.Walter Koenig turns up (hooray) as an alien, Oro, whose ship has crashed into the Ark. Enterprisingly, he starts cannibalising the environment he’s landed in for parts, and recruits one of the locals as an assistant. She is, of course, a beautiful woman named Idona, and Garth, whose job it is to fall for whichever woman is guest-starring, obliges.
The tension, such as it is, comes from the fact that Idona has a terminal disease which Oro’s people can cure, but she has to leave with Oro if she wants to live, meaning she’s got to choose between life and Garth, as it were. Some tension also comes from Devon being (understandably) a bit irked at someone coming along and treating the Ark as raw materials, and not even volunteering to help fix it in return.
I say “such as it is” because this is an incredibly tension-free episode. There’s about fifteen minutes’ worth of plot, a couple of contrived attempts at peril, and otherwise it’s just people talking flatly at each other. We again get character swings, in this case Oro spending 90% of the episode saying he won’t fix the Ark because frankly it’s not his problem (harsh but true), and then, five minutes before the end, saying he wished he could have helped and he’ll ask his people once he gets home.
Once again we find out that women in Cypress Corners cook and sew and bake bread and that’s about it. This is the third time we’ve been told that– and since Rachel has encountered women with more technical roles since then, you’d think she’d be less surprised to find one.
Fun fact for non-Francophiles: the name of Idona’s home biosphere, where the men all die before the age of 18 and the only adults are women, is “Igreque”, which is the French word for “Y”.
A Doctor Of Many Things 
2 thoughts on “The Starlost Episode Seven: The Alien Oro”