Jammer's Reviews

While answering an unknown signal with the word "Terratin" repeated twice within it, the Enterprise follows the transmission to a distant world, which emanates an energy beam of an unknown type that envelops the ship. It fries the dilithium in the warp core, making warp speed impossible. Soon afterward, everyone aboard the ship begins shrinking — or the ship itself is getting larger (an alternate theory that is soon debunked).

So strange and odd, this phenomenon! The simple concept of the shrinking crew makes for an appealing premise with good visuals well suited to this sort of animation (or comic book pages, which this often resembles, with the animation being so static). Figuring out how and why the crew is shrinking (a question, to be sure) is a secondary concern for them because they must do first things first: take any sort of desperate action to stop this before everyone is too small to work the controls on the ship.

"The Terratin Incident" is well paced, with a nice sense of urgency that pulls the story forward with a clear goal-oriented momentum that's often lacking on this scattershot series. (While trying to figure out the nature of the shrinkage, Spock learns that a certain testing procedure he had planned would provide an "analysis that will take approximately eight years." Kirk says, matter-of-factly, "Bypass that analysis." The deadpan understatement is its own punch line.)

After managing to survive various falls from consoles and into tubs of water, the crew is able to get Kirk to the transporter where he beams down to the planet and finds his size has been restored by the transporter (or temporarily made super-size, as indicated by the tiny communicator he now holds; this was a little unclear). The surface has active volcanoes that are erupting all around him, with lava flowing freely — and threatening a tiny city that sits in the middle of the chaos.

The city is populated by the citizens of Terratin (which is actually "Terra 10," an Earth colony that has been here for so long that the world's properties have shrunken them all down to miniature size). They harnessed these properties to "infect" the Enterprise crew with the affliction of sudden miniaturization, as a way of drawing their attention to Terratin's imminent destruction without outside assistance. After working out their differences, the Enterprise crew is able to transport the colony (which is about the size of a serving plate) to another world for relocation. Overall, this is a fairly fantastic voyage, and possibly the most successful example of using TAS's open canvas to tell a story in TOS's style.

Previous episode: Mudd's Passion
Next episode: The Time Trap

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