Search
Cookie Usage Statistics Colour Key Sudden Death Monthly Poll Caption Comp eMail Author Shops
Ships Fleets Weaponry Species People Timelines Calculators Photo Galleries
Stations Design Lineage Size Charts Battles Science / Tech Temporal Styling Maps / Politics
Articles Reviews Lists Recreation Search Site Guide What's New Forum
Constitution Class Klingon Battlecruiser Klingon Bird of Prey Magazine Capacity NX Class Phase Cannon Sovereign Changes Star Trek : Discovery The Defiant The USS Franklin Borg History Money Monoculture Religion in Trek Technology Levels The Ba'Ku Land Grab Trills / Dax Abrams Speed! Antimatter Phasers Romulan Warp Drive The Holodeck Torpedo Yields Transwarp Theories Tri-cobalt device Warp in a Solar System Warp Speed Anomalies D'Deridex Class Weapons Galaxy Class Shields Galaxy Class Total Output Galaxy Class Weapon Output Genesis Weapon Power Husnock Weapons Intrepid Class Total Output TOS Type 2 Phaser Power Trilithium Torpedo Power Dangling Threads Enterprise Ramblings Eugenics War Dates Franz Joseph's Star Trek Here be Remans? Live fast... Write Badly Maps Materials Nemesis Script Random Musings Scaling Issues Size of the Federation Stardates The Ceti Alpha Conundrum The Size of Starfleet Trek XI Issues

The Lights of Zetar

ReviewImagesDatapointsQuotesMorals
TimelinePreviousNextYour View
Title :
The Lights of Zetar
Series :
Rating :
0
Overall Ep :
74
First Aired :
31 Jan 1969
Stardate :
5725.3
Director :
Year :
Writers :
Season Ep :
3 x 18
Main Cast :
Guest Cast :
YATI :
Do the Federation buy Romulan hardware? The control room on Memory Alpha has a Romulan control box on the desk.
Worst Moment :
The idea of Memory Alpha was silly, surely each federation outpost should contain this information. Have these people never heard of a backups.
Body Count :
Zero?
Factoid :
Barbara Babcock, who does the Zetar voices, also did the Tholian voices in "The Tholian Web".

Plotline

Enterprise crewman Mira Romain is posessed by an alien being, and the crew must struggle to free her. The Enterprise is transporting Lieutenant Mira Romaine to Memory Alpha, a planet which houses the Federation's central library, so that she can install some new equipment. Whilst en route the ship encounters a mysterious energy cloud, apparently not a natural phenomenon. The briefly penetrates the ship before leaving and moving on to engulf Memory Alpha. It kills the entire staff before moving off.

On the Enterprise it is discovered that Romaine has developed some form of mental link to the cloud as a result of her exposure when it boarded the ship. She predicts that it will return to the Enterprise, which it subsequently does. The cloud posesses Romaine; on investigating the crew find that it is a group of intelligent beings from the planet Zetar. The beings refuse to relinquish control of Romaine, but Scotty uses the ship's hyperbaric chamber to expose her to high pressures. The Zetarians, having become accustomed to the vacuum of space, are destroyed. After recovering Romaine proceeds on to Memory Alpha to restore the library to functional status.

Analysis

Not one of the better efforts, even by season three standards. The idea of Memory Alpha doesn't make a lot of sense - why put this library out in the middle of nowhere, rather than on Earth or Vulcan or some other Federation planet? I suppose the members might want a neutral site for the facility so it is not under the control of any one member (though the episode never says this), but we have seen many times that communications across interstellar distances can involve significant time lags in Trek. Do we really want a library that takes hours to give anybody an answer to any question by subspace radio, and which everybody has to take a ship to get to in person?

I'm no great fan of Romaine's character either. The sudden instant romantic relationship with Scotty seems forced - it's manufactured entirely to make us care more about her, but it's so awkward to have a relationship pop up like that that it never really involves us. I know in the days of TOS long term character developments were very much the exception rather than the rule, and more than a few instant romances came and went, but having such a thing as such a major element of the show just turned me off.

The Zetarians are also a little thin. They seem to be stereotypical bad guys, entirely unconcerned with what they do to others so long as they get what they want. It would have worked much better if the writers had sought some way to make they a bit more sympathetic.
© Graham & Ian Kennedy Page views : 36,464 Last updated : 12 Mar 2013