The original Enterprise crew is back! Continuing their adventures right where they left off, The Animated Series exchanges Kirk’s five-year mission for an ongoing ‘star charting’ expedition, now rendered in a budget-friendly Hanna Barbara campiness. Aside from the obvious switch into the toonverse, and a shorter run time, there is no real difference between the animated adventures and the live action ones, which had ended only a few years prior. All the actors reprise their roles onboard the familiar old starship, and the animated format allowed for much more complicated alien and ship designs, which would not have been possible in the original Trek. In a sense, this new iteration was better than its predecessor, as it had more potential to explore Gene Roddenberry’s original vision for the show. The Animated Series was able to use a sort of special effects of its time, simply by being a more hypothetical medium. With modern film, we are so used to high budget CGI that we expect aliens and ships to look a certain way, but even these are all designs conceptualized by an artist at one point. Computerized special effects is essentially a type of animation. Fans can look back in fondness of what they were trying to portray, even if the number of frames can be counted on one hand!
The first voyage onboard Kirk’s animated Enterprise sees the crew caught in the gravity well of a dead star as they encounter an abandoned alien ship. This is where the animators took advantage of their new freedom, creating a complex alien vessel which looks like a network of fungal pods in space. Kirk assembles an away team and boards the empty craft. The team discovers that the ship was infected by an evil parasite, appearing as an intelligent, green miasma. The alien crew had to abandon ship, bursting the space pods to escape. They recorded a message to any passers-by that the hostile alien parasite is trying to escape the dead star by hijacking their ship. Kirk and crew try to evade it, but find that the parasitic smog infected the Enterprise as well, integrating itself into the ship’s systems. It is described as a symbiont, with the ability to understand and adapt to any technology. Since Spock managed to protect the navigation controls using a force field, Kirk is able to fly the ship at high speed toward the dead star. The apparent suicide mission scares the alien out of the ship, and it jumps into the star. Kirk instead uses the gravity of the star to slingshot the Enterprise out of the planetary system, leaving the lonely space parasite trapped inside.
Unfortunately, the shorter run time of the animated series does not allow for much in depth examination of the miasma parasite. It would have been interesting to explore what kind of biological or physical features a cloud of sentient green fog would have to develop in order to integrate into a spaceship. The only description given is that it is a ‘symbiont’ perfectly adapted to bind with the technology onboard both the alien ship and the Enterprise. Symbiosis is imprecise, as the green fog creature acts more like a parasite. However, both terms fail to accurately classify the creature, as these describe relationships between living things. Symbiosis is when two organisms form a mutually beneficial relationship. Human gut bacteria help us digest food in exchange for a habitat and food source for themselves. Parasitism is when one member of the relationship benefits while the other is harmed. A tapeworm is less welcome in your gut compared to the bacteria. This is where it becomes tricky, since the starship Enterprise is not sentient, can it be ‘harmed’ in the same sense that a living creature is? One could argue that the people aboard the Enterprise were harmed, but the miasma was not integrating into any of them.
Strictly speaking, biological terminology cannot be applied to non-living organisms without forfeiting some of its meaning. However, it often is. We refer to some malicious software as ‘viruses’. Even though a computer is not being infected with genetic code, its systems are still being commandeered to replicate and spread a different kind of code, using a mechanism reminiscent of a biological virus. When such a close analogy presents itself, old terminology may have to be adapted to describe the incomprehensible. Kirk and crew will need new terms as they encounter some truly alien lifeforms, both the evilly drawn and creatively animated.
Hopeless Trekkie 