Star Trek: 10 Episode Spoilers Hidden In The French Translation
4. L’équipage En Folie (The Naked Time)
This episode of Star Trek: The Original Series sees the Enterprise orbiting Psi 2000, an Earth-like world on the verge of ‘disintegration’. Whilst investigating a frozen lab on the planet, Lieutenant Joe Tormolen is exposed to an unknown pathogen that starts to cause some curious symptoms.
Sulu takes up topless fencing, Spock loses it, Kirk overshares, and Riley barricades himself in engineering and disables the ship so he can give us his best one-man show. With the Enterprise now descending into the atmosphere of the doomed Psi 2000, and more and more of the crew becoming infected, the matter-anti-matter reaction must be restarted in order to save the day.
The English title of the episode is no doubt an oblique reference to the fact that the crew lose all inhibition after being infected by the pathogen from the planet. They are metaphorically (and in one case literally) naked to their own whims. There is also time travel involved at the end of the episode, which was intended originally as a two-parter to have concluded with ‘Tomorrow is Yesterday’.
The French translation ignores all this, however, and goes right for the jugular. The simplest translation of ‘L’Équipage en folie’ would be ‘the crew goes crazy/mad’ or even ‘the crazy/mad crew’, which undeniably needs a spoiler alert. It is worth noting, also, that the season one episode of The Next Generation The Naked Now (a direct reference in name and plot) has the French title L’Enterprise en folie.