Star Trek: The Animated Series 1-05: More Tribbles, More Troubles

Episode:

5

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Writer:

David Gerrold

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Director:

Hal Sutherland

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Air Date:

06-Oct-1973

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm finally watching a Star Trek: The Animated Series episode! That's because today is the series' 50th anniversary!

It's also the 50th anniversary of Lassie's Rescue Rangers, Everything's Archie, My Favorite Martians, and Mission: Magic!, the other four cartoon spin-offs started by Filmation in 1973, but Star Trek: The Animated Series has had a more lasting impact. People actually remember it existed. That's partly because they went to the trouble of bringing (most) of the original cast back and got scripts from writers who'd worked on Star Trek before. It's partly because the series goes absolutely crazy half the time. But it's mostly because it's got Star Trek in the title. The series did fall out of favour for a long while, but it's been invited back into the family in recent years. Maybe someday they'll invite Star Trek: Prodigy back as well.

Anyway, the episode I'm watching isn't the pilot. It's More Troubles, More Tribbles, the sequel to The Trouble with Tribbles, written by the same writer! Well, one of the writers, as Gene Coon wasn't around to do an uncredited rewrite this time. It'd been a long time since The Troubles with Tribbles had first aired, five years, but Trek had become a hit in repeats so I'm sure people were eager for more tribbles. I know I am.

There will be SPOILERS below for this episode and maybe some earlier ones as I go through it scene by scene and share my thoughts, but I won't spoil anything about later stories. Except for Harry Mudd showing up again eventually, I totally give that away.

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The episode begins with the opening titles (because the Animated Series didn't do cold opens), and it's basically a shot-for-shot recreation of the original title sequence, complete with William Shatner's iconic monologue. Even the title's the same! They're apparently still on that 5-year mission, so 3 seasons of TOS and 2 seasons of TAS presumably covers most of it.

The main difference is that it's animated now, so the ship mostly slides across the frame instead of zooming by. Oh, plus it has a completely different theme tune, as they apparently couldn't use the original one. It's alright; not my favourite but it's suitably 70s.

I was going to point out all the changes to the ship, but they filmed the original opening titles before finishing their modifications to the miniature, so the Animated Series version is actually more accurate! It doesn't have spikes on the engines for one thing.

The episode begins with a voiceover from Captain Kirk as he records a captain's log about what the Enterprise is up to this week, so they haven't messed with the TOS formula there.

They're currently escorting automated grain ships to Sherman's Planet, the disputed world from The Trouble with Tribbles. Back then they were protecting a shipment of quadrotriticale, but here they've moved up to quintotriticale. At this rate, they'll be at quinquagintaseptimtriticale by that DS9 episode.

These transport ships are one of the earliest examples of a Starfleet ship that doesn't look like the Enterprise. The Original Series was pretty much all Enterprises all the way down. Some people find Star Trek dated because in reality most of our space travel is done by automatic probes. Well, Trek has automated ships too! It's just that we don't typically follow them, for the same reason that a detective movie might feature a maid but not a Roomba.

In fact, the freighter was basically forgotten after the Animated Series, until 34 years later when a modified version played the role of the previously unseen USS Antares in the remastered version of Charlie X. Then we got another variation of it 13 years later in the Lower Decks episode Terminal Provocations.

Okay, I'm done talking about the freighters now. The Enterprise is taking a break from them as well, as they've spotted a Klingon Battle Cruiser that appears to be chasing a smaller ship. There are rumours that the Klingons have a new weapon, so they may be seeing that in action fairly soon.

I always like a nice overhead shot of the bridge. You can immediately recognise it as the classic bridge, they didn't mess with it too much, but the railings and consoles are curved now instead of angular. Plus they've got a three-armed navigator in Chekov's seat. The Trouble with Troubles featured Chekov but no Sulu. Now we've got Sulu but no Chekov.

Walter Koenig never appeared in the Animated Series, mostly for budget reasons, so he's been replaced by a guy called Arex, voiced by Scotty actor James Doohan. They wanted to replace Sulu and Uhura as well, but Leonard Nimoy made a stand, pointing out that wasn't a great idea to get rid of all the non-white actors.

They identify the other vessel as a one-man scout ship, which is another new design. I don't think this one ever makes another appearance though. In fact, it probably won't even make it to the end of the episode, as the Klingons are trying to blow it to pieces.

The Original Series had a few space battles, but it never showed ships getting damaged. Here though they were able to have the Klingons crease the back end up.

There's a panning shot here showing off the new turbolift they've installed (I guess the doors will be installed later), and I couldn't resist stitching it together as a widescreen shot.

The Klingon ship is still ignoring Kirk's calls and he decides it's time to get involved. He orders them to accelerate to warp factor 6 and has Scotty lock the transporter onto the small ship. That's about 216 times the speed of light apparently, so I hope Scotty's got good reflexes.

Here's another stitched-together widescreen shot. We didn't get to see the Klingon Battle Cruiser until the final season of the classic show and even then it barely showed up, so this is a rare opportunity to get a good look at the thing.

It's extremely faithful to the original design, with every detail replicated exactly. Even that ridiculously thin neck. I like that Trek ships are designed to look flimsy to show off the futuristic materials and structural integrity technology, but it needs to be tall enough for the crew to walk through! Unless they all live in the bulb at the front. I suppose the turbolift could tip over 90 degrees and go through on its side.

The Klingon ship turns its attention to the Enterprise, hitting them with its secret spiral superweapon!

It's a stasis field that disables their matter-antimatter reactor, phasers, photon torpedoes... everything. Unfortunately this includes the transporter, and they were in the process of beaming the scout ship's pilot over. They haven't lost them, they just can't complete the transport process.

Uhura suggests throwing rocks at them, but before they can try that they finally get a message from the other ship.

Hey, it's... some Klingon.

They don't say his name yet, but this is actually Captain Koloth from The Trouble with Tribbles. The dude must live next to Sherman's Planet I guess. He claims that the pilot of the scout ship is wanted for ecological damage, but it's a Federation ship so Kirk can't just let the Klingons take them.

Koloth was apparently intended to be a recurring antagonist for Kirk, but this is his first appearance since the last tribbles episode. He doesn't sound like actor William Campbell anymore though, more like James Doohan doing a voice. It's much cheaper to make a cartoon when you've got Scotty doing all the characters.

The crew have other problems, as Scotty's in the transporter room struggling to materialise the pilot and their grain ships are flying off without them. Though they are still in remote control range... which means that Kirk has weapons after all!

I had to get at least one of these shots in. The iconic 'half a face right up in the camera' shot that TAS is famous for. It's almost as weird as the skin-coloured eyes.

Spock points out that they can't afford to lose the grain by ramming the freighters into the Klingon vessel, but Kirk replies that they can't lose the Enterprise either. He has the ships come at Koloth from two different directions to make it harder for him to deal with.

But the Klingon ship is able to fire the weapon sideways as well! It's so unfair.

Fortunately, the weapon uses an immense amount power and they were barely keeping the Enterprise frozen on its own, so the field is pushed past its limit and shuts down.

The Klingon vessel switches to conventional weapons, but its power has been drained and the best it can do is to cripple one of the robot ships.

It's nice to get another angle of one of the freighters, but it's a shame they didn't clean that hair off the cel. It's there for the whole shot, moving with the ship.

Meanwhile, the Enterprise has all her power back and Scotty is finally able to finish materialising the pilot. It's taken so long that he's grown a moustache in the meantime.

The dude's been in their pattern buffer for at least five minutes, which has to be a record at this point in the franchise. He seems alright, though Kirk is shocked into going full-Shatner when he sees who it is... and that he has company.

"I... think... we... know... that... man..."

"Cyrano Jones!"

Grain, Koloth, Cyrano Jones and tribbles... what are the chances?

This time around they actually did spend the money to get the original actor back, making Stanley Adams one of only three guest stars to return as their character from TOS (the other two being Roger C. Carmel as Harcourt Fenton Mudd, and Mark Lenard as Spock's dad Sarek).

ACT TWO

 

This guy could've been a familiar face from TOS as well, as he's supposed to look like writer David Gerrold. The dude seems to love making cameos, eventually turning up as Starfleet officers in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Deep Space Nine. But he wasn't allowed to make an appearance in The Trouble with Tribbles, so this is the first time he's shown up.

Spock and Jones immediately reuse a joke from the other episode, with Spock talking about the tribbles' natural multiplicative proclivities and Jones saying that they breed quickly too.

But that isn't a problem with this batch, as Jones has had them genetically engineered to not reproduce. It's a smart idea, as it's a lot easier to sell something if your prospective customers don't already have 1.7 million of them. Also, they're pink now.

TOS was known for its occassional magenta wall, but TAS has a suspicious abundance of pinks and purples in its palette, with even the Klingons switching their uniforms from grey to purple. The popular explanation for this is that director Hal Sutherland was colour-blind... which he was. But it also came out that color director Irvin Kaplan just liked putting purple and green together in a shot, and he was the one making those choices.

It turns out that Jones's been busy, as in addition to getting a new breed of tribbles engineered he also managed to escape his endless tribble nightmare on Deep Space Station K-7 by finding a special tribble predator, called a 'glommer'. Wouldn't literally anything that eats other animals be a tribble predator?

Jones also managed to piss off the Klingons by selling tribbles on a Klingon planet, as the two are mortal enemies (which the episode helpfully reminds us). Plus he's racked up 50 violations over on the Federation side of the border. He was just a friendly trader without a criminal record the last time they met!

McCoy is able to confirm Jones's claim that the tribbles won't breed, so Kirk's theory from the first episode is now correct: if you feed them too much all you'll get is a fat tribble. They won't be taking over the ship this time, so it's the Klingon superweapon they really need to be worrying about.

We get another "I believe I just said that," joke here, as Spock points out that the weapon also immobilises the Klingon ship at the same time and Scotty replies that it leaves them just as helpless as their target. I've never been keen on "I believe I just said that," jokes.

The superweapon's other weakness is that it needs time to recharge. But once the Klingons have recharged they're going to be back, and they'll almost certainly blow up the surviving grain ship to to prevent the Enterprise from pulling the same trick twice.

The Enterprise already has the wheat from the crippled grain ship lining the hallways, so they can't carry anymore.

They've also got tribbles roaming around, for some reason, but the glommer is out catching them.

Kirk is a tribble veteran at this point, so he makes sure to get the tribble off his chair before sitting down this time.

Koloth's ship shows up again, only this time it doesn't use the stasis beam. It goes straight for their remaining freighter, crippling its engines. It was a cunning tactical move to make the Enterprise more vulnerable, as now they'll have to tow it with a tractor beam.

Then we finally get to see what Sulu's looking at when he looks into that viewer on his console:

Oh, it's just a close-up of the enemy ship? No targeting HUD or anything like that?

It's a good episode for fans of this ship design though, as we're getting to see a lot of it.

Koloth goes after the Enterprise next and we get to see visible shields! I don't know if this is a first for Star Trek, but it feels like it might be. I mean, aside from those shield belts that they wear instead of space suits in the cartoon.

Damn, this is turning into a proper space battle.

There's more bad news: some of the cargo containers got knocked open in the fight and now tribbles are munching on the grain. They may not be multiplying but they can still eat everything, and they're growing fast.

The Enterprise hits the Klingon ship with phasers and photon torpedoes until it runs away, which leaves Spock a bit confused. They didn't use their stasis weapon at all during that fight.

Now that the battle is over, the Enterprise has to grab that damaged freighter and give it a tow.

I was going to say something snarky about the tractor beam appearing to come out of the shuttle bay, but then I realised that's actually a really sensible place for a tractor beam and I should stop nitpicking so much. Though the beam was never visible in the Original Series...

Kirk asks Spock if he has any suggestions about what to do the next time the Klingons turn up. He says that they could throw tribbles at them, which is basically just stealing Uhura's idea about throwing rocks.

The tribbles have gotten to big for the glommer at this point and it can't eat them anymore. The thing must have been stuffing its face just as much as the tribbles have been, but it hasn't been bulking up like they are.

Kirk calls Jones up to the bridge and I guess this must have been the point where the animators were getting tired. Either that or Jones broke the door when he came in and put it resting against the wall.

He tells Jones that the finite number of tribbles he brought over are still enough to cause them problems and security can't find them all. Jones suggests that Kirk needs better security people, which is a fair point, but doesn't calm him down any.

Especially as he has to put some effort into getting the tribble off his chair this time.

Just then the Klingons return, so Kirk has his crew drop the damaged grain ship and prepare for a fight.

ACT THREE

They've been panning across the bridge so much that I decided to put all the pieces together to see if they connected up and they do! It's all one big image.

This time the Enterprise immediately loses the fight, as Koloth just fires his stasis beam at them again. I guess it was still recharging the last time they met. All Koloth wants is Cyrano Jones and Kirk would love to be rid of him, but the guy's entitled to Federation protection so he can't just give him over.

He can't sit on his chair anymore either as the fat tribble's reclaimed its throne and this time it's too big to be unseated. At least the turbolift door has been fixed.

Kirk decides to implement a mysterious 'plan B', which he claims was Spock's suggestion. So they are going to throw tribbles at them after all!

Meanwhile, the Klingons are implementing boarding plan C, which means we actually get to see the inside of a Klingon ship! It's very green.

The episode also hints that Klingon ships don't have enough toilets, as the queue is a nightmare.

I don't know what they're really doing here, heading for a docking hatch maybe, but what they find there is a room full of giant pink tribbles. And comedy music. The Klingons are suitably horrified, considering that many of them probably still have nightmares about the last time the Enterprise filled their ship with tribbles.

Unfortunately, Kirk's solution doesn't quite make sense, as we see that Scotty beamed them over there while they were caught in the stasis field. It could be that the huge power drain disabled the Klingon ship's shields and that's how they got them through, but the last time they were hit by the weapon it disabled their transporter..

Kirk phones Captain Koloth to see if he's ready to deactivate his weapon yet. Koloth accuses him of being monotonous, which is a weird choice of insult. Turns out he doesn't know about the tribble infestation yet and when he sees one rolling by on the bridge he's so shocked that he leaps through the viewscreen onto the Enterprise bridge.

This is such a blatant animation error that my brain refused to see it the first time around. Someone had to point it out to me.

Koloth decides to finally give Kirk the full story, explaining that Jones stole their genetically-engineered prototype tribble predator. They only have the one and they really need it back in order to make more of them and get the tribble genocide going. I guess they don't have cats in the Klingon empire, because they'd sort this problem out real fast.

So Kirk's able to give Koloth his glommer back and end the conflict without also giving over Jones.

With the crisis over, Kirk, Spock and McCoy survey the carnage in their corridors. McCoy came through with all the answers at the end of The Trouble with Tribbles and he's doing it again here. He's discovered that Jones's genetic engineering was kind of shoddy, so each giant tribble is also a colony of tiny tribbles.

Koloth takes his tribble predator to engineering so that he can slay the mighty tribble, but the poor little glommer takes one look at the thing and runs. I don't know what Koloth was expecting.

So he has his first officer shoot the creature instead, which was always an option.

And they both end up buried in tiny tribbles, just like Kirk at the end of The Trouble with Tribbles! Except with more tribble screeching I'd assume, though they're being quiet at the moment.

I think that's supposed to Koloth's buddy Korax on the right, the guy who insulted the Enterprise and got punched over a table because of it back on K-7. He's more deadpan here though.

Back on the Enterprise, McCoy's come up with a hypospray shot that will break up their giant tribbles with less disruptor fire and slow down their breeding. Unfortunately, he didn't tell Kirk that he's already injected the one in the Jeffries tube he's standing next to.

So Kirk gets buried again, to his annoyance. I get how he feels, as reusing the same gag twice at the end of the same episode is a bit much. Hey, there's another animation error for you, though it's a subtle one. Kirk's rank strips on his sleeve are coloured wrong.

Once again Scotty gets a chance to drop a pun with the last line, saying "If we've got to have tribbles, it's best if all our tribbles are little ones."

There's something you never see in any of the other Star Trek series: the director signing their work. He signed all the season two episodes as well, even though he didn't work on any of them. Filmation just reused the same end credits.


CONCLUSION

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The thing I can respect and appreciate about Star Trek: The Animated Series is that it really wants to be proper Star Trek. In some regards, it does even better at it than the live-action spin-offs. It has no teenage sidekicks, it didn't drive David Gerrold away and refuse to film his script, and it even managed to get William Shatner to come back. Granted he was probably a bit cheaper back then. I imagine the animation was relatively cheap as well, considering how little there is of it.

More Tribbles, More Troubles is a sequel to an Original Series story by the original author, it features an original guest actor, and it's even about a similar subject, but it's not a retread. For one thing there's no space station. Plus the grain is called quintotriticale instead of quadrotricicale. Also, the episode's much more about space tactics, as it's Klingon ship with a superweapon vs. the Enterprise and its fleet of remote-controlled grain freighters. We get all the space battle action between the Enterprise and Klingons we definitely didn't get in the original episode. The advantage of animation is that they could actually show the ships trading blows and the weaker ships taking damage. We even get to see the shields! This episode could've been done in live-action for the most part (the glommer would've been tricky), but all those space shots would've cost a bit.

The comedy (and the comedy music) doesn't really start until a third of the way into the episode, when Cyrano Jones materialises in the transporter room, which is a definite change from The Trouble with Tribbles, which was throwing jokes around in the first scene. Well, it was throwing insults, and that can be the same thing if it's done well. Personally, I thought the tone of the episode worked but there were a few moments I thought were a bit clunky. Like thost two jokes about someone rephrasing something Spock said in quick succession was a bit much. Of course, I might just be too old to find it funny. The episode wants to be entertaining for adults but it's still a literal Saturday morning cartoon and I'm not its main target audience. I wish I could remember what I thought of it when I a kid. I mostly just remember wondering why the Klingon talked so weird.

More Tribbles, More Troubles isn't really on The Trouble with Tribble's level, and I'm not just saying that because of the limited animation. Great scripts are forged (or sometimes ruined) by rewrites and revisions, and I have a feeling that Filmation didn't put its writing through the wringer as much as the live-action series did. This definitely didn't get the benefit of Gene Coon's involvement in the process like the original did. On the other hand, I'd rank this as a top 5 episode of the Animated Series. In fact, it might even be my favourite, ahead of Yesteryear. It's good, I liked it.

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NEXT EPISODE

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, the tribbles trilogy concludes with the fifth season Deep Space Nine episode Trials and Tribble-ations. Man, I haven't written about DS9 in forever.

If you've got anything you want to say about More Tribbles, More Troubles, that box down there is an excellent place to say it.