YMMV / Star Trek S2 E15 "The Trouble with Tribbles"

• Fight Scene Failure: During the Bar Brawl, Scotty punches a Klingon across the room—without touching him.
• Fridge Horror: Who knows what the Klingons did with the tribbles Scotty gave them? Given that the Klingons eventually rendered them extinct, we can make a few guesses.
• Funny Moments: Quite a few! There's Cyrano helping himself to the booze while everyone is distracted by the bar fight. The "whoopie tribble" scene. And of course, the unforgettable scene where Kirk is buried alive in tribbles and getting hit on the noggin with more.
  Kirk: First, find me Cyrano Jones! Second... (shaking off another pelting by a tribble) close that door!
  • Which gets even better when it's revealed that Sisko and Dax have been hitting him with tribbles the whole time.
  • Kirk interrogating Scotty about how the Bar Brawl with the Klingons started. He gets slightly miffed finding out that Scotty didn't throw the punch after Kirk had been insulted, instead only attacking when...
  Scotty: He called the Enterprise a garbage scow!
  • The Klingon, Korax, imitating Scotty's accent..."Yahhh rhhight! I Shouuultt!"
  • And this scene in the DS9 remake:
  Miles O'Brien: I lied to Captain Kirk! I wish Keiko could have been there to see it.
• Genius Bonus: Assuming that Spock's assumptions are accurate, the number of tribbles on the station can be calculated as 11^x, where x represents the number of 12-hour periods that have elapsed since the first tribble showed up. Three days would give x the value of 6, and 11⁶ is indeed 1,771,561.
• Harsher in Hindsight: After watching Star Trek: Discovery, you understand what kind of gruesome agony Darvin had to endure to pass as a human.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When Korax refers to the Enterprise as "a garbage scow", angering Scotty, he adds "Half the quadrant knows it. That's why they're learning to speak Klingonese." James Doohan helped develop the fundamentals of the Klingon language for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, before becoming a complete language for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
  • Given the later controversy over the lack of gay characters in Star Trek, Bones casually referring to the tribbles as bisexual.
• Ho Yay: "My dear Captain Kirk." "My dear Captain Koloth." (emphasis theirs)
  • Mind you, both Koloth and Kirk were quite obviously using their salutations sarcastically.
• Older Than They Think: There are frequent allegations that the concept of the episode was copied from the "flat cats" subplot in Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Rolling Stones (1952). David Gerrold has denied any conscious influence, and stated that Heinlein himself considered that both of them had probably been influenced by Ellis Parker Butler's (non-SF) humorous short story "Pigs Is Pigs".
• Retroactive Recognition: You could actually argue that Whit Bissel as the station commander outranks Shatner, as he would later himself play a character named Kirk, who's a general.

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