This episode is one of those rare ship-to-ship duels a lot of people would have preferred to see more of in STAR TREK -- and it is probably the best one if what you are looking for is action and a kind of dogfight. But Real movie fans over the age of -- well, 50, maybe -- will recognize it immediately as Gene Roddenberry's answer to the Robert Mitchum/Curd Jurgens 1957 minor classic of World War II, THE ENEMY BELOW, with the Romulan ship being the U-boat and the Enterprise the American destroyer escort. The writers could have easily had a copy of the earlier effort's script in their hand while they wrote this. No other submarine movie was focused for its entire plot on a one-to-one cat-and-mouse face-off between one submarine and one surface warfare ship, captain to captain. Even all those references to "the praetor" jump out at you -- particularly in the dialog and bearing of the Romulan second-in-command -- as references to a better-known figure once known as "Der Fuhrer", as related in classic world-war-two-moviese. This episode shows that George Lucas (STAR WARS, etc.) had nothing on the STAR TREK production team when it came to shameless copying of an earlier successful entertainment formula (and even if this irritated well-regarded STAR TREK contributor Harlan Ellison).
Thus, while in one sense it is one of the better episodes, I gave it only a seven-star rating as somewhat lacking in originality. Rather than getting as absorbed in the story as I was supposed to be, I instead found myself dwelling on correlating the analogies -- the random phaser-firing patterns for depth-charging, the dust-generating near-hits on the Romulan ship for the effects of same, and so forth and so on. This took the edge off of something that could have been more gripping had it not been so obvious and predictable a copy.
P. S. Since first writing this review I learned that this episode was in fact a straightforward rewrite of THE ENEMY BELOW, and that indeed the writer was working directly from the script of the movie.
Thus, while in one sense it is one of the better episodes, I gave it only a seven-star rating as somewhat lacking in originality. Rather than getting as absorbed in the story as I was supposed to be, I instead found myself dwelling on correlating the analogies -- the random phaser-firing patterns for depth-charging, the dust-generating near-hits on the Romulan ship for the effects of same, and so forth and so on. This took the edge off of something that could have been more gripping had it not been so obvious and predictable a copy.
P. S. Since first writing this review I learned that this episode was in fact a straightforward rewrite of THE ENEMY BELOW, and that indeed the writer was working directly from the script of the movie.