What Are Little Girls Made Of?

Circuits and wires, apparently. 

I enjoyed this episode, it was a fun romp with Kirk and Nurse Chapel fucking around with a mad scientist and his alien android in some technicolor styrofoam caves for an hour. 

This is a Kirk episode, but I appreciated that it was also a Nurse Chapel episode because I like Majel Barret. I love her as Lwaxana Troi, I find her voice as the computer soothing and pleasant, and as a representative of the franchise she’s much easier to take than Gene Roddenberry or Rick Berman (god forbid.) She’s not really as prominent in post-TOS media as the ‘core’ crew, even though so far she’s had as much screen time as Sulu or Uhura and frankly, more to do (as of this episode at least.) She doesn’t even get cast in the Kelvin reboots! 

Her wig has also markedly improved since The Naked Time. 

Moving on,the episode revolves around Chapel’s fiancee, who has apparently been incommunicado for twelve years on a desolate alien world (the sixth alien planet since The Cage and the sixth wasteland planet as well.) 

Kirk is a realist; he doesn’t think it’s likely that Korby is alive, but Chapel is hoping against hope that he is. Of course, I’m with Kirk; it’s been 12 years and he was on a desolate frozen rock! And then - plot twist! - he’s alive! He answers their hail!

Note the uncomfortable young man in the background

Once they beam down, it becomes obvious by the two redshirt deaths and the sneaky presence of the sinister alien Ruk (technically alien android) that things are not as they seem, and the mad scientist Dr. Korby does what mad scientists do best:

Create a doppelganger of Kirk. 

Haters gonna emulate

Much like the Talosians in The Cage, the natives of Exo-III retreated underground after a natural disaster, where they set up a bunch of machinery and worked on perfecting android servants, presumably in their own image.

A handsome race.

Korby is a dipshit with a plan that Dr. Soong would have slapped him for squandering his research and expertise on: Korby is going to infiltrate and take over the Federation with his androids and then do mind transfers to perfect humanity. 

SPOILER ALERT! I read that book, and it sucked. You don’t transfer consciousness, you make a copy of your brain and stick it in an android body. You remain alive in your body and a copy of you in an android body goes forward after they put your organic body down. It was pure fridge horror. Nothing proves this more than Kirk - entertaining though his verbal sparring with his robot doppelganger is, it is proof that the android is nothing more than a copy. Sorry Janet, your book is a failed thought experiment that Star Trek did much better.

The rest of the episode is incredibly predictable but remains engaging and entertaining with some TnA and good old action. 

Yep, this is the dildo rock episode.

So I’m just going to come out and say it: Andrea is fine. Like...dayyyyuuummm. 

She is a very attractive woman. To be honest, her get-up makes the Berman-era catsuits of 7 of 9 and T’Pol look positively modest. 

Now, the real question she brings up: did Dr. Korby make a sexbot? Even Nurse Chapel calls him out by referring to her as a ‘geisha.’ Hell, just look at Kirk and Ruk’s faces!

Kirk: did he make a sexbot?

Ruk: he made a sexbot.

The bad doctor then tries to handwave it with a flimsy excuse about there being no emotional bond, but a man knows a sexbot when he sees one; after all, I don’t have an emotional bond with my hand but I still...you know what, we’re moving on. 

Dr. Korby’s real discovery here is that spinning is a good trick. Kirk programs his doppelganger with some old-fashioned racism to tip off Spock, a fact that Spock brings up at the end of the episode. One does wonder though, did Spock consider that Kirk’s rapist side had split off again? Someone go make sure Yeoman Rand is okay!

So in the end, Kirk discovers that Korby mind-transferred over to a robot body in his final moments and Ruk is the last of a race of androids that murdered their creators because all androids are evil or broken except for Data, and Andrea kills herself and Dr. Korby so we can finish this episode quickly. 

By the way, 2 redshirt deaths for the first time since Joey committed suicide via butter knife in The Naked Time 2 episodes ago. 

Oh yeah, I forgot about the appealing food! It looks like fruit chunks in gravy (there’s some mango, some watermelon, some kiwi or something) or canned beef stew. Christine’s favorite! This is on the same level as round playing cards and 3D chess/checkers except the latter looks interesting and this looks like something I’d whip together in the toilet to fake sick out of work. 

One final note on Andrea: Andrea told Kirk she was not ‘programmed for him.’ If that’s not evidence that Korby built a sexbot, I don’t know what is. 

Rating: 4/5, Don’t Skip

This was an entertaining episode with plenty of visually interesting things going on and a good Nurse Chapel episode.