Star Trek Log 9

Essef - This is the ninth of the "Star Trek Log..." series, a collection of adaptations of the animated Star Trek Series. The first six of the series were collections of three episodes to a book; the last three have been one extended episode per book. This is perhaps the best episode so far, "BEM", an episode in which the enterprise crew deal with a very alien intelligent life form, far more alien than special effects would have allowed on the original series. The aliens are "communal beings", collections of life forms which join symbiotically to create higher life forms, but which can still dissociate when neccessary into their component parts, so that a head, a torso, and a trunk can each be moving separately and performing separate functions. On the planet Pandro, all higher life forms have this capability. It was an interesting concept, one that was handled well, and in general the story did a fine job of maintaining established characters. Further, the primary representative of the alien species is given a plausible, interesting personality, and the plot flows well. There was an interesting (but implausible) sidebar in that for a part of the story, Lt. Uhura is left in charge of the Enterprise; this would have been a nice touch, except that Sulu was neither incapacitated nor absent, and as ranking officer, should have taken the Captain's chair before she did; still, it was nice to see her given a bit more of an active role for a change. All in all, a fine episode, even in spite of the fact that the author (not Foster, presumably, but David Gerrold, who wrote the script for the episode) couldn't resist the bad pun of naming the main alien character Ari bn Bem; for those of you not in the know, "BEM" is a term given to aliens in bad science fiction; it stands for "Bug Eyed Monster".


Genre: Science Fiction