By 
Title: The Gamesters of Triskelion
Airdate: 1/05/1968
Plot Summary
In The Gamesters Of Triskelion Kirk, Uhura, and Chekov get swiped away from the transporter pads to be slaves in a gladiatorial contest. Kirk fights for not only his freedom, but the freedom of all of those that have been taken by these gamesters.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk will not give up on trying to free himself and his crew. One way he shows how good he is as a captain is in how well he trains his crew. With just a simple look, Uhura, Chekov and Kirk make their escape. It didn’t go well, but I appreciate how quickly they were all on the same page.
Kirk also begins smooching Shahna pretty quickly and who can blame him? When he decks her, it’s pretty hilarious. Once again, the crew is on the same page for them to all escape by getting rid of their guards too. Once again, all for naught.
Logical
Spock decides to go for the ion trail against the opinions of Scotty and Bones. He asserts command and guilts Scotty and Bones into continuing the search and getting them going a bit faster.
He’s Dead Jim
Bones is not at all confident in Spock’s theory where the crew ended up and once again turns out to be wrong.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu is not in this episode.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov is not comfortable with his husky-voiced drillthrall. She seems quite taken with him though.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura is nearly raped by her thrall but thankfully that isn’t really shown. She also holds her own in a fight.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty does everything he can to figure out that nothing is wrong with the transporter and is able to get the Enterprise up to Warp 7 with a little coaxing.
Canon Maker
Quatloos are a method of currency that nerds will use for decades to show their Trek bonafides. Thank goodness that finally went out of style.
Canon Breaker
I do wonder if the federation ever came back to check on these people, and make sure the providers were holding up their end of the bargain. Then again, the providers were clearly powerful enough that maybe they couldn’t.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
No one dies.
Technobabble
Even the provider’s transporters leave a trail that can be tracked, though it wasn’t easy to find it.
I Know That Guy:
Angelique Pettyjohn plays Shahna in a fabulous outfit. Pettyjohn did some mainstream movies, including Repo Man for you GenX’ers. She also did some decidedly less mainstream movies which I’m sure some of you are readying some screenshots for the comment sections. Please don’t.
Joseph Ruskin plays the Master Thrall, Galt. He did a lot of work in The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Later he was in The Magnificent Seven, Prizzi’s Honor, Indecent Proposal, and Smokin’ Aces. He returned to Trek in DS9 playing a Klingon in two episodes.
Steve Sandor plays Lars. He did a lot of guest shots in various shows throughout the 70s. You might know his voice from Bakshi’s Fire And Ice as Darkwolf.
Dick Crockett plays the Andorian Thrall. He was in a lot of shows as muscle since he was a stunt coordinator. He previously played a background Klingon in The Trouble With Tribbles for the bar fight.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
“30 quatloos on the newcomer.”
I’m probably going to ruffle some feathers on this one but I’m not really fond of The Gamesters Of Triskelion. To be fair, it’s more about the subject matter, the idea of taking the main characters and making them prisoners for combat is a trope I just don’t find very compelling in general. I know this episode is very well remembered but I think it’s more for the various parodies and the quotes than for the actual episode itself.
It’s really just a paint-by-numbers episode of this type. I suppose you could say it was one of the prototypical ones as this sort of thing was in all the various high concept shows of the 90s. Voyager, Buffy, Smallville, etc. But all in all, it’s just a big yawn for me.
Really you just know this isn’t how they are going to end up so in order to make this sort of story compelling is how they are going to get out of it. Defeat and free the people or simply escape. Here they go for the former and I will give the episode credit in using a wager to get the Providers to use their power over the thralls to make them better, to create something rather than these empty contests. While I do appreciate the resolution, I find it difficult to understand how it got like this in the first place.
We got three brains in jars wagering meaningless currency on fights for generations. How have they not gotten bored to tears? What’s the point? There’s no audience, they have no bodies, the money doesn’t seem to be able to be spent anywhere. It’s the whole set up I find weird.
Perhaps the providers realized that and got them to shake things up, to find out something new but on the other hand, I get the feeling they’ve been stealing people for a while. It just seems like a silly way to pass the time when you’re a brain in a jar.
I can’t say there’s anything specifically bad about this episode in execution and who doesn’t like Angelique Pettyjohn in her tinfoil bikini outfit. I found myself much more interested in the search for the crewmen with Spock, Bones, and Scotty. Attempting to track them down and solve the problem worked for me a lot more than the stuff on Triskelion.
Overall, The Gamesters Of Triskelion is a perfectly adequate episode but not one that I find that rewatchable. I’ll bump it up slightly just for adding “quatloos” into our lexicon.
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