A couple of times a week, not really often enough, I walk a three-mile course on the treadmill. This is not very exciting by itself, so I generally use the time to watch or rewatch something.

Tonight, it was the last significant Klingon episode of Classic Trek, Jerome Bixby’s “Day of the Dove”.

This is a story that actually starts out somewhat promising. Indeed, for most of the first 20 minutes or so, I thought perhaps the rather low opinion my memory held for it must have been mistaken. There’s a real mystery, coupled with the longstanding distrust between humans and Klingons to build tension. Michael Ansara’s Kang shows hints of the kind of Klingon we’re more used to from TNG and after. We even get a glimpse of the Klingon’s rather tangled gender relations, with the appearance of Kang’s wife and science officer, Mara.

Unfortunately, that’s right about when someone–the director, I presume–started telling Shatner he wasn’t chewing the scenery enough. Oh, there were already some overwrought performances. It’s actually hard to reconcile Walter Koenig’s frothing (albeit under alien influence) with the subtle performances of his later career as Bester on Babylon 5, for example. But up until this point, Shatner’s theatrics are under control.

Now, I’m willing to grant that Kirk, like everyone else, is under alien influence here. And in the end, wound up as he is, it’s Kirk, not Spock, who really gets what’s going on first. But really, no matter how dire the situation, who the hell thought it was a good idea to include the line, “Captain’s Log, star date: Armageddon”?!

Actually, the biggest problem with this story is that the director clearly doesn’t trust the audience to have been paying attention up until this point, despite the fact that the show had been on the air for two and a half years. Whenever one of the regulars is under the alien’s direct influence, their behavior is so wildly different as to make it sledgehammer obvious. The result is painful because the actors are being asked to play far out of character.

The contrast with the earlier “Mirror, Mirror” is instructive, I think. There, the mirror universe crew of ISS Enterprise are believable because everyone is really expressing the dark side of their natures. By contrast, Bones spends half of this episode entirely out of character, ranting about war and drumming up hatred.

Thus, I am forced to conclude that my earlier memory of this episode being a sad exemplar of what was so very wrong about Season Three was justified. There were good ideas in that season, but they were so often marred by ham-handed execution that it’s hard not to dismiss the whole season as a write-off.