10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek: The Animated Series

“The Infinite Vulcan” is one of the series’ kookier segments. It begins sensibly enough but then goes off the rails when Doctor Stavos Keniclius Five shows up as a literal giant … who then clones a ginormous Spock 2 and plans to make a veritable army of Vulcan Gorts*.

But you can’t just scale up an animal and expect it to function, or even stay alive. We’re all evolved for particular environmental niches. Our hearts and lungs aren’t proportionally right for being scaled up seven times. Compared to the original Spock (it varies by shot), Spock 2 appears to be between 25 and 30 feet tall. The former would make him 125 times as massive, but the strength of his bones and muscles — which scales with cross-sectional area — would only increase by 25 times. At five times too weak to support himself against gravity, Spock 2's bones would shatter and he'd effectively be a beached whale: an immobile and quickly suffocating mass of jelly incapable of dissipating metabolic heat rapidly enough to avoid cooking himself from within … for starters.

“The Terratin Incident” goes the other direction and has all the organic matter on the ship — including crew and algea-based uniforms (let’s hope no one had metal fillings in their teeth) — experience diminution a la The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). The cause is explained as the distance between constituent molecules shrinking. This means everything and everyone still has the same mass. Thus when he fell from the helm, action figure-sized Sulu hit the floor with the same weight as normal. Sulu should be splat. Likewise, Chapel’s density would have caused her to sink like a stone in the fish tank, and Kirk’s using a needle and thread to pull her to safety would have been as ineffective as trying to lift a full-sized Chapel by the same method.

Worse, since the crew maintains their mass despite their vastly diminished volume, everyone has the same oxygen and food requirements as when full-size. A typical adult human being’s lungs feature hundreds of millions of alveoli, with a surface area on the order of 75 square meters. Shrunken lungs wouldn’t have a fraction of the surface area necessary to process unshrunken air to keep the lilliputian crewmembers — let alone the Terratin's —  alive.

Size matters. A lot.

*Gort being the peacekeeping robot of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).