YMMV / Star Trek S3 E22 "The Savage Curtain"

• Bizarro Episode: You know it's gonna be a weird one if it starts with Abraham Lincoln floating around in space. Don't you just love Season 3?
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Col. Green, despite this being his only appearance in the original series. Green was such a fun character, even his actor loved the part. Star Trek: Enterprise writer Manny Coto was another fan, and had hoped to feature the bad guy in the show, which ended up becoming a reality when the character had a cameo in a video recording from the mid-21st century watched by the isolationist industrialist John Frederick Paxton in the episode Demons.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Star Trek canon establishes here that Earth experienced a resurgence in authoritarianism and global unrest in the early 21st Century. Preposterous, right? Erm...
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A story about historical figures battling to the death? One wonders if the Fate Series was influenced...
• Narm
  • "Help me! Spock!" Possibly deliberately. Spock knows no Vulcan, especially Surak, would cry out like that.
  • When he's not imitating Lincoln's or Surak's voice (badly), Kahless's only other line makes him sound like a typical bad guy henchman out of a western.
  Kahless (referring to Surak): "It's one of them peace lovers, Colonel."
• Never Live It Down: The image and premise of Abraham Lincoln interacting with the Enterprise crew is often held up as an example of Season 3's nonsensical plots and ridiculous premises even on this very Wiki. In the actual episode, Lincoln's nature as an alien recreation is revealed well before the halfway point, and even before the reveal everyone is genuinely skeptical of his nature. Even Kirk, fanboy that he is, only gives Lincoln his due respect on the not-unreasonable grounds that, if it is an advanced life form convinced that it is Lincoln, it's best not to provoke it by suggesting otherwise.
• Values Dissonance: Abraham Lincoln refers to Uhura as a "charming Negress". He seems to realize right away that his words, well meant as they were are inappropriate and apologizes. Uhura, not offended in the least, tells him that in the future, people have learned not to fear words. And they shake hands.
• Values Resonance: Surak, who has never seen humans before, greets Captain Kirk saying "I am pleased to see that we have differences. May we together become greater than the sum of both of us." A truly timeless message that remains important into The New '20s.

---