Star Trek TOS The Mark of Gideon. S3 E16

Synopsis:  Beaming down to the isolationist planet Gideon, Kirk seems to be lost and the diplomats of the planet refuse to allow the crew of the Enterprise to search for him.  In fact, Kirk has been beamed to a duplicate of the Enterprise that is completely empty of any of the crew.  Wandering the empty corridors, he eventually encounters a beautiful woman named Odona who claims to have no idea who she is or where she comes from.

As Spock struggles with Starfleet's orders and the Gideon adminstration, Kirk and Odona continue to wander the empty ship until Odona collapses with an illness.  At that moment, the planetary leader, Diplomat Hodin, appears revealing that the mock Enterprise was all a deception to get Odona and Kirk together.  Previously, Kirk had Vegan choriomennengitis, a disease that almost killed him. Unless Odona receives treatment within 24 hours, she will die.

However, Hodin reveals that this has been their plan all along.  Gideon suffers from severe overpopulation and they have decided to introduce this deadly infection as a method of reducing the population.  Kirk must stay and continue infecting people, while Odona's death will be an example to the population and will inspire others to volunteer.

Finally, Spock has had enough of the diplomatic stalling and simply beams down on his own authority.  He finds Kirk and Odona and the three of them beam back aboard the Enterprise.  McCoy heals Odona, though she retains the microorganism in her system just as Kirk had and as the show ends she beams down to the planet to carry out her gruesome task of thinning the population.

Analysis:
Just as the previous episode had been about racism, the anvilicious message here was about the dangers of overpopulation.  As Hodin described it, because their culture valued life and refused to practice birth control, the planet had become severely overpopulated to the extent that there was room for nothing except merely existing a hollow life that everyone longed to leave but was prevented from doing so by annoying moral fixations on the sanctity of life.  This was written at a time when Paul Ehrlich's "population bomb" was on everyone's mind, a bomb that failed to go off when the predicted famine and disease declined to appear.  But in the meantime, the Catholic Church's discouragement of contraception took a beating from liberal intelligentsia.

That is the position that Hodin is referring to when he says:

HODIN:  The birth rate continued to rise, and the population grew, until now Gideon is encased in a living mass who can find no rest, no peace, no joy. ... But you see, the people of Gideon have always believed that life is sacred. That the love of life is the greatest gift. ...  We are incapable of destroying or interfering with the creation of that which we love so deeply. Life, in every form, from foetus to developed being. It is against our tradition, against our very nature. We simply could not do it.
KIRK: Yet you can kill a young girl. 

So in this episode we get a nice little moralizing speech about the benefits of sterilization, contraception, abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and forced population reduction because we definitely don't want to end up wandering in circles wearing those hooded onesies.

The story presented a trivial problem (Gideon trying to keep Kirk as a prisoner) with a very obvious solution (Spock beams down, despite protestations, and retrieves Kirk.)  The rest of the episode spent sparring with Hodin, endlessly repeating transporter coordinates, and wandering the empty decks of the Enterprise was meaningless and conveyed nothing.

And in the meantime the story introduced annoying plot inconsistencies.
1.  Why did the planetary government reconstruct the interior of the Enterprise in painstaking detail?  It provoked a few hours of confusion on Kirk's part, but they didn't maintain the ruse longer than that.  So months of work for a few hours of use seems like a bad trade off.  Where did they find the space for it on that ant hill of a planet.  Was it really worth it?

2.  Where did they obtain the detailed plans to the Enterprise interior?  How could this isolationst fringe member of the Federation possibly obtain these plans?

3.  That dumb Starfleet bureaucrat seemed to be particularly wrongheaded to the point that I was convinced that he was a Gideon plant and was genuinely surprised to discover that Uhura's transmissions hadn't been intercepted by someone on the planet with a Starfleet uniform.

4. Once again, the boys with the gold or blue shirts have absolutely nothing to offer in the way of a solution to this planet's problems.  They're just glad to fly away at the end of the episode, and put as much distance between themselves and the freakshow happening down on the surface.  We're not even going to address those volunteering to be infected by the deadly disease to relieve the population pressure by taking themselves out of the gene pool.  Very dark, Crow...

5.  There's no way either Spock or Scotty would have even hesitated to recognize that the transporter coordinates had been transposed. The Gideon schemers were exceptionally clumsy.

6.  Freebie:  Kirk beams down without a communicator?  The first thing Spock does is use his communicator to talk to Scotty on the Enterprise.  The whole elaborate ruse that the Gideons had set up could have been foiled in seconds if Kirk had simply followed procedure.

7.  Another Freebie:  if the health of people on the planet was so strong that they could regenerate organs lost to sterilization, how long would it be before the population developed an immunity to Vegan meningitis?


Rating 1.5 out of 5.  Not the worst episode ever, not the most offensive, but overall boring and without presenting the smart solutions that ST is known for.