Star Trek – Wink of an Eye

★★★★ November 29, 1968 Season 3 Episode 11

If you want to see where we are…and you missed a few…HERE is a list of the episodes in my index located at the top of my blog. 

This show was written by Gene Roddenberry, Arthur Heinemann, and Gene L. Coon

I always liked this episode…maybe more than some other Star Trek fans. The ending bothered me but other than that I loved it. I do have a question or two for you serious Star Trek fans coming up. 

The Enterprise receives a distress signal, but when they arrived on the planet, they see it was once inhabited but is now totally depopulated. When they transport back to the ship, something is slipped in Kirk’s coffee by an unseen force. Suddenly, everyone but him appears to be moving slower and slower, though it’s actually Kirk that is accelerating in speed to such a degree that he seems to disappear…moving too fast for the human eye to detect.

Once this occurs, he discovers that there were survivors on the planet and they beamed aboard undetected because they, too, were moving at this hugely accelerated speed. The Scalosians plan on putting the ship’s crew in suspended animation and using the crew as breeding stock to be thawed out as needed, as the same thing that makes these beings accelerate also makes their men sterile.

So they have to mate outside of their race or their race will die.  

I just noticed when Deela and Kirk are left alone in a room…it goes to another shot and when it comes back to the pair…Kirk is putting his boots on and Deela is combing her hair. It’s clear in a subtle way they had sex. I’m curious about how the censors allowed this. Nothing stops Kirk…even being held against his will. 

SPOILERS

Kirk leaves a message to the others about what is happening. Spock, McCoy, and Nurse Chapel see it and McCoy comes up with an antidote so Spock drinks the Scalosian water and he speeds up to help Kirk. They get together and disable the freezing device that the Scalosians have put in place. Spock does have the antidote with him. 

Why didn’t Kirk offer the Scalosians the antidote that he and Spock took? Would it have not worked with their body chemistry?

From IMDB:

The remastered version of this episode premiered in syndication the weekend of 13 January 2007. New shots of Scalos from space, as well as an enhanced matte painting of the surface were inserted into the episode, alongside more realistic phaser effects. This was the first remastered episode from third season to air and thus featured a “new” opening titles sequence.

Walter Koenig did not film any new footage for this. Chekov appears briefly in the opening scenes but it’s stock footage from earlier productions. He takes no part in the plot.

This contains the second time in The Original Series where Kirk is seen in what can be presumed to be a post-coital situation. He is seen zipping up his boots while sitting on the edge of his bed, with Deela standing nearby arranging her hair.

The hyper-accelerated movement plot was also used in The Night of the Burning Diamond (1966), produced by Gene L. Coon/Lee Cronin.

Written by Lee Cronin, the pseudonym of Gene L. Coon. The pseudonym was used because he had left Paramount and was under contract with Universal, so he was not supposed to be working for Paramount as well.

Loosely based on an H.G. Wells short story called “The New Accelerator”. A cartoon episode of The Lone Ranger (1966) also used this plot.

The Scalosian weapon was made from lathe-turned aluminum and was approximately 170 mm (6¾”) long. A sketch of the design appeared in the “Star Trek: The Original Series Sketchbook” (p. 91). The weapon made a sound identical to Klingon disruptors and the Ardana torture device in The Cloud Minders (1969).

The “Star Trek Customizable Card Game” features a wild card called “Boot Scene” (named after the famous suggestive scene with Deela) which can neutralize the opposing player’s Captain Kirk with a beautiful alien.

In the first scene, Scotty is shown on the bridge recording a log while other dialogue is played over this scene. The footage is reused from The Empath (1968). This is evident because Scotty wears a very different hairstyle, and another woman takes the place of Uhura. A piece of Scotty’s dialogue with Kirk on the planet below from “The Empath” can also be heard, very faintly. In fact, what he is saying originally played over Kirk’s communicator in “The Empath”.

This episode was, in essence, a bottle show with the need for only one set, a fountain, which was designed by Walter M. Jefferies.

As part of the condition of commissioning a third series of Star Trek, the network insisted on a cut in the budget of 25%. This meant that some episodes suffered notable cost cutting measures. This particular episode was considered one of the more lavish and expensive ones of series three due to the number of special effects that had to be created for the story.

Rael is also the name taken by Claude Vorilhon, the founder and actual leader of the UFO religion known as Raëlism. It started in 1973.

In a note from Gene Roddenberry to Fred Freiberger dated May 29th, 1968, he calls the water “Scalian water”, which may be a mistake on his part or a indication that the name was changed to “Scalosian” later.

This, along with ‘The Tholian Web’ and ‘The Cloud Minders’, was one of the most expensive stories to make from series 3 due to the number of effects shots needed. As the series budget had already been significantly cut back from the budget NBC had assigned to Seasons 1 & 2, some of the other stories filmed for the rest of Season 3 had to make noticeable cutbacks in their sets and effects to accommodate the high production cost of this episode. However, as other posters have noted, even here the budget was sparingly used with limited film sets.

This takes place in 2268.

Kathie Browne and Jason Evers also appeared together in Deathtown (1968).

In the accelerated world of the Scalosians and then Kirk and later Spock, touching anything (buttons, switches, machines, countertops, doors, etc), at the accelerated speed, would have the same (if not more) energy as a bullet from a gun. So, everything they touched in the unaccelerated world could blow apart as if it had been struck by a bullet. However, bullets are harder than hands/fingers so the latter might not have had an immediate effect. Over time, they might wear out through over-use.

Actress Kathie Browne (Deela), first worked with Gene Roddenberry in 1962 on an episode he wrote for Have Gun – Will Travel (1957), titled Taylor’s Woman (1962).

Captain James T. Kirk takes his coffee without milk.

When Kirk entered the accelerated world of the Scalosians, given everything they did within the ship, compared to the slower Enterprise crew, the crew’s movement could have equated to weeks or even months in the Scalosian world, not merely days. During that time, Kirk and the Scalosians would have needed to eat, sleep, use the bathroom, bath/shower and shave. Any appliances (e.g., shower, faucet or flushing toilet) would have operated far too slowly to be useable by Kirk and the Scalosians.

Summary

The Enterprise responds to a distress call from the planet Scalos, but when Kirk and a landing party beam down to the planet they find no living beings. It turns out that the Scalosians live at a much higher rate of acceleration, rendering them invisible to the human eye. One of the Scalosians, the beautiful and seductive Deela, accelerates Kirk so they can interact, where she tells him he cannot return to his normal life. For the crew, Kirk has virtually disappeared before their eyes. The Scalosians want to turn the Enterprise into a cryogenic storage facility for the crew. Kirk learns that at his current state of acceleration, they are subject to cellular degeneration and rapid aging should they suffer the slightest cut. He leaves a message for the crew but it is left to Mr. Spock to find a way to decipher it.

On this one…at least as far as the City…CGI brings the city to life…it’s one of the very few CGI effects that I liked.  

CAST

William Shatner … Captain James Tiberius ‘Jim’ Kirk
Leonard Nimoy … Mister Spock
DeForest Kelley … Dr. McCoy
Kathie Browne … Deela
Jason Evers … Rael
James Doohan … Scott
George Takei … Sulu
Nichelle Nichols … Uhura
Majel Barrett … Nurse Chapel
Erik Holland … Ekor
Geoffrey Binney … Compton
Bill Blackburn … Lieutenant Hadley (uncredited)
Dick Geary … Scalosian / Security Guard #1 (uncredited)
Eddie Hice Eddie Hice … Security Guard #2 (uncredited)
Roger Holloway … Lt. Lemli (uncredited)
Jay D. Jones … Engineer (uncredited)
Jeannie Malone … Yeoman (uncredited)