The Pirates of Orion (TAS)
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SST411: Spock is dying — and the cure is in enemy hands.
Choriocytosis encases copper-based blood cells so they can’t carry oxygen, and it’s 100% fatal to Vulcans. The medicine is en route aboard the USS Huron, a Starfleet freighter — until Orion pirates hijack it. What makes the situation worse: the Orions are a neutral power, and they’d rather blow themselves up than let the Federation prove they’ve gone rogue.
Dom Bettinelli, Jimmy Akin, and Fr. Jason Tyler dig into “The Pirates of Orion,” widely regarded as the best episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series — and the one written by Howard Weinstein at age 19, in a submission that almost never got read.
The discussion covers a lot of ground. McCoy finally gets to be the hero, devising the rendezvous plan before Kirk can even open his mouth. Lt. Arex gets real things to do for once. James Doohan voices the Orion captain and most of the Huron crew, demonstrating the vocal range that made him indispensable to TAS. And the Orion ship design — a pouncing, crab-like silhouette — effectively sells the menace before the mystery is revealed.
The panel also interrogates the episode’s central premise: can a neutral planet really disclaim its own pirates? A look at Somali pirates, letters of marque, and Larry Niven’s Kzinti subplot from another TAS episode all come to bear. And the transporter-defuses-the-bomb ending gets scrutinized — “molecular chain reaction” only goes so far as an explanation.
Feedback from the previous episode rounds out the show, including a listener’s detailed correction on dinosaur genus nomenclature and what it reveals about Neelix’s insult to Tom Paris.
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