By 
Title: The Enterprise Incident
Airdate: 9/27/1968
Plot Summary
The Enterprise Incident finds the crew wondering if Kirk is losing his mind. He orders the ship into the neutral zone where they are immediately surrounded by Romulan ships, who apparently are renting out Klingon ships now from Klingon-Boeing.
Spock admits that Kirk has gone insane to the Romulan commander who finds Spock quite irresistible. She offers Spock a chance to be a part of the Romulan empire after Spock is forced to kill Kirk. But is there a lot more at play here?
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk gets to be a Vulcan! Well, ok, a Romulan but same difference, especially in those days make-up-wise. Shatner does a good job of going “insane” and then slipping into his role of a Romulan spy.
Logical
Spock is pretty damn smooth with the Romulan commander. She is quite smitten with him. Nimoy never breaks character and you got to give him props for that.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy’s main job is to give Kirk a makeover. He also plays his part well in realizing Kirk ain’t dead but pretends he is.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu pilots the ship well blowing out of the surrounding vessels at warp 9.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov is able to discern between Vulcan life signs and Romulan life signs because he’s just that awesome.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura mostly just sets up communications between them and the Romulans.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty is pretty damn upset at Kirk’s death and shows the most surprise when he finds Kirk’s alive and a Romulan. He’s fine with it. He also is able to cobble together whatever he must to get the stolen cloaking device working.
He does get a funny moment when he activates the cloaking device as if he’s pressing the “blow up the ship” button.
Canon Maker
This is the second time Spock has killed Kirk and he got better.
The idea of the cloaking device was established in Balance of Terror but it gets a little more detail here. Klingon and Romulans aligning here is a first but it doesn’t last.
By TNG’s time, Klingon’s really REALLY dislike Romulans. Given the Romulans are sneaky bastards, my guess is they pulled some shenanigans which probably dissolved this little partnership. I also think that Klingon came out of it with cloaking devices as they use it in the movies and subsequent TV shows.
Later on there would be a treaty signed where the Federation would not use cloaking devices on any of their ships, a completely nutty concession I never understood. It was written to explain why the Federation ships never had cloaking devices but it was a bad explanation.
Canon Breaker
While here it’s clear that cosmetic surgery is used and continued into the TNG era, Strange New Worlds came up with some DNA bullshit that wore off after a certain amount of time.
Given that it was before TOS et. al., maybe they decided it was better to just do cosmetic surgery in the future. OR maybe it was all a bunch of BS NuTrek writers thought was cool. I’ll let YOU be the judge.
Also, there is no such thing as a Vulcan death grip, making this possibly the only episode to establish canon and then break it in the same episode. Yeah yeah, I know it was all a hoax, work with me here.
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
No deaths in The Enterprise Incident! Surprising, given the circumstances of the situation.
Technobabble
The cloaking device is so good that even the Romulans can’t track their own ships that use it.
I Know That Guy:
Joanne Linville plays the Romulan commander in The Enterprise Incident. She had a decent career in various supporting roles in movies and TV shows, but Star Trek remained her most known role. Interestingly her daughter reprised the role in the fan series Star Trek Continues and does a pretty damn good job.
She retired from acting in the 80s and taught at the Stella Adler Academy.
Jack Donner played Sub-Commander Tal. He would return as a Vulcan priest in Enterprise nearly 40 years later. He played in a ton of stuff regularly until his death in 2019 at the ripe old age of 91.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
I really enjoy The Enterprise Incident and it’s probably one of the best of the season 3 train wreck that we are about to embark on, but finally watching this with an analytic eye, I realize there are some weird issues with the story that probably could’ve been tightened up.
At heart, the biggest issue is that it really all hinges on the Romulan commander having a huge lady boner for Spock. If they had some sort of history and they knew she would be the one to intercept them, then
I can understand this whole plan. In fact it would’ve lent a little bit more to Spock’s character, that he would’ve looked like a big asshole in order to do his duty. But that’s couldn’t work as Balance of Terror established no one had seen a Romulan in 100 years. Maybe if she were a spy on the Vulcan home world but no one realized it.
But all that being said, the story does hang together. To be honest, a male commander could’ve done plenty of tempting without there being any sexual connotations so maybe this just simply worked out better than expected.
It was based on the Pueblo Incident that occurred in real life, where an American ship was seized by the North Koreans and held for a year on suspicions of spying. No cloaking devices on that one though.
Kirk plays his part ahead of time to give the appearance to the crew that he’s erratic. We even start out with a rare medical log from McCoy voicing his concerns over Kirk’s behavior. This is a nice set up to eventual meat of the episode where Kirk is “obviously” insane and Spock is tempted.
Kirk being a Romulan is a pretty neat sight, though I have trouble believing he wouldn’t have been immediately caught. I mean it’s not like people on these ships wouldn’t be able to notice a new face among them. On the other hand, Kirk gets stopped a lot and really has a lot of luck to get as far as he did. He only needed a few minutes in the right spot.
Spock does a great job playing with the commander’s feelings. When he’s exposed, he just simply asks “what’s your form of execution?” He then uses their laws against them to stall as long as possible until they can beam him out of there.
I also liked the idea that they treated the defeated commander with a little respect, putting her in quarters rather than the brig. The game was played, you played it well but lost. Let’s be good sportsmen in victory. Nice touch.
The Enterprise Incident is definitely a bright spot in an otherwise pretty terrible season of Star Trek, and would’ve been a bright spot in either season 1 or 2 as well.
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