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Star Trek The Original Series Rewatch: “More Tribbles, More Troubles”

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Star Trek The Original Series Rewatch: “More Tribbles, More Troubles”

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Star Trek The Original Series Rewatch: “More Tribbles, More Troubles”

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Published on December 20, 2016

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Star Trek More Tribbles More Troubles

“More Tribbles, More Troubles”
Written by David Gerrold
Directed by Hal Sutherland
Animated Season 1, Episode 5
Production episode 22001
Original air date: October 6, 1973
Stardate: 5392.4 

Captain’s log. The Enterprise is escorting two grain-carrying robot ships to Sherman’s Planet, which is suffering a famine. En route, they discover a Klingon ship, the I.K.S. Devisor under the command of Koloth, attacking a one-person scout ship belonging to Cyrano Jones. Kirk orders Scotty to beam the occupant of the scout ship on board.

The Devisor destroys the scout ship, but Scotty is able to rescue Jones, as well as a mess of tribbles. Koloth then fires a stasis field on the Enterprise and demands that Kirk turn Jones over. However, the Enterprise still has control of the robot ships, so Kirk orders Sulu to use them to ram the Devisor. The distraction is enough to get Koloth to release the Enterprise, and the use of the weapon has drained Koloth’s energy reserves, and so the Devisor veers off. Unfortunately, one of the robot ships is damaged beyond repair, and they have to overstuff the other ship and put the grain in Enterprise corridors and cargo bays in order to make the shipment.

Jones explains that he’s genetically engineered his tribbles so they don’t reproduce, and he also has a tribble predator called a glommer, which eats tribbles. That was how he was able to get the tribbles off of Deep Station K-7. He also sold some tribbles on a Klingon world, which is why Koloth was chasing him and accusing him of ecological sabotage.

Star Trek More Tribbles More Troubles

Kirk also announces that he’s in violation of multiple statutes and confines him until the mission is over.

McCoy examines a tribble, and reports at a meeting with Kirk, Spock, and Scotty that these tribbles just get larger rather than reproduce. Spock reports that the Klingon weapon is effective offensively, but not so much defensively, as it drains a lot of power.

Star Trek More Tribbles More Troubles

The Devisor re-powers up and sets course for the Enterprise. Kirk tries to distract Koloth by sending the robot ship in another direction, but Koloth is able to disable its propulsion.

The Enterprise and Devisor exchange fire. The grain containers break open and the tribbles start eating the grain. Koloth breaks off the attack, but now the Enterprise has to take the robot ship in tow. That’s a power drain the Enterprise can’t afford in a firefight, and sure enough, Koloth returns for another fight, forcing Kirk to cast the robot ship adrift.

This time Koloth uses the stasis weapon again, and the Enterprise is caught. So Kirk has Scotty beam all the tribbles over to the Devisor, which is a stalemate. Koloth then drops the other shoe: they want Jones because it turns out that he stole the glommer from the Klingons. They engineered it to be a tribble predator.

Star Trek More Tribbles More Troubles

Kirk is more than happy to turn the glommer over, though Jones is reluctant. McCoy then reveals that the fat tribbles are actually colony creatures made up of tons of smaller tribbles. He gives them an injection that will break them down into their component smaller tribbles and also reduce their metabolic rate so they’ll be as harmless as Jones thought they’d be.

Star Trek More Tribbles More Troubles

Of course, the Klingons don’t know that, and the tribbles on their ship are too large for the glommer to eat. So Koloth orders Korax to fire on them, at which point they turn into a huge pile of small tribbles, to Koloth’s chagrin.

Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The Klingons genetically engineered a tribble predator, which is just like them. They also have developed a weapon that incapacitates the enemy, but leaves you too de-powered to get any enjoyment out of that. 

Fascinating. Spock determines that the Klingon stasis weapon isn’t practical because of its power requirements.

I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy determines that Jones’s genetic engineering work was slipshod, but figures out a way to fix it with a simple injection. Because he’s just that awesome.

Star Trek More Tribbles More Troubles

Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu gets to fly the ship and fire phasers during the firefights with Koloth. 

Hailing frequencies open. Uhura is the one who hits on the notion of controlling the robot ships to get Koloth off their backs.

I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty grumbles a lot when trying to beam Jones aboard and he’s really not happy to see tribbles again.

Go put on a red shirt. The security guard in the transporter room whom Kirk asks to secure the room once tribbles show up on board is modeled after writer David Gerrold.

Star Trek More Tribbles More Troubles

Channel open. “Tribbles are well known for their proclivities in multiplication.”

“And they breed fast, too!”

Spock describing tribbles and Jones failing his saving throw versus linguistic comprehension.

Welcome aboard. Stanley Adams is the second actor (after Mark Lenard in “Yesteryear“) to reprise his role from the live-action series, having previously played Jones in “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Nichelle Nichols and George Takei play Uhura and Sulu, respectively, while James Doohan provides the voices of Scotty and Koloth. It’s unclear who is the voice of Korax—for years, there was a rumor that David Gerrold voiced him, but Gerrold himself has denied this. Doohan is often credited, but it doesn’t really sound like him. It’s probably one of the other Filmation regulars who did various voices for their shows.

Trivial matters: Obviously, this is a sequel to “The Trouble with Tribbles,” also written by David Gerrold. He’d originally pitched this for the third season, but Fred Freiberger hated “Tribbles” and passed on it. D.C. Fontana contacted Gerrold when the animated series was in development and told him to rework his sequel for the half-hour animated format.

One of the cuts from the original sequel pitch was the glommer being a human predator as well as a tribble one, as they didn’t want to show it eating people on a kids show.

The grain being taken to Sherman’s Planet is quintotriticale, because we needed something more awesome than quadrotriticale, I guess?

Koloth’s ship is named the I.K.S. Devisor here. His ship was identified as the I.K.S. Gr’oth in DS9‘s “Trials and Tribble-ations,” but that seeming inconsistency was covered in “A Bad Day for Koloth” by David DeLee in Strange New Worlds 9, in which the Gr’oth had to be scuttled because of the tribble infestation provided by Scotty when he beamed the tribbles over to Koloth’s ship in “The Trouble with Tribbles.”

Hal Sutherland is color blind, which is why a lot of things turned out pink in this series, but the most egregious example are the tribbles, which are all the same bright pink, and the Klingon uniforms, which are a more pale pink.

The glommer is mentioned again in the novels Pawns and Symbols by Majliss Larson and Forged in Fire by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, the latter establishing that they were created by a Klingon geneticist named Nej.

To boldly go. “That tin-plated overbearing excuse for a starship captain did it again!” This is a fun little sequel, though a few of the beats are a bit too repetitive. I mean, the tribbles get all over the ship, though less entertainingly than they did the first time, they fall all over Kirk, they’re beamed to Koloth’s ship at the end, and there’s a twist that changes the tenor of the story, in this case that Jones stole the glommer.

Filmation’s rather static animation doesn’t do the tribbles any favors, as their movements are a bit more awkward than they were in live action, and you don’t get the same sense that they’re everywhere that you did in the live-action predecessor. Also the episode just isn’t as funny. Gerrold’s dialogue works not because the characters tell jokes, but because of wordplay and dialogue exchanges, and the timing is just off for everyone because it’s damn near impossible to do that type of wordplay properly in animation, especially with actors not used to the medium.

Also, as little as I liked Koloth as played by William Campbell, the actor’s presence is severely missed here, as James Doohan doesn’t convey any of Campbell’s oily charm, reducing him to an overly simplistic antagonist.

Having said that, the plot moves nicely, the stasis weapon is a nifty little concept, and Kirk’s aggravation at being stuck with Jones is surprisingly well conveyed.

 

Warp factor rating: 6

 

Next year:The Survivor

Keith R.A. DeCandido‘s latest release is the Super City Cops novella Avenging Amethyst, from which you can read an excerpt right here on this site. This is the first of three novellas about police in a city filled with costumed heroes and villains published by Bastei Entertainment. Full information, including the cover, promo copy, ordering links, and another excerpt can be found on Keith’s blog. The next two novellas, Undercover Blues and Secret Identities, will be released in January and February.

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Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Keith R.A. DeCandido has been writing about popular culture for this site since 2011, primarily but not exclusively writing about Star Trek and screen adaptations of superhero comics. He is also the author of more than 60 novels, more than 100 short stories, and more than 70 comic books, both in a variety of licensed universes from Alien to Zorro, as well as in worlds of his own creation, most notably the new Supernatural Crimes Unit series debuting in the fall of 2025. Read his blog, or follow him all over the Internet: Facebook, The Site Formerly Known As Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, YouTube, Patreon, and TikTok.
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MikePoteet
8 years ago

Well, this episode was a hit with my 9-year-old daughter, to whom I’m introducing Trek. So it still plays well with the target audience. She thought Kirk shoving the huge tribble out of the command chair was hysterical.

I’d love to see a Mirror Universe story about tribbles sometime. I bet the little buggers are terrifying in the dimension of the Terran Empire. They’d still breed fast, but they’d have teeth — rows and rows of biting, bloody teeth!

Anybody know why returning voice actors — Lenard, Adams, Carmel — don’t get screen credit for their work? Is it just because the credits screens had to be “set in stone” (or cels)?

Avatar
8 years ago

This is a surprisingly unimaginative sequel. Couldn’t Gerrold find a scenario that doesn’t contain tribbles AND Cyrano Jones AND Klingons AND Koloth AND Sherman’s Planet AND whatever-triticale? Some of the dialogue was reasonably funny, but all in all, I didn’t enjoy it much. And how can genetic engineering turn tribbles into “tribble colonies”?

@1/Mike: Oh no, species aren’t different in the Mirror Universe, or Mirror Spock would have bigger teeth too.

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Chris Jordan
8 years ago

Good idea to keep the original target audience in mind.  This was way cooler than anything else on Saturday morning TV at the time, except possibly for Johnny Quest (which was originally a prime time show anyway).  I was somewhat disappointed when I later got to see the original series, young me didn’t think they were as good.

MikePoteet
8 years ago

@2/Jana – Ha!  Maybe Mirror Cyrano Jones was a mad scientist who genetically modified the tribbles to be hellish nightmares with fur. ;)

ChristopherLBennett
8 years ago

I’m not a big fan of this episode. It’s interesting how much more of a space-battle story it is than I recalled, but that’s the only thing that makes it different from the original. The contrivance of having almost exactly the same situation as “The Trouble With Tribbles” strains disbelief to the breaking point. I mean, I could accept that Cyrano Jones was still dealing tribbles. I could accept that he would happen to be chased by Koloth, because it stands to reason that the same ship and crew would patrol the same part of space. But to have it happen at the exact same time that the Enterprise was delivering a shipment of a new triticale variant to Sherman’s Planet? That’s just too great a coincidence.

It’s also a bit too much of a sequel, too dependent on the assumption that the viewers are familiar with the original episode. The Act I climax relies entirely on the viewers understanding who Cyrano Jones is and what tribbles are. Sure, the dialogue at the top of Act II clarifies that for the kids and novice viewers who didn’t see the original, but that’s after those viewers have just sat through a commercial break wondering what the heck a tribble and a Cyrano Jones are and why the heck they should care.

Perhaps because this was the first episode produced, there are also some egregious animation errors that are probably funnier than the scripted jokes. When Cyrano comes to the bridge, the cel of the turbolift doors is too far to the right — and in the next shot, Kirk has the turbolift behind him while he’s supposedly addressing Jones directly, and Jones isn’t there. There’s a shot of Uhura where you can see the right-hand edge of the background painting of her station, with the colors fading out toward the side. There’s a shot in the second battle where the beam effect of the stasis weapon is seen even though Spock then says they didn’t use it. There’s a shot in the latter scene of Koloth on the viewscreen where he’s suddenly on the bridge in front of the viewscreen for one shot. And in the scene where Spock asks Kirk if he’s going to sit down, Kirk is standing next to his empty command chair just a couple of shots before we see that the reason he’s standing is because of a giant tribble in his chair.

But what gets me the most are the glaring plot holes. If the stasis weapon freezes the transporter the first time, how is Kirk then able to beam the tribbles over to the Klingon ship the second time the stasis weapon is used? That’s a humongous plot hole. And how is it an effective threat if he beams the tribbles over before making his demands? That’s not how a threat works. If he’s already done his worst, he has no more leverage. Not to mention that McCoy’s medical scanner must be pretty lame if it can’t tell the difference between a fat tribble and a colony of tribbles until it’s plot-convenient.

I’m willing to forgive the pink tribbles, though, since it might be a side effect of Jones’s slapdash genetic engineering. By the way, this is the first use of the term “genetic engineering” in Star Trek, beating The Wrath of Khan to the punch by nine years.

 

By the way, Koloth’s ship is unnamed in the episode dialogue. The name Devisor comes from the Star Trek Concordance and the Alan Dean Foster adaptation, so I assume it was named in the script. But canonically, its name is unknown, so there was no reason it couldn’t have been the Gr’oth (or that Gr’oth couldn’t be the Klingon word for Devisor). As for “IKS,” that wasn’t coined until DS9.

ChristopherLBennett
8 years ago

@6/krad: “…items that tie into Trek or Batman or, in one case, both.”

I think I have an idea what the “both” might be. Maybe a certain unsold TV pilot?

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8 years ago

Not gonna lie. I always found the purring, cooing, born pregnant, fuzzy, yet appendage-less and faceless hamsters that are tribbles to be mildly revolting, the idea of man-sized ball-colonies of them is utterly terrifying.

Like Shub-Niggurath/Cthulu-esque terrifying. 

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Quill
8 years ago

I think the “ecological sabotage,” was a stab at being slightly educational. Even so, Cyrano ranks barely above Mudd in my list of recurring trek side-characters I actually like. (Mudd is more or less rock bottom most of the time. He never rises above Cyrano, but other people infest the bottom rungs of the ladder between them, or sink lower than Mudd, depending on what episode I have last watched.)

Avatar
8 years ago

Koloth said that the glommer was an artificial creature designed to be a tribble predator, that the one Jones stole was the prototype, and they need it to make others.

But the glommer is not the only tribble predator. In “The Trouble With Tribbles”, Spock blamed Jones for removing the tribbles from their “natural predator-filled environment” and as a result “their natural multiplicative proclivities would have no restraining factor.”

This could, of course, be explained any number of ways; for example, the tribbles’ natural predators could be unable to survive away from their own planet, or at any rate unable to survive on a Klingon planet. And a half hour episode would not allow enough time to explain why an artificially created predator was necessary.

I don’t believe Alan Dean Foster addressed this in his adaptation either.

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