Patterns of Force
Programming Note
I’ve been away for a long, long time, and I apologize. But now it’s time to watch some campy old sci-fi and make up.
Patterns of Force (Video; Memory Alpha) is that one with the Nazis.
Kirk and crew are going to Ekos in search of John Gill, who like every other person of import in the entire galaxy was one of Kirk’s old teachers at Starfleet Academy (here just ‘the academy,’ but let’s assume that’s familiarity speaking and not just TOS’s ridiculously low level of consistency in these matters). Gill has not been responding to Earth’s communiques, and now they’re going to send Kirk and Spock down to search for him.
But before they can even get to the planet, the Ekosians launch a nuclear warhead at them, which is both unfriendly and far beyond what the Ekosians should be able to do technologically.
Spock: Perhaps they had help.
Well, Spock, let’s think about it. One: we’re going to establish in just a moment that the Ekosians are in regular contact with the Zeons, who live on another planet. Somehow interplanetary travel is fine, but nukes aren’t? And we’re also going to dwell rather a lot that the Ekosian’s technology is just around mid-twentieth-century Earth… which is exactly when we figured this stuff out. So maybe they just put E and MC2 together on this one.
But anyway, now it’s time for Kirk and Spock to go down to the surface and see some guy get beat up, so that Spock can helpfully remind us all about the Prime Directive, here called “the non-interference directive,” which isn’t nearly as catchy.
But despite their efforts to blend in and be as non-interferencey as they can, it’s inevitable that they’ll fail due to Spock’s pointy ears. You’d think that eventually the crew would figure out that, even though the psychic powers and technical wizardry come in handy, Spock isn’t a good undercover agent, except on that one planet on the far side of the Alpha Quadrant where everyone has pointy ears, and where the Enterprise never seems to go.
But I’m losing the plot in all my snark. I’ve forgotten to even mention that the aforementioned guy being aforementionedly beaten up is being aforementionedly beaten up by the even-more-aforementioned Nazis. Upon seeing this, Kirk and Spock have a conversation which I will summarize thusly:
Mr. Exposition: How could they develop this same culture? They’d have to have some incredibly well-informed earth historian to lead them! Now, where is that incredibly well-informed earth historian we’re looking for?
Anyway, those ears get the pair landed in the jail cell next to the twice-now-aforementioned guy-getting-beaten-up, who has this conversation with Spock, who is played by a Jew, in a totally non-ironic manner:
Thrice-Now-Aforementioned Guy-Getting-Beaten-Up: [To Kirk] Why did they take you? You are not a Zeon, and he [Spock] is certainly not one. Why do the Nazis treat you as enemies?
Spock: Why do the Nazis hate Zeon?
Quatrice-Now-Aforementioned Guy-Getting-Beaten-Up: Why? Because without us the hate would be nothing to hold them together. So the party has built us into a threat; a disease to be wiped out.
Spock: Is Zeon a threat to them?
Penticlice-Now-Aforementioned Guy-Getting-Beaten-Up: Were did you come from? Our warlike period ended generations ago.
Then everyone gets free using the usual tricks, and Sextuple-Now-Aforementioned Guy-Getting-Beaten-Up leads Kirk and Spock to the underground where we learn that his name is Isak, and his brother is Abrom.
Yeah, really.
It’s at this point that Kirk and Spock introduce themselves and decide to do something about the whole situation. This is as close as Star Trek comes to “Taking Names and Deciding to At Some Future Junction Begin Kicking Ass.”
There’s some infiltration, some dress-up-as-a-Nazi, and some silliness, but overall this is a not-bad episode. It explores how society changes, and how power corrupts. It has a mystery that isn’t immediately obvious and works to guard its secrets with secondary and even tertiary mysteries.
But what it does very poorly is fail to tackle the central Zeons-as-Jews conceit it is built on. In this telling the Zeons are an external threat and not an internal one, which makes them a far less insidious-seeming scapegoat and a less powerful fear generator. The Final Solution in this telling is a bold attack on the peace-loving Zeons, and not a secret and ruthless extermination of their culture and population. By changing the basics they lose the grander point, and lose a powerful storyline along the way.
Grade
B
