episode #19 - Practical Joker

Air Date: 9/21/74    written by Chuck Menville

A genuinely amusing episode: The Enterprise is suddenly confronted by and chased by 3 Romulan warships (though these are Klingon-designed ships, like in the TOS episode, The Enterprise Incident; ironically, the animated show could have easily reverted these back to Romulan Bird-of-Prey design, unless it was too much work for the animators). The Enterprise flees through a cosmic cloud and soon after, practical jokes are being played upon the crew. It begins harmlessly enough - leaking drinking glasses. But, soon, the situation becomes dire: 3 crew members (McCoy, Uhura and Sulu) decide to use the rec room (an early  version of the holo deck) and get stuck inside a freezing scenario. It turns out that the joker is the ship's computer, infected with something when the ship passed through the cloud.
The most amazing scene for me, as I mentioned elsewhere, is the introduction of the holodeck. I watched this show as a kid and had forgotten this scene until seeing it again as an adult... after watching the TNG show in the eighties and nineties. So, this reveals that the holodeck had not originated on the TNG series. Score one for TAS.  The bulk of the episode is sort of a retread of Shore Leave (only on the ship) and Wolf in the Fold (entity taking over ship's computer), but it's entertaining. The voice actors tried to make the most of the comical situation. BoG's Score: 7 out of 10