Admiral Mark Jameson is summoned by Governor Karnas of Mordan IV when Federation Ambassadors are taken hostage by... somebody. (Hint: Karn-ASS is the only suspect. He is the only anyone in sight.)
45 years ago, Commander Jameson negotiated peace here. It clearly worked wonders: they had 40 years of civil war.
Flapping his rubbery jowls, smacking his lips from his wheelless chair, flaunting his 70 year old trophy wife, Jameson is 85 years old, his body collapsing from incurable Iverson's disease.
Beverly flips out when Jameson begins a startling, impossible recovery. The natives of Cerebus II (aardvark-like people, by all accounts) gave Mark two batches of rejuvenation herbs. (One for him, one for his wife Annie.) Eager for faster results, he took Annie's dose and started to Benjamin Button like a mo' fo'.
I read, heard, or made up somewhere that "Too Short A Season" was written with James Kirk in mind, (and probably the planet from 'A Private Little War'), but was quickly changed. Maybe this was better than that? Because I hate, hate, HATE, the idea that Kirk would've behaved so selfishly. If an Admiral-of-the-Week played Ollie North/Dorian Grey, then so be it. Adding Kirk to the Captain Tracey pile of jerks? That would've been a huge mistake tantamount to bringing him aboard this soon at all.
All that remains of that tale is a sense that the tolerant, thoughtful diplomacy trying to be born in 'The Next Generation' is at odds with the 'America! Fuck Yeah!' attitude that sometimes prevailed in 'The Original Series'.
Jameson's maudlin deathbed sex antics and everything else that happens is entirely ho-hum. Even 'The Counter-Clock Incident' is preferable.
The phaser fight in the steelplast maze is pretty cool, though. Boys like LASERS! If you hung on to your 1987 action figures, this is what they'd have been doing: phasering holes in your sandbox, not waxing rhapsodic about the folly of the quest for youth.
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