“And you claim these words as your own”: The Conscience of the King

"Let your indulgence set me free."

A flash of a dagger, and someone lies dead. The guilt-wracked murderer wonders if all the oceans could wash the blood from his hands. Not long afterward we learn the slain person was King Duncan and we're watching a performance of Macbeth. But then the camera cuts to a Shakespearean actor dressed in a bright yellow jumper commenting on the performance while the man next to him rambles on about somebody named Kodos the Executioner. Somehow this is supposed to be a science fiction show, somehow this is supposed to be Star Trek. But it is in truth another play.

This is an episode about performativity-It's about people playing roles and how the kinds of roles we play change throughout our lives and how each role only reveals a snapshot of one facet of a person at one point in time. That's the thing nobody in the story manages to understand, however: Kirk wants to extract justice; he wants to be able to prove Anton Karidian is *really* Kodos under an alias. By contrast, Lenore is hoping to erase all historical trace of Kodos by killing off those who had seen him, thus forcing people to see her father as Anton forever and always.

But the truth of the matter is the Actor is both Anton and Kodos. One is not more real than another, they're just two different roles the same man has played at two different points in time. As characters are by definition more flat that real people, each role can only reflect one specific aspect of his personality, and even then they can only reflect how they exist at the specific time the Actor is playing that particular role. As Kodos, he made the decisions he thought were justified when he was ruler of Tarsus IV. As Anton his worldview has changed and regrets the actions he took as Kodos and hopes to move beyond them. Despite what Kirk and Lenore want, he can't be only one for them. He has to be everything at once. Incidentally, this is as good as the show has ever been at depicting human nuance and complexity: There are no more White Hats and Black Hats here, only people trying to make the best choices they can in the present moment, and that alone makes it astonishingly progressive for its time.

The theatrical theme is everywhere in “The Conscience of the King”, and an argument could be made it's almost too heavy-handed: There's the title, a straight-up reference to Hamlet, which is the same play the Karidian Players wind up performing for the Enterprise crew. The teaser sequence with the Macbeth show is just about the most obvious bit of foreshadowing Barry Trivers could have come up with, and Lenore speaking almost entirely in Shakespeare quotes and allusions makes General Chang in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country look subtle and understated. Indeed, the entire episode itself bears some pretty overt similarities to Hamlet, featuring a guilt-ridden leader, his mad daughter and the exposure of his past during a stage show. But Trivers has a bit more going on here than might be immediately obvious, I feel: “The Conscience of the King” doesn't just reference Hamlet, by its very nature it's technically a performance of it. This is Barry Trivers' and Gene Coon's adaptation of Hamlet in a Star Trek context, and it's playing with the tropes of theatre in an attempt to explore the show's performativity through recursive metaphor. Nor matter how you look at it, that's a pretty damn clever, and bold, move for their first and second scripts, respectively.

This has quite a few really interesting ramifications, the first of which is that this is the absolutely perfect environment for William Shatner. As a Shakespearean actor himself, he's able to bridge the gap between the diegetic and extradiegetic plays, something which Shatner duly and exquisitely commits himself to. Kirk, like the Actor, is explicitly a Shakespeare character here, and in a world where we know Nicholas Meyer's Star Trek exists, it's difficult to understand how utterly weird this would have been in 1966. There is absolutely nothing in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, or indeed what we've seen of Coon's so far, that would give anyone the impression Shakespearean drama is something the show should be doing. But here it is, and this marks another real turning point for the franchise: This doesn't mean Star Trek is going to be popping off into other people's stories and mucking about on a regular basis, this isn't Doctor Who, but it does mean Coon has made a fairly decisive move toward shifting what Star Trek is about.

We're still zipping about on space patrol (and indeed Kirk even uses that word in this episode), but what's different now is how that's depicted. Roddenberry played the premise extremely straight, which is most clearly noticeable in “The Cage”: He really, genuinely wants us to take this show about the Space Air Force bopping about and teaching people about Right and Wrong seriously. But with “The Conscience of the King”, Coon is treating Star Trek as a staged theatrical drama. That's not to say Coon is poking fun at the show, but he does seem to be depicting it as a kind of nested artifice that everyone involved is at least partially aware of: Put another way, where previously we had Shatner, a campy RSC actor, queering up a tight-laced Hollywood version of science fiction, we now have under Coon Shatner the RSC actor starring in a *play* about science fiction concepts that's starting to become aware of its performativity, boundaries and limitations. And naturally we introduce this with the gravitas of Shakespeare, who was known in part for his grandiose historical epics about war, tragedy and the human condition. “The Conscience of the King” is far from the definitive statement on this of course; it's at times tentative and clunky and everything it's trying to do is going to be done better by Nicholas Meyer in the 1980s and 1990s, but the existence of episodes like this is what's going to allow Star Trek to eventually become what Meyer crafts it into.

This episode also happens to be Ron Moore's favourite episode of the Original Series. Moore is going to become an extremely important creative figure once we reach the 1980s, serving as a kind of combination of head writer and script editor during Michael Piller's tenure on Star Trek: The Next Generation before going on to become supervising producer under Ira Steven Behr on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and becoming the creator of and showrunner for Battlestar Galactica. We'll return to Moore when it's his time, but given this is his favourite episode I figured it'd be a good idea to see what he has to say about it:

“I liked the backstory of Kirk as a young man caught up in a revolution and the nightmarish slaughter by Governor Kodos. I liked the Shakespearean overtones to the episode as well as the use of the plays themselves. And I absolutely loved Kirk in this episode – a troubled man haunted by the shadows of the past, a man willing to lure Karidian to his ship under false pretenses, willing to do one of his more cold-blooded seductions on Lenore, willing to fight with his two closest friends, and risk his entire command in the name of justice. Or was it vengeance? Kirk's aware of his own lack of objectivity, his own flaws to be in this hunt for a killer, but he cannot push the burden away and refuses pull back from his quest to track down Kodos no matter what the cost. It also has some of my favorite lines in TOS. The scene with Spock and McCoy in Kirk's quarters is one of the series' highlights. The brooding tone and the morally ambiguous nature of the drama fascinated me and definitely influenced my thinking as to what Trek could and should be all about.”

I like Moore a lot as a writer but I also frequently disagree with him, and his analysis of this episode is a good summary of how our perspectives differ. Moore focuses a lot on Kirk's inner turmoil and the darkness he keeps buried. He loves the idea that a basically good man would go to such lengths in this kind of situation. What Moore likes, especially later on in his career, is to see how far he can push characters, and in particular characters who represent ordinary, mundane people, before they break. When I look at the theatrical symbolism of “The Conscience of the King”, by contrast, I'm immediately drawn to its more subtle oversignification and the fact this pushes Star Trek closer to metafiction. I tend to gravitate more towards ideas, symbols, and ideals. This will be a theme we will keep having to return to.

In terms of “The Conscience of the King”, taken on its own it isn't always as successful as one perhaps wishes it could be. I personally would have enjoyed a more overt connection between the recursive plays: Approaching it from the sort of perspective I do it's hard not to wish for some really creative video editing flourish that explodes the show outward and the theatrical trappings are typically used more as blunt symbols and similes then a recursive meta-narrative. This isn't quite language magick yet, and while that's a little disappointing, it's also silly to expect Star Trek of all shows to do Alan Moore before Alan Moore did Alan Moore. For 1966 this is more than sufficient, it's utterly daring and praiseworthy. To top it off we finally get the chance to revisit to the scathing critique the show delivered itself in “Balance of Terror”: Lenore explicitly calls Kirk Caesar here. Granted, this is partially because she was hoping to play Brutus, but the indictment of Kirk, and thus Star Trek, as an empire builder is definitely there as well and it still stands.

Probably the biggest weakness of this episode though is the handling of the supporting cast: Bruce Hyde is back as Kevin Thomas Riley, but in name only. Hyde auditioned for the part of Lieutenant Robert Daikan, the only other surviving person to have seen Kodos' face and thus fueled by vengeance over the death of his family. When the producers realised he had already been in Star Trek, they renamed the character at the last second. Hyde is delivers a predictably rousing performance, but it's not at all in keeping with the person we saw in “The Naked Time”. Spock and McCoy are put in the curious position of being shafted by the story despite having major roles in it: Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley are very strong as always, but their primary role here is to watch out for and be supportive of Kirk and keep him grounded. It's exactly what we expect them to do, but that's actually the problem: Nimoy and Kelley don't seem to have gotten the memo and feel like they're still stuck on the old show. Compared to Hyde, Shatner, Arnold Moss (the Actor) and Barbara Anderson (Lenore), who are very obviously relishing the chance to do a Shakespearean Space Epic and just running wild with it, Nimoy and Kelley feel a bit too, well, Star Trek. That said, I do agree with Moore that the scene in Kirk's quarters is exceptionally well done and a sign of things to come.

Then there's the issue of Grace Lee Whitney, or, to be more precise, the conspicuous absence of Grace Lee Whitney, who appears in one scene as an extra on the bridge and then never again. By the way, that's also her last scene in Star Trek, making her the first proper character to be written out. Or actually no, she's not written out: She's unceremoniously dropped from the show and then promptly forgotten about, which can't really be seen as anything other than an insult to someone who was supposed to be playing a main character. What makes this all the more infuriating is there was apparently a time Whitney was pegged as the third star after Shatner and Nimoy, and Roddenberry conceived of Janice Rand as someone who Kirk would come to see as a trusted advisor. But one of Desilu's first decisions was to drop Rand because they wanted Kirk to have a new love interest every week, a decision made easier by Whitney's unfortunate drug and alcohol addiction issues (which were of course made significantly worse by her being sexually abused by two members of the production team two days before she was fired).

Although the franchise finally attempts to make reparations to Whitney by making Rand a reoccurring character in the Original Series movies (long, long after the point at which that would have been needed) this situation without doubt has to go down as one of the blackest marks in the history of Star Trek. While Whitney is far from the only person who's going to be royally screwed by the show (she's not even, depressingly, the only woman who was told she was going to be one of the show's stars to be put in this position) I have a hard time coming up with someone who actually got screwed *worse*. And it's even more of a shame because it sullies what is otherwise one of the very best episodes the show has done yet. Star Trek has come a long way, but it's still not safe or stable, and it's still a very long way from being something we can enjoy with a clear conscience.

And with that the curtain closes. The play is over and we've taken our bows. Time for me to become someone else again.

“Listen to it...The sound of children playing...”: Miri

That's not right!

OK, let's get this out of the way right off the bat: “Miri” is pretty terrible. Its central concept, while interesting, is basic and stretched far too thin, it's padded to the point whole dialog exchanges and entire scenes are repeated almost verbatim, its pacing is excruciating, it has behind-the-scenes problems that will culminate in Grace Lee Whitney getting fired and it has a someone who looks like a 15-year old falling in love with Captain Kirk (even if she does turn out to be over 300) and as a result this is an episode nobody is especially fond of. In spite of all that, however, it *is* a landmark moment in the history of Star Trek, because this is the first episode overseen by new producer and showrunner-in-all-but-name Gene Coon.

Coon is one of the great unsung heroes of Star Trek and probably the most criminally marginalized person in the entire history of the franchise. Coon's influence on Star Trek, or at least the Star Trek everyone likes to pretend existed, cannot be overstated: Not to put too fine a point on it, but if there's something you remember liking about the Original Series that didn't evolve in some way from “The Cage”, chances are it was Coon's idea. The fact of the matter is the lion's share of the utopianism and progressive idealism Star Trek is so frequently praised for comes not from Gene Roddenberry, but from Gene Coon. I don't want to completely dismiss Roddenberry, mind: He and Coon seemed to generally work well together and one of Roddenberry's virtues was his willingness to listen to every idea and piece of constructive criticism people gave him. Granted, he was more likely than not to go ahead and do whatever the hell he wanted anyway, but he'd at least listen to you. However, the problems come when people, especially Coon, would give Roddenberry particularly good ideas that caused him to see things in a totally new way and then Roddenberry would then turn around and claim it was his idea all along. This will prove to be a troublingly reoccurring motif.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is Coon's first episode and I'd like to take some time to try and tease out a little of how his style contrasts with Roddenberry's. Unfortunately, Coon is given a right turkey of a story to work with here so the show isn't doing him any favours right from the start, but even so there are signs things might just be starting to change. For one, this is the first time the Enterprise seems to be doing something other than running errands or law enforcement: It's not entirely clear what it was up to before receiving the distress signal, but the crew were clearly not on another mission beforehand. And on top of that, the whole teaser and first few scenes are absolute corkers: The Enterprise stumbles upon a planet that is inexplicably an exact clone of Earth and, once the away team beams down, it seems dead except for a group of disturbingly feral children who seem to haunt the town, always hidden just out of sight and chanting in warped versions of playground games.

These opening moments alone are filled with more ideas and imagination than the entirety of the series up to this point: There is a real, palpable sense of mystery as to the setting and, more to the point, for the first time the crew know no more about it than we do-The Enterprise isn't checking out an Earth colony, which, while operating in ways the audience isn't familiar with given it's a futuristic setting is still something the crew knows as it's part of their culture, this is a genuinely strange and unfamiliar world they have to learn the rules of along with us. Of course “Miri” scuttles all this halfway through Act 1 where we find out exactly what killed off all the adults and how to deal with it (and it never does explain why this planet is a clone of the Earth) but even so this is still bolder and more creative than the show has ever been before.

These scenes are the first steps toward moving Star Trek away from being a show about running around policing people and telling them what to believe into one about going out, exploring and making contact with new people and new places. They're tentative steps in that direction, but they're clearly recognisable as steps regardless. If only the rest of the episode was as clever: The mystery is solved immediately and it takes Kirk, Spock and McCoy a tortuously long time to do anything about it. We still have Roddenberry-era gender politics as Miri gets catty and jealous of Rand (I suspect Rand is meant to feel the same, but Whitney does not come anywhere near close to selling it, although to be fair she had somewhat legitimate reasons not to. Still, seeing her acting deteriorate is sad). This is somewhat mitigated by Miri herself being an interesting and likable character, and she manages to work much better as an exploration of puberty than Charlie Evans was ever able to.

It's perhaps possible to read the Life Prolongation Disease as a metaphor for puberty's confusing nature, although I think Adrian Spies probably intended it more as a critique of the glorification of a kind of fairy tale interpretation of childhood and the fanciful desire some have to remain children forever (indeed Rand even gets a line espousing the charms of a permanent childhood, after which Kirk tells her she may want to rethink that). If this is the angle Spies was aiming for it's a laudable one: An unnatural romanticization of children is one of the Victorian era's defining cultural traits and has become a pillar of Westernism (and to an often detrimental extent) ever since. Indeed, the whole idea that children are by definition pure, innocent, honest, asexual beings who are special as they have been unsullied by the world's natural, sinful reality can be seen as an artificial Victorian construction based around a reductive interpretation of the New Testament, and Miri, both the character and the episode, are a sufficient refutation of this idea. Star Trek choosing to criticize this cultural tenet would firmly ally it with the leftist counterculture for the first time.

Although Miri's blossoming sexuality is portrayed as a sign of her maturation, it's something the show unambiguously supports: Kirk at once encourages Miri to grow up, but is gravely concerned for her because he knows that's a death sentence on this planet, causing him to redouble his efforts to find a cure. And William Shatner is gangbusters at this, showing more compassion and love for Miri than he has at any other time for any other character on the show before now. I'm sure he was helped by being a father himself and having two of his own three daughters on set as extras on this episode, and his performance is as heartfelt and beautiful as it is hyper-caricatured and scenery devouring. Of course, this episode runs smack into some more uncomfortable Freudian implications by having Miri be attracted to Kirk, but at least Shatner has the decency to portray Kirk's love as purely platonic surrogate parental concern. I also really appreciate how Kirk's affection for Miri contrasts so perfectly with his awkwardness in dealing with Charlie Evans in “Charlie X”: It seems clear Kirk is much more comfortable taking on this role with women than with men, thus implying he's more of a friend to female culture. This is the most feminist Kirk has been since his first appearance.

But the frustrating thing is this still isn't enough. Spies' script doesn't go anywhere with this idea, or any of these ideas for that matter, bewilderingly thinking the most interesting aspect of the story is watching Kirk, Spock and McCoy kill time in a bombed-out doctor's office waiting for the plot to progress to the point where they're allowed to discover the vaccine. Coming from a modern perspective, it's also really tempting to hope for Kirk, Rand and McCoy to serve as representatives of some sort of idealized, leftist uptopian version of adulthood for Miri to aspire towards, especially in contrast to the deranged monsters adults become on her planet. But the episode is sadly not designed to do this, in no small part due to the fact we're still a ways off from the point where the Enterprise crew can first actually conceivably be called ideals. There are a ton of really intriguing ideas worth pursuing here, but Spies follows through on exactly none of them: All we're left with are half-formed thoughts and glimpses of meaning. As an actual piece of television “Miri” is just a mess of potentialities and implications and doesn't have any desire to pick up any of the threads it leaves strewn about on the floor.

Nevertheless, the fact we can have this kind of discussion about the show's ethics, even if they don't work, is strong evidence something is different now. It doesn't really matter, in this regard, that Adrian Spies never wrote for Star Trek again thanks to Roddenberry finding this episode below-par: Gene Coon's fingerprints on it indicate his version of the show is promising and something it might be worthwhile for us to follow. Coon took a script that really wasn't going to work all that well and injected it with a genuine sense of mystery and imagination, not to mention has begun cleaning up the show's philosophy to be something a bit more nuanced and radical. Right now it looks like bringing him on was one of the best moves Star Trek has made to date. Now all that remains is to see where else Gene Coon will take it.

“We have an incredible ability to make people less than us”: Dagger of the Mind

Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor! What do I look like, a cat burglar?

We began in a zoo and we end in an insane asylum.

While certainly not a finale in any traditional sense, “Dagger of the Mind” is an ending of sorts, being the last episode of Star Trek produced solely by Gene Roddenberry, who decided to essentially step down as showrunner after this episode was filmed. Contrary to popular belief, Roddenberry was only ever significantly involved in operating and managing Star Trek for these first eleven episodes. He was never really put in this exact position again, and his influence on all subsequent Star Trek is somewhat dialed back. This doesn't mean, I hasten to add, that he's not relevant to future Star Trek-He very much is, but the role he plays is a different one than that of a hands-on, day-to-day showrunner. Starting next episode, Roddenberry will slip into the part he's actually far more comfortable in: An honourary executive producer who supervises things from a distance and vets ideas. From here on out, the actual creative decisions are on the whole made by other people; Roddenberry preferring to only get actively involved occasionally and veto things every once in awhile as he sees fit.

Since “Dagger of the Mind” arguably marks the end of Roddenberry's “purest” version of Star Trek (though I maintain the core work is and always will be nothing more and nothing less than “The Cage”) it seems appropriate to use this post to look back on what, exactly, the Roddenberry Star Trek actually is. I've spent a great deal of time trying to piece that together in the preceding essays, but this seems like the appropriate place to try and summarise and draw some conclusions. And it's fitting, as “Dagger of the Mind” is also one of the better executions of this structure: It doesn't redeem it, of course, at least not as a standalone text, (some combination of “The Corbomite Maneuver”, “Mudd's Women”, “The Enemy Within” and “Balance of Terror” has collectively shown that to be impossible) and it has unique problems all of its own, but it has a solid core concept worth engaging with.

Let's start with the plot first though, or rather the “moral”: Every Roddenberry-produced episode of Star Trek has had some explicitly didactic lesson it's trying to teach. “Dagger of the Mind” wasn't penned by Roddenberry himself, nor was it even a script Roddenberry took off someone else and completely rewrote in their name without telling them, but it does have one and it's an interesting one. Moving closer to the more complex areas travelled by “Balance of Terror” and away from overly simplistic things like “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and “we must control our emotions”, “Dagger of the Mind” takes a surprisingly candid, at least for the time, look at mental health facilities. Though the debate over ethical treatment of the mentally ill wasn't as open in 1966 as it is today, One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest had already been published earlier in the decade so there must have been some. Also, two years after this episode aired, CBS would run an expose on Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Spring City, Pennsylvania revealing the mistreatment and abuse mental patients suffered in it and institutions like it, so Star Trek doing an episode like this isn't entirely unheard of.

The idea behind the Neural Neutralizer is, naturally, a suitably disquieting one: It works by forcibly making patients forget unacceptable thoughts, memories and behaviours and replaces them with ones considered sociable and proper. This is a great idea to base a dystopian thriller around, because it touches on one of the biggest demons of Western society: The concept of “normalization”. Normalization is a word that gets bandied about a lot, and typically not without good reason, but it's also a word that does not mean what most people think it means. The pop interpretation of the phrase “to normalize” seems, at least to me, to be “to make normal”, and while that's technically true it also misses the majority of the nuanced critique the phrase carries with it.

See, the concept of what is “normal” is a particularly marginalizing, and peculiarly Western, idea. In Western cultures, “the normal” is interpreted as “the mean”, or “the average”, often conveyed visually by the famous bell curve. It's also Scientistic, as those on either extreme are seen as outliers that can be disregarded (especially if you happen to be unfortunate enough to fall into the “below average” category of your normal curve of choice). When we say something like rape culture or any other form of institutionalized sexism or misogyny is being “normalized”, we're not saying it's being glossed over and “made normal” when in truth it's not normal at all, we're saying the entire concept of “normal” is an artificial construct produced by the interaction of Western power structures that actively work to privilege some and exclude others unfairly and that this also works to disguise how unjust something like rape culture actually is.

The same is of course true for mental health issues: Those with certain mental conditions are seen as “abnormal” or “below average” and need to be “conditioned” and “acclimated” to function in “normal” society, even though no two people can seem to agree on what an “average”, “normal” person is supposed to look like (and those who can are most likely operating from the privileged position of some power relationship, whether they are aware of it or not or as an authority with a vested interest in keeping that power structure exactly the same). In that regard making the primary threat of “Dagger of the Mind” an institutionalized mental health medical system that reshapes people with “suitable” and “acceptable” thoughts and personalities that people outside the institution either don't know about or think is “in their best interests” is brilliant.

The only problem is it doesn't quite go far enough: The show's main problem with the Neural Neutralizer seems to be that Doctor Adams is basically cartoonishly evil and is using it to turn his patients into hypnotic slaves (which also brings me to the tangential point that this episode clearly has no idea how hypnosis works or that no hypnotist can actually make people do this sort of thing, but nobody in pop culture does either so singling Star Trek out here seems a bit unfair). Thankfully, Helen Noel does get a number of good scenes when she and Kirk are experimenting with the machine and she denounces it on the grounds that the emotions and memories it leaves people with are false and artificial, but she doesn't enough lines in this vein and one can't help but wish writer Shimon Wincelberg had followed up on this theme a little more.

Then we have the usual raft of Roddenberry-era concerns: Kirk and Spock seem altogether too shocked to find out Noel is a woman, she's by far the most gullible and obstinate person in the episode and it seems her fantasy is to be dramatically “swept off her feet” by Kirk, but compared to something like “Mudd's Women” and “The Enemy Within” this is peanuts. It also helps Noel is clearly a professional and nobody questions her credentials, competence and special expertise: Along with Uhura she's probably the best female character we've seen on the show so far and it's a shame we never see her again. That aside though, there's relatively little for me to actually complain about here, which is a nice change of pace.

Which leaves me with trying to sum up Roddenberry's tenure and make some statement about Star Trek under him. Although my core argument remains in my post on “The Cage” and my biggest criticisms of Roddenberry have been outlined already (that his micromanaging causes problems for the franchise on more than one occasion is a thread that begins here, not ends here) “Dagger of the Mind” is a decent showcase of what the show's become over the past two years, for good and bad. The Enterprise shows up to deliver a solid, yet simplistic moral (though it's not as blunt and shallow at this as it has been in the past) and is very clearly part of some interstellar police force (Adams' line about how people like Kirk are “just as naked without a gun as we are without our medkits” is telling, as is the fact that, just as in “The Cage”, the Enterprise is still running errands between Earth colonies). We have a noticeable amount of casual sexism, not outright misogyny, but things someone should have known better than to let through. We also have a tremendous amount of ham: William Shatner, of course, but also Morgan Woodward who plays Simon Van Gelder: He's so unbelievably crazed and over-the-top he apparently had to go home and recuperate for three days after filming wrapped. It's definitely a performance to see.

Then there's Leonard Nimoy as Spock, who delivers another wonderfully complex performance. This episode sees the debut of the famous Vulcan Mind Meld, and not only is it a delightful bit of mystical embellishment, the way the scene plays out is golden: It feels every bit as intimate and sacred as Nimoy says it is, and the way he and Woodward convey the shared minds effect is chillingly well done and actually quite lovely. It's Spock who has very easily asserted himself as the soul of the show by now: As fun to watch as Kirk is, everything that makes him memorable is solely due to William Shatner. Remove Shatner, and Kirk just becomes Jeffrey Hunter's Christopher Pike: A gruff, testosterone-charged military action hero.

But Spock's inner turmoil over balancing his Vulcan logic and human emotion seems like something Gene Roddenberry was fascinated by, especially given the fact Spock's role was originally intended for Majel Barrett's Number One. Perhaps counterintuitively though, this works better with Spock, not simply because Nimoy is sublime, but also because Number One was written from a place of ignorance about patriarchal hegemony: Had the role stayed with her, I very much believe this would have proven to be a distraction. Strange as it may seem, Spock allows for more interesting gender role fluidity: Setting Number One aside for a moment, it's worth bearing in mind the first person the very much symbolically sexual Mind Meld was used on was a man. Paradoxically, between William Shatner's camp and Leonard Nimoy's early, hesitant exploration of gendered issues Star Trek is indeed starting to pave the way towards a more open and liberated sexual discourse, but women are being left behind. It will be many, many more years before the franchise finally figures out how to bring them along.

Gene Roddenberry didn't give us a utopia or a series of ideals, at least he hasn't yet and won't by himself. What he's done instead is shown us some issues that were important to him and conveyed them in a way he felt would be exciting, entertaining and easy to swallow. His show betrays his positionality to an almost painfully obvious extent and he's not really an exceptionally good writer on the whole if we're being brutally honest, but his ideas aren't entirely misguided or unworkable either. The problem is literally every other aspect of the show aside from him is clawing at the walls, desperate to be allowed to grow into something bigger, grander and more beautiful. Roddenberry's own limitations, not only as a writer but in terms of his personality and experiences, are holding Star Trek back and keeping it from truly becoming great (or even consistently adequate for that matter). If anything is going to come of this, Roddenberry badly needs outside help. Thankfully, he's about to get it. It may turn out to be too little and too late for this particular show, but there's a way out of any cage and we'll find it in time.

Rise of the Machines: What Are Little Girls Made Of?

And here we have the blow-up doll division. They're like collectibles; you're supposed to find them all.

Only Star Trek would have the gall to do the exact same goddamn story twice in the same month.

Of course, me having to deal with “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” here is mostly my fault, a result of me deciding to follow the show roughly in production order. This episode was filmed after “Balance of Terror” but aired long before, the latter show being pushed several weeks back such that it aired with material produced under the next showrunner. Really though this actually fits: “Balance of Terror” has far more in common with that crop of episodes than it does with this one, which is pure Gene Roddenberry, down to him doing a last minute hectic rewrite that actually ran contiguous with filming as he felt the script was unworkable. Of course you know where this is going: We follow up the greatest episode in the entire Original Series with a third-rate rehash of every second-rate, half-baked concept the show's done to date. Another logic versus emotions debate? Yup. An evil duplicate of Kirk who fools the crew? You got it. Theiss Titillation Theorem? This episode gives us the poster child! Sexism that ranges from the mild to the straight-up blunt? Of course. Loads and loads of Majel Barrett? Do you even have to ask?

We're not quite back into “The Enemy Within” territory of awfulness with this one, though there are several moments that come close. No, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” just feels haggard, tired and spent, as if it's just halfheartedly going through the motions and re-covering old ground, which you might recognise as decidedly not the most healthy position for a show to be in ten episodes into its first season. So, not only do we have Roddenberry writing again, we don't even get Roddenberry at the top of his game. Delightful. One could argue I should go easy on this episode because of its tumultuous history: After all, Robert Bloch's original story was by all accounts never any good to begin with. One would be mistaken in making that argument. Poor quality at the start is a sign you should rethink the way you field story pitches, not the cue to give it to Gene Roddenberry and force it through production. That said, regardless of whether or not this episode *should* have been made (it shouldn't have), the fact remains it exists, I had to watch it and now I have to come up with something to say about it.

The only remotely interesting thing “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” adds to the very, very well-worn territory of logic debates and “what makes us human?” musings comes through what can only be described as drunkenly stumbling into personal identity theory. The core ethical debate of the episode is whether or not the androids actually are human. Korby seems to think that if the androids can “pass” as human that's enough and in fact argues they are superior because they are infinitely reparable and have superhuman strength. The key moment comes when Korby reveals he has discovered how to essentially upload someone's consciousness into an android body, and that's akin to crafting a superior version of oneself. This actually falls into some basic intro level personal identity theory, namely, a classic puzzle that is often posed to undergrad philosophy students. The conundrum goes something like this: If you were in a devastating accident of some sort that rendered you either a paraplegic or on the verge of death, but your brain was undamaged, and the technology existed to transplant your brain into a new, healthy body such that this duplicate would have the same memories, experiences and experiential identity (that sense of being within your body and experiencing the world through it) you do, would that new person be you? This is in fact the exact scenario Korby faces in this episode.

This being Star Trek, the show naturally makes a right mess of this. As someone who actually took personal identity theory as an undergrad and was given this same puzzle to work with, I can safely say the show doesn't have any idea how to handle this. The solution my professor gave us at the time, and one I'm inclined to agree with, is that no matter what your conception of the self, it actually doesn't matter whether the duplicate is “you” in the technical sense or not because the fact it has the same memories, personality and experiences things in the same manner you do means the duplicate is for all practical purposes you anyway and anything more is just tedious semantics (it may also be worth pointing out my professor was a Buddhist philosopher who didn't believe in free will or individuality either). But Roddenberry seems to think this is some horrible, dehumanizing thing, and we're never really shown any evidence that it is.

Kirk's primary objection seems to be that the androids, namely Andrea and Ruk, can be programmed, thus reducing them to unfeeling logic machines with no soul (well, that and the actually hilarious fear that the androids will rise up and overthrow their masters which not only made me literally laugh out loud from its blatant absurdity also means Roddenberry has gone and done Terminator 20 years early). But this is totally at odds with what we've seen from Roddenberry so far, who seems to on the whole favour distant logic to passionate emotion, or at the very least he does when it's dramatically convenient. Also, aside from this being a complete slap in the face to Spock, Kirk is also being incredibly facile here: Korby rightfully points out that Andrea and Ruk are constructed service drones built from the ground up to basically be computers, which is an entirely different thing than a human transplanted into an android body.

On top of that, the show can't even keep its own ethics straight, let alone Korby's: A big part of the climax involves Kirk “confusing” Andrea by displaying affection for her (alright, he does it by forcing himself on and sexually assaulting her) and pointing out to Ruk that he's acting out of vengeance, not orders to protect. This would seem to imply that the androids *are* in fact capable of human emotions and experiences, they just need to learn about them, so this invalidates basically everybody's arguments. Furthermore, the fact Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation is an android and nobody on that show (well, none of the regulars anyway) ever questions his sentience, experiential self or capacity to be human just makes me resent this episode all the more.

A saner objection for Kirk to raise might be concern that the androids have bodies that are built out of digital machines instead of being naturally occurring parts of the universe, but, as Captain Picard will also one day point out, human bodies are still machines of a sort: We're just machines built out of biochemistry instead of positronics. No matter which way you argue, however, the fact remains “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” is hinging its core ethics debate on wildly fantastic speculative future technology that places it about as far away from saying something remotely contemporary or relevant as it is possible to be. Even from a purely philosophical perspective instead of a futurist one, personal identity theory is a fun thought experiment, but I'm far more interested in the lived experiences of real people and material social progress and this episode has none of that.

What it does have is some solid acting from Majel Barrett, who clearly appreciates finally having a part of some significance to work with. She's good enough at conveying Chapel's conflicted affections for Korby we almost overlook the fact Chapel's presence here makes absolutely no narrative sense. The script writes her, and Barrett plays her, as still very much in love with Korby and the denouement shockingly seems to imply Chapel was ready to abandon her post on the Enterprise to live with him. But the last time we saw Chapel she was confessing her love for Spock (who she seems to have no feelings for in this episode at all) and gave no indication she was dealing with being engaged to someone she hadn't seen in a decade. Once again, the show gives Barrett a highly emotional scene she sells quite well, but gives it absolutely no context, history, development or follow-up.

On a different note, it is more than a little suspect that this script, which was predominantly written by Roddenberry, gives Chapel (Barrett) a complex love story with a man she swears she knows inside and out (which is admittedly there to sell the android plot) and than has her become immediately jealous and catty as soon as Andrea shows up (indeed, Korby even straight up says “I cannot love Andrea! There's no love there!” which is as hilariously on-the-nose as it is painful to watch). I was kind of hoping I could redeem Chapel's confusing and contradictory romantic aspirations by retroactively making her polyamorous, but thanks to her scenes with Andrea I can't. No, what this feels like to me is Roddenberry's and Barrett's relationship details slipping into the show, which is frankly nothing anybody really needs to or wants to see. As for the rest of the cast, William Shatner has settled into a groove and is just doing his job at this point. His job is to be a gloriously over-the-top ham sandwich, but we expect that of him now. Everyone else is either absent or barely gets any screentime.

“What Are Little Girls Made Of?” is tough to get too angry about. It's bad, but it was probably always going to be bad given the hectic behind-the-scenes situation during filming. Stress and sloppiness are no excuse for the ethical missteps it makes, of course-if anything that's even more reason to condemn it. But it's honestly not as bad in these areas as Roddenberry has been in the past, and it's frankly refreshing to finally have a script from him with which I can have a reasoned, academic disagreement instead of screaming incoherently until I pass out about how horrifically privilege blind it is. More to the point, we're rapidly approaching the end of Roddenberry's tenure as showrunner of Star Trek, and while some of these problems never quite go away they'll at least very soon cease to be quite as central to how the show works (we'll have some new problems to worry about, but one thing at a time here). And, if nothing else, this episode does give us some more of the show's iconic moments: Andrea is one of the most memorable characters in the Original Series, as is the penis-shaped rock Kirk uses to attack Ruk. If I've learned anything about this show, it's that setpieces like this will live on far longer than any philosophical questions it raises, or indeed my pillorying it for not being up to my standards.

"But I remember his words as though they were yesterday.": Balance of Terror

"I've just seen it happen too many times."

Finally.

After weeks of stumbling half-starts, frustratingly retrograde moves and absolutely awe-inducing spectacles of catastrophic, system-wide failure, we at last have the very first episode of Star Trek that can be unambiguously called an absolute masterpiece. “Balance of Terror” is an unmitigated triumph on all accounts and is exactly what the series needed to make up for the misfires of the past few episodes. In a bit of actually lovely irony, this still doesn't save this incarnation of the show. Not only does it not save it, it gives even stronger evidence that it should be killed off and retooled as quickly as possible: Far from redeeming the Star Trek we've been watching since “The Corbomite Maneuver”, everything that makes “Balance of Terror” work as well as it does is something that decisively proves Gene Roddenberry's original version of Star Trek is completely unworkable. We're nine episodes in and we already have the show's definitive deconstruction.

“Balance of Terror” is almost the inverse of “The Corbomite Maneuver”: While that episode went out of its way to glorify militaristic bravado and the chain of command, this one shows us in stark, terrible detail the tragic consequences of this way of thinking at a very intimate, personal level. Where Balok was an unseen Other throughout the majority of “The Corbomite Maneuver” before being revealed as friendly baby Clint Howard at the last minute, half of “Balance of Terror” is dedicated to the Romulan crew. We get to know each and every person on the Bird-of-Prey personally, especially Mark Lenard's commander, and their tired, beaten down and world-weary demeanor bleakly, and all too well, foreshadows their ultimate fate.

Ah yes, the Romulans. A reveal so historic it threatens to overshadow the rest of the episode (though perhaps not as much so as that of the Klingons will to their debut episode later in the season). As one of the pre-eminent alien cultures in Star Trek, it would be beneficial to spend some time talking about them, although in this sentence I've already touched on the first important thing about them: The Romulans are a culture, and that's a significant milestone for the series. Up 'til now, aliens in Star Trek have been portrayed as blunt metaphors for the show's moral-of-the-week: The Talosians are an extension of the Platonic cave theme of “The Cage”, Gary Mitchell was absolute power incarnate, Charlie Evans embodies the troubles of puberty and Salt Vampire was...a Salt Vampire. Or a buffalo. “The Man Trap” wasn't especially clear about that. Anyway, if they weren't straight metaphors, they were Deus Ex Machina: The Thasians exist primarily to provide a convenient way to get Charlie Evans off the Enterprise so he wouldn't blow it up. We don't get any sense of what their culture or lifestyle is. Balok is just an Other for Kirk to practice his manly command skills with, albeit one who happens to be friendly We get no idea of what the First Federation is like, though the design of the Fesarius is certainly imaginative.

But the Romulans are actual people, and within the span of one episode we learn pretty much everything we need to know about them. Firstly, and most obviously, the Romulans are the Roman Empire extrapolated into outer space. More to the point though, they're the Roman Empire past its pinnacle and entering into a decline: Though his crew seem eager to secure a Glorious Victory for their emperor, the commander himself seems from another age, openly questioning the value of imperialistic expansion, war for the sake of war and the cost in lives it demands. The Centurion sympathizes, but feels too bound by duty and tradition. The primary reason this works and the reason the Romulans are so memorable and easy-to-read is because the show gives us three different individuals (four if you count the subspace radio operator) and each one has a distinct personality: We see how the culture plays out across an actual group of people. What this means is that without really needing a bunch of exposition, “Balance of Terror” gives more depth and characterization to the Romulans than any episode of Star Trek has for its aliens-of-the-week before and, arguably, will after. There is absolutely no question why they get brought back.

But there's also another side to the Romulans' imperialism: “Balance of Terror” explicitly makes it clear the Romulan commander and Kirk are, for all intents and purposes, the same person and furthermore, that the Bird-of-Prey is just a reflection of Enterprise. There are numerous scenes where the two captains remark on how similar their thought process are (i.e. “that's what I would have done were I in his place”), how both are forced to work in dangerous, dehumanizing situations because they're at the behest of duty and circumstance and how neither desires to take the other's life because of how much they respect each other as equals.

The editing jumps back and forth between the Enterprise and the Bird-of-Prey, taking care to point out how each character has a compliment on the other side. The ensuing pointlessly destructive battle thus becomes a reiteration of an ancient scenario two groups of likable people are forced to act out against their will that prevents them from moving on to greater, happier things. Arguably the most moving scene comes in Act 3 as the Bird-of-Prey attempts to hide itself in a comet's tail: The commander gets a lovely line where he remarks on the comet's beauty, “shining in the dark”, before his crew presses him to explain its strategic merits. The majestic wonders of the universe must take a backseat to the mission. We're not explorers, we're conquerors, soldiers and policemen.

This is not an entirely original concept: Indeed, this episode is pretty much an exact shot-for-shot remake of the 1957 World War II movie The Enemy Below which concerned a US destroyer crew hunting down a German U-Boat (a fact which allegedly caused Harlan Ellison to flip out and refuse to speak to writer Paul Schneider). Certainly just taking a superficial look at both texts this seems obvious, and the Bird-of-Prey is a more than fitting stand in for a submarine with its small array of windows and cramped, self-contained bridge helping to craft an appealingly claustrophobic atmosphere. Indeed, it's the best bit of model work on Star Trek so far: With all due respect to legendary designer Matt Jeffries (and apologies to the generations of fans who will surely hunt me down for this remark), I never found the original Enterprise an especially inspiring bit of design. The Fesarius was provocative in a kind of Asimov Golden Age sense, but given how little of it we actually saw its effect is muted somewhat. The Bird-of-Prey is amazing though: Designer Wah Ming Chang gives us a truly evocative and iconic look, bringing together elements of raptors, rocket ships and flying saucers to produce something immediately distinctive and memorable.

But I'm going to make a bold claim here: “Balance of Terror” is actually a far more effective telling of this story than the movie on which it's based. Part of this is the acting; William Shatner, DeForest Kelley and Mark Lenard are all absolutely chilling, each one delivering what has got to be a career high water mark performance. But the bigger reason is the setting: In The Enemy Below the German U-Boat captain is shown to be in some sense “special” because he isn't a Nazi and is in fact quite hostile to Hitler's regime, he's just following orders and doing his job which makes him easier to compare with the destroyer captain. “Just following orders” has always been a flimsy excuse however: The Romulans are culturally obligated to valorize duty and glorious conquest and the crew of the Bird-of-Prey are just products of their time. It's much easier to sympathize with them than it is a bunch of Nazis. Furthermore, The Enemy Below is historical fiction, and in my view, this is a genre with a very noticeable limit on how emotionally compelling it can be.

I've never found the fictionalized past effective as a setting because the cinematic tradition's pretenses of realism at once require us to take it seriously as a work of representationalism while at the same time accepting it's weaving a yarn. Also, as history books are inevitably written by the “victors” (i.e. authority and hegemony) works of fiction based on them almost always wind up with a glorification of master narratives that inevitably marginalize certain viewpoints. Like, say, for example, the idea that the Europeans were the bold discovers of the Americas and thus “exploration” becoming equated with “European colonialism” when pretty much all historical evidence points to the Polynesians being familiar with the shores centuries beforehand but not settling them because they were already inhabited and the fact the ancient navigators were more interested in free exchange of goods and ideas and weren't imperialist assholes.

But as speculative fiction “Balance of Terror” doesn't have any of these problems, and what this also does is really highlight the theme of reiteration: What, exactly, makes the Romulans so very different from us? Yes, they crossed the Neutral Zone and launched an unprovoked attack against the Earth Outposts, but Stiles was also chomping at the bit to cross into Romulan space and exact vengeance on them for the pain his family endured during the Romulan War and one could imagine an alternate scenario where Earth made the fist move. No, if the commander and Kirk are the same, as are the Enterprise and the Bird-of-Prey, then so are the Romulan Star Empire and Earth Command.

Schneider is making an impossibly strong claim here, and I'll be honest: The fact this episode got greenlit under Gene Roddenberry is utterly shocking, Because “Balance of Terror” is nothing if not a gravely serious treatise on imperialism in all its forms and the devastating cost it extorts from everyday people and a definitive claim that Star Trek is absolutely imperialistic. The episode just revels in showing us the ugly reality of military bravado: The very first scene has Kirk about to preside over a wedding and he gives a heartfelt speech about how one of his “happier duties” is officiating shipboard weddings. All of a sudden he's interrupted by Uhura, who informs him Outpost 4 is under attack. The tone shifts suddenly and dramatically like a switch has been flipped. We get a painfully graphic scene of the outpost's complete destruction, with its last survivor dying in brutal agony live on camera before the entire bridge crew. As the Enterprise trails the Bird-of-Prey it slowly dawns on the crew a battle is imminent and unavoidable and Kirk informs the crew that should the conflict break out into war, in the eyes of his superiors they, him and the ship are all considered expendable. The show plays this as a tragedy with the music swelling dramatically and various low-angle shots of Kirk which, combined with Shatner's wonderfully expressive acting that displays every single iota of his exaggerated pensiveness and guilt-wracked consciousness, makes Kirk look for all the world for a man walking to his death.

Once the two ships finally do engage, we don't get some glorious and thrilling action set-piece where the Enterprise and the Bird-of-Prey exchange a manly amount of firepower, we get an excruciatingly drawn out cat-and-mouse game where the ships take turns brutally crippling each other and maiming each others' crew. First the classic scene where the Romulans turn out to be an offshoot of the Vulcans, immediately casting doubt onto Spock's loyalty and bringing Stiles' generations of pent-up trauma and rage to the surface (which results in one of Kirk's best lines so far: “Leave any bigotry in your quarters. There's no room for it on the bridge.”). Then the Enterprise picks away at the Bird-of-Prey with proximity blasts, each one tearing into the ship and causing the bridge to visibly collapse around the commander with each successive charge, ultimately resulting in the death of the centurion. The Bird-of-Prey responds by unleashing its plasma weapon, capable of vaporizing entire planets in one shot, which also saps its own energy reserves. As the bridge crew watch helplessly while the plasma blast overtakes them, Kirk and Rand get what they expect to be their first, last and only moment of intimacy as they hold each other close, fully prepared to face death together. The Enterprise gets lucky: It's out of range enough that it doesn't get hit by the blast at full power and is merely rendered immobile with its electrical systems overloaded, but that just as easily might not have been the case.

On the Bird-of-Prey the situation is considerably more dire. With the ship in critical condition and his officers perishing one by one, leaving him the sole survivor of his ship as much as the doomed Command Hanson was the last left alive on Outpost 4, we can not only see, but *feel* the moment where the Romulan commander realises his mission is forfeit and, more to the point, that he'll never see the skies of his home again. Mark Lenard plays this with absolutely gut-wrenching conviction, depicting a person fully ready to take his death and those of his crew upon himself, but deeply saddened that he has to. And with that we get the horrifically tragic emotional climax-The single greatest line in the episode, arguably all of the Original Series. As Kirk contacts the Bird-of-Prey and asks for their terms of surrender, the commander politely turns him down and, just before he destroys himself and his ship in a nuclear explosion, looks Kirk dead in the eye and says:

“I regret that we meet in this way. You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend.”

And then he's gone. The Enterprise has ended the battle and prevented another Romulan War, but Earth hasn't won anything. All this has accomplished is the deaths of four people who were no different from us: People just as motivated by a desire for peace, love and cooperation, but who, just like the crew of the Enterprise, were never allowed to find it in their lifetimes. And the cost on “our” side is no less devastating: In its closing moments “Balance of Terror” helpfully reminds us we began by interrupting a wedding as McCoy tells Kirk the only fatality among the Enterprise crew was Lieutenant Tomlinson in the phaser wing, who was supposed to get married today.

Kirk tries to console Angela Martine, Tomlinson's fiance by saying "It never makes any sense. We both have to know that there was a reason”. Martine briskly tells Kirk she's “fine” and walks away. She's not convinced. We're not convinced. Neither is Kirk. There was no reason for this, for any of this: There was no reason for the Praetor to order the Bird-of-Prey to attack the outposts and violate the nonaggression pact, there was no reason for Earth to demand a swift militaristic response from the Enterprise and there was certainly no reason for people to sacrifice their lives in a bloody, messy conflict to prove nothing except why it's pointless to fight this way at all. It's far beyond the days where empire building was considered the norm, if indeed those days ever existed.

Rome is in decline: It's time we stopped looking to the city on the hill for guidance and instead looked to it as a monument for the tragic, failed and misguided aspirations of generations long since departed.

"Your emotions make you weak!": The Naked Time

Genies and Ladlemen, presenting the Kevin Thomas Riley Revue...

An argument could be made that “The Naked Time” is the first “proper” Star Trek episode, at least to a certain number of fans. It's definitely the first truly memetic one: Everyone remembers Sulu fencing, Uhura's “sorry, neither” line (which is, admittedly, brilliant) Nurse Chapel professing her love for Spock and Spock's subsequent meltdown and Kirk's “I'll never lose you! Never!”. I've even read reports of Trekkers going full Rocky Horror Picture Show on this episode when it's screened at conventions, hissing along with the PSI 2000 virus and cheering at appropriate intervals, although being a lonely shut-in who spends their time marathoning Star Trek and flailing desperately at a keyboard into the wee hours of the morning I wouldn't have any hands-on experience with that.

This episode was also Bob Justman's choice for the premier on the grounds that the reduced inhibitions brought upon by the disease would be a good introduction to the characters and their personalities. Justman has a point and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the thinking that went into making an unapologetic remake of “The Naked Time” the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation twenty years later. There are issues with Justman's argument here I'll look at a little later, but I do agree with him in the broader sense that the strength of “The Naked Time” is in the fact it's an Actor Showcase Episode, which is a good thing to put near the beginning of a TV series. Before I get into that though, I want to square the plot away because, well, it has all the same problems every other Roddenberry-produced Star Trek episode does. It's not as bad in this regard as something like “The Corbomite Maneuver”, “Charlie X” or “The Enemy Within” so I don't need to go into the same level of detail as I did with those episodes, but it is worth mentioning if for no other reason then to point out how systemic a problem this has become for the show.

The PSI 2000 virus works by producing an effect similar to serious intoxication and strips the victim of all inhibitions. “The Naked Time” thinks this is absolutely disastrous. The Enterprise quite literally spirals out of control because the bridge crew can't keep their heads about them (a plot point telegraphed in the bluntest, most obvious manner known to mankind by Scott in the briefing room in the first act). It's clear the episode is treating this as another reiteration of the logic vs. emotions conflict, and given how upfront it's being about its symbolism we should take this as the definitive statement of Star Trek's position on the matter, or at least that of Star Trek under Gene Roddenberry. While there was some room for debate when Spock touts the superiority of logic in something like “Where No Man Has Gone Before” or “The Corbomite Maneuver” because it's Spock and we're always meant to be at least a little suspicious of him, there's really no other way to read the Enterprise screaming towards a fiery death because the crew can't control their emotional desires. Also, just for fun, count the number of times the word “irrational” is used in this episode, and keep in mind that there is a very strong Western patriarchal tradition of associating rationality and logic with men and irrationality and emotion with women and see where that leaves you.

In the “Mudd's Women” post I looked at the notion of sexuality as taboo and the subsequent fetishization of it in Western culture. “The Naked Time” has this in droves as well, most clearly observable in its really strange conception of romantic love. Kirk's attraction to Janice Rand, already broken beyond repair thanks to the appalling rape culture mess of “The Enemy Within”, is once again framed in terms of a forbidden fruit because of his responsibilities to the Enterprise (which, taken on its own, is of course only problematic if you're thinking purely in military terms) and now we have the added metaphor of Spock's inner turmoil over his human desire to express his emotions conflicting with his Vulcan desire to repress them. Now it seems we have Star Trek equating romantic love with blunt sexual drive, which is not only laughably puritanical but also really confusing: If the show is trying to make a point other than that we need to suppress each and every one of our emotions and strive to be unfeeling automaton taskmasters I can't find it.

But the plot and ethics of “The Naked Time”, eyeroll-inducing as they may be, are par for the course at this point. This episode also adds the troubling wrinkle of Joe Tormolen, whose “irrational” thoughts seem to be concern that humanity's unchecked expansion into space will damage or pollute it, which is a self-evidently valid and laudable thing to be worried about that the episode once again completely glosses over and disregards, but even that is still run of the mill Roddenberry Ethics. That said, this also ties into the other big thing to note about “The Naked Time”, which is that it's an Actor Showcase, and it's a good one to boot. It's easy to see how this could become an instant fan favourite: It's an absolute riot watching the actors freed from any kind of constraints just allowed to completely run wild with their characters in ways they'd never typically be allowed to.

As much fun as it is seeing George Takei run around the hallways shirtless brandishing a rapier, the immediate standout has got to be Bruce Hyde as Kevin Thomas Riley. Hyde's performance is completely at odds with something that's supposed to reduce inhibitions: Far from “giving in to baser instincts” as the script tells us the PSI 2000 virus makes people do, Hyde has Riley put on a one man musical comedy act, hijacking the Enterprise through engineering, declaring himself captain, belting out “I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” throughout the entirety of the last two acts over the loudspeaker and giving everyone ice cream. It is absolutely glorious. Spock gets some tossed-off line how Riley's actions are the result of his “longstanding belief” that he's “descended from Irish kings”, but this of course does not take at all: Riley's role in the story is to do nothing more or less than singlehandedly turn Star Trek, for a few beautiful, fleeting moments, into a Vaudeville routine and that alone makes this possibly the best episode in the series so far.

Though Hyde is amazing, this also segues into the episode's biggest problem (aside from its ethics, of course): A lot of people, Bob Justman included, praise “The Naked Time” for using its Actor Showcase structure to convey intimate details about the main characters (hence Justman's claim it would have made a good premier) and this isn't entirely true I feel. While it's fun to watch the cast act against type, “The Naked Time” is actually rather thin on character development. Let's look at what we learn about each main character through how they act under the influence of the virus: Sulu is apparently “at heart a swashbuckler”, and while the episode was kind enough to telegraph this early on through his conversation with Riley about fencing, this is never actually brought up again in any subsequent episode (although his interest in small arms is briefly mentioned in “Shore Leave” and the Animated Series episode “The Slaver Weapon”). Even if it were, though, “enjoying fencing” is hardly a significant, intimate reveal about Sulu's personality.

Similarly, Riley's fascination with Irish royalty is only mentioned in an offhand comment by Spock to handwave away the aforementioned impromptu musical theatre performance: Riley never mentioned Ireland before or after and when next we see him it isn't even brought up at all (that Star Trek doesn't turn him into an excruciatingly awful and bigoted comedy stereotype like the last time an Irishman showed up is something of a miracle, however). Tormolen has his environmental concerns which were again mentioned at the outset, which was good, but he's dead so it doesn't matter. Kirk gets some painfully generic speech about the burdens and responsibilities of command which was stale and boring when Pike gave Doctor Price the exact same story in “The Cage”. Everyone else just defaults to “act silly”.

Really the only genuine moments of character drama we get here come from Spock, who I'll touch on in a minute, and Nurse Chapel, played by Majel Barrett, who makes her first appearance in this episode. Even though she didn't get the lead role originally written for her, of course Majel Barrett was going to show up on Star Trek once it went to series: She's just as inexorably linked to it as Gene Roddenberry is, and it makes sense for her to reappear in a Roddenberry-penned episode (once again, the name on the credits says John D.F. Black, who was also working as the show's story editor at the time, but apparently the script was completely rewritten by Roddenberry before going to air, who didn't even bother to consult or inform Black).

Chapel is the first character we see who actually does seem to be affected on a personal, emotional level as we learn she's in love with Spock and, shockingly, the show actually plays it like a serious, proper love scene: Chapel isn't lusting after or fantasizing about Spock like how every single other relationship on the show to date has been framed, she genuinely seems to love and care for him as a person. And, to her credit, Barrett sells it like an absolute pro, delivering a very sweet, caring, mature and affectionate performance that's probably her best bit of acting in the entire Original Series. Of course, the show does her no favours given that this is Chapel's first appearance and thus we've had absolutely no opportunities to see this side of her character meaningfully develop to the point where this scene could serve as an effective dramatic climax, but I'll take what I can get.

Leonard Nimoy is no slouch here either, and plays off of Barrett's tender confessions to absolutely brilliant effect, portraying Spock as at first recalcitrant and taciturn, then confused, and finally heartfelt, vulnerable and apologetic as he tries to express to Chapel his fear that he'll never be able to reciprocate and care for her the way she does him. And Barrett is once again magnificent, showing Chapel to be overwhelmingly compassionate and unwaveringly loyal. It's little wonder this scene is so well remembered and why there is such a strong contingent to pair up these characters. Actually, having seen both “The Naked Time” and its Star Trek: The Next Generation remake quite recently as of this writing, I have to wonder if Denise Crosby and LeVar Burton echoed and inverted this scene for their own private moment on the latter show. As great and iconic as this scene is however, I do leave it up to you all to draw your own conclusions about the significance behind Gene Roddenberry making all the female crewemembers (save Janice Rand) swoon over Spock and then giving him a love scene with his own loverXmuse.

Of course Nimoy's best performance comes immediately after this as he breaks down in tears alone in the briefing room lamenting his inability to love others. It's by far the defining moment of the episode, sold even better by the absolutely brutal camerawork: We slowly follow Spock as he staggers out of sickbay into the briefing room, passing graffiti that says “Love Mankind”. Then, once he sits down, the camera creeps around him, just wallowing in his breakdown. It's pure cinematic voyeurism, but it's effective. What's the most astounding thing about this scene is that none of it was scripted: The original plan for this scene was to have a *really* dumb comedy bit where someone draws a mustache on Spock. Nimoy felt he needed something more emotional (how ironic) and ad-libbed this entire sequence starting from where he leaves Chapel and ending when Kirk storms in and screams about antimatter implosions. Shatner's reaction here is a bit changeable; he doesn't seem sure of how he should respond to Nimoy's raw emotion. In the end he decides to have Kirk just flip the hell out and start whaling away at Spock to get him to snap out of it before Nimoy has Spock throw him backwards over the table.Shatner's performance is suitably histrionic and he rightfully devours half of the conference room in the process, but he really could have played off of Nimoy here a lot better: This exchange doesn't hold a candle to the one with Barrett.

But even so it was enough: This is Shatner and Nimoy's first real hyper-emotional scene together of the type they'll soon become famous for (the exchange in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” having clearly been written for Jeffrey Hunter's Pike and Barrett's Number One), and, pairing it with Barrett's show-stealing scene in sickbay it's easy to see how “The Naked Time” got a reputation for being a strong character drama even if they're in truth the only two real character moments in the episode. They're iconic, memorable moments that stick with people, and that's really all something like this needs to go down in history. That's the real strength of “The Naked Time” I feel: reconceptualise it as a collection of fun and giddy setpieces and these moments of tender character drama fit right in alongside Bruce Hyde's grandstanding and George Takei's rapier. I wouldn't call it the episode where we get to know the characters better, but I would call it the episode where Star Trek proves it can have fun once in awhile and stumbles onto the path towards becoming an evergreen pop phenomenon.

"I am he and he is me!": The Enemy Within

Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction to this episode too.

“The Enemy Within” plays like an almost paint-by-numbers example of how Star Trek works at the moment. This of course means it's terrible. It has a crassly simplistic and poorly thought out moral delivered with zero semblance of tact, form, structure or good sense and almost painfully earnestly and gamely conveyed by the cast. This leaves me in a really frustrating position: It's bad, but it's bad along exactly the lines I've been drawing over the past several posts. This one manages to fall face first into rape apologia, which I will of course take it to task for, but only for the same reasons the show's been reactionary so far. It's a particularly egregious execution of this formula, but other than that, “The Enemy Within” brings nothing new to the analytical table.

However, I have a job to do here so let's see what I can make with this. First of all, if “Charlie X” doing a melodrama about teenage issues irritated me, “The Enemy Within” doing an evil lookalike plot where the baddie frames our hero and gets his friends to turn against him for half the episode before he clears his name is enough to send me straight into smash-the-television-in-blind-rage mode. Ignoring the plot for the moment, which I would sorely like to scream and yell about but shall restrain myself from doing, “The Enemy Within” could possibly be described as something I call an Actor Showcase Episode: These are special episodes, meant to give a specific cast member or members the opportunity to play against type and and show off their reach. These are typically made when shows get a particularly skilled cast who are normally pigeonholed into very tight, programmatic roles to let the audience know the full extent of their range. Actor Showcase Episodes tend to crop up either at the beginning of a show's run (to get the audience used to the new cast) or in the middle (to let them see a side of the cast heretofore unseen) and they're usually delightful changes of pace from standard operating procedure (indeed these become characteristic of Star Trek: The Next Generation once Michael Piller becomes showrunner).

In that regard, calling “The Enemy Within” an Actor Showcase for William Shatner is tempting, especially as the highlight of the episode is arguably Shatner's performance as both crazed madman Evil!Kirk and gentle, thoughtful Good!Kirk. However, as this episode seems consumed by a desire to thwart my attempts to say anything intelligent about it whatsoever at every turn, it comes literally right before an episode seemingly custom-tailored to be a full Cast Showcase, so there goes that reading.

So Roddenberry Ethics it is then. Although this problem is systemic throughout Roddenberry's entire tenure as showrunner, “The Enemy Within” is probably the most clear-cut example of just how badly this can go for the show (so far). The core theme of Richard Matheson's script is a kind of grade school retelling of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Each person is literally composed of a honest-to-goodness Good and Evil half and both are needed for us to survive. The Good Half is intelligence and compassion and the Evil Half is, of course, aggression, ambition, confidence and lust. This isn't even Freud's id/ego/superego distinction, which would be bad enough, this is straight-up “some human traits are by definition Good and some are by definition Evil and that's the Law of the Universe”. It's also very, very Christian, or at least Western: Sexual desire is equated with rape and blind lust and declared Fundamentally Evil. Furthermore, as both Spock and McCoy state, it's “intelligence”, which is here described in terms that makes it sound suspiciously like “logic” and “rationality”, that gives humans their innate goodness and strength, so we're right back at that whole “emotions are fickle and corrupting” thing again, so that's fun.

Let there be absolutely no mistaking what Matheson is suggesting here: Good!Kirk, composed of only his compassion and intelligence, is rendered increasingly frail, indecisive and unfit for command without the moderating influence of Evil!Kirk. There is one scene near the end where the episode seems to be trying to push a Freudian interpretation where Good!Kirk is unable to decide between Spock's logic and McCoy's passion: A common reading of the Shatner/Nimoy/Kelley triple act is that they in fact represent the id, ego and superego. Especially as this follows McCoy and Spock's “intelligence” comments, one could read this scene as the divided superego (the twin Kirks) being unable to moderate between the id (McCoy) and the ego (Spock). Director Leo Penn seems to like this angle, as do the editors, who frame the shot cutting back and forth between Spock and McCoy with Good!Kirk caught in the middle unable to take a stand. DeForest Kelley seems to be in this camp as well, playing McCoy as bristling with unchecked passion, but neither Nimoy nor Shatner seem to be responding to this.

Shatner continually plays Good!Kirk as someone determined to prove his strength, though his strength lies in different areas. When he faces down Evil!Kirk in engineering, he manages to gain the upper hand merely by calmly standing his ground. Nimoy, on the other hand, seems to be playing up Spock's own duality trying to remain cool and logical even has he grows more and more commanding and forceful. Indeed, Matheson even gives Spock a line where he tells McCoy he knows from experience what it's like to live as two people at war and having to keep a handle on both. But at the same time this is as passionate as we've ever seen Spock as he desperately tries to keep control over the ship: The show is at the same time trying to push the Freudian reading as a multi-leveled recursive metaphor, but not everyone seems to be quite on the same page about it. Even if the Freudian theme were completely intentional and not misguided and reductive, it wouldn't really come across all that well anyway.

And then there's the rape angle. Evil!Kirk straight up tries to rape Janice Rand and the show handles it in just about the worst possible way imaginable. First off, we have the Pop Psychology 101 for Dummies ramifications of the scene, which pretty much forces us to conclude Matheson thinks male sexuality is fundamentally based around rape which, wow, I'll let you all hash that one out on your own. Then we have Rand telling Spock, McCoy and Good!Kirk that she “wouldn't even have reported it...but Fisher saw it too” and Holy Goddamn I don't even know where to begin with that. Even so though, even despite all of this, the show *almost* pulled it off by having the attempted rape be portrayed as an absolutely horrible, trust-shattering thing, but then it ruins all its goodwill by having Good!Kirk be primarily confused because he was in his quarters the whole time and knew it wasn't him. He doesn't get a single scene where he acts devastated that someone tried to rape Rand in his name or a single line expressing remorse or sadness for her: It's all about him and he's just confused.

And then there's the ending. Rand eventually finds out Evil!Kirk and Good!Kirk are two sides of the same person (having previously been told the white lie that Evil!Kirk was an imposter) and on the bridge she confronts the newly-rejoined Kirk. The two have an awkward moment where she tries to apologise and he brushes her off. Rand then delivers some schematics to Spock who grins and says “the 'imposter' had some interesting qualities, wouldn't you say, Yeoman?” and this is where I finally draw the line. There is absolutely no way I can redeem this. Absolutely no way I can discern any kind of positive, edifying analysis out of this. This is undistilled rape culture, no, rape apologia in all it's ugly glory. We've moved beyond merely *threatening* to derail the series to actually derailing it outright. There's no way up from this. Star Trek, in this incarnation, is finally and irreparably broken.

Because, while the name on the script says Richard Matheson, this is all Gene Roddenberry. In her memoir The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy, Grace Lee Whitney express her disgust with this episode (thank god) and this scene in particular, writing:

"I can't imagine any more cruel and insensitive comment a man (or Vulcan) could make to a woman who has just been through a sexual assault! But then, some men really do think that women want to be raped. So the writer of the script gives us a leering Mr. Spock who suggests that Yeoman Rand enjoyed being raped and found the evil Kirk attractive!"

Some fan lore tries to spare Matheson, speculating the scene at the end was tacked on by someone else, and if that's the case it's perfectly clear to me who that was. I have no doubt someone with Gene Roddenberry's conflicted, confused ideas about what femininity is and how gender roles work would put in a scene like this. But even if Roddenberry didn't write it, this episode still went out under his watch. As a showrunner, and a showrunner who was known for being especially anal, hands-on and controlling, Roddenberry could have, and should have, kept something like this from being filmed. But of course he wouldn't: He oversaw the bungled sexual politics of “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and put out something as misogynistic as “Mudd's Women” and something as carelessly, needlessly reactionary as “Charlie X”.

And the show is in a real sense tainted by this: I can't even fall back on the actors here, except Whitney I guess, as they all seem either perfectly fine with what's going on or, at worst, getting a little too into it. Shatner gives a strong performance, but none of his characters, even Good!Kirk, seem equitable with the person I saw and praised in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and that's to nothing except the show's detriment. That Good!Kirk displays absolutely no empathy or remorse for Rand is inexcusable, and it's not helped by Shatner's Hitchcockian, Kubrickian method approach of slapping Whitney off-camera between takes to get her to sell the sickbay scene better. Nimoy's performance is good, but I'm probably never going to get over how he has Spock just leer at Rand: He sells it altogether too well. The best thing here by far is George Takei, who keeps Sulu in good spirits even as he's slowly freezing to death: It's a wonderful acting job that's as heartening and human as it is tragic and bittersweet. Shame he couldn't have done anything about the rape scene though.

I've gone at great length in the past to stress that while Star Trek isn't the hopeful, idealistic, imagination-filled show I love it's slowly sewing the seeds that will allow the franchise to one day become that. But that future has never seemed further away then it does while watching “The Enemy Within” (although I should probably watch my words, as I previously said that about “Mudd's Women” and “The Corbomite Maneuver” and look what happened. You'd think I'dve learned by now). The show as it exists now isn't just not that future, it's working actively contrary to realising that future. With callous, ill-thought out morality plays supported by some of the most stilted and clumsily reactionary writing I've ever seen on a television show I'm not sure how I can even call this Star Trek. But that's the awful thing: It *is* Star Trek: If anything, it's the version of the franchise I like that's the weird anomaly: How on Earth do we get from this to Vaka Rangi? How on Earth do we go from this to something that's actually watchable?