referred to as "V-ger" by the kidnapped and subsequently returned (and reprogrammed) female crewperson of the new and improved Enterprise."

Start Trek: The Motion Picture wasn't simply "inspired"by the Changeling. Roddenberry pretty much took the plot and characters of "The Changeling" tried to file the serial numbers off, and expand it into a feature film without any payment to the author of this script. Said author however wasn't sleeping, nor dead, and sued him over the attempted theft. You can pretty much do a direct mapping of the plot and characters from this episode to that film with Lt. Ilia taking the place of Uhura, but pretty much everything else lifted intact.

Classic Trek aficionados often pan the Third Season of Classic Trek as being the worst of the worst, and specifically they assign "Spock's Brain" as being the absolute worst Star Trek episode ever.

I disagree. I label "The Changeling" as the worst, and not because it was used as the basis for the first Star Trek feature film back in the late 70s.

No.

I just can't stand the execution of this story. The story concept is intriguing enough, but the interpersonal interaction with the mechanical antagonist and Enterprise crew, to me at least, is nearly laughable. If I'm watching classic Trek, and this thing happens to be on the DVD set I've got in the player, then I may keep it on in the background, but it's really painful to watch at times.

To me this episode is the poster boy for people to point at who think Star Trek is stupid. And you know what? I'd be hard pressed to deny them that claim after watching this particular installment.

I just don't know what went wrong here. For all the money that they had to spend on this episode, was this really the best the creative team could come up with? One is reminded of "Red Dwarf's" props department, and the Holly-Hop drive prop. Yeah, it's that bad.

Shatner and gang give us Kirk and crew to outwit a schizophrenic robot. It's a little cliché in that regard, which just adds another nail in the coffin for this episode, but it's not really the defining moment as some may think.

Not a worthy installment of the franchise, if somewhat interesting. Good acting (save for M-5), poor production values (again, M-5), and a lack of vision on how to properly present the story.

Take it for what it's worth.

Under attack from an old satellite, when it's on board demonstrates great insight, but the hybrid is mad, a crazy nomad, and it puts up a hell of a fight.

A bucket from the past that has evolved into a super thinking machine jeopardises the Enterprise and potentially all those back on planet Earth.