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[February 10, 1969] Beam Me Up! (Doctor Who: The Seeds Of Death [Parts 1-3])

February 10, 2024 Jessica Holmes 1 Comment

By Jessica Holmes

It’s not every day that you come across a title equally applicable to a Doctor Who serial and a PSA about the dangers of cannabis, but look what we have here: "The Seeds Of Death". With Brian Hayles back in the writer’s chair and a return to the base-under-siege format, do we have a good story sprouting, or a dud?

Let’s take a look.

In Case You Missed It

"The Seeds Of Death" is set in Earth’s future, where technology has progressed to the stage that humanity can transport themselves and their goods around the world in the blink of an eye. The system’s called T-Mat. Think, ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ (Before the Trekkies get me, let me state for the record that I am fully aware that nobody ever actually says that.) Essential to the operation is their moon-base, which itself can only be reached by T-Mat, because humanity in its wisdom has abandoned conventional space travel. Gee, wouldn’t it be awful if something were to happen to it?

Say, for example…an alien invasion?

Enter the Doctor. Arriving on Earth in a museum dedicated to the history of space travel, he soon runs into its curator, Professor Eldred (Philip Ray). Eldred, an ex-rocket scientist, is less than friendly at first, but warms up once the Doctor unleashes his inner dorkness. It really is endearing.

Meanwhile at the T-Mat London base, T-Mat operators Commander Radnor (Ronald Leigh-Hunt) and Gia Kelly (Louise Pajo) grow uneasy about their sudden inability to contact the moon-base and the interruption in service. If they want to check up on their moon-bound colleagues, they’re going to have to find alternative transport. But in a world where traditional space travel is obsolete, where might they find a rocket ship?

Why, a museum of course.

The pair visit Eldred’s museum, and get a bit of an icy reception. There’s no love lost between ex-colleagues Eldred and Radnor. Eldred is understandably a bit miffed about his life’s work being rendered obsolete, and therefore refuses to help Radnor with his T-Mat troubles.

However, at that moment a transmission arrives from the Moon. The technicians attempt to tell their colleagues what’s happened, but they’re caught red-handed by their captors, the Ice Warriors, and cut off. Of the three still-living technicians on the base, one is killed on the spot, another flees, and the third agrees to help the Ice Warriors to save his own skin.

Not knowing the full details but realising that something is very wrong, the Doctor attempts to persuade Eldred to allow Radnor and Kelly to make use of his prize exhibit: an (almost) functioning rocket ship. Radnor offers whatever resources are necessary to get it space-worthy, but Eldred is still reluctant to help.

As for the obvious question, why not take the TARDIS? The Doctor doesn’t exactly have a good track record on piloting it. He’d probably miss the moon by a million miles—or a million years. However, he knows enough about rocket ships that he could pilot one to the moon, and his friends could help. Radnor and Kelly are understandably concerned about their would-be astronauts. You’ve got the bloke who looks like he just walked off the set of the Three Stooges, a teenage girl, and a man who seems to have only recently learned of the very existence of rocket ships.

It doesn’t inspire confidence.

And they don’t even have spacesuits for their amateur astronauts.

Or helmets.

Nevertheless, they get the rocket space-worthy (ish) extraordinarily quickly and the ship blasts off, almost immediately losing communications with Earth.

Extreme g-forces might not be comfortable, but they do result in very funny facial expressions.

Speaking of Earth, the Earth side of the emergency T-Mat link comes back online, though all they can do is send something to the Moon. Taking the hint (and failing to consider the potential dangers), Kelly immediately sends herself and a few extra men to lend help.

The Ice Warriors remain hidden, and their collaborator, Fewsham (Terry Scully), meets her when she arrives, telling her that his commander went mad and destroyed the T-Mat system. He needs her help to repair it, and of course she’s only too happy to oblige.

Meanwhile the escapee, Phipps (Christopher Coll), rigs up a radio transmitter and tries to contact Earth again, instead finding the Doctor, and he’s able to help guide him into landing the rocket as he explains to him about the invasion.

Kelly soon gets T-Mat back up and running, learning too late that she’s just played straight into the hands (claws?) of the Ice Warriors, who immediately kill her assistants. Unable to T-Mat herself back to Earth, she flees into the bowels of the moon-base.

The Doctor meets up with Phipps, and quickly comes to the conclusion that in order to stop this invasion going any further, he has to put T-Mat out of action permanently.

He tells Jamie as much, and to get the rocket ready for takeoff. Unfortunately the rocket motors– I’m sorry, motors? I thought rockets didn’t have motors. It’s essentially a tube sitting on top of an explosion. They’re simultaneously very simple and hideously complicated.

Anyway. The rocket motors are out of commission. Jamie and Zoe go to look for the Doctor, and instead find Phipps and Kelly. Phipps shows Jamie, Zoe and Kelly his method for dealing with any Ice Warriors who come across him: a heat-trap, channelling the base’s solar power to a small area to effectively melt them.

As for the Doctor, he infiltrates the Ice Warriors by using the tried and true method of acting so completely pathetic that even a Dalek would probably offer him a blanket and a nice cup of tea.

He learns that the Ice Warriors have a purpose in mind with the T-Mat. They need to use it to send something around the world. Seeds. Exploding seeds. Seeds…of death! (Insert thunderclap here.)

One blows up in the Doctor’s face as he tries to examine it, knocking him unconscious.

And then the Ice Warriors send a seed to London…

Incuriosity and Obsolescence

So, there’s a pretty obvious theme emerging in this serial: obsolescence of old technology, and the dangers of new technology making us complacent.

Though the T-Mat system is undoubtedly more efficient than any conventional means of transportation, in entirely abandoning old methods, humanity has rendered global infrastructure frighteningly fragile. Planes, trains and automobiles? No thanks, say the people of future Earth. Never has it been easier to get medical supplies and food aid where it’s most needed, but with the T-Mat system down, millions are now at risk of death. And by the end of the serial it appears to have only been out of action for a day or two at the most. How much longer can society hold itself together?

Humanity in this serial is perilously short-sighted. It shows in their approach to global infrastructure, and it also shows in their attitude to the concept of space travel and exploration. Radnor and Kelly respect Eldred’s work in the field of space travel, but as a stepping stone to the creation of T-Mat, rather than for its own sake. In viewing the current T-Mat system as the endpoint of all advancements in transportation, they’re missing the potential of combining rocket travel with T-Mat. Sure, rocket travel is comparatively slow and expensive, but you’d only need to go somewhere once to set up a T-Mat booth, then you’d be able to come and go as you pleased. The possibilities are limitless. Off-world colonisation? Easy peasy. No need to worry about the practicalities of getting building supplies and colonists to Pluto if you can just zap them there. Scientific exploration? You could pop over and collect some samples from Mars and be home in time for tea. Resources? There are many large, metallic asteroids in our Solar System. Set up shop there, with instant transportation of materials to and from Earth, and you’ve got a licence to print money. And maybe you can give Earth a break from having chunks gouged out of her, to boot.

These ideas are the product of a layperson giving the topic a good five minutes of thought. Smarter people could probably come up with more. By assuming our latest innovations are the furthest we can possibly go in a particular area, we close ourselves off to new opportunities.

This is the crux of the character conflict here. Radnor and Kelly see Eldred as old-fashioned, but if anything they’re more stuck in their ways. There is a sense of practicality to the point of troubling incuriosity in the pair of them. They have no interest in rocket travel beyond their immediate need. Will they rediscover their curiosity by the end of the serial, or will short-term thinking prove the end of space travel—and maybe even the human race?

Final Thoughts

I’m enjoying this serial so far. It’s a base-under-siege, but decent enough. It’s at least using the format to have an interesting discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of rapidly advancing technology. And I suppose it has been a while since we last had a serial in this format, so I can’t complain. The format wasn’t really the issue, just its overuse.

However, the story does also suffer from a couple of real problems. Too often does the plot slam to a halt for a character to explain what the audience could easily enough infer from the events on-screen. Stage setting is good, but not at the expense of the story.

He's behind you! Ice Warriors apparently can't turn their heads.

Also a pain is the blatant padding. There are more than a few scenes that go nowhere, which I struck from my summary because they really didn’t matter in terms of plot or character development. Scenes that are dull to watch are dull to write about, and there are unfortunately a few of those sprinkled throughout.

All that said, I’m mostly enjoying it. We’ve got some interesting characters (I’ll give you my full thoughts of them once the serial is over) and some cracking music to set the mood. With the action starting to pick up, I have high hopes for the latter half of this serial to be stronger than the beginning.

But we’ll have to wait and see.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[January 31, 1969] Clinging to life (Star Trek: "That Which Survives")

January 31, 2024 Lorelei Marcus 3 Comments

by Lorelei Marcus

I'm convinced Star Trek is cursed. Around the same time every season, the episodes drop off in quality, going from engaging teleplays each week to bottom of the barrel Hollywood hack. Of course, the divide isn't quite so clear cut, but there is a distinctive shift as the producer runs out of his stellar front-runners and begins scrounging for TV-writer backlog to fill space.

I had hoped Season 3 would be an exception to this given its new producer and absolutely sublime first half ("Spock's Brain" notwithstanding!) but alas, the proverb remains true: the bigger they are…the harder they fall.

Now, granted, the recent decline has not been a degeneration of ideas, which often carry promise and interest, but their clumsy and contradictory execution. We as the audience are baited in on hooks, reeled in on the currents of the episode, and then discover, too late, that the answer at the end of the line is more convoluted and less inspired than the theories we'd developed during the journey.

And "That Which Survives" is no exception.

We begin with the Enterprise circling a newly discovered planet anomaly: it has an atmosphere and plant growth despite its young geologic age and small size. Kirk, McCoy, Sulu, and senior geologist D'Amato (an exciting new face—but don't get too attached) beam down to study the planet.

As they're being beamed, however, a mysterious woman (Losira, played by Lee Meriwether, lately of Time Tunnel) pops aboard and kills the transporter technician! The landing party makes it down anyway and ends up in the center of a vicious earthquake. The Enterprise experiences a similar tremor and is flung 990.7 light years from the planet.

"Wait! Let's shake hands, first!"

Spock is more concerned about rounding errors than the ship's current predicament, chastising Lt. Rahda for describing the distance as "1000 light years".

The landing party immediately began protocol for a survival situation after failing to detect or contact the Enterprise. Sulu and McCoy both pick up odd readings on their tricorders: "Like a door opening and closing." At the same moment, D'Amato sees a beautiful woman—the same one from the transporter room—who claims "she is for him" and tries to touch him. She succeeds, and he drops dead, every cell in his body disrupted. His corpse is soon discovered by the other three, but the woman is nowhere to be found.

Arthur Batanides is both delighted not to be cast as a mook this week, and dismayed that he's about to die

While the landing party scenes are the most interesting part of the episode, not much more happens. The woman eventually reappears and tries to attack Sulu, but Kirk and McCoy intervene, discovering in the process that the woman can't hurt anyone but the person she is targeting. She disappears and reappears again, going after Kirk this time, but Sulu and McCoy successfully protect him. For no apparent reason other than a limited runtime, the three are then allowed access to the planet's defense control center, and they learn the truth of the mysterious woman. It turns out the original builders of the planetoid accidentally invented a disease which killed off their race thousands of years ago. The commander left behind a computer imprinted with her personality and programmed it to kill any intruder. Kirk manages to destroy the computer before it can kill them, and all is well. A fine solution, though rushed and poorly explored, the episode would have hung together alright…if the scenes on the Enterprise didn't destroy all meaning in it.

"Wait! Maybe I can talk it to death. It's worked with every computer before…"

Shortly after the Enterprise is flung 1000 light years away, the death-robot woman appears on the ship, is implied to read the mind of a technician, kills him, and sabotages the matter/anti-matter combustion tubes. This raises questions like:

"How did the woman travel so far from the planetoid?"

"Why did she bother to attack the ship when it was no longer anywhere near the planet? Isn't 1000 light years far enough away for the computer to no longer see the Enterprise as a threat?"

It would have made more sense if the ship had simply been damaged from teleporting (logical, since it was never explained how the feat was done) and Lee Meritwether's lost screen time could have been made up for on the planet with additional scenes of the landing party unraveling the mystery of the lost civilization.

I haven't even mentioned the terribly dull scenes of Scotty trying to save the Enterprise from a Losira-induced explosion. Every party of that sequence felt like an artificial addition to stretch runtime. To summarize, Spock tells Scotty how to do his job, Scotty hesitates, runs into some roadblocks, then finally, in the last ten seconds does the job and saves the Enterprise. That's it.

"I've found the leak, Mr. Spock! I canna change the laws of plumbing!"

Once again, this is an area that could have been improved with some minor changes. Instead of the whole ship blowing up, have it simply be stranded. The tension comes from whether Scotty can fix the ship in time without getting himself killed. Have Spock as a commander wrestling with whether to eject the pod Scotty's working in because a wire's accidentally been tripped and now the whole ship is at stake. That would have been compelling storytelling.

This episode had so much promise: the promise of another ancient civilization and 4-D beings (Losira's teleportation effect is genuinely neat), of new cool characters and cameos of old beloveds like Sulu and Dr. M'Benga, of survival plot interwoven with futuristic technology. Indeed, there were a lot of pieces to love.

But, like a robot who is only beautiful on the surface, the actual experience was less than pleasant. Three stars—2 for the episode, and 1 for Merriwether's great acting. Hopefully, next week will be better.

by Gideon Marcus

Full reverse!

Remember the execrable episode, "The Galileo Seven"? There, we were meant to believe that Spock had never held a command in his life, and when forced to lead just six stranded crew on a hostile planet, he kept tripping over the basic emotional needs of his human comrades.

Now recall "The Tholian Web", where a much-improved Spock handled Captain Kirk's presumed death with tact and even compassion, officiating a funeral, commiserating with McCoy, and generally earning the respect of his crew. Scotty even called him "Captain", in a tear-inducing moment.

Heck, just recall last week's "The Mark of Gideon". While in no wise a good episode, Spock carried out negotiations with Chairman Hodin with reserve and acumen. This was a man who could, when the need arose, handle the center seat without issue. And we know from "Court Martial" that people in blue shirts sometimes become starship captains…

This week, the Enterprise is imperiled, Spock's two best friends and the ship's Third Officer are missing and presumed dead, and yet the half-Vulcan pedantically harps on decimal points and the human compulsion to be thanked for carrying out their duties. He is a cold fish, inspiring no loyalty. He also never seems in much of a hurry to do…well…anything! It is absolutely inconsistent with his demeanor as acting-skipper established over the last two seasons. Moreover, it is inconsistent with his ever-deepening bond with Kirk and McCoy. The real Spock would be mad with worry…and covering it up with a stoic and efficient veneer, welding together a 430-man team whose sole purpose is to retrieve the distressed landing party.

But it was easier to write a caricature. As one of our guests last week noted, it was as if the episode had been written by someone who hated the characters and wanted to lampoon them.

"Is it already time to harass someone else? Goodie!"

Then, of course, we get the egregious bit where it's Spock who tells Scotty how to fix the failed matter/antimatter regulator. As Joe Reid has noted many times, Kirk often gets the pleasure of being the smartest person in the room, suggesting solutions to folks who should be telling him how to solve problems. This time, Spock is the beneficiary of this irksome trend. At least in "The Doomsday Machine", Scotty is ahead of Kirk in the figuring out of things, and he beams admiringly at his captain as if at a promising student. In "That Which Survives", Scotty has considered and discarded Spock's solution—manually fixing the antimatter flow—as too dangerous. With no other solutions, what, exactly, is it more dangerous than?

Blech.

While we're at it, Kirk was quite the jerk to Sulu on the planet. Perhaps this was because he was distraught from the potential loss of the love of his life (the Enterprise), but at least he could have said he was sorry, as he has done in every other instance where he has snapped at crew under tension.

2.5 stars.

by Janice L. Newman

Slivers of Silver

While I agree with my esteemed co-writers about the poor characterization and plot holes in this episode, there were some good new special effects that I don’t recall seeing before.

I always enjoy looking at the props, especially after having read the interview with the man responsible for creating them in one of the many fanzines. The blue-tipped grass on the planet was pretty and interesting, giving it a slightly alien feel. The effects with Losira disappearing by seeming to fold up into a black line were new and intriguing. When Scotty went to fix the broken warp engine, a neat ‘blue lightning’ effect made a barrier across the tube. The flickering red and green lights on his face, though a bit headache-inducing to watch, also aided the illusion and increased the tension of the scene.

"There's your problem, Mr. Spock—a green gel light!"

Losira’s costume was cleverly-designed, but felt strange and wrong for her role. Several of my friends commented on the fact that she didn’t look at all like the head of a distant outpost whose members had just been killed off by a plague. With the cutouts in her shirt and her elaborate hairdo and makeup, she did not have much of a ‘last survivor’ or ‘hearty commander’ feeling. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being feminine, and for all we know she may have dressed up in her race’s version of formal wear before giving her final report. Still, it clashed uncomfortably with the plot for many of us, even if the seamstresses among us were mentally trying to figure out how to re-create the look.

Unfortunately, well-done effects cannot carry a story, and, while the episode was mildly-engaging, it didn’t leave much of an impression. Two stars.

Are There Men on This Planet?

by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

I was not the only viewer disappointed by some stand-out moments which highlighted that, progressive though Star Trek is, it still has weak spots. In particular this week: sexism. Losira is a replica of a commander, the last survivor of a disease-struck station. Her costume, while intriguing in design, conveyed none of that. Sulu comments when first threatened that he “doesn't want to shoot a woman.” As chivalrous as the helmsman is, by the time of starships and alien worlds, I would hope that humans no longer treat women differently than men, deadly touch or not. And then too, the repeated focus on beauty. A storm can be beautiful and deadly, but observing a force of nature is not the same as McCoy, Sulu, and Kirk making a point to comment on how Losira looks. These are the same crew who get excited about flying into the heart of a giant amoeba or historical facts from centuries past. After all they experienced on this not-a-planet, it seems improbable to focus on whether or not they found an alien woman attractive. As explorers and scientists, why not marvel at the mysterious botanical and geological feats, the design of the defense system, or the fact that that defense system was able to send the Enterprise through a molecular transporter and 990.7 light years away! Or wonder why a defense system would be calibrated to perfectly match a target, and seemed as equally focused on unifying as destroying?

(sings) "What intrigues a man about a woman is elusive…"

Despite the flaws, and feeling put off by the attitude of the men, I still enjoyed the episode. Characters had time to share the spotlight and pull on threads from previous episodes. I love seeing the crew operate the Enterprise when the Captain is away, and how different officers handle command. Lt. Rahda did a fine job as helmsman, and it was nice to have Dr. M'Benga return to the screen. Logically, a ship this size must have multiple doctors, but this episode confirmed that a minimum of three were present, despite us usually only seeing McCoy and Nurse Chapel. (Maybe the ship could spare one to give Spock a check-up after that bump to his head.) I also noted Kirk's persistent focus on supplies—he brought up the need for food and water at least four times—which may have been in part due to his experience on Tarsus IV, which started with a crop blight: something that is bound to leave a lasting impression regardless of whether he talks about it.

The overarching plot was lacking, and I would have liked to have gotten more explanation or simply explanation spaced out better. However as an episode among a larger story, it gave us a great look at the workings of my favorite starship and crew.

3.5 stars

[Come join us tonight (January 31st) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[January 24, 1969] Make rheum, make rheum (Star Trek: "The Mark of Gideon")

January 24, 2024 Gideon Marcus 3 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

"Gideon"—the very name connotes greatness. Grandeur. Brilliance. Romance. Surely, any world with that namesake must be a living paradise. So it is no wonder that the Federation bought the reports sent from planet Gideon declaring it to be just that. No wonder that the Federation would tie itself in knots so as not to jeopardize the chances of welcoming Gideon to the Federation.

Unfortunately, Gideon has other plans.

From the moment Captain Kirk, the sole allowed representative of the Federation, beams down to Gideon, "The Mark of Gideon" catches your attention. We've seen Kirk on an empty Enterprise before—in "This Side of Paradise", "By Any Other Name", and (sort of) "Wink of an Eye", but it's no less effective for its repetition. Sure, it's just a re-use of the standing sets on Stage 9, but then so was "The Tholian Web", "The Omega Glory" and "Mirror, Mirror". Indeed, because we have seen the sets used to represent other ships and other dimensions, the audience has already been trained to think in terms of historical precedents rather than the true situation.

That true situation, of course, is that Kirk is actually in a fantastically detailed replica of the Enterprise, so good that it takes him a (credulity-stretching given how quickly Spock figures things out) long time to figure out that he's not on his beloved ship. But fairly quickly, the episode's focus returns to the real Enterprise and Spock doing his usual sterling job in command, the "Mark of Gideon" becomes less "Where is Everybody?" and more "Stopover in a Quiet Town" (respectively, the first episode of The Twilight Zone, and one of the very last).

The plot is quite simple: Gideon was once Heaven-on-Earth, but it has since become a Malthusian nightmare due to the one-two punch of no native diseases and a fanatical reverence for life. Only the very privileged get a few square meters of space to themselves (Holy Shades of the Soviet Union, Batman!) So, the Gideon council hatches a plan to capture Kirk, withdraw some of his blood, and use the lingering, though harmless, remnants of Vegan Meningitis therein to infect Odona, the council chair's daughter. She will then serve as an example and a vector to infect the rest of the population of Gideon, which presumably will be devastated before natural immunity kicks in (or enough Gideonites stop wanting to be sick).

"Father, could I have a Bayer? No other aspirin works better."

The real problem with this episode is not the story, nor the effective bits with Kirk and Odona on the empty ship, nor the entertaining segments featuring Spock sparring with Chairman Hodin. It's that the plot and the events don't match up.

Regarding the disease: it's not stated what happens if mortality turns out to be 100%, or what the Gideonites will do once the disease loses its lethality.

It's never explicitly stated, either, why (or how) the Gideonites went through the trouble of building a replica of a starship on their surface for the purpose of letting Kirk wander around in it. If all they need is his blood, he could have been kept unconscious for the nine minutes required to take his blood and then sent back to the Enterprise with some kind of cover story. Did the plan really require that Odona join Kirk in the simulated halls of the starship? Did she really need to fake falling for him?

"I have. to. kiss you. Odona. It's in…the script."

I really want this episode to work. Not just because it bears an absolutely terrific name, but because it is genuinely entertaining to watch from beginning to end. Our crowd advanced a few hypotheses that I like. The best was that the ship was Odona's idea, and like the Dolman from "Elaan of Troyius", she could be refused nothing. Moreover, there was an intense voyeuristic desire on the part of the Gideonites to see beings in a truly open space, so this plan killed two birds with one stone. Another is simply that Kirk was drugged when he woke up, and the mock-up didn't need to be perfect (a la last year's Assignment: Moon Girl).

As for the idea that it is hypocrisy for the Gideonites to value life yet hatch a scheme to indirectly kill billions (trillions?), I am reminded of the orthodox Jew who could not turn on a light switch himself on the Sabbath, so he cannily lifted his infant son (too young to be bound by mitzvot) to within flicking range of the switch. And religion is, indeed, in the crosshairs of this episode, for did not Pope Paul VI this summer enjoin Catholics from using The Pill, humanity's main hope of stopping the population boom?

I'm writing this piece in the cold light of day, when I should be more inclined to savage the episode in light of its inconsistencies and absurdities. But I find myself feeling charitable—perhaps it's because director Jud Taylor finally seems to be finding his sea legs (even if Shatner. did. employ many. unnecessary pauses. last week).

Three stars.

Deeply Creepy

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

Maybe it was the feral cats yowling over my fence in the middle of the episode, but this is for my money the creepiest episode we've seen yet. Something about those yearning, horrifying disembodied faces just got me right in the shivvers.

It also had me thinking about ferality, about what happens when something once tamed becomes unruly. Consider pigeons. Tamed and bred by humans for 10,000 years as messenger birds, companions, and beauties, only to themselves over the course of a bare century transition back to a wild world that they had never been prepared for.

The people of Gideon likewise seem to be at the devastating mercy of a too-too civilized society whose very progress towards perfection endangers their lives. Yes, I felt the storytelling placed too heavy a burden on just telling us that they love sex too much to prevent vicious overcrowding — a cultural quirk that felt too big to swallow. But the feeling of confinement, of encroachment and enclosure came through loud and clear.

In a way, their whole society had become feral: bred and evolved for specific purposes and suddenly set adrift with all of that breeding and evolution still in place, but none of the supports and expectations which allowed it to happen in the first place. The individuals seemed civilized enough, grading on a curve of aliens we've seen thus far, but the entire concept of a society so desperately, brutally crowded seemed fundamentally wild to me.

Let's get to the criticism. As beautifully creepy as the premise was, the synthetic bodysuits and wobbling crowded walks outside the windows were closer to funny than horrifying. The question of where they got space to build a 1:1 model of the Enterprise also beggared belief. Some science fiction and fantasy writers believe you get one big lie, a total of one shocking premise that the audience will just go with you on because, hey, it's a genre story, them's table stakes. But you only get one.

For me, the Big Lie of this episode was that Kirk was lost and wandering around a completely empty Enterprise. That was disturbing enough. But then it turns out many of the assumptions we'd taken on faith as an audience were false and that just felt like being crudely manipulated. I watch shows to be manipulated, but I like it to feel earned, not like I'm being rushed from plot point to plot point, each more giddily hideous than the next. She's not just a fake damsel in distress, she's the weirdo ruler's daughter! And a national hero! And dying of some exotic disease! That she wanted! So they could cull their society like a dairyman shrinks his herd when the price of milk is down!

That's just too many additional premises in one story for me.

Even Spock is incredulous of this episode

I wish we'd kept the lens tightly on Kirk and the crew and the mysterious woman. I wish the weirdo ruler's throne room had given us a hint that claustrophobia was going to be the enemy of the day. And I wish we'd gotten more of the woman actress, she was doing so much with so little. I hope we see more of her.

Overall, this piece will be memorable for its premise and a few fine lines, but the execution was lacking.

2 stars.

How Crowded Is This Place?

by Erica Frank

Odona says, "There is no place, no street, no house, no garden, no beach, no mountain that is not filled with people." This sounds like the Earth of Harrison's Make Room! Make Room!: an overcrowded world, very little privacy, and extreme government measures to cope with the seemingly infinite population. (Can you imagine living on a planet with seven billion people, as we're expected to have on this planet by the year 2000?)

However, we get glimpses that imply it's worse than that. We are led to infer, from the masses of people in plain bodysuits visible behind the High Council room, that the planet is literally so crowded that they don't have space for a few rooms for office work. That aside from their fake Enterprise, there is no empty 20'-by-20' room on the planet.

The real question isn't "are there really that many people" but "why do they have a viewing window into the High Council room?"

I reject this notion. I believe Gideon is crowded, yes, but not that it's so packed that most adults spend their waking hours packed like sardines, slowly bumbling around in huge crowds.

If that were so, how would they even find space to make the fake Enterprise? What happened to the people displaced by it? No, while I can accept that Gideon is "full of people," I cannot believe they are literally shoulder-to-shoulder across the planet, nor even "…except for special cases" like childbirth and whatever space is needed to design and sew the High Council's uniforms.

Perhaps they're made of hexagons because they can be assembled by hand — no space for a sewing machine necessary.

Do the people have jobs? Families? How are children raised? How do they maintain a culture focused on the "love of life" if they are just walking around staring at nothing all day?

My answer: The people we see are probably tourists — visitors to the Capitol, hoping for a rare view of the Council chambers, which is separated by one-way glass. They may be required to keep moving; that gives everyone a chance to see the Council when the glass is raised, perhaps a few times a day.

This is a ridiculous conclusion, but the whole episode is ridiculous. A culture that refuses birth control on ethical grounds will use a fatal disease to cull their populace? How will they decide who to infect — will they be selected by computer and told to line up for it, as in A Taste of Armageddon? Or will they volunteer to die, these miserable people who reject diaphragms, IUDs, and condoms because life is too sacred to prevent?

The individual scenes of this episode were fascinating but the underlying story just doesn't add up. Two stars.

Old Fools

by Joe Reid

The story this week was about a people claiming to love life so much that they couldn't harm one another, and so long-lived that they developed an overpopulation problem. Overpopulation so severe as to cause them to lure a Starfleet captain who survived a deadly space disease to their planet to infect them with the pox. Why? Perhaps this seemed like the most interesting way to die? For people who love life their treatment of every life seemed to be just the opposite.

Let’s start off on the grand scale. Unlike most of the technically advanced races in the galaxy, the Gideonites lacked the most basic imagination when it came to needing more space. If there isn’t enough space where you are, go somewhere else and find some. Am I to believe that a people who could perfectly reproduce a spaceship as a ruse weren’t able to produce their own ships to take them to other planets to spread out? What weak imaginations these advanced humanoids must have had to not consider that most basic of solutions. During his career Kirk had been to dozens if not hundreds of worlds where a hardy race like the Gideonites could expand.

The next charge affirming the utter hypocrisy of the Gideonites had to do with how freely they lied. Although it might not be fair to lay this charge at the feet of all the people, their leaders certainly were not honest Abes. They lied about transport coordinates. The location of the captain. The girl lied about her origins, claiming to know nothing about Gideon. The entire fake ship was a lie. They only ever resorted to the truth after each specific lie was uncovered, and not a minute sooner. It might explain how these leaders came to power. Even in our world, you don’t come to power by telling the truth. It makes me wonder if the planet was even named Gideon, although saying, “welcome to the planet Marcus”, doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.

[Au contraire, mon ami. We've already had a planet Marcus 12 in "And the Children Shall Lead". If Odona emigrated from planet Gideon to planet Marcus 12, she'd be "Odona Gideon Marcus 12" (ed.)]

"Not only have we no space, but I am using the planet's only hairpiece!"

If they really did love life, it must only have been the lives of their own people. These Gideonites showed a complete lack of basic empathy for anyone who wasn’t them, for example, concocting a plan that lured an alien captain to their world to kidnap, imprison him, and bleed him dry. These actions sure sound out of character for the "lovers of life" they purport to be. In truth, the Gideonites were unimaginative in every sense of the word. Trapping their own people on a planet that can’t support them is evil for an advanced technical society. Using misdirection and bad faith negotiation tactics to carry out their shortsighted plan was contemptible. Making the incarceration and blood letting of an unsuspecting victim their plan to save a planet was morally bankrupt. Attempts by the leader's daughter to redeem their reputation by choosing to sacrifice herself in the end fell flat for me. There wasn’t enough good in the episode to salvage it from the bottom.

One star

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[January 20, 1969] Waiter? There’s An Alien In My Soup! (Doctor Who: The Krotons)

January 20, 2024 Jessica Holmes 2 Comments

By Jessica Holmes

Another new year rolls around, and we have a new writer to welcome to Doctor Who: Robert Holmes. Before you ask, no relation. At least I don't think so. Regardless, whenever he writes something I like, I will be claiming him as part of the family.

So, am I claiming him as kin today? Let’s find out, and join the Doctor as he shows the youths that their school is just a brainwashing tool to keep them in line, and introduces them to the wonders of acid. Here are my thoughts on "The Krotons".

On a planet with two suns, sunburn is a real killer.

In Case You Missed It

The TARDIS arrives on a blighted world lit by twin suns, wastelands as far as the eye can see and a strong whiff of sulfur in the air. Despite the harsh conditions, this world is inhabited by a race of people called the Gonds.

In their society, the two brightest youths of each generation are chosen to be companions of their rulers, the mysterious Krotons. What they don’t realise, and what the Doctor very quickly discovers, is that this great ‘honour’ ends with ejection from the city, and a swift and grim death by disintegration on the back doorstep.

The Doctor and his friends attempt to warn the Gonds against sending any more candidates, but their sudden and unexpected appearance only makes the Gonds suspicious. Despite their efforts, a girl called Vana (Madeleine Mills) enters the Krotons' machine, the Dynatrope. The gang rush off to try and rescue her, with her boyfriend Thara (Gilbert Wynne) following, defying the law of his people to venture out into the wasteland. They’re successful in saving her from disintegration, but whatever the Krotons did to her has left her catatonic.

Cut him some slack, the man's not a medical Doctor. Though I could have sworn he once said he was.

Thara takes Vana to the home of his father, Selris (James Copeland). While the Doctor attempts to bring Vana out of her catatonic state, Selris explains that the Krotons have ruled over the Gonds for all of recorded history. Shortly after they arrived, they rained poison from the sky, making the land uninhabitable and wiping out much of the native Gond population. The Gonds have been under their ‘benevolent’ rule ever since.

It’s not all been bad for the Gonds, or so Selris claims. Sure, they can’t leave the city, and sure, they have to hand over a couple of their people every so often, and sure, they have to obey everything the Krotons say… But at least they get a robust education. Courtesy of the Krotons’ advanced teaching machines, no less!

Well, they get a robust education when it comes to how great the Krotons are and how marvellous it is to be ruled by them. Less so when it comes to things like chemistry and the concept of electricity. It’s not education, it’s brainwashing.

The Doctor and Zoe leave with Selris to investigate the Learning Hall further. While the Doctor explores the Underhall with Selris, Zoe tries out one of the teaching machines, earning herself a very high score, and an invitation from the Krotons to be their companion.

Aghast, the Doctor takes the test himself, so that she won’t have to go into the Dynatrope alone. He's so terribly upset when he realises she's doomed herself. It's really quite sweet.

Jamie arrives to tell them that Vana has woken up, but he’s too late to stop them. As he hammers on the door from the outside, the Doctor and Zoe are at the mercy of a mysterious machine. It knocks them out, but they survive the ordeal, with Zoe deducing that the Krotons have found a way to convert brain power into energy. That’s why they’ve been educating the Gonds, and why they’ve been taking their best and brightest.

But what’s it all for? The pair spot a vat nearby, filled with a kind of slurry of crystals in suspension. Like a primeval soup. And what might one find in a soup? Croutons. Sorry, Krotons.

The Krotons take on solid form and emerge from the soup as the Doctor and Zoe make their escape. Outside of the tanks, they’re hulking crystalline beings, reliant on a feed line to maintain their form. Or something. It’s not entirely clear.

Jamie finally succeeds in breaking into the Dynatrope , but the Krotons capture him immediately. Despite his inferior mind (rude) the Krotons decide to spare Jamie, reasoning that he could give them intelligence on the Doctor and Zoe.

Outside, the Gonds don’t just have the Krotons to contend with, but power struggles within their own ranks. Eelek (Philip Madoc), previously very pro-Kroton, realises that the current crisis is the prime opportunity to seize control of the governing council away from Selris, its current leader. He goes on the warpath, trying to recruit his people into all out war against the Krotons—never mind that the Krotons have chemical weapons while the Gonds are fighting with axes and clubs. It won’t be a revolution, but a slaughter.

Having lost the Doctor, the Krotons decide to destroy his means of escape, disintegrating the TARDIS with a blast of the gas gun. All is lost…for all of about ten seconds, until the TARDIS re-materialises a short distance away.

Meanwhile, Selris has a plan to defeat the Krotons that is a little less doomed-to-failure. If the Gonds can destroy the supports at the base of the Dynatrope, they could bring down the whole machine! Unfortunately, he can’t get Eelek on board with this idea, so decides he’s going to go ahead without him.

The Doctor and Zoe return to the city, having discovered that the Krotons are composed of Tellurium, which happens to be soluble in sulfuric acid. As it happens, there’s absolutely oodles of pure sulfur all over the wasteland.

Jamie manages to sneak away from the Krotons as the Doctor and Zoe lend the Gonds’ chief scientist, Beta (James Cairncross), a hand with his very first chemistry lesson. They’re making acid, and their laboratory safety practices are absolutely atrocious. On learning that Jamie hasn’t been seen for some time, they go to look for him.

They arrive at the Learning Hall to discover that Selris’ scheme is well underway, the ceiling of the Underhall is caving in, and worst of all, Jamie is inside the Dynatrope. Following a narrow escape from falling debris, they rush off to the Dynatrope’s exit to try and save Jamie. Eelek arrives on scene shortly afterwards, furious at Selris for disobeying his orders. He has him arrested, and with his power secure, Eelek makes a deal with the Krotons: if they agree to leave the Gonds alone, he will hand over the Doctor and Zoe.

Blissfully unaware that they’ve just been thrown under the bus, the Doctor and Zoe meet Jamie at the exit of the Dynatrope, saving him from the disintegration gas. They tell him to go and find Beta and get him to make as much acid as he can, then run off, straight into the waiting arms of Eelek and his loyalists.

Beep boop.

Eelek shoves the Doctor and Zoe into the Dynatrope, with Selris diving in after them, bringing with him a bottle of the acid solution smuggled from Beta. It’s a brave act, and his last, as the Krotons kill him on sight.

However, it does save the Doctor and Zoe, who pour the solution into the soup, and the Krotons unknowingly pump it into their bodies. It takes them a little while to notice that something is wrong, and by the time they do, it’s too late to stop it. They dissolve from the inside out. It would be quite grisly if they were more fleshy.

As the Krotons dissolve, Jamie and Beta pour barrel upon barrel of acid onto the outside of the Dynatrope. The Doctor and Zoe flee the rapidly disintegrating Dynatrope, and the Gonds celebrate their new-found freedom. Thara deposes Eelek’s short lived dictatorship, taking on his father’s hereditary role as leader of the council. He has a mind to ask the Doctor for his advice, but our spacefaring friend has already slipped out the back and made a beeline for the TARDIS. I guess the Gonds will work out democracy at their own pace. Their future is theirs to decide now, after all.

A Few Thoughts

The dynamic between Zoe and the Doctor is so much fun in this serial. They snipe back and forth over which of them is the cleverest (and it’s very funny), but I don’t doubt they’d each walk into traffic if the other asked them to.

Holmes’ dialogue is snappy and witty, and Troughton and Padbury are definitely having fun with it. Unfortunately Jamie gets a bit sidelined in this serial, though he does have his moments. When the group initially encounters the Gonds, some of them get a bit aggressive, and Jamie steps forward, unarmed, to defend the Doctor. Later, he manages to keep the Krotons talking long enough to delay his own execution, and steal one of their gas canisters into the bargain. I’ve long said that he might not be a maths whizz or a super-genius from the future (or wherever), but he’s not dim.

As for the Krotons, well. I don’t think they’re going to become iconic like the Daleks or the Cybermen. There was an attempt to hint at a wider Kroton threat, with some mention of a wider Kroton battle fleet, but see… I just can’t take them seriously. They’re so clunky and awkward. I kept expecting them to go ‘beep boop’ in true B-Movie fashion. I know, I know, they’re not robots, but they look like them and act like them. And that’s a bit of a shame because a life form composed of living crystal is a marvellous idea. It’s so wonderfully alien.

And another thing. Remember how the Daleks have pretty iconic voices? All that modulated shouting they do, easily mimicked by shouting into a desk fan? And the Cybermen, with their uncanny computerised tones? Well, I think there was an attempt to give the Krotons a distinct, signature voice. Something to really sell the idea that they’re from a distant galaxy, a truly exotic life-form. The distant, far-away galaxy… of Birmingham. That’s what they sound like. Brummie aliens. Brummie aliens whose heads spin around. I don't think Krotonmania is on the horizon.

Let's not put gloves on before we pour enormous vats of corrosive fluid! Yay, safety!

I don’t know enough about Robert Holmes yet to guess if this was on purpose, but there’s a definite counter-cultural undercurrent running through this serial. You’ve got the youth rejecting the propaganda of the state, the education system revealed as a brainwashing tool, and of course the answer to it all is dropping acid. In a very literal sense. All we’re missing is some tie-dye and a little grass. Groovy.

I couldn't find anywhere appropriate to insert this image, but it's funny and I thought you should see it. Behold the Krotons' cruellest weapon: the wide-angle lens.

And Finally…

The plot’s nothing mind-blowing and the alien enemies are so-so, but "The Krotons" is a solid story. It’s tightly-paced and fun to watch, with likable characters to root for…and also Eelek. Stuff Eelek.

Robert Holmes has had an encouraging debut, and I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing more from him.

That’s about it for the first serial of 1969! Who can say what the year ahead has in store for us all, but as far as Doctor Who is concerned, I’d say the future is looking pretty bright.

3.5 stars out of 5 for The Krotons.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[January 16, 1969] Mixed messages (Star Trek: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield")

January 16, 2024 Janice L. Newman 6 Comments

by Janice L. Newman

Star Trek has given us some great episodes this season. Sadly, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was not one of them. It was ineptly written, poorly directed, and both ham- and heavy-handed in its delivery.

The story opens with the Enterprise coming across a stolen shuttlecraft on the way to Ariannus, a planet which urgently needs ‘decontamination’ else millions will die. The shuttlecraft is in distress, and the crew bring the vehicle aboard and treat its lone passenger. The scene with the shuttle bay opening and closing is a good effect…but would have been even more so if they had edited out the “1701” across its side.

The latest rage: All Federation shuttlecraft have the Enterprise's serial number

The scriptwriter here makes the first of a number of blunders. Over-eager to ‘explain’ the strange black-white coloration of the alien, the author penned an awkward conversation between Doctor McCoy, Captain Kirk, and Mr. Spock about how such a being might have come to exist. The problem is that this explanation is unnecessary and feels forced. The audience has seen plenty of strange aliens thus far and almost never has there been a need to ‘explain’ how they came about. Furthermore, the explanation doesn’t explain anything. Spock and McCoy write off the divided coloration as being a totally unique mutation, while Kirk nonsensically opines that “…he is the result of a very dramatic conflict.”

They got blue people and green people but this guy looks weird? And no one suspects it's not a cosmetic affectation?

The alien’s name is Lokai. He takes umbrage at the assertion that he ‘stole’ the shuttlecraft, both implying that he was only borrowing it and outright stating that his great need justified taking it. When Kirk attempts to interrogate him further, he becomes uncooperative and refuses to answer any more questions.

Kirk is called back to the bridge when an alien ship shows up—or doesn’t show up, as the case may be. The sensors are picking it up, but it doesn’t show up on any of the screens. It’s on a collision course with the Enterprise and ends by disintegrating against the hull and depositing one alien onto the bridge in the process.

This entire scene was awful. It’s a little tricky to put into words what made it so bad, but it had me groaning and hitting my head against a pillow repeatedly, so I will try.

First, the camera repeatedly did an extra-dramatic zoom in and out and shake effect on the red alert light. It drew laughs from the watching crowd, feeling more like something out of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea than Star Trek. The entire sequence is contrived and unnatural, existing only to get the characters where the writer wanted them. Efforts to ‘explain’ the ship and its fate, like the prior conversation about mutation, serve only to highlight how silly it all is.

The new alien is named Bele, and in direct contradiction to the previous conversation about one-of-a-kind mutations, has the same half-black and half-white coloration as Lokai. He states that he’s “chief officer of the Commission on Political Traitors” on his planet, and has come to claim Lokai. Kirk challenges him, but agrees to let him see the other prisoner.

"Riddle me this, Captain: what's black and white and insufferable all over?"

Bele and Lokai proceed to react to each other with pure vitriol. Lokai claims that he is a revolutionary, fighting for the rights of his people. Bele calls him a loathsome murderer. Lokai turns to Kirk and demands political asylum, while Bele demands to be taken to their home planted, Cheron, immediately. Kirk tells them both that Starfleet will sort it out after the Enterprise finishes their decontamination mission, as millions of lives are at stake. Bele states that this is unacceptable, just before the Enterprise takes a new heading, seemingly all by itself.

Maddeningly, Kirk doesn’t connect the misbehavior of his ship with the presence of the aliens aboard until just before Bele outright claims responsibility. Lokai and Bele have another confrontation on the bridge, both of them ignoring the fact that “millions of lives” on Ariannus are at stake. Kirk orders both of them to the brig, then shot at with phasers set on stun, neither of which are effective against the aliens’ “personal shields”.

The rarely seen "tickle" setting of the phaser

Contrived, contrived, contrived. I felt the hand of the scriptwriter turning and moving the ship like a child with a toy. The scriptwriter didn’t want Bele or Lokai thrown in the brig or knocked out, so they were given invincibility. The creator of the story wanted certain things to happen, and so forced them to happen in the bluntest and most direct ways possible.

However, Kirk’s response to Bele did lead to a scene I actually liked. Kirk tells Bele that the ship will fulfill its mission to Ariannus or he will destroy it. Bele tries to call his bluff, and Kirk initiates the self-destruct sequence. This was perhaps a little drawn out, and the codes for self-destruct could have been more complex than variations of, “one, code one, one A”. Still, Kirk’s defiance and unwillingness to surrender his ship is great, very in-character, and the scene actually managed some genuine tension.

"This starship will self-destruct in five seconds…"

Kirk’s never tolerated threats to his ship well, so it’s a little jarring that he chooses to give them free run of the ship after that. On the other hand, how could he stop them? They’ve been shown to be invincible and Bele is both able and willing to take over the ship, even at the cost of “millions of lives”. Kirk has exactly one possible counter-move, and it’s one that would lead to a Pyrrhic victory indeed.

Lokai begins making friends among the crew, making his case to them. He says something interesting here that could have been great if the writer had bothered to follow up on it: “Do you know what it would be like to be dragged out of your hovel into a war on another planet? A battle that will serve your oppressor and bring death to you and your brothers?”

This tantalizing hint of actual background is once again casually ignored by the rest of the story. We cut to Bele, drinking with the Captain and trying to win him to his side much the same way that Lokai is doing with the crewmembers. It is in this conversation that we come to the crux of the episode, a point delivered with a sledgehammer. Bele is amazed that the captain and Spock can’t see his superiority. He is, after all, black on the right side, while Lokai is white on the right side.

Wow, this racial metaphor is so nuanced and clever!

A punchline not worth waiting for

Well, perhaps in more skilled hands, it might have been. There is certainly a simplicity to the message, to the point where even a child could understand it. We the viewers are shocked by what appears to us to be such bizarre and extreme racism over a minor difference. We are meant to take it to heart, to apply it to our own lives and question our own prejudices.

The problem is, the message becomes muddled despite itself. I will leave going into detail as to why the portrayal of the two aliens undermines and even contradicts the episode’s theme to the other writers on this piece. Suffice it to say that the “revelation” of the source of the racial differences elicited more groans than gasps from the watchers in my house.

Ariannus is successfully decontaminated, and Bele takes control of the Enterprise again, this time burning out the directional and self-destruct circuits first. (In other words, the scriptwriter’s hand once again descended upon the ship and turned its course to Cheron.)

The ship arrives at Cheron and finds that the people on it have destroyed each other (presumably fairly recently, since there are still bodies on the planet). Bele chases Lokai through the corridors of the Enterprise, with Kirk doing nothing to stop them. Pursued and pursuer beam themselves down to the dead planet, presumably to try to kill each other. Kirk leaves them there, and we are spoon-fed the other Important Message of the episode:

SPOCK: To expect sense from two mentalities of such extreme viewpoints is not logical.
SULU: But their planet's dead. Does it matter now which one's right?
SPOCK: Not to Lokai and Bele. All that matters to them is their hate.
UHURA: Do you suppose that's all they ever had, sir?

The ashes of Detroit still smolder after 50,000 years

Well. That was a mess of poor writing, inept directing, and Shatner’s own particular brand of scenery chewing. And as much as I appreciated the messages the writer so desperately wanted to convey, it would have been more effective if the plot could have settled on one of them instead of trying to cram in both. If you want to watch a good episode about the dangers of racism, irrational hatred, and unchecked violence, wait for a re-run of Day of the Dove.

One and a half stars (the half almost entirely for the self-destruct sequence.)

Bones beneath the fat

by Lorelei Marcus

At a sacrifice in Ancient Greece, Prometheus once slaughtered an ox and offered up two piles for Zeus to choose from. One contained the meat and much of the fat. The other was a pile of bones artfully arranged under a layer of glistening juices so as to look like the more appetizing pick. Zeus chose the latter, and was so angered by this deception that he withheld fire from humanity.

From the unsubtle makeup to Lokai's stirring speech against Bele in Sick Bay, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" presents itself as a racial narrative in favor of Black rights. Yet, somewhere along the way, it loses that thread and ultimately concludes with a different message: If we continue to hate one another, we will only destroy ourselves.

This is quite a turn which clashes spectacularly with Lokai's initial characterization. Of course, Lokai is bound to hate the group which subjugates and ghettoizes his people. His revolutionary vigor seems justified when he is fighting for "basic dignity", a trait Kirk has often associated with humanity's freedom when dealing with alien enslavers and oppressors.

However, the finale would have you believe that Lokai's hatred is unjustified, or at least, excessive. Therein lies the true sin of the episode, because to achieve the dramatic final theme, it must gut its initial framing of racial injustice and the characters that metaphorically represent it.

Lokai is consistently unlikable. He arrives as a suspected criminal, refuses to communicate or cooperate, and he is quick to anger. Regardless of how noble his initial goals, or how genuine his pleas for amnesty, he is never truly taken seriously by the Enterprise crew and therefore, we also see no reason to sympathize. Throughout the episode, he is termed a firebrand, a troublemaker, and even a murderer, with no redeeming actions to prove otherwise. He also reveals a prejudice, not just against his oppressors, but also the monocolored humans and audience, further alienating him and his cause.

Bele's character, in contrast, while evil by default, is treated with respect, making Lokai look worse still. Bele is quickly established as the oppressive, bigoted, authority. He also commits heinous acts like hijacking the Enterprise from a critical, planet-saving mission for his own selfish purposes. But isn't he justified because he has toiled for nearly 50,000 years to capture his criminal, a mass-murdering fanatic? And after all, he does eventually allow the Enterprise to finish her mission, so can he really be so bad?

Well, yes, and the ending would even like to remind us of that: even with his whole planet destroyed, Bele is doomed by his own hatred to forever chase Lokai across their barren world. But first, he is allowed to roam the ship like an esteemed guest and even dine finely with the Captain. Even certain emissaries have not had so high an honor, but I suppose there are special treatment regulations for starship hijackers.

"Well, in compensation for our not immediately flying you to Havana, have some brandy."

While Bele's motives are prejudiced and unsympathetic, this kid-glove treatment affords him some respectability, furthering Lokai's appearance as irrational in comparison.

This brings me to my conclusion. Lokai and Bele both ultimately come across as incomprehensible extremists. Lokai is logical in motive, but not in action; Bele is logical in action, but not motive. Tragically, their extreme hatred seems to be a microcosm for their whole planet's struggle—they appear as figureheads of the two sides. Thus, the episode becomes a cautionary tale against extremism.

Yet, the shroud of the race-relations narrative remains, literally expressed by the ever-present alien makeup. So the two themes join, linking extremism with the race struggle and its leaders. This, in turn, undermines both causes. If Lokai's genuine issues can be disregarded with the justification that he is unlikeable and dangerous, then what implication does that have for the black man? Did the riots not begin because pacifist pleas for change fall time and time again on deaf ears?

The episode is so self-righteous about stopping hatred that it sours the positive social message it could have had, and instead, vilifies the struggle it claims to represent.

And so, some of the fire in my passion for Star Trek diminishes. To describe the episode in a word, I'll quote Mr. Scott: "Disgusting."

One star.

An end to war

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

24 men died on the USS Enterprise yesterday, another 85 injured as a rocket exploded onboard; 11 planes were also destroyed. Those young men were on that ship in service of a war many had no right to vote for just seven short months ago. The Enterprise herself has touched many conflicts — Vietnam, Cuba, Japan, the Middle East — and was preparing for her fourth deployment to Vietnam. This is the fourth time a U.S. aircraft carrier had caught fire in 15 years, accidents that killed 537 sailors in total according to The New York Times; of the four, only one involved enemy fire.

I was thinking about the ways in which war destroys the people who wage it while watching “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” Rather than an atom-powered football field-sized carrier ferrying fighter jets to bomb a country that barely has an air force, the war in this episode is reduced to two men; a binary pair. Their hatred is made irrational, and while other reviewers found it ham-handed, I found it operatic.

We have the sense of scale conveyed by a few terse lines — millions in danger; 50,000 years of pursuit! We have the stentorian arias given by Kirk, Spock, and our two representative combatants — where Kirk and Spock could have been Purcell tenor roles with their clear, short, decisive words, Lokai and Bele were all Mozart at his muddiest and most secretive, all Sarastro lecturing Pamina in coded Masonic lessons about how the world works with none of the delicacy or lightness of the Queen of the Night’s aria to lift us up again afterwards. We also have the oversized tragic ending — not just these two men killing each other, as they've been trying to do all episode long, but their entire world dead, corpses left on the ground unburied, and them doomed to chase and haunt each other amongst the moldering wreckage of their hatred forever more, like the ending of a Noh Play written for Tom and Jerry.

But what of Lazarus?

With the bright light of the teleporter and the offstage decision makers driving the plot, it reminded me of nothing so much as the end of Puccini’s Suor Angelica, where the former-aristocrat-and-current-nun learns her child out of wedlock has died and she kills herself. Obviously the plot is not the main parallel; Suor Angelica is mostly women’s roles, making it a favorite of mixed gender opera programs around the world, and Star Trek is sometimes pressed to include 2 speaking women per episode, much less a dozen. It is the feeling of the ending as an audience member that is the same. In my favorite productions of Suor Angelica, as she sings her final aria, begging Mother Mary to save her after she’s poisoned herself — “Madonna! Madonna! Salve me, salve me!” complete with its glorious high A's — a bright light floods down on center stage, a transporter beam from the Madonna herself, bringing Suor Angelica up with her to heaven to reunite with her child.

For me, there is something likewise satisfying about the ending of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” These two men have wreaked havoc across the galaxy for centuries, trailing their hatred like plague corpses, disrupting societies, destroying lives as they whirl and swirl and clash against each other. And as of the end of the episode, they cannot. They are planet-bound, returned to the home they both thought they were fighting for, deprived of the tools to hurt anyone but themselves. Trapped, forever, in a Hell of their own making, reunited and secure in their hatred.

Real war is nothing like opera or science fiction. It is famously boring until it’s not, and mostly kills people who had no say in its arrival or its leaving. Many who die in war and no small number who fight in it fervently wish that each clash would be their “last battlefield”; after all the useless deaths of sailors the real life Enterprise and of families who are Vietnamese, Nigerian, Palestinian, Eritrean, Guatemalan, Rhodesian, Laotian, Irish, and so many more who are suffering war today. It was nice, for a little less than an hour, to see a world on my screen where no matter how bloody, some wars end.

Three stars.

You've Come a Long Way, Baby

by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

Ads for Virginia Slims cigarettes have been playing over the past several episodes. Women sneaking away to smoke and getting caught, with an emphasis on how outdated the idea is. Thanks to the suffragettes we see, women won their rights in 1920. Modern women can vote and smoke! It's fashionable to applaud that movement, and from this side of history, relatively easy. None of the ads have mentioned the much more recent Voting Rights Act, though, which passed among significant backlash just a few years ago.

Part of Star Trek's appeal is that it offers a future that upholds ideals of equality. Most of the time.

The most important scene, to me, is not the final moments of pursuit against a backdrop of destruction. It is instead, a conversation held almost off-camera as Spock listens from behind a door.

LOKAI: I act the madman out of the anger and frustration he forces upon me, and thereby prove his point that I am a madman. [….] How can you understand my fear, my apprehension, my degradation, my suffering?
CHEKOV: There was persecution on Earth once. I remember reading about it in my history class.
SULU: Yes, but it happened way back in the twentieth century. There's no such primitive thinking today.

Except, prejudice is there when McCoy casually insults Spock for his biology and culture, or when crew members disregard his authority after he acts in accordance with Vulcan philosophy.

"Preach it, Lokai."

The message is tucked away from the rest of the ship and the rest of the episode. It's easy enough to make broad statements decrying hate. It is harder to face up to the part that we ourselves might play, to confront the systems that allow hate to act with authority. As fans of science fiction, many of us like to think of ourselves as more open-minded, more accepting. It's only logical. The true test is when those standards are challenged, when equality extends “too far”. Yes, yes, rights for women – but not too many. Freedom of religious expression – for some.

How many people today will support the cause of the oppressed, and yet sit and break bread with the oppressors under the guise of “civility”? Bele admitted his people's culpability in the crimes Lokai accused him of, and still was treated better than some of the diplomats the Enterprise has been charged with carrying.

Kirk tells Bele, “I cannot take sides.” He can, and by his own moral standards, he should. He may have limited power against an alien who can take control of the ship with his mind, but that has never stopped him from speaking his piece before.

Lokai is loud and angry, he insults the crew even as he asks for help and asylum. Nothing about his behavior is particularly endearing to his cause. And that, whether the rest of the episode discusses it or not, is important. The Federation, represented by the Enterprise, has standards of justice, and none of those standards are based on being well-mannered. What is right does not depend on what is easy or palatable. The meanest, rudest individual still deserves rights, because rights do not depend on being likable.

3 stars

Rich Tale to Poor Tale

by Joe Reid

“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, the second episode of Star Trek for the new year, drew out of me thoughts both praise and derision, with feelings of familiarity and futility. This episode at first took a simple message and elevated it with meaningful layered acting, only to become so utterly absurd, undermining said message.

The Enterprise encountered a stolen shuttle with a man in need of help. Aid was rendered by the crew to ensure that the alien man survived to answer questions. Things quickly went downhill as the half white half black alien, named Lokai, awoke in the infirmary with a suspicion on his face as was accused by Kirk of theft. Lokai objected only to being further pressed by Kirk on the matter, which led to no questions being answered by the two-tone alien as he refused to continue being interrogated. The brief exchange revealed that Lokai had a purpose for “using” the ship, which he was willing to face consequences for. Also, that he had been disappointed by “monotone humans” in the past.

This scene to me felt different than others on TV—the difference being that the character with the hidden cause in custody is often Negro or some other race. I felt a familiarity with Lokai’s circumstances. To be thought of as a criminal before trial. To be frustrated by a lack of or even willingness by some to understand my situation. Lokai served up a lot in this short scene. I found it interesting that the performance was carried out by a white actor portraying an alien who was neither black nor white. If the character were black like me, I might’ve identified with his plight and sympathized with his frustration at authority and the evasiveness it brought about. Since Lokai was not black, his position as a victim required proof, and the frustration that he expressed required justification to be seen as righteous. There is an old proverb that says, “Hope deferred makes the heart grow sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” (Pro 13:10). Lokai clearly had a sickness of the heart making him unpleasant. We are willing to forgive sickness in others only if we identify with their hopes. Lokai appearing as he does, made that challenging and interesting.

Later we were introduced to another alien man who’d been pursuing Lokai for fifty thousand years. Bele, also two-toned half black and white, appeared on the bridge of the Enterprise without warning. Unlike Lokai, Bele was not accused of anything although he invaded the bridge in what could’ve been seen as an attack. He demanded the “cargo”, Lokai, be handed over to him. Not frustrated in his interactions with Kirk as Lokai was, Bele was mildly irritated to have to defer to Kirk and challenged the captain’s authority repeatedly. His interaction with Lokai established that they were at odds for reasons of class and privilege.

The role of Bele was played by another white actor. Though two-toned himself, the duo considered themselves different based on which side of their bodies were black or white. Black on the right side was dominant and Bele was domineering in every way. Taking control of the Enterprise twice. Although Bele’s actions were resisted, he was never held accountable by Kirk. He was even allowed a pleasant social dinner with the captain after his first hijacking attempt.

Bele and Lokai obviously represent the color-based stratification of the U.S. Choices that were made by casting and the actors themselves in how they personified those roles, took an American reality and obfuscated it to detach it from our world. I was pleased by this execution, until the third act.

Then the Enterprise arrived at the home of the dual-toned men, the planet Cheron, devoid of life due to war. The episode was saying that we could be doomed to suffer the same fate due to our own hatred. The final act featured interlaced footage of burning buildings, possibly from the riots after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Happy memories of traipsing through the streets of Dresden

Social messages, especially simple ones, are better delivered if you don’t break the obfuscation in the telling of the story. Allow the message to speak through the story, and not scream over it. The ending displayed poor choices for what could have been a meaningful tale. It cheapened the emotional depth witnessed in the early part of the story and replaced it with shallow visual exposition just in case the audience was too simple to understand nuance. It was a poor choice.

Two stars

[Come join us tomorrow night (January 17th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[January 10, 1969] Mad for this show (Star Trek: "Whom Gods Destroy")

January 10, 2024 Joe Reid 3 Comments

The Cure for Schizophrenic Storytelling

by Joe Reid

Happy New Year to everyone! 1969 is upon us and the first new episode of Star Trek for this year is come! “Whom Gods Destroy” is the episode of the new year and although it was a smaller story, it was well crafted and concise.

It started off with the Enterprise arriving at a poisonous planet named Elba 2: a planet for the criminally insane. Kirk and Spock beamed down with an unnamed medicine that cured all incurable mental illness. As the curable ones have all already been cured throughout the galaxy, the asylum only had about a dozen patients in it.

Upon arrival they meet Governor Donald Corey, a very jovial man, who informs them that the asylum recently welcomed its 15th patient, Garth of Izar, a former captain that Kirk revered.

On the way to visit Garth, Marta, a green skinned Orion woman, says that Corey is not who he says he is. Corey laughs it off and takes them to Garth's cell, only to find that Corey, the real Donald Corey, is in the cell.

"Also, I'm Batgirl—why won't anybody believe me?"

Garth had tricked them, changing from Corey into his true form before their eyes, and freeing the inmates in the surrounding cells, bringing them to his side. Kirk and Spock are trapped on the planet. As Spock is dragged away unconscious, Kirk is put into the cell with the real Corey.

Lord Garth, leader of the future masters of the universe, as he now demands to be called, transforms into Kirk as a part of his plan to take the Enterprise and pursue vengeance against his former crew that mutinied against him.

As Garth contacts the Enterprise in the guise of Kirk, he is foiled in his attempt to gain access to the ship by Commander Scott. “Queen to queen’s level 3”, says Scotty. It's a passcode that the real Kirk set up as an increased security measure. Garth blows a gasket after this occurrs.

Garth then decides that he should change tactics. He goes back to Kirk, bringing Spock back and inviting them for dinner.

All the free asylum inmates, now Garth’s crew and subjects, are present and entertaining each other. We are even treated to a dance by the lovely, jade-colored Marta.

"Dessert, Captain?"

At this point I considered this episode, written by Lee Erwin, to be fully set up.

What came next was an expertly written tale of misdirection and subterfuge, by all parties. Kirk as the hostage trying to use his intelligence and wits to find a way out. Scotty, as a commander seeking to find a way to rescue his captain without causing him harm. Garth, as a brilliant, but insane, changeling able to match wits and brawn with Kirk to achieve his aim of universal domination.

Several times throughout the episode I had my assumptions challenged and my expectations subverted.

Again, I give credit to Mr. Erwin for crafting a tale with fleshed-out characters and subtle nods to history. Garth, wearing his coat with this left arm in the sleeve and the other draped over his shoulder, hinted at him being a futuristic Napoleon Bonaparte. Marta was a complex character who was as insane as the other inmates, yet lived within some rational rules and boundaries, never lying to anyone about anything.

Kirk, and the rest of the crew made no mistakes in the episode that a less skilled writer might employ to increase tension.

In the end this small, self-contained story did many interesting things, but didn’t try to do too much. There were many paths that this story could have meandered down, but Mr. Erwin skillfully kept the main thing the main thing. A great start for 1969 Star Trek in my opinion.

Five stars

by Janice L. Newman

The Little Captain

I was very much impressed by “Lord Garth’s” performance. He took a role which would have been terribly easy to overplay and made it his own. Thanks to movies, TV, and comic books, we’re all familiar with the idea of the inmate of an asylum who ‘thinks he’s Napoleon’. Often such roles are treated as one-note portrayals: usually for laughs, occasionally to be creepy or frightening, sometimes to be pathetic. Brilliantly, Steve Ihnat manages to infuse his performance as Garth with all of these, smoothly transitioning from menacing and cruel, to throwing a tantrum like a small child, to being unintentionally funny even as one tries not to laugh.

One of the most interesting and subtle aspects was Garth’s furred, gold-lined coat. Throughout the episode, except when he is disguised as someone else, he is never seen without it. He’s constantly fidgeting with the coat, swinging it around him like a cloak (with one sleeve hanging ridiculously off the back), slinging it over one shoulder like a toga, or even cuddling it like a child with a security blanket. The coat becomes a physical representation of his delusion, and it’s not until the very end of the episode, when he’s beginning to respond to the treatment of his mental illness, that we see him without it at last.

"Don't tell me how to wear my clothes…"

There were many other things I liked in the episode, but the one that stayed with me, and which I suspect will stay with me for some time to come, was “Lord Garth”.

Five stars.

by Gideon Marcus

Birth of a Dream

As is tradition, before we tuned into Trek Friday night, we all gathered 'round the dinner table for a fanzine read. Trekzines are a land office business these days, and my mailbox sees a good half dozen amateur publications in it each month devoted just to Trek (not counting the half dozen or so others that cover science fiction in general). This time around, it was the near-pro quality Triskelion issue #2.

The first piece in the fan-mag is by none other than Hal Clement, the famed hard science fiction author and professor, writing about the Enterprise and its basis in real science. Abstruse stuff, but interesting. It just goes to show how engaging the universe of Star Trek is, above and beyond the weekly drama and our favorite characters.

In addition to being a fine piece of writing and a showcase for some quite good acting, "Whom Gods Destroy" was compelling for how much it told us about the setting of the show. For though the episode takes place in the claustrophobic confines of Stage 10 on the Paramount lot, redressed to look like the prison colony of Elba, the dialogue fills in details about the show that seem to address the very beginning of the entire Federation.

When Kirk was put on trial in the episode "Court Martial", we learned that he had an award for "the Axanar peace mission". No other details were given at the time. In "Whom Gods Destroy", it turns out Axanar was the site of a terrific battle, one in which Fleet Captain Garth's participation was essential to victory. Kirk recounts that he was a "newly fledged cadet" when he went on the subsequent peace mission (in a role that could not have been too momentous given his inexperience). If Kirk is 35, which makes sense since last year he was 34, then he was a cadet probably 17 years ago, when he was 18.

And just last episode (well, last rerun), Spock related he'd been serving in Star Fleet for 17 years.

Hmm.

Add to that the fact that the Axanar accords resulted in Kirk and Spock being "brothers", and the significance of the event becomes pretty clear.

Kirk, Spock, Garth, red boa-cloak, and piggy-face: brothers, thanks to Axanar

In the first half of the first season of Trek, there were no references to the Federation. The Enterprise was an "Earth ship" reporting to the "United Earth Space Probe Agency". Only gradually did the words "Star Fleet" and "Federation" get bandied around with frequency. That suggests that the United Federation of Planets is a fairly new nation.

I deduce that Axanar was some sort of titanic conflict between what would be the major races of the Federation: the humans, the Vulcans, the Andorians, the Tellarites, the Orionids, and all the rest. It might even have resulted in a defeat for the Vulcanians—the "conquering" to which McCoy refers in "Conscience of the King". But now, the UFP is like a United Nations with teeth, ensuring harmony among the myriad worlds that have banded together in the name of peace.

Garth, a soldier's soldier, and maddened by a grievous injury, could not stomach this clemency, so he tried to incite an insurrection on Antos IV. Happily, the Antosians were having none of it, lest the shaky foundations of the Federation be toppled even as they were laid.

After Axanar, Kirk became an explorer first, and a soldier second. Now that Garth is on the way to recovery, perhaps he can join Kirk on that noble expedition to the stars.

About face

by Lorelei Marcus

It is not often that our Captain Kirk submits readily to another person. He gives his respect to direct Starfleet superiors, but to an esteemed alien passenger or important civilian escort, he shows only the required amount of deference, and sometimes less. Even when he or his ship is threatened with mortal danger, he refuses to buckle to the whims of any supposedly all-powerful being, often to his own detriment.

Yet, in "Whom Gods Destroy", Kirk not only lacks hostility towards his captor, but in fact follows Garth's orders and tries to reach an understanding with him through exclusively nonviolent means. One could argue this was merely Kirk acting out of self-preservation, as Garth could have killed him with a phaser at any time. However, in a similar episode, "Plato's Stepchildren" Kirk relentlessly resisted the physical control of the Platonians, almost to his death. He is not one to give in easily, if at all.

Then why the change in temperament with Garth? I postulate two reasons. First, Garth is a former starship captain and Federation hero. Kirk grew up reading of his exploits and admires Garth as a man of greater rank and accomplishment. Even in his delusional state, Garth still invokes an awe that commands obedience, even from Kirk.

Second, Kirk understands that Garth is mentally ill and doesn't hold him accountable for his actions. When dealing with other enemies, Kirk is unyielding from his position of righteousness. Other foes act horrendously, with full intent and cognizance, justifying Kirk's equally stubborn resistance.

But Garth does not truly know what he's doing, at least not the Garth Kirk worships and admires, and he's better dealt with using a soft hand. Ironically, this ends up being the wrong choice. On multiple occasions, Kirk tries to reason with Garth and talk him down. However, his diplomacy never works—as it shouldn't, given Garth's insanity is incurable. If not for Spock's clever ruse and confidence with his phaser, they might never have escaped the prison.

Kirk gives diplomacy the old college try

Between the acting and the development of Federation history, "Whom Gods Destroy" makes for an excellent bottle-esque episode.

5 stars.

by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

Second Verse, Same as the First

GARTH: You wrote that?
MARTA: Yesterday, as a matter of fact.
GARTH: It was written by an Earth man named Shakespeare a long time ago!
MARTA: Which does not alter the fact that I wrote it again yesterday! I think it's one of my best poems, don't you?

Kirk seems destined to watch his heroes fail. Professors and peers from the Academy, fellow officers, esteemed scientists. Time and time again, he expects better from his fellow humans, and is met instead by (mostly) men who think that the only issue with ultimate authority and unchecked ambition is the personal failings of previous tyrants.

“It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.” -Theodor Reik

Even with all the horrors he has encountered, perhaps even in spite of them, he is quick to declare a paradise, to look for the best in others. The rank of Starship Captain must demand a degree of ego, surely, to be capable of commanding over 400 persons, making life-or-death decisions, and being the first to approach previously unknown species and planets. Setting the stage for humanity and the Federation is a doozy of a first impression! A sense of confidence is a must, then.

We have seen Kirk mishandle situations, fall prey to his own weaknesses. But he also relies on Spock and McCoy to check him. Is it enough? After peers and mentors keep making the same mistakes with catastrophic repercussions… is it telling of the system, of the people, or both? Just what sort of curriculum does the Academy promote, that so many graduates have gone on to lose perspective, take over planets, view tyrants from history as inspiration, reconstruct fascist regimes? To repeat the mistakes and tragedy of history, thinking that this time they can do things right.

Starfleet: molding megalomaniacs for more than 20 years!

Consider Dr. Daystrom's desperate need to achieve again, at the cost of lives in war games with his M5. Or Lt. McGivers, so enamored with how men “used to be” that even as a historian who knew of Khan, she was easily swayed. Remember Dr. Adams who used a neural neutralizer to gain complete control of Tantalus, or Gary Mitchell declaring himself a god upon gaining psychic powers? And of course we can't forget John Gill, a historian and teacher so sure of his ability to do it the 'right way' that he recreated the Nazi regime. Kirk and his colleagues have stumbled to different degrees over the Great Man theory, the notion that history hinges on exceptional individuals.

More importantly, on dismissing those who aren't Great Men. Only the fact that his crew mutinied saved the planet of Antos 4 when Captain Garth was unable to handle the rejection. And yet, without his crew, he could do nothing. (Mutiny! As recently as in The Tholian Web, there is no recorded instance of such on a starship.) The story was written before, it will be written again. Abuse finds home in authority. Once one thinks of people as something less than human (or in Trek, alien), it is possible to justify any number of injustices.

Much of this episode was a re-wording of what has been said before, and usually said better. It wasn't terrible, but I'd like a key-change, at least.

3 stars

[Come join us tonight (January 10th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[January 2, 1969] Blood, Sweat, and Tears (Star Trek: "Elaan of Troyius")

January 2, 2024 GalacticJourney 9 Comments

by Janice L. Newman

On December 23rd, 1968, exactly eleven months after they were captured by North Korea, the crew of the USS Pueblo was finally released, and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. The USA would not be starting World War III over the incident, and our boys, though they’ve been starved and tortured, are coming home alive for Christmas.

It is thus appropriate that this week’s Star Trek episode revolved around choosing peace instead of war.

Bill Theiss, you've done it again!

In the episode opener, we learn that the Enterprise has been sent to support Petri, Ambassador of Troyius, in his mission to “train” the Dohlman of Elas to be a suitable wife for the Troyian leader. The Dohlman turns out to be a beautiful woman played by France Nuyen, made up to look like Cleopatra in a bathing suit. Her name is Elaan, and she is imperious and demanding, while Petri is servile but contemptuous. They are intractable in their dislike of each other. Kirk quickly becomes exasperated with both of them, telling Petri, “Stop trying to kill each other. Then worry about being friendly.”

"And maybe try wearing a bikini…"

In the meantime, the Enterprise is being followed by a “ghost” ship, which eventually materializes and proves to be a Klingon warship. This is a nice callback to Balance of Terror, where the Enterprise played the part of the “ghost ship”, and the recent Enterprise Incident, where we learned that the Klingons now have cloaking technology.

"Follow that starship!"

No sooner does the ship reveal itself than Kirk is called away from the bridge again. Elaan has stabbed Petri, who declares that he will have nothing more to do with her. He also explains to Nurse Chapel that the mysterious “allure” of Elasian women is merely biochemical: “A man whose flesh is once touched by the tears of a woman of Elas has his heart enslaved forever.”

Back in Elaan’s quarters, Kirk is fed up and declares that he will be Elaan’s new teacher. He tells her she is, “an uncivilized savage, a vicious child in a woman's body, an arrogant monster!”

"I said, 'Gimme five'—you've got to learn modern courtesy."

I must admit, my sympathies were thoroughly with Elaan. Despite her imperious attitude in the beginning, it becomes increasingly clear that she has no choice in the political marriage and no desire to be married. At one point she says, “I will not go to Troyius, I will not be mated to a Troyian, and I will not be humiliated, and I will not be given to a green pig as a bribe to stop a war!” And yet, the Enterprise continues on its way to Troyius, regardless of her behavior, her orders, or her protests. It seems she has no true power, but is merely a pawn to be traded, and probably one the Elasians don’t actually care much about.

In fact, I had to wonder if the Elasians didn’t want peace at all, but sent their “Dohlman” to be married as a sop to the Federation. That way they could say they’d tried, and if the Troyians couldn’t handle the Dohlman, well that just proved that peace wasn’t possible between them.

This also nicely sets up the question of why the Federation cares so much about stopping the war between these two planets, to the point of bringing diplomatic pressure and sending one of their best starships to ensure that the wedding and negotiations go well. Scotty blatantly asks the same question in the episode opener, leaving it to rest in the back of our minds as we watch.

The next day, Kryton, one of the Elasian guards, sneaks into Engineering and sabotages the Enterprise. Kirk forces his way into Elaan’s quarters and again begins trying to “teach” her, which mostly consists of wrestling with her and threatening to spank her. She starts to weep, and he wipes away her tears. The effect is immediate, with Kirk’s ire evaporating and transforming into passion.

"Say, you didn't just hear a kind of snake rattle sound, did you?"

Kryton is caught, and kills himself rather than allow himself to be subjected to a Vulcan mind meld. Kirk orders Scotty to figure out what Kryton did, then returns to Elaan’s quarters. Elaan tries to convince Kirk to work with the Klingons, but he tells her there are more important things than love: “Elaan, two planets, an entire star system's stability depends on it. We have a duty to forget what happened.”

At this point, those of us who have been watching Star Trek since the beginning already know what’s going to happen: Kirk will always choose the Enterprise over everything else. And indeed, when Spock and McCoy come to roust the captain out of Elaan’s quarters, all it takes for him to leave Elaan behind is to hear that the Klingon ship has changed course and is approaching at warp speed.

"Don't mind me. I always walk this stiffly when my friends are watching…"

Once Kirk gets to the bridge, we’re treated to one of the best combat sequences we’ve seen yet on Star Trek. Kryton’s sabotage, Kirk learns at the last possible moment, was rigging the matter-antimatter unit to blow if the ship went into warp. The Klingon ship therefore starts by trying to bait the Enterprise into going into warp, and that doesn’t work, just firing on them.

The captain sends Elaan to Sickbay because it’s the safest part of the ship. Petri speaks to her there, finally treating her with a modicum of graciousness and respect, and asks her to wear the necklace gifted her by the Troyians, “as a token of respect for the desperate wishes of your people and mine for peace”. She seems genuinely affected by the words and gesture, perhaps realizing that Kirk will truly never sacrifice duty for love.

"Please put these on. The Emperor paid retail."

Back on the bridge, the crew struggles to keep the Klingon ship’s hits to its best shield (Kirk doing a bit of back seat driving as he leans over Sulu and gives him his orders). An impulse-power driven ship is no match for warp, though, and all seems lost.

Elaan appears on the bridge, wearing the Troyian wedding dress and necklace. Spock immediately notes that there are strange readings coming from the necklace. It turns out that the stones, which Elaan says are “common”, are dilithium crystals! (No wonder the Federation and the Klingons are both so interested in this system!) She gives them to the Captain, who has Spock hurry them down to Engineering, where he and Scotty start installing them. Kirk does his best to stall, but the Klingons are unwilling to discuss terms (I imagine that after “The Enterprise Incident” and The Deadly Years, the Klingons have been instructed not to listen to anything the Federation says—or at least nothing that Kirk says.)

This fellow is no Michael Ansara. He's not even a William Campbell…

The crystals are ready in the nick of time. A photon torpedo at close range leaves the Klingon ship damaged and limping. The Enterprise leaves it behind to fulfill its original mission.

Pow! Right in the kisser.

Kirk says farewell to Elaan, who asks him not to forget her. He tells her he has no choice. Nor does she, she replies, only duty and responsibility. It’s clear that she’s come to accept her role, though whether it’s because she realized that her last desperate play to manipulate the captain failed or because her near-death experience made her decide that peace was more important than her personal feelings, we do not know. It is also worth noting that while she goes on to marry into a culture she despises and where she will likely be surrounded by people who hate, fear, and ridicule her (if Petri’s behavior is any indication), Kirk will simply continue doing what he loves. Her choice of “duty” over all else is thus, in my estimation, a far more difficult and admirable one.

"Oh, this knife? I was just going to pare my nails. Not kill the Emperor or anything like that, why do you ask?"

McCoy, unsurprisingly (given his track record) discovers an antidote to the Elasian tears. Spock tells him the captain has no need of it, as he’s already found his antidote: the Enterprise.

There were many things to love in this episode, and many things that frustrated me. The “Taming of the Shrew” sequences early on were grating, but the combat was excellent, and to the scriptwriter’s credit, the story did not end with Elaan being “tamed”. In the end, she makes a choice to accept her fate, but she does so with dignity.

The things I liked and didn’t like balanced out pretty well, leaving this a three star episode for me.

by Gideon Marcus

The Sum of its Parts

What I found so gratifying about "Elaan of Troyius" was its continuity with the Trek history we've encountered thus far. Once again, as in "Journey to Babel", the Enterprise is host to a diplomatic mission (though how the ship could house several dozen delegates to the Babel Conference, but Uhura had to give up her room for Elaan, is never explained). Once again, Kirk shows irritation at having to play nursemaid to a bunch of civilians. I would find his flip treatment of Elaan demeaning, but it's no worse than he displays to Commissioner Ferris or Commissioner Fox.

I particularly loved the galactopolitical situation depicted in the episode. Here we have a fairly new Federation system with two hostile planets, abundant with dilithium crystals, perched right at the edge of the Klingon Empire. What a fraught situation Kirk must navigate!

At first, it was difficult for me to glean the plot behind the plot, but by the end of the episode, the setup was pretty clear. The Federation, upon learning of the rich deposits on Elaas (and Troyius?) placed a clamp on all dispatches coming out of the system. Not good enough, though, as the Klingons clearly want the worlds badly, too. The Feds then explained to the two worlds in the system that they must work things out. Elaas grudgingly agrees—and then effects two simultaneous plans to queer the deal.

The first is Kryton's sabotage. By handing the Enterprise over to the Klingons, they get in their good graces (if, indeed, the Klingons have good graces). Obviously, the savage Klingons are a better fit for for the militaristic Elaasians anyway.

"Of course I want to be a Klingon—you think I want to keep wearing this outfit?"

The second is Elaan. She clearly doesn't want to be there. Indeed, she does everything she can to get out of it, despite orders from the Elaasian council. Elaan goes so far as to try to murder the Troyian ambassador and seduce the captain of the Enterprise. And yet, that scheme fails when Elaan takes a page from Kirk's book, and indeed the example of the whole crew, that duty and the preservation of life trumps all else. It's a quick, undershown change, but it's there, and I appreciated it.

The episode reminds me a bit of the parable of the peasant woman who shelters a starving prince. The royal promises to give a gold coin for every fat bubble in the soup she serves. Greedily, she dumps a huge pat of butter in the soup, which results in one big bubble rather than a myriad of little ones. Similarly, if the Elaasians had stuck to just one plan, they might have succeeded. Instead, they double hedged and lost all.

And was the Klingon commander operating with Imperial sanction? Or was he a rogue skipper with notions of glory? After all, taking on a starship seems pretty bold given the ever-watchful Organians.

It's not a perfect episode, but it's certainly an engaging one, and I always enjoy seeing Mrs. Robert Culp on the small screen. Plus, her appearance alongside Shatner is something of a reunion—they starred together in the Broadway version of The World of Suzie Wong. Plus, I dug both the Klingon ship (which we saw a bit of in "The Enterprise Incident" and "Day of the Dove") and the score for the episode.

Four stars.

Twixt Scylla and Charybdis

by Trini Stewart

The beginning of this week's episode did not seem promising to start, mostly because of the guest characters' first impressions on me. Petri the ambassador seemed childish and reckless in his peacemaking, and Elaan was almost comically uncooperative for royalty sent as a hospitable offering. Looking back, Elaan was possibly playing to her strengths to some end with her antagonistic reactions, and her development with Kirk ultimately became a gripping trial for our captain.

Kirk was the shining star of this episode, which is not something I feel about him often. He was impressively quick-witted against biochemical and psychological manipulation, which really sold his captain qualities for me more than his usual speeches or fights. The way Kirk kept his priorities in check while thinking on his feet reminded me of how Spock left me feeling in "The Tholian Web" when he held the ship together without Kirk. In the short time I have known Kirk, he has struck me as the type to always know what to say and fight when there is no other choice. Kirk managed to unravel the layers of the princess's antics even with serious disadvantages, revealing what his problem solving is like when he is out of sorts. Tension was well-built in this episode on several levels, and the challenges Kirk faced were arguably more dynamic and interesting than Spock's in "The Tholian Web".

"What's a case of tight trousers when the Enterprise is at stake?"

Kirk transitioned from acting as a respectful host to a firm authority with Elaan, and his initial responses to her rude behavior were tastefully poised. Once Elaan had seduced Kirk, he still managed to expertly dismantle the Elaisians’ schemes without falling for the Dohlman or her subordinates’ clever tricks. Shatner did a great job conveying how difficult it was for Kirk to maintain his composure, so it was riveting to see just how he would escape the Klingons, prepare the guileful Elaan for her marriage, and get the Enterprise back in ship shape under that level of duress. His allegiance to the Enterprise evidently sobered Kirk; his articulate maneuvering reflected his symbiotic relationship with the ship and her crew. In the end, even Elaan was humbled by our captain, finally submitting to the responsibilities her title bore. I was quite pleasantly surprised by Kirk this week, and the adversities threatening the crew were positively captivating. 4 stars!

Be Our Guest, Do As You Please

by Joe Reid

“Elaan of Troyius” was this week’s episode of Star Trek. “Taming of the Shrew” storyline aside, there is one thing that the writers of Star Trek keep doing to twist my britches, and this episode was another example of it. The Enterprise, powerful symbol of human achievement, has the laziest security imaginable. Episode after episode, people that wish to do harm to the ship and its crew need only to walk into what should be the most secure areas of a ship to do as they please practically unchallenged. Areas that on large ships, not all members of the crew are even allowed to enter. So, let’s delve into some of areas of a ship that guests should not enter.

Let’s begin with the command center of the ship. The bridge. The seat of command, where the captain steers the destiny of a ship to complete its missions. Obviously, a perfect place for a teenage princess to casually enter whenever she chooses. Elaan pierced the bridge and interrupted the ship’s captain, while he was in the middle of a combat situation. Good on the writers for making the captain, thanks to Spock’s urging, send her away from the bridge, only to have her show up on the bridge again after a change of clothes. For an area holding some of the most senior members of the crew, it seems unusual that it wasn’t better protected. Past episodes showcased singing children, enemy androids, and furry tribbles having free access to the brain trust of the Enterprise. I anticipate that 15% of Kirk’s problems could be solved by securing access to the bridge to “Bridge Crew Only”.

The next ludicrous pattern that we witnessed in this episode was the open and unguarded access that guests on the Enterprise had to Engineering, the area of the ship that provides all the power, without which the Enterprise couldn’t move, fight, or support human life. Why did Elaan’s former suitor have a free ticket to stroll into this most vital part of the ship and sabotage systems? Again, good on the writers for allowing him to be discovered, be it many minutes later, only to allow the discoverer to be summarily executed for his weak efforts to question someone he'd found messing with the thing that keeps the ship alive. If only this random trespass in Engineering were rare. Previous episodes sported children again, along with genetically advanced conquerors, self-aware talking space probes, and Klingons traipsing merrily into the bowels of Engineering.

Where before I said that 15% of Kirk’s problems could be solved by securing the Bridge, 99% of problems could go away if Engineering had a couple guards working shifts to protect the very heart of this starship.

If only Kevin Riley were on duty, none of this would have happened. So long as he's sober…

Historically there have been some areas of the ship that have been kept secure week after week. Areas that no one can casually walk into without permission (unless you are a floating cloud of space gas that is). Those would be crew quarters. Even in this week’s episode, crew quarters were better guarded, and their doors are better respected, than what should have been the most sensitive areas of the ship. Not even Spock and McCoy could casually walk into the room where the captain was passionately kissing Elaan.

Perhaps future episodes will take the security of the most critical parts of the ship more seriously. That, or have the crew consider moving the engines and bridge staff to crew quarters, where doors are respected.

For continuing to overlook this easily solvable problem, I offer only 2 stars for “Elaan of Troyius”. Ignoring the fact that the episode did display some interesting makeup and costumes, and featured a few well-acted scenes, the continued stupidity of the security of the ship is as untenable as its “secure” areas.

Two stars

[Come join us tomorrow night (January 3rd) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[December 24, 1968] We Shall Fight Them In The Streets (Doctor Who: The Invasion [Episodes 5-8])

December 24, 2023 Jessica Holmes Leave a comment

By Jessica Holmes

Hello again! Another year draws to a close, and so too does the latest Doctor Who serial, "The Invasion". Last time, we saw the Doctor try his hand at espionage in an attempt to uncover the villain Vaughn's wicked plans. Now that it's revealed that Vaughn is working with the Cybermen, can the Doctor and UNIT put an end to their plot, or is it curtains for the human race?

Let's check it out.

In Case You Missed It

Having borne witness to the birth of a new Cyber-menace, Jamie and the Doctor hurry back to UNIT. They report their findings to the Brigadier, who laments that thanks to Vaughn’s mind control, he’s lost the backing of the Ministry of Defence. To get help from UNIT command in Geneva, he’s going to need actual proof of the Cybermen.

It’s handy that there’s a photographer on hand then, isn’t it? However, the Brigadier rebuffs Isobel’s offer to go down into the sewers and photograph the Cybermen. Why? Old-fashioned sexism. Ugh. It doesn’t stop Isobel going down into the sewers with Jamie and Zoe to prove him wrong– though given the attempt ends in disaster, with two dead men and no decent pictures to show for it, I’m not sure she proved her point.

Meanwhile, Vaughn tests his secret weapon on one of the newly awakened Cybermen, driving it mad with pure fear. I actually felt a little bit bad for it. And scared of it. Those modulated screams will have given plenty of kiddos nightmares, I guarantee it.

He’ll need it soon, because the Cybermen have every intention of converting a small selection of humanity and then slaughtering the rest. And Vaughn can’t have that. He’s no great humanitarian but ruling the world doesn’t mean much if everyone’s too dead to follow your orders.

As for the Doctor, he’s trying to find out the particulars of the Cybermen’s plans for invasion. He suspects that the mysterious electrical circuits hidden in every piece of IE equipment have something to do with it, but how?

Not even Prof. Watkins (rescued offscreen) can enlighten him, but he can tell him about the secret weapon Vaughn made him build, which leads the Doctor to realise that the mysterious circuits could be used to produce a hypnotic signal. It’s like the hypnosis the Cybermen used back in "The Wheel In Space", but on a much grander scale.

The Doctor and UNIT can’t make enough signal-blocking devices to protect everyone in the world before the invasion begins; they can barely cobble enough together to protect themselves. And then the signal begins to transmit, and everyone who hears it loses consciousness. And then Cybermen come pouring forth from the sewers in their hundreds. It’s a terrific sight, Cybermen marching down the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It’s one of my favourite shots in all of Doctor Who, right up there with the parade of Daleks outside Parliament. And there’s nobody who can stop them.

Nobody except the Doctor and a couple dozen UNIT soldiers, that is.

Already starting to butt heads with the Cybermen over control of the invasion force, Vaughn dispatches Packer to try and retrieve the Professor in hopes of forcing him to mass-produce more of his secret weapon. Packer uses his characteristic restraint in doing so, both failing to retrieve the Professor and injuring him in the process. And Jamie, too.

Finding themselves alone against the world-ending threat, the Brigadier and the Doctor start brainstorming ideas for resistance. The main problem is that the hypnotic signal is being broadcast from the Cybermen’s ship, which is currently sitting somewhere between the Earth and the Moon. Not exactly within reach of missiles, and they don’t have a rocket handy. Or do they? The Russians had been on the verge of a rocket launch when the signal went out. If UNIT were to commandeer the rocket and replace the manned capsule with a warhead, they could use it to knock out the ship. I can’t imagine the Kremlin would be terribly happy about that, but they’re asleep right now.

Mind made up, the Brigadier sends a squad to Russia to take care of the rocket. Meanwhile, the Doctor decides to confront Vaughn. He tries to appeal to Vaughn’s better nature, but the unfortunate fact is that Vaughn doesn’t really have one.

More Cyberman ships are rapidly approaching Earth, but with Zoe’s help computing a tactical launch pattern, UNIT are able to intercept them with ground-based missiles. This loss leads the Cybermen to blame Vaughn for his failure to fully subdue the human populace, and they change their minds about their plans for humanity. They aren’t going to keep any of us around after all, converted or not. They’re going to deploy a bomb to wipe out all life on Earth.

Furious at his allies for betraying him before he got the chance to do the same to them, Vaughn agrees to help the Doctor. They need to switch off the Earth-based radio beam which the Cybermen will use to guide their bomb. I’d have thought that if a single bomb was powerful enough to destroy all life on Earth, it doesn’t really need a precise guidance system, but hey-ho.

Forming an unlikely alliance, Vaughn and the Doctor infiltrate the IE factory compound, slipping past hordes of Cybermen to reach the radio controls. As they advance, UNIT brings up the rear, engaging the Cybermen in a firefight from which UNIT emerges victorious.

And a good thing, too, because Vaughn doesn’t make it all the way to the radio controls. The Cybermen catch him and the Doctor in an ambush, and the Doctor has a very narrow escape as Vaughn perishes. To his credit, Vaughn takes a few of the Cybermen with him.

UNIT take care of the radio controls, saving the world from the bomb… for now. However, the world is still fast asleep, and the Cybermen are moving their ship to deliver the bomb at close range. The survival of humanity depends on the Russian rocket hitting its target.

A nail-biting few minutes ends in a mighty explosion—in space!

All’s well that ends well. By daylight, Isobel manages to get some very nice snaps of the Cybermen (and the Doctor, too) which land her a job in photojournalism. The Professor and Jamie recover from their injuries, and as for the Doctor, he finally manages to get those TARDIS circuits fixed.

Now, if only he could remember exactly where he parked it…

"Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up!"

A Few Thoughts

The Cybermen are back! And they have a new design. Again. They do change quite a bit, don’t they? A Dalek is a Dalek is a Dalek but Cybermen never seem to settle. We’ve done away with the droopy notches at the edge of the mouth in favour of a more straight-faced look, and added a headpiece. It looks a bit like a bulky headset, like they’ve just come down from the Abbey Road Studios.

There’s been another change to their vocal design, a little heavier on the modulation. It sounds absolutely marvellous on the mad Cyberman. The warbling screams are positively haunting.

However, I am worried that they’re starting to get a little bit too robotic. If we lose sight of the fact that the Cybermen were once very much human, we lose what makes them special as villains. There’s a billion evil murder-robots. They’re fun, and I like them. The Cybermen, however, are horrific, and that’s why I love them.

I can’t think of an elegant way to segue from talking about the Cybermen to talking about women's lib, so let’s just lurch over there, shall we?

There was an attempt, of sorts, to inject some feminist messaging into the serial. At least, I hope it was a good-faith attempt, because it really didn’t work.

As mentioned earlier, the Brigadier was reluctant to let Isobel go and photograph the Cybermen, on the grounds that she’s just a young girl and this is a job for his men. Isobel rightly enough tells him off, and when Jamie agrees with the Brigadier (he at least has the excuse of literally being from the 18th century), she and Zoe swan off to prove the men wrong, dragging Jamie with them. A win for women’s lib, you’d think. And you’d be wrong. The expedition to the sewers results in the completely avoidable deaths of two men, and to add insult to injury, Zoe’s pictures are dismissed by the Brigadier as useless. The messaging is loud and clear: the silly little girl should have just listened to the men and let them handle things.

After this point, Isobel spends the rest of the story flirting back and forth with one of the UNIT men. While their banter is cute, don’t get me wrong, it also feels like she’s being shunted back into the standard role for all pretty girls in stories: something for the men to flirt with.

At least Zoe does get due credit for her maths genius. Thanks to her calculations, UNIT are able to take out 90% of the incoming Cyber-ships. The UNIT chaps are quite keen to keep her around. After all, she’s much prettier than a computer. Insert weary sigh here. Well, at least they admitted that she saved their bacon.

Speaking of UNIT, they’re quite an interesting addition to the world of Doctor Who. Having been established as a permanent fixture on contemporary(ish) Earth, I wonder if we’ll see them again the next time the Doctor and company wind up round our neck of the woods. I’m not averse to that, they’re fun to have around. It is important to me, however, that they don’t turn into a tool the Doctor can call on to simply run in and shoot the problem. That wouldn’t be Doctor Who to me. Cleverness and ingenuity should be what wins the day, not a greater force of arms.

Final Thoughts

Now that I’m done sounding like a total wet blanket, I have to say I really enjoyed this serial. It’s tremendous fun, very exciting, and I loved the cast of side characters.

On the heroic side, the Brigadier, old-fashioned sexism aside, is just plain cool. I’m sure I said the same when he was first introduced as a Colonel, but it still applies. This is a man who is utterly unflappable. Give him a job to do, and he’ll get on with it, efficiently and without a hair of his moustache out of place.

The narrative didn’t do her any favours, but I really did like Isobel and how she stood up to the men. Her uncle the Professor is also very interesting to me. He doesn’t meekly go along with Vaughn’s plans, but fights him every step of the way. There’s a moment late on in the serial where he tells Vaughn that though he has no choice but to serve him, given half the opportunity he would kill him. And (this is my favourite Vaughn moment) Vaughn gives him that opportunity, handing him a loaded gun.

You might expect that the Professor would find himself unable to follow through on his threat, but he really goes for it, firing on Vaughn three times at point blank range. Unfortunately it turns out that Vaughn is bulletproof thanks to his cybernetically augmented body, but still, he tried. I have to give him credit for that.

I can’t overstate how much I enjoyed Vaughn. He’s an absolute delight to watch; a total slimeball, utterly despicable, absolutely captivating. We get to see him at the height of his strength, cool and smug and in control, and at the depths of wretchedness when all his plans come to nothing. What a great character.

The Invasion isn’t without its flaws, but it’s a jolly good time, and that’s what we’re here for.

4 stars out of 5 for "The Invasion."

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[December 20, 1968] A failure to communicate (Star Trek: "The Empath")

December 20, 2023 Trinity Stewart 6 Comments

by Trini Stewart

This week's episode, “The Empath”, gave Star Trek fans some wonderful interactions from our crew on a rescue mission, but also had them running on a vaguely-guided track throughout the episode.

At the start, the Enterprise is tasked with evacuating a research station before the star it was studying goes nova, but when Kirk, Spock and McCoy arrive at the station, there is no one left to rescue. An enormous solar flare threatens the Enterprise during the search, so the ship leaves to safety just before a record tape reveals where the former inhabitants went. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy watch as the station researchers suddenly disappear while a strange noise shrills on tape, and the three distressed crew members are almost immediately teleported away by the same noise.

Where Kirk was…a very effective effect!

They find themselves in a dark area with a mysteriously mute woman, whom they nickname Gem. While the crew attempts to ask Gem about how they got there, two large-headed figures, the Vians, bluntly introduce themselves and refuse to tell Kirk what is going on. The crew is easily overpowered, the Vians collect data from Gem, and they vanish with the crew’s weapons. A small cut on Kirk’s head is suddenly healed when he checks on Gem, and McCoy realizes that Gem communicates through her highly responsive nervous system; all of Kirk’s feelings and ailments can become hers from just a touch.

The healing power of interpretive dance

Spock then locates a sophisticated lab, where they discover the Vians preparing large perspex tubes for the crew members, and the missing inhabitants of the station dead in tubes of their own. The three officers learn that they are meant to be subjected to deadly tests for reasons unknown, and they flee with Gem through a cave mouth. The Vians trick the escapees with a mirage of a search party to test their wills, and capture Kirk once they observe the crew’s perseverance. Kirk sacrifices himself by insisting he be the one specimen the Vians want for their cruel torture, after which Gem reluctantly heals his potentially deadly wounds at McCoy’s behest.

Shatner is devastated that he's not in the spotlight…

While Spock works out how to attune the Vians’ instrument to allow their escape, the aliens come back to reveal that they plan to gravely injure either Spock or McCoy next, and that the trio must choose the victim when they return. This leads to one of the most endearing displays of the crew’s dynamic I have seen in the show: both officers insist they be the test subject without hesitation, and antics ensue. The two begin to argue that the other is more valuable to leave with the captain, but Kirk insists he will be the one to decide, only to be rendered unconscious by McCoy’s treatment. Spock then notes his approval of the treatment, as it relieved Kirk of a rough decision and put Spock in charge as second-in-command. McCoy punctuates that sentiment by ambush-sedating Spock, saving the critical Vulcan the only way he could. Gem sheds a single tear as McCoy is taken away, since she has now emotionally connected with both Kirk and Spock and feels the depth of their affinity for him.

A single tear—Gem's race has not had time to be acquainted with clichés

The two remaining officers eventually awaken and begin to configure the Vians’ device, acknowledging that the aliens likely wanted them to escape and leave McCoy behind. Instead, Spock transports Gem and them to the lab, where McCoy is found with multiple fatal injuries, and he tries to make light for everyone’s sake. The two realize their only hope for McCoy is for Gem to help him despite the risk, and the Vians restrict them in their force field to prevent their interference. The aliens begin to explain that they must see how Gem reacts on her own, because she is being judged of her worth on behalf of her whole species; Gem’s choice to save McCoy would determine whether the Vians use their limited resources to save Gem’s species. Spock and Kirk escape the force field, and Kirk indicates that the Vians do not know the value of the compassion they claim to idolize. The aliens, humbled all too quickly, mend McCoy and whisk Gem away with a short farewell. The episode ends with the crew appreciating Gem as an entity, and Spock delivering a fun riposte to Scotty in response to his joke at the Vulcan's expense.

"There. All better. No hard feelings?"

The episode did a great job at highlighting the main characters, but left the intentions of the new ones blurry in execution. It is unclear why the Vians specifically found compassion to be the only trait worth preserving, especially when they didn’t practice it. It is generally accepted that self sacrifice is the ultimate show of love, but the weight that carries as a theme is undermined by how dubious the whole experiment is.

The crew’s interactions give a good taste of what the impact should have been, but the incomplete understanding of the threat ultimately caused the intense stakes built up for the captives to fall flat. Moreover, the Vians were presented as an overwhelming force, yet they hardly understood why they were conducting experiments, to the extent that insults from Kirk immediately caused them to question their motives. Not to mention that they conveniently and inexplicably had the means to save one of the races in the solar system. The crew’s roles in this episode outshone the disappointing parts, so I still consider this a good episode as far as enjoyment goes.

3.5 stars.

Amateur work

by Gideon Marcus

Joyce Muskat's name is probably new to you. It wasn't to me—she's a N3FFer (member of the National Fantasy Fan Federation. Also, a few months ago, her name was mentioned in one of the Trekzines. I can't remember which one it was, but the author was pleased that her fan friend, Joyce Muskat, had sold a script to Trek on the slush pile. This was remarkable since Trek officially doesn't take unsolicited manuscripts. So, good for her. I love that Trek has opened the door to new talent, particularly women.

I'd really like to know if the inconsistencies in the episode were the result of a spotty understanding of the material or revisions after submission. I suspect the latter. No true fan (he said hopefully) would write the Federation as inhuman monsters who would let the sundry races of Minar die when the sun went nova. No sf aficionado would make the boner mistake of having a planet's atmosphere protect the surface from cosmic rays, but not the Enterprise's shields, not to mention having cosmic rays cause earthquakes.

It's never even made clear whether or not Gem (Jem?) comes from a race of empaths or if she was unique among them. The latter seems more likely; I find it hard to believe that a race of empaths could fail to feel compassion. I could see telepaths walling themselves off to avoid a confusion of the psyches ("where do I stop and you begin?") but given that Gem cannot verbally communicate at all, an empathic race would have to rely on its mental powers to relate. And as Heinlein pointed out, no beings have more compassion than those who "grok" each other.

There's much to like about the episode, from the performances of the leads to the creative use of set and costume (the Vians have excellent Outer Limits-style make-up, though it is strange seeing such in color). On the other hand, the unremitting score, the odd pacing (Shatner slo-mo-ing to the ground for about a minute springs to mind), the nonsensical motivations for the Vians' experiment, and frankly, the directorial decision to keep focusing on Gem's facial expressions, which made her look somewhat clownish, all drag the episode down to average territory.

If only Harlan Ellison had written this episode of Outer Limits…

Three stars.

Substitutionary Theology

by Joe Reid

“The Empath” is this week’s episode of Star Trek. In it the crew of the Enterprise explore another strange new world. Yet again they face forces that are overwhelming. Yet again they find a way to pull their fat out of the fire and yet again the writers of this show chose to lace in overt theology into their story. Not only were these salutes to God and the Bible poorly executed, they sought to teach biblical morals without delivering the substance of the message through the narrative of the story, but through imagery and exposition only. This practice proved to be utter folly.

In one of the opening scenes we witnessed a recording of two missing scientists going about their work when a quake happened. This prompted the scientist named Ozaba to quote the first part of Psalm 95, verse 4, “In his hand are the deep places of the earth;…” A verse that when looked at by itself means nothing, but surrounded by the other verses in Psalm 95 that speak of the grandeur and majesty of God. Ozaba quoting this added nothing to the scene nor did it make his sudden disappearance meaningful. It was as if the writers desired to open the episode with a random scripture and blindly opened a Bible and picked the first verse they saw.

At the very end of the episode this time Scotty delivered the references to scripture, without quoting it this time. It was Mathew 13:45-46, where Jesus speaks about the kingdom of heaven being like a pearl of great price—it being worth selling everything that one has in order to obtain it. Although closer related to the something in the story, (Gem) this scripture like the previous one was a bad fit for the message that the story was attempting to deliver: sacrificing oneself for the benefit of another.

Strange use of scripture aside, the troubling part for me was in the main story of the episode: the imagery of Kirk as he was tortured by the aliens. His hands were bound and his arms were stretched wide as if he were on a cross. A nearly impossible position to hold as his wrists were bound with two ropes. It was done intentionally so as to place Kirk in a crucified posture. Conversely when McCoy was bound in a similar way his hands were above him.

Shatner's double is dying for the episode's sins

The combination of the out of place scriptural references and imagery used for both Kirk and the girl (in particular, the Pietà at the end as she is draped in a Vian's arms) muddy the waters of what this episode is attempting to say. A much more effective method would be to keep the moral message and the story only based in the environment of an alien world and deliver the message without the forced and uninspired asides to scripture. I’m fine with teaching morality tales using other mediums. I’m not fine with the poor application of scripture. It has the potential to cause more harm than good if misused—as we’ve seen done throughout the centuries.

Lest I be misunderstood, it's not so much that I found the episode offensive; rather it was too shallow and ineffective to deliver its message faithfully and respectfully.

One star

Staging a Comeback

by Janice L. Newman

When movies and television became widespread, early directors and producers treated them much like stage plays. There’s a static quality to shows, noticeable all the way up through the fifties and early sixties.

Eventually creators began to innovate, finally realizing that they could do things that weren’t possible on a stage. We began to see more creativity in how things were filmed, and particularly in how things were staged. In Star Trek we’ve seen both styles. Some episodes have had more traditional, static staging with actors carefully lined up in staggered and visible rows, while other episodes have pushed the boundaries of what can be done with a camera (the moving shots from Nomad’s point-of-view in Changeling come to mind).

“The Empath” is an interesting hybrid. There are a few scenes on the surface of the planet, and a couple on the Enterprise, but most of it is shot in a dark, empty space with minimal props. This makes it feel like a stage play, but more like a modern production than a traditional play. Gem’s interpretive dance-style form of communication strengthens this impression as well. It’s interesting to see how we’ve come full circle, from techniques drawn from the stage, to more dynamic shots made possible by modern filmmaking techniques, and now returning to a stage play, this time deliberately, to get a particular tone and feeling.

Filming in limbo—next door to Tombstone

There was much I liked in this episode: the interactions between Spock, McCoy, and Kirk were excellent, and I loved the idea of Gem’s special ability. Unfortunately, rest of the story made no sense, with important or dramatic information revealed late and then ignored in ways that were entirely uncharacteristic. I found myself wondering, as Gideon did, how many of the inconsistencies were due to the original script and how much to modifications made by others (certainly Roddenberry never hesitated to cut up or re-write a script, as Harlan Ellison will bitterly tell you). The bright spots and dark spots canceled each other out, leaving me with a somewhat disappointing three star episode and a lot of questions.

A Familiar Song

by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

The Talosians are back! Oh wait, these are different beings with bulbous skulls, silver robes, illusory abilities, and a penchant for experimenting on humanoids. Supposedly the Vians have the power to save an entire planet (but only one!) from the imminent nova, and are deciding the fate of said planet by coercing an empath to absorb injuries to the point of death. Are there representatives from other planets being tested elsewhere? If Gem “fails" will the Vians save their own planet? Why does an entire world need to reach a certain standard of “compassion” to deserve being rescued from annihilation? Pay too much attention and you will start to wonder if the Vians are making it up as they go along. Note the dead scientists stored in macabre tube displays! Nothing says good intentions like having three more tubes ready and labeled for when the landing party eventually dies!

"The Red Cross is getting overambitious with their blood drives…"

The Talosians- sorry, the Vians pay strangely little attention to Gem, for all their claims. It's hard to tell if Gem was left on the sidelines more from being a woman, or from what translated in human terms as a disability. Captain Pike is one of the few men who have been equally dismissed by an episode at large, and it's very clear that his role in The Menagerie was impacted by his limited means of communication. Despite clearly being able to comprehend what was happening, his binary Yes/No indicator left him largely out of the conversation. Even when he did express an opinion, it wasn't always respected. Gem had a more interpretive means of communication, but she too was often overlooked. In a future with translators that can talk to glowing clouds, and in the company of Spock, a touch telepath who has expressed a growing willingness to meld with aliens he encounters, it's beyond me how the crew ever opts not to try to communicate.

Upon first finding Gem, Kirk wants to know what is wrong, why she won't speak. Most aliens they've met have compatible languages, after all. McCoy's analysis: “She appears to be perfectly healthy. As for the other, her lack of vocal cords could be physiologically normal for her species, whatever that is,” provides a good reminder about human norms and poses the question, is a being “mute” if their species doesn't speak to start with? If her entire civilization uses empathy to connect, then the landing party likely seems just as restricted to Gem as she does to them. Being an alien, she doesn't nod or shake her head, but she does press McCoy's tricorder into Kirk's hands when the question of where to go arises. Given the option of escape, she votes to rescue the doctor.

Katheryn Hays brought a lot to her role as Gem, when the episode remembered she was there at all. Her performance, the set, and some choice scenes between the landing party couldn't make up for the surrounding episode, though.

3 stars

[Come join us tonight (December 20th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it… Plus early coverage of the Apollo 8 launch!]

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[December 6, 1968] Wince of an audience (Star Trek: "Wink of an Eye")

December 6, 2023 Janice L. Newman 2 Comments

by Janice L. Newman

Star Trek has occasionally been dabbling in New Wave-style science fiction in the third season, but what we got last week was an episode based on solid traditional SF concepts. But if you're going to write a hard-SF story, you need to make sure the science backs it up. When the story you write isn’t even internally consistent—when it doesn’t play by its own rules—it’s not good storytelling and it’s not good SF.

The story opens with Kirk and a team investigating a distress signal. Strangely enough, even when they stand right where the signal is coming from, there’s no sign of the distressed parties. Even more strangely, one of the team vanishes before their eyes after sampling the local water.

A victim of post-production editing…

After they return to the ship, the Enterprise suffers a series of mysterious malfunctions, each corrected almost immediately, but nevertheless concerning. This sequence isn’t bad, as it builds the mystery of what’s going on. By the time Captain Kirk concludes, “Something has invaded the ship,” we are fully ready to agree. When Kirk and Spock discover that an alien device has been connected to the ship’s life support system, they have tangible proof of the invasion, though they cannot touch, disconnect, or destroy the device.

"Have these been put in all of the restrooms, Spock?"

Kirk returns to the bridge. He touches his mouth as though puzzled, and when he isn’t looking, his coffee bubbles for a moment. He takes a sip and everything and everyone around him seems to slow to a stop. Suddenly he’s on the bridge with a bunch of statues—and a beautiful woman who wasn’t there before.

"Again with the kissing!"

This is where the episode begins to fall apart. Deela, the woman, explains to Kirk that he’s been ‘accelerated’. She and her fellow Scalosians were exposed to a substance that caused them to live at a speeded up rate relative to humans. They’re so fast that humans can’t see them at all, and can only perceive them as an insect-like buzzing.

Kirk tries to shoot her with a phaser and she casually steps out of the way of the slow-moving beam. Wait, don’t phaser beams move at the speed of light? Does this mean that she’s moving faster than the speed of light? There are quite a few reasons that shouldn’t and can’t work. For one, the Scalosians wouldn’t be perceptible as a high-pitched whine. Wouldn’t they be followed by sonic booms everywhere they moved? How would they even touch anything without crushing it?

Well, let’s set that aside. Maybe phaser beams don’t actually travel at the speed of light. Maybe they fire some glowing plasma substance.

"Missed me! Now you have to kiss me!"

Moving on, Deela tells Kirk that he will soon grow docile and happy with the situation. When they encounter the missing crewman, Compton, this appears to be true. Compton declares that Kirk is no longer his commander and that he’s working for the Scalosians now.

"That's mutiny, Mister!" "Yes sir. It is." "NOT ON MY SHIP!"

This effect of the acceleration is never explained. Perhaps rather than docile and accepting, the people who have been captured and enslaved become hopeless and filled with despair. Not only are those who’ve been accelerated prone to die after the slightest injury—as we see when Compton dies and his body ages rapidly—but after being held by the Scalosians for a time they would realize that their friends and family must be aging and dying without them.

But no such poignant explanation is forthcoming.

Instead Deela details a horrific plan that will turn Captain Kirk into breeding stock and keep the rest of the crew of the Enterprise in suspended animation until such time as they will be used as breeding stock as well (at least, the men will. It’s not clear what will happen to the female crewmembers).

As all this is going on, the crew begin working to discover what happened to Captain Kirk, correctly deducing that it had something to do with the coffee he drank.

"Some sort of Benzedrine derivative is indicated…"

Kirk manages to leave an explanatory message tape in the medical lab. Then, stalling for time, he sabotages the transporter and seduces Deela (or perhaps more accurately, agrees to be seduced by her). To show the passage of time and, er, other activities, Kirk is shown pulling his boots on afterward. Quite suggestive for television!

"Sure glad to get that rock out of my shoe!"

Meanwhile Spock figures out what the ‘whine’ they keep hearing is by speeding up the message tape of the distress call until the images are a blur and the sound nothing but a high-pitched buzz. McCoy discovers Kirk’s message tape and brings it to the bridge where the bridge crew watch it together.

Rael, Deela’s subordinate, finds her with Kirk and takes a swing at the captain. Deela stuns him before he can hurt Kirk. Up until this point her behavior has come across as childish, but she delivers the next lines with a maturity and a gravity that earn the episode a whole extra star from me:

I don't care what your feelings are. I don't want to know that aspect of it. What I do is necessary, and you have no right to question it. Allow me the dignity of liking the man I select.

"And grow up, or I'll shoot you again."

After Rael leaves, Kirk pretends to be docile, then manages to steal Deela’s weapon.

In the lab, Spock and McCoy have apparently been working together amicably to craft a ‘cure’ for the acceleration—something Deela claimed was impossible. (Maybe she was lying? McCoy had to have come up with it incredibly quickly given the time scale of this episode.) Once Spock is relatively sure the cure will work, he drinks the Scalosian water and accelerates himself.

Kirk and Spock encounter each other on the way to the Life Support section of the ship. It’s a nice moment, as neither of them seem surprised. Together they destroy the unit that would have turned the Enterprise into a giant deep freeze. Then they send the Scalosians back to their planet, presumably soon to die out as a race, or at least, so Deela thinks. Once the invaders are safely off the ship, Kirk drinks the ‘cure’, which fortunately works. Spock stays accelerated a little longer in order to effect repairs and fix all the things the Scalosians changed. The bridge crew reacts with startlement and awe as their equipment almost seems to magically repair itself.

"Did Spock take care of my leaky faucet, too?"

After Spock returns to normal time, Uhura accidentally presses the button to display the distress call they received. Kirk bids goodbye to the Deela on the screen.

Written out like this, it sounds like an exciting episode. The problem was, the time scale never quite lined up, either visually or in terms of plot. His crew were completely frozen from Kirk’s perspective. Scotty is perpetually in the doorway of the transporter room across multiple scenes, apparently not having moved at all. (This could have been solved by having him standing behind the console, as though waiting for orders. By having him perpetually in transit, it ruined the illusion entirely.) Even if we arbitrarily say that one minute passes in normal time for each hour that passes for the Scalosians (a 1:60 ratio), either the crew had to have worked very, very fast or the Scalosians spent a lot more time on the ship than was shown or implied. Even if all of the bridge scenes, receiving Kirk’s message, and the development of the ‘cure’ took place over the course of only a single hour, that’s still 60 hours, or two and a half days, of accelerated time.

In the end, we're left with more questions than answers: Why didn't the transporter detect an anomaly when it beamed up at least four extra people (Deela, Rael, Compton, and the girl Compton fell for)? How did the Scalosians time the sending of their distress call such that they weren't years older by the time the Enterprise received and responded to it?

A lot of the same plot effects could have been accomplished by simply having the Scalosians as ‘out of phase’ with our reality, able to affect it but not be affected by it. This would have allowed things like Kirk and Spock getting shoved away from the deep freeze device without the audience asking, “why didn’t they smash into the wall?” (Think of shoving a person standing still while you’re on a speeding car and you’ll see what I mean.)

I could say even more about why the episode just doesn’t quite work, but I need to leave some room for my fellow contributors.

2 stars.

By Any Other Name

by Gideon Marcus

A lot of folks have complained about the reusing of plots this season. That doesn't really bother me as often the "remakes" are better than the originals (viz. "…and the Children Shall Lead" vs. "Miri"; "Day of the Dove" vs. "Wolf in the Fold.") This time around, we've got a remake of "By Any Other Name", which wasn't terrific to begin with, and this one does not do the theme justice.

Sure, there are cosmetic differences, but ultimately, it boils down to five people (three men and two women, one of them a blonde who romances Kirk). We have jealousy between the blonde and the head man. We have a takeover of the Enterprise, and I think there was an indestructible gizmo in "By Any Other Name", too. Maybe the episodes are just so similar that I'm conflating them. We have the same empty hallways, but the dodecahedronizer was a much more chilling method of accomplishing that than time shift. And really, the corridors should have been filled with frozen crew that Kirk and the Scalosians had to dodge around.

The tape Uhura was tracking must have been about a month long for it to be going all the way from discovery through the beam down of the landing party. How she couldn't tell it was a recording is beyond me and a bit insulting.

There's plenty of nonsense in this episode, which my colleagues are covering, but the worst is that, for a story that deals with super-speed, it sure moves awfully slow. When Kirk started narrating what we'd just learned five minutes before, taking about five minutes to do it (I recognize the narrative necessity, but that scene could have been three seconds long), I began pounding the floor in frustration.

"Captain's Log, supplemental: in lieu of a formal report, I will simply read the script again from the beginning… 'These are the voyages of the…'"

I did enjoy two scenes, however. When Deela confronts Kirk after the latter has broken the Transporter, Shatner plays it cute and coy, which was a lot of fun. Also (as with Janice), when Deela tells Rael to stop being a prude and ordering her around; she's a grown woman, a queen no less, and she at least should get the privilege of liking the person she chooses for breeding stock.

Other than that, though, the direction is pretty feeble. Nimoy speaks too loudly and woodenly, particularly in the first scene. Shatner hams it up for the first time this season (except for the other Jud Taylor story, "The Paradise Syndrome". Everyone else is given precious little to do, particularly Scotty, who gets to stand in a doorway for three days.

Two stars.

Blink a few times—it'll still be there

by Lorelei Marcus

Rarely does an episode start with so much promise and then fails to deliver so badly. "Wink of an Eye" wastes no time jumping into action, a new technique of Season 3 episodes I'm enjoying a lot, and it continues at a breakneck speed. Some of the setup information is thrown around so fast, it really is blink and you'll miss it. Respite comes at the point of beam-back to the Enterprise, which would be fine, except, like the incessant buzzing in the crew's ears, it never ends.

I don't mind an episode that likes to take its time, but this show just drags on and on. I think partly it's a psychological thing: the time dilation causing the characters to move through time slowly also makes us perceive the slow moments of the show more acutely. The length of an exchange between Kirk and Deela is quite exacerbated when Scotty is stuck stock-still in the background. How are we supposed to expect the plot to move when the characters themselves can't?

Madame Toussaud would like her Doohan back.

This episode also suffers from a bit of the Land of the Giants syndrome, where the special effects take precedence over every other aspect, to the overall detriment of the show. I suspect some of the stiff, uninteresting staging and poor pacing are symptoms of trying to stimulate the time dilation. Scenes could not easily be shot on a rolling camera or from multiple angles for fear of slowed crewmen jumping around to slightly different spots in editing. Even with all the care, the effect is still internally inconsistent as anyone's speed is relative to whichever scene they're in.

I think I've also given director Jud Taylor too much credit. Between "Paradise Syndrome" and "Wink", it's clear he has trouble reining in Shatner's eccentricities, and he consistently has difficulty with pacing. I suspect "Wink" would have been a much more compelling episode with someone like Ralph Senensky directing it. Imagine a rolling camera leading Kirk as he marches briskly through the hall, crewmen stock-still in comparison all around him. Then, more static, but creatively staged dialogy shots, where Kirk always remains in front of a slow-moving crewman who is doing the same three motions such that, in post, the actions are seamless and consistent. I think with a little more vision, it could have worked. [They actually do this in the scenes on the bridge and in the confrontation with Compton, but the corridor walk would have quite effective, similar to what they did in "By Any Other Name" (ed)]

Sadly, this is the version we received.

Two stars.

Brief Lives

by Joe Reid

“Wink of an Eye” is the latest episode of Star Trek from the good people at NBC. I have a few thoughts on what I just witnessed, and I feel it is best this week to lay my cards on the table before I explain how I arrived at my conclusions. First, it was intelligently written up to the point that intelligence became inconvenient to the narrative. It had intelligent characters up to the point that the desired conclusion was endangered. Lastly, it had a credible threat that lost all credibility when examined. If I were to provide a one sentence summary for this entry, it would be “Pride, lust, and expedience bring ruin”.

The episode started with a mystery. Kirk, McCoy, and Spock, along with some others are on an uninhabited alien world, where they expected to find people who were in distress and in need of help. There were no people to be found, but plenty of invisible insects. The insects turned out to be the baddies of the week: a small group of people that move so fast that they are invisible to those moving at normal speeds. After capturing and converting a sole crewman to their side, the beautiful queen of the aliens, Deela, captured Kirk because she was enamored with him. Speeding him up to her own speed, she traps him in her accelerated world while she and her countrymen carry out a plot against the crew.

Also, who could compete with these stylish outfits?

At the beginning this plot and the thinking behind it seemed smart and inscrutable. How in the world could Spock and the others defeat an enemy that moved a hundred times faster than them? As the episode progressed the narrative kept switching back and forth between the people moving at accelerated speed and the people moving at normal speed, and that is where the problem lay. An advanced alien race moving so fast that they rendered normal people as statues would always have the advantage. Spock and crew would never be able to mount a defense against a threat from them. The notion that the crew of the Enterprise would be able to fight back against such a threat, to provide a way for the good guys to win, weakened the story.

My second thought was regarding Deela and her people. She was prideful and calculating. She had every right to be. Deela possessed an overwhelming advantage over the crew, and she reveled in it. She even allowed Kirk to shoot at her with his phaser to prove the utter futility of his situation. She loves that Kirk, fighting as he did, could not overcome her well-thought-out plan. A plan which was short circuited not only by the aforementioned plot device which allowed the crew to fight back against a much faster enemy, but also by Deela’s lust and desire for Kirk. She kissed him repeatedly before he even started moving at her speed and kissed him passionately at their first meeting. Her irrational feelings for Kirk allowed him to manipulate and sabotage her plans to the degree that it allowed the crew the months of subjective time needed to mount a defense against them.

Lastly, there was the credible threat posed by Deela to the crew: that they would be frozen to be used at human chattel for the aliens when needed. The device that was installed on the Enterprise was unable to be touched when defended in person by the aliens but was easily blown to smithereens when Kirk and Spock shot it with their space guns. This third and final failure of this story to save the narrative left a story that started so strong and intelligent as a sad, weak, and uninspired tale turning Deela from a prideful and powerful queen to a horny teen that let a boy trick her into a tryst that ultimately defeated her people.

At the end of the day, the crew should never have been able to outrun an enemy moving a hundred times their speed. Also, the aliens should have lived such brief lives that they would have never met in the first place.

Two stars

[Come join us tonight (December 6th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings at 8pm Eastern and Pacific. You won't want to miss it…]

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[February 10, 1969] Beam Me Up! (Doctor Who: The Seeds Of Death [Parts 1-3])

[January 31, 1969] Clinging to life (Star Trek: "That Which Survives")

[January 24, 1969] Make rheum, make rheum (Star Trek: "The Mark of Gideon")

[January 20, 1969] Waiter? There’s An Alien In My Soup! (Doctor Who: The Krotons)

[January 16, 1969] Mixed messages (Star Trek: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield")

[January 10, 1969] Mad for this show (Star Trek: "Whom Gods Destroy")

[January 2, 1969] Blood, Sweat, and Tears (Star Trek: "Elaan of Troyius")

[December 24, 1968] We Shall Fight Them In The Streets (Doctor Who: The Invasion [Episodes 5-8])

[December 20, 1968] A failure to communicate (Star Trek: "The Empath")

[December 6, 1968] Wince of an audience (Star Trek: "Wink of an Eye")

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction