Star Trek: Start to Finish

The Lights Of Zetar

• The Lights Of Zetar* (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) takes the crew to Memory Alpha, namesake of the Star Trek Wikia. But before they get there, a mysterious storm of lights crosses their path and makes the obligitorily beautiful visiting expert feint!

And wouldn’t you know it but the storm did a number on Memory Alpha, too. And it’s gonna come back to finish the job on the Enterprise unless the crew can figure out a way to stop them!

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The lights are the last remnants of Zetar: a collection of noncorporeal echoes of the last survivors of that planet. And they’re slowly taking over the body of Lt. Mira Romaine, whose love of learning is matched only by her love of Scotty. Yes, Scotty.

This episode almost has a nice little freedom speech about the remnant versus Mira, and it almost has a nice discussion on identity, and it almost has a clever solution to destroying a life form native to space, but it lets the ideas wither on the vine and does the life-saving without explaining why it works. The result is an episode that needed one more draft to really shine, but instead just feels like a good idea badly done.

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Grade

B-

That Which Survives

That Which Survives (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) is the episode where Mr. Spock is as annoying as he actually would be if you knew him, and you want to punch him in the face. Sadly, no one in this episode does so.

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There is, though, a holographic woman who kills by touch, an artificial planet, a black second-in-command in sickbay and a woman helmsman. There’s the continued confusion over how fast the Enterprise can go before it blows up, and a not-terrible plot. But mostly this episode is completely forgettable.

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Best Dialog

Spock: “Can you give me Warp 8?”
Scotty: “Aye, sir. And maybe a wee bit more. I’ll sit on top of the warp cores meself and nurse them.”
Spock: “That position would not only be unavailing; it would also be undignified.”

Grade

C

The Mark of Gideon

The Mark of Gideon (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) finds our favorite starship visiting the planet Gideon, who is petitioning the Federation for membership but refuses to let Federation delegates visit or scan their planet. Until now, when they’ve requested Kirk come alone. And when he tries, he ends up on an empty Enterprise, all alone. Oh, no!

This episode is profoundly confused over what it wants to say, and it suffers for it. Instead of making a point and driving it home, it tries to make a point, then makes a different point on accident, and in the process undermines both points and the general philosophy of the show.

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The first annoyance is the entire “empty Enterprise” thing, which the audience immediately suspects is a replica and is not wrong to do so. But the reason this contrivance is trotted out is very obviously because it was cheaper to use their existing sets instead of build new ones. Yeah, we understand times are tough, but you’ve stepped on your Big Idea.

The Big Idea in question is of a planet overrun by population. This episode lands a few months after The Population Bomb was published, and its central thesis is an interesting idea for an episode: What if the world was so overpopulated no one could get any privacy?

Well, in a space-faring society people would leave, right? That’s not discussed here at all. They talk glancingly about contraceptives and the Rhythm Method, which are hot topics in 1969, but are sort of ignoring the huge blinking neon solution sitting in the room. And they also ignore the whole dearth-of-natural-resources angle that’d be an issue on an overcrowded planet long before the privacy thing happened.

And remember that replica-of-the-Enterprise thing? That’s a whole lot of space to dedicate to a ridiculous scheme on a planet where no one can get a moment’s respite from other people.

And let’s not even get into the fact that your scheme is lame (get the germs somewhere else!) and the heartbeats-of-everyone-outside thing makes absolutely no sense.

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Because we haven’t even gotten to this:

Spock: We must acknowledge once and for all that the purpose of diplomacy is to prolong a crisis.

Or this:

Spock: Diplomats and Bueraucrats may function differently, but they achieve exactly the same results.

Or this:

Bones: Are you going to let him get away with that? Scotty: No matter what you say, Mr. Spock, he’ll twist your meaning.
Uhura: Yes, he’s infuriating, sir; how can you stand it?
[He’s standing right there!]

Or this:

Generic Starfleet Admiral Guy: Permission denied.
Spock: Admiral, I would like to state for the record that your decision is completely arbitrary.
Generic Starfleet Admiral Guy: [Nods] So noted. [Transmission ends]

This drumbeat of anti-diplomatic language and man-of-action bullshit is so counter to the spirit of Trek I’m amazed this episode was produced. Roddenberry had some crazy ideas and some messed up priorities, but he was a guy who thought diplomacy worked and that talking about our differences was useful and that meaningful discussion of the issues helped us to solve the issues. That this episode goes out of its way to complain about the process is maddening, especially since it could have so simply been twisted into the crew complaining about how the diplomat in question was simply and obviously a liar. Lying is bad and you should complain about it, especially in the context of diplomacy, where it means that you can’t solve the problems because they’re not being talked about. If you instead complain that diplomacy can’t work and then prove that to be the case because people are lying, you’ve both been wrong and then presented evidence in bad faith. Star Trek is better than that.

And yet… I kinda liked it. It’s probably just the fact that it’s been months since I got to sit down and watch Trek, but I found Kirk charming and Spock interesting and Bones funny. I liked exploring new worlds and new civilizations with my old friends. And I want to do it more often.

Oh, and shields block sensors, now, but you can teleport right through them. Hooray for consistency. Oh, wait.

Grade

D

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (Memory Alpha; Video) is that episode with the people who are half-white and half-black that’s all allegorical.

I don’t really know what to say about this episode. The allegory is so naked, so unsubtle, so ham-fisted that what could be an interesting way to tell a story you couldn’t otherwise tell instead becomes a monotonous slog through an hour.

But I hesitate because I don’t know how much my being fifty years removed from the situation is coloring my perception. How daring a gambit was this when it aired? How far did this push the envelope?

Y’see, these aliens hate each other because they’re black on opposite sides. And their hate is repulsive: they have been chasing each other for 50,000 years to settle old scores. The crew thinks it’s ridiculous, and they want to get back to doing what they’re supposed to do. All that is fine. The little twist ending is fine. Even the silly use godlike powers is fine.

But it’s our old enemy pacing that gets us. This is a ten minute idea played out in a one hour show. There’s nothing interesting that happens after the opening gambit, and the crew literally spends the last ten minutes sitting in the bridge watching monitors as the climax happens to other people. Then they just fly away.

Perhaps that’s the most disturbing part: the crew flat out says that prejudice is a thing of the past, that they have no idea what it’s like, and that the human race has overcome it. Despite being a flat out lie, this inculcates them from learning anything from the experience. The crew is our stand-in as an audience; they represent us in the story. Letting them rise above these petty squabbles without effort allows us to pretend to be able to do likewise. It allows us to enjoy our bigotry while pretending that it doesn’t exist, and that’s all the more poisonous.

How much does our fifty years removal allow us to poisonously pretend the same?

Grade

C-

Whom Gods Destroy

Whom Gods Destroy (Memory Alpha; Video) is a great little episode filled with crazy people. It’s fun and smart and damn hilarious.

Kirk and Spock beam down to Elba 2, where the last fifteen criminally insane people in the galaxy are housed in an asylum. They bear medicine to cure their insanity.

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But as you would expect, the asylum has been taken over by the madmen. They’re all extras with the exception of an Orion Slave Girl and Garth of Izar, a former starship captain who has picked up the ability to transform himself to look like anyone he’s seen. Handy, that.

Garth is played wonderfully by Steve Ihnat; his manic swings from rage to joy to logic and back again are well written and ably performed. He’s one of the best villains in the entire series, and he manages to attain that rank without ever being a real threat to anybody but Kirk, since he’s trapped on this little world and delusional about what would happen if he escaped.

The Orion Slave Girl is Marta, again played well by Yvonne Craig, who played Batgirl in the old Adam West Batman. Here she’s a crazy vixen who meets her end onscreen quite a bit more horribly than I expected.

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This episode also has what may well be the first which-doppelgänger-should-I-shoot scene ever, and manages to do so without being terribly obvious about the resolution. I was quite amazed.

Best Bit of Dialog

Marta: [quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVIII]
Garth: You wrote that?
Marta: Yesterday, as a matter of fact.
Garth: It was written by an Earth man named Shakespeare a long time ago!
Marta: Which does not change the fact that I wrote it yesterday!

Grade

A-; would be a solid A if not for the echoes between this episode and Dagger of the Mind