Star Trek: Start to Finish

The Savage Curtain

The Savage Curtain (Video; YouTube; Memory Alpha) is an episode where the crew meets Lincoln, is imprisoned by rock aliens, is challenged on the differences between Good and Evil, and fails to mount even a cursory defense of their ideology.

Interesting Bits

Kirk explains how the teleporter works. We meet Surak. They miss an opportunity to discuss labels by instead saying that they don’t matter. There’s a ridiculous rubber suit alien. Everything is bad.

Why it’s crazy annoying

Because in the end, after the battle is won, the rock aliens say that they can’t tell the difference between the sides; good and evil both use the same methods to forward their goals. This is the point where Kirk stands up for Freedom, gives the long monologue about his values and delivers the lesson. Or rather, it should be that point, but instead Kirk just says the game is rigged, makes no attempt to explain how that changed anything, and then leaves. Total copout.

Grade

D

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.

Begin Spoilers

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.

End Spoilers

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

The Enterprise Incident

The Enterprise Incident (Memory Alpha; HD Video) finds Kirk taking our favorite starship deep into Romulan territory because he was bored. They are immediately surrounded by Romulans.

This episode is incredibly predictable, and continues the long line of episodes where a woman in a major role neglects her duties because she’s smitten. The woman in this case is the Romulan fleet commander, and her neglect lets our heros win the day, but only because they play the woman’s emotions against her. If a Romulan woman came aboard the Enterprise, Kirk would see through the same trick so quickly it wouldn’t be worth building an episode around.

This is all the more shameful because Joanne Linville plays a very interesting Romulan; a warrior and an executive, wanting passion but ambitious. But her bounds as a character shrink with every line she utters. The gender stereotypes slowly eat away at what starts as a command performance until there’s nothing left by my retrospective sadness that this show that was so progressive in so many ways was still held hostage to Gene Roddenberry’s personal vices.

Awesome Dialog

Commander: How could you do this to me? Who are you that you could do this?
Spock: First Officer of the Enterprise.
[She slaps him]
Spock: [Unflinching] What is your present mode of execution?

Two technical notes: First, the Enterprise here goes Warp 9, which should blow the ship up. Second, this episode features a lot of beaming onto and off of shielded ships, which should be impossible.

Grade

D

A Piece of the Action

A Piece of the Action (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is incredibly silly. No, no, more than that. Incredibly silly.

The Enterprise arrives at a planet that was visited by a Federation ship a hundred years ago, “before the non-interferance directive went into effect.” In that time, the inhabitants have completely transformed their culture into an exact replica of 1920s mob controlled Chicago.

The crime bosses are the closest the world has to a government, so the Enterprise tries to negotiate with them… by going native. Kirk and Spock dress up in zoot suits, carry around tommy guns, and speak in fantastically bad accents.

Now, this is all very, very ridiculous. But it’s also hilarious. This episode is completely, over-the-top silly, and it just revels in it. We get the traditional figuring-out-how-to-drive scene, the transporting-unsuspecting-people scenes, the behold-our-awesome-magic scenes, but the best parts is the crazy mob talk:

Okmyx: The most cooperative man in this world is a dead man. And if you don’t keep your mouth shut you’re gonna be cooperating.

That’s gold.

Grade

A- for being hilarious

D for being as totally non-canonical as you could possibly hope to be.

The Devil in the Dark

The Devil in the Dark (Memory Alpha; SD Video) is your standard monster of the week episode: Janus VI is a sparsely-populated mining colony and the miners are dying, eaten alive by chemical spew. The Enterprise is called in, and searches for the monster. They find it, they hurt it. There’s a little twist that they foreshadow heavily, and the episode ends with gumdrops and rainbows. There is no content to discuss, and no subtext to plumb.

Grade

D; it does what it does well, it’s just that what it does is kind of lame.

Miri

Miri (Wikipedia; HD Video) is an okay episode with one glaring flaw: the Enterprise finds an exact duplicate of Earth where the only survivors are children.

Wait, what? An exact duplicate of Earth? Why? Why would that exist? There’d better be a great explanation for this, some alien copy-ray or a race of crazed world-builder mice.

But there isn’t. It’s just a duplicate of Earth for no reason at all.

Oh, except that it’s an alternate Earth where everyone dies at puberty thanks to a crazy virus. Yes, a little Jeremiah there, but since this came first by a few decades I think we can give them a pass.

Except for this whole duplicate-Earth thing. I mean, really, there’s no reason why there couldn’t be a crazy adult-killing virus on some alien world, or an Earth colony, or whatever. The duplicate-Earth thing is just lame.

Oh, and Memory Alpha notes that the duplicate Earth bit was added after the fact and that has necessitated huge rafts of silliness to make it remotely canon.

Begin Spoilers

The crew doesn’t die on the planet.

End Spoilers

What this episode does do well, though, is the relationship of Kirk with Miri, a young girl just about to hit puberty (and thus die). She loves Kirk, and he knows it, but he also knows that it’s not ever ever ever gonna work. Up to this point, Kirk has been pretty much a completely different character than the stereotype would have it. He’s not a womanizer; he in fact goes to great lengths to give Yeoman Rand space, because he knows he’s attracted to her. He only gets into the occasional fist-fight. He’s apparently a scientific genius and a hard worker who did incredibly well at Starfleet Academy. But his shirt does come off a little too often.

Best Big of Dialog

Kirk: This is the vaccine?

McCoy: That’s what the computers will tell us.

Spock: Without them, it could be a beaker full of death.

[Ominous music]

Grade

D; would be a solid C+ if not for the stupid, stupid duplicate Earth thing.