By 
Title: The Trouble With Tribbles
Airdate: 12/29/1967
Plot Summary
In The Trouble With Tribbles, the Enterprise responds to an emergency signal sent by a federation bureaucrat to protect grain at the Deep Space Station K7. Kirk is annoyed but Starfleet command is very concerned about this grain for Sherman’s planet, which is in dispute with the Klingons. Said Klingons show up to cause disruption, but no one is prepared for the tribbles, seemingly innocuous little fuzzy animals that proliferate all over the station. Kirk’s in deep trouble when they get into the grain, but is there a deeper mystery to all this?
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk is extraordinarily salty at Baris, regarding him as a petty little middle manager and useless bureaucrat. I’m totally here for it. His complete dismissal of this guy, and taking every opportunity to take shots at him, is hilarious.
Of course, the tribbles appear to get the better of Kirk but he comes around when he finds out they make great Klingon detectors.
Logical
Spock finds the soothing cooing the tribbles make have quite an influence on the more emotional crewmembers, pretending it has no effect on him which it clearly does.
He also is ready with the calculations on how many tribbles there are, as well as how long it will take Cyrano Jones to clean up all the tribbles on the station.
He’s Dead Jim
Bones seems to like the tribbles and is pretty amused by their sex drive.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu is not in this episode.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov is quite familiar with the Quadrotricale grain, much to Kirk’s annoyance as Kirk appears to be the only one who’s never heard of this wheat.
Chekov is also quite involved in the bar fight with the Klingons though he didn’t throw the first punch.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura is pretty much the reason this whole episode takes place, falling in love with the tribble and giving out the “pups” when it has them, setting off the whole chain of events.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty really doesn’t want to take shore leave and would rather read his tech manuals. After the last episode, I don’t blame him. He IS the one that throws the first punch in the bar fight, which gets him confined to quarters to happily read all the tech manuals he wants.
The reason he threw the first punch was the Klingons took shots at the Enterprise, after shredding Kirk up and down. Kirk is a little miffed by that.
Canon Maker
The Organian Peace Treaty is referenced, the first time I can think of a prior episode having repercussions on a future episode. Yes, I know, Mudd came back but this feels different.
Tribbles are introduced and they would make cameo appearances here and there throughout Trek. We also make canon they hate Klingons.
This also makes canon space stations. Prior to this, Starbases were usually just settlements on a planet. It’s also called Deep Space Station K7, I’d like to think that over the next 100 years, the vernacular just ended shortening the names to Deep Space 7 or Deep Space 9.
Canon Breaker
So in Deep Space 9, there is an episode that uses this episode as a framework for that one. The crew ends up going back in time and using advanced special effects of 1996 are inserted into this episode. To be fair, the effects really hold up to this day.
Anyway, they address the way Klingons look in this episode vs how they would look starting in the movies and afterward. So this is addressed in Enterprise but really doesn’t address how they changed back. And really, we’re talking over a couple of years since The Motion Picture takes place 2 years after the 5-year mission. It would’ve been better to simply just hand wave it as “they always looked like bumpy heads, we just couldn’t do that in the 1960’s.” But alas, they addressed it and now it’s still a whole thing that opens up more questions the more they try to fix it.
Also, Cyrano is selling the tribbles on the space station, and Uhura is willing to buy one. The fact that Cyrano gives her one doesn’t change the fact she was prepared to pay. So the economics of the future continues to be confusing as hell.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
No one dies except for thousands of tribbles. And most likely the ones beamed on the Klingon ship, which is supposed to be the more humane, funny way of dealing with the tribbles, but you just know they roasted them all.
Technobabble
So Scotty beamed all the tribbles on the Enterprise to the Klingon ship. I’m really curious on how he did that in such a small of amount of time. Can the transporter mass transport that many life forms all at once? Or are tribbles just easier? Maybe because they are smaller? It seems like given how many there were and assuming you can do one at a time, how he was able to do that doesn’t make sense but I’ll assume that the transporter can do shit like that in a pinch.
I Know That Guy:
The Trouble With Tribbles has a returning guest in William Campbell. Of course, he was the Squire of Gothos. He plays Koloth here and will return in Deep Space 9.
Stanley Adams will play Cyrano Jones and will return as the character in the animated series. (Sorry for forgetting Mudd did as well.) He was a prolific character actor and was in a ton of shows back in the day. Sadly, he committed suicide in 1977 due to chronic pain from an injury.
Whit Bissell played station manager Lury. He played in some classic monster movies such as I Was A Teenage Werewolf, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and Creature of the Black Lagoon.
Michael Pataki plays Korax, and the Klingon that picks the fight. He had a ton of guest parts in various shows throughout the ’70s and ’80s. He also returned to Trek in the first season of The Next Generation, making him one of the few actors to appear in both shows.
Guy Ramond plays the bartender. He’s not well known for anything in particular but was a pretty prolific guest star and worked consistently.
Willam Schallert plays the insufferable Baris. You really want to strangle this guy and Schallert deserves a ton of credit of making you just despise him. He was most known for shows in the late ’50s and early ’60s such as Death Valley Days and The Patty Duke Show. He does re-appear in a role in Deep Space Nine.
Finally Charlie Brill plays Arne Darvin, the Klingon disguised as a human. He would return to the role in Deep Space Nine’s Trials and Tribbleations. He played in Silk Stalkings as well as role in the big TV bomb Supertrain. You Gen’Xers may well remember how big a deal that show was and how big of a bomb it was. He also was continually working and is still around today.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
Baris: “You have taken this entire very important project far too lightly!”
Kirk: “On the contrary, sir. I think of this project as very important. It is you I take lightly.”
The Trouble With Tribbles may be on some people’s top 3 list of all TOS episodes, including myself. I absolutely love this episode.
First off, the mystery is pretty well thought out and the twist at the end is earned. They set up that the planet is in dispute and the Klingons showing up to cause problems for the federation to try to take it makes sense, especially since the Organians have pretty much put the kibosh on any fighting.
Secondly, the humor is never stupid but not above doing some physical humor with the tribbles. The site of Kirk getting buried in fuzzy little puffballs is great. He basically at that point of the story seems to be totally resigned and defeated to the absurdity of the moment and Shatner plays it beautifully.
But the real joy of The Trouble With Tribbles, especially for an old anti-bureaucracy-minded person like myself, is watching Kirk completely disrespect Baris. This guy is a button-pushing, arrogant middle manager who thinks too much of himself. Watching him find out his bootlicking sidekick is actually a Klingon spy is delicious.
I loved watching this side of Star Trek. Sometimes it’s not all glorious exploration, sometimes it’s just work. Sometimes it’s dealing with paperwork and untalented morons. It probably did more to flesh out daily life in Starfleet than any other episode in a lot of ways.
And it’s just flat-out rewatchable. I suppose I could nitpick a few things. Cyrano is a little grating to me at times but he’s supposed to be.
The bar fight is great. How Scotty keeps Chekov in .. well, check… only to lose it because the Enterprise was insulted is definitely in character for him. Kirk realizes that the fight wasn’t started because they were insulting him, but his ship, took him down a couple of notches as well. He looked like a kicked puppy at realizing what it takes to get his crew to throw a punch and it wasn’t him.
I just love The Trouble With Tribbles every time I watch it and I can understand why it ranks so highly. It’s not a big character-defining episode, it’s not a big epic universe-destroying episode; it’s a light, fun humorous episode that manages to elevate itself much higher than it probably set out to do.
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