10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek: The Animated Series

“The Practical Joker” is unlikely to be on many people’s favorites list, even amongst fans of this series. It’s only memorable for Trek’s first depiction of a shipboard recreation facility capable of simulating environments; i.e. a proto-holodeck! Beyond that, it’s an exceedingly thin premise, no real story, and dumb as a box of giant Spocks.

It’s one thing to accept the malfunctioning computer causing the ship’s laundry to print writing on Kirk’s shirt, manufacture dribble glasses for the food synthesizers, mess with the environmental systems to ice the floors, and reprogram the recreation room to torture the crew. But just how does it make a new instrument materialize on Spock’s bridge console? Is it beaming things onto the bridge? How does no one notice?

The dumbest of these pranks is when the Enterprise releases a Galaxy class-sized balloon version of itself, which Spock describes as “twenty times” the size of the Romulan ships. One assumes the computer had the ship’s machinery fabricate it, but how did it get into what Uhura identifies as the “main cargo hatches” (depicted as the hangar deck)? From what vast store of raw material did the computer manufacture this monstrosity? Where does all the gas come from to inflate it, even at very low pressure? And how does the thing maintain such a specific shape without looking like the Michelin Man?

The premise of the episode is dumb to begin with. The balloon is just the peak of this drecky dumbness. Nice holodeck, tho.