Behold the god who bleeds! (the one great line). Behold a tribe of re-located American Indians. Behold a planet with the exact same vegetation as Earth. 'What are the odds?' Kirk muses. Is Kirk kidding? I place the odds at billions to one against, but they've already found a planet with the exact same continents as Earth ("Miri") and the 'Roman Empire' planet in "Bread and Circuses." What's the big deal? The odds look pretty good in the Trek galaxy. So now we have a 'Tribal American Indians' planet - but at least with an explanation: apparently some ancient alien race likes to displace doomed cultures from Earth to other planets. Now, in a set of circumstances I calculate as millions to one against (or, in the Trek universe, very likely), Kirk accidentally opens a hidden floor panel on a mysterious obelisk with his communicator, falls inside and gets zapped by amnesia. Spock and the rest of the crew, unable to find him, have to leave the planet to head off an approaching asteroid. The better scenes, as with a couple of other episodes, turn out to be the 'B' storyline on the Enterprise, where Spock really annoys Scotty by placing too much strain on the ship's engines.
With us so far? Kirk now exits the obelisk, gets spotted by a couple of females from the tribe and is assumed to be a visiting godling (the uniform must've given it away). Some tribe members are skeptical, but on a 1 in 10,000 chance (a certainty here), he resuscitates a drowned boy, thereby assuring his super-stud, main man, head honcho, favored status. However, he makes an enemy, the former medicine man (Solari) and that's where the whole bleeding god scene comes in. About two months pass. That's right - 2 whole months for this episode! While Kirk, er, Kirok exults in his new found life of nearly carefree abandon, hugging himself in ecstasy and running around the woods with his new wife(!), the Enterprise retreats before a steadily-closing hunk of rock almost the size of our moon. The theme in this one involves placing Kirk in a scenario completely divorced from his usual duties and watch his 'other' true self emerge - the gentle, unhampered Kirk existing in all of us working stiffs. This all sounds very ambitious for a TV episode, but Shatner's over-emoting, hard-to-buy-into plotting and a slipshod pace does it in, undoing much of the tragic impact at the end. I was more interested in these unknown advanced aliens, who may be the same unseen puppeteers of "Assignment:Earth."