Star Trek S2E67: What Are Little Girls Made Of?

Apocalypse Now in space. With robots. But kind of boring.

See the Star Trek TOS Rewatch Index page for links to all the episodes covered so far.

“WHAT ARE LITTLE GIRLS MADE OF?” RATING: 6/10

“What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, like “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” is a rejiggering of Heart of Darkness. The script, by noted s/f writer Robert Bloch, is not especially compelling, in part because the main antagonist is so much less compelling than Kurtz. But it’s interesting for the way that Conrad gets updated for a 60s era which was ambivalent about the rationalizing project of colonialism.

As in Heart of Darkness, the mission is to retrieve an official who has gone lost in the interior—of a distant planet in this case, rather than the Congo. Genius exobiologist Dr. Roger Korby (Michael Strong) has been missing for five years on the frozen wasteland of Exo-III. The Enterprise manages to make contact with him. But when Captain Kirk (William Shatner) beams down to the planet, Korby takes him captive.