Customer Reviews

Star Trek - The Original Series, Episode 68: Wink Of An Eye [VHS]

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I give this episode a relatively low rating for a classic Trek episode because of its profound logic problems. An episode like "Mirror, Mirror" is so good that you can look beyond its wild implausibility. But "Wink Of An Eye" has no particularly memorable characters or even a message, beyond a simple ecological one.

The Enterprise encounters a race of people, the Scalosians, whose metabolism has been sped up many thousands of times by some ecological disaster. These people are so accelerated that they can dodge phaser blasts, which one presumes move at the speed of light. If you moved at a speed even remotely close to that, air resistance would become a huge factor, so it would be more difficult than moving through thick molasses. And you'd be causing sonic booms. But people at this level are shown walking around normally, while everyone and everything else is slowed to a standstill. (That's an effective way of showing their point of view, but the problem with air resistance remains.)

That's just one problem. You can find plenty more. Another is that for even a minute of normal time to elapse, the acclerated people should have experienced months or even years. Yet Spock and McCoy, in normal time, experience almost as much time passing as the accelerated people.

The plot concerns the Scalosian's young beautiful queen accelerating Kirk by putting a drug in his coffee. You see, another result of the ecological disaster is that the Scalosians are sterile unless they periodically mate with outsiders. Kirk pretends to go along but tricks the queen, intending from the beginning to stop her plans. Meanwhile, Spock and McCoy find an antitode to return Kirk to normal time. Alas, the queen should have known that Kirk's true love is the Enterprise; all other women are merely flings.

Up until this point, Season Three was doing just fine. For the first 50% of Season Three, there were only two bad episodes (Spock's Brain and For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky). Unfortunately, the restraints on Season Three finally started to show. Wink of An Eye is a turning point in Season Three. It is episode 13 out of 24, the first episode of the last 50% of Season Three. The Season Three slump that started with Wink of An Eye would continue until The Way to Eden (Let That Be Your Last Battlefield and The Mark of Gideon being the only good episodes). Unfortunately, this slump is the focus of Trekkers. I urge fans to look past this slump and enjoy the other 2/3 of Season Three that was simply amazing.

But back to Wink of An Eye. Where shall I begin with this episode? First you have a crew member drinking alien water? Now come on! They spend four years at the Academy and didn't learn not to drink untested water. Then you have the landing party not realizing that people were on them when they beamed up. You also have that annoying Rael. Now Deela's plan was to get knocked up by Kirk. And what did Kirk do? He most likely knocked her up. Also, the Scalosians should have completed their device before the landing party even got out of the transporter room. I also like how Kirk left them on the planet to die. Couldn't he have shown mercy like he did in Space Seed or By Any Other Name? He could have called on the greatest minds in the Federation to help them. But nope he left them to rot on Scalos.

There are many logical holes in this episode; the most glaring is technical in nature. The human body is designed to operate within a narrow range of temperatures and metabolic speeds. Working in temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit can cause a human to collapse and die of heat stroke. Therefore, the idea that a person's metabolism could be speeded up in the manner depicted in this episode is absurd. Such an action would cause the body with the increased metabolism to immediately combust in a violent explosion. The writers try to compensate for this somewhat by making the accelerated humans physically fragile, but that is not adequate.
A second logical hole is the ease with which the aliens take over the Enterprise. They manage to beam aboard the ship undetected, even though the mass compensators of the transporter would immediately detect the extra mass. Since the transporter would be one of the primary ways in which the security of the ship could be penetrated, there would be many safety protocols linked into the basic beaming process.
Given that the Enterprise is a ship designed to explore the unknown, there would be additional safety protocols that would monitor the physical traffic throughout the ship. These sensors would be programmed to react to a wide range of possible inputs and those sensors would also have detected the extra persons. Even though their bodies operate in accelerated mode, their mass is still the same and therefore there would be some form of physical signature.
The final logical hole is the fact that the Scalosians feel it necessary to abduct their mates rather than simply ask them for assistance. Current technology can perform artificial insemination so all they had to do was to ask Captain Kirk to provide sperm donors. It would then be up to him to choose the donor(s) and whether it would be injected by pipette or inserted using the natural manner.
This is a silly episode, although it is fun to speculate on the alternate ways in which the Scalosians could have managed to breed their females.

In "Wink Of An Eye," Kirk must face some invisible beings who are struggling to continue their species. The queen of the species wants to use Captain Kirk to mate so her species will have more members. Kirk must find a way to escape these beings who sound like flies before they capture him in the wink of an eye.

"Wink Of An Eye" is a good episode of the original series. I recommend any Star Trek fan to give it a try.

The U.S.S. Enterprise responds to a distress call from the planet Scalos; the call shows several Scalosians asking for assistance. Arriving at Scalos, however, the crew find only an empty city, with no life forms registering on tricorder scans. Compton, a young, inexperienced crewman samples the local water and disappears. Beaming back up to the ship, the crew investigates while the U.S.S. Enterprise experiences a series of strange malfunctions. When an alien device is found in engineering, the ship is put on full alert. Back on the Bridge, Kirk sips coffee and suddenly finds himself "accelerated" far beyond the rest of his crew. After acceleration, he is able to see and interact with the missing Scalosians, who are now on his ship. Kirk meets Deela, the Queen of the Scalosians, who specifically chose Kirk to be her consort. Deela reveals the Scalosians' plan to cryogenically freeze the crew of the ship so that they will have a ready gene pool to integrate into their radiation-contaminated one. Kirk also finds his missing crewman, Compton, and sees the effects of rapid acceleration -- any damage to cells causes an accelerated death. Kirk manages to send a message to Spock and McCoy warning them, and delays the Scalosians long enough for Spock to join Kirk in his accelerated state. Spock brings a possible antidote with him, and after stopping the Scalosians, and returning them to their planet, Kirk takes it. The Captain returns to normal, and Spock uses the advantage of his acceleration to repair several of the ship's systems, before he too returns to normal speed.

most people who watch star-trek think Spocks Brain is the worst episode of the original series. Wink of an eye IS truly the worst, it's boring it makes no sense and just drags and drags and drags