...Yeah, sure, why not?
The episode opens with Kirk reviewing the log of a small science vessel. The ship was deserted when a landing party disappeared and the rest of the six-person crew beamed down after them. While trying to find the missing crew, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy get captured by aliens and put in their zoo.
This episode provides examples of:
- Artistic Licence – Geography: The planet of the week. Spock and Kirk quickly figure out something's not right when they find pristine forests next to a desert. It's because it's a massive alien zoo.
- Bizarre Alien Limbs: The gastropod-like Lactrans have one elephant-like appendage with three or four tendril fingers.
- Hypocritical Humor: After reviewing Commander Markel's log entry explaining his decision to beam down with his remaining crew to find his missing landing party, Kirk criticizes him for violating orders and not following the book.
- Mama Bear: An accident involving the transporter means a Lactran kid gets beamed up, and its parents aren't exactly happy about this, nearly killing Kirk trying to probe his mind for where it went.
- Non-Malicious Monster: The Lactrans legitimately did not understand that the strange creatures they were collecting for their zoo included sentient species.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Scotty manages to befriend the baby Lactran, and convince it to return to its parents and explain everything, entirely offscreen.
- People Zoo: The whole planet serves as a world-sized zoo kept by the Lactrans, a species of superintelligent slug-like aliens. They regard humans as dumb animals, and imprison the captured crew members in an exhibit alongside the crew of the ship they had come to rescue.
- Starfish Aliens: Yeah... these ones are definitely odd. Giant slug-things with hand-like tentacles who think at levels so complex that humans and Vulcans barely register as lifeforms to them at all. Not something any of the live-action series could produce, that's for sure.
- Sufficiently Advanced Alien: The Lactrans aren't exactly godlike, but they're still an order of magnitude beyond Federation tech, and their level of intelligence is far beyond that of humans and Vulcans.
- Two of Your Earth Minutes: Gets a Lampshade Hanging at the end when Spock notes the aliens decided to meet up with mankind again in a few of their millennia... and he has no idea how that translates into human years.
- The Voiceless: The Lactrans don't speak, and communicate with one another telepathically. It helps to emphasize their otherworldliness.
