Synopsis: the Enterprise has located a planet that seems to defy all logic. It is about the size of a moon and is very young but has an atmosphere and vegetation like an earth-type planet that is larger and much older. Just as they beam down to investigate, Kirk, McCoy, Sulu, and geologist D'Amato are surprised by the appearance of a woman in the transporter room. After they dematerialize, the purple woman touches the transporter chief and kills him instantly.
The Enterprise is displaced 1000 light years away and begins the return trip to the planet. The Purple woman appears again, this time questioning one of Scotty's engineers before killing him as well. The Enterprise begins accelerating out of control, meaning that the ship will explode if something isn't done to correct it. Scotty undertakes the dangerous task, while Spock analyses data from the displacement.
Back on the planetoid, the Purple woman begins to appear to the away team. First D'Amato is killed, and then Sulu is attacked but escapes when Kirk intervenes. The Purple woman is only programmed to kill a specific target, and is harmless to others. After dodging other purple assassins, the away team finds a door leading to the interior of the planet and the central computer. Inside, three purple assassins appear, one for each of them and they spend some time dodging away.
On the Enterprise, Scotty's initial attempt to fix the ship has the opposite effect until Spock's analysis reveals that the spatial displacement also knocked the ship out of phase. Evidence of this is what Mr. Scott observed when he said that something felt wrong with the ship. When Mr. Scott reverses the polarity of his probe, the repair attempt is effective.
On the planet, Kirk and the team are about to be touched by the assassins when Spock and a security officer beam down, and shoot the controlling computer with a phaser. Then a recording plays of the purple woman who is revealed to be Losira, the last commander of this station. She explains that this planetoid is the remains of an artificially constructed outpost that had contracted a deadly disease, killing everyone and leaving the automated defenses active. McCoy surmises that the entire species had been wiped out by this disease, and this outpost was all that remained.
Analysis
Taken in its entirety, this was an entertaining episode, with both the action on the Enterprise and the action on the planet working together to tell a coherent story. The structure is right, the cast is right, it's just that there isn't enough there to give it any punch. After a few minutes, it just felt like padding.
Kirk directing his team on the planet seemed repetitive and each time we went back to them, basically the same things happened and the story did not advance. Yep, stuck on a desert planet with no food or water, better look around. Yep, let's say the same thing over again 3 minutes later. Still on the planet, no answers, no clues, the team still working over old ground, the purple woman appears for D'Amato and still we learn nothing.
Spock and Scotty are trying to re-take control of the ship, which is a great story idea. Spock comes up with a solution and Scotty volunteers to carry out the plan. Again, Trek gold here. It's just that it was too drawn out so that it felt padded and lost its drive.
I wanted to like this episode so much more that I actually did. For example, Scotty reports to Spock that the ship doesn't feel right. The audience instinctively believes the chief engineer and knows this will lead to an important breakthrough. But then, nothing and we are distracted by a development in a different direction.
The bottom line is that this should have been a hallmark episode: a mysterious planet, creepy deaths, a deadly female assassin that appears at will and kills with a touch, a long-dead civilization with an automated defense that kills without remorse, or does it.... It has all the classic elements that should provide for an intriguing solution to an intractable puzzle, a brilliant discovery, dazzling displays of intuition, dogged persistence, and deductive reasoning. And while we got the form, it lacked in substance.
Small asides:
1. Spock's dialogue with the bridge crew, and especially Scotty, completely missed Spock's character. Rather than making him appear devoid of emotion, it instead made him appear irritable, impatient, and annoyed. Spock is a Vulcan dedicated to logic, not a cultural neophyte who is unfamiliar with human idioms and figures of speech.
2. I was fascinated by the brief suggestion that part of Losira's character remained within the computer's re-creation of her as a weapon of assassination. Some of Losira's compassion, value for life, and abhorrence at murder seemed to shine through, however briefly. I would have loved to see this idea developed even more and incorporated into the ultimate solution.
3. Kirk snapping at Sulu seemed entirely out of place. And the extended burial scene for D'Amato seemed forced and awkward. In the absence of any explanation offered by the story I must conclude that this was poor writing.
Rating 2.5 out of 5
Showing posts with label Kirk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kirk. Show all posts
Sunday, October 29, 2017
Saturday, October 28, 2017
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:
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.
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.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.
KIRK: Yet you can kill a young girl.
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.
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
Star Trek TOS Whom Gods Destroy. S3 E14
Synopsis:
Tasked with delivering a new medicine to a mental health facility for the criminally insane on the desolate planet of Elba II, Kirk and Spock beam down only to be taken prisoner by Garth, a former fleet captain of the Federation, now declared criminally insane. Captain Garth has the ability to perfectly mimic the appearance of anyone he sees and he adopts the guise of Dr. Cory, the governor of the penal colony, first to take control of the institution and then to capture Kirk.
Garth is insane and his plan is to take over the Enterprise disguised as Kirk. With his insane followers and a new powerful explosive that he has discovered, he has grandiose plans to take over the galaxy. However, his initial attempt on the Enterprise is foiled because of a new security measure that Kirk instituted before leaving the ship. When Garth asks to be beamed aboard, Scotty gives a sign "Queen to queen's level three" and requests the counter sign, which Garth does not know.
Garth hosts a dinner to attempt to gather information from Kirk. When conversation and dancing fail, Garth tries to use torture to extract the password from Kirk, but the captain will not reveal anything. Marta, the Orion dancer and prisoner, pleads with Garth that she will get the information out of Kirk, if he will stop the torture.
Marta does begin to seduce Kirk, when suddenly she pulls out a dagger and attempts to stab him. At that moment, Spock arrives and subdues Marta with a Vulcan neck pinch. Armed with a phaser, the two of them make their way to the control room to lower the force field surrounding the planet. Once there, however, Kirk suspects that Spock is actually Garth in disguise and refuses to give the countersign to Scotty.
Now completely insane and past all reason, Garth begins to set up a kingdom, with the rest of the inmates as his subjects. He demands to be called Lord Garth and hosts a grand coronation ceremony with Marta as consort and Kirk as the "heir apparent." Afterward, however, Garth brings Kirk to the control room to watch as Marta is dragged out into the poisonous atmosphere of the planet and then killed by the detonation of a small crystal of Garth's explosive.
Garth then sends his minions to bring Spock from his cell. Spock dispatches both of them and takes their phaser only to find two identical Kirks in the control room when he arrives. Initially hesitant as to who is the real captain, when one of them demands that Spock shoot them both and bring the Enterprise to safety, Spock stuns the other Kirk, who proves to be Garth in disguise. Spock then calls the Enterprise and gives the correct counter sign "Queen to King's level one."
McCoy beams down to the planet and administers the medicine to each of the patients in the facility who begin to recover from their insanity and have no memory of the previous events.
Analysis
Whom Gods Destroy is another of those episodes noted for the passivity of the crew. Kirk, Spock, even Scotty are notable for their inaction, merely observing the development of the story around them. Instead, we are captive to the machinations of Lord Garth. And this remains the major complaint throughout. All of Kirk's plans are negated, as indeed are Garth's. The resulting stalemate becomes increasingly boring and ultimately annoying. The death of Marta should have been shocking, but it came so late in the proceedings that it served only to cement our lack of will to care about the outcome. I wept for Marta, but I was not angry at Garth so much as at the writers, who couldn't think of any better ending for that character.
And finally when we had run through the nonsensical dance scene, torture chair scene, seduction scene, and coronation scene, during which our heroes take no action, we bring Spock out of seclusion to almost instantly save the day. Nothing we had done up to that point in the story made any difference to the outcome. It's hard to argue that Garth had undergone any development or arc in his character, and we were merely accumulating scenes to document the depths of his insanity.
Even the twin dilemma at the climax seemed underwhelming. This was clearly an opportunity for the writers to have Spock do something very clever, as the reference to Solomon seemed to indicate, but the fact that he had at his disposal a phaser that could stun meant that elaborate wisdom was not needed. As Kirk pointed out, he should have just stunned them both, and watched Garth resume his normal form.
For that matter, Why was Kirk, the real Kirk, fighting Garth at all? Garth chose to attack Spock when he reached for the chair, instantly identifying himself as the imposter. Spock should have just stunned him then or overpowered him with his superior Vulcan strength. Instead, Kirk decided to jump in, leading to the two twins locked in a totally unnecessary deadly struggle. The bottom-line here is that the this scene should have been all about intelligent problem solving, Star Trek's bread and butter. But instead it was so full of holes that it was robbed of its triumph.
In the end, the audience is left to look at the spectacle as it flows past. Watching fools be fools, isn't very interesting. Most of the crew are off screen for the majority of the episode, the Enterprise rendered impotent by a planet-wide force field, leaving the mad captain Garth to carry the show on the back of his madness, which wasn't that interesting.
There were a couple of minor quibbles, as well. How could Garth use the Vulcan neck pinch on Marta to subdue her when he was disguised as Spock? This seems like a minor thing, but it effectively undermines whatever credibility the writers had as fair storytellers. The power of this story lies in the mental contest between Kirk and Garth. This is the meaning of the chess reference in Scotty's sign and countersign. The two captains are playing a game of chess for control of the Enterprise, and this is borne out in many clever scenes when Garth creates an elaborate ploy and Kirk sees through it just in time. So when the writers cheat by giving Garth Spock's powers without justification, the audience stops looking for clever solutions. They just assume that the writers will continue to cheat and that any further engagement with the puzzles is a waste of time.
What happened to the powerful explosive that Garth discovered, a single pouch of which could destroy an entire planet?
Throughout its run, The Original Series has an unfortunate habit of resorting to the foolish and bizarre instead of developing a strong plot. Here was another tired example of that failing.
Rating: 2 out of 5.
Tasked with delivering a new medicine to a mental health facility for the criminally insane on the desolate planet of Elba II, Kirk and Spock beam down only to be taken prisoner by Garth, a former fleet captain of the Federation, now declared criminally insane. Captain Garth has the ability to perfectly mimic the appearance of anyone he sees and he adopts the guise of Dr. Cory, the governor of the penal colony, first to take control of the institution and then to capture Kirk.
Garth is insane and his plan is to take over the Enterprise disguised as Kirk. With his insane followers and a new powerful explosive that he has discovered, he has grandiose plans to take over the galaxy. However, his initial attempt on the Enterprise is foiled because of a new security measure that Kirk instituted before leaving the ship. When Garth asks to be beamed aboard, Scotty gives a sign "Queen to queen's level three" and requests the counter sign, which Garth does not know.
Garth hosts a dinner to attempt to gather information from Kirk. When conversation and dancing fail, Garth tries to use torture to extract the password from Kirk, but the captain will not reveal anything. Marta, the Orion dancer and prisoner, pleads with Garth that she will get the information out of Kirk, if he will stop the torture.
Marta does begin to seduce Kirk, when suddenly she pulls out a dagger and attempts to stab him. At that moment, Spock arrives and subdues Marta with a Vulcan neck pinch. Armed with a phaser, the two of them make their way to the control room to lower the force field surrounding the planet. Once there, however, Kirk suspects that Spock is actually Garth in disguise and refuses to give the countersign to Scotty.
Now completely insane and past all reason, Garth begins to set up a kingdom, with the rest of the inmates as his subjects. He demands to be called Lord Garth and hosts a grand coronation ceremony with Marta as consort and Kirk as the "heir apparent." Afterward, however, Garth brings Kirk to the control room to watch as Marta is dragged out into the poisonous atmosphere of the planet and then killed by the detonation of a small crystal of Garth's explosive.
Garth then sends his minions to bring Spock from his cell. Spock dispatches both of them and takes their phaser only to find two identical Kirks in the control room when he arrives. Initially hesitant as to who is the real captain, when one of them demands that Spock shoot them both and bring the Enterprise to safety, Spock stuns the other Kirk, who proves to be Garth in disguise. Spock then calls the Enterprise and gives the correct counter sign "Queen to King's level one."
McCoy beams down to the planet and administers the medicine to each of the patients in the facility who begin to recover from their insanity and have no memory of the previous events.
Analysis
Whom Gods Destroy is another of those episodes noted for the passivity of the crew. Kirk, Spock, even Scotty are notable for their inaction, merely observing the development of the story around them. Instead, we are captive to the machinations of Lord Garth. And this remains the major complaint throughout. All of Kirk's plans are negated, as indeed are Garth's. The resulting stalemate becomes increasingly boring and ultimately annoying. The death of Marta should have been shocking, but it came so late in the proceedings that it served only to cement our lack of will to care about the outcome. I wept for Marta, but I was not angry at Garth so much as at the writers, who couldn't think of any better ending for that character.
And finally when we had run through the nonsensical dance scene, torture chair scene, seduction scene, and coronation scene, during which our heroes take no action, we bring Spock out of seclusion to almost instantly save the day. Nothing we had done up to that point in the story made any difference to the outcome. It's hard to argue that Garth had undergone any development or arc in his character, and we were merely accumulating scenes to document the depths of his insanity.
Even the twin dilemma at the climax seemed underwhelming. This was clearly an opportunity for the writers to have Spock do something very clever, as the reference to Solomon seemed to indicate, but the fact that he had at his disposal a phaser that could stun meant that elaborate wisdom was not needed. As Kirk pointed out, he should have just stunned them both, and watched Garth resume his normal form.
For that matter, Why was Kirk, the real Kirk, fighting Garth at all? Garth chose to attack Spock when he reached for the chair, instantly identifying himself as the imposter. Spock should have just stunned him then or overpowered him with his superior Vulcan strength. Instead, Kirk decided to jump in, leading to the two twins locked in a totally unnecessary deadly struggle. The bottom-line here is that the this scene should have been all about intelligent problem solving, Star Trek's bread and butter. But instead it was so full of holes that it was robbed of its triumph.
In the end, the audience is left to look at the spectacle as it flows past. Watching fools be fools, isn't very interesting. Most of the crew are off screen for the majority of the episode, the Enterprise rendered impotent by a planet-wide force field, leaving the mad captain Garth to carry the show on the back of his madness, which wasn't that interesting.
There were a couple of minor quibbles, as well. How could Garth use the Vulcan neck pinch on Marta to subdue her when he was disguised as Spock? This seems like a minor thing, but it effectively undermines whatever credibility the writers had as fair storytellers. The power of this story lies in the mental contest between Kirk and Garth. This is the meaning of the chess reference in Scotty's sign and countersign. The two captains are playing a game of chess for control of the Enterprise, and this is borne out in many clever scenes when Garth creates an elaborate ploy and Kirk sees through it just in time. So when the writers cheat by giving Garth Spock's powers without justification, the audience stops looking for clever solutions. They just assume that the writers will continue to cheat and that any further engagement with the puzzles is a waste of time.
What happened to the powerful explosive that Garth discovered, a single pouch of which could destroy an entire planet?
Throughout its run, The Original Series has an unfortunate habit of resorting to the foolish and bizarre instead of developing a strong plot. Here was another tired example of that failing.
Rating: 2 out of 5.
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