TOS S01E24 – This Side of Paradise
Dir. Ralph Senensky, Wri. D.C. Fontana & Jerry Sohl
The Summary: The Enterprise crew lands on a planet that seems to make everyone passive and calm, with interesting side effects on the crew members.
The Good: The episode starts off with a well-executed tone of melancholy, and even I must admit that the idea of Spock having a woman in his past is an interesting one. Bones gets very Southern in this one. Like very Southern, like strolling around sippin’ juleps and calling the captain ‘Jimmy Boy’ Southern. This may not be in the ‘good’ category for all viewers. Kirk and Spock get some very fun best buddies time. This episode did make me laugh out loud quite a few times (the plant, um, ‘spores’, Spock in a tree), but not for the reasons that the episode wanted me to. Jill Ireland as Leila does the very best she can with the incredibly little she’s given to work with.
The Bad: If I’m being completely honest, pretty much everything else. As opposed to the previous episode, we get some of Kirk’s dumbest, least substantive monologuing in this one, and the episode’s only solution for every problem is just to have the captain get ANGRIER about every single event that happens. The episode has at best 20 minutes of actual content that is painfully stretched to the full 55 minute runtime. More significant than any of those problems, though, is that this episode is just dumb. I know that’s lazy criticism, but it’s so painfully, horribly dumb at every single opportunity. Every plot twist, every development, the motivations in any given scene, all dumber than a bag of hammers. I am in absolute shock that this was written by the usually pretty great D.C. Fontana. It has absolutely none of the creativity and wit that she often brought to her teleplays. Also, just to add a little distasteful cherry on the top, Kirk solves the episode through the power of racism, which just doesn’t feel much like a win.
The Review: If the negatives above didn’t give it away, this isn’t my favorite episode of TOS, not by a country mile (as Bones would probably drawl in this episode). The idea has a lot of potential, and the characters have been around long enough that the idea of abandoning their inhibitions has some merit, but the execution is just terrible throughout. The characters spend huge swaths of the episode just beaming back and forth, and a half dozen pointless long shots are included just to pad the runtime. The whole thing revolves around Spock’s narrative, and it’s just not interesting. The dramatic heart of the episode just made me laugh derisively. I’m fully aware that this is supposed to be one of the lighter more throwaway episodes of the series, but I demand more from my fluffy Trek (Give me “The Naked Time” or “Shore Leave” over this junk any day). This episode is bizarrely (to me) beloved among Trek fans, often being named in best of lists and receiving uniformly high marks, but I just don’t get it. It’s repetitive and feels like a waste of my time. It has a lot of ideas and even some ambition, but the execution just falls entirely flat for me. The only joy that the episode gives me is DeForest Kelley smarming around as a hard-drinking, hard-punching Southern stereotype, and that’s only because I love the character so much. This one is a hard pass for me.
The Score: 
