We're getting close to the end, folks. I've given up hope at this point of finding some lost classic, which is for the best. Star Trek has been pored over by fans for decades, and the idea that I'd stumble across an episode that had gotten lost in the shuffle is a tad deluded, to put it kindly. This season wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but it wasn't what I'd call good, either, with underdeveloped writing, uneven performances, and stories that unabashedly recycled the same bare handful of ideas while often failing to meet even the minimum demands of such theft. So you start hunting for interesting moments, even while you accept that those moments aren't ever going to combine into a satisfying whole. You savor character interactions, good pieces of dialog, striking design elements. You realize what interested you in the series to begin with, even if all that's left are echoes.
"The Cloud Minders" isn't a complete loss, although much of what's good about it has been done better elsewhere. (This is also true of "The Savage Curtain." In fact, it could be considered an epitaph for the whole season.) The central conflict should be familiar to anyone with a basic knowledge of labor struggles, or if you maybe read The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells; it's the people of Stratos versus the Troglytes instead of the Eloi and the Morlocks, but the principle remains. The privileged elite have become dangerously disconnected from the sweat and toil that keeps their civilization running, and while the workers haven't quite got to the flesh-eating phase in their struggles for the proletariat, they're definitely beyond writing firm letters to the newspaper.
This poses something of a problem for Kirk and company, because the Troglytes do the mining, and the Enterprise is visiting Stratos to pick up some much needed zenite, a mineral of crucial importance for stopping a botanical plague over on another planet. Again, this isn't the first time we've had this set-up; hell, we saw roughly the same thing happen last week. It's a little disappointing that we never get to address the plague directly—we're informed that if the zenite isn't delivered on time, all the plant life on the planet will die, and that could've served as a good focus. There's a curious conservatism in many third season storylines; not from a political standpoint, but in the way the writers keep retreading the same ground. Which is too bad, really. I'd be willing to endure a few more missteps like "The Empath" if it had led to more risk-taking in the scripts overall.
But we've got what we've got, so let's see how that plays out. After a brief struggle planet-side with some angry miners (later labeled "Disruptors," which sounds like the name of somebody's high school New Wave band), Kirk, Spock, and McCoy meet Plasus, high advisor of Stratos and essentially the only ruling figure from the city we ever deal with. He apologizes for the misadventure, and invites everybody back to the cloud city for some chill time while his people try and force the Troglytes to give up the necessary materials. (The cloud city effect is obviously done on the cheap, but it's effective nonetheless. There's something fairy tale-ish about such a perfect model castle floating overhead.) In Stratos, Spock makes an impression on this week's Wearing Next To Nothing Female, Droxine, who happens to be Plasus' daughter. She's smitten by Spock's background and intellect, so we get a few scenes distributed throughout the ep of Spock keeping his pimp hand strong. (So to speak.)
Kirk makes an impression of his own on Vanna, the leader of the Disruptors, when she breaks into his room and tries to take him hostage. They struggle on the bed for a while in a fight scene that can only be described as… unpleasant, until Kirk takes control and learns of her plans. Unsurprisingly, Kirk is sympathetic towards the rebelling workers, and it's hard not to be; they're stuck doing all the crap work, while the cloud city folks lark about and behave like grad students (ie, "the worst people.")(that was a 30 Rock reference, by the way). Plus, while both sides are aggressive about standing up for themselves, Plasus breaks out the torture faster than you can shout "Where is Marwan?!?", and that's never really a good sign.
The most interesting angle that "Cloud" takes, story-wise, is that it actually bothers to find some justification for the Stratos bigotry against the Troglytes. McCoy discovers that the miners are mentally inferior to a normal person, because of a gas they inhale from mining zenite. Plasus is still a blind, infuriating ass, but his and his people's prejudice is grounded in some kind of fact, and it's hard to know how to take that. It ends up providing the episode with a third act, as Kirk decides to take matters into his own hands and force Plasus to directly experience the gas's effects. But given that the fight between the two groups is already pretty easy to understand without outside factors, why is it necessary to have the gas at all? The Troglytes aren't going to be as educated as the Stratosians, because their job requirements don't call for it (some of them work as servants on the cloud city, which is how Vanna ended up being away from the gas's effects long enough to get her brains back), and the conflict between the under-educated and the elite is such a familiar one that giving it a logical justification is redundant at best. It doesn't even serve to make Plasus more sympathetic, because he never stops being an angry, blinded creep.
But like I said, this does give us a third act, and it does give Kirk a chance to get kind of stupid, so that's all right. I'm not sure I completely buy that the gas wears off as quickly as it does, and that prolonged exposure has no cumulative ill effect. This seems like a narrative cop-out—just like the gas itself. Because what if the Troglytes really were somehow mentally inferior, and they still didn't want to spend their whole lives doing dangerous, demanding work? Does missing a few IQ points mean more intelligent people are fully justified in exploiting you? I'm grateful that "Cloud" had enough story that it didn't drag too terribly near the end, and Droxine and Spock's flirtation was entertaining, but philosophy-wise, it chickened out in a way that's highly unusual for the show. There's nothing wrong with a disenfranchised lower class trying to stand up for its rights, and pretending that the Troglytes could really be just like the Stratosians misses the point of such a struggle.
While "The Savage Curtain" is just as derivative as "Cloud," it's a lot more fun, and it's deeper than you'd expect from an episode that opens with Abraham Lincoln in space. Hey, you know how everybody complains about TV, how it's destroyed our culture and turned millions into attention-span-deficit morons? Well, everybody is wrong, and Star Trek gives us proof. Without daily programming, our race would've quickly turned to games of death and chance for our amusement, kidnapping strangers from other worlds to compete against one another simply because we couldn't think of anything better to do with our time. TV saves lives, my friends. Without it, we'd all just be another group of hideous rock monsters living on the lava planet. (Don't question me! This is science.)
The Enterprise is orbiting a red planet, and for once, Spock's computer equipment has found actual signs of life—the problem is, it's carbon-based life, and given the planet's unstable, really, really, really hot environment, that's just flat out impossible. Uhura isn't able to make contact with whatever life is down there, real or computer glitch, and because no one can actually beam in to check on the readings in person, for once Kirk decides to do the sensible thing and leave. (I know it wouldn't make for great drama, but I wish we could've seen a few instances where the Enterprise discovers a strange anomaly, but can't do a damn thing about it. Most everything our heroes encounter has been explicable, even if the explanation often boils down to, "A wizard did it.") But it's too late! Before the ship can exit orbit, the form of Abraham Lincoln appears on the view screen, very chummy, very confident in his flat-out impossible existence.