The Practical Joker (TAS)

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SST435: The Enterprise flies through a cloud of charged particles, comes out with a taste for pranks, and spends the next 22 minutes soaking Sulu with a dribble glass, melting Kirk’s fork, and printing “Kirk is a jerk” on the back of every uniform in the captain’s closet.

“The Practical Joker” is the third episode of The Animated Series season 2, and it carries a footnote that outlived the comedy: this is the first holodeck episode in Star Trek. It’s called the rec room here, and Gene Roddenberry had wanted the idea in season 3 of the original series before the budget said no.

Then Star Trek lost track of it. D.C. Fontana wrote for the first season of The Animated Series and came back for season 1 of The Next Generation, where she was insistent the writing staff didn’t remember this episode while they were inventing the holodeck. McCoy asks for a walk in the woods here, and 13 years later Riker walks into a holographic forest in “Encounter at Farpoint.”

Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler split on the jokes. Fr. Jason Tyler had fun with it. Jimmy Akin thinks the humor is forced, and that the 1970s novelty-shop material lands under what the writers could have reached for. What he does like is the verbal stuff: the computer telling Spock “that is for me to know and you to find out,” or making Kirk say “pretty please with sugar on” before it will open a door. That’s where the 12-year-old mind behind the pranks shows up.

The panel then builds the physics of a room that hadn’t been invented yet. McCoy, Uhura, and Sulu walk for what feels like miles inside a room they know has walls, so the rec room has to be repositioning them. It also generates a covered pit they fall into, so it can raise a slope under their feet without them noticing. Data’s rock throw at Farpoint works only because the rock is a real object he carried in. Everything else is projection.

Under the gags sits a real question. The Enterprise runs on one computer: air, temperature, gravity, food, navigation. In 1974, computers were warehouse-sized machines that ran a job or two and could fail without taking the building with them. Centralize everything and you get a single point of failure with a sense of humor. The computer cuts the gravity and Scotty ends up crawling on the ceiling, one of the very few times Star Trek lets gravity break.

Also on the table: the inflatable decoy Enterprise at 20 times scale, whether Spock’s bacteria metaphor survives contact with what a computer virus actually is, the HAL 9000 shadow over the premise, Kirk’s Br’er Rabbit routine to talk the computer back into the cloud, and a writing flub where McCoy thanks Uhura for an idea McCoy had.

And the question hanging over every computer-malfunction episode ever made: has anyone on this ship heard of backups?

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