Star Trek: The Animated Series S1E05 – More Tribbles, More Troubles.

The Animated Series boldly goes where Star Trek has gone be-fur, bringing back those pernicious plush pests the tribbles. In More Tribbles, More Troubles, The Animated Series recalls David Gerrold, the mastermind behind The Trouble with Tribbles, for an ecological encore, taking the chaos up a notch by adding Klingons, glommer predators, and more exponential tribble shenanigans than you can wave a tricorder at.

The story kicks off with the Enterprise coming to the aid of a Federation freighter under Klingon attack only to find out the pilot at the centre of the commotion is none other than Cyrano Jones, the galaxy’s most problematic peddler, with a new breed of tribbles that, supposedly, don’t reproduce. As with every new and improved product, these new tribbles come with new and improved problems. But More Tribbles, More Troubles takes some steps to avoid simply being a homage to its progenitor episode by introducing a sub-plot involving a new Klingon weapon that threatens the Enterprise’s grain escort mission.

This is the first time it feels like the series’ reach starts to exceed its grasp as it stuffs the episode with too many ideas and too little time to do any of them justice. Ecological balance, genetic engineering and the unintended consequences of meddling with nature all get touched on but they’re often shunted aside for an animated do-over of jokes from the original Tribbles episode. The glommer, another MacGuffin in an episode that has as many MacGuffins as it does Tribbles, looks like it was designed by someone who lost a bet, but it’s a subplot in an episode that’s so unfocussed it’s almost all subplot.

With the exception of one line of absolute sass from Uhura when the Klingon weapon first paralyses the Enterprise, most of the dialogue is reserved for Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty along with guest voice Stanley Adams’ returning Cyrano Jones (apparently there wasn’t enough money to get William Campbell back as Koloth too) . Brevity may be the soul of wit, but the compressed running time and overstuffed plots both work to supress the sparkling repartee that was the hallmark of The Trouble With Tribbles and while the regular cast do what they can to inject life into proceedings, Adams lethargically phones it in. The jokes are mostly recycled and the resolution repetitive. With more time to explore its ideas, this might have made for a solid episode of the original series but for the animated one, it’s the first episode that lazily trades on fan recognition instead of using the freedom offered by animation to push the boundaries of Star Trek storytelling a bit further.

More Troubles, More Tribbles is perhaps the first episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series which feels like a Saturday morning cartoon. The comedy feels childish rather than charming and the balance between silliness and sci-fi is off-kilter in a way that cheapens what does actually work well.