Thursday, December 15, 2011

How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth

** (2 stars out of 5)
An advanced probe approached the Federation homeworlds, took a scan, did a little jig and exploded. So Enterprise went looking for its maker.

A ceramic vessel cloaked as a dragon encases them in a force globe.

Dawson Walking Bear at the helm is a Comanche, and he recognized their foe as Kukulkan the winged serpent god from the legends of the Mayans and Aztecs. If he hadn't, apparently they all would have been destroyed out of hand. Either an endorsement for getting a good education or a reminder that space chariot gods are a-holes.

Walking Bear, McCoy, Scotty, and Kirk are beamed into a Mayan-esque city and activate a pyramid machine by turning four serpent-head statues. It's nothing like as entertaining as a rejected level for PS3's "Uncharted".

Kukulkan returns and makes loud, irrelevant pronouncements. He's half snake, half buzzard. He's Snuzzard! One of Disney's least popular Wuzzles.

Kooky lives alone with his pets. Unlike warrior humans, his animals have been rendered peaceful, even the notoriously nasty Capellan power cat.

Spock and Arex do something shiny with science to free the ship.

Kirk and Bones free the power cat and happy kitty becomes zappy kitty!

It seems Kukulkan was also "the Toltec's Quetzalcoatl, the Chinese dragon, and all the rest" Does Kirk mean the Professor and Mary Ann? Who is "and all the rest"?

The humans leave in peace, but without any vast knowledge. "The price was just too high."

What price? Did I miss Snuzzard putting a price on anything? I heard loneliness, a desire to enforce pacifism on four pacifists, great age, and unjustified blame. Is this god senile or did he trap the script in a force globe?

"How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth it is to have a thankless child", said King Lear, apparently. Kukulkan thought of humans as ungrateful kids, but I have to ask: what the hell did he ever do for them? We're smart enough to design our own pyramids, and horrible enough to work each other to death building them, thank you very much.

Even that much-vaunted calendar of his is about to expire. We'll just buy another one. It's not the end of the world or anything.

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