Star Trek: Start to Finish

Bread and Circuses

Bread and Circuses (Memory Alpha; HD Video) is one of the rare original series episodes I’ve already seen, and knowing the twist ending didn’t ruin anything.

This episode is yet another Hodgkin’s Parallel, where the crew visits an Earth where the Roman empire survived into the twentieth century. This alternate Earth is also suspected of housing the survivors of a ruined ship, whose captain (you guessed it!) Kirk knew at the Academy.

Now, I’ve been down on most of the alternate Earth plotlines, but this one is pretty good. A simple counterfactual and a smart integration of contemporary culture help, but the plot and the baddie in this episode are leaps and bounds better than a lot of episodes.

The Proconsul is devious, smart, willing to be evil, and well played. That he’s also well written makes him one for the ages.

And the entire episode is well-written. There’s a minor run-in with some runaway slave characters that seems inconsequential– and is– that turns out to be incredibly interesting while still being inconsequential. There’s some great banter between the major characters:

Spock: Then the Prime Directive is in full force, Captain.
Kirk: No identification of self or mission, no interference with the social development of said planet.
McCoy: No references to space or recognition that there are other worlds or more advanced civilizations.
Kirk: That’s right.
McCoy: Once– just once– I’d like to be able to land somewhere and proclaim, “Behold: I am the archangel Gabriel!”
Spock: I fail to see the humor in that situation, Doctor.

And there is what might be the best scene in the entire show so far, between McCoy and Spock as they sit in a jail cell awaiting death, unsure of Kirk’s whereabouts, or even if he’s still alive. Spock has just saved McCoy’s life, which leads to one of the best exchanges between these two characters that have most of the best exchanges in the show:

McCoy: I’m trying to thank you, you pointy-eared hobgoblin!
Spock: Oh yes, you humans have an emotional need to express gratitude. “You’re welcome” is, I believe, the correct response.

It’s not all rainbows and lollipops, of course. They fall back to the old pointy-ears giveaway. The baddies don’t have a reason for demanding what they demand. The stranded Captain’s backstory has a huge gap between “landed” and “got into my present circumstances.” But all in all it’s a very strong episode that I liked a lot.

Grade

A+

The Omega Glory

The Omega Glory (Memory Alpha; Video) finds our favorite starship crew discovering the unmanned USS Exeter circling a far off planet. Aboard, the crew has turned to rock salt. Yum!

So The Omega Glory starts off strong. There’s a disease, there’s a mystery cure, there’s politics and a rogue starship captain playing with the Prime Directive, which is suddenly very, very important:

Kirk Voiceover: Although it appears the infection may strand us here the rest of our lives, I face an even more… difficult… problem: a growing belief that Captain Tracy has been interfering with the evolution of life on this planet. It seems… impossible. A star captain’s most solemn oath is that he will give his life, even his entire crew rather than violate the Prime Directive.

Captain Tracey, the only survivor of the Exeter, is trying to find the Fountain of Youth on Omega IV (not the fatty acid), and he’s bending the rules a bit. Nevermind that rule bending in extraordinary circumstances is the kind of stuff the Enterprise crew does all the time: now it’s a grave peril.

But then, half way through, the stupid drops out of the sky and ruins everything.

Begin Spoilers

It turns out that this episode is strangely familiar, and exactly as lame as it was the first time. We’re on another alternate-history Earth, and this one fell prey to bacterial warfare where the commies destroyed the world, and now the savage Yankees are coming to take it back. Weak.

End Spoilers

For all that, it’s not as bad as it could be. The back and forth between Kirk and Tracey is good, and when they play mind games on the natives it’s very clear why the Prime Directive is important.

But ultimately the stupid is an incredibly important plot point that ruins the whole thing. Spoilers Again Which is unfortunate, since Memory Alpha tells me that there’s a short aside that was edited out that neatly explains the whole thing: the people on Omega IV are humans who got off Earth during the early years of the space race. That goes a long way to making this better (even though the chronology is very confusing if you want to accept this explanation). End Spoilers

Best Dialog

[Spock does the Vulcan Neck Pinch]
Kirk: Pity you can’t teach me that.
Spock: I have tried, Captain.

Words of Wisdom From Doctor McCoy

Spock, I’ve found that Evil usually triumphs unless Good is very, very careful.

Grade as Aired

C-

Grade as Scripted

B

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

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.