Or, “The One Where Spock was Green”
I’d never seen this episode, but a few minutes in, it started feeling very familiar.
The Enterprise encounters a probe. A crewman, also a close friend of Captain Kirk gets nailed by an energy field. When he comes to, he has glowy silver eyes…
….wait a minute…
I’d just read this whole sequence in IDW’s Star Trek comic.
Slightly different, of course, as the IDW comic occurs in the alt.timeline generated by the JJ Abrams ST movie. But, still very much the same in terms of Mitchell’s looks and powers and fate. Which really makes me wonder about the comic, you know? I’m not terribly interested in alt.timeline re-tellings of TOS stories. I’d kinda like, you know, something new. I know it’s a terrible inconvenience.
But, here we are in the 1960s, with the second Star Trek pilot. It’s laughable to compare points between this and “The Cage”:
Spock, previously thought of as a satanic looking dude, is made more alien with greenish skin and super aggressive eyebrows.
Ultra Stoic Lady Number One has been replaced with ladies of a more emotional nature. There are only two prominent women here: the captain’s yeoman and Dr. Dehner. The yeoman is a twitchy, fearful girl.
Dr. Dehner, something about her doesn’t set well with me. It was quite a point of contention between me and John. I think I just hate that a woman at the time had to be tied up in emotion to be on the TV machine.
And yet, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” is far better than “The Cage”. For starters, everyone is a hell of a lot more likable. Like “The Cage”, this ep addressed tha nature of humanity from the POV of a superior being, only the observations here are far uglier. In “The Cage”, humans were merely not fit for captivity. In “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, humans are insects.
Kirk largely plays a secondary role to Mitchell, here. He’s there and he’s in charge, but he’s not in charge in the Kirk sort of way, yet. He’s pretty much Captain Pike without the self-loathing, reacting to what’s in front of him without being assigned character traits of his own at this point.
With soooo much time spent on Mitchell and his new, godlike powers, I couldn’t help but make the following connection…loudly…while pointing at the TV machine:
“HE’S A BABY Q! I DON’T KNOW WHY HIS EYES ARE SILVER, BUT HE’S A BABY Q!”
Unfortunately, the sucky part about watching a show that’s almost fifty years old is that someone has already made the connections. And written a tie-in novel about it.
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Naturally, Captain Kirk prevails because he’s Captain Kirk. I think the universe implodes if he doesn’t prevail. Meanwhile, Mitchell and Dr. Dehner are presumed dead on Delta Vega…
….or are they?????
Related Stuff:
Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
Sally Kellerman makes this episode memorable, in my opinion.
She has serious sci-fi cred for her “ambitious woman that goes insane” role in the Outer Limits episode, The Bellero Shield.
You can watch the whole episode here:
http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi2232288025/
Shatner also appeared in an episode of The Outer Limits.