Time travel. Homoerotic subtext. Sulu brandishing a rapier. Spock crying about his mom. Scotty lasering through the bulkhead to free the bridge crew from (O’)Riley’s singing.
The Naked Time has everything.
When Spock and some guy — and there’s a reason his name is so forgettable — beam onto another ship, they find the whole crew dead in the strangest ways: frozen, it seems, while committing acts of hedonism so absolute that they disregarded even fear of the cold, unfeeling space looming beyond every wall.
It’s not long before what’s-his-name is feeling the space heebie-jeebies himself. Sweaty, unfriendly, and incoherent, the poor crewman who beamed aboard the doomed ship with Spock finds himself with even less will to live than the average doctoral student he resembles.
It’s not long before he’s dead and the whole crew is affected, some to comedic effect, some to deadly, and some, like our spray can-brandishing graffiti artist, to chilling.
The Naked Time is truly a masterclass in television sci-fi storytelling. John D. F. Black’s script makes proper pacing look like child’s play. Gliding from character to character, the episode never slows as each element comes together for a nail-biting climax.
Take the scene where Kirk snaps at Uhura. Frustrated and hurt by his uncalled-for demand to stop Riley’s miserable musical renditions, she stops herself retort, remembering her duty as lieutenant to serve Captain Kirk — a duty that remains no matter how unkind he is. But even in the throes of his own frustration and his own fight against the disease destroying his ship, it’s not enough to just not punish her: Kirk meets her gaze and apologizes.
It’s a narrative-driven reminder that not everyone has succumbed to their base instincts; it’s another endless plea to watch the un-remastered version, which here especially softens the actors’ countenances; an implicit statement about our duty to each other no matter our race or rank; it’s an interaction, and those rapidly diminish as the show goes on for our secondary crew. When they do have lines, they’re in service to Trek technobabble; on a good day, they might get a pithy one-liner.
While the early show’s incongruities usually chafe at me like the strangely ill-fitting scrubs we see on Bones in this episode, not so here. From Spock and McCoy’s meticulously depicted scanners to the rec room set dressing, The Naked Time is trying to impress the viewer with an impression of its worldbuilding. Seeing Sulu and Uhura actually have lines and meaningful moments, I’m wistful for what should have been — their casual integration into the fabric of each storyline in a way that not only boosts their characters but aids the storytelling overall.
And we haven’t even talked about Kirk or Spock.
The Naked Time brings us our first glimpse of Nurse Chapel, already appearing in two of her many contradicting wigs in the same episode. What effect does this inhibition-loosening disease have on our third female character.
Naturally, the disease reveals that Chapel wants to…toy with her hair. And don’t worry: we also immediately learn that Chapel is deeply love with Spock. One of this episode’s many funny moments — such as every scene where Kirk reacts to Riley’s torturous delusions — includes her dazed line delivery in response to McCoy instructing her to watch Sulu. He pauses; he carries on.
More on that in a bit.
For now, The Naked Time picks up with a Spock who has finally affected by this mysterious disease. Chapel’s confession is the first of several moments where the narrative clearly means to lead us down a path to understanding Spock as repressing his natural urges to reciprocate the affection so sincerely expressed to him, but there is tension in this attempt.
Spock knows Chapel, but we, the audience, don’t. Why should Spock love her? He doesn’t confess to, after all. In trying to establish his emotional connection to Chapel, Black overreaches the burgeoning show’s authority. We see a confession; we see the pain it causes him, but we cannot take the show’s word for it as to why.
And so Spock stumbles across Kirk, who sacrifices his own grip on sanity to restore Spock’s — not before Spock, still reeling from Chapel’s words, that his friendship for Jim Kirk leaves him ashamed.
Time is running out; the ship will burn up in this mysterious planet’s atmosphere if Kirk doesn’t get Spock’s input on the cleverly compelling matter-antimatter solution he’s got cooking up (a wonderful character detail that reminds the audience that the Captain isn’t just a pretty face but conversant in every speciality needed to run the ship), they will all die. Spock talks about friendship; Kirk talks about love, and the way they talk about them is the same.
But it isn’t Kirk’s yeoman with the crazy hair that pulls him out of his funk. It’s the Enterprise, that space-faring lady who so commands his attention.
So, what’s Bones up to while Spock sobs and Kirk cries out for his real one true love? The good ol’ emotional Southern doctor must be worse off than anyone, right?
Actually, no.
Dr. McCoy is quite busy identifying, isolating, and developing a total cure for a condition he’d never seen before that morning. He might be a little brusque about it, but, then again, when isn’t he? And in his defence, he’s doing this completely on his own. Since the crew is off defacing the ship and pitching them all towards certain death, the cure he develops from scratch — starting from his scans on Sulu to the finished product less then twenty-eight minutes later —includes a race down to the biology lab.
What Bones does here is not only a feat of such magnitude that it raises him to the sphere of fantasy physicians like Tezuka’s Black Jack — it’s a fest made especially remarkable considering he’s doing it under the same disease everyone else has.
Because he does have the disease. Bones hasn’t avoided contact with the infected; he’s in more contact than anyone, since doctors don’t seem to need gloves anymore, even during surgery. In an early scene with Kirk, we even see him sweating profusely, one of the disease’s hallmarks.
This isn’t a plot hole. After all, this disease doesn’t actually just make one crazy — it frees one to pursue their normally repressed desires at full tilt. Sulu fences; Rily proclaims the superiority of the Irish; Spock cries about the self he leaves behind.
As it turns out, Leonard McCoy is exactly who he says he is.
The disease just makes him even more of himself — more tenacious, more focused, and even more devoted to medicine. This doesn’t reduce the brilliance of his actions; his success is only possible because he already lives the life that makes him happiest. If he didn’t, he’d have been just as debilitated as the rest of the crew.
Four episodes in, and we may have already seen the greatest refutation of Spock’s logical way of living the Original Series has to give.
Now, does Bones finding a cure actually…do anything?
In the long run, yes. There won’t be any more O’Rileys running about the place; no more Sulus jumping out at you in the halls. But Kirk did already remember how in love with his ship he is, so it doesn’t actually save the day.
The cure does, however, let Bones tear Kirk’s shirt off at the shoulder — and the only reason to do it that way was because he wants to.
Love wins.
Or should I say mankind?
Good Doctor: I
Bad Doctor: I
No Doctor: II
Finally, a Good Doctor Bones episode! One of the very best, even. While he does lose a patient early on, this is one of the few episodes where we actually get to see Bones operate, even if it does mostly look like him a series of eclectic sonic screwdrivers on the patient.
Also, everything I said up there.
Filk Recommendation: Kathleen by Cynthia McQuillin. Performed by Larry Warner.
(I heard this song for the first time while driving on a long, winding Kentucky road in the dark, and it jolted me right out of a late night stupor. Thank you, Filkcast!)
P.S. I like Kirk’s little microtapes. They look like Game Boy Color cartridges.
Leave a comment