“...a mere apendix.”: Spock's Brain

The newspaper reads "Spock gets 2-year prison term".

“Spock's Brain” needs no introduction. It is infamously terrible. Universally regarded as the single worst episode of the Original Series by those for whom “The Omega Glory” is too niche a pick. Every aspect of this story is iconic for all the wrong reasons: It's just as memorable as something like “Arena”, albeit for being as bad as the former episode is good. And, to add insult to injury, it went out as the season premier for the fans' hard-won third year of Star Trek, a move which has to go down as one of the biggest, most grandiose middle-finger salutes to a television audience in the history of broadcast.

I thought it was OK.

Now, I hasten to add “Spock's Brain” isn't good by any means either. Is it campy and cheesy? Oh, please. This is Roger Corman levels of lowballing it. Is it sexist? For sure: It's a story involving a tyrannical matriarchal society of incompetent, childlike women who torment their male underlings with mixed signals-Of bloody course it's sexist. It's borderline racist too, with characters throwing around words like “primitive” and “apish” on a regular basis and Kirk's ultimate resolution to the problems of the Sigma Draconians is to encourage them to follow a “natural” course of social evolution and learn how to think for themselves. It's just “The Apple” all over again. And, as is par for the course for this season, there are logic lapses and exposition holes everywhere and the plot actually completely falls apart if you think too hard about it. (Although really it all boils down to “alien space women need Spock's brain to control the computer in charge of running their library and central heating system”, which is arguably straightforward enough. Trust me: I watch 1980s Scooby-Doo. I've seen stuff that makes far less sense than this.)

But is “Spock's Brain” the single worst episode of Star Trek, or at least the Original Series? Oh, Prophets no. It's not even the worst episode of the season that we've see so far. As far as terrible Star Trek episodes go, it's eminently watchable for a number of reasons, and in fact I'd go so far as to say it's probably the most watchable bad episode of Star Trek that there is. There's a certain entertainment factor in how charmingly lowbrow it is. Furthermore, “Spock's Brain” is one of the most interesting episodes of the show to talk about, if not actually watch, and frankly, given a choice between this and another test of endurance like “The Paradise Syndrome” or “And The Children Shall Lead” I'll go with the Morgs and Eymorgs every time. So I mean yes it's bad, but not really in a way that would seem to justify the amount of vitriol it gets from mainline fandom. Unpacking how “Spock's Brain” got quite the reputation it did is a worthy field of study, and we'll return to it in a bit, but first let's try and answer the most obvious question: Why does this episode even exist?

One other thing “Spock's Brain” shares in common with “Arena” aside from being its antimatter universe twin is that, perhaps astonishingly, both are Gene Coon scripts (well, originally at least). Coon is once again using his penname Lee Cronin, and, unlike “Spectre of the Gun”, I can absolutely see why Coon wouldn't want his name associated with this one. But the question remains: How on Earth did Coon crank out something like this? He's consistently been arguably the best writer on the entire series (for my money only Paul Schneider and D.C. Fontana come close, and Schneider only wrote two and a half episodes while Fontana has the ill fortune to have crap like “Charlie X” and “Friday's Child” attributed to her, even if they weren't really her concepts). It seems unthinkable to imagine Coon sitting down to genuinely and unironically pen “Spock's Brain”.

Well, for one thing, just like Fontana, Coon had his scripted gutted by the production team, and this one came out in considerably worse shape then “The Enterprise Incident”. Some of the differences between Coon's original story and the aired one include the Sigma Draconians being called “The Nefelese” and being ruled by a male authority known as “Ehr Von”. There would have been an exploration of the Vulcan concept of slon porra, supposedly a state of mind where conscious mental faculties are in absolute control of the self. Also, there wouldn't have been a temporary transference of hyper-advanced medical knowledge to McCoy and there wasn't going to be a “Teacher”: McCoy only received information on the planet's local culturally specific techniques and it was a combination of them with his own abilities that would have allowed him to reconnect Spock's brain and body. Now, it's not especially clear that even had Coon's original draft gone through this episode still wouldn't have been a legendary turkey: This is still, after all, ultimately a story about shoplifting Spock's brain and using it as a glorified CPU chip. But one does get the sense, especially just knowing the stuff Coon has written in the past, that there may have been at least a halfhearted attempt to explore the concepts of the Self, mind/body confluence and structures of authority.

Or, it's entirely possible Coon wrote this episode simply to troll Fred Freiberger, Arthur Singer and the new production team: “OK, so you guys aren't going to treat Star Trek any differently than a bottom-of-the-barrel pulp sci-fi serial? Then fine. Here's a story that's as pulpish as it gets” (William Shatner even jokes this episode is a “tribute” to the NBC studio executives, which is frankly as good an explanation for “Spock's Brain” as exists). Because really, that's what this episode is: We've got a stereotypical-to-the-point-of-parody pulp sci-fi situation and a structure that is, of course, a tedious series of captures and escapes. Aside from this episode in particular (though it is certainly the best example), the accusation the third season is “pulpy” and “campy”, and that this is the year's real sin, seems to be a common one amongst fandom: Recall back in “Elaan of Troyius” Paula Block and Terry J. Erdmann said that “overblown” writing, wardrobe and makeup design was “common” to year three. This raises some rather interesting implications, however. If in the end the biggest crime “Spock's Brain” commits is that it shows Star Trek succumbing fully to its pulp instincts and this is enough to make it the Worst Trek Ever Made...Then why aren't we once again making the same argument against Gene Roddenberry's work? Just like in “The Omega Glory”, I have to wonder: If this is as bad as it gets, why aren't we being equally as critical to, say, “The Cage” or “The Corbomite Maneuver”?

There are two possible reasons for this the way I see it: The easy answer is that while Star Trek has been pulpy on many occasions in the past, it's never been quite this campy before, and for a certain type of genre fan and film critic campy and theatrical is the worst possible thing for a work of visual media to be (I will briefly mention the homophobic and misogynistic overtones such a statement can potentially acquire, but you all are smart enough to take it from there, and anyway such a discussion is best saved for when we return to slash fiction). However, there's a bit more to it than that: Namely, Star Trek is also a whole lot more visible now than it's ever been before.

While ratings continued to decline throughout the 1968-9 season, partially by design but also partially because despite everything this was still Star Trek with Star Trek's audience, certainly more people were probably at least *aware* of the show and the reputation it now had. It would have been difficult not to be: It really has to be stressed what a watershed and discourse changer “Save Star Trek!” must have been. So, what I have a feeling happened was that while Star Trek may have built its fanbase on its momentary flashes of progressive idealism, starting with the third season there was a now the beginnings of an expectation for the show to behave that way on a regular basis. Something like “Spock's Brain” is going to stick out a *lot* more in the fall of 1968 then it would have in the fall of 1967, and I have a feeling had it been made in the second season it wouldn't have quite the reputation it does (I mean, not that it would have been made at that point in the first place: If it's a work of troll literature it's specific to this particular climate).

The other thing peculiarly notable about “Spock's Brain” is the cast. Normally an episode like this would merit the actors totally phoning it in or goofing around, but that's largely not the case here. With the exception of Leonard Nimoy, who has gone on record saying this episode left him constantly embarrassed, as much of the season did (which is, to be fair, a perfectly natural and understandable reaction) and whose stage presence totally reflects this, the cast does seem to be on the whole actually trying here, which is curious. However, William Shatner, DeForest Kelley and James Doohan don't quite give their normal performances either: They wind up at something considerably different and more interesting.

Starting with Shatner, we fully expect him by now to just eat everything in sight like he did in “And The Children Shall Lead”, and while there's a little bit of that in certain places, the version of Kirk he delivers for “Spock's Brain” is altogether more complex and nuanced then should really be expected: Shatner plays Kirk as someone intensely driven and who'll stop at nothing to get Spock back. Similarly, Kelley plays McCoy as obsessed with the concept of removing and reconnecting a brain, especially at the beginning of the first act when the Sigma Draconians' duplicity (and unfathomably advanced technology) is discovered and during the climax as he feverishly races against time to rejoin Spock. Doohan, meanwhile, plays Scott as a loyal and dutiful assistant who uses his specialized skill to help Kirk and McCoy's ambition. Now, while it could just be because I'm writing this in October so maybe it's on my mind, it seems to me that Shatner, Kelley and Doohan might just be trying to turn this into the Star Trek version of a horror movie, with Kirk and McCoy playing two sides of the mad, single-minded obsession of Victor Frankenstein.

Just like the doctor, Kirk and McCoy are consumed by their goal to, in a sense, bring Spock back from the dead by transplanting his brain, and this can be seen as being paralleled with the Eymorgs' steadfast, unthinking dedication to the Teacher's tyranny of hierarchical knowledge and ritualized subservience. There are even moments where Shatner and Kelley give performances that are uncannily reminiscent to me of Colin Clive's portrayal of Frankenstein in the 1931 Universal film, and James Doohan taking up the role of eerily capable and loyal lab assistant is actually genius. “Star Trek does Frankenstein” is a brilliant, brilliant concept, especially given how the original Frankenstein novel was a cautionary treatise against unrestrained technoscience that marked not only one of the first works of modern science fiction, but one of the first fusions of science fiction and horror. Even the movie adaptations are worth taking note of, as there becomes a kind of kinship between the genres of science fiction, horror and cowboy westerns with the camp aesthetic as B movie staples (even if this isn't really what the original Universal films were). If there was ever a time for Star Trek to attempt something like this, crossing all these genres together to make a larger metaficitonal statement, well, this would be the year to do it.

The only problem with this reading is that there are ultimately too many ideas here that never cohere. “Star Trek does Frankenstein” is a great idea, and so is an exploration of Self and identity through the lens of authoritarian power structures. It's just that nothing actually sticks here and, as is frustratingly the norm for this season, nobody seems to be on the same page about what they're doing (or should be doing). Had Coon been given the comparative freedom he enjoyed on “Spectre of the Gun” this *might* have actually worked, presuming (as I think is fair to) that the chasmic structural problems and casual sexism came from the production team's rewrites. There's a fine line between falling into camp due to incompetence and embracing it as an aesthetic style, and Coon seems like the kind of guy who could have pulled it off. But any good ideas the different people involved in “Spock's Brain” might have had remain buried and difficult to tease out of the uncooperative mess that became the finished episode.

But that says something in and of itself: Even at its worst, the Star Trek that comes out of people like Gene Coon, William Shatner, James Doohan and DeForest Kelley remains thought provoking and very, very entertaining. I wish the same could be said about everything that's part of this franchise.

“Seduction of the Innocent”: And The Children Shall Lead

"Does it need saying?"

Bloody hell.

Every time I think this show has bottomed out the floor vanishes from beneath my feet. I haven't been as angry at Star Trek as I was while watching “And The Children Shall Lead” in quite awhile. This is execrable. This is the worst parts of every retrograde story this show has ever done distilled to their core essences. This is “Omega Glory” standards. Actually, no, not even: “And The Children Shall Lead” starts as a third-rate retread of “Miri” and then dovetails into one of the most bald-facedly reactionary and youth-hating things I've ever seen, and it's another sloppy, incoherent and cack-handed production on top of that. This isn't just as bad as the show has ever been it's worse.

Well, where to begin? How about with the absolutely bleeding obvious? Kirk, Spock and McCoy discover a Federation colony where all the adults have died out leaving only their children behind, who are suspiciously unnerved by the mass deaths. When they beam back aboard the Enterprise, it's revealed the children are part of some scary and mysterious cult with strange language and unfamiliar customs built around worship of a “friendly angel” whom it is further revealed is actually another Alien Entity of Pure Evil who has enslaved the children. The being then orders them to commandeer the ship in an attempt to convert more brainwashed slaves for his army, with which he intends to take over the galaxy. In the end, the alien is dispatched by Kirk convincing the children adults always have their best interests at heart and can always be trusted, and demonstrating the Gorgon (which is apparently the alien's name, as Kirk refers to it as such even though at no point in the episode did he ever learn this) requires faith and obedience to live, without which he is revealed as the evil (and, naturally, horrifically disfigured) being he truly is.

I mean, do I really need to spell it out? This couldn't be more transparently an attack on the counterculture if Spock made some comment about how Earth was almost destroyed in the late-1960s by a group of misguided youths who were led astray by an Evil Alien Communist who told them to distrust the United States and protest the Vietnam War as evidence of historical precedence. The Gorgon is even dressed in a flowing, paisley gown and I'd say his design makes him look like a shoddy knock-off of something from the Doctor Who serial “The Mutants” except for the fact “The Mutants” wasn't actually filmed until 1972, which leads me to believe Arthur Singer and writer Edward J. Lakso had some kind of right-wing time machine that could only be fueled by fear, hatred and the tears of children. I'm actually dumbfounded: I thought I'd have to wait until the 2010s and Internet culture to find an example of a show that held as much active contempt and loathing for its fanbase as this one does.

Then there are the illusions. My God, the illusions. Apparently, one of the ill-defined witchcraft powers the kids have is their ability to place illusions in people's minds constructed out of their deepest fears. Kirk freaks out over the possibility of losing command, Chekov panics over potentially having to disobey orders, Uhura, naturally, sees an images of herself ugly and old in the mirror that she has logically bolted to her instrument panel (wimmenfolk and their vanity, amirite?) and Sulu sees spinning rings of Samurai swords and daggers that will destroy the Enterprise if he deviates from the course he's laid in, which is both racist and idiotic. This episode is such a superstorm of hegemonic fear, bigotry and oppression it almost makes me want to apologise to Gene Roddenberry: Roddenberry was merely inept as a creative figure and a totalitarian bean counter. As bad as someone like Roberta Lincoln was, she was still evidence he felt the youth were heading in the right direction, it's just he thought they were too scattered and flaky to get anything done, though they were sexy to look at (which is another issue entirely) Singer, however, seems like he actually, legitimately has an axe to grind against the forces of material social progress and is going out of his way to stamp them out. Either that or he's out to troll everyone, and frankly neither scenario really warms me to him.

On top of all that the production is an absolute shambles. It makes the frenzied disorganisation of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, “The Alternative Factor” and “The Menagerie” look like opening night at the Globe Theatre. Major plot developments happen off-camera and go totally unexplained, the entire cast is written badly out of character and, most astounding of all, Fred Freiberger cast criminal defense attorney Melvin Belli as the Gorgon, someone with zero experience in the acting business. I have absolutely no idea what on Earth would have possessed Freiberger to cast someone like Belli instead of, you know, an actual actor. Belli was somewhat famous as an attorney, if for no other reason then the high-profile cases he was involved in (Belli was famous for defending Jack Ruby and The Rolling Stones, and had a minor role in the investigation into the Zodiac murders), but I can't think of anything about him, apart from his minor marquee status, that would have made him a good fit for Star Trek. His son did in fact play one of the children in this episode, but neither that nor the potential ratings boost Freiberger seemed to think Belli's status would yield is really a sufficient justification of his presence here. I mean, I suppose I could try and read this as Freiberger's attempt to redeem “And The Children Shall Lead” by having the corrupting force be a lawyer, and thus a hegemonic establishment figure, except no: Belli defended The Rolling Stones and the guy who killed the guy who killed John F. Kennedy-That doesn't really make him an enemy of the youth. If anything, that somehow manages to make it even worse.

But I'm not done yet. Like all terrible episodes of Star Trek, “And The Children Shall Lead” brings out not only the worst in the show, but the worst in its fans as well. While The Agony Booth (which regular readers will recall panned “The Alternative Factor” in the first season, an episode I thought was marvelous) did in fact agree this was one of the worst episodes of the show (if not the very worst), it was for maddeningly facile reasons: Their major complaint was that the episode “...offers virtually nothing: No suspense, no character development, no intriguing sci-fi premises, and not one memorable line of dialogue.”, as if the superficial structural problems are some kind of unforgivable sin and somehow worse then the appalling and blatant youth-phobic subtext and flashes of casual racism and misogyny. This fetishistic fixation on plot and character development is so typical of contemporary, early-21st Century fandom and I continue to be strongly put off by it every single time I see it.

And of course, The Agony Booth reserve their most potent bile for William Shatner, blaming the vast majority of the episode's woes on him and proceeding to mercilessly mock him with sarcastic dialog such as:

“There's no denying it: This is 100% grade-A pure Shatner here. We have now reached ShatNervana. The Shat goes through his entire range of grotesque, buffoonish facial expressions until Spock finally moves towards him, prompting Kirk to wildly grab him by the throat."

By now I really shouldn't have to lay out my response. Obviously, Shatner is the most enjoyable thing about the episode by light-years. There's no contest. While it is true he's in full-on “Omega Glory” or “Gamesters of Triskelion” mode once again, we firstly shouldn't find this shocking, nor should we blame him. Frankly, the only thing that surprises me about Shatner turning into a scenery singularity is that he didn't also spend the entire third season wearing an ice bucket as a hat like Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Secondly though, Shatner's particular performance in this episode is so legendarily off-the-wall it had far-reaching consequences that went beyond what anyone was able to predict, or that many people have noticed even to this day. Shatner turns Kirk's meltdown into such a spectacle he's only brought out of it by Spock coming right up into his face and whispering his first name in his ear. This is very possibly the single slashiest scene in the entire Original Series such that I'm willing to bet it was largely responsible for the birth of the entire genre.

Slash fiction, the idea of taking two (or more) characters who were not originally intended to be romantically involved and writing fanfiction about their (typically homosexual) relationship is a massive part of Star Trek's female and feminist fandom. In fact, the concept originates with Star Trek fandom, and despite what an irredeemable mess “And The Children Shall Lead” is, the confluence of factors that comes together in that one scene is an absolutely perfect demonstration of how it came about. While a more thorough examination of the history and development of slash is best saved for the 1970s where it starts to become a very pronounced and irreducible part of the Star Trek pop culture phenomenon, since a lot of the fundamental sources of inspiration are already self-evident, a brief overview is in order.

Essentially, Star Trek provided a very powerful mixture of elements that, when combined, led very straightforwardly to an environment in which slash could blossom: The show was always in some way sexually repressed, going back to Gene Roddenberry's confused conception of gender. But, more to the point, Spock is a character who it is very easy to code as sexual: His suppression of his emotions makes a very convincing metaphor for the closet, in addition to making him seem brooding and mysterious. Kirk, meanwhile, thanks to William Shatner's overt theatricality, comes across as very flamboyant in a way that's very easy to queer up. Furthermore, the fact Kirk isn't allowed to hold down any meaningful romantic relationships with people other than his crew for a number of reasons, and that he considers Spock one of his closest, most personal friends just makes this reading all the easier. The turbolift scene in this episode, then, comes across as just blatant: Previous moments (like the bondage and torture scenes in “The Gamesters of Triskelion” or “Patterns of Force”) could be argued away on any number of qualifiers. This one though, not so much.

But the fact the most positive thing I could come up with to say about “And The Children Shall Lead” is that it helped indirectly create slash fiction really says it all. The only thing this episode has going for it is the way the fans could transform it into something more interesting and less repugnant, reactionary and horrid. This really and truly is one of the worst things this franchise ever did. Amazingly, in five weeks, the new creative team has concretely demonstrated itself to actually be worse and less competent than Gene Roddenberry. Congratulations, I guess.

As a final twist of the knife it's a fitting summary of Star Trek itself: Something that was made great by and large through the hearts and minds of the people whose imagination it captured, not always through the extant bits of Soda Pop Art that were made in its name.

“Excuse me, can you help me? I'm a spy.”: The Enterprise Incident

"Legendary Space Encounter", by Randy Asplund

“The Enterprise Incident” is arguably one of the most iconic episodes of the original Star Trek, or at least this season. “Iconic”, however, is not necessarily a synonym for “good”. While decent and a godsend compared to what the show has been hurling out since the beginning of the season, I'm not especially inclined to call “The Enterprise Incident” one of the all-time greatest stories from this show, especially coming off of the streak of home runs that was the latter John Meredyth Lucas tenure. This episode is, however, perfectly serviceable, better than the last two stories by light years and further evidence of what a tremendous asset D.C. Fontana was to Star Trek.

The circumstances behind Fontana's resignation as script editor are somewhat hazy. The official story is that she was too overwhelmed by her day-to-day duties and wanted the opportunity to freelance for other shows, but the somewhat caged and guarded way she tends to recount this (along with the rather exasperated tone she often takes on when describing her time associated with the franchise) leads me to believe there's likely a bit more than that at play. Whatever the reasoning though, “The Enterprise Incident” is Fontana's first Star Trek contribution as a freelancer, a position she'll hold for the remainder of the Original Series, and also her final contribution to the Original Series under her actual name. And right away, it's very clear the impact her absence has had on the show's overall production: “The Enterprise Incident” was extensively “edited” by Gene Roddenberry (even though that shouldn't technically be his job anymore) as well as (I presume) Arthur Singer. As a result, what we get here is in many ways D.C. Fontana-lite: Even “Friday's Child” wasn't monkeyed around with to quite the same extent this story was, and this had an almost quantitatively net negative effect on the final product.

Fontana's original draft was partially inspired by the 1968 “Pueblo Incident”, where North Korean forces captured and detained a United States Navy cruiser for over a year on charges of espionage, hence the title. This would make “The Enterprise Incident” arguably the first Star Trek episode to explore a current and topical sociopolitical issue (previous episodes, namely things like “A Taste of Armageddon”, “The City on the Edge of Forever” and “A Private Little War” made halfhearted stabs at this, but were almost always held back by the show's apparent desire to remain somewhat safe and apolitical) were it not for two issues: Firstly, Roddenberry's and Singer's “improvements”, among a great deal many other things, helped to obfuscate this significantly. Secondly however, “Journey to Babel” proved that, if nothing else, Fontana is a master at blending complex political world building plots with intimate stories about characters, and would prefer to lean in this direction if given the opportunity. “The Enterprise Incident” builds off of this, using the backdrop of a high-stakes espionage mission to further explore Kirk and Spock as well as the sense of loyalty and devotion the Enterprise crew shares amongst themselves.

Much like in “Journey to Babel” then, it's clear the story Fontana is really interested in telling examines is the effect the situation has on the characters, as opposed to the intricacies of the situation itself. She's said the Pueblo story was merely what kickstarted the train of thought that led her to write this episode and it was not as much intended as a direct analog or parable. However, and that qualifier hangs like the Sword of Damocles over this episode just as it does every other episode this season, this is largely not the story “The Enterprise Incident” actually is. Nevertheless, we can try to piece together what Fontana's original story might have been based on her words on it after the fact and the inklings we get in the thing that made it to air: We see hints of a story about Kirk pushed to the edge of madness over his flagrantly warmongering and potentially trust-shattering orders from Starfleet Command, Spock's exploration of heritage being pushed to the logical limit by having him sympathetic to, and ultimately side with, the Romulans, and a Romulan Commander who is in many ways an extrapolation of the tantalizing groundwork laid down by Paul Schneider in “Balance of Terror” and who proves once and for all the Romulans, the supposed Evil Enemy, are in truth a deeply complex and multifaceted culture who, while they may not be *just* like us, are ultimately just as worthy and deserving of respect and personhood as we are.

As Fontana is not one to speak ill of her former colleagues (though one does frequently get the sense she'd really, really like to), she says there were a lot of “little things” that were changed she wasn't happy about. And while she may be coy about her original intent so as not to upset the Trekker cart, let's be honest with ourselves. We know enough about Fontana, her writing style and her positionality by this point to rather easily discern which parts of this production were hers and which parts...weren't. I'm willing to bet the first “little thing” that was altered was Kirk's mental state. In the episode as aired, Kirk puts on an elaborate show to give the impression he's losing his mind and endangering the crew to provoke a diplomatic incident with the Romulans, while in truth he's on an undercover mission to steal their new cloaking device so that should something go wrong his reputation and his alone would be tarnished. Fontana says that in the final product “Kirk's attitudes were wrong”, but never elabourates. I have a feeling this is what she's talking about-It would not surprise me in the slightest to learn the original draft had Kirk genuinely teetering on the brink of insanity due to what the Federation is asking him to do and the strain it's putting on his relationship with the crew, and yes, the Romulans. This is the kind of story one does not expect to see until the Dominion War: To see Fontana hinting at it in 1968 is astonishing. But, it is in keeping with her perspective: She was there when Gene Coon created the Federation (which was intentionally problematized from the beginning) and neither of them have been especially keen to leap at the idea it's a perfect utopia.

(That said, as aired “The Enterprise Incident” does give William Shatner a decent vehicle: Playing Kirk playing mad while secretly scheming is right up his alley, and he knocks the performance out of the park: We suspect he's secretly up to something from the teaser. It's properly close to “A Piece of the Action” standards).

Spock's story seems to have remained comparatively intact, which is for the better as it's arguably the best part of the episode. It's not, however, completely unaltered: While Spock and the Romulan Commander were always meant to fall in love based on their similar perspectives and experience, the final episode drastically changes some significant scenes with the Commander such that her impact is altered and, in my opinion, worsened. She starts out as a truly hypnotic presence: Someone just as intelligent, competent, cosmopolitan and with just as much dignity as Kirk (and crucially, just as workmanlike too). And, helped by Joanne Linville's imperious and elegant performance, she absolutely dominates the first half of the episode. Naturally, all this is promptly shoved out an airlock as soon as she begins a relationship with Spock, who is easily able to manipulate her and allow Kirk to sneak on board the Bird-of-Prey and steal the cloaking device right under her nose, turning her into a generic “woman scorned”. Fontana hated this, saying “Any Romulan worth her salt would have instantly suspected Spock because they are related races. That was wrong.”. Of course, she's right, and frustratingly, this would have made a far, far more interesting story: Imagine the Commander and Spock constantly trying to play and outmaneuver each other throughout the whole episode because they know what they're planning and what they're capable of (and what their respective orders are), despite also deeply loving each other. That would have been electrifying.

One alteration Fontana is perfectly upfront with is the actual love scene: Apparently in the original script Spock was meant to “rain kisses” on the Commander. This was *not* Fontana's idea: Gene Roddenberry felt the need to throw this bit of stage direction in before it was submitted to Arthur Singer and Fred Freiberger. This enraged Leonard Nimoy, who penned Roddenberry a scathing letter complaining about this addition and demanding he cut it out. Fontana, predictably, agreed with Nimoy and also wrote Roddenberry a(n altogether more diplomatic) letter cautioning him on what the fan backlash would be if Spock was written out of character. Eventually Roddenberry backed down, and Nimoy and Linville improvised their gestural makeout session, a further extrapolation of the significance of hands to both Vulcan and Romulan society. A final note on the Spock/Commander plot: It's delightfully telling that Fontana's first post-“Save Star Trek!” script puts Spock in an intricate and deeply personal love story and throws Kirk into the clink to pretend to have a mental breakdown. She clearly knew perfectly well the sort of thing all those fans really wanted to see!

Despite everything that was tacked on, altered or taken out, there's still a lot of great moments in “The Enterprise Incident”, the best of which build on not just “Balance of Terror”, but the work both Fontana and Gene Coon have been building over the past two years. This is as nuanced and developed as we've ever seen any culture in Star Trek so far, not just the Romulans, and the Commander's description of them as a deeply passionate and aesthetic people who guard against the more retrograde, warlike aspects of their culture with a smouldering love of life is intoxicating in and of itself: I could listen to Linville go on about Romulan sensuality basically forever. Speaking of Linville, she has the distinction of playing the very first female captain of a starship in the entirety of Star Trek, and I'm quite sure Fontana meant for there to be symbolism behind having her be Romulan instead of a member of Starfleet: There are a number of times she comes dangerously close to having the moral and ethical high ground, and one suspects she would have won the whole thing in Fontana's original version. Shatner-as-Kirk too plays into this theme when possible: It's an easily missed bit of genius to have Kirk retain his surgically altered Romulan appearance after he beams back to the Enterprise with the cloaking device...and have the episode end before we get to see McCoy change him back.

But the problem is these great moments never add up or come together to be a truly great episode. The story that we can watch on television is too in love with its espionage trappings and refuses to problematize the actions of Starfleet Command in the slightest. We never get to see any actual debate over the morality of Kirk's orders and the Federation emerge the unambiguous Good Guys again. And, well, putting aside the larger sociopolitical and ethical concerns of the UFP for the moment, just knowing the sort of things Richard Nixon was getting up to in 1968, one sort of hopes Fontana would have been allowed to write a story less enamoured with the glory of Western-style representative democracy. Furthermore, the Romulan Commander gets a positively dreadful ending: Yes, she's treated as a guest of honour on the Enterprise, but she surely won't be once she gets taken back to Federation space to be “processed”. Imagining the loneliness and despondence she must feel trapped on the other end of the galaxy from her people literally deep in enemy territory just makes me shudder, and no amount of apologising and commiserating on Spock's part makes any of that better.

“The Enterprise Incident” is also the last story to depict the Romulans in a manner consistent with their original characterization in “Balance of Terror”. Though it builds on and extrapolates this to a marvelous degree, it's kind of gut-punching to know we're never going to see this developed on ever again. In many ways the Romulans are the perfect adversaries to the Federation, because we get to see different aspects of ourselves reflected and emphasized in different ways, both for the worse and for the better. But, much like “The Enterprise Incident” itself, future Romulan stories will be subject to micromanaging such that their overall impact is significantly dulled. A case could be made D.C. Fontana too was never able to see the true potential of her vision realised: This is far from her last offering; we'll be talking about her well into the 2000s and 2010s and she even gets to be showrunner of her own Star Trek series, but her story is all-too-frequently one of being hamstrung, runaround and dismissed in favour of bigger-name creative figures and studio party lines. In that sense, while “The Enterprise Incident” may not be her best work, it may sadly be what best represents her contributions to Star Trek's legacy.

“Put up a parking lot”: The Paradise Syndrome

"There seems to be a reoccurring reference to a 'World-Eater'..."

Somewhere around the point one begins musing “you know, maybe 'Elaan of Troyius' wasn't so bad after all”, one gets the sense there are worryingly fundamental underlying problems with “The Paradise Syndrome”.

It is wretched. Somewhat amazingly, it manages to tell a story about the concept of an idyllic lifestyle without invoking the godforsaken Garden of Eden again. This does not make it any less wretched. It is unabashedly racist, because it is noble savages again, and this time the show just drops all pretense and flat-out calls them literally “American Indians” so there's absolutely no doubt about who and what it's horrifically stereotyping and misrepresenting. Aside from “The Apple” (which this is almost as bad as) this was the episode I most dreaded having to rewatch: A story about a Kirk rendered amnesiac by a von Dänikenesque obelisk who becomes the messianic spiritual leader of a village of Space Native Americans, and lives for months married to a doting priestess who is promptly stoned to death along with their unborn son is my idea of just about the worst possible way to spend an evening.

My expectations were not disappointed.

Let's tackle the racism first, because “The Paradise Syndrome” is absolutely racist and it's so transparent about this it's almost refreshing in a way. Let's once again turn to Daniel Leonard Bernardi, as this is his territory and he's apparently becoming something of a fixture this season (and also because it saves me having to reiterate everything):

"'The Paradise Syndrome" stereotypes Native-Americans as noble savages and whites as 'normal' and even divine [...] Miramanee cannot figure out how to pull Kirk's shirt off, as she cannot find any lacing. She is portrayed as simpleminded, not that bright. This is not the case with Kirk. Moments before, he has fashioned a lamp from an old piece of pottery and saved a boy by using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Despite his amnesia, he is shown as naturally superior [...] When the Indians realize that Kirk is not a god, they stone both him and Miramanee (it's the Indians who are violent in this version of the noble savage stereotype). Spock and McCoy eventually intervene, but only Kirk survives. In this take on a standard white/red miscegenation narrative, the native girl dies so that Kirk, the white male hero, isn't shown unheroically and immorally leaving her and their unborn baby behind."

Just like before, we'll use Bernardi's analysis as a jumping-off point because, once again, he's right as far as the basics go but he also seems to miss a great deal of nuances. I don't want to go too hard on him as in many ways Bernardi was one of the first people to make note of Star Trek's more reactionary tendencies, but really: That “The Paradise Syndrome” treats Native Americans as simpleminded primitives is so laughably blatant and obvious it really doesn't need to be commented on, at least not to the extent Bernardi does. This is far from the first time the Original Series has done this, and we should really stop being shocked by this at this point, especially during a season it's clear was a write-off from before it even began. No, the larger racialist issue with “The Paradise Syndrome” is that its Native Americans aren't just primitives, they're not even real people: They're constructed entirely out of half-assed and half-remembered stereotypes and vague imagery. There's a lot of strong medicine, abbreviated, punctuated speech, feathers and thunderstorms, but there's not a single thing to indicate this is an actual, living culture, which even “The Apple” managed, albeit terribly. These aren't even cartoon caricatures, they're ad spot and slogan mascots.

And furthermore, “The Paradise Syndrome” misrepresents its Native Americans so completely it bewilderingly wants us to believe their complex and deeply symbolic animism can be distilled to straightforward pop Christianity, or at the very least generic Western theism. Kirok is explicitly called a god and is prophesied to return from the “temple” at a predetermined time to save his people from catastrophe. This is the stuff of the absolute dregs of dime-store sci-fi-fantasy, and it's not possible to misread Native American spirituality worse even if you were deliberately trying to. Part of this is due to the von Däniken embellishment of the Preservers, who “seeded” humanoid life in the galaxy and left behind monolithic artefacts to watch over and protect them, but come on. That's not an excuse, and if anything, that makes it even worse. Thing is though, this remains easily explainable. “The Paradise Syndrome” is the work of Margaret Armen, whose previous credit was “The Gamesters of Triskelion”, so she's sort of established a track record for spectacularly bombing on issues of race and culture. I wish I could be kinder to Armen as she's one of the only other female writers for Star Trek during this period aside from D.C. Fontana, but the fact remains her work so far has been consistently middling to disastrous.

This also raises some serious concerns I have about the validity of Bernardi's work: So far, the only episodes in which he's been cited as being critical of and demonstrating the irreducible Whiteness of Star Trek have been calamitously shitty ones by troubled or irredeemable writers. This rather smacks of Bernardi stacking his argument. Also, Bernardi attacks the final scene by arguing it skirts around the issue of Kirk potentially abandoning his wife and unborn child. But this isn't quite what happens-They were both already dead by then and there was nothing even McCoy could have done. Kirk is not a deadbeat dad: There's no implication anywhere in the final act that Kirk wouldn't have taken Miramanee and her child with him had they lived. The real problem here isn't Kirk being cast as colonialist and thoughtless, it's that Miramanee is considered expendable, tying into the standard power structures of imperialism, racism, institutionalized misogyny and the fundamental disadvantages of serialized anthology television. “The Paradise Syndrome” has a ton of problems, but it doesn't have that specific one. If we're going to damn Star Trek, let's at least damn it for stuff it actually did.

“The Paradise Syndrome” also provides some more illuminating evidence on how the way in which Star Trek is bad now is different from the way it's been bad in the past. Horrifying racial insensitivity and casual sexism are, sadly, nothing new to the Original Series. What makes “The Paradise Syndrome” significant is that it's not only reactionary, it's also a flatly terrible production. There are basic, amateur mistakes all over the place: Spock is reduced to nothing more than exposition machine, delivering overly padded monologues about basic science and setting details while McCoy is treated as almost as simple and thick as Miramanee. While the portion of the episode taking place on the Enterprise is ostensibly supposed to be about Spock and his command choices, Leonard Nimoy isn't actually allowed to convey any of this: McCoy has to come in and flat-out state the emotions the script says Spock is going through. On a related note, the passage of 58 days takes place during one, single cut and is conveyed purely through dialog leaving no sense that any time has passed at all. There's even a jaw-droppingly cliched “running through the forest laughing” montage designed to let us know Kirok and Miramanee are in love that's played unnervingly straight. Forget being rejected by a major network television series, a script like this would have failed an intro to creative writing course.

While Gene Roddenberry was something of an incompetent writer, his problems were largely due to the fact his style was too firmly stuck in the pulp sci-fi style that was already dated by the time he first pitched “The Cage” in 1964 and he refused to ever admit this wasn't working. The reason something like “Mudd's Women” or “A Private Little War” is bad is purely by virtue of its grandiose jingoistic soapboxing. Neither of those episodes were de facto poor pieces of writing, they were just *offensive* writing. While “The Menagerie” and “The Return of the Archons” did have logic issues, even those weren't as glaring and crippling as the ones here are. Furthermore, Compare “The Paradise Syndrome” to “The Omega Glory”: While both are awful, retrograde stories, the production level problems with “The Omega Glory” were due to the explicitly pulp structure that was about two-thirds stupid fight scenes and the fact Roddenberry was an abject failure at conveying any kind of nuance or subtlety. You simply can't imagine him turning in a script like this: Although the politics are just as abhorrent, even Gene Roddenberry would have known better than to make such obvious writing mistakes.

Most damningly however, the cast is very clearly aware of what a mess “The Paradise Syndrome” is and, for the first time in the history of the show, just flat-out give up. Even during the low points of the past, the actors always went out of their way to deliver their lines with conviction, or at least make them entertaining. Here though, they simply can't be bothered any longer. Nimoy plays Spock as the most deadpan and monotone parody of a stoic, logical character you can think of, DeForest Kelley is clearly just punching his time card and, chillingly, William Shatner mumbles his way through his every scene as both Kirk and Kirok. The only person who seems remotely like the characters we've become accustomed to is Scotty, thanks to James Doohan's animated performance of someone exasperated at his boss' unreasonable requests, but he's in so little of the episode it's nowhere near enough to make a difference. Everyone else just looks painfully bored and drained.

One of the biggest strengths of Star Trek has always been its cast, who have reliably come to it's rescue whenever the rest of the show trips up, very much alive and aware Star Trek means something more than the sum of its parts, and imploring us to not forget this in spite of everything. With them checked out, Star Trek has lost its final asset, and it seems its time, at long last, really is up. One gets the sense everyone should just pack up, go home, move on and let the show wind down, which is probably neither the environment nor mindset you want to cultivate three episodes into the new season. While it may be no more reactionary then the show's worst moments of the past have been, “The Paradise Syndrome” is very possibly the saddest and most depressing episode of Star Trek ever made.

“I'm spunky!”: Elaan of Troyius

"Wow, this is a really crap episode." "I know. Let's see what else is on."

“Elaan of Troyius” is the first visible sign that things have gotten really bad for Star Trek. “Spectre of the Gun” may have raised suspicions a bit and, upon closer examination, it turned out to be Gene Coon in active revolt against the new status quo. This episode, by contrast, is evidence of how toxic the new status quo actually is.

First of all, it is catastrophically terrible. Star Trek has been reactionary on many an occasion before, but it hasn't managed to be quite *this* reactionary since the Gene Roddenberry era. Elaan is flat-out the worst character we've seen in the Original Series so far: Not since Nona has there been a confluence of bigoted, xenophobic tropes of this magnitude, and Elaan makes Nona look downright progressive. I could explain why, but I really don't have to because our old friend Daniel Leonard Bernardi had a few choice words to say about this episode:

"'Elaan of Troyius' brings into play stereotypes of the Asian female – the manipulative dragon lady and the submissive female slave. Elaan is both irrational and primitive. She throws temper tantrums, eats with her hands, and drinks from the bottle. Kirk tells her, 'Nobody's told you that you're an uncivilized savage, a vicious child in a woman's body, an arrogant monster.' Captain Kirk, the 'white knight' of Star Trek, articulates his and the Federation's moral superiority and authority over the Asian-alien and her people through sexual conquest [...] Indeed, it is only after the captain physically and sexually dominates her that she respects and eventually falls in love with him [...] After giving in to Kirk's power, Elaan, like the cunning and manipulative dragon lady of classical Hollywood cinema, returns the favor by capturing his heart. The Asian-alien's tears contain a bio-chemical agent that, when touched by a man (even aliens like Kirk), forces him to fall deeply in love with her. After she manipulates Kirk into desiring her, Elaan becomes submissive, gentle, loyal, even willing to die with him, by his side, as the Klingons ruthlessly attack the Enterprise. It is at this point in the narrative that the other stereotype of the Asian female comes into play – that of the submissive Asian slave. In the end, Elaan does anything Captain Kirk requests, politely and adoringly obeying his demands and orders. Her dragon lady tactics were only used so that she could assume a position she truly desired: the submissive mistress of a white knight."

Bernardi goes on like this, and, as is somewhat typical for him, he's generally spot-on but in a narrow scope and with caveats. Ironically enough, Bernardi misses one of the biggest racist signifiers in the episode: While he's right that Elaan draws upon Dragon Lady stereotypes, probably unfortunately in part due to her actor, France Nuyen, who is half-Vietnamese, the show is very clearly coding her as African too. Nuyen is dutifully browned up and her costume, hair style and facial makeup are all clearly modeled after stereotypical Ancient Egyptian imagery. Elaan isn't just a racist caricature of Asians, she's a generically amalgamated nonwhite, nonwestern Other, and one would think Bernardi of all people would have noticed that.

Of course, in this quote Bernardi also seems to fail to point out how obviously and spectacularly misogynistic this episode is. Not only is Elaan an archetypical savage, she's also a strong, independent woman respected as an absolute ruler on her planet who spends the entire episode quite literally infantilized by everyone else on the show: She's explicitly called a “spoiled brat”, runs into her room and locks the door when challenged and Kirk even actually threatens to spank her. It's utterly appalling and disgraceful. There's also the narrative Bernardi does mention, which is how the whole episode is based around Kirk forcing Elaan to become “proper” and “courteous”, which really just means submissive. This is bald-facedly anti-woman in a way this show hasn't managed since “Mudd's Women”, and honestly I think this one is actually worse.

Somewhat bewilderingly, this episode was supposedly meant to appeal to Star Trek's female fans. Of “Elaan of Troyius”, Fred Freiberger said "We tried to reach a segment of the audience we couldn't otherwise reach, and didn't succeed.” which is actually pretty funny. However, it also points out a serious failing on the part of the Star Trek staff. Aside from the fact they turned out a jaw-droppingly sexist turkey of a story, according to Freiberger and other members of the creative team, the whole intent was to reach out to women because women didn't typically watch science fiction. I just find this statement completely inexplicable: Women were the *original* fans of Star Trek! Bjo Trimble organised the letter writing campaign that gave us this season in the first place! Spock, Kirk and Uhura were all wildly popular with women, and this would have been painfully obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to the people actually watching the show. Women were already watching and in droves to boot-How on Earth were Freiberger and his team unaware of this to begin with?

I think the reason is because there is now a cavernous disconnect between the show, the people making the show, the people overseeing the show and the people watching the show, and this trips up a lot of people who try to talk about this season. Let's take a quick survey of the various reactions to this episode. We've already mentioned Bernardi's, and we'll come back to him a little later on, but let's look and some others first. There's the fan account, which we can divide into two versions. The mainline, semi-official account in this case comes from Star Trek historians Paula Block and Terry J. Erdmann, who call “Elaan of Troyius”:

"...indicative of many, though not all, of the episodes produced for Star Trek's third season. Costumes, makeup, and script were all overblown, perhaps more suitable to sci-fi pulp than to the show's earlier attempts at straightforward storytelling in a unique setting."

I normally respect Block and Erdmann a lot, but I can't help but roll my eyes at this. Never mind the fact the episode is a racist and sexist disaster, no, the real problem is that the costumes are too frilly and the script reads too pompous and pulpish. But, at least Block and Erdmann agreed the episode was bad, which is more than can be said of the A.V. Club, our representatives of contemporary fandom, who gave it a “B” rating and praised the “unexpected” ending and “nifty” space battle with the Klingons, which sort of speaks for itself.

The person whose reaction most interests me is that of the episode's writer and director, John Meredyth Lucas. It's more then a little staggering to see his name associated with “Elaan of Troyius”, and even more so to find he was apparently *proud* of it, saying: "I enjoyed the love story aspect of the show and thought it was an interesting change of pace. You didn't get to do too many of those.". It should go without saying this statement makes close to zero sense given what we've seen of Lucas so far, but I think this might actually demonstrate something other than damning Lucas as an insensitive bigot. For one, I'm starting to get the sense Lucas was probably a better showrunner than he was a writer or director. This can happen: Many times creative personnel double up on jobs, and very rarely are they good at all of them. Lucas oversaw one of the best runs in the show's history, but as for stuff he actually wrote? So far it's been this and “The Changeling”, neither of which were particularly successful. “Patterns of Force” was great, of course, but there Lucas was working off of a Paul Schneider script, and Paul Schneider is hard to screw up. Left to his own devices, however, well, maybe Lucas should have stuck to the producer's chair.

But let's play close attention to the word choice Lucas uses in his defense of his script: He specifically says it's the love story that makes up the second half of the episode, which is interesting, as nobody else who's commented on “Elaan of Troyius” has seemed to pick up on that. Admittedly, it's an extremely problematic love story: It begins with Elaan either bowing to Kirk's masculine dominance or trying to manipulate him to enact genocide on the Troyians, depending on which horrifically misogynistic and reactionary trope is least likely to ruin the rest of your day. From what I gather, Lucas wrote this as a retelling of both The Taming of the Shrew and the Helen of Troy myth, which frankly doesn't do this story any more favours anyway. Although Lucas quite honestly fails to do anything with this plot point, he's saved by his actors, who give the entire back half of the episode an entirely different interpretation.

Naturally, William Shatner is the primary figure here. Kirk is written pretty disastrously out of character for the majority of the episode, reinforcing the script's rampant misogyny (seriously, did nobody but me notice “Mister Spock, the women on your planet are logical. That's the only planet in this galaxy that can make that claim”?). However, Shatner doesn't play Kirk with the typical exaggerated, manly bravado he's done when given this kind of prompt in the past: Instead he plays the part exasperated and frustrated at his inability to help bring about a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The key turning point comes, however, after Kirk and Elaan fall in love, because, completely contrary to the way we would expect him to behave (and indeed the way the script seems to be written) then and only then does Kirk actually begin to act like Kirk. Rather then render him unfit for command and incapable of handling the crisis with the Klingons, Kirk seems in possession of every single one of his normal faculties. Spock and McCoy try to handwave this away during the denouement with the annoying "The Enterprise infected the captain long before the Dohlman did." (Nimoy and Kelly actually play their parts in this episode altogether too straight for my liking to the point they got on my nerves), but that's not at all what Shatner seems to be trying to convey.

Nor, actually, is it what France Nuyen is trying to convey either. Interestingly, Nuyen and Shatner had worked together before on Broadway and apparently they got on well enough to work together at least twice more after this episode. The two actors visibly have a chemistry together, and while for most of the episode it's held back by the script's overbearing paternalism, when it does shine through it's bright enough to commandeer the episode's meaning. This is the key thing Bernardi misses in his critique of “Elaan of Troyius”: By focusing on the textual representation problems of the script, he once again overlooks the fact that Star Trek is a joint production composed of many different creative figures, and while Elaan may be loaded up with racist and sexist imagery about manipulative and savage foreign women, Shatner and Nuyen play their characters as being very much in actual love.

Because of this, the back half of the episode gets to play out very differently: Now it seems more like Kirk admires Elaan for her warrior strength and indomitable spirit and Elaan sees in Kirk someone she can consider an equal, and who might consider her an equal in return. The key scene here is when Elaan beams down and says goodbye to Kirk, giving him her dagger to remember her by. Kirk says he has no choice but to let her be married off as political tribute, and Elaan says she doesn't have any choice either, saying she now has only “responsibilities and obligations”, and the way Nuyen delivers this line is obviously loaded. The episode now becomes, only in its final act, a tragedy about political systems and structures of power, and how deference to orders and one's assigned social role puts physical and metaphorical chains on people and dehumanizes them. That seems like something that Lucas may have been attempting to convey through referencing Helen of Troy, but he was so incompetent at it here any evidence for this reading in the finished product comes strictly from William Shatner and France Nuyen.

Star Trek has always in some sense been defined by the ability of its cast to elevate middling and ill-conceived ideas, but this time it feels a bit different. In the past there have been at least more than one party who were more or less on the same page, and now it seems like the management is not only incompetent but deliberately refusing to listen to not only the people they're overseeing, but the people watching the show. Which is, if we're honest, a not entirely unexpected thing for a production team largely interested in making sure this season is the series' last. Thanks to William Shatner and France Nuyen, we can once again read “Elaan of Troyius” as an episode ultimately transformed and redeemed by a few visionary people, but really, with a production this apathetic and retrograde, why would you want to?

“The Last Chance Saloon”: Spectre of the Gun

"Zoinks! It's...It's It again! Let's git!"

Star Trek is not in a healthy position.

Let's get this over with right from the start. This is a dead show walking, and the average quality it hits over the next year backs this up completely. Under no condition did NBC want a fourth season of Star Trek, and the network went out of its way to hurry the show's inevitable demise along, slashing the budget while increasing the actors' salaries and shunting it into the Friday Night Death Slot, the final straw that lead almost the entire original creative team to stage a mass exodus in protest. Furthermore, those who did stay on were driven away by NBC's constant micromanaging and burdening them with D.C. Fontana's replacement as story editor, one Arthur Singer, who by all accounts knew absolutely nothing about what Star Trek was and how it worked, and nor did he care.

Traditionally, the blame for the malaise of the 1968-9 season was laid at the feet of incoming producer and showrunner Fred Frieberger, who is typically seen as a network lackey and responsible for “ruining” Star Trek. However, the reality was likely far more complex then being the fault of one person: Although Leonard Nimoy and Gene Roddenberry are quick to finger Frieberger, in their memoirs of their time on the show, both Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner go out of their way to defend him, saying he did the best he could with a show that had become at that point unmanageable. For the rest of his life, Frieberger was hounded by fans and critics alike eager to blame him for “killing” the Original Series, even going so far as to say his tenure as showrunner of and association with Star Trek was the single worst experience of his life, counting the time he spent in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Thankfully, one of the more laudable phenomena of recent Star Trek fandom is a comprehensive movement to redeem Frieberger. It's just a shame they couldn't have done that for other people involved in the franchise's early years as well.

And really, this does seem to make a lot more sense then to posit Frieberger was some Evil Network Demon come to destroy the fans' beloved utopia. Frieberger was an extremely professional and experienced television producer, with credits on shows like The Six-Million Dollar Man, Bonanza, The Wild Wild West, Have Gun, Will Travel, Rawhide, and The Dukes of Hazzard among many, many others. It seems, erm, illogical to argue he was an incompetent hack on Star Trek and Star Trek alone. It's far more reasonable (and fits with the rest of what we know about this point of the show's history) the presume this was a situation that was entirely out of Frieberger's control.

Furthermore, Herb Solow and Bob Justman, perhaps predictably, don't even need to think about laying all the blame at the feet of Gene Roddenberry in Inside Star Trek, whom they continually take to task for abandoning the show and leaving it leaderless (while continuing to draw an executive producer's salary from an already desperate budget, no less). And look, while I'm usually quick to side with Solow and Justman in regards to pretty much everything and in spite of my deep loathing of Roddenberry, I can't entirely fault him for jumping ship here, nor can I fault D.C. Fontana, Gene Coon and John Meredyth Lucas for stepping back from day-to-day operations. Like the O.K. Corral in the episode I promise I'm going to actually talk about soon, this looks like a situation that it was far more advisable to escape from if possible, as those who stay to fight end up locked in a deathtrap.

(I will, however, absolutely fault Roddenberry for continuing to turn a salary from the show he not only walked away from but which was hurting for money as it was. This is the veritable definition of scummy.)

But although it is imperative to keep in mind that this year is going out in the context of all of this, I largely want to leave aside the Agony and Ecstasy of Season Three narrative for a time, as I'm saving a more detailed examination of precisely what went wrong for Star Trek creatively this year for a few episodes from now, especially as the show hasn't exactly been a beacon of quality up to now as it is. And anyway, “Spectre of the Gun” has enough going on in its own right, being on the whole one of the more interesting episodes we're going to get this year. Almost inescapably, however, the very things that make it interesting are inexorably bound up with the behind-the-scenes turmoil: This is a story about Star Trek being shackled and sentenced to death. Naturally, it's a Gene Coon script, although this marks the debut of his pseudonym Lee Cronin, which he uses on all of his third season contributions. I'm not entirely sure why Coon felt compelled to protest “Spectre of the Gun”: It's not one of his best offerings (there are pacing issues and a bunch of dialog is straight-up repeated, though I'm inclined to blame that on Arthur Singer), but I'm not sure what about it caused him to be embarrassed enough to refuse credit for it (honestly were I Coon I would have taken my name off of “Space Seed” and “A Taste of Armageddon” instead). Indeed, the true irony is this is still one of the most self-aware and imaginative stories the show ever did.

“Spectre of the Gun” concerns Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty and Chekov becoming trapped in a recreation of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Mistaken for one of the two warring factions of Tombstone, Arizona, the landing party have to find a way to escape before they get caught up in an outbreak of very real violence. Readers who are versed in the history of Doctor Who will most likely have just perked up, as this premise is intriguingly similar to a 1966 Innes Lloyd/William Hartnell serial entitled “The Gunfighters”. Now, I've tried hard to keep Doctor Who out of the discussion up to now as there's a point much further in the future where it's in my opinion far more appropriate to bring it up, but in this case it really is unavoidable as “Spectre of the Gun” is literally the exact same story, down to one of the characters (The Doctor in “The Gunfighters” and Kirk here) trying to convince a Tombstone citizen they're not who they appear to be by getting them to feel the fabric of their clothes in hopes they'll realise it's not of that time and place. Now, I can't accept that Gene Coon would stoop to straight-up plagiarizing a Doctor Who script, if for no other reason there's simply no way he would ever have had the chance to see Doctor Who: That show wouldn't premier in the United States until the 1970s, and as far as I know Coon wasn't in the habit of popping off to the UK on a regular basis. But the similarities really are uncanny, and it's endlessly fascinating to compare and contrast how the two shows handled the same brief.

The first difference is who our characters get mistaken for. In “The Gunfighters”, the TARDIS crew falls in with the Earp brothers because people think The Doctor is Doc Holliday (which is, admittedly, hilariously perfect). In “Spectre of the Gun”, however, the landing party is explicitly assigned the roles of the outlaw Clanton gang who are ultimately killed at the O.K. Corral shootout, perhaps because they're being punished for trespassing in Melkotian territory. But what I find really interesting here is that the Clantons are not only outlaws, but the script is clearly treating them as the protagonists as well. While in “The Gunfighters” there was a lot of anxiety about unnecessary violence and the threat of these armed and dangerous men making a bad situation worse, in “Spectre of the Gun”, every character who isn't an Earp is deeply sympathetic to and supportive of the Clantons and, crucially, when history is suddenly changed and Chekov's character, Billy Claiborne, is gunned down, the Sheriff is completely in favour of Ike ClantonXKirk's right to vengeance.

Identifying Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Chekov (and by extension the rest of the Enterprise crew) as heroic outlaws is incredibly revealing: Not only does it help to drive home and make clear a lot of Gene Coon's signature motifs, but it tells us something about what the general attitude on the Paramount studios set was in late 1968. On the one hand, this is obvious as the whole recreation of Tombstone is part of an overly elabourate death sentence on the part of the Melkotians, so naturally the crew would be cast as outlaws. But let's stop and unpack this for a minute: Why, exactly, are the Enterprise crew on death row? And why did the Melkotians go to such laughably convoluted extremes to punish them? Well, the Melkotians' entire argument comes down to the fact the Enterprise ignored their warning buoy, which doesn't make any sense because Kirk made it very clear on several occasions their only intention was to make peaceful contact. Even under the most cartoonishly exaggerated of authoritarian Judge Dredd-style universes, this shouldn't be a death penalty offense. Kirk and Spock make some comments about how they're under strict orders to make contact with the Melkotians at all costs, which also makes them look like idiots: The last time we had a story like that was “A Taste of Armageddon”, and that was at least in part about how disconnected and incompetent bureaucrats were and how stupid it was to blindly follow orders at all costs.

But this is not the approach “Spectre of the Gun” takes. This is the first episode of Star Trek made in a post-Bjo Trimble, post-”Save Star Trek!” world. While perhaps not textually overt yet, there is now the beginning of a general sense that the point of Star Trek really is to “Seek Out New Life And New Civilizations” and not to enforce space law or solve everybody else's problems. We saw the seeds of this in “Return to Tomorrow” and this episode is the next step: Star Trek is now trying to justify its existence by virtue of its sense of exploration and idealism rather than its moral superiority. In other words then, the Melkotians are trying to punish Star Trek for being Star Trek because they don't understand it (recall they repeal their sentence and allow a diplomatic conference after Kirk proves to them he's not a killer). The real-world overtones of this theme are quite obvious. But this motif goes even deeper: The point of “The Gunfighters” was in many ways the idea that Doctor Who is incredibly ill-suited to being a western. Not only does The Doctor look laughably out-of-place in Tombstone, on the level of the actual production, the guest cast are absolutely terrible at doing US accents and acting like characters in a cowboy flick. This has been cited as evidence that Doctor Who is special amongst genre shows in that it can throw off the more pulpish and action-oriented aspects of science fiction to become something unique unto itself. But this is what “Spectre of the Gun” does too.

The original Star Trek is frequently (and inaccurately) described as “A Wagon Train to the Stars” in an often-misattributed quote. Despite this flatly not being the original intent of the show (Gene Roddenberry's own bafflingly idiotic ramblings about John Wayne in latter years perhaps notwithstanding) there does still remain this tendency to think Star Trek is some kind of Space Western and ought to operate by the logic of Hollywood cowboy flicks. “Spectre of the Gun” is Gene Coon's response to that claim, where having Star Trek trapped into becoming a western is a literal death sentence (note how the Melkotians' Tombstone is “unfinished” and consists mostly of facades and assorted props, just like the stage set for a cowboy movie or play might be. The characters even point this out). In a sense, the crew are forced into playing roles they're not suited to-The entire story is about them trying to re-write the O.K. Corral myth so it ends nonviolently, after all. But while “The Gunfighters” played its premise as a kind of goofy genre romp comedy (complete with an intentionally irritating “theme song” that plays throughout the whole serial) “Spectre of the Gun” treats its gravely seriously, down to teasing the death of a major character as a consequence of Star Trek being forced to not be Star Trek (it's telling Chekov is the character most obviously eager to take up, and disappear into, his role).

What's genius about the trick Coon pulls here is that it ties so beautifully into the recursive artifice and performativity Star Trek inherited from people like him and William Shatner (recall not only did Coon write “A Piece of the Action” but “The Conscience of the King” was the first proper script of his tenure as showrunner). Just like his last script, Star Trek is shown to crash-land into a story it really doesn't belong in, but while there Kirk could slip in and out of the two genres and ultimately deform Star Trek for the better, here he's forcibly shoehorned into a role he's not supposed to play, and things go badly wrong. Although Kirk may still be a literary outlaw (and it's perfect that in the last two Gene Coon scripts Kirk has gone from mob boss to leader of an Old West gang of bandits and gamblers), this role requires him to be a murderer, and that's something his personal moral code won't permit. So, he does what he's best at: Rebels against the narrative structure and reshapes it from within. So, when Spock deduces that the entire recreation is (of course) one big artifice, Kirk holds a mind-meld orgy to get the landing party to aggressively reject the reality of their situation, thus making them immune to the Earps' bullets and allowing them to wrestle Star Trek back from the hands of the people who don't know what it's true potential is and want to make it a show about space cowboys.

I can't think of a better way to open up Star Trek's notoriously problematic, doomed-from-the-start third season, which makes it all the more astounding this wasn't made the season premier. Gene Coon makes one last grand attempt to define what Star Trek should be about, even in a time where it's becoming clear his vision of the show is no longer the network-mandated and approved one. It's not altogether surprising Coon only has three stories left after this. But the true tragedy here is that we know Coon and his friends will ultimately win: Star Trek gets to come back over and over again, and it's entirely thanks to the efforts of people like him, D.C. Fontana, Paul Schneider, William Shatner and John Meredyth Lucas. While the production circa 1968 may now be indifferent to their efforts and eager to move beyond them, we certainly won't be.

Sensor Scan: The Transformed Man

William Shatner is one of those personalities who is so ubiquitous that their reputation precedes and obfuscates their actual contributions to art and pop culture. Shatner is so famous as Captain Kirk and the the king of unironic and self-evidently ridiculous camp that his iconic public persona dwarfs and overshadows his entire creative body of work. One of the reasons why I focus so heavily on Shatner in my overview of this period of Star Trek history (if not the primary one) is that his status as an omnipresent and immediately recognisable part of pop culture has ironically made it difficult to discern any reasonable erudition about the kind of actor he is, the style of performance he delivers and what the positionality he draws it all from really is. That's not to say Leonard Nimoy, James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig aren't equally as iconic and memorable in their roles, they are, but everyone knows they're brilliant and, more to the point, everyone largely knows why they're brilliant. That's not really the case with with William Shatner.

All of which is to say that in 1968 William Shatner released an album of spoken-word poetry.

This is, it should probably go without saying, manifestly not the sort of thing anybody expected of William Shatner at the time, two thirds of the way through the original run of Star Trek. It is also probably fairly safe to say it is still not the sort of thing people expect of William Shatner today, because despite his subsequent musical performances becoming part of his camp reputation, the sort of bemused detachment this part of his oeuvre attracts from would-be fans and critics is rather telling. But the existence of The Transformed Man is in fact a very revealing look at not only the approach to Soda Pop Art in the late-1960s but also Shatner's own worldview and how his presence helped re-shape what Star Trek came to represent. So with that said, what the heck even *is* The Transformed Man?

It may actually be beneficial to begin with an overview of what The Transformed Man *isn't*, as this is the source of the overwhelming majority of confusion and bafflement this record attracts. In this regard it's worth comparing it, if for no other reason then the comparison is unavoidable, with Leonard Nimoy's musical catalog. In 1967, just as Star Trek was starting to gain a significant following, Dot Records released an album called Mr. Spock's Songs from Space, which was pretty much exactly what it sounds like: A collection of fluffy novelty songs Nimoy recorded in full-on Spock-the-logician mode to abjectly hilarious results. Literally the only reason this album exists is because Spock was the show's breakout character, and in the 1960s releasing an album of novelty music to tie in to a popular TV show was just sort of the thing you did, no matter how nonsensical it might sound if you think too hard about it (see also “Snoopy's Christmas” by The Royal Guardians). However, the album was popular enough it spawned a follow-up release in 1968 entitled The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy, which added the twist of having one side be the in-character Spock one and the other side being dedicated to Nimoy singing as himself. This album also featured the mythically bonkers “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”, which has gone on to become Internet Famous.

The thing about both of Nimoy's releases however is that, like all novelty music, it's abundantly clear none of this is meant to be taken remotely seriously. This is Nimoy goofing around and clearly having a fantastic time running with the self-evidently ridiculous (and amazing) idea of Spock singing songs to children (in fact, next time a Trekker approaches you to complain about something or other betraying the sanctity of these characters, just remind them Spock once recorded an album full of songs with names like “Music To Watch Space Girls By” and “A Visit To A Sad Planet” and that it's 100% canonical). Go watch “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” again and it very obviously looks like the sort of thing you'd see on a variety show targeted towards children to get them excited about literature-There are even direct references to slogan buttons and Carnaby Street fashion. This is largely because that's exactly what it was.

This is not, however, what The Transformed Man is. Shatner's release had the spectacular ill fortune to come out around the same time as Nimoy's, and while Star Trek was more popular and visible than it had ever been before to boot. It would have been impossible to not compare the two and mentally associate them with each other, when in truth the two records couldn't have been more different. The first clue should be in the artwork and liner notes: Nimoy's albums unabashedly cashed in on the popularity of Spock and Star Trek and latched onto the delightfully lunatic concept of Mr. Spock recording a novelty album. However, Shatner barely references Star Trek at all, except to say he met his collaborators in between filming blocks. There's a solitary picture of Shatner in costume as Kirk and while he is credited as “William Shatner: Captain Kirk of Star Trek”, I presume for marketing purposes, this had the side-effect of fundamentally altering people's expectations. As a result, fans picking this up expecting a cheerfully tongue-in-cheek comedy record about Captain Kirk singing space songs instead got a somber and profound meditation on the nature of performativity and the meaning of life. Suffice to say, this made Shatner look cataclysmically self-indulgent.

But if we cast aside all preconceptions of The Transformed Man being a celebrity novelty cash-in, which it's not, and try to take it at face value, it starts to become clearer what Shatner may have been aiming for here. At its most basic, The Transformed Man comes out of the spoken word poetry most famously associated with the Beat Generation movement of the 1950s. Spoken word is fundamentally focused on the dynamics of language, especially the tone and sound of words, often combined with an emphasis on nonverbal gestures. The genre has its origins, as much avant-garde art in North America does, with black culture, in particular modernist Jazz, blues and the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. This is an environment that will also provide some of the inspiration for the early Mod scene and many art rock acts of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, thus linking the Mods with the Beats and the literary underground. Spoken word performance then, at least this kind of spoken word performance, is thus an extremely countercultural form of creative expression, such that if you come up with a list of spoken word performers, it will also double as a roughly comprehensive introduction to some of the most significant artists, thinkers and social justice activists of the past half-century (Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, William S. Burroughs and Laurie Anderson, just to name a few).

What William Shatner realised, and indeed what he was uniquely poised to realise, was that there is an intrinsic connection between something like spoken word poetry, theatre and music. Namely, that they are all explicitly, and in fact almost uniquely, performative. In the liner notes, Shatner talks about how as a child visiting the theatre he was always fascinated by orchestral music and how it complimented the performance, and how he's always wanted to do a project that explores the interconnection between the two art forms. The Transformed Man, he goes on to say, is the product of a chance meeting with producer Dan Ralke after working with his son Cliff on Star Trek where they would talk about Shakespeare, music and poetry on breaks, and that he knew he needed to make an album after being exposed to the wonderful poetry of Frank Davenport. Seeing this album released, he claims, is the realisation of that dream he's had since boyhood. Shatner may be pulling our leg here, but then again he actually does seem like the kind of person who would talk about poetry on his lunch break. What he does on The Transformed Man then is use his perspective as a thespian to explore this interlinking performativity.

The way Shatner accomplishes this is by taking a mixture of poetry and classic Shakespeare scenes and pairing them up with spoken-word renditions of famous contemporary pop songs. This basic approach is usually a source of derision, but I have nothing against reinterpreting pop songs in different genres. What Shatner is saying is that pop music, poetry and Shakespearean prose are all equally creative outlets for people to explore human experience, which is something I really can't find fault with. After all what is Vaka Rangi but a long-winded experiment in treating pop culture like any other form of “serious” art? And anyway, you can't help but smile to hear Shatner breathlessly introduce each track like an old-fashioned stage manager, quite literally “setting the stage” for the audience at the beginning of a play. He's clearly having an absolute blast.

And furthermore, the structure works great. The album opener, for example, “King Henry the Fifth; Elegy for the Brave” takes the bombast and zeal of King Henry rousing his troops to action and sets it up against a somber poem about soldiers lying dead and dying on a battlefield after a conflict. The glory of the battle is shown to have little meaning in the hereafter, as the bodies of the deceased are unable to know of the effect their efforts had on the ordinary people at home, or of the comings and goings of nature's cycle, indifferent as it is to human ambition. Similarly, “Hamlet; It Was A Very Good Year” and “Romeo and Juliet; How Insensitive (Insensatez)” look at anguish and nihilism in opposition to rose-tinted nostalgia and obsessive young love contrasted with the clumsy, confused coldness of a relationship coming to a close, respectively. Crucially though, Shatner is saying that all of these conflicting emotions are things everyone experiences throughout life, and that expressing them is itself a kind of staged artifice.

The pinnacle of this theme would appear to be “Theme From Cyrano; Mr. Tambourine Man”, which seems like Shatner's exploration of the creative process, and how creators struggle between appealing to to the demands of fandom and doing what they personally find intellectually rewarding and stimulating. It's possible to read this track as a bit of autobiographical embellishment on Shanter's part, especially knowing what was going on with Star Trek at the time (or indeed what we know the Star Trek phenomenon is going to eventually become), but I think there's something altogether more subtle going on here. Never once on The Transformed Man does Shatner ever indicate he's doing anything different than what he normally does, that is, play a role. The creator of “Theme From Cyrano; Mr. Tambourine Man” isn't meant to be a crass stand-in for Shatner himself any more than he's the lover in “Romeo and Juliet; How Insensitive (Insensatez)”, the soldiers in “King Henry the Fifth; Elegy for the Brave”, or Captain Kirk in Star Trek, for that matter (And anyway, Shatner plays the creator as frenzied and standoffishly huffy, so if he is talking about himself he's being *extremely* self-deprecating about it). These are all different *characters* Shatner is playing, and while they may come out of his positionality as all art by definition has to, he's frankly too good a writer and a performer to do something like that.

But one of The Transformed Man's many hidden virtues is its ability to slowly and methodically build tension all the while lulling the audience into a false sense of security with fake climaxes. The real stunner comes on side two, which features only one track (the title one) as Shatner and his producers very wisely recognised it stands on its own. This track, a recitation of a poem of the same name, tells the story of a person who gives up a day job and house in the city to seek wisdom and inner peace in the wilderness. The speaker begins a lengthy meditation amongst and communion with the land, the sky and the wild creatures before eventually experiencing something that can very easily be described as ego death: A complete dispossession of the Self leading to an understanding of their place within and connection to a cosmic consciousness. Interestingly though, the last line of the poem mentions “touching God”, which would imply a pop Christian reading, despite the rest of the poem describing a very pagan version of enlightenment. The lynchpin, however, is, as always, William Shatner.

Although the words are not his, I'm going to speculate a bit and hazard a guess this is a kind of experience not altogether unfamiliar to Shatner. See, despite becoming known mainly for being part of a ubiquitous and iconic piece of United States pop culture and being seen primarily as a US actor, William Shatner is, of course, actually Canadian and was born and raised in Quebec. Canada has the largest, most unbroken stretch of wilderness in the world: The Boreal Forest, and Quebec, one of the nation's oldest and most storied provinces, is situated right where the forest's great expanse truly begins to open up. I don't think it's unreasonable to presume this might have left an impact on him. Furthermore, as a performer, and in particular thanks to his unique style of performance, Shatner is very, very good at conveying and drawing attention to artifice, and that's the entire point of The Transformed Man, both the album and the poem: Shatner's overall message here is that our conception of reality, all the way up to the way we can attain enlightenment, is subjective. Furthermore, enlightenment, wisdom and inner peace are deeply personal and ethereal things, and in the end it's ultimately impossible to convey them to others in a way that is 100% loyal. So, if Shatner's rendition of “The Transformed Man” feels hammy and stilted, well, that's the point: It's a metaphor unto itself, and the almost audible twinkle in Shatner's eye lets us all know it's a grand, cosmic joke that he's in on as much as we are.

What's even more marvelous is that “The Transformed Man” comes directly after “Spleen; Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”, where the contrast is despair and hopelessness pitted against the euphoria of describing a transcendental experience (and the ultimate futility of trying to get someone who didn't experience it firsthand to understand it the same way you do). While “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” may not actually be about LSD, it was definitely the poster song for altered states of consciousness for a very long time, and certainly would have been seen as such in 1968. The easy thing to do here would be to draw parallels between the two songs and declare Shatner is endorsing the 1960s counterculture and the possibility enlightenment can be found by allying with them. However, I'm going to go one better.

While the youth culture themes are there, I think it's even more rewarding to put Shatner amongst a larger group of colleagues. See, reading William Shatner as someone who is first and foremost invested in the performativity and artifice of human interaction puts him square in the tradition of Avital Ronell, who is herself operating in the tradition of Giles Delueze, Goethe, George Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Søren Kierkegaard, Edmund Husserl and Walter Benjamin. Ronell regularly likens writing, and really all creativity, to drug tripping. Writers, like junkies, let go of the sense of Self and independent will and let themselves be taken over by an outside force. Writers and creators, if we can allows ourselves to momentarily use those words despite their patriarchal connotations, take dictation from an ethereal spirit and become “writing beings”, in the language of Kafka. The text exists only inasmuch as it is a dead signifier of some long-forgotten intangible mental and physical confluence. In the language of William Shatner and Avital Ronell, we're all putting on some stilted and awkward show in an attempt to pay our dues to writing. We transform ourselves every day in an attempt to grasp and understand truths that will transform us spiritually.

In case it wasn't abundantly clear after all that, I consider The Transformed Man to be something of a masterpiece. It's not Shatner's absolute best effort (there are in fact moments where it feels like Shatner is trying a bit too hard-His histrionics at the end of “Theme From Cyrano; Mr. Tambourine Man” tread dangerously close to “Omega Glory” territory), but it's an absolutely staggering debut album and piece of work once you figure out what it's trying to tell you. See, the big secret about William Shatner is that, in truth, something like this record is a far better showcase for his style of acting then something like Star Trek, and it's in an environment like this where he's finally and truly allowed to shine. The end result of all this is that we finally have a handle on what William Shatner really is and the perspective he brings to the table: Shatner certainly isn't a musician, but he's not an actor either.

No, William Shatner is a performance artist. And his subject is the performativity of our lives.