TOS S1E8 "What Are Little Girls Made Of" Review by AnswerMan

Horrible:Meh:Adequate:Good:Fantastic

The Enterprise is on an expedition to contact Dr. Korby, a bio-engineer that went missing on a frozen planet five years ago. Other expeditions have failed to net any results, but sure enough with just a simple hail they get a response from Korby, who also is apparently a former main squeeze of Nurse Chapel, before she left her work to serve on the ship. At the same time some guy walks into the shot in his bathrobe, Korby asks that only Kirk beam down, but Kirk gets permission to bring Chapel as well. He also brings two redshirts, who immediately get killed by Ruk, a strange hulking guy who has apparently borrowed David Byrne's big suit.

After being led around by one of his assistants, they finally get to meet Korby, who starts making out with Chapel right in front of everyone. Kirk greets him with a warm smile and a handshake, despite the fact that he's probably just murdered at least one of his men. Korby insists that Kirk not contact the ship, and a row ensues that exposes one of Korby's assistants as an android. In fact, all of his assistants are androids, including Ruk, and a barely dressed Andrea (the latter of which makes Chapel jealous as hell). Under duress, Kirk and Chapel have no alternative but to play along with Korby to see what it is that he so desperately needs to show them. Korby has a real Liberace-ness about him. "Don't you love my Boogie Woogie, and my androids?"

It turns out that Korby has a vision to replace mankind with androids. He has a technology to actually transplant human consciousness into the machines, and then everybody can live forever and never get sick or kill each other in emotional fits of rage. To demonstrate, he makes a Kirk clone, a process that involves Ruk and Andrea pushing lots of buttons while Kirk lays flat on a spinning merry-go-round. Korby then uses the duplicate to get information from the ship on potential planets to start his android nation. But Kirk has programmed the Kirk carbon copy to call Spock a half-breed, which alerts him that something is off.

Then it gets confusing. Korby apparently didn't make Ruk (and maybe not Andrea?), he came from the "old ones." Kirk confuses Ruk enough to possibly make him rebel against Korby, but Korby kills Ruk first. Then he flirts with Andrea and gets her head all messed up too over whether she is capable of love. She kills android Kirk. Then the big plot twist: Korby is also an android. Apparently he created a copy of himself right before he froze to death. A confused Korby then kills himself and Andrea simultaneously. In short, they all kill each other in emotional fits of rage. Just then Spock and a security crew show up to offer no additional help.

This episode is a bit of a mess. There's unexplored loose ends, like when Kirk insists that Korby instruct Ruk to never disobey an order from Chapel, but then she never bothers to give him any. And I'm confused as to whether Korby actually ever created anything, or just stumbled upon some technology from an old civilization. Then the episode ends with Chapel stating that she's decided to stay on the ship, even though it was never mentioned that she might be leaving. And what would she be leaving to do? Work with a long-dead Korby on creating that android society? The episode still manages to muster a Meh rating though, due to some creepy characters and entertaining choices in visuals like Ruk's big suit, futuristic jumpsuits all around, and Kirk fighting Ruk with a giant cock and balls.

Published February 1, 2018