“I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist.”: Turnabout Intruder

Yes, this is Kirk and Spock. Yes, they're holding hands. Fanfic writers, start your pencils.

There's a sense of poetic justice in having Star Trek go out on an episode that names “the Enterprise family” just as it threatens to destroy it because it doesn't respect women.

This was an episode I always consciously avoided: Partially because I have sort of an instinctual reticence towards big emotional finales, and while “Turnabout Intruder” certainly isn't that, it's still very much the end of an era and I can sometimes have a hard time dealing with that: I guess its because I don't like the idea of my stories having to end, or being forced to say goodbye to characters I've grown so accustomed to over the course of several years. I always needed to know there were more adventures, or at least the potential for more adventures.

That said, the biggest reason I avoided "Turnabout Intruder" was because it looked like utter crap. This episode is famously bad, and there are certainly no more ominous signs and portents on the last bow of the Original Series than the credit “Teleplay By Arthur Singer. Story By Gene Roddenberry”. So, I went into this episode absolutely dreading having to watch it. Happily, it turned out to not be nearly as bad as I expected-It's certainly not the worst effort from either of its two co-writers.

Of course, this doesn't mean it's actually any good either.

Answering a distress signal from an archaeological excavation on Camus II, Kirk, Spock and McCoy encounter Kirk's old lover, Doctor Janice Lester, now the head of the expedition, who is suffering from severe radiation poisoning. As Spock and McCoy go to investigate a cry for help further down the dig site, Lester and expresses resentment towards Kirk over the fact their relationship never worked out and her inability to fulfill her dream of becoming a starship captain as Starfleet prohibits women from holding command positions. Suddenly, Lester reveals her illness is a ruse and traps Kirk in an ancient consciousness transference device and transplants her life energy into his body, intending to command the Enterprise in his name...and then to kill him and her old body. This all happens in the teaser, mind you, and the entire remaining forty-eight minutes or so is dedicated towards watching Lester attempt to keep cover on the ship as her increasingly erratic behaviour starts alienating her from the rest of the crew, culminating in her attempting to execute the entire senior staff on mutiny charges.

“Turnabout Intruder” has, clearly, quite a number of rather significant issues. Let's tackle the really obvious one straight off: This episode has serious gender problems. Getting cited as the premier example of reactionary sexism in Star Trek by the Star Trek fans themselves probably counts for something. This episode is typically seen as a slap in the face to feminists, and it's absolutely easy to see why it has that reputation: Lester is a megalomaniacal, murderous woman who wants to usurp a man in a position of power and, once she gets there, she slowly starts to become unhinged and cracks under the pressure, eventually culminating in a massive meltdown (that Scotty even literally describes as “hysterical”), indicating she's incapable of handling the duties and responsibilities such positions of leadership require. Considering this is the work of two of the most blatantly reactionary creative figures in the entire franchise, one is really sort of afforded that reading almost by default. And this seems especially egregious as this is going out in a time where women's struggle for civil rights was really becoming a major concern: In the context of its time, “Turnabout Intruder” seems explicitly and firmly retrograde, which only twists the knife deeper as this is Star Trek's series finale.

That said, there are a surprising number of truly great moments and elements to this episode that seem to at least call into question how straightforwardly indisputable the conclusion to that above argument is. A lot of this has to do with the acting (which I'll touch on in a moment) and I'm sure my reaction is based at least in part on me wanting to close out the Original Series on a somewhat vaguely positive note. It may even be possible that Roddenberry and Singer's general incompetence has finally worked in our favour: Perhaps they actually just bungled trying to write a hateful bit of reactionary sexism. In any case, there are even bits of scripted dialog that hint at an altogether more progressive and interesting story here just beneath the surface waiting to be told. In the teaser, for example, when Lester rants at Kirk about how unfair it is that women aren't allowed to be starship captains, Kirk actually agrees: What he criticises her for is taking out her justified anger and frustration on him. This does get into stereotypically defensive reactions from men to feminism where they frequently try to make it about themselves and take criticism of patriarchy as personal attacks, but I don't think that's quite what's going on in this case: Lester genuinely seems like an abusive partner here, and her later behaviour certainly supports this reading of her character.

But the scene that really got me to take notice was a few moments later, after Lester steals Kirk's body. She taker her time admiring her newfound physical strength and the respect she can command in this form that she wasn't able to do before, then promptly tries to strangle Kirk to death in her old body. Lester declares that she doesn't fear killing now that she has the power to do so, and that Kirk will now understand “the indignity of being a woman” and how it's “...better to be dead than to live alone in the body of a woman”. Lester doesn't sound like a cruel reactionary Right Wing “FemiNazi” caricature to me: She sounds more like an evil woman who has become evil in part because of her own internalized misogyny. Lester doesn't want a Sisterhood Cabal to rise up, take over the world and crush men the way men have crushed women, nor does she even *really* want equality between men and women. Lester hates the entire concept of “woman”, conceiving of it as a handicap that has held her back from achieving the greatness she feels entitled to. And now, in the body of a man, she finally has the ability to indulge every single one of her power fantasies, because self-absorbed power fantasies that oppress and marginalize others are the exclusive domain of men. It's very telling that Lester gains both the thirst and the ability to kill upon entering a man's body.

(And it's similarly telling that Lester's power fantasies revolve around being the captain of a starship: Five years later is Gene Roddenberry finally beginning to understand how much he hurt Star Trek by infusing the captaincy with so much repugnant masculine bravado and machismo?)

Of course, the true show-stealer is the drag performance that ensues thanks to the body-swapping gimmick of the teaser. William Shatner is absolutely delightful as Janice Lester, spending forty minutes out of the runtime simply vamping around the Enterprise like a supervillainess from some amazingly cheesy sci-fi B-movie: Seriously, he reminds me of Queen Arachnea from Space Ghost: All he needed was to hiss at the camera during the climax screaming “Curses! Foiled again!”. Thing is though, Shatner is so much fun to watch it's easy to miss the gravity and professionalism he actually brings to the part: While he does enthusiastically throw himself at the idea of an evil space queen inhabiting Kirk's body (the part on the climax where a flustered and impatient Lester, who it must be stressed is still being played by William Shatner, tries to seduce Doctor Coleman into killing Kirk must have launched a million slash fics alone), he doesn't prance around in an exaggerated caricature of femininity: Instead, Shatner puts on an extremely nuanced and multifaceted performance that goes at great lengths to emphasize the differences between Lester and Kirk.

Lester is psychotic, cruel, vindictive, manipulative and prone to random outbursts of violence, and seeing someone who looks like Kirk behave this way tips off the rest of the crew pretty much immediately. Critically and laudably, Shatner approaches this the same way Diana Muldaur had previously approached her own two-character brief in “Return to Tomorrow”: Just as Muldaur limited Thalassa's flaws to Thalassa alone, Shatner similarly goes out of his way to make clear that whatever personal failings Janice Lester might have (and it is worrying that so many of them seem to be part of the “emotional” and “irrational” stereotype of women), these are failings unique to her, not generalizations that should be made of all women. It's possible some of this comes from Roddenberry (starting from this point most of Roddenberry's sexism stumbles come from positive discrimination instead of misogyny) but the overwhelming majority is purely due to William Shatner. The best evidence is the last line in the episode, which doubles as the last line in the series:

"Her life could have been as rich as any woman's. If only...if only..."

But the way Shatner delivers it it sounds a lot more like “..as rich as anyone's”, which is a far more powerful statement: In the original line, it seems like Kirk is reflecting on how sad it is that institutionalized sexism still exists. Now though, it sounds like Kirk is mourning Lester specifically. Roddenberry may have meant this to be a clumsy problematiziation of Star Trek's utopia inasmuch as women are still not afforded all the rights men are, but Shatner wrestles the meaning away from him and reminds us that no, the purpose of Star Trek is to inspire and give hope to people, and it's up to each one individual to decide what that means for us personally, which is a much nicer note to end the Original Series on.

Really, Janice Lester ought to be remembered as one of Shatner's very best roles: She's a perfect showcase of everything he's so good at. Playing Lester attempting to play Kirk (and getting it wrong, at first slightly and later very much) is a recursive artifice as good as, if not better than, anything in “A Piece of the Action” or “The Enterprise Incident”. It's an incredibly challenging brief Shatner works miracles with, and it's even more remarkable considering he was apparently sick with the flu all throughout filming. But Shatner's not the only one to do a drag turn: Sandra Smith too has a double-character brief, beginning and ending the episode as Janice Lester...but spending the majority of it as Kirk. And it's with her that things get *really* interesting. As Kirk, Smith is every bit as dignified and commands every ounce of respect and admiration Shatner does. But there are subtle differences in what happens to Kirk when compared to what happens to Lester, and Smith's the one who takes this part of the episode from simply good to actually great.

See, Smith plays Kirk as being largely unfazed by being shunted into a woman's body. Whereas Lester is deeply uncomfortable and it is clearly costing her a lot of exertion and willpower to maintain her facade, and she's not all that great at it as is, Kirk doesn't seem bothered in the slightest and is more concerned with proving her identity to Spock and McCoy and regaining control of the Enterprise. In fact, delightfully, Kirk makes an utterly convincing woman: The scene right after waking up in sickbay and discovering what's happened where Kirk has a friendly girl chat with Nurse Chapel is simply a masterstroke: Kirk effortlessly adopts traditionally feminine mannerisms and speech patterns like it's the most natural thing in the world and Chapel is completely fooled. The contrast between this scene and Lester's bungled disguise continuously crumbling around her as more and more of the senior staff start to become suspicious is magnificent: Lester may hate being a woman, but it's a purely conscious hatred of her identity brought on by her egoistic response to oppressive social factors. She's manifestly not a transgendered person, and she has very clear problems adapting to a male role, or rather to what she conceives of a male role to be. Smith, however, has, in essence, turned Kirk into a genderfluid individual-Kirk is equally content taking on a male or a female form, and that's actually a stunningly perfect extrapolation of the character he's always been.

While the scene with Chapel is delightful, what seals it is when Spock goes to question Kirk after Lester tosses her in the brig. Kirk implores Spock to trust her, appealing to the close bond they've always shared. She even flat-out tells Spock that he is “...closer to the captain than anyone in the universe”. First of all, this is the shippiest of shipper-bait dialog, but what's great about this line is that it's something Kirk would have said to Spock anyway. What Smith adds to it is her delivery: She infuses the line with a very deliberate sense of kindness and compassion that's more traditionally associated with women. There's no way a male actor would have delivered this line the way Smith does. You could read this as “straightening out” the homoerotic subtext between Kirk and Spock, but I prefer to read it as emphasizing the nature of the relationship the characters have always had by highlighting parts of it that might otherwise not be picked up on as easily. And, when Smith gets to record that marvelous Captain's Log entry and then gets to defiantly face down Shatner-as-Lester in the court martial scene, there's absolutely no questioning who she really is. Smith is so magnificent as Kirk we actually don't want to see her go back to having to channel Janice Lester.

“Turnabout Intruder”'s biggest problem isn't its messy approach to gender roles, it's actually its really terrible structure. The majority of the episode is taken up by the awful “evil twin” story and the constant scenes where Lester has nasty fights with Spock and McCoy and slowly betrays the trust of the entire crew are absolute torture. I hate, hate this kind of conflict: It's pretty much everything I loathe about scripted drama bound up in one episode. This would have been leagues better had Spock and McCoy figured out Lester's deception somewhere around the first or second act instead of the fourth, as happens in what made it to air. Then, we could have split our time between Spock, McCoy and Scotty colluding with Smith-as-Kirk in secret to take back the Enterprise while putting on elabourate ruses of their own so as not to arouse Shatner-as-Lester's suspicions. We'd get to see everyone try to outmaneuver everyone else through staged recursive artifices and Star Trek's theatrical performativity get kicked into warp drive.

This would all lead up to an epic showdown where the crew perhaps has to chase Lester through the ship as Smith-as-Kirk assumes her rightful place with the senior staff monitoring the crisis from the bridge. I'd have adored a scene where Smith gets to take command of the Enterprise and interacts with the bridge crew as if nothing unusual was going on: That would have been one of the greatest moments in the history of the series. As Spock tells her, “the bridge is where you belong”, and he never said she had to be a man to get there. But, she's kept away from the captain's chair by both diegetic and extradiegetic limiting factors: Hearing Shatner-as-Lester gloat about how Kirk is unable to take command in her current form stings, and so does the fact Smith has so few actual scenes in this episode. While I can't complain too much about the episode focusing on Shatner to the extent it does as Shatner is in fact profoundly entertaining, I can't help but wish it spent an equal amount of time on Smith. The real gender problems with this story aren't in some deliberately reactionary diatribe against feminism, it's that our female captain was never allowed to act like a captain in an episode supposedly about how unfair it was that women aren't allowed to be captains.

It is more than fitting then that Star Trek should end with a Curate's Egg of botched feminism and confused utopianism. Whether he meant to or not, Gene Roddenberry might just have turned in the perfect final episode of the Original Series by having the show go down mired in its inability to live up to its own promises and potential. Like the rest of the series, “Turnabout Intruder” hints at genuine greatness and leaves us with a lot of thought provoking ideas to work with, but it also makes it eminently clear that the show as it stands now is in no way capable of taking these concepts any further. Star Trek is, and always has been, capable of becoming a timeless shared myth in which we can see reflections of the best of ourselves and who we want to be. But Star Trek is also, much like Kirk in this episode, frequently shackled and restrained from being everything it could be. But now Star Trek is, for the moment, free: Ironic that the cancellation of the Original Series is the thing that seals its bid for immortality, from here on out Star Trek can be shaped and interpreted in as many ways as there are people who were inspired by it. And when next we see the Starship Enterprise, we'll finally get a clearer picture of what she meant to those who first journeyed with her.

“Dust to dust”: All Our Yesterdays

"I knew it was a bad idea to install that survival mod."

“All Our Yesterdays” is the second, and final, submission by Jean Lisette Aroeste, whose previous credit was “Is There In Truth No Beauty?”. It's also the final official fan submission in Star Trek for awhile, the last in the Original Series not to mention the second to last episode in the Original Series overall. Suffice to say, there is a distinctly funereal air about the general proceedings, which isn't at all helped by how stupendously uninspiring this episode is.

It is, however, significantly more coherent than the previous episode made out of an Aroeste script at least. While on a mission to ensure the planetary civilization of Sarpeidon evacuates in time to avoid the imminent supernova that will engulf their solar system in three hours (how exactly Starfleet was planning to evacuate an entire planet in three hours is not explained), the Enterprise finds the planet now entirely free of inhabited life. Beaming down, Kirk, Spock and McCoy find themselves in a gigantic library curated by an enigmatic man named Mr. Atoz, who runs the installation all by himself with the aid of his many duplicates (how the Enterprise failed to pick up Atoz's life signs is similarly unexplained). As the landing party peruses the discs that archive Sarpeidon's history Kirk hears a scream from outside and goes through a doorway to investigate, only to find himself on a city street in what appears to be England in the 17th Century. Spock and McCoy follow, but find themselves in a frozen arctic landscape from Sarpeidon's ice age. Spock and McCoy are rescued by a woman named Zarabeth, who confirms that the purpose of the library was to tie into a time portal, which allows people to travel back in time to any period in Sarpeidon's history, and that the planet's entire populace must have done so to avoid the supernova.

Reading this episode becomes pretty straightforward once you realise Aroeste was the librarian at UCLA. “All Our Yesterdays” seems quite overtly about the idea that books in a library can transport you to other places and times, especially in Aroeste's original brief, which had a lot more time travel shenanigans. Entitled “A Handful of Dust”, Aroeste's original story featured Spock and McCoy trapped in a desert suffering from heat stroke before encountering a band of mutant humanoids. Kirk ended up in a period reminiscent of Barbary Coast-era San Francisco where he encounters another time traveller, who helps him return to the library and rescue Spock and McCoy. Kirk and his fellow time traveller destroy the portal and escape just in time to watch everything crumble to dust in their hands.

Once again this is an instance of an episode that was considerably monkeyed around with and for which the original submission seems considerably more interesting, so I'm going to be talking primarily about that. But first, a few major things changed between “A Handful of Dust” and “All Our Yesterdays”. The big thing that seems to be different is the effect of time travel on the landing party, and in particular, the fact the original brief didn't seem to specify any. However, in the aired episode, once Spock travels back to Sarpeidon's ice age he seems to devolve to the way Vulcans behaved five thousand years ago: He falls in love with Zarabeth and becomes violently jealous when he thinks McCoy is interested in her as well. This, flatly, doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Neither McCoy or Kirk are similarly affected, and, well, while I'm not one to pull continuity, this didn't happen to Spock in “Tomorrow is Yesterday”,“The City on the Edge of Forever” or “Assignment: Earth”, so I'm not sure why it needed to happen here. Both the prosecutor Kirk associates with and Zarabeth make reference to the time machine “processing” its travellers to fit the period they travel to, which might account for some of Spock's actions were it not for the fact none of the landing party actually ever are “processed”: In fact, that's what allows them to return to the present in the first place. Speaking of Zarabeth, the most notable thing about her is that she's the part of the episode you'd most expect to see from a Star Trek fan, but neither her nor Spock's romance subplot were in Aroeste's original submission at all.

What I'm most interested in talking about here is actually the change in the time period Kirk gets sent to. In “All Our Yesterdays”, he's sent someplace that looks like the UK circa the 17th Century. This is, largely, a missed opportunity. If, judging by Spock, our heroes are meant to somehow adapt to the time period, this seems like it's be a great opportunity to show off William Shatner's talent for mercurial performativity: We'd expect him to turn into a drag show dandy version of Errol Flynn in Captain Blood, and while he does get a brief swordfighting scene soon after he leaves the portal, we've seen Kirk fence before and this doesn't seem like anything any different from what he's normally capable of. Then, there's a tantalizing moment where Kirk is able to contact Spock and McCoy through the portal, leading the villagers in his presence to immediately conclude he's a witch who communes with spirits.

This was naturally the part of the episode that got my attention, as for awhile it seemed like it was going to conclude that Kirk was some kind of shaman and the time portal was a magickal door between realms (which would neatly tie into my reading of “Wink of an Eye” that posited the world of Star Trek is a Otherworld of Eternal Youth and Summer), but ultimately Kirk just stamps his feet and screams about how “there are no such things as witches”, which sort of throws a damp towel over that particular reading for me. Kirk on the whole actually utterly fails to get into a role here which, sadly, means the episode plays out as almost the opposite of “A Piece of the Action”. I'm not sure whether this was just due to Shatner not caring anymore, or if he simply didn't feel the script was giving him enough material to work with. Given how haphazard the final product is though and that this is the penultimate episode of the series, I am going to lean towards the latter.

But Aroeste of course didn't have Kirk in 17th Century England originally: In “A Handful of Dust”, she had him in the Barbary Coast in the Victorian United States, which is somewhat more intriguing. During the California Gold Rush, the Barbary Coast section of San Francisco became an infamous Red Light District that was also a hub for all kinds of other illicit activity, such as gambling and organised crime. Putting Kirk here when at the opposite end of the season he was playing an Old West gang leader and, a few months before that a Chicago Mob Boss, is quite telling. Presumably Kirk would have wound up mingling with all the lowlifes and undesirables, tacitly putting him in opposition to the ways in which Victoriana manifested itself in the United States, which had the potential to give Star Trek one last chance to bare the anti-authoritarian teeth we now know it had. Also, I'm not sure how far Aroeste was planning to go in this direction, but it's certainly in keeping with her library theme to go to logical limit of having the landing party in some sense integrate themselves into the time periods they visit, just as a good book can sometimes be evocative enough to “draw us in” to the world it depicts.

But of course none of this is clear whatsoever in the episode that we can watch. “All Our Yesterdays” is positively crippled by plot holes and logic problems and commits an unforgivable sin by being possibly the most boring and uninteresting episode in the entire series. Furthermore, I found Kirk's violent treatment of Mr. Atoz in the library as he tried to rescue Spock and McCoy really distasteful: Giving Kirk a gratuitous fight scene is one thing, eye-rolling as it may be, but watching him aggressively assault a helpless old man and wrestle him to the ground without once explaining himself or his motives is shockingly awful display of flat-out cruelty that goes beyond simply writing him out of character. And anyway, if the Enterprise was sent to check in on Sarpeidon anyway, wouldn't it have made just a little sense to make sure they'd been contacted beforehand? The Prime Directive isn't explicitly mentioned, but I'm assuming that's why the landing party is so reluctant to tell anyone what they're actually doing, which would have resolved the entire plot about two minutes into the teaser.

Perhaps the most important thing to take away from this episode is the idea of people using time travel to escape a coming catastrophe: The Sarpeidons retreat into their own past to live out their lives in a deliberate attempt to circumvent the supernova by, in a sense, denying it. Much the same could be said about Star Trek now: The end is very much nigh and, in a real sense, the only thing the show's fans have to hold on to for the moment are the perpetual syndicated reruns to come. Their own history.

“History prefers legends to men.”: The Savage Curtain

Seriously, you guys. Flying Space Abraham Lincoln. You thought I was kidding.

“The Savage Curtain” marks the return of Gene Roddenberry to Star Trek as an actual creative figure for the first time since “The Omega Glory”, and it's apparent pretty much right from the start. The whole teaser is made up of unrefined methodology porn, as the bridge crew mulls over conflicting sensor reports from the planet Excalbia, which the script attempts to convey by having Kirk, Spock, Sulu and Uhura shout random bits of starship operations procedure. Almost the entire first half plays out similarly: I feel like I'm watching “The Cage” all over again. Roddenberry genuinely seems to think it's a good idea to devote lengthy chunks of his script to having his characters robotically quote regulations and jargon. This isn't even technobabble, this is Roddenberry reveling in his show's cod-military structure and pedigree. This isn't writing, this is feeding an academy cadet training manual into a paper shredder placed over a bin full of old Star Trek scripts. We're not even five minutes in and this is already the worst the show has been in months.

And then suddenly Flying Space Abraham Lincoln.

That's not an exaggeration. Out of nowhere, a bad transition fade appears on the viewscreen, spiraling around and around before materializing into full-on Abraham Lincoln, sitting on the Lincoln Memorial to boot like it was Wan Hu's mythical Rocket Chair, except powered by very poor 1960s visual effects. Flying Space Abraham Lincoln. And look, I'm not one to ridicule weird and quirky ideas, especially in a speculative fiction show ostensibly designed expressly for the purpose of exploring them. I'm really not. Nor am I one to make fun of outdated VFX technology, especially on a show that's been starved for funding all year. Honest. But come on. Flying Space Abraham Lincoln. You look at him and just laugh. There's no way not to, and even though over the course of the past five years on this show we've seen Alien Neanderthal Bigfoot, Actual Lizardmen, sentient lumps of silicon, animate balls of fluff, Poisonous Snow White Monkey Unicorns, a Giant Space Amoeba, Space Spriggans, Half Moon Cookie Aliens and a community of energy beings powered by Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse, I'm pretty much going to have to draw my line at Flying Space Abraham Lincoln.

Especially when he's used to tell a painfully damp squib of a story. It turns out that Flying Space Abraham Lincoln has been either resurrected or conjured up out of Kirk's thoughts (it's not clear which), along with Surak, the founder of modern Vulcan philosophy, to side with Kirk and Spock in a deathmatch against history's greatest villains, namely Genghis Khan, Kahless (the founder of Klingon society) and dictators Zora of Tiburon and Colonel Green (and yes, Genghis Khan and Kahless are made of concentrated racism. Did you have to ask?). None of these other characters, it should be noted, seemed to feel the need to make their presence known to the Enterprise by flying through space on rocket chairs. The Excalbians, sentient piles of magma and rubble that are far and away the most sensible things in this episode, have no conception of good and evil and figure the most reasonable and effective way to learn why humans hold to such principles is to stage an all-star brawl the likes of which are known only in the most storied of ten-year-old boys' Trapper Keeper doodles and see who wins. The remainder of the episode after the halfway mark mostly consists of one big extended (and badly choreographed) fight scene interspersed with strangled and unnecessarily detailed exposition about why the Enterprise can't simply beam everyone back.

It's at this point the analysis sort of writes itself. “The Savage Curtain” is once again quintessential Gene Roddenberry, and every single of one his litany of writerly flaws is perfectly clearly on display. This episode, in fact, reads if nothing else like a fiery declaration from Roddenberry to Arthur Singer and Fred Freiberger that nobody is allowed to fail at his show harder than he does. He's naive enough to think “good versus evil” (where, I hasten to add, the participants are quite literally Objectively Good and Objectively Evil-They may as well be wearing white hats and black hats. So Roddenberry has a ten-year-old-boy's conception of morality in addition to a ten-year-old-boy's conception of storytelling structure) is a deep and profound statement and self-absorbed enough to scream about this to us at every possible opportunity and drag the episode's pacing out to such a degree it should legally be reclassified the Self-Transcendence 3100 mile. Then there's the fawning, ahistorical hero worship Kirk (and the script) exhibits towards Flying Space Abraham Lincoln, making “The Savage Curtain” almost as insufferably jingoistic as “The Omega Glory”. I'm not even going to waste time going into the rest of this episode's simpering, pretentious, provincial, facile moralizing: If you want an overview of Gene Roddenberry's motifs read literally anything else I've ever written about him.

This episode does add one significant twist to the traditional Roddenberry formula inasmuch as it occasionally flirts openly with utopian idealism in a way he hasn't really done before now, which is fitting for a third season submission. Regardless of whether or not you think Star Trek inherits the lion's share of its utopianism from Roddenberry, and I think there's at least some room for debate on that matter, the previous scripts that were largely or entirely his work didn't actually focus on this aspect of the show all that much, perhaps excepting “Assignment: Earth”. Roddenberry supposedly extensively rewrote all of the twelve scripts produced under his tenure as sole showrunner back in the first season, but none of those stories were really about the idealism of the world of Star Trek either-They were all largely one-off and incredibly simplistic morality plays. In fact the only real bit of proper utopianism I can recall from the first season at all is Kirk's comment to Stiles in “Balance of Terror” about “leaving any bigotry in your quarters” because “there's no room for it on the bridge”, and in regards to Roddenberry all that hedges on whether that line was his or Paul Schneider's.

That aside, the show was only “idealistic” under Roddenberry because the primary creative figure blatantly used the main characters as mouthpieces for his own ideas and moral code, not because the show on the whole was actually demonstrating what a utopian society might look like (the other major selling point being the diverse cast, which from what I gather was at least in part NBC's idea). The setting was straightforwardly the United States Navy in Space and was only there to move the plot from one place to another: I'm not convinced even Roddenberry thought the Navy was an ideal model for progressive societies. Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana changed that, and, under them, the show started to be more about exploring the concept of idealism in a setting such as Star Trek's, and after that breakthrough it seems Roddenberry started to be more open about explicitly talking about his perception of idealism, as both “Assignment: Earth”, and to a lesser extent this episode, demonstrate.

And the idealism on display in “The Savage Curtain” is quite revealing, especially Kirk's abject reverence towards Flying Space Abraham Lincoln. Roddenberry seems to think that heroic presidents are the model we should aspire to because of their strong and benevolent leadership skills. Incidentally, this is also the only way I can explain why the Enterprise, supposedly a *United Space Ship* from the multicultural United Federation of Planets, has actual procedures in place to welcome visiting presidents from the ancient history of a now-defunct nation-state (which, of course, we need to have explained to us in meticulous detail). And naturally, Flying Space Abraham Lincoln acts nothing like the actual multifaceted historical figure: He's a caricature who speaks entirely in inspirational soundbites.

The big problem with Flying Space Abraham Lincoln, aside from absolutely everything else about him, becomes evident in the scene on the bridge when he meets Uhura and apologises for calling her a “Negress”, as he's just now starting to come to terms with how much more advanced human society is now then in his time. First of all, the real Lincoln's attitude to the Emancipation Proclamation was significantly more complicated than simply him Doing The Right Thing, and deifying him for that is a literally textbook case of the Big Man model of history that effaces the contributions of of the actual former slaves who fought an underground war to wrestle their freedom away from the southern slavemasters for years themselves instead of waiting for politicians to give them concessions, as well as the unpleasant reality the whole thing was by and large a series of calculated political machinations to make Washington look good.

Furthermore, the crew's reaction to Flying Space Abraham Lincoln's comment is abhorrent: They claim that our advanced, evolved society has learned words are meaningless and, in Uhura’s own words “to be delighted with what we are”. No, Mr. Roddenberry, actual progressive societies do not acknowledge that words are meaningless and that we should always “be delighted with what we are”. Actually, the complete opposite of that: They recognise that words have power and have centuries of meaning and connotations associated with them and know that understanding this is the key to helping craft a language and discourse where nobody is made to feel silenced, alienated, dismissed or less than human. And furthermore, they realise that nobody is required “to be delighted with what [they] are” because people have the right to feel however they wish about themselves and their bodies, especially if they belong to a group or groups historically made to feel that their bodies are objects of public scrutiny and critique.

There's Surak too, and while his wandering philosopher archetype is very different from the patrician leadership of Flying Space Abraham Lincoln, that reveals another troubling aspect of Roddenberry's approach. For the first time in quite awhile, the Vulcans are used here to explicitly tout the superiority of pure, untainted logic as a lifestyle, and nobody once calls this into question. Surak's logic is shown to be inherently pacifistic and objectively good, and Spock's flush of emotions at seeing him on Excalbia is portrayed as a failing on his part. Leonard Nimoy and D.C. Fontana have spent over two years showing how Spock is a complex character grappling with notions of identity, faith and belonging and this feels like a giant leap backwards. Furthermore, combined with the fetishistic fixation on protocol in the first half of the episode, it comes across like Roddenberry is once again claiming we should all be some kind of idealized detached and emotionless “rational actors”.

And Surak has other major problems of his own: Roddenberry associates Surak's logic with enlightened pacifism, which results in the characters behavour not actually making a whit of sense. Surak flatly refuses to harm another person, so he goes alone to Team Evil to broker peace and a cease-fire. Naturally, he's tricked, betrayed and murdered, because Evil People are Evil and only ever do Evil Things. This has the handy side-effect of either making Surak look stupidly naive and gullible or returning to the old Roddenberry theme that violence, selfishness and an instinct to murder are all inherent aspects of the human condition and that only two-fisted diplomacy ever gets things done. Neither possibility exactly fills my heart with gladness. Annoyingly, there was the potential to do an actually legitimate criticism of pure pacifism here: Claims that, for example, purely pacifist movements are inherently more successful and more righteous than less pacifist ones do tend to overlook the history of civil rights movements in violently oppressive societies. I remain as ever ambivalent about violent revolution, but the situation is a complex and difficult one and there are a lot of variables and perspectives to take into consideration. However, Gene Roddenberry doesn't seem to be interested in engaging with any of that and just has Surak spout off some vaguely positive sounding pop philosophy and then kills him off to crank up the drama a bit.

One way to perhaps explain all of these confusing and contradictory statements away might be to read “The Savage Curtain” as Roddenberry attempting an early Gene Coon-style problematization of the show's ethics by way of testing Captain Kirk. Indeed, the whole idea of holding a gladiatorial contest to explore human nature is more than a little reminiscent of “Arena”. But that episode was about punishing Kirk and the Gorn captain for their hotheaded aggression, and Kirk ends up proving to the Metrons he's capable of mercy after all. Here, while it's certainly possible to read the Team Good/Team Evil split as being a kind of Angel-and-Devil-on-the-shoulder temptation for Kirk (despite how stupefyingly hackneyed and juvenile that narrative device is), it's not really clear what Kirk is actually being tested on. If Surak's supposed to embody an enlightened form to aspire to he absolutely doesn't come across that way because he acts like a idiot. Maybe then Flying Space Abraham Lincoln is meant to represent Roddenberry's ideals, which would certainly fit with the rest of the episode, but he's also the one who encourages Kirk and Spock to fight dirty if they want to win against Team Evil: Even the Excalbians say the experiment was a failure because Team Good and Team Evil used the same tactics, to which Kirk responds with a truly incoherent bit of moral speechifying. And anyway, Roddenberry even has the Enterprise crew come out and state they're already advanced and virtuous on several occasions, so we're right back where we started.

This episode is just bad. It's Roddenberry screwing up in just about all of his signature ways and even a few new ones. It does see him moving more towards utopianism in his writing, which is going to prove critical once he comes back to Star Trek, but this isn't even a rough draft of where he eventually goes ("The Changeling” is actually the closest we've seen so far which, again, wasn't even his story): It's a half-baked series of ideas, none of which work together and that combine into an episode that's an abjectly broken mess even by third season standards. In addition, it makes me even angrier as this is actually one of the most frequently-cited episodes in all of Star Trek: Astonishingly, almost every character introduced here goes on to play a major role in one or more future incarnations of the franchise. And the only reason why that happens is because Roddenberry wrote it, and Roddenberry Can Do No Wrong, even with a script like this one. “The Savage Curtain” is self-evidently silly, impossible to take seriously by any discernible standard and yet another low for the series.

Thankfully there's not much lower to go from here.

“If I've lived a thousand times before/And if I'm gonna live a million more”: Requiem for Methuselah

"Hi there. This is Flint, for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation..."

“Requiem for Methuselah” is an episode I feel like I should probably like a whole lot more than I did. It's got a knowingly overreaching central premise, sublimely poetic dialog, and strong, moving acting. Furthermore, it also has that signature hallmark of the very best budget-starved speculative fiction TV around: The main characters sitting around in a room debating philosophy with the guest stars. Somewhere in here is a tragic story about human frailty and the human condition: In some ways it does 1970s Gene Roddenberry better than Gene Roddenberry. It's also Jerome Bixby's final Star Trek contribution, and, judging by his later work, a story that meant a great deal to him.

And here I am trying to figure out what to say about it.

I guess a plot summary is in order. After an outbreak of lethal Rigellian flu renders the Enterprise a literal plague ship, Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to a planet on an emergency mission to acquire a sample of a rare element from which McCoy can derive an antidote. If they don't return to the ship in two hours, everyone aboard will perish. On the planet they meet a mysterious man named Flint, who claims to have fled Earth to escape it's neverending barbarism and conflict. After a “test of strength”, Flint offers to have his robot servant collect the ore McCoy needs to craft the vaccine, and invites the landing party to his house, a sprawling mansion lavishly adorned with an impossible array of collectibles, including a first edition Gutenberg Bible, first drafts of William Shakespeare's plays and what appear to be brand new, authentic works by Brahms and Leonardo da Vinci. But his biggest surprise is his adopted daughter Rayna, whom Flint claims is educated in centuries of art, music and science...and who immediately captures Kirk's heart.

The first half of the episode seems to halfheartedly play with doing another critique of Star Trek's claim to utopia, having Flint debate with Kirk, Spock and McCoy about how and by what standards humans consider themselves advanced, but this largely takes a backseat to the primary sci-fi mystery: Who Flint is, why he behaves so erratically and what his sudden interest in the Enterprise crew is. The problem is the mystery is painfully easy to guess, and this is clear to everyone except the actual characters from about ten minutes into the runtime. I'm just going to go ahead and spoil “Requiem for Methuselah”'s big trump card right now, because it's pretty much the script's only actual idea and the fact it holds it to the climax makes the whole episode feel tortuously padded: The reason Flint is able to amass such a collection and has the money for his enormous compound (and so apparently we've decided money does exist in the world of the Original Series then?) is that he literally is Brahms and da Vinici, as well as Alexander the Great, Lazarus and Methuselah, as well as a whole host of other major historical figures. He was born immortal at the dawn of modern human civilization in Mesopotamia and has spent his endless life mastering every skill and amassing all the knowledge he can in an attempt to live as the ultimate human. His only failing is his endless loneliness, as he's watched all his friends and lovers die as human history inevitably moves onward without him. He created Rayna, an android, in an effort to create a perfect mate for himself who could share his immortality.

I will grant the episode this: The actors playing Flint and Rayna, James Daly and Louise Sorel, respectively, are total class acts and deliver some of the best performances of the year. Daly completely sells Flint's loneliness, detachment and crushing sadness, working wonders with Bixby's somber, piquant and elegiac dialogue. Sorel was a theatre actor and it shows, and her facial expressions alone convey the almost-humanity of the android Rayna's confusion, torn between her love for both Kirk and Flint and the slow dawning of her individual identity that her programming is ultimately unable to handle. And the final few scenes are an absolute triumph: Sorel has Rayna collapse at the conflicting emotions she feels, and Daly, along with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley act their hearts out mourning her loss. Shatner and Kelley in particular: Shatner absolutely sells Kirk devastated at not only the loss of his dream woman, but at how poor examples he felt he and Flint made of humanity as they were reduced to jealous violence. Kelley has McCoy pity not Kirk, but Spock, who he feels will never be able to understand what love is and what it can drive people to do. Meanwhile we know Spock understands, not just because we know Spock very well by now, but because it is he who takes the time to comfort and support the grieving Kirk.

The downside of this is that this makes the script feel even thinner: Firstly, it's basically impossible to buy how Rayna is somehow different from the approximately one billion other one-off romances Kirk's had over the course of the series such that her loss elicits this distraught a reaction from him. Secondly though, Sorel is such gangbusters at portraying an android trying to comprehend what it means to be human that I would have guessed that plot twist even if I didn't already have prior familiarity with this episode and wasn't made suspicious by the title “Requiem for Methuselah” which essentially gives the whole thing away before the first act. Which would be fine had the episode been about, say, Flint challenging Kirk to prove how far humans had truly come. The Enterprise is now up against the literal sum-total of human history: That's a lightning-strike brief if I've ever seen one-The story should have been about Kirk and McCoy trying to convince Flint they've truly left their past excesses behind and deserve to be called a utopia as Spock mediates. But instead, “Requiem for Methuselah” fervently keeps its cards close to its chest and tries to hide from us what we already obviously know, much as Flint tries to hide his own actions from Kirk.

Also, the thing about the “immortal man who lives through history” idea is that it's just that: An idea. It's a fun science fiction concept that seems like something you could get a little mileage out of, but that's pretty much *all* it is. Perhaps this gets at the difference between the kind of science fiction I tend to enjoy and the kind Bixby maybe enjoyed writing: I like sci-fi when it's being used to explore themes that, while you could perhaps do them in contemporary period drama, would be very difficult to convey genuinely effectively. A good example of this would be “The Cloud Minders”, a critique of division of labour that, because it's set in the future on a faraway planet, avoids the problems typically associated with, say, historical fiction. Another good example would be, naturally, “Balance of Terror”, which in my view works significantly better on Star Trek than it did as a World War II movie called The Enemy Below filmed a decade after World War II ended.

Another thing I like science fiction for, and in particular Star Trek, is its ability to talk frankly about enlightenment and borderline Fortean and spiritual concepts which are only acceptable to the majority of audiences if they're presented in this kind of context. We have in fact already seen the Original Series do this on a number of occasions just this season alone. Eventually, both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are going to perfect how to explore everyday human experience and show how both the mundane and gritty materialism of human social organisation and our omnipresent mystical, yet tangible, connection to the larger cosmos are equally fundamental aspects of what it means to be a living thing. An idea about an immortal man who becomes various historical figures simply because he's immortal is none of these things: It's an almost Golden Age throwback that's more interested in the tautological cleverness of the concept itself than actually doing anything with it, and Star Trek has already demonstrated that it's by-and-large rubbish at pure Golden Age science fiction.

That's not even getting into the troublingly Western-centric way Bixby handle's Flint's immortality. Although he claims to have been just about every major thinker in human history, Flint curiously only name-checks Western intellectuals and his ideal woman is almost Hellenistic (indeed, he claims to have once been Alexander). There's not a single work in Flint's mansion compound that isn't from somewhere in central Europe or the United Kingdom, and he puts the place of his birth, and that of human civilization, in Mesopotamia of all places. Flint is about as Western as is possible to get, down to him essentially being the Big Man theory of history on steroids.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Big Man theory is essentially the history they teach in textbooks: Every once in awhile a Unique Genius comes along and singlehandedly changes the course of history pretty much in a vacuum: The Great Man is depicted as coming up with all his historical contributions largely by willing them into existence from nothing, much like a patriarchal Godlike Creator, such as Zeus or the Abrahamic God: He doesn't have any influences, inspirations, muses, contemporaries or cultural context: He's just a Uniquely Gifted Genius who happens to come along just in time to shift the tide of human evolution. Flint is this guy taken to the extreme: Literally One Man responsible for every single notable development and breakthrough in all of history, and naturally, he's an Old White Dude.

I suppose the other thing worth mentioning is that this is Jerome Bixby's last contribution to Star Trek and apparently the story he considered his masterpiece, which I guess says more about Bixby than I could. He was working on a film script with a functionally identical premise about an immortal man who lives through all of human history off an on throughout his career, and he finally completed on his deathbed. This script eventually became the movie The Man from Earth, produced by his family members and released in 2007, which is famous largely for being one of the first movies to achieve the majority of its acclaim thanks to its acquiring a cult following through being shared via BitTorrent sites, increasing its notoriety more than it would have had its creators stuck to traditional methods of distribution and publicity. The biggest difference between “Requiem for Methuselah” and The Man from Earth is that the newer story is set in the present day, there's no Rayna and its entire runtime is devoted to the immortal man telling his story to his latest group of friends acquaintances, along with the revelation that he is also Jesus, a title he gained while trying to spread his Buddhist beliefs to the ancient middle east, which is perhaps a slightly more provocative way of exploring this concept.

So what have in essence here is a rough draft. The existence of The Man from Earth alone proves this idea had potential, but “Requiem for Methuselah” perhaps proves Star Trek was not the venue for Bixby to fully realise his vision. And that I guess is as fitting a farewell to Jerome Bixby as any, a talented and respected voice in science fiction who seemed more often than not to require a little help to get his ideas to work in the world of Star Trek.

Star Trek is an incredibly hard story tapestry to work with, a fact even its originators often had to come face-to-face with.

“...a framework for utopias”: The Way to Eden

"Far Out."

Well, it's not quite as youth-hating as “And The Children Shall Lead”. I can at least say that much for it.

Yeah, this one was never going to be any good. You know the routine by now: The Star Trek team (or what remains of it) digs up an old story pitch, it gets turned into a teleplay by one or more writers who had nothing to do with the original submission, the original idea having been extensively rewritten beyond the point of recognition in the process and then this becomes the framework for the finished episode we see onscreen. Last time the show got lucky: Margaret Armen and Oliver Crawford turned Dave Gerrold's submission into something that wasn't quite his original idea, but worked almost as well, if not better in some respects (thanks, surely, in no small part due to it keeping Margaret Armen as far away from anything having to do with race politics as is humanly possible). This week, well...it doesn't.

“The Way to Eden” is loosely (and I mean extremely loosely) based on an old D.C. Fontana pitch entitled “Joanna”, which would have featured Doctor McCoy's estranged daughter, the titular Joanna, coming aboard the Enterprise and beginning a relationship with Kirk, thus creating tension between him and her father. Despite being one of the more famous unused story ideas for the Original Series, I wasn't able to find a lot of information on plot details or anything like that, so I'm actually going to keep Fontana out of the discussion for “The Way to Eden” for the most part (and after all, she did dislike the finished episode enough to request credit under her pseudonym): Supposedly Joanna was the character who eventually became Chekov's love interest Irina Galliulin, but if she were indeed going to be one of the Space Hippies, my guess is that it probably would have played out a lot like “Journey to Babel” where the plot is largely a basic skeleton upon which to frame a character piece (which in this case would have been about McCoy's relationship with Joanna and Kirk) and it wouldn't have gone any further than that. And anyway, unlike Gene Coon, D.C. Fontana's thankfully not going anywhere anytime soon so we'll have plenty more opportunities to talk about her. This isn't her final bow in Star Trek, this is, for at least us, the point where it becomes clear who the next showrunner is going to be.

So let's talk about Space Hippies instead. “The Way to Eden” concerns a group of free-spirited youths who have formed a movement built around peace, brotherhood and an aggressive rejection of modern technology and political structures in favour of a return to an idealized pastoral lifestyle. The youths think that they are destined to travel to the mythical planet Eden, supposedly a tranquil unspoiled paradise where they can live out their lives free of technology and on their own terms. Inconveniently for pretty much everyone, the travellers believe Eden resides in Romulan space. Furthermore, things get more complicated when their leader Doctor Sevrin is revealed to be a dangerously insane manipulator carrying a disease similar to antibiotic resistant super-bacteria: He blames modern society for infecting him, and believes those who reside on Eden will be able to cure him, and he doesn't care who he has to use to get there.

The Space Hippies are pretty much everyone's objection to “The Way to Eden” and it's really not difficult to see why. They're dressed to the nines in positively ridiculous outfits that look like parodies of Hippie clothes, spend half the episode singing intolerably bad imitation folk music and, just like in “And The Children Shall Lead”, speak in strange, unfamiliar slang and have weird rituals and habits meant to unnerve decent, respectable, law-abiding grownups like us. But there's a significant difference between “The Way to Eden” and the last time Star Trek ham-fistedly tried to talk about “the kids these days”: While the Enterprise crew is famously unkind to the Space Hippies at first, deriding them by calling them grown adults who act like spoiled, irresponsible children (Scotty's especially bad: I'm surprised he wasn't literally yelling at the damn kids to get off his lawn), by the end of the episode they're all, with the exception of Sevrin, portrayed as innocent (if sometimes misguided), kindhearted people who ought to be respected for making their own decisions about how they want to live their lives.

What this touches on, and with surprisingly more nuance and sophistication than I actually expected of Star Trek in 1969, is the oftentimes complex and troubled relationship between the Hippie movement and the larger counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s. Despite becoming the iconic and ubiquitous symbols of 1960s youth thanks to major events like Woodstock and their memorable fashion sense making them easy targets for pop culture references and pastiches, it's very important to keep in mind that the Hippies did not comprise the entire scope of the revolutionary zeitgeist of the mid-20th century. Long before them, there were the Beats, the Mods, the Situationalist Marxists and psychedelic street performance artists. The Hippies were but one branch, and a particularly United States branch to boot, being in truth a movement actually based primarily on syncretism and cultural appropriation: The Hippies picked and chose assorted bits and pieces from the Beats, the Mods and the Psychedelics and blended them through their own perspective with a rather populist and facile interpretation of Buddhist philosophy, crafting a unique, and uniquely United States, kind of movement.

Furthermore, the Hippies were very much middle class in a way the previous and contemporary countercultural movements really never were: The major nerve centres of the Hippie movement were big Southern Californian universities known for military industrial complex supported technoscience research, like Berkeley, Caltech and Stanford. Indeed, the Hippie movement is intrinsically linked to the origins of the personal computer and modern computer science, a field and industry pioneered in those selfsame institutions. Now, look at who comprises our Space Hippies in “The Way to Eden”: Starfleet Academy dropouts, the son of an ambassador, a disgraced physician and several scientific specialists. In other words, all people who come from largely academic, and largely privileged, backgrounds. These are certainly not Vanna's expressly oppressed working class Disrupters from “The Cloud Minders”.

Perhaps then the Space Hippies were never meant to stand in for the actual radical youth, or if they were, they were intended as a comment on the dangerous tendency for real-world Hippies to develop a somewhat blinkered worldview. This would mean Doctor Sevrin also comes across far better as an antagonist: Unlike the generically evil Other of the Friendly Angel from “And The Children Shall Lead”, Sevrin is an unscrupulous person who is co-opting and using an otherwise well-meaning and harmless group of people. Just like in the real world, the good intentions of the youth can be manipulated for evil ends, such as to support a politician who outwardly courts them, but who is in truth just another establishment figure who will betray their trust as soon as his populism gets him elected. Or, for that matter, the Hippies' own deal with the devil that was the military industrial complex.

In this regard Spock is the character most worth paying attention to. He's the most sympathetic to the Space Hippies' plight (though he calls it “curiosity”) as they, like him, feel like aliens in their own world. He understands their culture and language and tries to persuade them that Sevrin is delusional and doesn't really have their guiding principles in mind. Furthermore, he tries to show them how modern technology has made some developments worth holding on to and that it's pointless, counterproductive and even dangerous to reject everything simply because it's modern (actually, I think this part of the episode may resonate stronger today than it did in 1969: The behaviour of Sevrin and Adam in particular reminds me very much of the claims made by nervous and reactionary anti-vaccine advocates).

That Spock is the person to mediate in this way is actually critical, and it takes a lot of the edge off of the episode's numerous problems. It's important to remember here that, at the time, Spock was still very much seen as a countercultural figure: He was a pop culture icon respected and admired by real-life utopian idealists and was someone a lot of young people could relate to. He wasn't yet the Star Trek brand's mascot known only for the hand salute and saying “fascinating” all the time. To have Spock very overtly ally himself with the Space Hippies and stress on several occasions that while what Sevrin is doing is wrong, what his followers seek absolutely isn't is a very powerful statement, or at least an admirable attempt at one. And it's Spock, not Chekov, who gets to say the final goodbye to Irina at the end once Sevrin is defeated, delivering this gem of a line:

"It is my sincere wish that you do not give up your search for Eden. I have no doubt but that you will find it, or make it yourselves."

This line is lovely because it has Spock come right out and state the single most important thing about utopianism, which is that a utopia really means the freedom for each individual and network of individuals to make their own utopia. The Enterprise might be a utopia, but it's not the utopia Irina and her friends want, and it shows great maturity on the part of both parties to accept that.

But I have to end with the inevitable and obvious: “The Way to Eden” doesn't work. It doesn't come close to working. Sevrin, for one, is still awful: Once again, he's emblematic of Star Trek normalizing the stigma attached to mental health issues. Furthermore, while there are definite hints at a great Star Trek story about the youth and utopianism here and while Spock's actions certainly count for a lot, most of the time the way the episode treats the Space Hippies feels like outright bullying. From their idiotic costumes and music to their incessant gullibility, it just comes across as mean-spirited. In addition, every member of the crew should have been as understanding as Spock, if not right away without question by the end, and the episode never quite gives us that resolution. Kirk sort of gets there and makes a lighthearted joke in the denouement that seems like it's meant to give the Space Hippies his approval, but it doesn't really take.

And Kirk's not the only one-Chekov's behaviour in particular is inexcusable: “The Way to Eden” paints him as almost as programmatically dogmatic as Tamara Jagellovsk from Raumpatrouille Orion (and any time he's onscreen together with Irina the episode becomes an excruciating showcase of the most unwatchably terrible and embarrassing fake Russian accents ever put to film). It's one more example of the character's laughably wasted potential. And finally, while there is fodder here for an intriguing and even-handed critique of the Hippie movement, the episode simply doesn't go anywhere with it. What it really needed was for a character like Vanna to come in and call them out on their self-righteous privilege.

But ultimately it's tough to get too worked up about it, because “The Way to Eden” came along far too late to do any lasting damage to the series, or to give it any help either, for that matter.

“They live, we sleep.”: The Cloud Minders

"My beloved, let's get down to business/Mental self defense fitness"

Well. This, I did not expect.

There are quite possibly no bedfellows stranger than Dave Gerrold, Oliver Crawford and Margaret Armen. Gerrold is at this point still an energetic young Star Trek fan and beginning writer, albeit one who, with the help of Gene Coon, penned arguably the single greatest episode of the Original Series. Crawford was an experienced Hollywood screenwriter who miraculously recovered his career after being blacklisted for refusing to disclose names of supposed communist sympathizers, but his only Star Trek credits have been co-writing “The Galileo Seven” with Shimon Wincelberg and somewhat misreading Gene Coon in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”. Armen, meanwhile, is one of my least favourite writers in the entire series and a compelling candidate for one of the worst as well, with the two spectacular turkeys that were “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and “The Paradise Syndrome” to her name. The prospect of a story jointly written by all three of these wildly disparate talents is quite frankly inconceivable. But hey, we got Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop last week, so stranger things have happened.

Actually, “The Lights of Zetar” is a good point of comparison because like it, “The Cloud Minders” is absolutely a flawed masterpiece, which took me completely by surprise: This one is properly excellent. I mean, it's not perfect-It has some worryingly serious flaws which, although customary for the third season, are still really annoying and keep “The Cloud Minders” from completely going the distance. But there are moments of genuine greatness in this story, and it crackles with an energy and passion the show hasn't seen since John Meredyth Lucas was running the show. This is most likely the part of the episode inherited from Gerrold, who wrote the original story pitch, entitled “Castles in the Sky”. Thankfully from my perspective, Gerrold gave a quite lengthy and detailed comment about the differences between his story and the episode that made it to air in his book The World of Star Trek, which both gives me ample fodder for discussion and saves me having to summarise the plot:

"It was intended as a parable between the haves and the have-nots, the haves being the elite who are removed from the realities of everyday life – they live in their floating sky cities. The have-nots were called "Mannies" (for Manual Laborers) and were forced to live on the surface of the planet where the air was denser, pressure was high, and noxious gases made the conditions generally unlivable. The Mannies torn between two leaders, one a militant, and one a Martin Luther King figure. (Mind you, this was in 1968, shortly after King was assassinated, and just before the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.)

In my original version, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Uhura were captured by the Mannies when their shuttlecraft was shot down by a missile. (The Enterprise desperately needed dilithium crystals. This planet was one of the Federation's biggest suppliers, and Kirk's concern was to restore the flow of crystals. He didn't care who worked the mines, just that the supply was not interrupted. The shuttlecraft was necessary because I felt that the crystals might be too dense for the transporter.) In the process of the story, Kirk realizes that unless living conditions for the Mannies are improved, the situation can never be stabilized.

Because Uhura has been injured in the shuttlecraft crash, McCoy starts treating her in a Mannie hospital. But he is so appalled at the condition of the other patients there, especially the children suffering from high-pressure disease, that he begins treating them as well. Meanwhile, Kirk and Spock have convinced their captors to let them go up to the sky city and try to negotiate a settlement to the local crisis.

The story focused primarily on the lack of communication between the skymen and the Mannies. Kirk's resolution of the problem was to force the two sides into negotiation. He opened the channels of communication with a phaser in his hand. 'You –sit there! You –sit there! Now, talk!' And that's all he does. He doesn't solve the problem himself, he merely provides the tools whereby the combatants can seek their own solutions, a far more moral procedure.

In the end, as the Enterprise breaks orbit, Kirk remarks on this, as if inaugurating the problem-solving procedure is the same as solving the problem. He pats himself on the back and says, 'We've got them talking. It's just a matter of time until they find the right direction.' And McCoy who is standing right next to him, looks at him and says, 'Yes, but how many children will die in the meantime?'

This answer was not a facile one; the viewer was meant to be left as uneasy as Kirk.

– But in the telecast version, the whole problem was caused by Zenite gas in the mines, and 'if we can just get them troglytes to all wear gas masks, then they'll be happy little darkies and they'll pick all the cotton we need...'

Somehow, I think it lost something in the translation."

Gerrold might not have liked the finished product, and he certainly has a right to as “The Cloud Minders” *is* significantly different from “Castles in the Sky” in a number of important respects. However (and acknowledging how weird it is for me to be in the position of defending Margaret Armen), I think Gerrold is missing some crucial nuances of the final script that not only make it far more progressive and interesting than he grants, but in my opinion actually improves on his original story in some areas.

The first thing is that it was probably a mistake to do this overt an allegory for racism: For one thing it's doubtful to me that NBC would have allowed something this pointed through, especially this year and coming so soon after the hand-wringing over “Plato's Stepchildren” (not to mention the fact NBC had a vested interest in killing Star Trek off by this point). Secondly however, the thing about Gerrold is that he's not particularly known for his subtlety when it comes to hot-button political issues. It's not that Gerrold doesn't have his heart in the right place or that the issues he's interested in aren't important and worth being overtly critical about, it's just that he sometimes has trouble wrapping that all up into a functional story and, like a lot of people who write about Big Important Things, he frustratingly frequently doesn't have the broad-scope understanding of sociocultural and historical factors necessary to give the issues the kind of serious overview they deserve. “The Trouble with Tribbles” started as a very overt criticism of introduced species before Coon helped mould it into the masterpiece it became, and this is eventually going to come back to bite Gerrold big time when he tries to Say Something Important about AIDS and “the plight of the gays” on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

(Incidentally, the other problem with the kind of brief “Castles in the Sky” was is that this isn't actually the way you go about addressing racism, or sexism or homphobia or any other kind of institutionalized oppression for that matter, in Star Trek, but that's a discussion best saved for another day).

So we can probably safely assume that without the necessary help (which Gerrold certainly would not have gotten six weeks before Star Trek got canceled), it's altogether possible “Castles in the Sky” would have ended up an ethical trainwreck, especially as in the final episode both the Stratosians and the Troglytes are depicted as mixed ethnic societies. But of all the issues “The Cloud Minders” has (and it has a number of them), the fact that it's “heavy-handed” is far from problematic. In fact, it's a virtue: The finished episode is extremely blunt and upfront about what it's saying but, and full credit to Armen and Crawford here, what it largely avoids is being carelessly heavy-handed. The primary difference between it and Gerrold's original submission is that instead of being a parable about slavery and racial inequality, “The Cloud Minders” is a straightforwardly Marxist criticism of division of labour and the dehumanizing effects of industrial late-stage capitalism on a workforce that is so beaten down and exploited they may as well be slaves. And the episode is absolutely brilliant because of that.

In spite of Gerrold's complaint that adding the technobabble explanation about the gas temporarily inhibiting mental faculties removing the episode's sense of social commentary, I find “The Cloud Minders” to be quite explicitly making a very clear point about social justice: The Stratosians are absolutely Western capitalist producers profiting off of an oppressed working class, the Disrupters are absolutely a workers' revolt, and the episode absolutely wants us to side with them. Vanna is unquestionably the episode's hero, and Kirk and Spock become sympathetic to her almost immediately as soon as they learn the truth about the way Ardanan society is structured. Kirk in particular is written on the whole magnificently here: He's willing to go against the direct orders of Starfleet Command and the Stratosian government to ensure the Troglytes receive justice and vindication, as he flat-out refuses to allow the Federation to be complicit in or benefit from their exploitation. And, of course, William Shatner leaps at the opportunity, infusing Kirk with a truly magnetic sense of righteous anger.

Also, the gas plot in my opinion helps the story more than it hurts it. Rather than taking the blame away from Ardanan's exploitative society by giving it a technical explanation, I think it emphasizes how the Troglytes are victims of the social stratification industrialization naturally brings. The Stratosians force them to mine in toxic working conditions that are not only visibly harmful to their health and well-being, but that also deny them access to the education and aesthetic luxuries the ruling class enjoys, thus reinforcing their dependency on the system and keeping them from organising themselves to strike back. In this regard I am inclined to excuse Vanna and the other Troglytes not knowing about the existence of the gas and betraying Kirk in the mines: Keeping the workers uneducated, or just educated enough so they don't ask too many questions, is a key tool of the oppressors who know an ignorant workforce is a complicit workforce (although it maybe would have helped for the Stratosians to know about the gas beforehand). Furthermore, Vanna had absolutely no reason to trust anyone who wasn't a fellow Troglyte, let alone someone like Kirk, who works for Starfleet: An organisation that explicitly enjoys material benefits from its alliance with Stratos, which, along with Ardanan more generally, is a society built on the subjugation of people like Vanna.

That said, this does lead to one of the biggest problem moments in “The Cloud Minders”, during the scene where Kirk traps himself and Vanna underground by causing a cave-in, then having Spock beam Plasus to their location. Kirk forces them both to dig to prove the existence of the gas. It's unnecessarily cruel and goes against the heart and soul of the rest of the episode: Not only would it have been significantly less awkward and tone-deaf had that scene been tweaked so Kirk just abducted Plasus to make him see and experience for himself the squalor he forced Vanna and her people to live and work in, it would have made a lot more sense and been far more effective too. There was no need to humiliate Vanna further. I do, however, very much enjoy how Kirk and Plasus quickly and obviously succumb to the gas' effects and try to tear each others' throats out (and Shatner is, predictably, masterful at portraying Kirk's artificially heightened emotional state) while Vanna remains rational, level-headed and cogent.

(This is the big problem with this episode in general in my view: There are an unpleasant number of noticeably crap scenes that weigh down an otherwise terrific story: Another one is the bit earlier on in the guest room where Kirk wrestles Vanna to the bed as she tries to kidnap him, then leans over her while he says he's quite enjoying the whole situation, which is more than a little eye-rolling.)

Speaking of Vanna, she's positively stellar. She's a perfect protagonist for this story and is everything Lokai in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” wasn't: She's not a charismatic, populist revolutionary figurehead, she's an angry, brutal and venom-spitting oppressed worker woman who's had enough and is taking her destiny into her own hands no matter what the cost or who stands in her way. She's also a shrewd tactician and confidant, competent leader for her people and unquestionably an equal to Kirk, as the brilliant and mesmerizing Charlene Polite goes out of her way to make her so even when the script doesn't always afford her that opportunity. She's in the league of people like Daras and Diana Muldaur's characters; Simply one of the greatest female characters in the Original Series. And, perhaps most importantly, she wins: Far from what Gerrold says about how the resolution to the gas problem will mean the Troglytes will capitulate and “pick all the cotton we need”, Vanna explicitly states that this “is only the beginning” of her demands, and Plasus complains about how now all the Troglytes will be just as “ungrateful” and “uncooperative” as she is, to which both Vanna and Kirk emphatically agree. And, most deliciously, it is Vanna who puts an end to the heated argument between Kirk and Plasus in the denouement, stepping in as the mediating voice of reason.

And although her relationship with Kirk is neither entirely unproblematic nor as overt or meaningful as some of his other dalliances, it does remain an important one. In fact, the way the cast gets divided here is quite intriguing, and it even manages to introduce some not entirely unwelcome minor criticism of Star Trek's own ethics. Spock spends a lot of the episode interacting with Plasus' daughter Droxine, and the two seem to share an obvious mutual attraction. Droxine is very much a pampered aesthete, and this has allowed her the freedom to pursue academic and artistic interests in a way someone like Vanna would never have had the opportunity to. This is why Droxine and Spock get on so well, as they both very much admire the other's commitment to logic and artistic expression. Spock, the character who so often tries to remain cool and distant and above petty and unhelpful human frailties like “emotion”, is a natural fit for Stratos, although, importantly, he is also one of the first to condemn Stratos' oppressive treatment of the Troglytes, and it's telling Droxine does eventually turn against her father after spending time with Spock (he is, after all, first officer of the Enterprise).

Kirk, meanwhile, mostly interacts with Vanna and spends a lot of time getting literally down and dirty in the mines. Because of this, “The Cloud Minders” allows us to see a side of Kirk the show hasn't really explored since D.C. Fontana wrote it into “The Ultimate Computer”: Kirk is once again the working-class spaceman here, and it's perfectly fitting that he be the one to ally himself with Vanna and take on the Troglytes' cause with her. The split between Spock and Kirk may be somewhat muted in contrast to some of the other motifs the episode works with, but it does very clearly mirror the split between Droxine and Vanna, and it's an indictment of Star Trek's occasional tendency to privilege intellect and intelligence at the expense of equality and material social progress (think back on how many hyper evolved beings of pure thought we've run into, or indeed all those Roddenberry-esque logic vs. emotions debates). And, once again, it's another set of one-off romances I unabashedly champion and really wish weren't one off: Spock and Droxine and Kirk and Vanna are perfect matches for one another.

There are, of course, other problems with “The Cloud Minders”, mostly structural ones: It once again feels padded at times (complete with entire dialog exchanges recycled wholesale) and the characterization is once again inconsistent scene to scene, which is really a problem when you're trying to do a story this morally and politically charged. But, sadly, this is sort of the thing you have to expect when you get Margaret Armen to write your teleplay, a writer not exactly known for her exquisite and boundless competence. But this remains the best story she's been associated with to date by far, and the fact she and Oliver Crawford were able to take a Dave Gerrold brief and not only not totally screw it up but arguably make it a little bit better in some respects really has to be commended. This episode manages to do a story about oppression without falling into the repugnant moral equivalency of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (well, mostly-the scene in the mine is still rather distasteful). In fact, “The Cloud Minders” is very possibly the most boldly and brazenly forward-thinking Star Trek has been since “Mirror, Mirror” and “Patterns of Force”. Furthermore, it feels noticeably less restrained and far more comfortable about its stance here than it has recently, and that makes a huge difference on the overall impact it leaves. And, while it's still burdened by the usual raft of season three problems, I'm confidant enough to call it a highlight of the year, and maybe the entire show. I mean, where else are you going to get unfiltered Marxism on primetime television?

I only wish it had come along a little sooner.

“You're very good-Are you a puppetmaster?”: The Lights of Zetar

"This is the song that doesn't end/Yes it goes on and on my friend..."

“The Lights of Zetar” is Ron Moore's least favourite episode of Star Trek. Naturally, as part of my apparent mission to disagree with one of the greatest writers in the entire franchise on absolutely everything, I found it thoroughly fascinating. It's not especially great, and the usual season three problems submarine it, but it's one of the most enjoyable and provocative episodes, at least in theory, we've seen in awhile. Quality-wise it's at least on par with the last month of scripts.

It even opens on an enchanting note. Kirk's log entry begins

“Captain's log : stardate 5725.3. The Enterprise is en route to Memory Alpha. It is a planetoid set up by the Federation as a central library containing the total cultural history and scientific knowledge of all planetary Federation members. With us is specialist Lieutenant Mira Romaine. She is on board to supervise the transfer of newly designed equipment directly from the Enterprise to Memory Alpha.”

Kirk then goes on to explain how Scotty has fallen in love with Lieutenant Romaine in one of the most captivating and poetic bits of dialogue in the entire show:

“When a man of Scotty's years falls in love, the loneliness of his life is suddenly revealed to him. His whole heart once throbbed only to the ship's engines. He could talk only to the ship. Now he can see nothing but the woman.”

And naturally, William Shatner delivers a grand slam of a reading. Unfortunately, this is the most interesting Kirk is in the whole story, and this is a decent microcosm of “The Lights of Zetar”'s problems.

But before we get to that, let's talk about the episode's background a bit. For the first time since Harlan Ellison and “The City on the Edge of Forever” (and arguably Robert Bloch), we have a celebrity writer this week: Shari Lewis, famous for her television puppet shows from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1990s starring herself and her puppets, the iconic Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse and Hush Puppy. Although the episode is credited first to Jeremy Tarcher (her husband) the overwhelming majority of the episode, at least the basic story, is quite obviously Lewis', and it's her positionality that really clarifies what “The Lights of Zetar” is about. I must confess I did a bit of a double-take when I learned Lewis was behind this script: There are some things that simply cannot cross in my mind, no matter how open I may try to keep it. Lamb Chop and Star Trek are two of those things.

Although upon closer examination, they really do turn out to be a solid match for one another. Firstly, Lewis was an enormous fan of Star Trek, and it was a dream of hers to write for it. And furthermore, though her routine was ostensibly a variety act for children, Lewis always had higher aspirations: She performed for children sadly more often than not because children were the only ones who would watch her. The Shari Lewis Show was one of the only major network television shows of its time to star a woman who also had complete creative control and wasn't about how dizzy she was. What Lewis really wanted was to headline her own primetime variety show or sitcom, and between her stints on children's TV she bounced around in bit parts for shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Car 54, Where Are You?, desperately hoping to shed her stigmatic typecasting as a children's entertainer. And in 1969 she submitted a script for Star Trek.

In a less sexist world, Lewis might have been remembered alongside the likes of Jim Henson, having had all the opportunities and accolades he enjoyed. But I'm really not qualified to do adequate justice to the career and historical significance of a performer like Shari Lewis to the extent she deserves: I vaguely remember her 1990s show, and upon reflection it was pretty shockingly subversive for a PBS show (but then again this was the early 90s where that kind of postmodernism was in vogue, and the same broadcasting service would give us Wishbone later in the decade and blow children's television straight out of the water), but Lewis was never someone I had a lot of experience with. I will, however, link you to TV writers Mark Evanier and Ken Levine, both of whom give very heartfelt and deserved tributes to her. It is perhaps fitting then that “The Lights of Zetar” turns out to be a story bungled by network micromanagement and that Shari Lewis wasn't allowed to be as involved with the project as she would have liked.

The plot concerns a mysterious cloud the Enterprise encounters on its way to Memory Alpha, comprised of a multitude of shimmering lights. As it overtakes the ship, it has a palpable effect on the physical abilities of every member of the crew, though the effect is different from person to person: Kirk and Uhura are rendered unable to speak, Sulu becomes momentarily blind and Chekov is unable to use his hands. Meanwhile, Mira collapses, after which she begins experiencing wild mood swings and having visions of the future. The cloud eventually reaches Memory Alpha, wiping out the entire crew and burning out the library computer cores such that vast sections of the archive are rendered inaccessible. Eventually, Spock discovers the cloud is actually a colony of non-corporal life forms, and that Mira's brainwave patterns have become an identical match with the colony's resonance readings. In essence, Mira is being possessed. At the climax, as Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scott work feverishly to expunge the cloud from Mira's mind, the community speaks, revealing itself to be the remnant of Zetar, a planet whose entire civilization was destroyed by natural disaster, but whose collective will and spirit simply refused to die, and they'll happily kill Mira to live the life they feel has been robbed from them.

At first I couldn't figure out where this episode was trying to go. It starts out feeling quite mystical, and the Zetarian community is definitely the sort of weird phenomena the Enterprise crew has been running into a lot lately (which is perfectly fine by me: After all, aren't they supposed to be Seeking Out New Life And New Civilizations?), but it takes a really long time for everyone to figure out what's going on, it feels padded and the crew spend the majority of the episode fighting with the Zetarians (including blasting them with phaser beams, which also hurts Mira) instead of trying to communicate with them. Furthermore, on a number of occasions it feels uncomfortably like the show is slipping back into its Red Scare anti-groupthink propagandizing that had an annoying tendency to characterize it in the first season: Kirk condemns the Zetarians for forcing their will on Mira and not letting her be her own person.

But, once you know about Shari Lewis, “The Lights of Zetar” becomes a whole lot clearer. Sadly, its weaknesses as much as its strengths. See, the critical detail is that Lewis wanted to play Mira Romaine herself, but she wasn't allowed to. From what I understand, Arthur Singer extensively rewrote her character, which I would not put past him in the slightest, and in the finished episode she certainly comes across as a generic wistful pouty Star Trek yeoman archetype, instead of the formidable presence Lewis would most likely have infused her with (there are even numerous reference in the episode to Romaine's strength of character and resolve). But now the episode makes perfect sense: It's overtly about Shari Lewis' own life experiences and sense of creative frustration and marginalization. And yes, that means “The Lights of Zetar” is in fact about Lamb Chop.

The thing about Lewis' ventriloquist act is that she was so expressive and such a dynamic performer her puppets took on a life of their own, and I think more to Lewis than anyone else. I have a feeling Lewis may well have seen Lamb Chop in some sense as her own person, and someone who was both an extension of Lewis herself and someone who held her back. One of Lewis' most frequent routines was to have Lamb Chop complain about not having enough space, or that she wasn't being paid enough as her partner. When her show was canceled in 1963, Lewis apparently went back to her room and cried to Lamb Chop...in private. In the same way Lewis was a children's entertainer because she didn't have any other audience, she was soulmates with Lamb Chop even though the relationship wasn't always healthy because she didn't have anyone else. This is what “The Lights of Zetar” is about then: It's about how characters like Lamb Chop take on a will of their own (recall that the whole reason the Zetarians are still around is that they simply could not accept the fact they were dead and didn't exist anymore), and the writing, performing being has her identity subsumed by the characters she takes on. In Shari Lewis' case, it's about exploring and blurring the line between puppet and puppeteer: The Zetarians are using Mira, in essence, as a puppet.

Furthermore, the way the crew treats Mira is interesting. She finds love in Scotty, but he's also the one who persuades her not to report her visions (which turn out to be critical to understanding the Zetarians' plan) to Kirk and McCoy, dismissing them as first-mission space jitters. Lewis is saying that even people who love us (and by *us* she is most likely talking about *women*) hurt us even if they don't mean to by unfairly dismissing us. Even Chekov and Sulu aren't convinced Scotty knows Mira “has a brain”. She irritates McCoy by not cooperating with his examination, which she later regrets (though that might be due to the Zetarians' influence, it's not clear). However, the idealism Star Trek's lovers have previously found in the show is still present too: Spock goes out of his way to compliment Mira's abilities, intelligence and her good fortune in getting assigned to curate Memory Alpha, and while Kirk is initially annoyed by her romance with Scott, he ends up being the one who believes in her the most, demonstrating unwavering confidence that she'll survive her battle with the Zetarians in the decompression chamber even as he has Spock keep cranking up the pressure beyond what should be the limits of human endurance.

But the problem, the really big problem, is that none of this is as clear as it should be and, heart-wrenchingly, I'm not sure how much I can blame on Arthur Singer's usual antics and how much is the fault of Shari Lewis' original submission. Kirk isn't written terribly consistently scene-to-scene and he's too frequently too reminiscent of his gruff, snappy portrayal from the first season. Also, everyone except Scott keeps calling Mira “the girl” instead of by her name, even characters who really ought to know better. I know Lewis probably meant that as a commentary on how underappreciated Mira is and how everyone keeps underestimating her, but there's enough utopian content elsewhere that really wasn't necessary, or at least it didn't need to be that overt and ubiquitous. But the major issue is that the idea of the Zetarians being a metaphor for a writer's characters is not obvious in the slightest. There's a minor bit of dialogue during the conference scene that seems to imply Mira is uniquely susceptible to being contacted this way because her brainwaves I guess match the brainwaves of the Zetarians, but it's really not clear. This is the part of the episode that needed to be super overt and it isn't: The Zetarians needed to be firmly established as, if not explicitly her creations, having some kind of special bond with Mira and Mira alone and that simply never happens.

What really kills me is that had Lewis submitted this to Star Trek while D.C. Fontana was still story editor, I'm almost positive she would have helped her turn it into an absolute masterpiece. But Arthur Singer, like so many other people who worked with Shari Lewis, simply didn't care and wrote her off, and “The Lights of Zetar” ends up feeling not terrible, but unfinished, and that's almost worse. Furthermore, I wish Fontana had looked at this script, its author, and the potential it hinted at and had immediately snapped up Lewis for Star Trek: The Animated Series. She would have been a much, much better fit for that show than Margaret Armen. But this is all maybes and neverwheres. Fittingly, if sadly, “The Lights of Zetar” is quintessential Shari Lewis: Overlooked, criminally underrated, and nowhere near close to living up to its own potential.