Star Trek TOS Requiem for Methuselah. S3 E19

Synopsis: McCoy needs a supply of the rare element Ryetalyn, to combat a virulent epidemic on board the Enterprise.  Three crewmen are dead and 27 others are in the grip of Rigellian Fever.  However, the crew has located a supply on an isolated planet.

Beaming down to the surface, the trio are met by an unwelcoming man who demands that they leave immediately.  After a brief bit of posturing, Flint, apparently moved by memory and compassion,  invites them to his home while his robot gathers the ore.

Spock and McCoy remark on Flint's extensive collection of original literature and artworks, while we see Flint conferring with a young woman, Rayna, who wants to meet the crew against Flint's better judgement.  As McCoy oversees the ryetalyn purification, Kirk and Spock become acquainted with their host, with Kirk becoming increasingly enamored with the lovely Rayna.  Spock again remarks that the music he played was an original work by Johannes Brahms, though it is unknown.  McCoy declares that the ryetalin has been tainted by impurities and a new sample must be procured.

Kirk meets Rayna in the laboratory and begin to kiss, when M-4, the guardian robot attacks Kirk, who is only saved by the intervention of Spock with a phaser.It becomes apparent that Flint has an ulterior motive for allowing Rayna and Kirk to interact, but the relationship has gone to far, as Kirk urges Rayna to leave Flint and go with him on the Enterprise.

Searching for the processed ryetalin, Kirk discovers in Flint's lab a copy of Rayna, who is apparently an artificial life form that Flint has made to appear human.  While Kirk is enraged by this discovery, Spock puts together the fact that the long-lived Flint actually is Brahms and DaVinci and other geniuses as well, who has grown weary of life on Earth.  Rayna was to be his perfect and undying bride.  However, now that Kirk and the others know his secret, Flint is unwilling to let them leave.

Kirk and Flint struggle in a symbolic contest for the affections of Rayna, who, unable to make a choice, dies of uncertainty. Later, on the Enterprise, the plague is under control though Kirk is still in the throes of love-sickness.  McCoy announces that Flint has once again resumed the aging process and will eventually die, leaving us with a bittersweet ending as Spock engages in a brief meld with the sleeping Kirk, instructing, "Forget..."

Analysis

One of the recurring problems with Early Trek deals with the fundamentals of storytelling.  The erly series ws more interested in creating a tableau, a vista of a troubled world or a troubled future, without offering any kind of story development or resolution  The creation of the scene is all that the episode offers, and once it has detailed the last corners of this new reality, it leaves us there to contemplate the wonder and despair that such a scene engenders.

So this episode spends most of its time carefully explaining the situation that Flint faces, drawing on the medieval tale of the undying Roman Centurion.  Flint does not age and so has lived several lives, and particularly notable lives of great creators in Earth's history.  His one tragedy is that his companions are doomed to grow old without him, and he has watched several of them die while he is helpless to prevent it.  Now, he has created an android to be his companion, but he needs Kirk to awaken the spark of love within the automaton.  It's an interesting concept to contemplate, but it isn't a story on its own.

And there are fascinating ramifications.  Flint creates the perfect Rayna, and spends decades instructing her in all the knowledge he has accumulated, but he cannot stir in her the emotions of love, emotions he needs from her to be his perfect mate.  But he discovers that Kirk can spark those emotions and though he is playing with fire, he goes ahead with the experiment because it is the one thing that Rayna lacks.

This episode always reminds me of Data from TNG, because of the obvious parallels.  It is one of the iconic references for much of science fiction:  the undying man, the perfect artificial intelligence with the potential for vast repositories of knowledge, the sentient android, the robot who doesn't know that she isn't human, shades of Blade Runner.  The same considerations are explored with Data's mother Juliana.  There is the seeds of many sci fiction elements present.

Unfortunately, there are also some regrettable elements present as well, the most obvious one being Kirk's behavior.  Knowing that the lives of the entire crew of the Enterprise are at stake, why does Kirk insist on pursuing some inappropriate romantic relationship with Rayna?  With the responsibility of the ship on his shoulders, his choices are completely unreasonable and nearly inexplicable.  And Spock reminds him of this on more than one occasion.

Sure, Kirk is a soft touch for a pretty face, but he has always put the good of the ship above his own needs.  Why then is he antagonizing the one person who has the cure for the plague that has cursed his crew?  Rayna is beautiful and intelligent, but that doesn't give Jim some license for flirting with her, for taking advantage of her obvious naiveté.   This is so out of character for Kirk that it defies  belief.

Of course it is selfish to jeopardize the lives of 400 people for his own desires, but it also seems particularly ungentlemanly of him; primarily to force kisses on this obviously innocent woman ("you are the first men that I have met...") and more generally to consider all females in the galaxy open game to his hunting season.  I also feel a little bit of sympathy for Flint.  Even before he fully understands the current relationship between Flint and Rayna, Kirk has already started to break the two apart, wearing that wolfish Lothario grin as he moves in. Normally, we'd call someone like him a homewrecker.

We all know that Kirk is married to his ship, from the string of broken relationships he's left across the galaxy.  Some of his trysts escape with their lives or their sanity, while many of the others aren't so lucky.  So why does he think that things will be different with Rayna?  He's just going to drop her off on the nearest starbase after he's bored with her, so he can go back out to the stars.

I picked up on a background vibe that was subtly condemning Flint.  It was somehow inappropriate for him to create an android to be his companion.  Kirk suggested that he was saving Rayna from the clutches of this evil creator, and there's a suggestion that somehow Flint got what was coming to him at the end when he was once again fated to resume the normal aging process.  But I was never convinced that Flint deserved our censure, or that Rayna was some kind of an abomination, or that Flint shouldn't try to create another incarnation of her. She was a creation that rivaled the triumph of Dr Noonian Soong in his creation of Data, and Data is not diminished at all by that fact.  I can only imagine what a holy union there could be between Data and Rayna.  They are truly soulmates who would be perfect for each other. 

I squarely blame Kirk for Rayna's death.  He's a captain who's lost his way like so many of the others we've encountered in the series.  Logically, Spock should not only question his actions but also report him for his irresponsible behavior and possibly try him for murder.

Star Trek TOS The Way to Eden. S3 E20

Synopsis
The Enterprise is sent to retrieve a small group of idealists who have stolen a space ship intent on finding the planet of Eden, a mythical idyllic location that is free from the technological influence of the Federation.  Among the group is Tango Rad, the son of a Federation ambassador, and their leader Dr Sevrin, a famed for his research in acoustics, communications, and electronics.  The Enterprise does locate the stolen ship but the group refuses to acquiesce when they are caught in a tractor beam.  Scotty is able to transport them off the ship before it explodes.

Once on board, they prove to be an unruly and unreasonable group, but Spock seems familiar enough with their traditions to begin a conversation.  Kirk sends them down to sick bay for a thorough checkup but they prove resistant.

  
Analysis
In reviewing the original series, I have specifically avoided any cultural context from the 60's when they were written and broadcast.  While these episodes would be appreciated differently in the context of what was happening at the time, I can only understand them from my own personal perspective.  The goal is not to attempt to appreciate them for what they represented to previous audiences, but to explore what they offer to me, in the present day.


For their time, they reflected the struggle of the culture, but they also represented a relatively young medium.  Serialized television of this style was young, since the 1950s.  Color television was an innovation of the middle 60's.  Realistic science fiction was an inspiration of the 60's, with imaginations fueled by the Apollo space program.  And the cultural awareness of race, war, equality, and youth was reaching an importance that was novel for the 20th century.

But to a viewer in 2017, the medium has had decades to explore how to tell stories in this medium, and has educated audiences in conventions and practices that were unknown to naive audiences huddled around their small, usually black and white screens. The amount of story we can tell to modern audiences in an hour is much greater than the 60's audience was accustomed to, and the mere novelty of showing colorful and bizarre images on the screen was an entertainment that just doesn't hold the same appeal to modern audiences.

All the preceding is why I find it so difficult to analyze this particular episode.  This more than any other seemed to rely on the understanding of the day

Star Trek TOS The Lights of Zetar. S3 E18

Synopsis: The Enterprise is given a mission to Memory Alpha, an installation set up by the Federation solely as a central library containing the total cultural history and scientific knowledge of all Federation planetary members.

The Enterprise is delivering equipment and a specialist named Lieutenant Mira Romaine to Memory Alpha when it encounters what appears to be a "storm," though it is unusual in its intensity and in its ability to exceed light speed in its pursuit of the ship.  The storm, characterized by an intense visual display of lights, does invade the bridge, affecting everyone there.  It seems to have a particular effect on Lieutenant Romaine, causing her to collapse.

After leaving the Enterprise, the "storm" heads directly for Memory Alpha, and reaches there before Kirk can arrive. When the away team reaches the facility, they find the memory core burned out, and all personnel dead or dying.   Mira Romaine begins to have premonitions, such as the sight of the dead personnel on Memory Alpha, or the knowledge that the alien storm was returning, reflecting a connection between herself and the alien lights. Mira also has a problem beaming back to the ship along with the others.

With everyone back aboard, the Lights have returned and begun pursuit of the ship one more. Kirk fires phasers at it and ends up causing pain to Lieutenant Romaine. Clearly there is some connection betweeen Romaine and the lights that Spock now identifies as a collection of 10 distinct life units. When the lights overtake the ship, Mira is overcome by the life units who occupy her body and speak with her voice.  

The Lights identify themselves as being from the planet Zetar.  Specifically, "the desires, the hopes, the mind, and the will of the last 100 of Zetar."  These remnants of Zetar insist that they must be allowed to survive, by any means necessary.  Kirk, however, tells them that the price of their survival is too high.

Scotty puts Mira into a kind of pressure chamber, and Spock increases the pressure, eventually driving the lights out of Mira and destroying them.  

Analysis

There is no question that this is one of the better episodes of the third season, but somehow I always manage to fall dead asleep about halfway through.  This is entirely my own fault, I am sure.  

Part of the issue is that this is a dialogue heavy episode, with much of the plot development coming through discussion and conversation, but I think a deeper problem is that there is very little continuity between the problem and its resolution.  The problem is Coherence.

While unusual and interesting things happen, they don't appear to fit together in a meaningful way that creates a larger story.  The lights kill everyone at the Memory Alpha facility but not on the bridge of the Enterprise, and we don't really know why.  Even when the question was asked during the episode, only a vague answer (they resisted) was offered.  One of the researchers, and earlier Mira herself, begins speaking in a distinctive creaking sound with exaggerated facial gestures.  But again we are given no explanation as to why this is meaningful, and it doesn't form a piece of the larger puzzle we put together at the end. Why was Mira left behind when the party returned to the ship?  We never got a good explanation of what happened. In short, the clues we receive along the way are vague, revealing little that is concrete about the problem.  

Compare this with, for example the episode where Kirk heard an insect-like buzzing, which was later revealed to be the vastly sped up aliens taking over the ship.  By introducing that effect early, we are able to connect the later story with the former in a satisfying moment of epiphany.  "So that's what Kirk was hearing!"  Only in this episode, we get no similar payoff.  We  don't know why Mira was making the same grotesque faces as the victim at the library.  And that piece of the story never makes sense.

Early in the story, Spock declares that there are 10 life forms that make up the lights. Later, the Lights themselves declare that they are the "last 100 of Zetar," introducing an odd and unnecessary contradiction. Are there 100 or 10?  And why introduce these numbers into the narrative if they don't matter in any way?

Kirk decides to put Mira into a pressure chamber, but that's not based on any experience we've had with the aliens up to this point.  It is solely his own idea. 

Because these clues to the mystery are so poorly explained, they don't really point in an actionable direction, and we don't really use them in formulating a solution.  As a result, the audience is strangely detached from the final resolution.  No particular reason was offered for why pressure would cause the Zetarans to leave Mira, as opposed to heat, for example, or light or inducing a coma, or a number of other ideas.  And once having left, why did they remain in the pressure chamber?  They could pass through the walls of the ship, and through the ship's shields, so there was no reason for them to stay and be killed. The narrative fails because the solution doesn't grow out of what we've learned during the course of the story.


Memory Alpha
The concept of Memory Alpha as a repository of all knowledge in the Federation was a brilliant creative idea.  Unfortunately, it was an idea lost in this particular episode, because its actual function played no role in the developments of the story.  As far as I could discern, the outpost could have been a mining colony for all the impact it had on the narrative.  It's a shame that such a story rich idea was just thrown away, and thrown away literally since the Zetarns destroyed it unintentionally.  Spock kept going on about how irreplaceable it was, but that didn't motivate any urgency on Kirk's part, who didn't make any overt move to try to protect it or salvage any of the data.  

If Kirk was so complacent, it's hard for the audience to generate some sadness about it.  All that was left was for Spock to shrug as if to say, "You humans are the reason why we can't have nice things."  At the end of the episode, they intended to drop Mira back at Memory Alpha, presumably to install that new equipment she brought into the smoking hardware of the central memory core that the Zetarans just fried. 

All the other station personnel were killed, and with the emergency beam out, the away team just left them to decay. So I'm guessing Mira has a little bit to clean up before she can get started on what will doubtless be a lonely job.  Let's kick off months of isolation with the disposal of a half-dozen bodies before moving on to cataloging just how much of the vast wealth of the Federation's knowledge has been carelessly lost due to the hubris of politicians who don't want to create a bad impression.  It's just what Dr. McCoy ordered, to get over a little psychological distress.  Good, honest work.

One odd thing was the continual references to Mira Romaine as "the girl," which seems unnecessarily patronizing.   Part of her characterization was a narrative that Mira was a young officer, a fresh Starfleet commission, perhaps unused to the rigors of space and the discipline of the chain of command.  This was the reason suggested for why she was abrupt and almost disrespectful with senior officers.  I think it was to reinforce the idea of her youth and inexperience that Kirk and Mr. Scott kept referring to her as a "girl."  It was also suggested that this brashness on her part enabled her to fight off the attempts of the Zetarans to take control of her mind.

Scotty was alternately delightful and annoying.  Mira was good as an outspoken fresh graduate, and made the most of her scenes with Mr. Scott

Rating:  3 out of 5.  I want to rate this higher but it needed a more coherent story.

Star Trek TOS That Which Survives. S3 E17

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

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.

Star Trek TOS Let That Be Your Last Battlefield. S3 E15

Synopsis:
The Enterprise encounters a shuttle reported to be stolen from Starbase 4.  Tractoring it onboard, they discover a single occupant who is unusual because of the pigmentation of his skin.  He appears to be divided directly down the middle, with half of his face being white and the other half black.  He gives his name as Lokai.  Kirk questions him about stealing the shuttle, but he remains unresponsive and unrepentant.

Back on the bridge, an invisible ship is being tracked, which eventually deposits another visitor on board named Bele, also half black and half white.  Bele identifies himself as a commissioner in pursuit of Lokai, who is a political refugee.  He demands that he and Lokai be taken immediately to their planet, Cheron, where Lokai is sentenced to be executed.  Kirk refuses because of an emergency mission to the planet Arrianus.  Bele uses the power of mind to take control of the ship, and Kirk threatens to destroy the Enterprise using the self-destruct mechanism until Bele relinquishes control.

Again in command, Kirk re-directs the ship back to Arrianus where Scotty and the bridge crew are successfull in decontaminating its atmosphere.  With this completed, Kirk directs that the ship return to Starbase 4, but Bele insists that they communicate with Starfleet about Bele's request to travel to Cheron.  When Starfleet refuses, Bele again takes control with his mind, this time deactivating the self destruct circuits in the main computer.

Arriving at Cheron, Spock reports that all humanoids have been killed.  The entire species of black and white humanoids has been wiped out except for the two on the Enterprise.  After fighting with each other on the ship, the two Cherons beam themselves down to the planet to continue their struggle on the surface of the planet, the only two people alive.



Analysis

The two characters of Bele and Lokai, locked in eternal struggle, eternal pursuit; neither able to overcome the other nor be swayed by their arguments.

The characters are very skillfully created.  While our immediate sympathies were with Lokai, the pursued, the one who seems to be oppressed by the other, Bele. Bele seems to assert superiority based entirely on the pattern of his skin color, something that the audience instinctively recognizes as racism, and so we question his right to take Lokai prisoner.  We are further convinced that he’s bad, when he takes over the Enterprise and refuses to abide by the Starfleet directive.

However, the writers gave Lokai some equally unsympathetic scenes as well:  quick to take offense at Kirk’s questioning, quick to justify his own bad behavior (in stealing the shuttle), quick to condemn the Enterprise crew for not immediately flocking to his side when he urges them to kill Bele.

In the end, the show condemns each of them as being lost to their own hatred.  It shows the hopelessness of their situation with the condition of their home planet, where everyone has died. And it suggests that the two of them are destined to continue this struggle for eternity.  The chase scene running in circles around the lower decks of the ship serves as an allegory for their entire 50,000 years of existence, something they are destined to repeat down on the planet.

As a piece of social commentary, this was interesting if a little heavy handed.  I think it is brilliant that the superficial differences between them were intended to be so subtle that Kirk and Spock, and I would guess the audience as well, did not even notice until Bele specifically pointed them out, "I am black on the right side...  Lokai is white on the right side.  All of his people are white on the right side." I remember the moment of this reveal as electrifying in its triviality.  (Now, of course, the episode is so well known that the revelation is lost.)

I think it's a mistake to consider this a direct allegory of 60's racism, however.  That's too simplistic and does a disservice to the story.  The writers made the decision to create a distinctly different world that is not a direct parallel to the American civil rights era, and this gives them the freedom to tell a slightly different story for Lokai, with a different conclusion. In fact, we are never given confirmation that either of their stories are entirely accurate.

The problem was that there was very little actual story involved.  The message was conveyed almost entirely through dialogue, with dueling speeches between Bele, Lokai, Spock, and Kirk.  Instead, we were given extended and largely meaningless procedural scenes to fill the remaining time:  tracking the incoming ships, activating the self-destruct mechanism, purifying the planet Arrianus, Spock narrating their positions on the lower decks and eventual exit from the ship. Each of these was action without purpose, without tension, without story.  It’s like someone telling a science fiction story without actually understanding science fiction, and what makes it meaningful.

Equally annoying is that old favorite of The Original Series, the hyper-powerful species; one that is immortal and travels in an invisible ship that easily transports through the Enterprise’s shields, a species that can take control of the ship using their will alone, and repel phasers with an impregnable personal shield. The problem with these super powers is that they don’t allow the story to focus on the science fiction, on the physical mechanics of what is happening.  They don’t allow the crew to employ their knowledge and training to resolve the situation.  Instead, either Kirk attempts to argue with the antagonist, or the alien wanders off on its own as was the case in this story.

The story denied the crew agency.  Other than Kirk’s threat of self-destruction, which was eventually rendered moot, nothing the crew of the Enterprise did had any effect on the outcome of the story.  Once again, they were mere observers as the two aliens drove the action and engaged in their struggle.  Eventually, the Cherons got what they wanted and were delivered to their own planet, after which the Enterprise simply flew away leaving them to their own fate.

There are other minor continuity problems with this episode which stem from the director not really caring about them.  The most obvious of these is that the primary method to combat a hijacked ship is to stop the engines.  Ship design should have this as an integral component.  A hijacked ship should be dead in the water.

I also can't help but wonder where Lokai was, when Bele was taking over the ship with his mind.  If there are nothing but superficial differences between them, and Lokai was so adamant not to return to Cheron, it seems that he should have struggled with Bele for control of the ship.   Lokai's quiescence at that point was puzzling. 

In addition, when Spock comes upon Cheron, he describes bodies lying in the cities, but the vegetation and wildlife beginning to encroach on its borders.  I think the writers didn’t have a clear picture of what happens to bodies left out in the open, which would have been long decayed or scavenged by the wildlife, unless the final destruction came mere days before. Yet it takes years for vegetation to begin to encroach on a developed city, not weeks.

It is an important moment because Spock’s narration is the lasting image left in our mind – the fate of this planet of hate, and its two remaining occupants.  But it’s a conflicted image that doesn’t make sense.  Did the Cherons, after having been gone 50,000 years, miss their civilization’s downfall by a few weeks?  Are the burning buildings that appear as images to the running Cherons visions of what is happening on the planet? Or maybe they are simply a reflection of the hatred burning in their minds.

 Story element references:  In The Enemy Within S1: E5, Kirk is split into two halves by a transporter accident. and in The Alternative Factor S1: E27 the two versions of Lazarus are committed to an eternal struggle where neither can die and neither can win.  This is very similar to the struggles of the two left on the planet Cheron.


The Bottom Line :  They have some interesting characters and an exciting premise about racial hatred but no actual story to take place in that premise.  The Cherons come on board the Enterprise, travel to Cheron, and leave.  That's really all that happens.

Rating: 2 out of 5 

 

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.