By 
Title: The Practical Joker
Airdate: 9/21/1974
Plot Summary
In The Practical Joker, the Enterprise explores a mysterious cloud in space. After passing through it the ship’s computer begins acting in a bizarre fashion. It replicates Kirk’s shirts with “”Kirk is a Jerk”” on the back, manufacturers devices that leave a black eye ring on Spock, and shoot cream pies out of the food devices. Things take a turn for the worse when McCoy, Sulu, and Uhura are trapped in the holodeck where they are beset by dangerous weather phenomena.
They are rescued by Scotty when he bypasses the controls, but the Enterprise crew are further endangered when the Romulans attack and the ship’s computer overrides manual controls. By feigning fear of the cloud, Kirk tricks the ship’s computer into entering the cloud, which reverses the process. As they depart, they pick up transmissions from the pursuing Romulan ship that they are experiencing strange phenomena from their computer. Oh won’t they have fun.
Risk Is Our Business
This whole episode may be worth it just for Kirk’s uniform alteration at the hands of the entity.
Logical
Nitrous Oxide is no laughing matter for Vulcans.
He’s Dead, Jim
Bones has a moment where he tells Uhura and Sulu to just leave him, he can’t make it in the cold. He’d do something similar in Star Trek VI.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu works the rec room controls. Probably wished he engaged the safety protocols.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura gets stuck with Bones and Sulu in the rec room and one wonders why she didn’t freeze faster in that mini-skirt uniform.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty isn’t amused.
Three Arms Are Better Than Two, Ya Fuzzy Face
Arex and M’ress are pretty amused by Scotty getting covered in food. Less amused when Scotty decides to report them.
Getting Animated
I could’ve put this under technobabble but decided on this section as it breaks canon: a Holodeck. They don’t call it that, they call it the Rec Room but same difference. So in reality, do I think they couldn’t have had a holodeck in the 23rd century? All things being equal, yes. But in canon, no. It was well explained that not only was holodeck tech a more recent invention, the Enterprise D had an advanced, state of the art one that Riker was amazed at. This would imply that holodeck tech wasn’t so realistic until then.
In any other medium in the 23rd century, no holodecks were even implied. So I have to call it a canon breaker. Still, it clearly was something Roddenberry had in mind and brought it to fruition in TNG which lent to a wide variety of interesting holodeck stories and even evolved into a full holographic character.
Uhura mentions to keep walking and they’re bound to hit a wall. Ok, let’s assume that the area they are in is just the size of the rec room which we see is maybe 40X70 feet and I’m just eyeballing. Might be a little bigger. Point is, they walk for miles it looks like and never find the wall. So is it like the new holodecks where they simulate distance, perhaps treadmilling the floor or something? If it doesn’t work that way as Uhura implies, then why did it take them so long to … awww fuck it.
Technobabble
The ship goes through a cloud quite slowly but after they emerge, Kirk orders to go to Sub-warp speed. Meaning they went through the cloud at warp which given the circumstances, doesn’t seem likely. Typically they don’t go through dense clouds at high warp.
Scotty mentions that gravity reversed polarity which is something that sounds correct but really makes no sense.
The Enterprise apparently carries a full size inflatable replicable of itself. That may be the weirdest thing I’ve seen on this show.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
So the Enterprise goes through some kind of weird sparking cloud and it turns the ship’s computer into a weird practical joker. Most of the time the crew has to deal with the escalating “pranks” with more and more dangerous effects. The computer seems to be having a good time.
To get things back to the way they need to be, Kirk tricks the computer using the Br’er Rabbit technique of “Oh please, don’t throw me back into that briar patch! I mean, don’t go into that weird cloud!”
So going back through sets the computer back to normal working order. Ok. Let’s say you take a magnet to a hard drive and scramble all its data. Wiping the magnet in the other direction isn’t going to put all your data back. It’s ludicrous. I would’ve liked to have seen Scotty come up with a tech solution or Spock do some sort of Vulcan magic or something. Even the old “turn everything off and load from backups” would’ve been better.
The addition of the Rec Room was an interesting, if anachronistic, touch. It clearly was the inspiration for what would come later.
Overall
Overall, The Practical Joker is a paint by numbers episode. The Romulans were pretty pissed the Enterprise was in their space, except they weren’t. Nothing came of it and no explanation of the mix-up. Were the Romulans just trying to get the Enterprise and making up BS? Was the computer on the fritz even before the cloud and they really were in the wrong place? Don’t know.
And they don’t have replicators yet, how did the computer come up with all these things? How did it put the old black eye gag on the sensor scanner for Spock? Don’t know.
It’s not the worst idea to have the computer become a mischievous entity, but the execution and everything around it was sillier than the pranks themselves.
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