Star Trek: By Any Other Name Rewatch

July 11, 2015 10:09 AM - Season 2, Episode 22

Galactic alien scouts capture the Enterprise for a return voyage and a prelude to invasion. Kirk's one advantage - they're not used to their adopted human form.

"By Any Other Name" was first broadcast February 23, 1968 and repeated May 31, 1968. It is episode #51, production #50, with screenplay by D.C. Fontana and Jerome Bixby based on Bixby's story, and directed by Marc Daniels. The title is taken from a line spoken by Juliet in Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet: "that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet", a line quoted by Captain Kirk during the episode

Memory Alpha Link

The episode can be viewed on Netflix and YouTube.

posted by Benway (3 comments total)

The crushing death of the cubic paperweight crewman freaked me out when I was a kid. The original series is full of low-budget, horrifying, surreal little scenes that can haunt kids for life. (Remember the scene in Charlie X where Charlie makes that girl's face disappear? And then we never see her get her face back.)

Interesting detail from Memory Alpha:

The basis of this episode can be found in Gene Roddenberry's first ever produced science fiction script, "The Secret Weapon of 117" for Chevron Hall of Stars in 1956. The episode featured a pair of aliens (the male played by Ricardo Montalban) who disguise themselves as Humans to study Earth people and get overwhelmed by the sensations and experiences of their new host bodies, and decide to remain Human.

I didn't know Roddenberry had had anything sci-fi produced before Trek, or that he had worked with Montalban before he played Khan.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:41 PM on July 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

In the Andromeda Galaxy, it is apparently fashionable to wear lavender boots with a sky-blue backless jumpsuit.

I don't know why a race of hundred-tentacled beings would have to be human in order to enjoy sensual pleasures. TOS's main preoccupation is how aliens think they are doing fine until they meet us and realize how inferior their existence is: they don't have poetry, they don't understand Freedom or Democracy properly, they don't have Scotch whisky or a decent fruit salad, power corrupts them, they don't have foxy hunks like James T. Kirk.

I was amused how they remembered that power Spock had for one episode last season, and that negative energy barrier around our galaxy that existed for one previous episode, but we'll never again hear about this improved engine technology for the Enterprise. [Checks Memory Alpha to make sure this is true]

I was wondering if I would detect a clear point where TOS jumped the space shark, and this disc (energy aliens prefer human form, Space Nazis, tentacle aliens prefer human form, Space Yankees) certainly appears to be the spot.
posted by acrasis at 9:58 AM on April 10, 2021

Honestly the entire show jumped the shark. It's just as campy here as it was in episode 2. It's just that you don't expect continuity in episode 2 as much as you do two seasons in.
posted by pwnguin at 4:21 PM on December 20, 2023