This is one battle Koloth likes to pretend never happened.
Cyrano Jones is back! And he brought tribbles that can't reproduce. That doesn't stop them from causing more trouble for the Enterprise crew.
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- Awesome, but Impractical: The Stasis Field Generator that the Klingon battlecruiser uses to immobilize the Enterprise takes up so much power that it can do little of anything else while deploying the device, let alone fire weapons. Kirk makes note of such a limitation in his Captain's Log when reporting the events of the episode.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Kirk gives the camera a big Aside Glance, smirk and wink following Scotty's pun at the end.
- Gone Horribly Right: Jones's genetic engineering technically stops the Tribbles from multiplying — it causes them to instead become colony creatures that grow to enormous size.
- No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The Klingons demand an anti-tribble predator, the "glommer", since they claim it was designed by them and they only made one.
- Oh, No... Not Again!: The Klingon captain is furious that Kirk has once again caused their ship to be inundated with tribbles. Meanwhile Kirk is once more buried in a pile of tribbles.
- Running Gag: Kirk shoos a constantly growing tribble off his chair multiple times over the course of the episode and by the time he has to do it for the third time, it's big enough that he has to use both hands and lean forward to push it off. Later yet, he's asked if he's not going to sit in his chair and with a tribble that's almost as big as him occupying his chair, he comments "I think I'd rather stand".
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Confronted by one of the giant colony tribbles, the glommer, newly returned to the Klingons, high-tails it out of the Klingon engine room as fast as it can go.
- Sequel Episode: The episode is a sequel to the original series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles".
- Series Continuity Error: In every other story, tribbles are shown hissing and screeching in the presence of Klingons. Not the case here. More than likely done for the benefit of the audience, as the sheer number of Tribbles unleashed on Koloth and his crew would have resulted in an auditory nightmare.
- Tempting Fate: When McCoy is talking about how he broke down the Tribble colonies into individual Tribbles, Kirk points to one lodged in a maintenance tube and tells McCoy that he missed it. The doctor replies that he didn't, and moments later the colony breaks down into individual Tribbles, just in time for them all to land on Kirk's head.
