“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.

“Be not a cancer on the earth”: The Mark of Gideon

"'Oh, I wish it could stay like this forever!' 'So do I.'"

“The Mark of Gideon” is not one of the original Star Trek's finest hours. But you expected this. It has the makings of a great example of the show's newfound direction, but it ultimately ends up proving the show is just drifting at this point, painfully obviously out of steam.

It tries though, it really, truly does. For an episode very clearly produced solely so the show didn't have to build any new sets, “The Mark of Gideon” does the self-evidently correct story to make with that brief: Having a crewmember be mysteriously transported an eerily empty starship. It's a novel concept, though it would be perhaps more novel if the show hadn't pulled similar tricks in both “The Tholian Web” and “The Doomsday Machine”. So novel in fact it's done again in the similarly resource-challenged second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (albeit to a much more effective extent) and one of the most frequently overlooked virtues of the first two seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was it's ability to knock out world-class science fiction on a weekly basis while consistently only using one set.

This time though it's Kirk who, ostensibly on a diplomatic mission to a notoriously reclusive and xenophobic civilization, beams down only to find himself apparently where he started, on the transporter pad of the Enterprise. Only now it seems like he's the only one on the ship. To make matters worse, he has a mysterious bruise on his arm and nine minutes of his life, the period of time between when he beamed down and beamed back up again, are a blank to him. Soon though he realises he's not alone when he meets a mysterious woman named Odona who claims to have been abducted from her home planet. Although she doesn't remember much about it, she says it was extremely claustrophobic, and that thousands upon thousands of faces were constantly staring at her from every direction. Meanwhile, we keep cutting to scenes on the very much populated Enterprise as Spock, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura try to determine why Kirk has disappeared into thin air and trying to navigate diplomacy talks between Starfleet Command and Gideon, the latter who are clearly hiding and withholding information.

This part of the episode is actually brilliant. There is a palpable sense of mystery surrounding the proceedings, keeping us constantly wondering about whether or not Kirk has been transported to another dimension or perhaps into his ship's own past...or perhaps its future. It slowly builds tension and unease over the course of a full half-hour up until the moment Kirk and Odona look out of the portholes and suddenly see the stars transform into thousands of faces staring back at them, a scene which is genuinely unsettling to the point of actually being disturbing. Furthermore, just like the subtle Forteanism of “The Tholian Web”, the Fairy Myth overtones in “Wink of an Eye” and the supernatural horror of “That Which Survives”, the first half of “The Mark of Gideon” is yet another example of Star Trek shifting its approach to science fiction from the pulp and Golden Age tradition to the more fantastic trappings that come to define the genre from here on out, and indeed that the franchise is capable of making this kind of shift at all and living on after Apollo 11. The concept of Kirk having a sense of missing time and a mysterious injury he can't explain is straight out of UFO abductee reports, in particular the case of Betty and Barney Hill.

On the night of September 19, 1961 Betty and Barney Hill were driving through New Hampshire on their way back from a vacation (to, funnily enough, Montréal) when they claimed to have sighted a strange object fly across the face of the Moon that seemed to be tracking them. The object, which the Hills described to be a kind of craft, suddenly came down in front of them, at which point they blacked out and swerved into a roadblock. When they woke up, they were thirty-five miles away from where they were when they crashed and two hours seemed to have passed without them retaining any memory of what happened, though their car was inexplicably damaged and Betty's dress had been torn and stained. For weeks afterward, Betty had reoccurring dreams about being led into the craft they saw land by strange beings, who proceeded to conduct medical tests on them in an effort to determine the difference between the Hills and the people in the craft. Seeking medical help and at the urging of the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena, with whom they had been having regular meetings with, the Hills underwent hypnosis sessions, where they both recalled the events of Betty's dreams. A sketch Betty drew based on her memory of a starmap she saw inside the craft has been used by some UFOlogists as evidence the beings who the Hills encountered originated from the Zeta Reticuli star system.

In many ways the Hill case was one of the events that helped to shift the pop perception of UFOs. Previous sightings had largely been similar to Kenneth Arnold's, where people would observe mysterious objects appear at random in the sky and then vanish after a time (indeed, this is the most common type of UFO sighting dating back to the beginnings of recorded history). With the Hill case, there was something of an unprecedented confluence of tropes and motifs that would define how the phenomenon was interpreted: There was the the contemporaneous theory that UFOs were spacecraft piloted by extraterrestrials, and now they had a physical appearance and a potential point of origin. Also new to the Hill case however was the possibility these aliens could abduct and experiment upon humans, and the Alien Abduction subgenre of UFO accounts was born.

Now, it's not an enormous stretch to see this as an extension of earlier folklore about visits to Fairy realms inhabit by strange, unpredictable and unreadable entities (in fact Jacques Vallée has made a somewhat significant second career out of historicizing these cultural comparisons), and really, UFOs have always been a somewhat mystical and Fortean mystery. It was just the 1940s and 1950s that linked them to rocket science and astrophysics. The point being Star Trek doing a story like this is another great example of the series moving away from its roots and expanding its reach by looking a bit more closely at if not the literal supernatural (Gene Roddenberry would never approve after all), at least the roots of this kind of cultural phenomenon and what it might say about the connection between humans and their larger world, which is really the kind of story this show should be doing.

Except that's not the story “The Mark of Gideon” ends up actually *being*. In an unbearably maddening and frustrating twist, it's revealed not halfway through the episode that the whole thing is an elabourate psychological experiment by the Gideons to, get this, find a way to curb their out of control population problem brought upon by their virtual immortality by selectively culling random members of the populace with a deadly virus Kirk is a carrier for and that Odona was there so Kirk would fall in love with her and be compelled to stay on Gideon as a living blood bank. And it reveals all of this at about the 35 minute mark, leaving the rest of the episode to spin its wheels pointlessly as Spock, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura get caught up to the rest of us in the most tortuously slow fashion imaginable. There are a great many things wrong with this, so let's take them one at a time. First of all, that twist has got to be one of the biggest, most underwhelming letdowns ever: You don't tease us with Betty and Barney Hill in Star Trek and then land us with a clumsy parable about overpopulation. Yeah, the Gideons were probably always going to have to be behind everything, but to really sell this plot they needed to be a lot more alien and mysterious. Instead they look like a bunch of bored city councilmen in a beige meeting hall. Zeta Reticulans these guys ain't.

And furthermore, you kind of have to be really careful when you do an overpopulation story as so many of them tend to be cloaked in blatantly racist overtones as the argument always seems to be about how those ignorant people in Africa need to stop having so many babies and learn about condoms instead of, you know, the fact the Western world dominates the planet's natural resources and has built its entire cultural history on appropriating and exploiting them to the point they thoroughly wreck the whole ecosystem. Miraculously, “The Mark of Gideon” actually manages to not fuck this up, as the Gideons are not space Africans, but a bunch of Old White Men who go on at length about the holiness of all life, and that everyone is a full person and is sacred even from the moment of conception. The Gideons would rather encourage people to voluntarily commit suicide in the most agonizingly painful way imaginable then practice safe sex. In this regard they're more similar to the fundamentalists in Abrahamic religions who are militantly against contraception and abortion rights, and coming down on people like that is pretty laudably brazen move for 1969 (and it does come down on them hard: Kirk condemns the Gideons, in particular what they would do to Odona, who was the first volunteer, and frequently explicitly implores them to relax their hardline stance on contraception).

“The Mark of Gideon” isn't the worst episode of the year, far from it: There's actually a lot to recommend and, once again, the show seems to have its heart in the right place, and the acting and characterization of the main cast is once again where it's supposed to be. But it's also, yet again, a staggeringly incompetent bit of television: The two halves of this story might as well be two different episodes and the justification for reusing the Enterprise set, as good of an idea as it might have been originally, comes across as pretty flimsy in the finished product. A lot of fans complain that this episode doesn't make sense and there are a lot of logical lapses and plot holes, but I actually couldn't pick up on any more than what's sadly become the norm for the show.

No, the big problem with “The Mark of Gideon” is that it shows Star Trek stretched so thin it's starting to fray and crack. It's not going to be able to keep this up for much longer.

“All the greatest men are maniacs.”: Whom Gods Destroy

"A cat may look at a king..."

“Whom Gods Destroy” is famously bad. It is also famously unapologetically repetitive, reiterating the exact same plot of the first season episode “Dagger of the Mind” down to reusing the same chair prop that was central to that episode's climax. It is also, like the vast majority of third season episodes, riddled with plot holes, logic lapses and inconsistent characterization: In terms of basic narrative structure and coherence, it's once again a mess. “Whom Gods Destroy” seems to be a particular bugbear for Leonard Nimoy, who spent the entire week writing memos and complaints about it to anyone who would listen including, but not limited to, Fred Freiberger and Douglas C. Cramer, the Paramount Studios production executive.

While the laziness and sloppiness are painfully apparent, I'm not especially inclined to tear into them here for a few reasons. One, exasperating as it is, this is not really unusual for this season, and really I'd go so far as to say it's standard operating procedure for the show at this point. Secondly, even if it hadn't been officially stated yet, it's pretty clear Star Trek's time is just about up. We've had our bonus year, and the show has about two months left before it's put to bed for good. It's rather pointless to get too worked up about structural problems now. While it's possible we might get one or two late-stage minor classics along the lines of “Wink of an Eye” or “That Which Survives” in the remaining stories (I have little to no recollection of the next batch of episodes except for the really blatantly obvious ones), the show is for all practical purposes done and we're just killing time before the inevitable sits in. This run of episodes is the word death of the Original Series.

“Whom Gods Destroy” isn't even all that bad given the standards of the 1968-1969 year. It manages to on the whole avoid being as incensing as “Elaan of Troyius”, “The Paradise Syndrome” and “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, though it does have a few ethical issues of its own. And, while it's not as much of a B-movie pleasure as “Spock's Brain”, there are certainly parts that are genuinely entertaining in a way only the most gloriously trashy science fiction can be. Indeed, though “Whom Gods Destroy” is certainly nowhere near as thought provoking as “The Tholian Web”, “Plato's Stepchildren” or “Wink of an Eye”, it does actually manage to occasionally drunkenly stumble into one or two genuinely captivating concepts. What we have here is probably Star Trek's first Curate's Egg: It's a disaster, but parts of this disaster are quite excellent.

Let's square away the obvious issue right away. “Whom Gods Destroy” is literally a retelling of “Dagger of the Mind”, and a shitty one at that. This time the story follows the almost cartoonishly stereotypical plot of having the inmate running the asylum have a Napoleon complex, on which I'll have more to say a little later. Most catastrophically though, “Whom Gods Destroy” not only removes the single most important theme that made “Dagger of the Mind” the pinnacle of the Gene Roddenberry era, it completely botches and inverts it. The whole point of “Dagger of the Mind” was that the Neural Neutralizer was an absurdly terrible idea: Yes, Doctor Adams is a megalomaniacal crazy guy who's using it to create an army of hypno-zombies, but both Kirk and Helen Noel point out that it's leaving people with false memories and insincere personalities and there was at least an inkling of a critique of the kind of Scientistic normalizing Western society engages in with such wild abandon. Here though, the vaccine the Enterprise is delivering is supposed to serve the same purpose as the Neural Neutralizer, mentally reprogramming people who are considered deviant and socially unacceptable to make them “normal” and “healthy” again, and it's portrayed as an unambiguously Good Thing that the ethics of which are never once called into question. It's horrifying.

So it's probably best to avoid trying to read “Whom Gods Destroy” as a challenging and provocative critique of how mental health issues are handled in Western societies. Actually, on a brief tangent this is one of my biggest objections to the way Star Trek has traditionally been read: Each and every episode is typically seen as some highbrow and intelligent work of social commentary, which is dangerous in my view, and this episode is a good example of why: It's actually far easier to read “Whom Gods Destroy” as part of the archaic theatrical tradition of using madness as a metaphor and insane asylums as a setting for satire. It's no more progressive, of course, as it's still horrifically dehumanizing to the people involved, but it's in my opinion ironically less problematic (and significantly less likely to plunge you into hopelessness and despair) to read the story this way than it is to presume the Star Trek creative team circa 1969 genuinely endorsed coercive institutionalized mind-wiping for mental health patients.

In this view then while Garth of Izar remains the central character, the key scene is the dinner he throws for Kirk and Spock. Garth is a former Starfleet hero whose military exploits remain required reading at the Academy and who was a personal hero and role model for Kirk during the early part of his career. After an unspecified “accident”, Garth decided that the logical cap-off to his illustrious career was launching an unprovoked attack on a peaceful planet of healers as the first front in his bid to become, I kid you not, Emperor of the Universe. As delightfully hilarious as that bit of backstory might be, it also leads to the one true moment of erudition in the entire episode. Garth's argument is that the Federation's policies of pacifism are not only irrational and illogical, but also hypocritical given the military might they wield and their idealizing of him. Garth figures the far more sensible course of action is for him to appoint himself Emperor and use Starfleet to take over the universe, and it's as he outlines his philosophy to Kirk and Spock over dinner that we catch a glimpse of the episode “Whom Gods Destroy” might have been.

What's great about this scene is how Kirk responds to Garth's arguments. Kirk states that Garth's exploits demonstrated that he was a brilliant tactician and military leader, but his is not the kind of leader the Federation needs anymore. The key moment is when Garth appeals to Kirk as a fellow soldier, and Kirk politely responds that while he was a soldier once, he's now an explorer. This is brilliance, because it's absolutely true: Star Trek started out as literally a show about the adventures of the Space Air Force or Space Navy going around dropping tactical moralizing strikes on people and Gene Roddenberry absolutely wrote Kirk (and before him, Pike) as a gruff, manly military hero. But that's not what the show became, and that's not who Kirk really is. The split between Garth and Kirk embodies the split between what Star Trek started out as and what Star Trek wants to be, or perhaps more accurately two different directions Star Trek could go. But the line that absolutely clinches it is Garth’s declaration that he too is a great explorer and that he's discovered more new planets than any other captain in history.

Regardless of the truthfulness of this particular account, and I think we're supposed to take it as more of Garth's delusional ramblings, what this line also does is bring back the theme of exploration, and what the purpose and consequences of exploration actually are, that we last saw in “Return to Tomorrow”. Recall back then I pointed out one of the problems Star Trek often has to fight against is the Western roots of exploration that are intrinsically linked to imperialism, in particular the notion of an objective Unknown (which in reality doesn't exist and has never existed). This is in fact built into the whole idea of a “Final Frontier”: That last Great Unknown that we heroic Westerners must boldly plunge and expand into as is our inalienable right. But even here in 1969, Star Trek is actually rejecting this: Garth claims to be an explorer, but if he is one he's explicitly an explorer in the colonial sense: The only reason Garth would explore is to find new worlds to conquer and expand his reach into. Meanwhile Kirk seems to explore simply because he enjoys travelling and learning from others: Though he never comes right out and says this, by clearly placing him in opposition to Garth the episode would seem to be granting him this position by default.

Now we can maybe at least kinda see why “Whom Gods Destroy” casts Garth as an inmate in a mental asylum. It's trying to say that anyone who holds to the kind of megalomaniacal and imperialist beliefs Garth does must be crazy. This is not an especially effective statement, obviously, largely because the episode unnecessarily weds its anti-imperialist sentiment to a rather staggeringly awful bit of normalization, but the basic claim is a solid one and worthy of further development. On a related note, this also adds more nuance to the scene where Garth uses his shapeshifting skills to impersonate Kirk. On the surface this seems like an eye-rolling return to a really tired cliche from the first season (the evil Kirk duplicate), especially as the rest of the episode has an aggravatingly stock pulp structure. But if Garth is supposed to be what Starfleet gone bad looks like, this suddenly becomes more interesting. Despite taking his visage, Garth really isn't in the vein of characters like the android Kirk of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” or even the roles William Campbell played. Garth isn't a Dark Mirror of Kirk, he's actually more of a Dark Mirror of Star Trek-He embodies not only the concepts of the frontier and manifest destiny, but the dangerous egotism of any one individual (or worldview) declaring themselves absolute ruler...and an ideal to aspire to.

And further, Garth is an incredible character. Steve Ihnat is an unbelievably charismatic and crowd-pleasing presence, delivering a memorably twisted and over-the-top performance that effortlessly (and hilariously) shifts between the character's mania and dementia while just eating everything in sight. It's a masterpiece of late-stage Star Trek ham-and-cheese that is consistently and laudably entertaining and is everything “For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky” wasn't. In fact, the only thing more enjoyable than Garth is Yvonne Craig's Marta, who is amazing, and manages to actually steal the show from Ihnat. Craig, fresh off her stint as Batgirl on the Adam West Batman show, plays Marta as delightfully unhinged and psychotic, literally dancing around the other prisoners with a deliberately exaggerated flair. The scene where she and Garth have an overplayed shouting match of a debate over whether or not Marta actually wrote the complete works of William Shakespeare and her wonderfully medium aware declaration that since Kirk is her lover this means she is obligated to kill him are sublimely elegant works of comic perfection and actually made me laugh out loud. As a matter of fact, I'm going to come right out and say it: Marta blows Batgirl out of the water and is prime evidence that even when it's struggling Star Trek is still capable of outclassing its competition if it plays its cards right.

I only wish I could say all of this comprised a better episode. As entertaining as all the various elements and ideas in “Whom Gods Destroy” might be, the whole is not greater than the sum of them. The episode torpedoes itself from the beginning with is tired structure, lazy self-plagiarism and unacceptable attitudes towards mental health patients. There is a great episode you could make out of the various disparate elements here, but it's not an episode I think Star Trek at this stage of its life was probably capable of making. Even so though, there's something to be said about the arc the series has taken this year: Just last year Star Trek was on the whole a show that wildly swung between the extremes of retrograde garbage and progressive, idealistic brilliance. What we've seen in the third season is a show that largely seems to have its head and heart in the right place, it's just staffed by people who have their hands tied by a number of factors in a number of different directions such that the day-to-day production is kind of spectacularly incompetent. This isn't an *amazing* position to be in (as what's going to happen in eight weeks sort of retroactively proves), but it does seem like evidence Star Trek has finally figured out what it wants, and needs, to be.

It's just too bad it's only happening now.

“Between good sense and good taste...”: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

"It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for."

Personally, I've never been drawn to the idea of casually “marathoning” a television show. The idea of spending days locked inside watching every single episode of some TV show sounds to me like some heretofore unknown circle of Dante's Hell. I've never felt the need to be completionist about television because I've always understood the realities of day-to-day, 'round the clock production inevitably mean not every episode is going to be a classic, and I see no need to force myself to sit through obvious misfires in what's supposed to be my downtime.

Now for a project like this I do, of course, have to watch every episode, or at least almost every episode, because the point here is to get a relatively comprehensive understanding of the history and evolution of Star Trek. But if I were to just watch this show casually, I'd have no hesitation to skip over huge swaths of it because frankly the idea of watching “The Paradise Syndrome”, “Elaan of Troyius” or “Space Seed” again is the antithesis of entertaining to me. My point being I was long under the perhaps mistaken assumption that other people might have a similar viewpoint to mine here, so whenever I've been asked by someone to introduce them to a show, I almost always give them a truncated episode list of recommendations instead of flopping a twelve-disc DVD box set on their table. I figure if a friend, who presumably shares at least some of my taste and habits, is asking my advice on Star Trek they're not likely to find “A Private Little War” any more enjoyable or engaging than I did. So, when a few years back my sister wanted to get into the Original Series, of which she had no prior familiarity, I gave her a crash course on the show, and “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” was the place I suggested she stop.

I hadn't seen the Original Series in quite awhile when I made that list, and were I to do it again today I would have done a number of things differently: I'd have taken one or two episodes out and put a great deal more in (mostly from this season, interestingly enough), so apologies for that if you happen to be reading. I'm not sure if I would still have put the cutoff at this episode, because I have not, as of this writing, seen the last few episodes of the third season, though I at least feel I'd be justified in calling it quits here if I were so inclined (and yes, don't worry, we'll see the old lady all the way through “Turnabout Intruder” to port, no matter how painful it might be). “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” marks a number of endings and lasts of its own: It's the last really iconic episode of the Original Series, mostly due to Bele and Lokai, though there's something to be said about the art design on “The Cloud Minders”, I suppose. It's also the final episode Bob Justman worked on, walking away from the producer position he'd held since “The Cage”, and Gene Coon's final story contribution to not just this show, but to all of Star Trek.

I'm going to have a lot more to say about Justman and Coon later on, in particular Coon, as Justman at least gets to come back (along with D.C. Fontana and Dave Gerrold) for the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the meantime, let's talk a bit about the episode at hand. “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” concerns the interception of a stolen shuttlecraft by the Enterprise, in the middle of a mission to deliver a much needed cure for a devastating plague. The shuttlecraft was stolen by an alien named Lokai, who is on the run and seeking political asylum. Moments later, his pursuer, Bele, appears (through an invisible one-way starship that disintegrates as soon as it transports its crew to another location, in one of the most stunningly and painfully cheap sequences in the entire franchise), demanding Kirk turn Lokai over, alleging him to be a mass-murderer who he's been pursuing for fifty thousand years. Both claim to be from Cheron, a planet unknown to the Federation at the opposite end of the galaxy, and are products of a centuries-long programme of institutionalized segregation and oppression of Lokai's people (who are white on the right side) by Bele's people (who are black on the right side).

So a parable about racism then. This seems like a logical and straightforward thing for Star Trek to be doing in 1969, although the fans astonishingly seem to disagree with me: Both The A.V. Club and the normally reliable and respectable Mark A. Altman pan this episode for being “too heavy-handed” and “obvious”, which just about makes me want to abandon this whole ridiculous endeavour right now and throw myself out of a third-story window. I do concede “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” has serious problems, however: It's nowhere near as good as I remember it being, but the reasons it falls apart has nothing to do with how “heavy handed” it is. For one, the statement “apartheid and the reconstruction-era Southern United States were very, very bad” (because that's pretty much the society Bele's people built on Cheron) is not a claim one should be subtle and restrained about. Certainly doing straight allegories of anything, not just institutionalized racism, is almost always a bad idea, because inevitably fiction writers aren't familiar enough with the historical and cultural factors that lead to such deplorable states to make an intelligent observation about them (especially if they're working on a television timetable), but the larger problem here is that “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” becomes just about the worst possible story about racism you can think of.

The fundamental problem is that there is simply no way to argue Lokai is in any way in the wrong. This is the most shining and perfect example of false equivalence and the Golden Mean fallacy this side of FOX News. Kirk spends the entire episode making bombastic speeches about how he's in charge of what happens on the Enterprise, how the Federation is the authority in this part of the galaxy and how pointless and self destructive hatred is, making him sound the most gratingly macho he has since the first season. In “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, the Enterprise crew goes out of its way to try and stay apolitical and above things, stunned at how much hatred Bele and Lokai have for one another over irrelevant details, as if racial hatred simply springs out of a vacuum. Racism developed on Cheron the exact same way it does on Earth: By one group of people attaining power and lording it over others they personally deem inferior and easy to control. Then, the oppressed developed an altogether rational and predictable loathing of their oppressors, and, determined to take their destiny and dignity into their own hands, strike back. Despite literally everything Spock says in this episode, every single action Lokai takes is perfectly logical, but the episode doesn't want us to side with him. Instead, he's portrayed as a charismatic, populist manipulator who sends people to die in his name for a pointless cause, which is wrong on just about every level I can conceive of, and probably some others I haven't yet.

The one criticism it is possible to level at Lokai is a problematization of his violent tactics. He is a very firm believer in vigilante justice and actively calls for the death of Bele and anyone who sides with him. I, like many radical leftist anarchists, am a bit ambivalent about the concept of violent revolution. I tend to be of the belief systems of oppression come about due to structures of power and how power tempts people to make choices that privilege themselves over others. Likewise however power structures are only sustained by people choosing, ether consciously or unconsciously, to submit to them. Some might feel that this is indeed the proper natural order of things, but I'd wager the vast majority simply are brought up to believe this type of unequal arrangement is simply “the way things are”. In the words of several of my estimable colleagues, this is “the banality of evil”, as it were. Though there are many willfully evil people, there are also people who do evil not aware that what they're doing is evil, or without the agency to do anything else. Killing these sort of people accomplishes nothing as the underlying system remains unchanged, and Kirk is right to point this out, but “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” doesn't go anywhere near as far as it needs to in this area: What it needed was a scene encouraging revolutionary voluntary noncompliance as a possible solution to Lokai's problem. Instead, the episode depicts the Enterprise crew preferring to remain disconnected and above things and to paper everything over with smug platitudes about “senseless violence”.

In an effort to spare Gene Coon, not just because I want to fawn over him at the end of this post but because his actual involvement in this episode was minimal at best, this really wasn't his idea. Coon pitched the story that would eventually become this episode back in the first season and while Gene Roddenberry liked it, the network didn't. Fast forward two years, however, and Star Trek was nearing the end of its lifespan and out of scripts. Knowing the show was at this point just looking for anything they could dig up and throw out to fill out the last bit of the episode quota, writer Oliver Crawford found Coon's original pitch and built this script around it. Certainly the finished product simply doesn't sound like Coon: Even as recently as “Wink of an Eye” he was demonstrating a far more nuanced conception of utopia and sense of sociopolitical patterns than anything we get here. Even Crawford wasn't responsible for the half-moon cookie aliens, though: Director Jud Taylor suggested that look, and Gene Coon's original pitch mentioned a literal devil pursuing and tormenting a literal angel, which would perhaps have driven home Coon's intended political subtext a wee bit stronger.

And that's as good a segue as any into my farewell to two of Star Trek's greatest foundational figures. Bob Justman was involved with the franchise from literally the very beginning. He and Herb Solow were as important in launching Star Trek as Gene Roddenberry. While Roddenberry came up with ideas and put his name on everything and D.C. Fontana handled the parts of the production to do with scripts and story pitches (getting to a point where she would have to singlehandedly rewrite every submission that crossed her desk) it was Justman who had to bear the brunt of the day-to-day nuts-and-bolts television-making stuff. He was the one who had an eye on the budget and oversaw every single production cast change, being the guy who had to do the dirty work of hiring and firing people. And, of course, he was the only original creative figure to carry through to this season, for which took on the additional duty of co-producer from “Spectre of the Gun” to now, essentially becoming Star Trek's showrunner for the majority of the third season. As I mentioned above, we're not saying goodbye to Justman forever quite yet, but it is a somber feeling knowing the show has devolved to a point where even he has to walk away from it.

We are, however, saying goodbye forever to Gene Coon, who soured on Star Trek so bitterly after “Bread and Circuses” he didn't even want to come back for Star Trek: The Animated Series despite D.C. Fontana personally requesting he join her writing staff, thus becoming one of the extremely few creative figures from the Original Series not to make the transition to the sequel show. Coon died not long afterward of lung cancer, which tragically meant he was unable to return for either Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. That this, a mediocre and not especially effective pantomime of his most personal themes and ideas (the episode even has Kirk come right out and say he and his crew are the Federation's “best representatives”, which couldn't misread Coon any more completely if it tried), is the note on which he has to bow out of the franchise for good has got to be one of the cruelest jokes in the history of television.

What else is there to say about Gene Coon than what I've already said? This is the man who created Starfleet, the Federation, the Klingons and the Prime Directive and problematized each and every one of them. This is the man who was consistently arguably the best writer in the entire Original Series, regularly turning out some of the show's most imaginative, creative, challenging and thought provoking stories. This is the man who wrote “Arena”, “The Devil in the Dark”, “Bread and Circuses” and “A Piece of the Action”. It was Coon's tenure as producer that saw scripts from Robert Bloch, Paul Schneider, Harlan Ellison and Dave Gerrold. Coon was the one who encouraged Dave Gerrold to submit “The Trouble With Tribbles” and walked with him step-by-step in transforming his original submission into a story that became an instant classic. It was under his tenure that D.C. Fontana became story editor and got “Journey to Babel” made. Gene Coon was the one who got John Meredyth Lucas the job as Coon's own successor, and Lucas' tenure boasts probably the greatest run of classics and mini-classics in the entire series.

Gene Coon is the man William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy emphatically refer to as an unsung hero. Gene Coon was the man who helped make Star Trek Star Trek.

Gene Coon gave Star Trek its heart and soul.