YMMV / Star Trek S2 E5 "The Apple"

• Alternative Character Interpretation: When Spock complains about McCoy's medicines turning his stomach, the doctor answers that if he were human, he wouldn't have an upset stomach. This could be taken as a dig at his biology. However, given that they just saw a Red Shirt killed in seconds by the same thorns that got Spock, it could also be "If you'd been like most of us, you'd have suffered far worse effects than nausea."
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Kirk only barely hints at the Federation helping the former people of Vaal, and is more concerned with having them learn to build a society themselves. After killing their god, you'd think that Kirk would be more concerned with helping these people transition, but nope, he just gets back on the ship to go make fun of Spock, leaving these people to more or less start from scratch, without their provider, and surrounded by the Everything Trying to Kill You forest. Boy, Kirk must've really wanted to get away from that planet.
• Retroactive Recognition: The role of Makora is one of the first acting roles for David Soul.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Kirk having a quietly ongoing breakdown about the red shirts dying and the Enterprise failing (at one point he looks like he's going to pass out) is commonly considered to have deserved a better episode to be in.
• Strawman Has a Point: Kirk's decision to, without the knowledge or consent of the locals who actually have to live with the consequences, destroy the supercomputer that's regulating the planet is presented as a good thing, insofar as it supposedly saves their civilization from stagnation. The only person to debate this choice is Spock, and despite being treated as wrong in-universe his arguments actually come across as quite reasonable: there's no death, disease, or war on this planet, the locals are all healthy and content, literally the only thing the supercomputer asks of them is an occasional offering from the harvest to use as fuel, and the native populations do have the right to choose a system that works for them regardless of how unappealing it is to a human mentality. He's not wrong that Kirk and McCoy's determination to "save" the planet is based more on an emotional knee-jerk reaction than on any logical line of reasoning. In the end, the conclusion of this episode looks less like Kirk saving a group of hapless victims from the clutches of a tyrannical machine, and more like Kirk messing up a perfectly functional civilization and not even sticking around to deal with the fallout.
• Values Dissonance: This episode is much harder to watch in the post-colonial 21st century, especially considering how well-known it is that 19th and 20th century American and European colonization led to much of the instability that still plagues modern-day Africa, the Middle East, and southern and southeastern Asia. It also doesn't help that the tropical planet they're on looks like an expy for Vietnam.

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