“Watch...your future's end.": The City on the Edge of Forever

“I am my own beginning. And my own ending.”

“So. You've found the courage to speak to me face to face at last, have you? I must congratulate you on finally discovering your spine, however some thinkers far wiser than I might say there exists a very thin line between courage and stupidity.”

“I've not come for bravado-filled threats, I've come in the hope that together we might be able to negotiate an end to all of this. The damage can be repaired.”

“You people never fail to disappoint me, though your unwavering stubbornness is to be commended, I suppose. Have you nothing more or better to say to me than that?”

“Withdraw your troops from the 22nd Century. The damage can be repaired, and I'd hoped to make you remember the fundamental importance and worth of the Temporal Accords.”

“Please spare me your impassioned appeal to regulations and rules of order. I've lived far, far too long and much too hard to be swayed by your vapid platitudes, Agent.”

“Your quarrel isn't with these people in this time! It's with us!”

“Isn't it? Tell me, do you know why my ships didn't blow you out of the stars on sight? Because I wanted to show you this. This is what your people did on Earth in 1930, A.D. I want you to take a good, long look at it and try to defend or explain away your actions. Here. Now. To my face.”

“This...ceaseless hatred and violence...It is alien to us. And repugnant. We must depart this plane; the pain has become simply too great for us to bear any longer.”

“A philosophy of pacifism is only practical if you're not living under oppression. It has been so very long: Do you remember what it feels like to be imprisoned? Trapped? Walked over? Used? Violated? We all know what the future means: Cycles of making and unmaking repeating themselves forever. We walk in eternity, you and I. But we are also stewards of it.”

“You are not of Organia, but you are like us. We should like to speak with you about this further.”

“Shh, now. In time.”

“The City on the Edge of Forever” is also rather infamously the center of an extremely messy legal dispute between writer Harlan Ellison and the then-members of the Star Trek production team. There seem to be two versions of events here and, unfortunately, in neither of them does Gene Roddenberry come out looking good. The first account, which is supported by Bob Justman and Herb Solow in Inside Star Trek and even Ellison’s own book on the subject says that the original draft (which was delivered late) featured an Enterprise crewman named Beckwith who was a drug dealer. After murdering a fellow crewmember who threatened to turn him in, he was sentenced to death on the planet the ship was in orbit of, which in this draft was inhabited by an ancient race of time observers called The Guardians and who maintained a Time Vortex. Beckwith escaped through the Time Vortex and changed history such that the Enterprise becomes a pirate ship called the Condor. Kirk and Spock must then follow Beckwith into the vortex and, as in the aired episode, arrive a week before him and discover they must stop him from averting the death of an Edith Koestler, which is difficult for Kirk as he has fallen in love with her.

The story then goes that Roddenberry considered this draft unusable for a number of reasons, the most prominent of which being that he was opposed to the idea that drug addiction would remain a serious problem in the enlightened future of Star Trek. Roddenberry himself told a variation of this on the convention circuit, where he would claim he disliked Ellison's original script because it “had Scotty selling drugs”. This is, of course, blatantly untrue as Scotty wasn't in the first draft of “The City on the Edge of Forever” at all (although Roddenberry did later admit he hadn't read Ellison's treatment in years at the time he made that remark). That aside, this version of events seems somewhat unlikely overall, given that from what we've seen of his work so far Roddenberry was far from a utopian at this point in his career. Either way, Roddenberry asked Ellison to rewrite his script, which he did, two more times. Still finding it unsatisfactory, this sequence of events has Roddenberry giving the story over to a number of editors, most prominently Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana, who did a series of uncredited rewrites of the script.

Unhappy with the way his script had been handled, Ellison requested that it air under the pseudonym “Cordwainer Bird”, a request Roddenberry allegedly denied by threatening to blacklist Ellison from Hollywood. Apparently, Roddenberry knew Ellison used this pen name when he was unhappy with the way television production teams interfered with his work, and furthermore that this was a technique of Ellison's known to science fiction fans. This argument goes that Ellison's major complaint with the situation was that Coon and Fontana weren't credited in the final story, and that had fans seen “The City on the Edge of Forever” go out under the name “Cordwainer Bird” then they'd realise Star Trek was no different than any other science fiction show in the way it mistreated its story editors and production staff and that this was something Roddenberry couldn't accept as he wanted to cultivate the myth it was special and ahead of its time.

“You speak many grand words about peace and egalitarianism, but the actions of your people are deafening. Consider this, then. Your crowning achievement. You cling so tightly to your reality that you would glorify the death of an innocent bystander who would become the voice of peace on Earth because it means you get to carry on living as you have always lived, turned away from the world until it's time to pass judgment on the lesser cultures. You are not just silent, but willfully silent. I wonder, do your kind know anything about real silence?”

“We cannot take the risk that tampering with the past will negate our existence in the future! We all take that risk, and it is our duty as officers to keep the timeline pure and free of paradoxes-It must be upheld! Edith Keeler was an admirable woman, but ahead of her time. Had she lived, the Axis powers would have won the second World War, because Earth of the 1930s was not ready for such beliefs. She was a dangerous outlier in the timestream and, regrettably, had to be neutralized to preserve it's natural flow. Your dangerous meddling is a threat to not just the safety and sovereignty of “my people”, but to the stability of the entire universe! Please, let me help you understand!”

“*I* do not 'understand'...There truly is no limit to Federation arrogance. A life really means so little to you? I've tried to be charitable to you, to grant you as much intelligence and as much space at the debate table as I can. But you don't give me arguments or defenses, you give me talking points and hollow catchphrases. What are you saying? That at once the integrity of all of creation hinges on one person, yet one who is also too pure and sophisticated for her backwater planet? And that death is preferable to life in such a place? I've never heard so much entitled double-speak and self-aggrandizement in my entire long, miserable life. You've wasted your trip, friend. You came to me hoping to convince me to put an end to our hostilities by making me “see reason”. All you've accomplished is to make me even more certain of my beliefs.”

“You can't hide forever, Ayelborne. One day they will come for Organia. When shots ring out and the sky is set ablaze, you'll be conscripted just like the rest of us. You know it to be true: You've seen it just as I have. It's happened before, and it is written it will happen again. This time it can be different. This time it will be different. But you and I will have roles to play. It is an act of love.”

The account Ellison tells is rather different, though no less depressing. According to him, the dispute was not about writing credit and the treatment of the Star Trek production staff, or even Roddenberry's attempted blackmail. Instead, Ellison claims the sticking point was a shift in the depiction of Edith Keeler: By the final draft Ellison submitted to Roddenberry, Keeler had become an overt anti-war protester. In the version that aired, there is a clear implication that the reason her death was important to history was because, had she lived, she would have ushered in a powerful new pacifist movement that kept the United States neutral in World War II, this allowing Nazi Germany to develop atomic weapons. This claim is bolstered significantly by the extensive legal documents and internal memos Ellison eventually made public, as well as a rather vague remark from Bob Justman that takes on a deeply upsetting reading within this context. When asked if the staff version of “The City on the Edge of Forever” was meant "to have the contemporaneous anti-Vietnam-war movement as a subtext", Justman allegedly replied “Of course we did”.

While this version of events is significantly more plausible in my opinion just knowing what we know now about what Star Trek was like in its first season, I have a hard time accepting it completely at face value either. The primary reason this is tough for me to stomach is because I have a seriously hard time believing writers like Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana would have intentionally altered a story like this to give it such a flagrantly reactionary tone: That's simply not in keeping with anything in their catalog, even at this relatively early date. Coon's last two stories were about how Starfleet's militarization and the Federation's distance and pursuit of material wealth almost led to outright genocide and having Kirk punished by a group of hyper-evolved pacifists for his bloodlust and desire for conflict. Indeed, Coon also penned “Arena” and worked on the angrily anti-war “A Taste of Armageddon” which had Kirk admit humans were natural-born killers. Fontana's last script was hideously reactionary, yes, but that was primarily the result of it being written by the author of “The Corbomite Maneuver”, and it's very easy in my view to argue the most progressive aspects of “This Side of Paradise” were Fontana's doing. I see absolutely no reason why either one of them would suddenly turn around, take Ellison's relatively straightforward pitch and go out of their way to add in a scene that depicted pacifism as inherently wrongheaded and dangerous, and to then have that episode immediately follow Coon's “Errand of Mercy” is ludicrous even by Star Trek standards.

Now, from what I gather Gene Roddenberry had the last go at “The City on the Edge of Forever” and it's far easier to see this being his doing than Coon's or Fontana's. Bob Justman's comment is confusing, and while I'm not entirely familiar with what his views might have been circa 1967, the fact he went on to work on Star Trek: The Next Generation for a time and to co-author Inside Star Trek with Herb Solow should be some kind of clue. Either way, it seems clear Harlan Ellison got somewhat shafted here, and the end result is yet another episode that's frankly nowhere near as good as its reputation would suggest it is. It's not the greatest episode of Star Trek, not by a long shot: It's not even the greatest episode of this series, or even this season. The show is on very shaky ground now: Had we not just had “The Devil in the Dark” and “Errand of Mercy” this would be Star Trek's death knell. There's no escape from a future built on manslaughter and crushing pacifism, even if it is because that pacifism isn't “of its time”. But we have, and “Balance of Terror” and “Arena” too, and thus we soldier ever onwards.

However, it should be extremely telling that even in the version of events meant to excuse Gene Roddenberry, he still comes out looking pretty unequivocally like the bad guy.

 

 

“This conflict is not over, Agent. But I've done what I came here to do. Perhaps I didn't even need to do what I did. Maybe you people will blow yourselves up without me. One thing you cannot seem to understand is that I don't fight for the future: I fight for futures, and for a present and a past too. Our campaign here is over, but the conflict continues. Mark my words, Agent, this is not the last you'll see of us. We will return. And when we do, time will stand still and the war to end all wars will rage once more.”

"Many such journeys are possible. Let me be your gateway".

“Work for peace at any price, except the price of liberty.”: Errand of Mercy

"Tell me, Jim: Why do you fight?"

“Errand of Mercy” is the moment where all the themes and motifs Gene Coon has been working with since the beginning of his tenure finally coalesce into a cohesive, articulate message. It's a stinging indictment of what Star Trek is at this point, but what saves it from the nihilism of “A Taste of Armageddon” and “Space Seed” is that it's paired with a slightly more hopeful outlook gleaned from the other scripts Coon is the sole author of. It's not perfect, even by the standards the show's laid out for itself by this point, but it's a sufficiently effective statement of where the show is placing its ethics now. Also, it's the debut of the Klingon Empire, which is somewhat self-evidently important, so I guess I'd better deal with that.

There are few things more immediately recognisable as undeniably Star Trek than the Klingons. In terms of ubiquity within the pop consciousness, they're on par with Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise. They're so well-known and beloved that fans who own replica Klingon uniforms, headpieces and weapons and speak Klingonese fluently are seen to be as quintessentially Star Trek as it's possible to get, and none of these things are even going to be a part of the franchise until 1989 at the absolute earliest. Even the Federation and Starfleet don't quite have this level of memorability and iconic status. In fact, the Klingons are so entrenched in people's ideas of what Star Trek is about there's only one other thing in the entirety of the franchise that can claim to have anywhere remotely near their level of cultural capital and that's the Klingons' own mortal enemies.Why might this be? Part of this has to be the fact the Klingons are the Original Series' only recurring antagonists. Although they only actually appear in seven episodes out of the show's 79 episode run, they do appear more frequently than any other alien race. Certainly the fact they get brought back and heavily retooled to become a lovable culture of proud, honourable (sometimes comically so) warriors in both the original movie series and the Rick Berman era also must have something to do with it, but there remains, after all, a reason they come back in the first place.

All that said, however, one thing that's worth noting about the Klingons in “Errand of Mercy” is that they really don't seem like they're actually cut out for the job: I'm not so much referring to the general execution of the characters here, although John Colicos' intense performance as Commander Kor is pretty much the one memorable, or actually convincing, acting job amongst the Klingon cast, but in terms of their actual conception. Common lore claims Coon based the Klingon Empire on the Soviet Union, and while there is evidence of this (Kor's comment to Kirk about how all Klingons are cogs and everyone is monitored primarily), D.C. Fontana asserts that Coon wrote it as more an amalgamation of all the worst traits he saw in the people he fought during World War II. Apart from the Soviets, Fontana claims Coon based the Klingons just as much on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, which makes a great deal of sense if you look at how they behave in the episode as aired. The problem is that because Coon throws all these disparate groups together, the Klingons end up feeling a bit like bland, generic and overly broad villains here, so any critique they may have been written to convey doesn't really stick.

The result of this is that we have an alien people who are somewhat lacking in distinction, and their effectiveness is slightly...mixed as a result. First of all, lets address the obvious. The costume design of the Klingon, consisting mostly of a bunch of dudes in blackface and fake goatees wearing faux chain mail is deeply unfortunate. Coon apparently didn't give any indication in his script as to what the Klingons were supposed to look like (apart from “Oriental” and “hard-faced” which is, well, bad), so the makeup department left it entirely up to John Colicos to come up with a design. Regrettably, Colicos decided to model them on Genghis Khan. This was obviously a bad idea for any number of reasons, just one in particular being we've already seen a Khan not three episodes ago. I mean I know video recording technology in 1967 wasn't what it is today, but I doubt audiences would have that short a memory. In all seriousness, the larger issue is of course the fact this makes the Klingons a more than vaguely racist mess. I mean, the production team on the supposedly racially diverse Star Trek didn't even approach Japanese actors, not that this would have been much of an improvement, but still defaulting to browning up Caucasian actors with makeup shouldn't be anyone's first move, even in 1967.

All of this adds up to the Klingons not really ticking all the boxes they should have to become a valid and legitimate reoccurring challenge to the Enterprise crew. Their conception is muddy, their execution is something of a disaster and they have a patently ludicrous name that will make them the butt of endless crude jokes in the future (apparently Fontana complained to Coon about this a number of times, imploring him to come up with a better sounding name. Clearly they never found one). All of this might have been OK had they just stayed here, which was actually the intent: According to subsequent interviews Coon never meant for the Klingons to come back, a claim supported by Fontana who tells us she figured he was just looking for a “good, tough” adversary for Kirk for this one episode. Fontana also says the reason the Klingons came back time and time again was because they were exceptionally cheap to costume, as opposed to the Romulans, who she found much more interesting, but which required special and pricey headpieces.

Let's actually think for a moment about what “Errand of Mercy” would have looked like with the Romulans instead, because the parts of this episode that don't have to do with Klingon culture and design are on the whole actually quite excellent. I bring up “Balance of Terror” a lot, mostly because it's incredible, but here the comparison really is valid. Paul Schneider very clearly meant for the Romulans to be a critique of imperialism by showing how the concept harms ordinary people, which is already a better setup in my view than “generic fascist”. Furthermore, however, the Romulan Star Empire was designed to be for all intents and purposes the same as Earth Command, down to Kirk and Mark Lenard's Commander being basically the same person. This approach would have fit “Errand of Mercy” like a glove, as the episode's whole point is that despite his protestations Kirk and Kor are both hot-blooded warriors and the Federation and the Klingon Empire are basically indistinguishable to people like the Organians. In that regard I have to praise not only Coon's script, which gives William Shatner and John Colicos very similar speeches, providing the story with a real structural symmetry and elegance, but also director John Newland, because the cinematography here is positively delightful. My favourite scene is at the end, when the Organians finally intervene and stop the war from breaking out: Kirk and Kor take turns spewing similarly phrased insults and demands at them, before indignantly declaring that they have “no right” to meddle in the affairs of “'my Federation!' 'Or my Empire!'” as the editing brilliantly ping-pongs back and forth between the two of them.

What this also does though is once again draw a contrast between Gene Coon and Paul Schneider. In the “Arena” post, I said the primary difference between the two writers is that while both go out of their way to problematize Star Trek's militarism, or are at least somewhat concerned with using the show to condemn the militarism of the day and provide a counterbalance to it, Coon seems to enjoy using Kirk as a stand-in for the diegetic ethics of the series while Schneider seems to play off Shatner's acting style and writes Kirk as someone larger than the show who might be in some sense constrained by it. While both are valid approaches, I do personally prefer Schneider's in this particular case as it seems to fit the character better. That said, Coon's comes from a curiously metatextual perspective: Despite him having Kirk make several morally bankrupt decisions, not only here (where he is disturbingly patronizing, paternalistic and cruel to the Organians) but also in “Arena” and the first half of “The Devil in the Dark”, this is always framed in the context of Kirk learning from his mistakes and recanting at the last moment to prove he has the potential to grow into a better person.

On the one hand, this would mean using the Romulans in “Errand of Mercy” would improve the script significantly, as Schneider's equation of them with us is arguably even better suited to this story than “Balance of Terror”. On the other hand, Coon's problematizing of Kirk means the effectiveness of the Romulans themselves might have been diluted somewhat: If the whole point of them is that they're part of an empire in decline and whose people are beginning to lose faith in it, than having a Romulan commander fill Kor's role here might not have worked as well. Of course, one other option might have been to create a totally new Romulan character, someone far more conservative in his views. Mark Lenard's character committed suicide of course, and this would also help contribute to the idea the Romulan Star Empire is a vast, sprawling entity comprising a vast array of people with many different perspectives: A Foundation-style galactic empire without Asimov's unfortunate determinism. However, this would also mean equating him with Kirk would have seemed contradictory, given his prior equation with Lenard's character in “Balance of Terror”.

The other area in which “Errand of Mercy” stumbles a little bit is its resolution. While the episode does a very good job building up to Kirk's inevitable fall by telegraphing the Organians as sophisticated, powerful pacifists from the beginning and have Kirk become gradually more adversarial, combative and dismissive, for this to have really worked we would have needed a scene that showed Kirk was more willing to put a stop to the war than Kor was, showing that there's some hope for him, much as we saw in his sparing of the Gorn captain in “Arena”. But we never really get that scene, or at least it's never quite clear enough. Instead, it's left to Spock to paper things over at the end by talking about how it took the Organians millions of years to reach the state they did, so he shouldn't be too embarrassed and disappointed. The problem is this feels like something of a step back for Coon, and it pushes “Errand of Mercy” a bit too close to the nihilism of “A Taste of Armageddon” and “Space Seed” for my particular taste. Both this episode and “The Devil in the Dark” might have been more effective had their positions in the season been switched, with the former episode serving much better as Kirk's final redemption, or at least proof that he's capable of redemption.

But the fact Spock, who has by this point firmly been established as the show's central character in several areas, seems to think it's possible for humans to grow is a powerful statement in of itself. Spock has been subject to no small manner of discrimination on this show, and his positionality gives him a unique perspective on the actions of people like Kirk and organisations like the Federation. If he, who so wishes to distance himself from his human side, seems to think we might not be so bad after all, that should tell us a lot. This leaves us with a fundamental question, however: At the end of Star Trek's first season we've seen an awful lot of reflexiveness, introspection and back-and-forth about what this show is and the consequences to be had as a result of making a firm decision about it. We've had the show ripped to shreds by forces within and above the narrative and had it stressed by more than one entity that in spite of all of this there's potential and the humans of Star Trek are capable of great things. But that's just it; we've heard a lot about potential, but very few concrete steps in a progressive direction. The onus is now on the show to prove not only that it has potential, but that it's actually capable of fulfilling it.

“I hope to live to hear that good communication corrects bad manners.”: The Devil in the Dark

This is the weirdest orgy I've ever been to...

“The Devil in the Dark” is one of the most beloved episodes of the Original Series to fans and at the top of both William Shatner's and Leonard Nimoy's list of favourite episodes they worked on. It's deservedly a classic Star Trek episode and undeniably a highlight of the season-While it might not quite unseat “Balance of Terror” as the year's high-water mark, it's certainly one of the best episodes the show's put out yet and absolutely the sort of thing we needed after the last month, which was just about enough to suck the will to live from anyone.

The fundamental thing that makes “The Devil in the Dark” so successful is that it's just about everything “The Man Trap” was trying to do except done right. Once again, we have an unknown, dangerous alien lurking in the shadows and picking people off one by one who turns out to be a highly sophisticated and unique being and an intellectual equal to the crew, but here the justification for the creature's actions is far clearer and far more defensible. Also, delightfully, the solution Kirk, Spock and McCoy come to involves communication (in particular giving the voiceless party the ability to speak that it had been denied before), cooperation and the free exchange of ideas instead of blowing it to pieces. The one thing this episode doesn't do that its predecessor was able to is mix and match and play with the tropes of multiple genres, but I think there's a good reason for that: We're at the opposite end of the season now, and “Star Trek” is an established genre itself. While “The Man Trap” was in hindsight prophetic for where the franchise eventually goes, at the time it was really just experimenting to try and get an early handle on what made this particular show unique. “The Devil in the Dark”, by contrast, is about taking what we might expect typical sci-fi plot, or indeed a typical Star Trek episode to be (and tellingly, an early, Gene Roddenberry-produced episode) and setting about subverting those expectations.

Fittingly, this is another Gene Coon script. Coon seems liberated and refreshed here, which is a more than welcome sight after the past few scripts his name's appeared on. Perhaps in hindsight most of the cynicism of the past month can be laid at the feet of Robert Hamner and Carey Wilber, because, freed from the shackles of having to adapt their stories to a teleplay, Coon is right back in “Arena” territory: He's still very critical of the way the show is operating, but he remains optimistic it can do more and better than what it's been allowed to be so far. Quite noticeably, once the Enterprise crew shows up Kirk immediately begins running the operation like a strict military commander: He paces up and down and addresses his men in a lineup (and “men” is a very appropriate term as there are zero female characters in this episode, save the Horta), formulates attack strategies with Spock and sends strike forces into the tunnels to hunt down the enemy. Also, as in “Arena”, his first instinct is to vaporize his opponent and issues a standing shoot-to-kill order before having a change of heart at the last second once he becomes able to see his adversary as another life form who is an equal to him.

This gets at another thread I mentioned in my writeup of “Arena”, and of “The Squire of Gothos” as well, because what I think Coon is doing here is using Kirk as a stand-in for the ethics of Star Trek itself (at least Star Trek as originally conceived by Gene Roddenberry) and forcing him to face the consequences and implications of such a worldview both diegtically and extradiegetically. I'm still not convinced this is the best use of Kirk's character, but it's a savvy move nonetheless and this concept is the clearest in this episode it's been yet. Consider the startling teaser sequence, set entirely on the mining colony as the guards nervously scan the tunnels awaiting the next move of a creature they can't see or track. This is the only time in the entire Original Series where an episode doesn't open with Kirk's narration and where the Enterprise never appears: Instead, it opens somewhere else in the galaxy with a mystery. This is at once the logical evolution of a pattern we've been following since “Miri” and the first indication that there's both a cohesiveness to the world of Star Trek and that, even more so than with the Metrons, the actions of the Enterprise crew can be observed from perspectives other than that of the audience.

What we have then, is both an unknown and the first real serious test the show has of its ethics and, thankfully, it doesn't *quite* screw it up completely. The Enterprise, and by extension Star Trek, has a mandate to “explore strange new worlds” and to “seek out new life and new civilizations”. However, almost a full season into this mission, it's done almost none of those things. It's much preferred so far to ferry people and supplies between Earth colonies and inciting the occasional diplomatic incident, and (“Where No Man Has Gone Before” aside) Kirk seems very keen to think of himself as a soldier rather than an explorer. Here, however, we have a strange new world right from the beginning, and the Enterprise is nowhere to be found: They have to pick up a distress signal before going anywhere near the place. The Horta turns out to be both a new life and a new civilization, but both the miners and Kirk come perilously close to wiping the whole species out before they learn anything about it. But crucially this *doesn't* happen: Kirk spares the Horta when he had a clean shot at it, trusted it enough to let Spock try and communicate with it and put it in McCoy's care. Kirk is not only continuing to justify the Metrons' faith in him but starting to refute his own claim about himself in “A Taste of Armageddon”: Maybe he's not just a bloodthirsty killer acting against instinct. Maybe he *is* more than that, and maybe he's capable of showing a model for humanity to become apart from Khan Noonien Singh.

Coon's critique here isn't just about Star Trek's own interiority and introspection either: It's about the entire genre of science fiction on the whole. Recall one thing that makes Star Trek unique is that it is, at least in part, a paradoxical and oxymoronic mixture of both pulp and Golden Age sci-fi. Despite being on the surface diametrically opposed approaches to conceptualizing speculative fiction, they both share a common weakness in that they're frankly not very good on the mundane human level of things. Pulp sci-fi, with its fixation on flashy spectacle, exciting setpieces and rugged, manly heroes, oftentimes means characters end up disposable as things like death and war are at best glossed over and at worst glamourized. In addition, due to its *extremely* masculine-centred structure, women in particular end up fetishized and stripped of their personhood. Golden Age science fiction has its own problems: By it's very definition it's about high-concept technoscientific futurism, logic-puzzle plots and grand, vast, sweeping settings that dwarf everything else. The key failing of Foundation, after all, was the concept of psychohistory and that every single aspect of human behaviour can be mathematically calculated and predicted and ultimately reduced to cold numbers and theory. That's going to be dehumanizing by default.

But Star Trek has a very peculiar solution to this, even if it doesn't quite have a hold on it yet. Aside from the two types of science fiction, Star Trek also draws on soap operas, and will later also add a kind of prototypical character drama to its wheelhouse as well. Getting back to “The Man Trap” for a moment, that was one of the more interesting things about that episode and one of the best arguments for making it the premier: The focus on the everyday lives of the Enterprise crew (to better explore how Salt Vampire's presence disrupts this, or perhaps doesn't) was one of the things that made the story so memorable. While Coon hasn't played up this angle of the show as much as Roddenberry did (albeit sporadically), he is very much interested in the human element of the series, as evidenced by the kinds of scripts that have gone out under his watch, such as “The Conscience of the King”, “The Galileo Seven”, “Court Martial” bits of “Shore Leave” and even absolute turkeys like “Miri” and “This Side of Paradise” to some extent. What Coon's also done is severely tone down Roddenberry's clunky, heavy-handed moralizing, often fearlessly and without hesitation calling the entire show's premise into question and forcing it to justify its existence.

What this means is that even if Coon isn't always as keen on the character development angle, he's very much engaging with the show's worldview and the repercussions this has for people at a metatextual level. It's because of this Star Trek is going to be able to fray its bonds a bit, and in this regard it's appropriate that “The Devil in the Dark” marks the second appearance of the Vulcan Mind Meld. The Mind Meld is, after all, a very intimate, spiritual and sexually coded process by which two people can know each other utterly and fully. This is significant for a number of reasons, the first of which is obviously that of the two times we've seen Spock do this on the show so far one was with another man and one was with an alien rock lady. Secondly, however, the Mind Meld is about communication and the sharing of worldviews. Indeed, it could well be seen as the purest, most naked form of it there is: Not just discourse, but discourse framed in terms of mysticism and meditation-Spiritual, mental joining, in a sense. What we have here at long last is finally something that can be seen as a way for Star Trek to grow, and that this is the way Coon has Kirk and Spock resolve the conflict with the Horta is genuinely fascinating, if you pardon the term.

We've got a ways to go for sure, but “The Devil in the Dark” isn't just a sign things might get better, its a decisive step forward, the first we've really seen Star Trek take and absolutely the right way to respond to the damnation of the past month. The show's identity crisis over for the time being, it can finally continue its journey of self-improvement without fear it might implode in on itself, at least for now. We've learned how to better ourselves and that there's more to humans than war, killing and hatred, now we just need to actually put these principles into action for a change. And about time too, as Star Trek's biggest challenges are still to come.

“One morn a Peri at the gate/Of Eden stood disconsolate”: This Side of Paradise

Oh, I give up.

“This Side of Paradise” is a story about how dangerous idealized societies are. It's also about how the pursuit of simple, communal living and an exploration of love are inhuman temptations and how it's far better and more proper to focus on duty, responsibility, modernist, technoscientific notions of progress and suffering. At its best it's a crass indictment of collectivist lifestyles as being “lazy”, “stagnant” and “counterproductive” and at its worst it's the exact same goddamn story as “The Return of the Archons” from three bloody weeks ago. It's also written by the same guy who penned “The Corbomite Maneuver”.

So yeah heads up there's no way in hell there was ever the remotest chance of me liking this one. Just so I get it all out in the open right away: I think “This Side of Paradise” is utterly immoral and I have no intention whatsoever of mustering up a redemptive reading for it. I've also just about lost patience completely with this season, as this is the fourth story in a row with a rock-bottom cynical, nihilistic and actually downright mean-spirited attitude about it and at this point the series is genuinely teetering on the edge of invalidating itself and self-destruction. Thankfully, by the grace of some divine cosmic miracle I have something to talk about in this post aside from the unbelievably depressing and infuriating plot.

Firstly, there's a second name on this script apart from Jerry Sohl (or rather his pseudonym Nathan Butler), the aforementioned writer who previously made me want to suplex my TV set with “The Corbomite Maneuver”. That name would be D.C. Fontana, who slips into her familiar Star Trek role with this episode. Fontana is one of the single most important creative figures in Trek history, story editing the lion's share of the Original Series before becoming the joint showrunner of the Animated Series with Dave Gerrold and continuing to contribute scripts to the franchise as late as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This is actually the third time we've seen Fontana's name in the credits, but this is the first opportunity we've had to explore her impact on the series in any meaningful way. She wrote the teleplay for “Charlie X”, but that was mostly a Gene Roddenberry effort, and she also wrote “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, but I decided to use my essay on that episode to play with temporal mechanics instead. Which actually turned out to be fortuitous, because not only is this really the best time to introduce Fontana as it's where she first becomes story editor, it also spares me actually having talk about “This Side of Paradise”.

Fontana heavily retooled Sohl's original contribution, apparently at the behest of Roddenberry, who is said to have told her “if you can rewrite this script, you can be my story editor”. He must have liked the job she did, as she was promptly hired for the position as soon as the story went out. Fontana's alterations do undoubtedly improve the episode: She has the plants scattered all over the colony instead of being in one easily-avoidable cave as Sohl had written them and she also takes the love story with Leila, originally intended for Sulu, and gives it to Spock instead, which allows Leonard Nimoy to explore his character in a way he hasn't really been able to since “The Naked Time”. However that being said, it's hard to argue this is Fontana's best contribution to the show (even at this point in her career: Scary temporal connotations aside “Tomorrow is Yesterday” is an absolute riot and this...isn't). Even Fontana is incapable of salvaging the story from its blatantly reactionary overtones. So let's talk about Spock instead.

As I've mentioned before, Spock is in many ways the central character of Star Trek. This is mostly due to Roddenberry's particular interests: He is fixated at this point, in a sense, on the split between logic and emotions and he is very interested in when it's better to lean on one than another. We can infer this quite easily from the fact Spock was originally Number One, who was a character especially written for Roddenberry's muse Majel Barrett. Barrett is on record saying Number One was the first character created for Star Trek and while the captain character wasn't *quite* an afterthought, Roddenberry was specifically interested in her. Even though Leonard Nimoy is demonstrably not Majel Barrett, this has carried through to the series. As fascinating as Kirk has become, this is about 99% due to William Shatner camping and queering him up to positively delightful degrees. Kirk-as-written is basically a generic, masculine commanding presence and the only other person we've seen apart from Shatner who seems to truly get him has been Paul Schneider: Indeed in this episode Kirk overcomes the spores' evil temptations of love, happiness and tranquility through force of sheer aggressive manliness, which really says more about Star Trek's ethics in one scene than I could ever hope to with the entire section of the blog I've set aside for it.

But Spock doesn't have these drawbacks. He's increasingly become able to explore the concept of human emotion in ways the other characters aren't able to, and, under Fontana, he's eventually going to become basically the best evidence the show has that it's got anything at all to do with leftist counterculture or any kind of spiritual dimension. While we're still a ways away from seriously talking about that, Fontana is laying the groundwork here. When it's not being intolerable, “This Side of Paradise” actually has some provocative things to say about Spock and romance. The whole point of his relationship with Leila is that she's capable of seeing sides of him Spock's not able to show to anyone else. In that sense, were I inclined to be charitable, I could read the spores as an extension of that theme, metaphorically representing intimacy and emotional vulnerability. This manages to work both better and worse than in “The Naked Time”: Better in the sense that establishing a pre-exisiting relationship with Leila gives her an authority Nurse Chapel didn't have, but worse in that the episode is nowhere near capable of supporting this kind of character moment, certainly not compared with “The Naked Time” which, despite its numerous faults, did sort of have that as a central theme.

Credit to Fontana, this does also result in the episode's one interesting idea. See, Spock can very easily be read as a closeted character: His inner conflict over wanting to explore his emotions and feeling ashamed of his desire to do so is a very apt metaphor. While this is far from the most slash-worthy episode of the Original Series (or even this season) and despite the fact his relationship with Leila is very obviously a straight one, the basic narrative is still there, and this will only continue to develop over the course of the series' initial run. Nimoy is excellent at this, conveying all the different levels of Spock's anxiety and turmoil beautifully, and this is the first time he's been able to really do so since the very beginning of the series. However, because this episode is rubbish, it manages to ruin this by having the spores be a Bad Thing that needs to be overcome through firm, rigorous vigilance, essentially advocating everyone to go back in the closet, lock the door and never speak of it again,

Actually you know what, let's talk about the plot a bit. While the majority of “This Side of Paradise” can't seem to decide if it wants to condemn the evils of red communism, critique the concept of the utopia the way “The Return of the Archons” did or yell at the damn hippies to get off its lawn, the final scene is interesting, as it actually problematizes Kirk's blustering speech about how humans aren't meant for paradise. As if the fact the benevolent spores of love and happiness are killed by anger and sadness wasn't quite enough, Spock says the time he spent with Leila at the colony was the one time in his life he was ever allowed to be happy, and the whole thing ends on a very uncertain note. It almost seems as if the show is expecting us not to be comfortable with the idea of “walking out of paradise on our own”, as it were. However, this also doesn't work, and here is the one time I might actually prefer Gene Roddenberry's overly simplistic, two-fisted conception of morality over some kind of nuance: Where “The Return of the Archons” managed to end up at a fairly straightforward critique of utopianism, “This Side of Paradise” ends up drenched in a very particular version of Western, Christian-influenced thinking.

Setting aside the larger reactionary, anti-youth elements of the story, the concept of paradise, especially given Kirk and McCoy's lines at the end of the episode, is very much drawn from the Book of Genesis. Doctor Sandoval is, after all, essentially trying to build a new “Garden of Eden”. As is common to popular readings of Genesis, paradise is seen as something that we're not allowed to have in the mortal plane. While this episode never goes to the next level and actually *says* we have to wait for happiness in the Kingdom of Heaven, it ticks pretty much all the other boxes: Kirk's big objection to the Omicron Ceti colony is, essentially, that it's fundamentally wrong and humans aren't supposed to have something like that. Humans aren't meant to live in paradise because they're just not: They're meant to work and to suffer. This is about as stereotypically Christian as it's possible to get. I suppose I could make an effort to try and read this as some kind of Buddhist parable, as some threads of Buddhism do indeed posit existence is suffering and Star Trek is going to have more than a casual flirtation with Eastern spirituality in the far future, but that's a stretch even for me. There's too much Biblical imagery to ignore and the idea the Star Trek writing staff circa 1967 was knee-deep in Buddhist philosophy is one I have a very hard time accepting.

I also want to briefly mention DeForest Kelley, who gives the other real standout performance here. We haven't been able to talk about Kelley much, but one thing that's become clear to me over the course of the first season that in many ways he's playing McCoy with almost as much of a performative streak as Shatner gives Kirk. He never quite makes the final connection from performativity to camp to drag, but he's definitely giving an overstated performance. This contrasts significantly with how he was depicted in Sohl's previous effort, which also happened to be his debut. There, Kelley played McCoy with genuine humanness and believability, a true successor to Boyce and Piper who also managed to one-up them. Now, he's almost as much of a caricature as Kirk: The switch seemed to take place somewhere around “The Enemy Within”, and ever since McCoy has been defined by a kind of raw, crackling emotional passion, mostly to contrast with Spock's logical aloofness. The pinnacle of this development in this regard will, of course, be the episode airing in just a few week's time, but it's abundantly clear here: Once McCoy gets infected with the spores, Kelley switches to an absolutely hilariously stereotypical southern gentleman, drawling out his lines to cartoonish extent, peppering his dialog with conspicuous “y'alls” and “Jimmy-boys” and drinking mint julep. I'm not quite sure why Kelley never gets the reputation for camp excess Shatner does or is linked with Spock quite the way Kirk is in pop consciousness, but he's well on his way to leaving his own mark on the series' legacy.

But that's the problem: Nimoy and Kelley are the *only* likable things here, with even Shatner getting once again shafted with some truly godawful, morally bankrupt dialog. As nice as it is to see D.C. Fontana stepping up to a more active role in the show, this is nobody's best effort, is one more in a month of truly depressing episodes and, worst of all, continues to push Star Trek further and further away from the counterculture and the ability to contribute in some way to material social progress. We've got four more episodes this year and then two more seasons after that, but it's starting to feel like even people like Gene Coon, William Shatner and DeForest Kelley are giving up on the show at this point. One does have to wonder if, after episodes like this, “The Enemy Within” and “Space Seed” if Star Trek is actually something that can continue and has something to offer to society, or if it's just being kept alive on life support at this point.

“Marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet.”: Space Seed

Shame I already used "I got your gun".

I suspect if there's one episode of the original Star Trek that my readers will expect me to come up with some mad, overblown stream-of-consciousness, recursive mess of a writeup for it would probably be this one. I hate to disappoint expectations, but that's not going to be the case here. There was a fairly unbroken streak of episodes starting midway through the season that all seemed to call out for that kind of interpretation, hence a number of the last few blog posts have been in that style, and there's at least one more coming up that will more likely than not warrant it as well, so my abandoning that structure is certainly not something to worry about for the short term. However, “Space Seed” calls for a different approach.

The elephant in the room is naturally that this episode provides the subject matter for the consensus-best Star Trek movie, which is at once a kind of revisit and reimagining of the events of “Space Seed” and also the debut of Nicholas Meyer's unique, and much loved, interpretation of the franchise. Whether or not I feel Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is actually deserving of the kind of breathless worship it gets from mainline fandom or is worthy of the title of Best Trek Ever, let alone Perfect Cinematic Masterpiece, is something I'm not going to even begin to worry about until we reach 1982, which is still quite a long ways off from where we are now.

The more important thing to keep in mind for now is that Carey Wilber, who was the actual writer of this episode is not Nicholas Meyer, and this is really where we need to begin before we get anywhere near close to figuring out what this episode really is. Gene Coon has a secondary credit on the teleplay, but given this episode's plot and general tone I'm going to assume he just did some cleanup work after the fact because, for reasons I'll get into a bit later, “Space Seed” doesn't feel like Coon's material at all. Actually, I'll just come out and tip my hand right away. I'm positive this is going to be a nuclear bomb of a claim to make and this is without doubt the entry that will turn away any longterm Star Trek fans who haven't been driven off already, but this is my reaction and my blog and I get to say it: This episode is bad. Really bad.

Actually, I take back part of that last paragraph. This isn't *bad* television: It's as competently and professionally made as any of the strongest episodes of the series so far. In this regard, the incoherent structural jumble of something like “The Menagerie”, or especially “The Alternative Factor”, is much worse. But the thing is both of those episodes hinted at, or maybe accidentally hit on, deeper, more exciting concepts and wound up delightfully oversignified as a result. No, “Space Seed” isn't *bad* television, it's *wrong* television. We're right back in the territory we last tread in “The Corbomite Maneuver”, and in fact this one is infinitely worse: What we've got here is a perfect microcosm and embodiment of everything that's wrong with Star Trek in 1967.

Let's start with the obvious. Marla McGivers is terrible. She spends her off-time drawing and lusting over erotica of muscly, hyper-masculine historical figures and when she actually has a job to do she stands around dumbly and immediately falls for Khan before the dude's even been defrosted. Once Khan comes aboard the Enterprise, she quickly and enthusiastically submits to his dominance and authority and than enters into what can absolutely only be described as an abusive relationship with him. Furthermore, McGivers' character is *defined* by her submissiveness: In Wilber's original script, she was meant to have a friend named Yeoman Baker, and there was to be a scene where Baker tells her a Lieutenant Hanson wants to take McGivers to the ship's dance, which is apparently a thing now. McGivers was to have told Hanson to “get lost” and that she was “waiting for a man who will knock down my door and carry me to where he wants me”. And, well, there's not a whole lot of ways for me to redeem that.

What's almost even worse than McGivers herself is how the rest of the crew treats her. Kirk is noticeably disdainful and dismissive towards her from the beginning, sneering at the notion a mere historian would be a part of his crew. With one line, the show brings up years and years of prejudice towards both women and the humanities, and how the two are a natural, proper fit for each other. The humanities are frequently seen as more “feminine”, and thus inferior, fields of study when compared to the hard sciences, or indeed the military. That scene was enough to get me balled up with rage, and this offensively authoritarian, male supremacist attitude defines the rest of the episode. McGivers might even have been acceptable to me had there been other women to contrast her with: Maybe Yeoman Baker would have been that character. I doubt it, but we'll never know. Even when “Shore Leave” gave us Yeoman Barrows, who was almost comically stereotypical, that episode at least also had Alice to contrast with her. McGivers is played painfully straight and just lands at irredeemably offensive and retrograde.

There's Uhura, of course, but I can't keep leaning on Uhura as a feminist and racial Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for the show. The blunt reality is she's simply not an important enough character according to the show's own internal structure and logic. I wish she was, but 23 episodes after her debut, her role hasn't developed much beyond generic background space switchboard operator and she barely gets any lines in any given episode. Nichelle Nichols is a wonderful stage presence and makes Uhura far more memorable and likable a character than she would have been without her, but the sad truth is this simply isn't enough. And here, of course, she gets beaten by Khan's super-soldiers and bursts into tears.

Then we come to Khan himself. Now, before I get any more hate for this piece than I already know I'm going to get, let me first say for the record Ricardo Montalbán is brilliant: He delivers a tremendously multi-layered and charismatic performance that's unlike just about anything else we've seen on Star Trek so far, and that alone may be the reason this story gets revisited in fifteen years' time. The first thing to note about Khan as a character then is he's another in a line of evil or otherwise dark doubles or reflections of Captain Kirk. A surprisingly significant number of episodes this season have dealt with this theme: First we had Gary Mitchell in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, then the Good!Kirk/Evil!Kirk split in “The Enemy Within”, Kirk's android duplicate in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” and Trelane in “The Squire of Gothos”. By this point this particular thread could charitably be called “tired”, but Khan is without question the most memorable of the lot.

Khan is also a unique twist on this particular formula, and it's worth putting in the context of all those other characters like him. Coon's big contribution to this script seems to be changing Khan's background details. Wilber originally wrote him as Harold Erikson, a regular, non-enhanced criminal who would become a space pirate. Coon apparently suggested Erikson should become “a true rival to Kirk” and introduced the genetic engineering dictator plotlines. The name change to Khan came when Montalbán was cast (the Noonien was apparently Gene Roddenberry's idea, who named him after an old Chinese friend of his he wanted to reconnect with, which I'll just let speak for itself). Of course, as conceived this gives the character rather disturbing Nazi overtones, especially given the way the episode as filmed actually plays out. Whether or not it's better he became a charismatic, masculine, generically foreign man (Khan is supposedly Indian, Montalbán is Mexican, the show seems to think the two are one and the same) is something I'll leave to you to hash out.

Regardless, Coon's edit is worth paying very close attention to: He specifically said in order to become a match for Kirk, Khan would need to be functionally superhuman, which is highly interesting given the reading about Kirk's character we've been building since “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. We should also contrast Khan with Trelane, the last such instance of an antagonist being a mirror of Kirk: What's crucial to note here I feel is that Trelane was for all intents and purposes a mirror of William Shatner, or at least Shatner's performance-He's the other side of Shatner's drag action hero. Khan, however, is explicitly a rival for *Kirk*, or at least he's meant to be, and Jim Kirk-as-written and William Shatner are absolutely not interchangeable, something a great many Star Trek fans and, actually, members of the larger pop culture, would do well to remember. But Khan is more than just Kirk's evil clone or doppelganger; He's also his equal, and by doing this the show opens up a whole host of problematic subtexts, and I'm not sure exactly where this leaves Star Trek at the end of it all.

What I do know is that, through this, “Space Seed” takes the show to some very dark places, and I'm not convinced this is a good thing. Khan is a ruthless dictator and the product of eugenics such that he considers himself morally, intellectually and physically superior to anyone not of his lineage. Also, as befits his name, his one desire is to conquer the universe and lord over an empire of his making. But Khan is also frequently and distressingly validated in these beliefs: In many ways he really *is* superior, or at least the show seems to want us to think he is. He frequently comments on how humanity hasn't fundamentally changed in two centuries, easily outmaneuvers and dispatches the Enterprise crew, and the only reason Kirk survives his intended execution is due to McGivers betraying Khan and saving his life at the last second in an act that is framed both diegetically and extradiegetically as a “weakness” on her part. Even once Kirk regains control of the ship and rounds up Khan and his soldiers, the hearing he gives is essentially a surrender-As Khan explicitly says, he gets what he wants. A planet to rule and turn into the seat of a new empire. Khan wins.

What's even more disturbing is that Kirk, McCoy and Scott *admire* Khan, and are furthermore actually in *awe* of him. Once they discern his identity, they take turns musing that he was “one of the good ones”, stresses that there were “no deaths” under his rule and go out of their way to praise his charisma, energy, ambition and style of dictatorship. This manages to do the impossible and cause Spock to be visibly shocked and appalled, but his protests are laughed down and dismissed with an incredibly unconvincing bit from Kirk and McCoy about how humans can detest a person for what they did while admiring their stamina. This is exacerbated by the fact Kirk and McCoy are just about the most patronizing and demeaning to Spock we've ever seen them: McCoy calls him unfeeling and inhuman and launches into an ugly rage for really no reason and Kirk is intolerably smug and condescending to him throughout the entire episode. This is, frankly, undistilled speciesism conveyed in racist language and bald-facedly patriarchal. No manner of diverse casting is going to make up for this.

But this is, sadly, to be expected, given what the rest of this episode is doing. Look at the word choice here: If Khan is Kirk's “rival” or equal and opposite, than we're to take them as expressly comparable entities. The threat Khan poses is not that of a dark mirror of what humanity might become or the dangerously re-emerged relic of a misbegotten age long in the past, it's that he might just show himself to be manlier and more competent than Kirk. The central battle of “Space Seed” isn't authoritarianism sparring with democracy, nor is it even a fight over the value of eugenics: It's a war to control the Enterprise and over who gets to be the leading man. The show is overtly likening Kirk to Khan, and it's not doing anything to problematize this. And Kirk definitely is not opposed to Khan on principle: Putting aside for the moment his hero worship of Khan's suave badassery, his dropping of official charges against him and granting him and his followers a planet has to be seen as a tacit endorsement of his beliefs. If he were truly interested in demonstrating humanity had evolved, he absolutely would have brought Khan to justice. Even Spock gets to say “It would be worthwhile to return in several centuries to see what grew of the seed you planted here today”.

Aside from once again completely derailing the ethics of Star Trek, this also gives us one of the most distressing morals in the show's history. There is an unsettling tendency amongst some classical liberals to believe that a temporary dictatorship might be beneficial, even necessary, to bring about true egalitarianism in the future. There is a quote often attributed to 18th century French economic philosopher Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune in which he is alleged to have said “Give me five years of despotism and France shall be free”. The alleged theory, which is scarily believable given some aspects of liberal thought, is that an enlightened absolute ruler would be better than looser, more generative forms of government because we'd finally have someone who knew what they were doing in charge and he (it's always a he) would be able to institute reform without hindrance from annoying checks and balances from less-intelligent obstructionists. I'm also reminded of the Philosopher Kings mentioned in Plato's The Republic, which uses very similar language: People would be best served under the kind, wise and benevolent patrician authority of a king who was also a scholar. Jesse Walker, editor of Reason Magazine, further elaborates on these issues in this article, where he takes to task free-market economist F.A. Hayek, Jorge Louis Borges and other such leftist thinkers who, in seeming violation of their stated beliefs elsewhere, at one time or another expressed fondness and admiration for Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse Tung and Augusto Pinochet, some of the most violently right-wing totalitarian governments of the modern age.

This is what Khan is. A tyrannical dictator, but one of the “good” ones. A monomaniacal despot, but one who is somehow more “enlightened” and “liberal” in his views, as if that's supposed to be some kind of excuse. His eugenics backstory and the crew's deference to him is incredibly telling: Khan is not some artefact of Earth's shameful past: If Star Trek is about idealistic futurism, then Khan is the show's own potential future. After all, as he is so fond of saying, humanity hasn't evolved much, and right now the terrifying thing is he's the only clear-cut vision of the future Star Trek's given us so far. And why wouldn't he be? Wasn't the original pitch for the show about a crew of space naval officers going around telling morality plays, teaching everyone the difference between Right and Wrong? Just last episode we had Kirk strolling onto Eminiar VII and making all their decisions for them, all the while touting humanity's inherent barbarism. Here we have him the most stern, authoritarian and masculine he's been since “The Corbomite Maneuver” and treating Spock with open contempt for not being human enough to understand the value of emotion and illogic. Why isn't the end result of this train of thought going to look suspiciously like Khan Noonien Singh?

And let's go one better. Let's also take another look at Khan's relationship with McGivers. At first, this seems to open up the one confusing structural logic hole in the otherwise very tight production we've got this week: Khan has thirty genetically perfect Überfraus aboard the Botany Bay: Why would he waste his time pursuing someone of inferior stock? His interest in McGivers can really only be seen as a means to an end to get access to the Enterprise. Sure, he gets a line at the end about how she's a “superior woman” and he's glad she's joining them, but it really doesn't take as far as I'm concerned. But that's exactly it. The reason Khan is interested in McGivers is horrifically clear: Because he can use her. Because he can control her. He can dominate her completely and utterly and she'll love it. Oh, she may not at first, but he'll just need to give her a strict lesson from the back of his hand to make her step in line before him. Of course he's not going to be interested in the Überfraus: They're his equals, or perhaps they might be superior to even him in some respects. Either way he'd have to treat them accordingly, and that's not something Khan wants in a female companion. Nor, would it seem, is it what Star Trek wants in its female characters.

We're coming off of a stretch of episodes that have been about nothing if not tearing down the show as it exists right now bit by bit. This isn't by definition a bad thing, but against that backdrop “Space Seed” is horrifying. This episode would have us believe the only way forward for Star Trek is Khan's enlightened despotism. Well I'm not going to stand for that: There is absolutely nothing leftist or progressive about authoritarianism, totalitarianism and male supremacy, no matter how much “liberal” or “socialist” language the monster wishes to clothe himself in. Tyranny and domination are tyranny and domination regardless of the form they take. I cannot tolerate this and I will not accept this. The other side of the argument is no better: Can the equation of Kirk and Khan, and thus “Space Seed” on the whole, be read as yet another condemnation of the show's militarism and patriarchy? If so that's even worse, as Coon has doomed the show to an inevitable and inescapable future of iron-fisted despotism.

But, no matter how toxic it may be, I'm stuck with it for now. Thanks in no small part to the success of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, there are few episodes in the Original Series more influential, more fondly remembered or with more of an artificially inflated reputation than “Space Seed”. And, as a result, I'm marooned here. Trapped once again facing down the show's Death Drive, this time brought upon by its own egotistical conception of itself and delusions of lordship. I really want to help turn Star Trek into something that can be taken as a genuine source for good in the world and as a version of idealism that it's actually possible to respond to and is something to strive towards. But at the moment the biggest obstacle in my path is Star Trek itself: I can, once again, appeal to the future, but now it's a question of what that future is going to entail, exactly. A future that leads to Khan Noonien Singh is not one anyone should be allow to come to pass.

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”: A Taste of Armageddon

Jimmy wants big boom.

What's most immediately interesting, to start with, is that we seem to have encountered a temporal event of our own and skipped several episodes. The Federation was established in “Arena”, and Starfleet way back in “Court Martial” but we haven't seen much of either of them since and it didn't seem to alter the status quo of the show in any meaningful way. The Enterprise still putted about on routine patrol for the most part. “The Alternative Factor” and “Tomorrow is Yesterday” gave us some sweeping, dramatic shakeups, but both of those seemed like special exceptions: Not quite narrative collapses, but definitely temporary crises in the way things worked. Still, nothing we didn't really think we wouldn't come back from. The only indication things might be changing at all was in, ironically enough, Gene Roddenberry's own “The Return of the Archons”. In “A Taste of Armageddon”, however, the Federation now has the full name of the United Federation of Planets (implying a structure larger than just Earth and its colonies) and the Enterprise is now escorting its ambassadors on a mission to open up friendly negotiations with civilizations around the galaxy (confirming it). This is, to understate things considerably, a rather immense shift in standard operating procedure for Star Trek.

A cursory glance at the credits reveals this to be not completely unprecedented or unexpected, as this is the second script from Gene Coon, who, recall, penned “Arena” himself as well. This one is also credited to a Robert Hamner, but, aside from an interesting note that he is listed as the creator of the police procedural S.W.A.T., I can't find a lot of biographical information on him and not having seen that show personally I'm somewhat at a loss to talk about his positionality and interests as a writer. But Coon is a known quantity to us by now, and as his name shows up twice, as both the co-writer of the episode and the current showrunner, it's probably safe to attribute an at least not-insignificant amount of the ethics here to him. And besides this makes sense as “A Taste of Armageddon” is very much the evolution of the territory we first found ourselves in with “Arena”.

At first glance this episode would seem to be about the juxtaposition of the Enterprise crew and the world of Federation diplomats. Ambassador Fox is depicted first as just as much of an obstructive bureaucrat as Commissioner Ferris in “The Galileo Seven” and he frequently butts heads with Kirk, and later Scott, in a rote safety of the mission vs. safety of the ship debate that's already become a stock and hackneyed Star Trek plot. It's Fox's bizarre fixation on opening relations with the Eminians at all costs that puts the lives of everyone on the ship in grave jeopardy, leads to Kirk’s away team being captured and thrusts everyone headfirst into the EminianXVendikan war. Following the logic the show has established up to this point, it would seem sensible to read the episode's central conflict as one between distant officials in fancy suits and the soldiers on the front lines who know the reality of living day to day on the edge. Further evidence for this interpretation would be in the scenes where Fox keeps acting bullheaded and naively trustworthy, lacking the gut sense of trouble Scott and McCoy have and the climax, where, after being rescued from the disintegration chamber, he flatly tells Spock that he's “never been a soldier” but “learns quickly”.

What's also interesting is this also further condemns the Federation. Absolutely nothing related to the UFP seems to work in this episode: The Federation's obsessive demand to open up trade agreements in the NGC 321 cluster seem comically overstated and it's really never fully explained why the area is so important to them. We just have to open up diplomatic relations because...they're diplomatic relations. You've got to open diplomatic relations, I guess. Fox's overtures just about get him and the crew sentenced to death, and every other discussion tactic he attempts fails both decisively and hilariously. Diplomacy is shown to be, on the whole, ineffective and overly convoluted at best and blinkered to the point of being actually dangerously counterproductive at worst. Fox does get a manner of redemption in the end when he offers to stay behind on Eminiar VII to help moderate talks between them and Vendikar, but it's clear this isn't quite in either his job description or his area of expertise: He says he'll do the best he can, but by no means does he give us the indication he's the best person for the job, or even that this is the right job for the situation at hand. Even Spock says normal diplomatic procedures aren't going to work here.

So obviously what we have is another chest-thumping, tale about honour and duty and the rugged, manly heroism of the militaristic way of life, a la “The Corbomite Manuever” or, to a lesser extent, “Court Martial”? Not quite. Coon may have been an ex-marine, but sometimes it takes a veteran to realise the ugliness that can exist in the world. The reality is “A Taste of Armageddon” is a deeply, deeply cynical story. Just about every element of the show at every level is seriously problematized. Fox is misguided and dangerous, but so is everyone else: The Eminians and the Vendikans have made killing clinical and routine because war is too important to their cultural heritage to move beyond and even Kirk and the Enterprise crew, who are definitely meant to have the moral and ethical high ground, are retroactively made, and by their own admission, natural-born, instinctive killers. On the one hand this episode isn't quite as dark, somber and brutal as “Balance of Terror” as it does have some exciting setpieces and Kirk, Scott, Spock and McCoy all get to deliver some very rousing and triumphant speeches. On the other hand, this episode is extremely disquieting in some other areas, namely, in that it makes the audience *uncomfortable* for liking these things.

Indeed, this is essentially the entire point of the story-Kirk freely calls himself a barbarian and a bloodthirsty killer, is willing to risk the total destruction of both Eminiar VII and Vendikar and his big speech involves widening the net of that condemnation to everyone on both planets, the Enterprise and basically all of humanity itself. The central failing of the Eminians is that, in reducing war to a numbers game, they've forgotten how horrific and destructive it is and why it's something to be avoided. But this is by no means a hypothetical or a thought experiment: Coon has a very clear target in mind he's satirizing here, and it's us. Or, at least, the US in the 1960s: Dave Gerrold, an important Star Trek creative figure who we'll start to talk at length about next season, says the computers tallying up the simulated war casualties was a direct reference to, and condemnation of, the way the mainstream news in the United States at the time covered the constantly updating ground reports of similar casualties Vietnam War. This goes beyond problematizing war as a spectacle to attacking war as a mundane reality, and no-one is spared from judgment and reproach: In order to teach us war is monstrous, Kirk turns himself into a monster and, in the process, shows us we're all monsters too. It is unbelievably disturbing.

The key line comes in the denouement, where Kirk states how “instinct can be fought”, and all it takes to start working towards peace is for a killer to say “I'm not going to kill today”. Which I mean yes, but...Bloody Hell is that depressing. It must be stressed that absolutely no-one in the story denies that humans (or I guess humanoids, as the Eminians and Vendikans aren't meant to be human) are at heart murderous, bloodthirsty savage killers. The best we can hope for is that we eventually figure out how to work against our baser predilections to reach some semblance of social harmony. And well...There just really isn't anywhere to go from that, is there? As much as Coon's stinging critique actually does stick, my objection is we really don't have any actual heroes here. The Federation is, again, tunnel-visioned, self-interested and shortsighted and Kirk and the Enterprise are essentially telling us they're all murderous savages and we should feel bad for watching them.

This is particularly awful coming off of “The Return of the Archons”, an episode all about Gene Roddenberry just straight-up bearing all and saying no, he's not a utopian and neither is Star Trek. Now we have Gene Coon telling us to our face, and in no uncertain terms, that we're all terrible, cold-blooded monsters. In my darker moments I might agree with Coon's indictment, but I'd kind of like to think we're capable of being more than that. We don't quite want a utopia: Roddenberry (and I can't believe I'm actually saying this) quite sufficiently laid out the problems with that particular intellectual tradition last time. What we need is hopefulness and optimism; some kind of hint at a way forward. But we don't get anything along those lines in “A Taste of Armageddon”: There's no-one to actually root for here, nor any inkling there's a way out of this. This isn't just not Vaka Rangi, it feels like Star Trek throwing in the towel and flat out giving up on the possibility, however distant, of ever being Vaka Rangi at all.

In the last post I tried to argue that despite Roddenberry rejecting any claims of being a utopian in “The Return of the Archons”, there was still enough that was positive and hopeful about Star Trek that the chance of it remaining *idealistic* was still there. Is it possible to do some similar salvage work with Coon and “A Taste of Armageddon”? Very possibly. I'm at least not as willing to give up on the show as the show seems ready to give up on itself here. Not after 24 episodes and with two more seasons, five more TV shows, twelve movies and a frankly frightening amount of comic books, video games and mass-market paperback tie-in books in my future. Firstly, there is the truism argument: It's a fact that countless people have read Star Trek as expressly progressive and idealistic series, so there has to be something here to support that. It's simply ludicrous to expect *that many* people to be misreading the show. As I count myself as among those people, given the fact I'm doing this blog at all, I'd tend to agree with them at least in the very general sense. Last time I talked about how the mere presence of a mixed-race, mixed-gender and mixed-species crew is enough to inspire many people in spite of how unintentional or coincidental that might have been. I still stand by that, but let's go one further. Let's go back to Coon's last episode.

Putting aside the possibly problematic aspects of their characters for the moment, the Metrons said humanity showed great promise. Kirk displayed “the advanced trait of mercy”, as it were, surprising them (and Coon, apparently, as well, given his attitude in this episode). We're not quite good enough to make the cut now, but it's entirely possible we might someday. I think the same can be said about Star Trek as a whole. Nearly a full season in, we have a rocky, confused and occasionally actually brilliant show that has the makings of something truly great about it. It's not good enough to actually live up to its potential, and it's frequently acting actively contrary to realising it far too often for my liking, but it's worth keeping in mind when we caught our first glimpse of the Enterprise bridge in 1964 during the opening for “The Cage”, there was absolutely no indication the show would ever be able to achieve even the things it has 24 episodes in. I'm also lucky enough to speak from a privileged position: I know the future. I know what Star Trek will eventually beget, and it's even more wonderful, bizarre, heartening, inspirational and magickal then even the most wild speculation about the show's prospects as they stand now would suggest.

That this franchise will eventually spawn that, and still has the potential to become even greater things even today, is all the redemption I need.

“You Will Be Assimilated”: The Return of the Archons

Kirk sees no reason why he can't have both a frock *and* a gun.

Let's take care of the obvious first, shall we? We've got Gene Roddenberry writing again this week. By this point we should know what this means: Terrible pacing, ham-fisted, confused ethics, a disturbingly capricious attitude towards the personhood of women, screamingly vast logic lapses and a truly amazing ability to craft a cartoonish 16-ton safe of a moral and somehow still manage to miss the point entirely. With that squared away, let's take a look at the less obvious: “The Return of the Archons” is final, conclusive evidence Roddenberry's original concept of Star Trek wasn't a utopia and is the first appearance of the Prime Directive (and thus also the first deconstruction of the Prime Directive).

The Prime Directive is a very interesting concept unique to Star Trek, and by this I mean I don't like it very much. I never have: Traditionally doing a Prime Directive story is the quickest way short of doing an “evil clone frames the hero” plot or having a woman strut onto the bridge in a miniskirt to get me to shut the TV off. On the surface, it sounds like a self-evidently Good Thing, as it prohibits Starfleet officers from interfering in the natural development of a society (although here it's framed more in terms of a vague opposition to “noninterference” of any sort). In fact, at conventions or in interviews Roddenberry (or those attempting to speak for him) would tout the Prime Directive as a key indication of the Federation's evolved, idealistic society, typically framing it in opposition to Western colonialism or the cargo cult myth. This is of course hilarious, as every single Prime Directive story throughout the entirety of Star Trek is either about how demonstrably, measurably worse off the local people are by the crew's adherence to it or how they just go ahead and flagrantly violate it anyway because they know better. Anthropologically speaking, however, it's a nightmare, and given my prior experience in that field it causes me no shortage of headaches.

That said I don't want to spend too much time on the Prime Directive here as, aside from this being the first mention of it, it doesn't play an enormous role in the ethics debate of the week and there are two episodes coming up in the second season which are in many ways the definitive Prime Directive stories, so it seems something of a waste to use up all my critique of it in this post. What's more interesting about how it's used in “The Return of the Archons” is that it's explicitly framed as a mirror of Landru's “Prime Directive” to preserve The Body at all costs. As it's Landru's fixation on this basic order that results in the Beta III colony becoming “soulless”, in the words of Spock, it could be argued Roddenberry is trying to tell us blind adherence to orders is a Bad Thing and people need to think for themselves and make decisions on a case-by-case basis, and furthermore, that he's now become perfectly willing to point the finger as much at his own people as he is at others. This makes a great deal of sense: First of all, it fits very neatly with what can be ascertained about Roddenberry's worldview (he was very much an individualist and this is exactly the kind of simple, didactic message he loves on the Original Series), but also with the way the rest of the episode plays out as The Body is basically a society built around unthinkingly following the orders telepathically communicated to them from Landru.

But of course there's a problem. In this case, it's that Beta III can also be read very easily as a collectivist, communist society: Everyone calls each other friend, doesn't ask any questions and obeys orders for the good of the The Body, i.e., the overall society. Perhaps it's a Stalinistic society, where a single, authoritarian power has absolute control under the guise of an egalitarian, co-operative paradise: Even the viral motif, where those who are “foreign” and “do not conform” are “destructive” to The Body and must be “purged”, is straightforwardly a reiteration of Stalinistic disciplinary and disappearing tactics, albeit a rather clever and original one. Even so, it's not clear that Roddenberry actually recognises the difference between communism, collectivism, Stalinism and generic authoritarianism (which, to be honest, is probably an accurate allegation). As a result, “The Return of the Archons” is at once a critique of rote obedience that fingers Starfleet as being part of the problem and a chest-thumping bit of Rugged American Individualist Anti-Soviet Propaganda and neither of those things because nothing about this episode fits together.

The big revelation is, naturally that Landru is a computer. Exactly who programmed it, why, and how it lasted this long in control of an entire planet for 6000 years (or was that only 100? I was never very clear on that, and there's a bit of a difference between those two numbers) is not explained, but also not entirely important. What this also means is we get another example of the signature James T. Kirk method of computer repair: Blowing it up by shouting paradoxes and logic errors at it (it's a good thing he never tried this on Spock, especially given his lines in the denouement this time). This is of course ridiculous and displays a riotous failure to understand and wanton disregard for basic computer science, but again, there's another episode coming up where it will be far more appropriate to talk about that than it is here. This is very irritating to me, as it all adds up to “The Return of the Archons” being another episode that there's very little for me to say intelligent about it.

But there are a few things. Firstly, like “Miri” and “The Squire of Gothos” before it, “The Return of the Archons” is also very good at building an air of mystery. The teaser alone holds up the rest of the episode in this regard: Sulu and a redshirt are running though Mayberry dressed in Victorian frock coats while evil clockwork monks slowly close in on them with what basically amount to magic staves. That's got to get anyone's attention. Likewise, the Stepford-esque villagers and chaotic, hedonistic Festival (despite actually making no narrative sense whatsoever if you think too long about it) help contribute to the general unsettling atmosphere. Most importantly in my opinion, however, is that the one thing “The Return of the Archons” is unwaveringly consistent and coherent about is its perhaps surprising, yet firm and undeniable, anti-utopian stance.

It's continuously stressed by not only the followers of Landru, but the crew itself, is that Beta III is explicitly a utopian society. Those who are part of The Body continually talk about how happy, serene and peaceful they are and how Landru has created a paradise. Indeed, he arguably has: There is no war, hunger, disease or conflict on Beta III (except during the officially-sanctioned Festival) and Landru removes such concepts from The Body immediately as inherently dangerous foreign substances should it detect them. And the show hates it for those very reasons. The Body is depicted as vapid, empty and without any sense of creativity or enthusiasm for life, despite being placid, content and happy. The clincher comes in the denouement, where Spock muses on how humanity has often longed to create an ideal, perfect world and Kirk grins and says “Yes. And we never got it. Just lucky, I guess”. This is quite frankly astonishing from a modern perspective: Here's Gene Roddenberry, the supposed Arch-Utopian, quite clearly penning a story where a desire for utopia is portrayed as dangerous, stifling, wrongheaded and dehumanizing. To paraphrase a young Jean-Luc Picard: What the Devil is going on here?

Thing is, this isn't so inconceivable a statement as it first appears, and we should already be familiar with some of the reasons why. Roddenberry in 1967 is not a utopian futurist, and actually whether or not he ever actually was is a matter for debate in my opinion (a case could be made there's evidence he becomes this as of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but how much of that was him and how much was him playing up his audience can be hard to discern at times). Star Trek was never created to be something like this, and the show as it exists now most certainly isn't. Furthermore, the entire idea of a utopian society is a loaded concept: The term was coined by political philosopher Thomas More in a treatise that is now largely seen to be a work of straight-up satire, skewering 16th century Europe's panglossian attitude towards its rampant, systemic social problems. As a result of this, anyone following More attempting to craft an unirionically “utopian” society really has to be seen as somewhat egregiously not getting the joke. The fact so many of the so-called utopias in speculative fiction come from Western authors who are still very much part of a culture descended in more ways than they'd care to admit from the Europe Thomas More was bitterly complaining about in 1516 can be seen as nothing short of delicious poetic irony.

Does this mean that Star Trek and other works like it can never be hopeful? Are we all doomed to all be eschatological nihilists from now until the inevitable heat death of the universe, or the equally inevitable entropic collapse of human society, whichever comes first? I don't think so, and the key reason why I don't is that I strongly believe there is a stark difference between utopianism and idealism. Star Trek isn't utopian: It never has been, and each and every time the franchise has started experimenting with utopianism it's caught and severely problematized itself, sometimes with absolutely horrifying consequences. Star Trek is, however, idealistic: When it's at it's best, it shows us people and concepts entirely within our reach that we can strive for. Even now, in 1967, it's showing us that maybe an environment where men, women and others of all backgrounds and creeds can live and work together as equals isn't an absolute impossibility. Granted a lot of this is coming about purely by accident, coincidence and the secondary effect of decisions that were made in the interests of goals pretty far removed from that of material social progress and the show isn't going to engage with these themes with any seriousness or maturity until it gets rebooted a few more times, but it's still a reading and implication that's demonstrably there, if only as a truism given that a not-insignificant number of people have in fact read it this way.

This is hopeful; this is idealistic-It's not a utopian society by any stretch of the imagination, and as Kirk says we probably shouldn't be waiting around for one, but it is giving us the most basic of hints that a world better than our own is possible. This is a declaration we should take notice of, respect and be thankful for. These things can happen, and we can and should strive for them. Even if it's not really all there now, in 1967, it definitely will be before our trek through the stars is over. It won't always be paired with completely unproblematic concepts and ideas (it certainly hasn't been to date) and indeed on a great many occasions will be actively working contrary to this declaration, but this still may well be the most important thing to know about Star Trek: A better life is possible. Equality and peace are possible. Love is possible. Enlightenment is possible. And isn't that, ultimately, what progressiveness means?