I thought this was the first fairly good episode of the first season (not including "The Cage", which I did like; I'm going by the Blu Ray set, which had episodes 1-3 as "Man Trap", "Charlie X", and "Where No Man Has Gone Before", and this one as the 4th episode). Sure, there was some hammy acting (by Shatner and Nimoy in particular), but the premise was interesting (crew becoming disinhibited, revealing their hidden secrets) and the techno-crisis was also interesting. The silly acting actually kind of added to the fun of it. I've seen this episode many times before, and it holds up quite well on re-watch.
The crew did almost everything right here-- decontaminated everyone and medically checked them; Spock ordered security to make sure Riley made it to sickbay-- and they didn't do it! I know it was a necessary part of the plot for Riley to seal off engineering, but confining Riley would have eliminated the crisis! I thought that the only really implausible part was that Riley could disable the entire ship so easily; surely they would have command codes and security access features to prevent a relatively low ranking officer from doing something like that. But that's a minor quibble that easily could have been taken care of with minor script changes, so I don't mind too much.
Great character moments here- Kirk as obsessed with the ship; Spock forced to suppress his emotions all his life; Chapel's love of Spock (was Majel Barrett with Roddenberry already by this point?). Sulu's swashbuckling was dorky, but at least Takei actually got to do something in that episode rather than just sit around-- Shatner really did hog most of the screen time! I actually thought this episode was significantly better than the analogous TNG episode, "The Naked Now"-- there, Picard makes numerous dumb decisions that greatly facilitate the spread of the contagion. Here, Kirk and Spock made only small, fairly excusable errors. Though on the whole, I find the writing much superior on TNG. But TOS had pretty good writing for a 1960's show.
The time travel shtick was goofy, but it did open up many possibilities.
The crew did almost everything right here-- decontaminated everyone and medically checked them; Spock ordered security to make sure Riley made it to sickbay-- and they didn't do it! I know it was a necessary part of the plot for Riley to seal off engineering, but confining Riley would have eliminated the crisis! I thought that the only really implausible part was that Riley could disable the entire ship so easily; surely they would have command codes and security access features to prevent a relatively low ranking officer from doing something like that. But that's a minor quibble that easily could have been taken care of with minor script changes, so I don't mind too much.
Great character moments here- Kirk as obsessed with the ship; Spock forced to suppress his emotions all his life; Chapel's love of Spock (was Majel Barrett with Roddenberry already by this point?). Sulu's swashbuckling was dorky, but at least Takei actually got to do something in that episode rather than just sit around-- Shatner really did hog most of the screen time! I actually thought this episode was significantly better than the analogous TNG episode, "The Naked Now"-- there, Picard makes numerous dumb decisions that greatly facilitate the spread of the contagion. Here, Kirk and Spock made only small, fairly excusable errors. Though on the whole, I find the writing much superior on TNG. But TOS had pretty good writing for a 1960's show.
The time travel shtick was goofy, but it did open up many possibilities.