The actress playing the sick, persnickety ambassador happens to be the daughter from a little show called Father Knows Best. My sisters and I were not allowed to watch that show because in ONE episode she decided she wanted to be an engineer and wear overalls and get grease smeared on her face hanging out with the boys; but, by the end of the episode, she decided it’s better to wear dresses and make-up and go on dates with boys.
This episode of Star Trek isn’t much different.
Let’s start with the disembodied alien entity (while skipping over the fact that you can’t be disembodied if you never had a body in the first place … uh … oops). Before they got the translator working I knew it would somehow be a female and — lo and behold — the translators are designed to pick up on psychosexual indicators. Ruh-roh. Stranded astronaut dude has been letting a woman inside him. Whew. Let that sit in your brainpan for a bit.
Lady Ambassador — while dying because the entity won’t heal the woman she sees as being competition — says she envies the entity for finding such a perfect love and how she regrets setting love aside for her career. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s Father Knows freaking Best all over. Ugh.
Happy ending? Why don’t I hint at that with another William Congreve quote for the month:
Nothing but you can lay hold of my mind, and that can lay hold of nothing but you.