Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (1969) Star Trek episode -
My Rating: {>>>>} (Bussing!!!) {{ Previous - Next}}
Please note that this review is laden with
spoilers.
The crew of the Starship Enterprise encounters a pair of aliens who absolutely hate each other. One is black on the right side and white on the left, and the other one is reversed.
Body count: Zero. No one actually dies, but the eminent death of one of the aliens is implied to happen right after the episode.
Plot Outline: The crew of the Starship Enterprise manages to catch a humanoid named "Lokai" who had stolen a shuttlecraft from Starbase 4. Lokai is a native of the planet Charon and has skin that is clown white on one side and pitch black on the other side.
The Enterprise soon encounters an invisible pursuing ship tracking them at great speed. That ship contains another humanoid who also has black skin on one side and white on the other. This humanoid is Bele, and he claims to be an officer sent out to bring in Lokai for his crimes.
The two aliens are reversed in their color configurations and they absolutely hate each other, each seeing the others species as being inferior. Bele soon takes control of the ship, but Kirk manages to stalemate him with a self destruct command sequence.
Eventually the Enterprise does take the aliens back to their planet of Charon, and they find that it is a dead world, everyone on it killed from a war between the two races. The aliens beam down to kill each other and we are all left with a valuable lesson on racism.
My Opinion: This episode is so awesome, it combines Star Trek with social commentary with implausible aliens in all new ways. It really says a lot about how we view other races on our own planet.
Notes
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Third season Star Trek episodes are notoriously low budget. They made the alien spaceship in this episode invisible so they wouldn't have to build a new ship model. Meanwhile all the shuttle craft footage was recycled from other episodes.
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The shuttle that was stolen from Starbase 4 is marked as one belonging to the Enterprise.
- Frank Gorshin received an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Bele.
- The scenes of destruction on Charon are all stock footage of World War II battlefields.
- This episode establishes how the self destruct sequence works, this was used again and again in the films and in later Star Trek series.
Cast and Guest Stars
Directed by: Judd Taylor directed this
episode along with three other original Star Trek episodes.
Writing credits: Lee Cronin was responsible
for this script along with the scripts for three other original Star Trek episodes..
Sources: Star Trek.com, my head, and watching the
sucker multiple times. A big thanks to weasello
for the format used.