I decided to watch and review “The Apple” after it was mentioned as an episode chock-full of red shirt deaths on a super-fun episode of All Things Trek featuring the creators of The Red Shirt Diaries.
“The Apple” does not have a complicated plot, so I won’t spend a lot of time on that. Basically:
- Away team beams down to Eden-esque planet, and makes sure you know how Eden-esque it is. Chekov is excited to spend time with his gf, Yeoman Martha Landon
- Four redshirts die after being attacked by trick flowers and comically exploding rocks.
- Away team meets “primitive” people festooned in plastic but non-attacking flowers and redface makeup, finds they are worshipping papier mache high school art project monster named Vaal
- Away team finds Vaal is a computer that is keeping the people on the planet immortal but also forbidding them from love/sex
- Away team + Enterprise kill Vaal because Kirk thinks people should not live in ignorance, despite Spock’s concerns about the Prime Directive
- Kirk and McCoy joke that Spock kinda looks like Satan.
- The End
Some parts of “The Apple” work better than others. Let’s start with the others.
Awesome: “Really? I mean, as a union activist, I’m all for giving people the right to refuse unsafe work, but it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense in Starfleet.”
