#56: The Galileo Seven
In case you forgot: A shuttle craft with Scott, McCoy, and Spock (and some other boring Enterprise crewmen) crashes on Taurus II. They try to figure how to survive and get off the planet while the Enterprise blindly gropes about for them in space. There's an obnoxious High Commissioner Ferris (Bueller? Bueller?) barking down Kirk's back the whole time.
This episode has a lot going for it, and I struggled a bit with where I should rank it. Part of the story—the stranded vessel unable to contact its blind mothership—is solid adventure/science-fiction fare. We also have some aliens for once that are neither more-or-less people nor ~beings of pure energy~: they're 10 foot tall, super primitive ape creatures. (I guess that makes them more-or-less people, but it's more of a stretch than you usually see in embodied TOS aliens.)
But it's not without its flaws, obviously. You might as well have titled this episode "Why Spock Isn't the Captain and Why Everyone on the Enterprise Deserves to Die." The former part of that title, at least, seems to be the purpose behind this episode. Unfortunately, while it's important (or at least interesting) to establish why someone as capable as Spock isn't the captain of his own ship, "The Galileo Seven" does that at the cost of making you hate everyone else and their stupidity. Since when did anyone on the Enterprise ever care about burying their dead? Why can't Spock just nerve pinch Mr. Broma to get him to shut up, already?
In the end, the bad outweighs the good, for me. There are a lot of "just okay" episodes of TOS that I don't remember well and don't mind rewatching (even if I don't enjoy rewatching them, either). But when I plowed through TOS again to write this, I definitely remembered this episode by title—and not fondly.
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