As I finish this post, we are but hours away from Thanksgiving here in the United States, and I can’t seem to come up with a good intro paragraph to cap it off. By the time this goes up, it will be too late to use this post to duck into the bathroom and avoid your family for an hour, but hopefully it will be timely enough to use it to avoid crowds of mindless consumers trampling each other as the Christmas shopping season gets underway. Regardless of the time of year, it’s never a bad idea to hole up in the bathroom with your good pals here on the Enterprise and at Deep Space Spines and binge the archive until your legs fall asleep from sitting too long. Anyway, thanks for reading, and please enjoy your regularly scheduled weekly Trek literature review.
It’s Dr. McCoy’s birthday. He’s feeling every minute of however old he is, and a surprise party thrown for him by Kirk isn’t helping. So then, what better to put the pep back in one’s middle-aged step than an escort mission involving a bright young princess who wants to bring new meaning to the phrase “jump your bones”?
There are some episodes of Star Trek where Kirk rekindles a relationship with an old flame. There are other episodes where the crew meets a once-respected hero or mentor figure, only to realize that person has gone completely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. And there are still other episodes where they’re burdened with a civilian who snoops around and asks too many questions and throws their weight around and is totally overwhelming and annoying and in the way all the time.