By 
Title: Albatross
Airdate: 9/28/1974
Plot Summary
Dr. McCoy is arrested and held responsible for causing a plague that ravaged the planet Dramia Two, where he performed a mass-inoculation 19 years earlier. In their investigation, Kirk and the rest of the crew come down with the same plague. It’s a race to save the crew and clear Dr. McCoy’s name.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk is pretty crafty with the Dramian, luring him in through some legal sleight of hand and then using law against him so he can investigate Dramia Two and find out exactly what happened.
Logical
Vulcans are thankfully immune to the disease, which comes in handy as Spock has to take command, break Bones out of jail, and help find the cure. He also takes some time out to poke fun at Bones at the end, much to McCoy’s irritation and Kirk’s amusement.
He’s Dead, Jim
McCoy is genuinely taken aback and begins to wonder about his own expertise. He manages to put all that aside and saves the day.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu mans the helm as long as he can until Spock finally has to order him to sickbay.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura collapses at her terminal.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty coaxes everything he can out of the engines as he is just as worried about McCoy as everyone else.
Three Arms Are Better Than Two, Ya Fuzzy Face
Arex turns blue. He gets better.
Getting Animated
The Dramians are certainly alien looking. It’s a nice design.
McCoy apparently had been there 19 years earlier. Weirdly, the episode starts as Kirk, Bones, and Spock are just wrapping up their mission on Dramia and are preparing to leave when the Dramians drop the arrest warrant. I would assume they had been there for a bit, maybe days. Why did they wait until the very last second? Kirk was calling Scotty for beam out!
Technobabble
Auroa’s are the visible effect that can be seen when charged particles from the sun hits the atmosphere creating a neat effect, usually nearer to the poles. Not sure how it’s out in the middle of space. Maybe it’s just another name for a weird radiation cloud.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
I had no memory of this episode so it was a pleasant surprise that it was pretty damn good. I was pulled into the mystery and wasn’t sure how it was going to go. First I thought it was going to be a courtroom drama but when the crew became ill, it became a medical race against time. The reason everyone got sick was not only revealed but in the most tense way possible.
We even get Spock doing a little commando work (at least as much as the limited animation could muster) to break Bones out of jail. They have to pull it all together to resolve the two storylines and they mesh beautifully.
We even get Kirk playing a little hilarious games Riker would’ve been proud of. He “accidentally” leaves the hanger doors open and pretends to not notice the Dramian ship trying to intercept them. The Dramian sneaks on board to immediately get met by Kirk and Spock. He’s very angry that Kirk is going against the world’s wishes while Kirk impounds his ship. It’s great.
They all end up going to the planet and find Koltai, a Dramian that made it through the plague because of Bones, though he didn’t know it at the time. It turns out the inoculation he gave Koltai for a different disease saved him from the new one. That brought it all together. The color changes of the skin gave the viewer a nice visual representation of the ticking clock.
They wrap it all up with Dramia and the Federation on good terms and Spock’s little needling of Bones at the end was a nice cherry on top. A really great episode.
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