Die Maschinenmensch: The Ultimate Computer

"Oh, it's the end of the Earth!"

“The Ultimate Computer” is another somewhat deceiving story. It has a great deal of things all going on all at once and is indeed good in many of the ways people often say it's good. But there's a secondary tier of ideas this episode is also working with for which it doesn't tend to get the credit I think it probably should, and it's very indicative of the way Star Trek is always in some sense pushing against itself. On the other hand, “The Ultimate Computer” doesn't quite work either: Not all of the concepts it's trying to convey come across as well as they perhaps could have, and the script has an unfortunate tendency to contradict itself. I'd definitely say it's a good baseline target for the show to have been shooting for this season though. However, the one problem with that is that we're a month away from the end of the filming block for this year: It has the bad luck to end up being compared to “A Piece of the Action” and “Patterns of Force” (a comparison in which it is found wanting) and, just like those episodes, we probably could have stood to see “The Ultimate Computer” about ten weeks ago.

The original pitch for “The Ultimate Computer” came from a mathematician named Laurence N. Wolfe, who wrote it around his passionate interest in the titular devices. However, D.C. Fontana found the script he submitted to be basically unworkable, as it was almost entirely about the story of Doctor Daystrom and the M-5, to the point the Enterprise crew was barely in it. Indeed, the simple explanation for why the episode as aired is in some sense disjointed is because Fontana rewrote it so heavily: There are very much two stories going on here, and they actually probably didn't belong in the same script. Let's start with the most obvious reading of “The Ultimate Computer”, and what I'm presuming to be the original pitch: The concept of a computer so sophisticated and humanlike it can actually replace people, and what would drive a person to create such a device in the first place. As we've talked about before in regards to the mid- to late- 1960s context in which these episodes were being made, one of the larger sources of malaise at the time was the fear that the rapid increase in both the power and awareness of computers in the immediate postwar age, as well as the move towards mechanizing the workforce that helped usher in what can be called the post-industrial era in late-stage capitalist Westernism (a theme we'll be returning to a little later on) would eventually dehumanize society. This, combined with a distrust of unchecked logic and bureaucracy, a healthy fear of Stalinism and good old fashioned Red Scare thought poisoning paranoia that defined the Cold War led to many lamenting what they saw as the erosion of “traditional” “American” “values” such as individuality, loyalty and personal achievement.

Aaron and Unnunillium, two of my estimable commenters, pointed this out under my blog entry on “A Taste of Armageddon” in the first season and quite reasonably wondered why I didn't have more to say about it then. And while that theme certainly can be read into that episode, and arguably in other first season stories like “The Return of the Archons”, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” and most obviously “Court Martial”, the reason I didn't would be because in my opinion this is the best episode to talk about that sort of thing in the context of: It not only provides a decent example of the typical argument, it also gives some hints about how Star Trek can tackle the issue with a slightly different approach then what would be considered the norm. While the M-5 itself is basically just another computer that gains sentience and decides it's superior to humanity and goes on an ego-tripping rampage, which is (and you have no idea how much I'm resisting the urge to make a MythBusters joke here) just about the most stock science fiction concept imaginable, the actual story for this half of the episode is Richard Daystrom.

Daystrom is seen as one of the best and most memorable characters in all of Star Trek, and rightly so in my opinion. He's an incredibly gifted person whose achievements were not always seen for what they were, and who didn't always get the credit he deserved. His breakdown in the climax where he confesses to the camera that he was never taken seriously because of the young age at which he made his biggest breakthroughs, not that his “colleagues” weren't perfectly willing to steal his ideas and pass them off as their own, is a gut-punching bit of dialog and should hit very close to home to anyone who was dismissed, belittled or otherwise not taken seriously as a child (or indeed who went to graduate school, for that matter). This is what drives Daystrom to create something as ludicrously ambitious and overreaching as M5: His now-fanatical desire to have himself and his work recognised by their own merits for the first time in his life, and, in a great twist, this is why the machine goes bad-It has just as obsessive and single-minded dedication to its goal that Daystrom does, as he patterned its neural engrams off of his own.

We of course also need to talk about William Marshall: While I'm not sure if his casting was intended from the start, making Daystrom of African descent is a grand slam for the series. While the show does not overtly draw attention to his ethnicity as his tragic character arc could have been done with someone of any skin colour, making him African does subtly get us to pay more attention to how underappreciated he is. The story of someone who is never really seen as an equal, never treated with the proper amount of respect or even treated as a full person is of course all too well known to people of colour living within Western societies. This way, Star Trek can talk about social injustices of all kinds, even outright racism, while still depicting its setting as more idealistic and without having to jump through too many narrative hoops to get its point across. It's a tactic that will pave the way for some of the best of Star Trek to come, and just as strong a lesson the franchise could have stood to pay more attention to at various other points of its history. Also, having Marshall in such a dynamic and powerful role here, combined with things like the introduction of Doctor M'Benga (the only good thing about “A Private Little War”) and the increasingly more fleshed-out and central space Uhura's been able to carve for herself this year increases the show's progressive lot substantially. It also helps Marshall is just an outstanding actor, and perhaps just a touch hammy.

In other words, this part of “The Ultimate Computer” is very much Daystrom's story: It's the story of someone who sought solace in machines and his own technical ability, hoping he could prove a fully computerized and automated future was the way forward for humanity, perhaps to himself as much as anyone else. This is Star Trek doing pretty much exactly what it should be doing: Putting the guest star in the limelight and giving him the bulk of the story's drama and gravity while we watch the main cast react, because of course, “The Ultimate Computer” is also about the effect Daystrom's confidence, drive and beliefs have on Kirk, Spock and McCoy. It's exactly the same tack the show took (and correctly, as far as I'm concerned) in “The Doomsday Machine” and here's where D.C. Fontana comes in, because it's a bit more nuanced this time and Fontana ends up pulling off some extremely clever narrative sleight-of-hand. Firstly, as the episode opens we're led to believe this is going to be another rote, almost by-the-numbers first season-style logic versus emotions debate. Spock is very intrigued by Daystrom's new machine as he's a big fan of him and his work with improving the efficiency of computers, McCoy goes on a curmudgeonly tirade about how he don't trust no newfangled computerized thingamawhatzits, declaring machines will never replace people, and Kirk is caught in the middle trying to decide where he stands on the whole thing.

But this doesn't actually turn out to be what the episode is about (well, on the whole-there's one big caveat I'll get to): We expect Spock to be completely taken in by the M-5 to the point he has a “Galileo Seven”-style overflow error when the computer inevitably goes berserk and its logic fails to provide the proper solution. But he doesn't-Instead, he becomes the first person to figure out there's something fishy about the M-5 precisely because it's not behaving logically, and continuously emphasizes that while computers may be more efficient at performing tasks than people, they're merely tools and that given the choice he'd much rather work with humans. Furthermore, we expect McCoy to go into “Bristling Unchecked Passion Mode” for the entire episode and, er, “rage against the machine”, as it were. And while there is indeed quite a lot of that, McCoy also snaps quite frequently into being the person who can empathize with and understand people and their motivations. While he's wrong about Spock, he reads Daystrom like a book, and one of the best scenes in the episode is where he rants at him in engineering about the M-5 taking over the ship and deciding to randomly start destroying things...and in the next scene it turns out he was baiting Daystrom to react in order to learn more about his personality and history.

Then, of course, there's Kirk. According to the rules this kind of story should be obeying, he should be righteously angry about the sanctity of individuality, personhood and the inalienable right of a man (and, naturally, it has to be a man) to shape his own destiny. The war games scene should be resolved like the end of “The Deadly Years”, with Kirk confidently swinging onto the bridge and taking a manly amount of control of the situation and shutting down M-5 by force, probably by punching it. “No machine will replace me, damn it!”. Except...that's not what happens. Kirk convinces the M-5 that it has violated its own personal code of ethics by killing the Excalibur (and here once again is that idea that a starship can be killed, murdered in fact, and that's before getting into the highly symbolic name) and that it should face consequences for that. This isn't the James T. Kirk School of Computer Repair where he causes a machine to explode itself through logic paradoxes, this is talking to somebody and asking them to accept responsibility for their actions, and the M-5 is very much a person: Even Spock calls it a human mind amplified by the power of a computer. For a story that's supposed to be sceptical of technology and bureaucracy eroding Traditional American Values™, Kirk sure doesn't seem to be acting like the the ruggedly masculine “American” “Individualist”. That's because “The Ultimate Computer”, at least according to Fontana, isn't that story at all. It's a critique of that story that uses its framework to tell an altogether different story.

What Kirk is concerned about here isn't that the principle of machines replacing humans is unmanly: Indeed, he even says right from the beginning he's worried this might be what upsets him about the M-5 (and tellingly, he dismisses such thoughts as “petty”; focused more on pride and prestige instead of genuine ethics). What Kirk is actually troubled by is the possibility the M-5 will cause him to lose his job because working on a starship is the only thing he enjoys and knows how to do. Under Fontana, “The Ultimate Computer” is a straightforward examination and criticism of the materialistic consequences of mechanized industry and how capitalist societies privilege ever-more efficient, cheap and automated forms of production without consideration for the effect this has on the workers who are being replaced. Lack of concern for humans and basic human decency is an argument that can be made about just about any aspect of capitalism, not just industry: Consider, for example, how much the market (or at least the warped corporate conception of what the market is) has come to dominate just about every facet of discourse in the United States, and how this has utterly destroyed the humanities, social sciences and the creative arts. Nobody respects these endeavours anymore, because there's no net monetary value that can be applied to them. Late-stage capitalism measures the value of people by how much money they have, takes away their jobs because it's cost-effective, and, in doing so, removes a person's sense of self-worth.

In other words, what Fontana has done here is overtly liken the Federation (which is, of course, already tacitly descended from Westernism, even as that line is starting to become blurrier) to the early post-industrial West and made Kirk, in essence, a working-class spaceman. This is frankly as profound and transformational a shift as anything we've seen in Star Trek so far, and it's going to prove to be a particularly bleak example of life imitating art for William Shatner himself in just a few years. This isn't an entirely clean gear change, mind, and it's going to be a long time until this completely takes and becomes an important part of the franchise, but, like a lot of things the Original Series does, the seeds are sewn here. Most of the reasons why I don't think this is as clear as it could be in the finished product is, once again, the fact it was so extensively rewritten. There are quite a few scenes (presumably ones that were in Wolfe's original pitch) that seem to actively grate against this reading, almost as many as there are to support it. Spock's speech about how a starship “runs on loyalty...to one man” is probably the joint most egregious, along with Kirk flatly stating "There are certain things men must do to remain men. Your computer would take that away.” but the stilted and hokey invocation of John Masefield's “Sea Fever” is probably a close second.

(Although that said, also notice in this same scene how William Shatner starts playing with some gizmo in his quarters just before McCoy walks in: It's almost as if he's trying to convey Kirk's attempts to prove to himself he's capable of doing other things besides captaining a starship, which can also be seen as an echo of his earlier dialog with McCoy just after M-5 is installed: “Am I afraid of losing command to a computer? Daystrom's right. I can do a lot of other things”, which comes across to me as just as halfhearted and uncertain a bit of soul-searching).

The other reason this isn't as immediately clear as it perhaps could be is the long-standing confusion over how systems of production and labour actually work in the world of Star Trek. The basic standing Marxist critique of Star Trek: The Next Generation is that the show makes no sense because it depicts people working for a living in a world where money either doesn't exist or material goods are ubiquitous to the point nobody need work for them. Ergo, why does something like Starfleet exist? Personally, I find this particular argument to be riddled with holes and logic assumptions that aren't actually backed up by textual evidence, but I'll save rebutting it until we get to the series in question. However as it applies to the Original Series, there is perhaps a line of thought worth pursuing here, because, unlike The Next Generation, we actually *don't* have a really good sense of what the economic system in Star Trek is.

We know Starfleet and the Federation exist, of course, and that both are big enough organisations that pretty much everyone we've seen so far is a part of them. But is Starfleet a voluntary service? Do the officers get paid? We can't actually say for sure at this point. We don't hear much about money, no, although there was an offhand comment about credits in “The Trouble with Tribbles”. But crucially, nobody ever said Starfleet officers don't turn a paycheck, just as nobody said they do either, and regardless, having this happen to Kirk, someone we know and sympathize with, is still an effective way of conveying the message: The reduction in dignity and self-esteem he goes through is still very palpable. This does mean, however, that Fontana's depiction of Kirk as a working-class spaceman hurt by having his job taken away from him is going to come across really strangely to someone accustomed to the way Star Trek works after the 1980s, even though in 1968 it would have made absolute perfect sense to use “The Ultimate Computer” as a straightforward allegory about the effect of mechanization on people reliant on Western industry for their livelihood.

But in spite of the fact this episode may not be 100% successful in everything it's trying to do, it's still without question one of the more complex, and coherent, episodes of the season. The concepts and ideas it's working with are extremely mature and multifaceted ones, and its yet more proof Star Trek is capable of a lot more than flying around the galaxy dropping moral nuclear warheads on people. Honestly, the biggest complaint I have is still that this is one of the last episodes produced for the year: We could have used a lot more stories like “The Ultimate Computer” and a lot fewer like “The Apple”.

“EVIL ALIEN NAZIS!”: Patterns of Force

"This, uh, isn't what it looks like, guys..."

If there's a surer, more immediate sign of the quality of something other than being banned by national governments, I can't think of it.

“Patterns of Force” was one of the handful of Star Trek episodes initially blocked from airing in certain markets outside the United States for a time. In this case, the country was Germany, which refused to show it for, well, rather obvious reasons as far as banning television shows go. And this is a shame, because Germans would probably have really enjoyed “Patterns of Force”: It's the most flagrantly anti-authoritarian the show's been since “Mirror, Mirror”, and in fact this one's even more blatant and upfront about its message (which is actually a good thing in this case) and a more than capable bit of television to boot. It's yet another cracking mini-classic of an episode, and I'm genuinely surprised at how many of them there are at this point in the season. In fact the last few weeks may have turned my opinion on the second season around a little bit, as I know two out of the next three episodes are quite good and the one that isn't is largely irrelevant: This no longer feels like the show that was throwing out garbage like “Who Mourns for Adonais?” and “A Private Little War” on a regular basis, which makes it all the more ironic the show's still facing cancellation at this point.

“Patterns of Force” itself is somewhat deceiving, as at first glance it looks like the most irritatingly pulpish thing ever. Kirk and Spock beam down to a planet that turns out to be ruled by quite literal space Nazis. What follows is a straightforward series of captures and escapes that's about as dynamic and exciting as it sounds. However, “Patterns of Force” is nothing if not proof positive plot structure is ultimately superficial and meaningless when you get talented actors delivering tight, well-written lines about gripping and interesting ideas. I actually found myself forgetting I was watching a story this stock because what it's actually trying to say was compelling enough. Dig a little into the episode's production history though, and, once again, the reasons start to become clear: The original story outline, dating to the first season, and the first few drafts of the teleplay were penned by Paul Schneider, who I maintain is one of the greatest writers and most unsung heroes of the Original Series. Schneider was behind “Balance of Terror”, which I still think is basically perfect, and one of the only people to recognise Star Trek's strengths came out of its theatrical heritage.

Although this is a very promising start, Schneider wasn't the sole writer of this episode. John Meredyth Lucas picked up his draft late in the second season and retooled it into the script for the episode that made it to air (and, as tragically befits Star Trek at this point in time, Schneider went uncredited). I'm not entirely clear on how much of the finished product is Lucas' and how much is Schneider's, but what I can say for sure is that “Patterns of Force” shows them both at the absolute top of their game. I expect bristling anti-imperialism from Paul Schneider, and if there was ever any doubt about what “Balance of Terror” was truly about, this episode should lay it all to rest. What I didn't expect (because I didn't know what to expect) was to see John Meredyth Lucas working with the same ideas and with the same clarity. There's some of his trademark logic-emotion alliances on display here, but in this case this serves to reinforce the episode's staunch anti-fascist stance (one of my favourite motifs in the episode is Spock being impressed with the logical approach to problem solving Kirk displays here, then to have the script turn on its heel and point out how logical the goals of National Socialism were. Not to mention Spock's “Quite correct. You should make a very convincing Nazi”, which speaks for itself).

It may not seem like an especially bold thing for “Patterns of Force” to come out against Nazism, as Hitler's National Socialist party are pretty much the default villains for any kind of genre adventure story in the history of ever. It's not a hugely controversial statement to declare that the Nazis were pretty bad; indeed they may be one of human history's only clear-cut examples of a objectively, unambiguously evil group of people whom pretty much everyone can agree were evil. However, there's two things to keep in mind here. One is that this is still only 1968, so while pulp adventure serials may have done the “Nazis are Bad” angle a bit to death already, World War II was still in the living memory of the people writing stories like this. Gene Coon, as I believe I mentioned in the past, had been a Marine in the war. It was sort of expected that Star Trek, given the parts of it that it inherited from pulp science fiction, would eventually have to do the space Nazi angle. However what's actually interesting here is that “Patterns of Force” is far from the Hitler-punching baseline of the genre. Actually, in point of fact, “Patterns of Force” has very little to do with Nazism at all.

What “Patterns of Force” is actually about is authority. It's about power structures, and not just totalitarian ones, how they manifest, how they become entrenched in society and how they stay that way for so long. Lucas claimed this script comes out of his fascination with this phenomenon, and it shows. The key figure is, of course, John Gill: A Starfleet historian who, while studying the fractured, violent society on Ekos and feeling compelled to help in spite of the Prime Directive (and I'd like to note despite my problems with it, I appreciate how the show's attitude towards the anti-imperialist reading of the Prime Directive has shifted in recent weeks), instills himself as the leader of a new National Socialist party. While he knew what happened when Nazism arose on Earth, he was firmly of the belief that despite how evil Hitler's regime was, it was the most efficient form of government the planet ever saw, and that so long as a benevolent, liberal dictator was at the helm, Ekos would be spared Germany's fate. There are a couple of things worth looking at here: One is the idea Nazi Germany was an “efficient, logical” form of government. Contemporary scholars will be quick to tell you that the Nazi party was anything but efficient, and was in fact actually burdened by a number of bureaucracies of questionable competence and competing interests mostly operating on stolen funds. However, this was the leading theory of historians and social scientists at the time, and it obviously would have heavily influenced Schneider's and Lucas' depiction of National Socialism.

But what's most important to take note of is the character of John Gill himself, because “Patterns of Force” is nothing less than “Space Seed” done right, and Gill is far closer to how someone like Khan Noonien Singh would have actually turned out. In that post I talked about the classical liberal dream of the enlightened despot, the benevolent dictator, or the philosopher king. They're all variations of the same core idea. Liberals of the New Deal variety (which in 1968 were still rather new and hip having seen the US through World War II and all) can trace their lineage back to the managerial progressives of the early 20th century. Broadly speaking, these sorts of liberals have been predisposed to fantasizing that absolute power might just not be a bad thing provided one of them were in charge (because, of course, we'd finally have someone intelligent in power who knew what *really* needed to be done. The liberal predilection towards intelligence-based discrimination is a topic for another time and place), whereas those on the actual radical left are vehemently opposed to any sort of authoritarian power structures at all because they recognise them for the tools of social stratification they truly are. This is why “Patterns of Force” is so fascinating and why I say it's the opposite of “Space Seed”: In that episode Khan was very much in the mould of the enlightened despot, and the crew was in awe of him, even admitting he was intellectually and physically superior. Here, Star Trek, for perhaps the first time, is unambiguously siding with the radical left, because John Gill's dream of a benevolent, liberal Nazi party is shown to be just as catastrophically misguided as it sounds. If anyone ever tells you it's impossible to read Star Trek as a truly leftist and egalitarian piece of anarchic idealism, just sit them down with this episode.

While the true horrors of the Ekosian Nazi party are laid at the feet of Melakon, who supposedly betrayed its true purpose for his own means, we're very clearly not meant to side with Gill either. What he did was wrong and did measurable harm to the Ekosians as well as the Zeon targets of their ethnic purging. Gill's speech to Kirk as he lays dying after Melakon assassinates him in a fit of panic and rage is one of the most beautiful moments on the show yet, as Gill confesses how he now understands the extent of the mistake he made and how, as he so wonderfully puts it:

"Even historians fail to learn from history...they repeat the same mistakes. Let the killing end, Kirk.”

Which is frankly just about one of the best lines ever.

Kirk, Spock and McCoy's exchange in the denouement is similarly poetic. That this doesn't go down as one of the finest bits of dialog in the Original Series is frankly disgraceful:

“He drew the wrong conclusion from history. The problem with the Nazis wasn't simply that their leaders were evil, psychotic men. They were, but the main problem, I think, was the leader principle.”

“What he's saying, Spock, is that a man who holds that much power, even with the best intentions, just can't resist the urge to play God.”

“Thank you, Doctor. I was able to gather the meaning.”

“It also proves another Earth saying. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Darn clever, these Earthmen, wouldn't you say?”

“Yes. Earthmen like Ramses, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Lee Kuan. Your whole Earth history is made up of men seeking absolute power.”

“Spock, you obviously don't understand.”

“Obviously, Doctor, you fail to accept...”

“Gentlemen. Gentlemen, we've just been through one civil war. Let's not start another.”

I think Kirk's statement is a thing of pure beauty, naturally, but Spock's and McCoy's exchange is also very telling. So frequently on the Original Series we've had denouements where those two have been throwing thinly veiled slurs at each other and the show desperately wants us to think this is funny and endearing. They're both absolutely right in this case, and furthermore Kirk implores them to stop fighting in the last line of the episode. It may not be clear if you just watch these in isolation, but after two seasons of watching this show in order, I can't tell you how refreshing that was for me to hear.

It's so easy to get wrapped up in “Patterns of Force”'s Big Ideas it's possible to forget what a great production it actually is. While the plot itself is, as I've said, dangerously bog-standard pulp stuff, the cast and characters are all fantastic. The Zeons are genuinely sympathetic and likeable, and this is the first time on this show I found myself actually caring about their story and what happened to them. Richard Evans in particular is quite compelling as Isak, a broken and shell-shocked Zeon resistance fighter teetering on the edge of being desensitized to the death and violence that has come to define his life: His vacant stare says it all. “Hero of the Fatherland” Daras, played by Valora Noland, is also absolutely brilliant and the reveal in the beginning of Act 3 that's she's actually a double agent when she stages an invasion of the resistance headquarters to test Kirk's and Spock's loyalty is a genuinely shocking and unexpected twist that savvily plays off of the audience's expectations for a pulp adventure structure. Even better, the show treats her as an important, respected and multifaceted character equal to her male comrades: Daras' story about having to pretend to betray her father and her childhood spent growing up with the Nazi party's atrocities is actually really, really well done and very touching, and the fact she's flatly not Kirk's girl-of-the-week (and is in fact just about anything but) just makes it better. This is the kind of thing I absolutely did not expect to see in Star Trek until 1992. With Doctor Ann Mulhall last time and Daras here, Star Trek has given us two of its best female characters ever one after another.

(Speaking of characters, this leads me to one of the funniest jokes in the series: All of the characters in the story are references to the Old Testament: Isak is obvious, his brother Abrom is a take-off on Abraham, Zeon is like Zion, and so forth. However the name of the Nazi party chairman who was secretly sympathetic to the rebellion movement despite his faith in the concept of an authoritarian state is named Eneg...which is “Gene” spelled backwards.)

It's maddening to see Star Trek rolling out classic after classic in 1968. Maybe if we'd seen episodes like “Patterns of Force”, “The Immunity Syndrome” and “A Piece of the Action” about a year earlier, the show wouldn't be facing cancellation now. The world would not be a lesser place had these episodes been booted up in the production schedule and “The Apple”, “A Private Little War”, “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and “Friday's Child” been dumped. In this regard it is helpful to keep in mind the second season, like the first, was aired just about completely out of order and at least “The Immunity Syndrome” and “A Piece of the Action” did in fact air before a decent chunk of the season, not to mention the show did after all open its year with “Amok Time”. But bafflingly, this one was still kept for the back end. And even so, it was clearly not enough to appease NBC, who were well aware of the show's steadily declining ratings, nor the actors (William Shatner was so sure Star Trek wasn't going to be renewed he'd started looking for other jobs) or even the showrunners, as will be plainly obvious in another week or so.

But for now let's be happy “Patterns of Force” exists at all. Maybe it came too late to save Star Trek, but it's exactly this kind of thing that proves this mad, tempestuous, conflicted show did in fact have some good ideas occasionally and will ensure that the legacy it spawns will live on.

“Let's try it once more, with feeling”: Return to Tomorrow

Morph Ball acquired.

This is an episode I really, really wanted to like but the whole thing sort of left me feeling unsatisfied at the end. Mind, this is after I had to remind myself what it actually was: “Return to Tomorrow” is unfortunately one of the episodes that I've always tended to get mixed up with a bunch of other episodes, namely “The Return of the Archons”, “This Side of Paradise”, “The Way to Eden” and “The Paradise Syndrome”. Basically, Star Trek has far too many episodes with the words “Return”, “Eden”, “Paradise” and “Tomorrow” in the title, and this isn't even getting at my old bugbear the show keeps loving to fall back on: Bland, lazy Garden of Eden and Book of Genesis pastiches. By The Prophets even “The Cage” had an “Adam and Eve” plot, and this one has the nerve to not only drag that up again, but throw Erich von Däniken into the mix and imply Sargon's people were the inspiration for those myths. Almost five years into Star Trek I can flatly and confidently claim I am beyond sick and tired of Adam and Eve by now.

(For what it's worth, I also used to confuse “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, “The Alternative Factor” and “Requiem for Methuselah” a lot, but interestingly not with “Return to Tomorrow” even though this one also deals with androids. Hopefully now that I'm doing this project I'll be able to keep all these episodes straight for once.)

But, once I figured out what precisely I was watching, that is, the episode I knew as “the one with the hyper-evolved humanoids, the talking soul gem balls and the first appearance of Diana Muldaur in Star Trek” I was genuinely excited because I remember it having some interesting ideas and really classic scenes. As it turns out, while “Return to Tomorrow” does in fact have all those things, it's somewhat less than successful at bringing them all together. This in itself is worth commenting on, though: I've seen just about every episode of Star Trek up to now as either a complete triumph or a crateringly awful disaster, especially this season. There's been very little in-between these two extremes in my experience, but with “Return to Tomorrow” we get something else entirely: This isn't even middling filler, this is a great episode brought down by a small handful of nevertheless fairly noticeable missteps whose potential greatness is still very self-evident.

This becomes clear very early on, as the teaser sets us up for something epic: The Enterprise is out exploring beyond the furthest point where any Starfleet vessel has ever explored when a booming voice comes out of nowhere, takes control of the ship's systems and, seemingly knowing everything about the crew, requests the ship enter into orbit around a dead Class M planet while declaring that he himself is dead, and all of humanity will die too if they don't help him. The first act, where it's revealed Sargon's people are a race of unfathomably evolved beings of pure thought who were once humanlike, but who destroyed their species in their own hubris and who now require temporary humanoid form to bring themselves back to life, is good enough to get us thinking about themes like the death of gods and the inherent connection between gods and humans through the unique factor of individual human experience, and it didn't even have to rape anybody. Even the rest of the episode, which is where the cracks in “Return to Tomorrow”'s central premise start to become more obvious, does a very good job describing the human experience as a combination of intellectual pursuits, emotional needs and physical sensuality. Furthermore, this is a terrific demonstration of John Meredyth Lucas' talents as showrunner, him having previously overseen a re-evaluation of the core Star Trek logic-emotions duality in “Obsession” and his own “The Changeling”.

Starfleet too has frankly never been better depicted before. The crew are willing to take dangerous risk after dangerous risk because of how much they could learn, and Kirk even says for one of the first times that searching for new life in the interests of scientific advancement is their paramount goal. Kirk also gets a frankly rousing speech in the second act where he likens helping Sargon to humanity's first steps into outer space and the evolution of the field of medicine, firmly declaring that this is why they're on the Enterprise and that “risk is our business”. It's a great bit that finally moves Starfleet, and more importantly the Enterprise, away from the dull space patrol stuff it was doing throughout the first season and some earlier parts of the second (though William Shatner seems less than convinced: He's a bit changeable this episode, and this is the scene where it's the clearest. I'm never sure if he's trying to do broad-strokes Shakespearean performativity or a having a “Gamesters of Triskelion”-esque lunch of scenery) that's brought down by one thing: It's all based on an extremely Western concept of exploration.

The two things I love most about Star Trek are its use of science fiction to extrapolate everyday life and its sense of wonder about the universe and exploration. However, that said the term “exploration” is a bit of a loaded one: The concept of boldly taking risks to challenge the unknown and “make discoveries” is one that's wrapped up in some very Western, and actually patriarchal, assumptions. This is because the whole notion of discovery is predicated around the discoverer being the first person to find something, and therefore going down in history as having made an unknown known. Thing is, there are very few instances where this has actually happened: Especially in the case of discovering new places, what typically happens is that indigenous people learn about things through their travels, which become part of their shared cultural knowledge, and then some pompous Western asshole shows up, declares himself (and it's always himself) the sole discoverer of the place because he's the first to mark it on a map that he can send back to his royal patron.

The Ancient Navigators didn't plunge into the unknown and make discoveries, they made travels and excursions to different places that they knew were going to be there because they could read signs in the ocean surface waves, the behaviour of pelagic birds and the position of stars in the sky to discern with accuracy where land was. This allowed them to reach every shore that touched the Pacific and Southern Oceans and most likely establish friendly relations with all the indigenous people they met there. Meanwhile, colonial Western Europe couldn't figure out what shape the Earth was such that they thought you could sail off the edge of it (though naturally, they figured they were the centre of it) and assumed everyone who wasn't them were either subhuman or witches. In all seriousness, what this gets at is that the Western idea of exploration is intrinsically linked to the notion of there existing an objective unknown that can be slowly filled in with Knowledge, which is quite different than the way it is elsewhere in the world.

In this regard I can't recommend highly enough Joseph Turnbull's book Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers, which asserts the dividing line here is the embrace in Modernist, Western societies of the concept of map-making and meticulous record-keeping, whereas Pre-Modern, Non-Modern, Non-Western cultures prefer unwritten oral history shared by an entire community and passed down from person to person (Turnbull also dedicates an entire lengthy, though outdated, chapter to Polynesian navigation which is as good a primer on the subject as you're likely to find in Western academic literature). It's also why I can't quite let go of the concept of exploration, or at least the word, as once again this is a case where I don't really have something I consider a suitable alternative to offer aside from “journeying” and “travelling”, which is closer but still not quite there in my opinion. Until I can rectify that, for the moment I'll have to tentatively posit a Western and Non-Western version of exploration, and that my sympathies lie more with the latter than with the former.

Getting back to actual Star Trek in a blog post ostensibly about Star Trek, this is the sort of problem that plagues “Return to Tomorrow” everywhere. Because, for all its fascinating exploration of the centrality of intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual pursuits to humanity, “Return to Tomorrow” also ultimately has a very strong and visible pop Christian conception of this, just as it has a clearly Western concept of exploration. The consciousness receptacles fundamentally operate via a very traditional dualistic conception of the Self. As much as the script on the one hand embraces sensuality as an important part of what it means to be human, it still depicts our possible fully-evolved future as beings of pure thought energy, and let's not forget Thalassa's tragic fall, despite the fact it is ultimately, though narrowly, avoided, is based on her becoming “tempted by the sins of the flesh” as it were. Were I especially inclined to follow this thread to the logical limit, I'd point out how Henoch is telegraphed as the villain almost right from the start, his plan involves murdering Sargon and seducing Thalassa and he spends the bulk of the episode in the body of Spock, the person who all the characters just love pointing out looks like Satan. There you go: Another bloody Adam and Eve story. This one's just inverted, as Adam and Eve are trying to get back into the Garden.

It's probably not entirely fair that I'm always dogging Star Trek so hard about this. After all, it's just as much of its culture as any other work of fiction is going to be. But that's sort of the point: The problem for me isn't that Star Trek is of its culture, its that it's part of *hegemonic* culture and, like most hegemony, not very many people seem to notice this. Pop Christianity, through being central to Westernism, is part of a network of interlinking social norms and cultural assumptions that comprise a master narrative that dominates world discourse at the expense of other ways of seeing and interpreting. Star Trek isn't seen as a cultural artefact of how Westernism manifested in late-1960s Los Angeles, it's seen as a fairy tale from the future that takes an objective look at contemporary society and provides a utopian blueprint for the way forward. That so many technologists and engineers have spent so many years trying to turn so much made up future gadgetry from Star Trek into reality should be proof enough of that (Don't believe me? Take a look at the thing 99% of you have in your pockets or purses right now. Some of you might even be reading this article on one). This is simply not what any of these shows was ever intended to be, especially not this one, nor is it, I argue, a helpful way to even approach reading them. That's the problem with hegemony and privilege: Those who live within it see it as the default or norm. As an anthropologist, and especially as an anthropologist who had the flatly insane idea to study Westernism instead of a village in Africa or Oceania due to particular aspects of my own life and upbringing, that's always something I'm going to fixate on.

But in spite of this “Return to Tomorrow” does make some of the first noticeable steps towards moving away from this sort of thing a bit. It's tough to pick out at first as the character who we would most expect to be providing this given the type of story we're working with, Doctor McCoy, is once again hideously shafted. The script calls for DeForest Kelley to be in “Bristling Unchecked Passion” mode yet again and casts him as basically a crotchety neo-Luddite opposed to taking risks in the name of science, which is curiously the exact opposite of the position he held in “The Immunity Syndrome”. This episode could have been a fantastic showcase for McCoy, writing him as the one person savvy enough to notice the potential problems in Sargon's plan, to see Henoch's duplicity for what it is and to remind Thalassa that she was human (or at least human-like) once and to plead with her to not put herself and her ambition above the rights and dignity of others despite her great power, sort of a more nuanced and less bombastic version of what Kirk tried to do for Elizabeth Dehner and Gary Mitchell in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Instead, “Return to Tomorrow” just has McCoy irritated and indignant all the time and resolves its conflicts by repeatedly faking the audience out with hollow and false “all hope is lost” moments and gets Spock and Sargon to make everything better on each occasion by pulling heretofore unknown plot convenience superpowers out of thin air.

Thankfully, the episode does have someone to take up this role, but, tellingly, only by virtue of pure dumb luck. Despite showing up with absolutely no introduction and getting the same annoying “I can't believe she's a woman” response from Kirk that Helen Noel got in “Dagger of the Mind”, Doctor Ann Mulhall is this episode's best asset by far. Despite technically only appearing in the story briefly near the beginning and the end and sitting the rest of the episode out while Thalassa explores her body, Mulhall gets the best scene of the week when she interrupts Sargon's long-winded von Dänikenesque ramblings by flatly stating that all contemporary science points to humans having evolved on Earth by their own accord, causing Sargon to backtrack and change the subject. Although Spock says the theory would explain parts of Vulcan history, Mulhall's point stands, effectively rebuking both of “Return to Tomorrow”'s most troublesome premises in one blow.

This scene aside though, every ounce of Ann Mulhall's impact comes from her actor, Diana Muldaur. This is Muldaur's first of three high profile Star Trek roles, returning next year to play Miranda Jones in “Is There In Truth No Beauty?” before coming back to the franchise twenty years later as a series regular during the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, playing Doctor Katherine Pulaski: chief medical officer of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D. I'm not going to beat around the bush here: Muldaur is hands-down one of my absolute favourite actors to ever grace any incarnation of Star Trek. She's a flat-out masterclass, and it's screamingly evident why from her first appearance: Muldaur is a jaw-droppingly commanding stage presence and she exerts so much gravity over the entire production she practically generates her own singularity. Taken on their own, the bulk of Mulhall's lines are not particularly remarkable: Aside from the one (admittedly brilliant) scene with Sargon, she mostly just confirms McCoy's and Spock's tricorder readings and backs up Kirk when the senior staff is debating leasing out their bodies. But Muldaur infuses her lines with so much confidence and matter-of-factness Mulhall comes across as a consummate professional and is the first female character in Star Trek to go toe-to-toe with Kirk, Spock and McCoy utterly as an equal.

One can imagine another actor playing Mulhall as more of a traditional Star Trek wistful, childish pouty Yeoman archetype: A smiling, doting supporting character just happy the boys let her play with them. The tricorder dialog exchange would have played out more like “Ooh, I got the same readings too, Captain! See?” then the “colleagues flatly share information with each other” feel we get, and even the scene with Sargon could have been delivered with a naive, ingenue-esque “But...I don't understand! How is this possible?” vibe to it. Now, I stress I'm not trying to be cruel to the other female guest stars the show's had, as I'm quite certain this is the way they were told to act by various members of the production staff, especially if Gene Roddenberry was involved. But the fact remains Star Trek without question has a track record for treating its female characters like this. Equally though, the show's never had a co-star like Diana Muldaur before, and she's not having any bit of that. She goes out of her way to make Mulhall a devastatingly competent professional who demands our respect and attention, and the results are electrifying: Mulhall is one of the greatest characters in the entire Original Series by virtue of Diana Muldaur alone.

This does absolute wonders for “Return to Tomorrow”, as the script is clearly a sexist nightmare. Mulhall gets very few scenes as herself, Thalassa is yet another weak woman tempted by the sins of the flesh and the episode clearly wants Mulhall to be Kirk's girl-of-the-week, even though this is in practice not at all who she is, mostly due to Muldaur, but also actually William Shatner, who seemingly deliberately misses every single cue that he's supposed to play Kirk infatuated with her. The keystone is Muldaur's dual role as Mulhall and Thalassa, as she plays them both very, very differently. Muldaur undoubtedly handles the two character brief the best of herself, Shatner and Leonard Nimoy: Although Nimoy is clearly trying to play Henoch as distinct from Spock, in practice he tends to come across more as Evil Trickster Spock instead (not that this isn't highly entertaining to watch, mind). Meanwhile, Shatner plays Sargon as straightforwardly and generically godlike.

Muldaur though goes to great lengths to depict Thalassa and Mulhall as two very different people: As Thalassa she's every bit as vindictive, spiteful, passionate and capricious as the script wants her to be, but, like Shatner, she brings a grandiose theatrical flourish to this, making her seem wild, mighty and unpredictable, and just a little bit unreal: A very far cry from the cool and collected Ann Mulhall. And this is what ultimately saves “Return to Tomorrow” from itself: Muldaur limits and contains Thalassa's foibles to Thalassa and Thalassa alone, highlighting that this is a personal flaw with the character, and not something intrinsic to all women. In doing so, Muldaur deals the death blow to the script's sexist overtones, although ironically in the process this might also have undermined the story's general coherence as well.

That's sort of the problem with “Return to Tomorrow” on the whole. There's a lot to like, but most of what there is to like doesn't seem to be the parts of the episode the writers and producers actually wanted us to focus on. The scene that best exemplifies this is the denouement, where Sargon and Thalassa destroy themselves because the temptation of being corporeal would be too great. This was not the original ending: Writer John T. Dugan wanted instead for them to roam the galaxy together as beings of thought. Gene Roddenberry took the script and changed it so they died instead (and this is the thing about Roddenberry: He doesn't give editorial comments, he just takes a script, rewrites it himself without telling the original author and then sends it out without crediting or acknowledging anything), prompting Dugan to use his pseudonym John Kingsbridge. Neither ending is amazing (though Dugan's seemed like it could have been made to work), but Roddenberry's ending is just pointless and mean-spirited and only seems to be there because he wanted to throw his weight around.

As apt a metaphor as any.

“On your television screen”: By Any Other Name

"Well, I've only got these two d12s. We need more dice to make a complete set."

This was most likely one of the first episodes of the Original Series I ever saw-One of the VHS tapes I rented from the local video store when I was first getting really into Star Trek: The Next Generation to see what all the fuss over this older show from the 1960s was. Although I certainly knew the Original Series existed, my practical experience with it came mostly from pop culture references and the numerous books and video games I had about or set during the show's time period. I never saw this show in syndication (in fact the first time I got to see it in order was when the Sci-Fi Channel picked it up sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, perhaps a consequence of possessing about four TV stations during my more formative years), so these scattered and assorted VHS tapes were my first real window into Star Trek's past. It may well have been among the first two tapes I got, along with “The Trouble with Tribbles”, although I may be blurring memories of multiple rental events into one due to the passage of time.

What I do remember most vividly about this episode is how the brightness and colourfulness of the Original Series contrasted with the look of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now, I'm not one to claim the 1980s and 1990s shows have a drab, dull, faded or Grey look about them: I am in fact very much in love with the look-and-feel of at least both Star Trek: The Next Generation and early Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. As far as I'm concerned there's a vastness of scale and a sense of wonder to those shows the other Trek eras simply don't possess, but which is mitigated by a genuine feeling of warmth, intimacy and welcoming. The Maurice Hurley- and Michael Piller-era shows were also shot in a very filmic style (and this doesn't just refer to the use of film stock) and the Enterprise and Deep Space 9 from that period feel radiant and alive. If you need further convincing, I more than encourage you to check out the recent Blu-ray transfer of Star Trek: The Next Generation: 1980s broadcast technology hamstrung that show's sensory impact significantly, as did the previous less-than-acceptable home video transfers of steadily decreasing quality (the DVD transfer is taken from the original VHS transfer, for example, and following several generations of signal decay to boot). On Blu-ray, the show looks the way the creators intended for the very first time.

However, this is very unlike the sheer 1960s primary colour gaudiness of the Original Series, and I don't mean this in a bad way at all (I mean at least as a general rule: There are some episodes coming up next season that look astonishingly trashy in a way the Original Series' theatricality usually manages to avoid). I found the Crayon-bright uniforms on Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty combined with the verdant planet where they respond to the Kelvans' fake distress signal to be quite striking at the time (although upon watching it both in the order and in the rapid succession I'm going at it does look rather a lot like a number of other Class M planets the crew has landed on, probably because it was in all likelihood the same location). I also recall both the transporter and phaser effects, which, to someone accustomed to Rob Legato's practical effects for Star Trek: The Next Generation which were as laudably workmanlike as they were cutting-edge and boundary-pushing, seemed ever-so-slightly off (although upon reflection, there aren't any transporter or phaser effects in “By Any Other Name”, are there?). I remember Kelinda too sticking out quite strongly, and no, not for the reasons you might presume: Say what you will about William Ware Theiss (and I do, a lot) the man had a real talent for designing eye-catching costumes for TV, and that weird, angular, blue-gray jumpsuit with no back definitely stands out, and I suppose in more ways then one.

And of course, it's difficult to forget the Kelvans turning the crew into Styrofoam Dungeons and Dragons dice (apparently they were based on a Mexican onyx dodecahedron D.C. Fontana gave to Gene Roddenberry). Styrofoam has a (somewhat deserved) reputation for being the material of choice for no-budget overreaching TV productions but, just like any prop it can be used quite effectively if the rest of the production makes up for it. Although, seeing it again the Kelvan field projections were probably not made out of Styrofoam: Styrofoam doesn't crumble to dust the way Yeoman Thompson does when she's killed by Rojan (and once again it's nice, by which I mean not nice in the slightest, that we not only have another generic Redshirt killed but a woman to boot. I suppose when the choice is the black guy or the white woman you've sort of written yourself into a no-win situation, although it all could have been avoided by, you know, not randomly murdering people on primetime TV). It was certainly effective though: It's intensely visceral to watch that thing crumble; you can almost hear and feel it within your body, and I remember being genuinely upset to see Uhura and Chekov turned into dice, despite knowing they'd turn back at the end of the episode (not that we get to see this, mind. Upon reflection it's rather cruel to have the Kelvans declare that only Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty are “essential”. It's almost like the show is textually reaffirming its implicit prejudices and predispositions. I know the Kelvans are the bad guys and we're supposed to be put off by it, but the episode doesn't go far enough to prove the show can do any better in my opinion).

“By Any Other Name” is the second script by Jerome Bixby, who previously gave us “Mirror, Mirror”. Unfortunately, it looks like this one is closer to his actual perspective: “Mirror, Mirror” was extensively rewritten (uncredited, naturally) by a number of people, and the original draft was apparently something of a disaster, featuring, among other things, Kirk introducing phasers to a less technological Mirror Federation to help them conquer an opposing empire and Mirror Kirk married to Mirror Nurse Chapel. To say the original script carries the faintest echo of the aired episode's bristling anti-imperialism and self-critique would be being *extremely* charitable-It would seem Bixby had an almost Gene Roddenberry-esque attitude to morality and ethics with a stance on imperialism that could best be summarised as “Empires are bad and things like the Federation should be opposed to them”. D.C. Fontana has a credit on this one too, but her influence was apparently nothing more than tweaking Bixby's script to make it more lighthearted, as the original version by all accounts took itself far, far too seriously. But while Fontana can turn this into a functional, serviceable script (and this certainly is: It's more than competent) she can't actually make it terribly interesting. One can't help but feel this is a staggering waste of someone like Fontana given what we know she's capable of, but I suppose this is part of the job description for the story editor.

And really this does seem to fit “By Any Other Name”, which is otherwise a stock, to-the-letter recitation of tiresome Pulp-style captures and escapes. Even when it's not literally a capture or escape, it *feels* like it as Our Heroes try out a new plan to thwart the Kelvans, are foiled, are forced to come up with a new plan, wash, rinse and repeat. The episode only actually picks up in the last third as the crew try to overwhelm the Kelvans with unfamiliar human sensations (which is, of course, a conceit lifted straight from “Catspaw” and is barely more effective here). Once again, it's the lead female extraterrestrial who gets tempted by sensuality, because of course she is, but I guess it says something “By Any Other Name” is on the whole in favour of this process as its ultimate solution is for the Kelvans to form a new society where they learn to live as humans. The scene where Scotty gets Tomar drunk on his entire alcohol stash was definitely one of the most memorable and enjoyable moments of the episode for me (despite how stupefyingly stereotypical it is to have the Scotsman be the friendly drunkard, and to his credit James Doohan blows the scene out of the water, rightly cementing it as one of his best moments on the Original Series).

Speaking of human emotions, let's talk some more about Kelinda, in particular her falling in love with Kirk. Despite the reputation Kirk has as an interstellar (and now intergalactic) ladies' man thanks to his studio-mandated girl-of-the-week, one thing I've noticed is that for all his dalliances Kirk actually has very few lovers: Almost all of his seductions have been shockingly cold hearted, using his charm to manipulate women as a means to an end. First of all, this is utterly awful, and any person who did this in real life would be rightly dubbed a dangerously abusive sociopath. That the only meaningful relationships Kirk seems to have are with his ship and his crew does have a tangentially sum positive side effect worth talking about at a later date, but as it manifests in the actual show this is continuously and deeply distasteful. As for Kelinda herself, rote sexism is written into her character from the very start: She eventually becomes another passive woman to be fought over (even if the actual animosity was one-sided) and even gets a generically and insufferably precocious “I can do as I please!” scene that is mostly successful only as an unpleasant reminder of how patriarchy leads some men to treat their wives and daughters the same way (as cattle) and that apparently extragalactic beings wearing human skinsuits act the same way as it's a fundamental human emotion. So thanks for that, Jerome Bixby.

Drea punches her time card at the flight conn station.

Personally, I always liked Drea, the Kelvan flight controller. She seemed to me like someone who was just trying to do her job and I got the impression she was a highly skilled and intelligent space explorer (probably due at least in part to Lezlie Dalton's competent and collected portrayal). I would imagine Kelvans have a very serious sort of body dysphoria, but Drea seemed to handle her new form quite well. That she never seemed to succumb to emotional confusion told me she probably had a better handle on her human side than her colleagues did, especially as she seemed to respect Kirk as much as Rojan. I have to wonder what the bridge dynamic might have been like had she decided to stay on as part of the Enterprise crew permanently: After all, they had to warp back to the Milky Way anyway and Sulu wasn't around this week, so she must have been the ship's flight controller for at least the trip back (although given the way the show tends to treat women, and how Uhura in particular has fared just this season alone, it's probably best I only have my imagination here).

Trying to imagine what Drea's everyday life would be like is fun for me. I like explorations of the everyday. My experience with the everyday has always seemed to be very different from that of others, so maybe that means I'm more cognizant of and drawn to it.

I guess I've always been the most drawn to the characters who go largely unaffected by the plot. Maybe it's because it subconsciously signals to me they have their act together and that resonates with me (or maybe it's because it also gives the sense they might be up to something of their own). Star Trek seems to be frequently, and derisively (albeit in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way) referred to as “Competency Porn” these days, a term I confess I'm a bit unfamiliar with. I am starting to see the appeal, though: I will admit the more and more a show delves into a character's inner psyche the less interested or invested I often find myself. I know conflict and character development are important, foundational elements of drama and narrative going back to Aristotle. Maybe that's also part of the reason I actually dislike so much drama. Star Trek: The Next Generation was the first scripted drama I ever saw that actually hooked me enough to pull me into its world, and it remains in many ways my standard for what the genre can and should aspire to.

Aside from Star Trek, the only TV shows I used to watch regularly when I was younger were nature programmes and cartoons. That remains the case to this day, which is making it increasingly hard for me to find television I actually like as both are genres that seem to me to be on their last legs, as much of the medium is. I've always preferred music and video games to stuff descended from cinema.

“By Any Other Name” certainly isn't terrible, but seen coming right after “A Piece of the Action” it's hard to see it as anything other than a rather large step backward, in spite of its quite many iconic moments. It's a far more acceptable “average” (to use a word I hate, but for which I can't at the moment think of a suitable replacement) episode of Star Trek than, say, “A Private Little War” or “The Gamesters of Triskelion”, but I don't think it's a preferable standard operating procedure to something like “The Doomsday Machine” (or even the episode coming up a few weeks from now, actually). I suppose there are worse places for a show to be going into its fifth year, though.

Drea is a creature of outer space who has acclimated to being human. Would this make her an expatriot, or even (in a very literal sense) an anthropologist?

"Enterprise log, Captain James Kirk commanding. We are leaving that vast cloud of stars and planets which we call our galaxy. Behind us, Earth, Mars, Venus, even our Sun, are specks of dust. The question: What is out there in the black void beyond? Until now our mission has been that of space law regulation, contact with Earth colonies and investigation of alien life. But now, a new task: A probe out into where no man has gone before."

“This is MY town!”: A Piece of the Action

"We rock."

OK yes, it's absolutely delightful.

Actually, it's better than it lets on, and to find a reason why look no further than that second writing credit. Gene Coon had decided that, given the success of “The Trouble with Tribbles”, Star Trek could use more episodes with a larger and more overt focus on comedy (and it's worth noting it was Coon who saw the potential in young Dave Gerrold's script, encouraged him to keep submitting to Star Trek and who helped him shape “Tribbles” into the masterpiece it became). George Clayton-Johnson, the author of “The Man Trap”, had written an early version of this story as a treatment early in the first season called “Chicago II”. The actual idea for the episode is frequently attributed to Gene Roddenberry due to a two-word pitch (among many others like it) in his original 1964 proposal for Star Trek, Star Trek Is..., entitled “President Capone”, but as it's a rather strangled path from that to what we can watch on screen, it's tough for me to give him full credit for it. Coon discovered Clayton-Johnson's script, liked the idea and decided to retool it. Coon's writing partner here is David P. Harmon, whose previous Star Trek credit was “The Deadly Years”, which is not especially encouraging, but thankfully, “A Piece of the Action” turned out actually beautifully: It's a highlight of the season, deservedly one of the most iconic stories of the series and exactly the sort of thing the show needed right about now.

The knee-jerk way to read “A Piece of the Action” is through its Cargo Cult undertones, and as it turns out this is what I expected I'd be spending this post going on about. In the most pleasant of surprises, “A Piece of the Action” manages to avoid the majority of the flak involved with this kind of prompt, (I know this is the second week in a row I've underestimated Star Trek, but given this season has made me sit through “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, “Friday's Child”, “The Apple”, “The Deadly Years” and “The Gamesters of Triskelion” I maintain I had some right to lower my expectations) but first let's talk a bit about what we mean by Cargo Cult. A Cargo Cult refers to what happens when, following contact with Western colonial powers whose presence results in a short-term burst of material prosperity, non-Western peoples establish a new religion based around worship of specific aspects of Western materialism in a hope this will bring about a return to that period of prosperity. The most famous example of a Cargo Cult took place in Melanesia following World War II, when natives began worshiping spiritual versions of US servicemen prophesized to return to teach them how to to live in plenty.

Obviously, as a particularly blatant example of how callous and thoughtless Western expansion thoroughly wrecked traditional Oceanian societies, Cargo Cults are not a phenomenon I'm not especially fond of, especially when they're so frequently treated in the West as a source of mild paternalistic bemusement. And it could be, and often has been, argued that the Iotians in “A Piece of the Action” are a planetwide culture built around a Cargo Cult of the book Chicago Mobs of the Twenties. Certainly all the Prime Directive hand-wringing in this episode seems to support that interpretation, with Kirk, Spock and McCoy all very concerned about future “contamination” and “corruption” of the native culture. Except I'm not entirely convinced this is the best way to read “A Piece of the Action”: In fact, a better approach might actually be to compare it to a Doctor Who serial.

I want to avoid going into a huge amount of detail on Doctor Who here as there was simply no creative diffusion between it and Star Trek in the 1960s and frankly the majority of you know where to go if you want information on the other big science fiction-fantasy franchise kicking around television during this time (and for the rest, check the links on the right-hand sidebar). There will be a Sensor Scan on Doctor Who at a specially preordained time as there is in fact a point where it actually does enter into both my narrative and that of Star Trek, but let's just say for now one of the most important things to understand about what Doctor Who is and how it operates is that it's a highly literary (in a very literal sense) show known in part for its ability to bend, deform and explore different genres. The Doctor's power comes from his ability to invade other people's stories.

In some ways this is what's going on here-The Iotians are not a society built around historical accounts of Chicago gang wars, they're a society built around the tropes and motifs of exciting gangster crime stories. This isn't entirely clear in the script (although it's never called as such, Chicago Mobs of the Twenties is implied to be a history book which means this is the one part of the episode that may actually be improved by its Star Trek: The Next Generation remake, which is in every other respect a fantastically missed opportunity), but it totally is everywhere else in the production: Everything is deliberately overplayed; there are heaters and mobs and molls and moonshiners and pinstripe suits and pool tables. Naturally, this is just about heaven for William Shatner, who seems clearly and absolutely in his element here in a way we really haven't seen him before.

Over the course of the episode, Shatner-as-Kirk slowly realises he's in a different story and that his usual tactics of diplomacy-or-gunfire aren't going to work, and his transformation from weary exasperation in the first act to fully-clothed mob boss character in the last is a magnificent bit of acting. Funnily enough, despite being arguably the preeminent creative force in shaping Star Trek to become a show that can do stories like, well, this, Gene Coon has on the whole avoided writing Kirk the way Shatner so obviously wants to play him, as a delightfully campy drag action hero. In his past scripts, Coon has tended to use Kirk as a stand-in for the show's ethics, and under every writer except Paul Schneider, who seemed to actually get where Kirk's actual potential as a character lay, Shatner has had to fight to keep from being written as, well, a Hollywood action male lead. Here though, Coon writes Kirk as someone constantly improvising his performance on the fly, and Shatner couldn't be happier, playing off Coon's material with positively flying colours. What we wind up with then is a kind of recursive artifice: Shatner doing a subtly exaggerated performance of Kirk doing a subtly exaggerated performance of a 1920s mob boss. It is a genius, genius bit of theatrical flourish that goes criminally under-appreciated and under-recognised. Furthermore, this is without doubt William Shatner's defining move: If there's one thing that ought to go down as his signature contribution to the performing arts, this is it.

(And not to completely ignore the other actors, who are all brilliant as well, special props have to go to James Doohan, whose confused, befuddled reaction to “Koik's” solution to the Iotian situation is marvelous, and, of course, Leonard Nimoy, who has Spock try his absolute best to join in on the act. “I would advise yas to keep dialin', Oxmyx." is a thing of absolute beauty and probably the blueprint for about 70% of the jokes about Commander Data in the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

But there are other reasons why “A Piece of the Action” isn't something quite as simple or straightforward as a Cargo Cult story. Firstly, the Iotians are not depicted as childlike Noble Space Savages, we've seen those before on Star Trek and this is something altogether different. Spock mentions in passing early on that prior to the incident with the Horizon, Sigma Iotia II was just entering its industrial revolution. Later on, during a discussion about Chicago Mobs of the Twenties, Bella Oxmyx says that the Horizon crew left a lot of books behind, in particular textbooks, but this was the most important one. Clearly the Iotians understand what these objects are and where they came from. The clincher comes when Oxmyx refers to Chicago Mobs of the Twenties as *The* Book, and Spock states the Iotians latched onto it and turned it into their Bible. These people are not are not, for once, some warped conception of indigenous Oceanic people extrapolated to a science fiction setting and dropped into some Space Age Garden of Eden (thank The Prophets for that). No, the Iotians are Westerners, and that changes everything.

For the first time then we have the Federation portrayed as something that might conceivably be above and beyond Westernism instead of something that is just an extension or extrapolation of it. The overt performativity of Shatner-as-Kirk and the rest of the production in this case takes on a new meaning, almost as if it's trying to tell us the world of Star Trek doesn't really belong here (after all, it is, as Boss Kirk says, a “small-time operation”). Read this way, “A Piece of the Action” can be seen as fulfilling the potential “Bread and Circuses” was hinting at before Gene Roddenberry came along and defanged it (I know it was a joint effort but come on, we all know who that episode's denouement really sounds like). Of course, this approach has problems of its own: No matter how hard future Star Trek will try to show the Federation is a wonderful ideal we can all strive for, the fact remains the whole concept of any sort of “federation” is wrapped up in Western tropes and ideas to begin with. In many ways, the United Federation of Planets is a very Western utopia. Once again though, I'll draw a line between “The Federation” and “The World of Star Trek”. The former may not be a viable way forward, but the latter may well be, and that's what “A Piece of the Action” is helping set the stage for as much as anything else.

The key scene is without doubt the climax. Of all the “Kirk shows up and straightens out a backward or problematic society” we've seen in Star Trek so far, this might be the greatest and most unique. While it's accepted a unified planetary society is where Sigma Iotia II *should* end up (which irritates both my anarchist and anthropological senses as unified planetary societies are yet another extrapolation of a non-functional Western idea, namely that of the nation-state), the actual approach the show endorses is one of the most unorthodox, and brilliant, in the entire history of Star Trek. Boss Kirk doesn't encourage the Iotians to form a United Nations or some other form of representative democracy: Instead, he proposes the different mob bosses get together and form a syndicate, cutting him in for a percentage of the organisation's net value.

I can't get over how fascinating and delightful this ending is: First of all in many ways a criminal outfit like a mob syndicate does in fact work better than a representative democracy, in spite of its more unscrupulous aspects (compare Las Vegas in the 1960s and 1970s to Las Vegas today for a textbook example of this, or just read any of Hunter S. Thompson's late-period writings), and in this episode Star Trek actually seems to be acknowledging that. Secondly, this is another example of how “A Piece of the Action” recognises and plays off its performativity so well: Essentially, Boss Kirk gets so wrapped up in his role he forgets he's supposed to deliver the “proper” Star Trek moral, which Spock actually points out in the denouement, reminding him this is going to be tough to explain to Starfleet Command. Wonderfully, Kirk retains his mob boss persona even when back on board the Enterprise, seemingly only partially aware of the extent to which he's genuinely subverted the entire show here. For that matter, I might even be able to redeem the whole united planet thing: A core tenet of anarchic individualism (as opposed to “American” “Individualism”) is that alliances of individuals should form based around shared interests, worldviews and goals. Maybe that's what the syndicate is: A streamlining of the native system already in place designed around the idea the different mob bosses are too similar to be fighting each other.

“A Piece of the Action” isn't the best episode of the season (For my money “The Trouble with Tribbles” is still untouchable for a number of extradiegetic reasons even this episode can't come close to) but it's bloody fantastic and one of the best episodes in the series by far. Additionally, it contributes something to the evolving narrative that's truly invaluable: Coming here at the tail end of a season of rapidly deteriorating quality, this is the concrete evidence we needed that “Tribbles” was more than a fluke success and that Star Trek might actually really be special and that it really does have the potential to offer something of genuine greatness. At long last, every one of the series' more radical and experimental factors seem to be working in harmony here and we get the first undeniable clue of what they're capable of. No matter where the last few episodes of the year go, at least Gene Coon, the first person to make Star Trek Star Trek, has finally given us a defining statement.

“A world sinks thus; and yon majestic Heaven/Shines not the less for that one vanish'd star!”: The Immunity Syndrome

Sometimes you really do have to go with the obvious screenshot.

Well, here's something I wasn't at all expecting. Given how Star Trek has been seriously underperforming the last few weeks as well as the fact the series has been steadily but noticeably running out of steam since midway through the season I fully anticipated that the episode about the Giant Space Amoeba would be another silly runaround, especially as my memory of it consisted mostly of some agonizing debate over Spock taking on a suicide mission from which it was eminently clear he was going to come back, as well as of the aforementioned Giant Space Amoeba. I was totally prepared to glibly take the piss out of this one as another example of Star Trek's inevitable march towards cancellation.

It turns out the memory does in fact cheat, and I'm thankful it does in this case because “The Immunity Syndrome” is actually properly excellent.

In some ways the episode “The Immunity Syndrome” is most immediately comparable with is “The Doomsday Machine”, from which it inherits its thriller structure. Once again, we have a tense countdown to destruction that is narrowly averted at the last possible second and which keeps us on the edge of our seats throughout the entire story. Perhaps as a result, this is a laudably tight and exciting production, and, like its predecessor, a sterling example of what an “average” (to use a potentially loaded term) episode of Star Trek in its second season ought to look like. However it's a great deal more than that: In this regard (and uncannily so given “A Private Little War” is still relatively fresh in the memory) “The Immunity Syndrome” may actually be closer to “The Alternative Factor”, because the threat posed by the Giant Space Amoeba for almost the entire runtime of the episode is an honest-to-goodness narrative collapse.

We've come perilously close to narrative collapse a number of times in Star Trek so far: “The Alternative Factor” is, naturally, the most obvious example, but as I mentioned in its corresponding post, “The Menagerie” at least flirted with the iconography of collapse, though thanks to a combination of the approach of the early Gene Coon era and Gene Roddenberry's general writerly incompetence that's not quite what we got. “The Immunity Syndrome”, however, is the closest we've gotten yet, and while it ultimately stops just short of becoming one, for the vast majority of the episode it seems like it just might go all the way. The telltale sign comes in the very first act, when the Enterprise discovers the aptly named Zone of Darkness, which immediately begins to sap the life force of both the ship and its crew. Within the zone, there is no starlight, either because it's been blocked by something or all the stars have simply gone out. Now a lot of calamitous things can happen on Star Trek: The show threatens the destruction of the ship or the death of crewmembers on a seemingly weekly basis. But as far as I'm concerned, if you take away the stars from Star Trek, that really is it.

Even before that, in the teaser we see Spock recoiling in horror at the destruction of the Intrepid and her crew of Vulcans, which he can sense thanks to a species-wide empathic link. Spock describes the Intrepid as not just “destroyed”, but actually “dead”. It's a commonly circulated piece of Star Trek fan lore typically attributed to Gene Roddenberry that the Starship Enterprise (or starship Voyager or Starbase Deep Space 9) should be seen as a character unto itself and just as important to the show as any of the other regulars (and in reality this probably comes from Dave Gerrold or D.C. Fontana, as Roddenberry had to actually be convinced to use an Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation instead of increasing the range of the transporter). In other words, what we have in “The Immunity Syndrome” is a threat big enough to actually kill the Enterprise. It's tough to think of something that, at this point in the show's history, could seem more like a direct and grave threat to its diegetic existence than this: Vaporize whole sectors of space and you have drama for an episode. Kill the Enterprise and you kill Star Trek.

The behaviour of the Giant Space Amoeba is also interesting to note, as it's described on a number of occasions as a virus, that is, something foreign and dangerous that has invaded the body of the galaxy and needs to be purged before it spreads and infects everything. This rhetoric, just as it was in “The Return of the Archons” last year, is potentially worrying because it has the potential to tread into xenophobia. That said “The Immunity Syndrome” is thankfully divorced of clunkily handled metaphor because the Giant Space Amoeba is simply exactly that: A Unicellular organism, albeit one that's the size of a solar system. In spite of all this though it remains a form of New Life (you know, one of the things the Enterprise is supposed to be on a mission to Seek Out), so Kirk's by this point signature solution of Blowing It The Fuck Up does grate a little, even if it was arguably his only option.

However, this is distinguished from the more ethically troubling iterations of this in the past by a number of factors: Firstly, the Giant Space Amoeba, being a form of single-celled life, can hardly be called sentient, and if we start arguing for the rights of viruses we're probably going to have some serious problems. Secondly though, everything up to the climax shows the crew trying their hardest to make scientific observations about a heretofore unknown type of creature, and McCoy is perfectly willing to risk his life to work in “the greatest biology laboratory ever”. It does seem like somewhere a corner was turned in the crew's standard operating procedure: They're starting to act more like scientists and explorers than soldiers and policemen, and on a more regular and noticeable basis. Crucially though this still almost gets everyone killed: Every attempt the crew makes to study and learn more about the Giant Space Amoeba causes it to react in such a way that it causes things to become markedly worse for them, almost as if the show's own ostensible premise is fighting against it, challenging it to prove it's actually capable of living up to it.

Ultimately of course it's the possible death of Spock that truly marks “The Immunity Syndrome” as a narrative collapse in waiting. While narrative collapses do result in the restoration of a work's ability to tell its stories, this typically comes at a massive, tragic cost, and the death of a major character would certainly suffice. The choice of Spock out of everyone is particularly visceral: As the embodiment of Star Trek's central duality that dates back to Gene Roddenberry and “The Cage” and the character frequently representative of the very best the series tries to strive for, this would be a mighty loss indeed. And, appropriately, “The Immunity Syndrome” goes to great lengths to lead us to believe this might very well be Spock's final bow up until the very last scene, tying in beautifully with the thriller structure the episode employs elsewhere. We've had the death of major characters threatened before (Spock alone has faced death a not-insignificant amount of times just this season), but in the past this has always been clearly a fake-out in order to drum up dramatic tension cheaply and quickly. There's absolutely no doubt Spock's going to survive something like the gunshot in “A Private Little War”, for example-That was only put in to get him out of the story for awhile. Here though, the entire episode is basically set up to telegraph Spock's ultimate fall, with the story gradually building to his supposed heroic sacrifice from his horror in the teaser, which also results in one of his very best moments in the series so far when he criticizes McCoy, and by extension humanity, for their lack of empathy, declaring, probably rightly, that if we had the same conception of a greater whole that Vulcans do our history “would have been a lot less bloody”.

But killing off Spock would have done more than just provide the sacrificial lamb necessary to escape narrative collapse: An argument could be made this would have ended up killing Star Trek just as effectively as killing the Enterprise: As not just a major character but the central one who symbolizes the show itself and its core themes (at least at first) and someone who becomes one of the most iconic aspects of the entire franchise, having him die here would have been absolutely catastrophic, probably bringing about a narrative collapse of its own. Which is why, in the end, “The Immunity Syndrome” once again backs away from unleashing the true horror it was hinting at on the show. Spock miraculously survives his mission and Kirk gets to blast his way out of a problem once again. Star Trek avoids narrative collapse a second time, but we're left with the worrying notion that this time it was a little too close for comfort. And in a sense “The Immunity Syndrome” has condemned the series anyway: By destroying yet another previously unknown, and possibly unique, form of life, the show has really demonstrated itself to be something of a hypocrite. Kirk can talk all he wants about being on a mission of peaceful exploration, but we know exactly what he's going to do when the chips are down.

The only qualifier I may have with all of this is the source of this potential narrative collapse itself: While it serves very well as an unknown form of life, and thus by definition something the Enterprise crew are on the whole unable to deal with, the effectiveness of the Giant Space Amoeba as a believable threat to the very fabric of Star Trek is...somewhat limited by the fact that it is, in truth, well...A Giant Space Amoeba. This alone means “The Immunity Syndrome” comes across as a little lacking when compared to “The Alternative Factor”, the latter episode having as it does matter and antimatter realities that pose a danger to the show's coherence by virtue of traumatic metafictional multiplicity (although it is interesting that within the Zone of Darkness things seem to run backwards, much like one would expect in a realm opposite of ours). Perhaps that can be seen as part of the joke though: Star Trek is on such shaky ground that a Giant Space Amoeba is almost all it takes to completely break the series like a twig. All that said, the Giant Space Amoeba is a truly fantastic visual effect, both the original design and the CGI re-imagining that's part of the new effects added to the rebroadcast syndicated run of the Original Series that aired in the mid-to-late 2000s and that's available now on all the home media versions as an optional extra.

It's also crucial this happens now, at the tail-end of the second season and in the first script of John Meredyth Lucas' tenure as producer that can actually be called basically functional. Behind the scenes, the show really is flying apart at the seams, and it's starting to look more and more like Star Trek isn't coming back next year. There's seven episodes left to air in the season, and only five of those really actually count. Barring something unprecedented, like, say, a large-scale fan-driven letter-writing campaign demanding the show be kept on the air, one does get the distinct sense Star Trek is winding down. This is the perfect time to put out an episode like this, seeming as it does to be such an extradiegetic critique of the show's structure and basic ethics. Was it, ultimately, the show seems to be asking of itself as much as it is of us, at all worth it? Well, we have to wait a few more weeks to get the answer to that.

“...is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?”: Obsession

"What did you see, old man?"

“Obsession” is Moby-Dick for Star Trek again, so firstly all of the comments I made the last time we talked about this kind of story in “The Doomsday Machine” still apply. There is fundamentally not a whole lot to add to that (except for one issue I'll discuss a little later). The primary problem is, as always, the idea of doing a blind vengeance story in a setting that's supposedly more enlightened, idealistic and utopian. With Commodore Decker this worked, because we could get a character study about the tragic fall of someone consumed by a need for revenge without jeopardizing one of our own: Imagine, for a moment, that Decker's role in “The Doomsday Machine” had been filled by Kirk, McCoy or Sulu: There's no way the show could come back from that the next week, because the nature of serialized anthology television necessitates hitting the reset button in the last two minutes of every episode and doing that after that kind of intensely personal story would have been catastrophic. Furthermore, by essentially casting the Enterprise crew as Ishmael, this upholds the narrative reiteration structure that helped make the episode successful and also helped push the series towards the idealism it will soon become famous for.

In short, this is the problem “Obsession” is continuously grappling with. It's doing Moby-Dick again, except this time with Kirk as Ahab. Aside from this being, ultimately, a bit lazy and more evidence Star Trek and other US TV shows really need fewer episodes a year in order to better vet their scripts (at least this one is actually somewhat coherent and isn't a total write-off like the past few weeks have been), it risks breaking the tenuous solid ground the show's carved out for itself in the wake of “Mirror, Mirror”, “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Journey to Babel” because now Star Trek is more indebted to idealism than it's ever been before. It's not fully in that camp yet, it will take the fans to actually put it there, but it is now self-evidently the kind of show that someone could conceivably and plausibly draw that reading from. Hell, even “The Gamesters of Triskelion” portrayed the world of the Federation as something positive and worth striving towards, even if it was appallingly modernist and teleological about it. “Obsession” now has to deal with the challenge of doing a mad vengeance story with a main character on an anthology show that's started flirting with utopianism, which is something not even “The Doomsday Machine” had to worry about.

The success or failure of this was always going to hinge on how the script handled conflict, and to its credit “Obsession” at least doesn't totally blow it-It handles the problem about as well as could have been expected of it. It helps greatly that Kirk's turmoil isn't just vengeance here but guilt and self-doubt about his hesitation when facing the Vampire Cloud eleven years prior and his inability to save the crew of the Farragut. Depicting Ensign Garrovick as someone Kirk sees as a reflection of his younger self is a very nice touch (down to him finding himself in an echo of the situation Kirk faced when he was in his place), and their reconciliation in Act Four is a great character scene that's ahead of its time and takes some of the edge off of the episode's biggest problem: “Obsession” simply ties itself in knots trying to keep Kirk the hero and moral centre of the story and is trying desperately to keep him in a heroically authoritarian light.

The first half of the story plays out very similarly to “The Conscience of the King” where Kirk's judgment is cast into doubt because of his intensely personal connection to the situation and a fear he's no longer looking out for the welfare of the ship and the crew, but out for blood. At one point McCoy even tried to determine if he is medically unfit for command. However, unlike “The Conscience of the King” which was allowed to be far more of a character piece (perhaps by virtue of its overt theatricality), Kirk isn't actually allowed to learn anything here and in the second half of the episode the script turns itself inside out and reveals Kirk was in the right all along, and goes out of its way to show McCoy's concern was unjustified, thus undermining one of the best moments DeForest Kelley's been allowed all season when he talks to Kirk in his quarters about the nature of guilt. This need not be fundamentally a bad thing, as I feel the idea characters need to learn something every episode is a largely unhelpful and counterproductive one, but “Obsession” didn't need to do this by forcing Kirk into the heroic lead role and belittling everyone else by showing they were worrying over nothing.

The interesting flip side is that in doing this, “Obsession” actually helps further Star Trek's claim to be considered a work of idealism. What makes the scene in Kirk's quarters such a success, despite it being in many ways a rehash of what amounts to basically the exact same scene in “The Conscience of the King”, is that Kirk, Spock and McCoy have an actual intelligent discussion about their concerns. Kirk is still visibly on edge, but he tries to do his best to keep his anger contained and, when challenged by Spock and McCoy, calmly defends himself and articulates reasons why he doesn't feel he's become consumed by vengeance but is instead acting with the best interests of the ship, the crew and local space in mind (which, of course, turn out to be true once the Vampire Cloud invades the Enterprise). This is an extremely mature and intellectual approach to problem solving: Kirk doesn't hide the fact he's personally affected by self-doubt and feels guilt over his previous actions, but he quite correctly states he can't control that but has to rely on what his intuition tells him is the best thing to do. Instead of wallowing in pain and anguish for our voyeuristic amusement, Kirk actually discusses his feelings and opinions with his friends and colleagues. And, of course, William Shatner is perfect at this and his performance here is 180 degrees around from his antics last week, deftly signaling each and every one of Kirk's conflicted emotions, sufficiently demonstrating that the best way to prevent him from hamtastically eating the set is to give him an intelligent bit of writing to work with.

“Obsession” also provides us the first look at something we could conceivably call indicative of the style of new producer John Meredyth Lucas. Although the first episode to go out under his watch was “Journey to Babel” that was largely an example of letting an established veteran do her thing, which is good because that one was by D.C. Fontana and it takes talent to screw up a script of hers, if you happened to be so inclined to do so. “A Private Little War” saw the chair go back to Gene Coon, which is sad because he had to deal with Gene Roddenberry again. “The Gamesters of Triskelion” was Lucas', which is deeply unfortunate, but remember at this point in Coon's tenure we were still dealing with things like “Miri”, so we should cut him the same amount of slack (it's also interesting to note “Obsession” is Lucas' third story as producer and “The Conscience of the King” was Coon's second). However, the problem the Lucas era has is that it never really gets the chance to develop its own unique voice and perspective: Lucas is here for eight more weeks and then hastily abandons the show along with Roddenberry, Coon and Fontana as soon as “Assignment: Earth” wraps, and, unlike Roddenberry, he doesn't lurk around the franchise for the next twenty-five years such that we get intimately familiar with his worldview. Along with Coon and Fontana he'll occasionally pop in over the course of the third season to contribute a script, often under a pseudonym, but, just like them, it's clear he doesn't have any serious expectations about getting his conception of Star Trek seen and heard anymore.

As a result, “Obsession” is about the closest we're ever going to get to what a typical episode of John Meredyth Lucas' Star Trek might have looked like, although I'll do my best to try and tease his voice out of the remainder of the stories he's involved in. From what I can gather, and remember this is only his third episode, despite having written “The Changeling”, Lucas does seem to be more interested the character side of Star Trek then the “Strange New Worlds” concept. The Vampire Cloud is once again a malevolent Other and is just there to give Kirk and Garrovick something to, well, obsess over. He also seems to be interested in logic vs. emotions debates: On the surface this causes me to roll my eyes because Fontana has already wrapped all that up to a satisfactory degree by now, but to his credit Lucas' episodes (at least this one) seem to understand they're going out into a post-”Journey of Babel” Star Trek and show how all the main characters call upon a mixture of logic and emotions to make decisions. Even “The Changeling” showed Kirk having to use a combination of logic and improvisation to outwit Nomad.

(I'd talk more about the actual writer of “Obsession”, Art Wallace, except his only other Trek credit is co-writing “Assignment: Earth”, which is mostly a Roddenberry effort anyway. However, as the writer of the first seventeen weeks of the horror soap opera Dark Shadows and the author of that series' bible, he's definitely an interesting person to see connected to Star Trek).

But as sound as “Obsession” ends up in spite of its less-than-ideal central concept, it's tough to see it as a good sign either. To see this kind of personnel shakeup behind the scenes going into the tail-end of a season that's seen a mixture of absolute classics and absolute nightmares is not encouraging, especially when the people beginning to retreat are the very people who turned Star Trek into a show that was capable of turning out those classics in the first place. From the perspective of the future, the looming cancellation casts a dark shadow of its own over the proceedings, and it's tough to feel anything but sorry for John Meredyth Lucas, knowing he's inheriting a show that's on its way towards losing many of its best assets and will ultimately, and quickly, prove to be a sinking ship that he'll be unable to turn around. But with an irritable cast, a terrible track record for quality, an apathetic network and ratings that could charitably called middling, it's no surprise the end is coming soon.