"Patterns of Force" represents one of the more outrageous episodes of Trek, foregoing subtlety altogether to service a point of view so free from controversy it neuters any reason behind the effort. That this viewpoint must be driven by careening the crew through an improbable series of lucky sequences exacerbates the original insult that discriminating good and evil requires expenditure of a failed social experiment on a planetary scale (and this by a historian at that!).

Kirk and Spock beam into a large plaza empty of any people save a solitary Zeon (fortunately connected to the underground) running from his Ekosian persecutors. They hide, fortunately intercepting Nazi uniforms and a video transmission on a large outdoor screen that literally no one else would have otherwise watched. After being captured they prove "insensitive to punishment" they are fortunately spared S.O.P. execution and they manage to escape (with a fortunate nonsense weapon). They fortunately hook up with a high-placed cadre of defectors capable of Phelps-caliber subterfuge. For all his precautions Melakon fortunately places a trivial guard on the Fuhrer whom he parades in a comatose state, and so on. Unfortunately.

The guest stars perform adequately, screen veterans most of them with quite a few from Trek. Skip Homeier as Melakon should be more the evil villain but appears too late in the convoluted drama to earn a glance askance. David Brian as John Gill could have been more professorial or menacing and appears instead as a sleepy old man. Richard Evans is unobtrusive as Isak, reacting equally to losing a fiancé and to shooting a wannabe evil dictator. Spock is off his game, feeling exhilaration and quipping about barn sides (not to mention Nimoy's audible head cold - put a shirt on!). Shatner plays it at all times with professional belief, particularly during Spock's painful targeting discussion and also his priceless exasperation as his first officer's cover of "dazed Lieutenant" falls apart.

For brief moments the episode rouses to lucidity but like Gill (even in his "condition") not much. Any promising momentum is halted by interminable dialogue patching inferior construction of plot and characterization. Gill was clearly a fool disrespecting his function as cultural observer, neglecting his duty to the Prime Directive, and ignoring history's lesson of "The Leader Principle" (wherein a small personality leads good intention astray into senseless ruin). The concept of Godwin's Law applied to early television programming as it applies to the internet today, and indeed for the same reasons should have been avoided. Edith's Nazis were enough.