Star Trek - The Original Series, Episode 72: The Mark Of Gideon [VHS]
Every now and then, the meager budget forStar Trekwas helped along by stories set almost entirely on theEnterprise, which required shooting within established sets. "The Mark of Gideon" was a clever way to mitigate the visual monotony of such episodes. Captain Kirk (William Shatner) beams himself down to the planet Gideon, but instead finds himself alone in a mock-up of his own starship. (Translation: it's Shatner on theEnterpriseset without the rest of the cast.) Almost alone, that is: Kirk finds himself accompanied by the beautiful Odona (Sharon Acker), an inhabitant of Gideon selected for infection by an outsider, in hopes that a plague of some sort will help the planet's overpopulation problem. Despite, or even because of, the set-bound nature of the story, "The Mark of Gideon" is actually one of the boldest and freshest ideas in the series, and like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," took on a hot topic of controversy (population control) in the issue-driven 1960s. The script, incidentally, was cowritten by Stanley Adams, who played Cyrano Jones in "The Trouble with Tribbles."--Tom Keogh