[Star Trek is back for its third season!  Accordingly, we've devoted a great many inches to this rather uneven debut….]

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by Janice L. Newman

This week we gathered all our friends together to start off a new season of Star Trek. We served dinner, then put our little portable color set outside and everyone enjoyed the lovely late summer night.

Well, everyone except me, that is. I was stuck inside with a VERY nasty cold that, oddly enough, no one else wanted to share with me. It made watching Spock’s Brain a lonely experience, but it did give me space to focus on the episode without being distracted by gasps, groans, or laughter—except my own, that is.

With the recent threats of cancelation and huge fan response, I expected NBC to put their best foot forward starting the new season. For Season 2 they knocked it out of the park with Amok Time. Could they do it again?

In a word, no.

Spock’s Brain had a lot of good elements. The set up was interesting, if fairly typical by now. An unknown alien vessel confronts the Enterprise. An alien woman appears on the bridge and knocks everyone out with a gadget worn on her wrist. When the crew awakens again, they are horrified to discover that Spock is missing. Then, in a twist I could not have predicted, they find that Spock’s body is in Sick Bay, but his brain has been carefully removed!

Kirk's brain doesn't pass muster…

Somehow Spock’s “incredible Vulcan physique” (McCoy’s words, not mine) allows him to survive without a brain until McCoy can get him on futuristic life support. However, they must get back Spock’s brain within 24 hours, McCoy tells Kirk, or they won’t be able to reconnect it.

Kirk, furious and terrified, orders the navigator to follow the trail of the other ship. When it dead ends in a known system, they must determine which of the three planets has Spock’s brain. Playing a hunch that the audience knows will be correct, Kirk chooses the one that seems the least likely.

The surface of the world is cold and barren, populated by all-male tribes of primitive humans. Beneath the ground, women live in luxury and comfort. But both groups are strangely childlike. Neither understand what Kirk wants when he demands “Spock’s Brain”.

The away team consists of Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Mr. Spock—or rather, his body, controlled remotely by McCoy with a little gadget. He is even more inexpressive than usual, and little ticking sounds are heard whenever he moves. If it sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is.

Own your own clockwork Spock!

The team is captured, escape, and eventually make their way to where Spock’s brain has been hooked up to the machine controlling the entire complex. His autonomic functions have been repurposed to control the air, water, heating, and so on. It’s not a new idea in SF—Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang did something similar if I recall correctly—but it was one of the more interesting plot points in the episode.

Spock's brain after getting the Sargon treatment

The team learns that the childlike people occasionally get temporary boosts to their knowledge by wearing a funny helmet with pins sticking out of it. This is how their leader was able to remove Spock’s brain. When they force her to again partake of the forbidden knowledge, however, she refuses to help them. If Spock’s brain is removed, the machines will cease to function and her people will die.

McCoy, left with no other choice, dons the helmet himself, receives a temporary boost in knowledge and skill, and proceeds to reattach Spock’s brain. The knowledge runs out before he can finish, but fortunately he’s able to connect Spock’s vocal cords, and the Vulcan is then able to guide him through reattaching the rest.

Kirk, meanwhile, tells the leader not to worry her pretty little head, because soon the women and men will be living together like they should have been all along, and the Federation will ‘help’ them.

Spock is unusually garrulous as the episode ends, lecturing them all on Ancient Rome as the theme swells triumphantly.

Spock is all better now—he didn't even muss his hair!

The frustrating thing about Spock’s Brain is that there’s so much good in it. The acting is very good. Kelley, Shatner, and Nimoy feel like they’ve really started to slot together as a team. Their banter is smoother than ever, Kirk’s over-acting is kept to a minimum, and they deliver the most nonsensical lines with absolute sincerity and straight faces. For that alone, they all deserve Emmys.

Added to that is Marc Daniels’ excellent direction, with interesting angles and innovative camera work. The music, too, was new.

Yet none of it mattered, because the fundamental plot was such schlock that it was impossible to take seriously. Every time McCoy screamed out, “Where are we going to look for Spock’s brain?” or Nimoy robotically walked across the screen as little ticking sounds followed along in the background, I was thrown right out of the world of Star Trek and into a bad B-movie. It was funny. It just wasn’t Star Trek.

Hopefully next week the studio will have something better to offer us.

Two stars.

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A Sow's Ear from a Silk Purse

by Amber Dubin

This episode started with promise, the way the scantily clad, mysteriously powerful alien women that smoothly and silently dispatches the entire crew harkens back to the hostile takeovers we’ve seen in other episodes like Norman from “I, Mudd” or the Kelvans from “By any other name.” We expect, then, the plot to follow a similarly cerebral path where this new species of alien demonstrates how their improvements upon humanoid society have allowed them to surpass us in power while sacrificing one very human trait whose immense value they’ve forgotten. That would be following a tried and true formula of an episode that, while banal, can still be entertaining. It is seemingly from this scaffold that this episode attempts to reach to higher heights, without recognizing that it never truly took the time to support itself beforehand.

This reach is visible in the beautifully presented viewscreens, the dramatic "behind the captain's chair" camera angle they debut in this episode, the smooth score, matchless acting and the shiny new svelte uniforms they've adorned the cast with. They took a step backwards with Scottie's new haircut, which is so devastatingly unflattering that it makes Chekov's Monkees wig look tolerable, but it's a small misstep when compared to the unforgivable sin of completely forgetting to attach these shiny tassels to an intelligible script or plot.

For once, Chekov's hair looks better than Scotty's…

The most obvious problem with the plot is the concept of removing Spock's brain. Spock has had his body hijacked countless other times but the insistence of using the removal of his physical cerebral organ this time, instead of just his consciousness, makes all the subsequent actions ridiculous. Also, the fact that none of the Imorgs even seem to know what a brain is is absurd. This leads me to my second biggest problem with the episode, and that is that the alien societal structure is incredibly poorly designed. Ostensibly, the species is segregated across gender lines with the females (the Imorgs) living underground, most likely for their own protection as the males (the Morgs) seem to have descended into violent, brainless savages. The most interesting implication I find with this structure is that Imorgs are described by the Morgs as “bringers of pain and delight.” This implies, to me, that their society must survive by the Imorgs periodically returning to the surface, not just to discipline the Morgs, but also to.. ahem.. milk them of their genetic material for reproductive purposes.

While this is a comical concept, the explanation for this setup makes no sense. It is explained that they became so advanced and so comfortable that their species' intelligence gradually atrophied like an unused muscle, thus requiring the externalization of said intelligence in the archival brain-training headset that certain members of society can put on to receive the combined knowledge of the ancients at their intellectual peak. Yet this raises the question: how did their loss of intelligence happen so slowly that it was unavoidable and yet so quickly that they were able to see it coming in order to store it externally to be used later? Perhaps there was a brain-eating disease that only spared the less intelligent? Yet this does not explain how McCoy's readings picked up evidence of a gradual degradation and does not explain how the best solution that these highly intelligent beings could come up with is to turn their habitat into a body controlled by a physical cerebral organ sustained for 10,000 year periods; meanwhile the remnants of their species are left to crawl around said body mindlessly like ants in a glass-bound ant hill.

As absurd as this premise makes the episode, it introduces what I see as its most redemptive quality: the positive sexism. As often as this show strives for portraying women as valued members of an advanced society, it's my personal opinion that it falls short too many times. This episode seeks to bend the needle at least a little bit in favor of a 'women being smarter than men' narrative, and I am a fan. The Imorgs, while dumb, are no more dumb than the Morgs, and I am quite fond of the fact that their highly intelligent ancestors chose the females as the more reliable receptacles into which to download the collective knowledge of their species. I also enjoyed that, while graced with the knowledge and basically the consciousness of the ancients, the Imorg priestess is successfully able to out-smart Kirk and is completely immune to his powers of persuasion. I find it infinitely refreshing that Captain Kirk doesn’t once again save the day by aggressively teaching the femme-fatale the value of love. Although when said woman decries that they can’t control the men without systems of punishment and reward, Kirk does sneak in a snide “there are other ways.” I could be reading too far into it, but the way he delivered the line made me think he was more than willing to provide instructions as to techniques that women can use to get men to do what they want (maybe he’d even suggest a hands on approach to the milking process).

"How about some lessons in healthy sexual relations?"

Despite this episode's obvious flaws, which there are many, I wouldn't overall say this is a bad episode. It's a testament to the commitment of the actors that they're willing to deliver solid performances of the sometimes silly lines with depth and sometimes deadly seriousness (Nurse Chapel’s 10 second fall alone is Oscar-worthy). In general, the characters appear much more polished than we've seen in some other episodes; and the lighting, which I think is a little too severe for Shatner's face in a couple of scenes, was an interesting departure and a bold choice. What the episode lacked in structural continuity, it tried to make up for in fluid pacing, an exceptional score, and special effects opticals that I believe have vastly improved from even the last season. Ultimately, however, the failure of editors to cut the obvious silliness out of the script makes all the high quality elements feel like lipstick on a pig.

They say you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear but apparently you can make a sow’s ear from a silk purse. This episode makes for one very stylish pig, but if it’s just going to dunk its head in the mud, I don’t see the point of the wasted effort.

Three stars.

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The Mental Divide

by Joe Reid

Star Trek has returned for a 3rd season!  I've missed our weekly sneak peek into the future as well as that regular glance into the mirror of our present.  “Spock's Brain” is the name of this entry.  Spock's brain is the apparent focus of this episode, at least on the surface.  As I stated before, Star Trek is sometimes a mirror to show us who we are or may become.  In “Spock's Brain”, we don't look good.

Watching shows like Star Trek, we see ourselves as the heroes.  We picture ourselves as Kirk.  We are Uhura.  We are Chekov.  From a narrative standpoint, we are actually the silly characters that the crew of the Enterprise are fighting, kissing, lying to, or helping each week.  This week, we are the inhabitants of Sigma Draconis 6.  What do the people of this planet tell us about ourselves?

The people of Sigma Draconis 6, which I will call Sixers from here forward, were divided by sex.  The Sixer males were ignorant of relationships with the females outside of knowing them as the ones that bring pain and pleasure.  Similarly, many men in our world don’t understand women.  We sometimes reduce women to being instruments of pleasure, which if not handled correctly might lead to intense pain.  Of course, it doesn’t help at all if men are uneducated and uncultured.  Such men are reduced to seeing women in the context of either, “Heavens!  She makes me feel good!”, or “Dammit! She is a pain in the neck!”

Women gain the upper hand in the battle of the sexes.

The Sixer women, being physically weaker than the men, and as ignorant as them, defaulted to using instruments of pain and pleasure to get what they wanted from men.  Although the episode didn’t offer what pleasures were given to the men, I myself am intimately aware of the pleasures that today’s women use to get their way from a man and of the pain some of them inflict when they are not satisfied.  Bill Shakespeare wrote about the fury of a woman’s scorn.  I find myself questioning which is better—the long deep pain caused by a woman who hurts your soul or the short and intense pain of this episode’s futuristic torture device.  Both seem equally bad ways of dealing with the opposite sex, based on an utter lack of compassion.

This portrayed male/female struggle, although interesting, was not a perfect mirror to our culture in that it gave no example to the pain that men have caused women today and throughout history.  Also giving no notion that men could bring pleasure to women outside of what they can physically provide through their labor. In the end, "Spock's Brain" shows us that there must be more to successful human relations than simple Pavlovian techniques.

Another key lesson of the episode involves Spock’s brain and how it was to be used on Sigma Draconis 6.  Sixers females could only continue their way of life if a controller was there to run their world.  Without a controller, the females and males would have to rely on each other in a different way.  This may seem far from reality, but I think this lesson should be taken as a warning rather than an indictment of our society.  We should be wary of any leader, religion, philosophy, or machine that promises to take care of our needs or manage our lives to such a degree that it reduces our interdependence with those around us.  Women and men need each other to survive, but all are better served through understanding and love over pain and pleasure.  Families need each other in the same way.  As do neighbors.  Coworkers.  Citizens of a country.  People of a planet.  Dependence on a solitary thing to care for us may lead to retardation of how we relate to one another.

Why think for yourself when you can just be force-fed knowledge?

For this exciting and thought-provoking episode of Star Trek, I offer 4 of 5 stars.  It told a compelling and suspenseful yarn laced with relevant social commentary and caution—exactly what one wants from science fiction.

Four stars

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Third Season Drinking Game

by Erica Frank

Take a drink every time you spot bad science, male chauvinism, Federation cultural supremacy, or the Enterprise crew pretending that an alien culture has human needs, interests, and abilities. …For this episode, make them small drinks. Sips only. Optionally, take long drinks; you may bypass a few others while you're raising your glass.

I'm leaving it to others to discuss the computer technology (take a drink), the womens' clothing (take a drink), and Kirk's ethics (take another drink), so as to focus on the split communities: Women living underground in the warm, computer-controlled facility; men living without technology on the frozen surface.

How are they making their clothes with "no sign of industrial development?" Those are awfully straight seams for hand-worked leather!

They have lived this way for thousands of years, long enough to have long forgotten why, even if they had attempted to keep records. They seem mostly content (or at least resigned): The men fear the women, but they do not band together to attack them; the women see no reason to change anything until they need a new "Controller."

(I have no idea how children happen. They're aliens. Maybe they lay eggs and the Controller keeps them in an incubator.)

But we are probably supposed to believe they are human-like, just split into communities so separate they don't even have words for sex or gender. Are we to believe these people, human-like enough to prefer buildings that are well-suited for our crew, wearing clothing that seems designed for human cultures, have no concept of human-like relationships? Of course not!

We have plenty of examples of what kind of relationships humans have, if you segregate them by sex: sailors, military forces, and even nunneries have a long history of homosexual behavior.

Of course, the residents of Sigma Draconis 6 won't have "gay" relationships that look like modern human ones: They have no notion of "husband and wife." They don't raise children together, don't have one employed partner and one housekeeper. (The men probably need every able-bodied person working for survival; the women's physical needs are all met by the Controller.) So their relationships – which may not be limited to pair-bonding the way that child-raising couples tend to be – would be mostly invisible to casual, short-term visitors like Kirk and his crew.

When the Morg realize that Spock is Kirk's oath-bonded partner, his assault on the women's complex will make so much more sense to them!

Two stars – mostly for the fascination of "how does that work?"; bump it to three if you've been drinking enough to put yourself in a pleasant fog.

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Anything but Star Trek

by Lorelei Marcus

I think we're entering a new era.  The music feels different, as if it's finally finding its groove after many years of experimentation.  The politics are different, too, with black delegates trying to sit at the convention (and a young Julian Bond making a plausible run for Vice President!), and a weird match-up between two Vice Presidents.

Most of all, the TV is different.  It's all in color, and there's just so many shows, most of them new.  From Julia to The Mod Squad, everyone's jumping to be the fresh, hip thing.

Except, apparently, Star Trek.

It's ironic that this show, which broke new ground on television in not just science fiction but ethnic diversity chose to take such a step back into the past for its Season 3 debut.  "Spock's Brain" felt like a plot straight out of the '50s.  The society separated by men and women, the spooky science beyond our understanding, and even the new, tighter-fitting uniforms made the episode feel right at home next to Forbidden Planet.

What's worse, this quaint exploration of an alien society clashed sharply with the actual Enterprise and crew.  For instance, the (excellent!) scene in which the bridge crew decide which of the three Sigma Draconis planets to investigate in search of Spock's brain feels like a scene from another show—and might as well be: the sentient races on the other planets never become relevant to the episode.

The bridge becomes the briefing room in one of the best scenes of the episode.

I didn't actually have much problem with the whole "brain removal" element of the plot, just how it was executed.  A lot of the lines felt forced and corny, particularly Spock's indifferent voice-overs.  His dialogue should have been the highlight of the episode, not the drag.  Also, the surgery montage at the end of the episode was cheap, taken straight from Ben Casey or maybe even General Hospital.  I was laughing too hard at that point to care whether or not the brain restoration surgery was a success.

Don't get me wrong.  I did enjoy the episode at the time, and the actors salvaged what they could with the lines they were given, but it ultimately left a bad taste in my mouth.  I'm disappointed that "Spock's Brain" was chosen to be the debut of Season 3.  Perhaps a tongue in cheek episode like this (assuming the camp is deliberate) could have been fine midseason, but putting it front and center feels disrespectful to the show and characters, not to mention the audience.  I don't regret writing all those letters to Mort Werner to keep Star Trek alive, but I fear the result may be a degraded, less sophisticated program.

Let's hope this episode is a fluke and not representative of the rest of the season.

Three stars

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Minority Report

by Gideon Marcus

I'm going to go out on a limb here.  I enjoyed this episode.  Perhaps it was the endless summer over which I was starved for new Trek.  Maybe it was the terrific giggles I got out of every time one of the gifted cast had to seriously pronounce the words "Spock's Brain" (usually preceded by variations of "Where are we going to look for…" and "Give back…")

The story didn't bother me.  Was it rushed with intriguing concepts left undeveloped?  Sure, but that's par for the course.  There are only 50 minutes each week with which to introduce a plot and resolve it.  The rest must be done with shorthand.  Indeed, the episode wastes little time, clanging into action with a red-alert signal.  And while Kirk does destroy a 10,000 year old society with no compunctions, he's done so before, under similar conditions ("Return of the Archons" and "The Apple"), and the Federation has specialists to help clean up the ensuing mess.  Plus, in this case, it was personal—they'd taken (chortle) Spock's Brain!

Speaking of plots we've seen before, Spock's Brain (guffaw) is really just the inverse of "Return to Tomorrow".  In that episode, three disembodied brains want Spock's Body (and those of Kirk and Dr. Ann Mulhall).

Of course, in the cold light of day, when I can't be swept along by the superb pacing, the new scoring, the slick new uniforms, the beautiful Daniels-shot bridge (how about those lovely viewscreen shots?!), getting to see all of the B-team doing their jobs, Scotty's disaster of a new hair style (did Jimmy's new wife Anita approve of this?), I can see there are issues with the episode.  For instance, the idea of snatching a brain to power a society is fine.  The notion of finding the best brain for the job makes sense.  But Sigma Draconis had three class M planets in it.  Surely there were scholars on Planet 3 or scientists on Planet 4 who could have done the job.  (Also, Planet 4, with a technology grade of "G" or 2030 A.D. presumably has space travel and perhaps even warp drive—why hadn't they settled/explored Planet 6?)

Also, all this gas about "ion propulsion" being the cat's meow made no sense.  Ion propulsion is something we use today, which I talked about in my article on the (failed) satellite ATS 4.  It is a low thrust , economical drive that uses the constant ejection of cesium atoms to propel a spacecraft.  Maybe Scotty's "ion propulsion" means something different, but it sounds goofy without further explanation.  It's why Trek moved from "lasers", which are new but well known, to "phasers", which are made up but sound cool.  Call it "muon" propulsion or better yet (to make up a word) "buon" or something.

"She's steam-powered, Cap'n!  Far beyond what we can do with antimatter…"

All that said, I want to think that this rather silly script was Trek's essay at deliberate camp, sort of how The Trouble with Tribbles and A Piece of the Action were deliberate comedy and Catspaw was deliberate Halloween creepiness.  In any event, the episode accomplished the main goal, which is that I'm eager to see what's on next week…even if it means I have to stay up past my bedtime to watch the furshlugginer thing, now that they've moved the air time to 10 P.M.!

3.5 stars

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