Star Trek: Start to Finish

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.

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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.

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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

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (Memory Alpha; Video) is that episode with the people who are half-white and half-black that’s all allegorical.

I don’t really know what to say about this episode. The allegory is so naked, so unsubtle, so ham-fisted that what could be an interesting way to tell a story you couldn’t otherwise tell instead becomes a monotonous slog through an hour.

But I hesitate because I don’t know how much my being fifty years removed from the situation is coloring my perception. How daring a gambit was this when it aired? How far did this push the envelope?

Y’see, these aliens hate each other because they’re black on opposite sides. And their hate is repulsive: they have been chasing each other for 50,000 years to settle old scores. The crew thinks it’s ridiculous, and they want to get back to doing what they’re supposed to do. All that is fine. The little twist ending is fine. Even the silly use godlike powers is fine.

But it’s our old enemy pacing that gets us. This is a ten minute idea played out in a one hour show. There’s nothing interesting that happens after the opening gambit, and the crew literally spends the last ten minutes sitting in the bridge watching monitors as the climax happens to other people. Then they just fly away.

Perhaps that’s the most disturbing part: the crew flat out says that prejudice is a thing of the past, that they have no idea what it’s like, and that the human race has overcome it. Despite being a flat out lie, this inculcates them from learning anything from the experience. The crew is our stand-in as an audience; they represent us in the story. Letting them rise above these petty squabbles without effort allows us to pretend to be able to do likewise. It allows us to enjoy our bigotry while pretending that it doesn’t exist, and that’s all the more poisonous.

How much does our fifty years removal allow us to poisonously pretend the same?

Grade

C-

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

Elaan of Troyius

Elaan of Troyius (Video; Memory Alpha) is a mediocre episode with one awesome scene. In a disputed star system on the border between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, two warring planets are ready to forge a peace with a marriage.

There’s some stuff that’s supposed to be funny with the bride not wanting to go and being a savage barbarian and Kirk telling her what-for, but it kind of falls flat. And then she cries and her tears enslave Kirk and that has very little apparent effect on him but makes her into a completely different person. Then half way through the episode the writer forgets this plot and focuses on Klingons.

The Klingons want the system for their own purposes, and stopping the peace treaty is apparently in their interests even though it’s never explained why. So the Klingon Warbird attacks the Enterprise, making strafing runs while the Enterprise’s warp drive is out. There’s some tactics and maneuvering, with feints and bluffs and last-minute aid from Scotty in Engineering. It’s a nice little bit of action and it’s pulled off well. Too bad it’s in such a lame episode.

Grade

C

The Empath (Video; Memory Alpha) is terrible. It’s the old away-team-captured-by-aliens-on-a-planet-that-they-thought-was-abandoned schtick, complete with big-headed aliens performing a mysterious experiment.

Added to the boring retread is the fact that they use the term “empath” completely incorrectly. The titular empath doesn’t feel others’ emotions, but instead takes their injuries upon herself and heals them. She very literally “feels their pain,” but in so doing takes that pain from them, and then within seconds heals from it herself. That’s neat, but that’s not what an empath is.

And further, it undermines the entire episode. The big-headed aliens are trying to teach her to be self-sacrificing, and to do so they make Kirk, McCoy, and Spock offer their own lives or each other. But the crew is in actual danger when they do so; the Empath seems none the worse for wear after she does her injury-transferral trick. So the lesson should be “this is of no cost to you; do it all the time.”

And then there’s the terrible, terrible writing. The dialog is flat, and McCoy spends the entire time spouting expository technobabble that only barely makes sense. The aliens aren’t threatening or interesting or menacing, because they’re too busy being mysterious. And the twist ending is predictable and lame while also being more like a “keep left” than a real twist.

Favorites

This was DeForrest Kelley’s favorite episode. The Devil in the Dark was Shatner’s. The stars of the show pick the worst episodes to love.

Grade

D

Wink of an Eye

Wink of an Eye (Video; Memory Alpha) finds Scotty in charge of the ship with Kirk in an abandoned city that the sensors say doesn’t exist. When suddenly, a redshirt disappears!

The crew goes back to the Enterprise, but a lot of crazy stuff is going on. Systems are turning off and righting themselves, things are being moved around by no one, and everywhere there’s a weird buzzing sound. Weirdest of all, a machine is in the environmental control surrounded by a force field.

The crew, apparently out of ideas, asks the computer for help.

Spock: Are we currently capable of resisting?
Computer: Negative.
Spock: Your recommendations?
Computer: If incapable of resisting, negotiate for terms.
[Kirk and Scotty look at each other]
Kirk: We will not negotiate. Do you concur?
Scotty: Aye.

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Shortly thereafter, Kirk drinks some coffee, and is sped up so he can see the aliens who’ve taken over the ship. They live at hyperspeed, and as such can’t be seen by the crew. They came by this fate accidentally when their world was hit with a volcanic cataclysm, and since they are unable to return to normal speed their race now survives only by luring passersby in and stealing the crews to repopulate their civilization. It’s kind of sad, really.

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This episode has one of the best female leads in the series. Deela, the leader of the aliens, manages to be menacing and charming at the same time. She shares most Star Trek villains’ misunderstanding of the crew’s motives (“why don’t you want to live as my slave?”), and she shares the familiar letting-her-man-get-to-her story arc, but she pulls it off a lot better than usual. Her situation is sympathetic, and that makes all the difference: this woman is trapped in her appointed role and this is the only way she can proceed.

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The weirdest thing about this episode is how the crew just takes off at the end. There’s no attempt made to help the aliens out of their temporal prison with the wonder-drug Spock and McCoy have made, or even to find out if they want it. Deela even goes so far as saying out loud that the solution Kirk is proposing is to let her and her people die, and then Kirk goes ahead and lets that be the solution. Giving them the serum would be an easy fix– a voiceover would do– and it’s strange that it’s not done.

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Best Star Trek Scene Ever

But this episode is worth watching because it contains my favorite scene in the entire series to date. Kirk, having been sped up and trapped at the aliens’ timepace, unable to communicate with the crew, is running to break the McGuffin. He comes around a corner, and there’s Spock, having distilled his own serum to speed himself up. The two of them look at each other, smile, don’t say a word, and run into the room with the McGuffin to the fight. This scene so perfectly encapsulates the Kirk/Spock dynamic I don’t know what I could possibly add to it.

Grade

A+

Plato’s Stepchildren

Plato’s Stepchildren (Video; Memory Alpha) are immortal humanoids who have built Plato’s Republic after visiting Earth millennia ago and settling on a rogue planet that escaped the nova of its star. They need a doctor and McCoy fits the bill.

This episode has a whole lot of good in it, and a sizable dosage of silliness. On balance it works, but only just.

Thirty-one of the Platonians possess powerful telekinetic powers, with varying levels of ability. The dwarf Alexander is the only one who lacks the power, and he is treated as a slave by the others. This leads quite naturally into the standard Star Trek get-the-outsider-on-your-side story line where the crew beats the odds by using the disaffected society member’s access to break the hold of the overlords. And surprisingly, they don’t do it. Alexander (played brilliantly by Michael Dunn) wants none of the power, for he has tasted its downside for hundreds of years and refuses to be like his oppressors.

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Instead, after lots of Kirk and Spock doing ridiculous dances and movements, the crew figures out the source of the power and attains it themselves. Alexander is apparently fine with his friends using the power– they even use it on him– which is dissonant but not impossible to believe.

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The Kiss

This is also the episode where Kirk and Uhura share the first televised interracial kiss (which Shatner stole from Nimoy because he’s a blowhard). But what struck me was that the scene features two kisses– Uhura gets kissed, but so does Nurse Chapel. Uhura and Nurse Chapel are both played by actresses who got their roles in the show because they were sleeping with Gene Roddenberry. That they both get kissed on the planet whose inhabitants can move them about like puppets had a few too many undertones for me.

Grade

A-. This is a solid episode with a strong plot and some great acting.

The Tholian Web

The USS Defiant is missing, and in an attempt to rescue her Kirk is lost and the Enterprise is snared in The Tholian Web (Video; Memory Alpha).

This episode is interesting because Kirk is absent almost the entire time. He’s trapped in “interspace” and the action is all with McCoy and Spock on the Enterprise. Without Shatner hogging the spotlight, it’s nice to see everyone else get some screen time– Chekov and Uhura get nice parts in this episode– but we return to our old enemy and can’t quite get the pacing right.

There are lots of things going on in this episode: rescue attempts and space combat and new aliens and internal conflict and a strange malady are all pulling the crew’s attention. But the effect on the viewer is to wonder why the main plot is being drowned by all this other stuff. Arguably this too-many-things-before-teatime is more “realistic,” but in the process it loses the thread that we as an audience use to navigate the action. They could have played a metanarrative drawing parallels to our using Kirk in the same way– which we certainly do– but they don’t.

That said, the interplay between Spock and McCoy is interesting but poorly executed. McCoy comes off too heavy-handed, seemingly completely unfazed by the loss of his friend. That’s necessary so that McCoy can act as a foil to Spock’s seemingly needless attempts to rescue Kirk, but it plays both characters wrong and comes off the worse for it.

But check out some of this dialog:

Renowned Vulcan Understatement

[The Tholians fire upon the Enterprise]
Spock: The renowned Tholian punctuality.

Scotty is Awesome

McCoy: [The antidote is] a diluted Theragin derivative.
Spock: Theragin? A nerve gas used by the Klingons.
Scotty: Aye, and deadly, too. What’re ya thinkin’, doc, are ya tryin’ to kill us all?
Spock: If I remember correctly, it caused fatality only when used in pure form.
McCoy: That’s right, but in this derivative, when mixed with alcohol, it merely deadens certain nerve inputs to the brain.
Scotty: Aye, any decent brand of Scotch will do that.
McCoy: Well one good slug with this and you could hit a man with phaser stun and he’d never feel it– or even know it.
Scotty: Does it make a good mix with Scotch?
McCoy: It should.
Scotty: [Picks up bottle] I’ll let you know.

Grade

B+