This entire episode could have been shown in ten minutes without any removing any of the plot. But taking a ten minute plot and stretching it into a hour presentation makes for a very slow and boring show. The viewer is forced to watch essentially the same scene five times in a row: one of the crew gets tortured, the Empath girl makes over-expressive sad faces for several minutes, she heals the crew-member, and then the cycle repeats again and again, seemingly with no end in sight. It's like watching Groundhog Day: you see it once and you feel like you've seen it ten times. It's obvious at this point that the production team has run out of money and run out of ideas, and they are desperately just trying to fill minutes.
Combining a virtually non-existent set, bad acting, bad special effects, and a plot so simple that it quickly becomes un-engaging; this episode fails to maintain the illusion of drama. It no longer looks like Kirk, Spock, and McCoy trudging along some alien planet in palpable peril. It looks like Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley bumbling about a Hollywood stage counting the minutes until they could go home and watch a ball game.
The mission of the production crew for this episode seemed to be: find a girl with very sad looking eyes and let's do a hundred close-up shots of her eyes, and then fill the rest of the episode with fluff. I consider the principles of empathy and self-sacrifice to be noble and inspiring. This episode simply doesn't do these principles justice. What the Empath girl was doing wasn't really free-will sacrifice because they were all pawns in the aliens laboratory. Every time she healed a crew-member, she was enabling the aliens to have more subjects to torture. She was effectively a useful fool perpetuating the torture cycle with her "empathy". The truly empathetic action would have been for her to refuse to play along with the "experiment" and stop enabling the sadists.
Between the syrupy, fluttery music, the Empath's over-exaggerated mime expressions, and the blinking "special effects" I felt like I was watching a high school's failed attempt at modern dance. I say all this as an ardent Star Trek fan. Episodes like this are just painful to watch because they show how far Star Trek had fallen.
Combining a virtually non-existent set, bad acting, bad special effects, and a plot so simple that it quickly becomes un-engaging; this episode fails to maintain the illusion of drama. It no longer looks like Kirk, Spock, and McCoy trudging along some alien planet in palpable peril. It looks like Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley bumbling about a Hollywood stage counting the minutes until they could go home and watch a ball game.
The mission of the production crew for this episode seemed to be: find a girl with very sad looking eyes and let's do a hundred close-up shots of her eyes, and then fill the rest of the episode with fluff. I consider the principles of empathy and self-sacrifice to be noble and inspiring. This episode simply doesn't do these principles justice. What the Empath girl was doing wasn't really free-will sacrifice because they were all pawns in the aliens laboratory. Every time she healed a crew-member, she was enabling the aliens to have more subjects to torture. She was effectively a useful fool perpetuating the torture cycle with her "empathy". The truly empathetic action would have been for her to refuse to play along with the "experiment" and stop enabling the sadists.
Between the syrupy, fluttery music, the Empath's over-exaggerated mime expressions, and the blinking "special effects" I felt like I was watching a high school's failed attempt at modern dance. I say all this as an ardent Star Trek fan. Episodes like this are just painful to watch because they show how far Star Trek had fallen.