10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek: The Animated Series

“The Ambergris Element” introduces something sensible every “strange new worlds” exploring starship ought to have: a vehicle capable of exploring liquid environments: the so-called Aquashuttle. Plus one for that. Minus a cool million for, well, pretty much everything else that happens, especially Kirk and Spock undergoing “surgo-ops” that transform them into water-breathers.

It's possible for air-breathing animals to breathe oxygenated liquid, as memorably demonstrated for real with the rat in the movie The Abyss (as detailed in the documentary Under Pressure: Making ‘The Abyss’) but breathable perfluorocarbon emulsion isn’t ordinary water and isn’t naturally occurring in emulsion form, at least on Earth. And, let’s face it, lungs aren’t evolved for breathing liquid, the viscosity of which makes it harder to “breathe,” so whatever mutation was carried out by the amphibious Aquans was something pretty freaking complicated.

McCoy’s diagnosis of their condition is preposterous: he describes the substance in their bloodstreams as “similar to the ambergris of Earth whales.” Ambergris is a waxy substance produced in the digestive system of sperm whales. Sounds like clotting awaits. Did writer Margaret Armen ("The Gamesters of Triskelion", "The Paradise Syndrome", "The Cloud Minders" and "The Lorelei Signal") not look this up? And let’s not even get into how venom would induce these mutations, let alone how an anti-toxin would reverse it.

More silly things happen when the mutations are finally reversed. Kirk briefly becomes more fishlike: developing scales in seconds and inexplicably sprouting a dorsal fin, which rises into view even though he has his uniform on. And the webs between his fingers don’t retract, they fade away. Just how does that work?

No Star Trek’s ever been particularly good about either medicine or biology. This episode is the poster child for that.