Star Trek: Start to Finish

Journey to Babel

Journey to Babel (Memory Alpha; SD Video) starts with the Enterprise picking up the Vulcan Ambassador to the Federation, Sarek. He comes on, is a little cold and a little rude to Spock, and then we learn that he’s Spock’s dad.

The Enterprise, you see, is picking up delegates to convene and decide if a new planet will be allowed to join the Federation. Everyone is traveling toward Babel, where the conference will take place. As such, this episode seems like part one of a two-parter, but the second part would have been more political and more challenging, and was never shot. I’m not sure if that’s because it would have been too political (which Trek mostly skirts) or because it would have been too challenging (involving lots of stuff Trek mostly skimps on, like big sets and nitty gritty details).

But in the course of talking a little bit about politics, we get this from Kirk:

Kirk: [In] Star Fleet force is used only as a last resort: we’re an instrument of civilization. And it’s a better opportunity for a scientist to study the universe than he could get at the Vulcan Science Academy.

This plays quite nicely into my view of the Federation as an interplanetary UN. It is also pretty much completely at odds with the series so far. The Enterprise does go on the occasional scientific expedition, but is just as often a warship looking for a fight. It fits very closely to what I would have told you about Star Trek before watching TOS closely, and it’s stated quite clearly in Next Generation, but I’m sorry to say that it’s not as explicit as it could be, or as obvious as I think Roddenberry thought it was.

This episode also goes to great lengths to make Spock a little more alien:

McCoy: [Spock, you had] a teddy bear!
Spock: Not exactly, Doctor. On Vulcan, the teddy bears are alive. And they have six inch fangs.

Seriously, that’s just bullshit. It would be incredibly illogical to give a youngster anything alive, let alone something with six inch fangs.

Also, this:

Telerek: There will be payment for your slander, Sarek!
Sarek: Threats are illogical.

Again, that’s just crazytalk. Threats are incredibly logical: they are a way of stating your position in such a way that the opposite party is aware of your intentions and the price you expect to exact for noncompliance. This could just be bluster, but Sarek is a freakin’ ambassador; he should know how threats work.

And why can’t they replicate blood?

Focus…

But we’re getting lost in the weeds, here. This episode is really rather good. It’s not as political as it first appears, which is disappointing but par for the course. It continues the trend of putting more moving parts into the picture than early episodes, which is great; the beginning of the show felt like it was trying too hard to fill airtime, but with the introduction of B-plots, layered mysteries, and progressive revelations the pacing has really gotten a thousand times better.

Grade

A

Computers in Star Trek

I, Mudd is yet another episode where the bad guy is a big, scary computer.

Computers in this series are, without fail, staid machines that have a mission they don’t understand, that attempt to fulfill that mission based on a false premise, and end up undermining their premise.

We see this in The Return of the Archons and in The Apple, where a computer tasked with protecting the populace has enslaved them.

We see this in The Changeling, where a computer probe has confused its programming and is now out to annihilate the life it’s supposed to discover and report on.

We see this to a lesser extent in What Are Little Girls Made Of?, where a computer thinks that it’s a man, and doesn’t understand that its plan is hideously flawed.

And to stretch a little further, we see it in A Taste of Armegeddon, where the computer is merely the means through which the people have lost their way; it is the buffer that keeps them from realizing the magnitude of their folly.

Almost all of this is attributable to computers being new, unknown quantities. If the only thing you knew about computers was that they were machines that made logical decisions, it stands to reason that you would, much like the Romantic poets, rally against them and for emotion, for feeling, and for humanity. And we see this pattern again and again in Star Trek.

But what we also see again and again is Mr. Spock, cooly logical and yet heroic. He shows flashes of emotion, and that connects us to him, but he strives to suppress it, to hold that rational part of himself forward.

But what really distinguishes Spock is that he simply has more insight. The computers of Trek are defeated by pointing out their flaws; by making them aware of their shortcomings and leading them to admit their contradictions and, in so doing, to destroy the illusion of their perfectly logical actions.

Spock, though, is a walking contradiction and knows it. He is half human, and so cannot deny that he has emotions. And the Vulcans as a race do not deny their emotions; they merely seek to control and suppress them. But most of all, Spock understands that the world itself is not entirely logical, and the inhabitants of that world are far from it. When he encounters a failing of logic, it is “fascinating” and not earth-shattering. Spock has a healthy skepticism but is willing to admit that there are more things in heaven and on Earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy.

Kirk versus Spock on Retaliation

Arena sees another in the long-running dialogs between Kirk, who jumps immediately to a “Kill ‘em all” stance, and Spock, who wants to show all sentient creatures compassion. This is an undercurrent with particular implications on this episode, but it’s been present in a lot of episodes and it’s something I don’t remember from my occasional viewings before this.

Which is a shame, really. This is a smart argument for these two characters to make because of who they are. Kirk, the thinking but emotional human, is driven by revenge and impetuous desires. Spock, the logical and sometimes cold half-Vulcan, is instead weighing reactions and repercussions.

But what’s really interesting is that when McCoy makes an appearance in this back-and-forth, it’s usually as a stand-in, but he switches between the sides. He frames his argument for compassion in terms of our ability to aid suffering, and his argument for vengeance in the shared burden that suffering inflicts upon us.

It’s this sort of discussion that makes Trek interesting, and I’m kind of surprised that I don’t remember this particular thread. Does it fade out as time goes on?