By 
Title: The Counter Clock Incident
Airdate: 10/12/1974
Plot Summary
With Commodore Robert April (the first commander of the Enterprise) on board, Kirk pursues a ship plunging into a supernova, and enters a universe where time runs backwards. As the crew gets younger and younger, it’s up to April and his wife, who are already considerably older than the crew, to save the day.
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk is quite respectful of April, not quite hero worship but pretty darn close. He does his best but pretty much can’t figure out how to Captain and gives command over willingly to Spock.
Logical
Spock is able to hang on the longest since he’s probably in his 60s at this point.
He’s Dead, Jim
McCoy is really happy to meet Sarah April as she was the first Chief Medical Officer.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu is the first to forget how to steer the ship.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura was a darn adorable baby.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty mostly just bitches about dealing with learning how to run the engine room in reverse.
Three Arms Are Better Than Two, Ya Fuzzy Face
Arex gets younger. I think.
Getting Animated
Apparently there’s a mandatory retirement age at 75. This is countered in TNG in the very first episode, where Dr. McCoy is shown as an Admiral and in his 120s.
April remarks that he saw the Enterprise being built in the San Francisco shipyards. Utopia Planitia on Mars is generally considered the building place for all Starships but that’s in the24th century. Given this was about 20 years before TOS, this could be true. Also some may object to ships being built on the planet rather than spacedock. But this really doesn’t bother me, it makes sense to build as much as you can planet side and then transport to space to do the rest of the construction.
Of course the big introduction is Robert April. He was captain of the Enterprise before Pike even. This makes the Enterprise quite a bit older than other mentions in the movies. His wife apparently invented a lot of equipment that McCoy uses today.
The tractor beam holds on to the ship and it pulls it into speeds in excess of Warp 23. I’m gonna call BS on that whole thing.
Technobabble
So the transporter does it’s magic again with the record of their patterns and changes the baby crew back into adults. cough cough *BULLSHIT* cough cough.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
What a shit episode. And I really wanted to like it too. I mean you got the timey-wimey stuff going on, you got all the new lore introduced, it feels like it should’ve been a pretty cool episode. But boy does it fall apart under any critical thought.
So let’s take the idea of them trying to tractor a ship moving somewhere between Warp 33 and Warp Batshit Insane. Like it would even have a chance of locking on to the ship and even if it did, it would probably pull the Enterprise into about a billion pieces strewn over a few lightyears.
But ok, fine they needed a reason to end up in the backwards time universe. They are getting younger. But even if time moves backwards, does it move faster? It doesn’t seem to for most of the episode, they should’ve only been a few days younger at most. But for reasons that completely escape me, they go from their 30s to diapers inside 5 minutes. Why? And why did it take so long for the effects to accelerate?
Then because they are going backwards, they forget what they learned. When they get younger than their starfleet academy days, they have no idea how to work the equipment. Ok but if that’s the case, how are they remembering what the spoke about 20 minutes ago? Wouldn’t it be like it hadn’t happened yet?
Of course the theme is that you can’t go back again. April is supposed to be old and being put out to pasture. He spends most of the episode lamenting his forced retirement. Then he and his wife end up back in their 30s again. They decide to take the transporter cure to be old again. But why? There’s no reason to not take this gift. April says some BS about you don’t need to do that if you’ve led a fulfilled life. Then why is he complaining about it the entire episode?
Then for no reason at all, when they return Starfleet decides to let him unretire? Why? They couldn’t have known that he took command in this situation yet. It’s was just a magic happy ending the writers pulled out their asses.
It’s a good concept that just falls apart in the execution.
Well that’s it for The Animated Series. To be honest I was dreading having to do it but I was really surprised at how much I ended up enjoying it. Sure, the animation is mostly crap but the imagination and art design was pretty good. Some episodes were far better than I expected and the dumb ones didn’t piss me off. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a interesting curiosity in the Star Trek universe. It doesn’t have the iconography or memorable episodes and stories that TOS or the subsequent series did, but it’s far better than anything that is coming out currently. It was definitely made with a genuine love of Trek and at the time, it was the only new Trek we could get. It would be five long years for the movies, and thirteen more years until we got more Star Trek on television. It has it’s place in Trek-dom and that’s good enough for me.
Speaking of movies, look for those to come soon!
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