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
