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[June 12, 1969] Heavy on the Bitters (Star Trek: Turnabout Intruder)

June 12, 2024 Janice L. Newman 9 Comments

by Janice L. Newman

The mood was bittersweet as we gathered to watch the final episode of Star Trek. It also held a hint of trepidation: would we get another instant classic, like All Our Yesterdays, or another disappointment, like the string of episodes before it?

As it turned out, the final episode of Star Trek, probably the last new one that will ever be aired, was compelling, well-acted, well-paced, well-directed…and disappointing for an entirely different reason.

The episode opens with Kirk encountering a former lover, a woman by the name of Janice Lester (not to be confused with Janice Rand, his former yeoman). Lester is ill, having received a dose of unknown radiation, and Kirk stays at her bedside to discuss their shared past, which was rife with emotional upheaval. Then Lester utters a sentence that gave every one of the watchers pause: “Your world of starship captains doesn't admit women. It isn't fair.”

This, on the face of it, makes no sense. I will discuss why later in this piece.

Kirk agrees with her that, “No, it isn’t.” When he turns away from Lester for a moment, she sits up and remotely triggers an alien machine which causes their “souls” to be switched. Kirk’s mind is now in Lester’s body, and vice-versa.

The plot that then unfolds is simple: Kirk must try to convince his crew that he is himself, despite being in Lester’s body, while Lester must convince them that “Janice Lester” is dangerously insane and that she is Captain Kirk. Lester is hampered by the fact that she is emotionally unstable, to put it mildly, and clearly unfit to be a starship captain. Spock uses Vulcan telepathy early on and believes Kirk, and the rest of the crew slowly come to support him as well, despite no medical tests showing anything off about Kirk (this is another implausible point—surely brain scans, psychological tests, or gauges of emotional stability should have shown that something was different.)

I have to give both Shatner and Sandra Smith, who played Janice Lester, credit here. Shatner does a good job playing someone not himself, particularly with body language (small touches like primly sitting with his knees together in the captain’s chair, for example). Smith also does an excellent Kirk impression. It's clear she studied his mannerisms before the role, and the tight, narrow-eyed, watchful look she has throughout definitely evokes him.

Eventually, apparently with the help of Spock’s telepathy, Kirk is able to force a reverse mind-transfer. Lester breaks down, and Kirk ends the episode with a mournful, “Her life could have been as rich as any woman's, if only. If only.”

There are a couple of ways to interpret this story. You could, as we tried to do, simply say that Lester sees sexism where it none exists, blaming an outdated concept for why she couldn’t get promoted rather than her own mental and emotional instability. Unfortunately, this is undercut by Kirk’s agreeing with her statement that, “It’s not fair,” and Kirk’s own final words that her life could have been as rich as “any woman’s”.

On the other hand, taking it at face value seems wildly counter both to previous episodes and to current (present-day) trends. “Number One” from The Menagerie was a woman, and even acting captain of the Enterprise back in Pike’s day, years before Kirk was put in charge. Perhaps there hasn’t been a female starship captain yet (there are only 13 Enterprise-class ships, per Tomorrow is Yesterday) but you don’t make someone First Officer if there’s no avenue for them to eventually become a captain. And in “our world”, two world leaders are women: Golda Meir became the Prime Minister of Israel just two months ago, while Indira Gandhi has been Prime Minister of India since 1966! In every other way, the “Federation” has been shown to be an organization freer of prejudice than our own time. Race hatred is a thing of the past, so much so that the very idea causes revulsion in Day of the Dove and helps Kirk realize that they are being controlled. Yet we are to believe that this same future somehow bars women from holding certain positions of power?

Perhaps…yes. The ugly truth is, no matter how we spin it, those lines on the face of them say to female viewers, “Stay in your role. You are allowed to do certain things, but not everything a man can do. To want more is madness.” This, from a show that made so many women into science fiction fans, and for which female fans have fought so hard and created so much support, is doubly insulting.

In summing up, I can’t put it better than a friend who goes by Greenygal, who has had thoughtful and interesting commentary on a previous episode as well:

Do I prefer to think that all the dialogue of women's limitations and hating womanhood and "as rich as any woman's if only" is just about Janice Lester's own issues and not institutional and societal sexism in the Star Trek universe? Sure, of course. Are those lines perfectly innocent? No. Do they hurt? Yes.

Bittersweet indeed. Four stars, despite the script, because the production and acting were just that good.

Despite Itself

by Lorelei Marcus

While it's true that the episode sets out to send an egregious message about female incompetence in the realm of leadership, I think the result is quite the opposite. In the world of literature there is an emphasis on showing rather than telling the audience any information that needs to be conveyed. Not only is presenting a concept visually rather than verbally more engaging and complex, but also more impactful because of our dependence on sight as our number one sense of reality. We may not believe everything we hear, but we almost always believe what we see. Perhaps that is why I was so moved to see a woman unquestionably in the captain's role, with no epithets to belittle her importance.

The person on screen may be the soul of a man trapped inside a woman's body, but what we hear and see is a woman's voice and a woman's face speaking with the same determined spirit of Captain Kirk, receiving the same respect from the male first officers as any leader of the Enterprise. She is not a "beautiful" Captain, or an "ice cold" Captain, or even a "woman" Captain. She is simply, The Captain, a person with a role beyond her appearance.

Before this episode I had not realized the extent of the limited portrayals of women in television. I had heard the first season of The Avengers was remarkable because the co-star role had been written for a man, but ended up being cast as a woman, and the characterizations were excellent because of it. I never saw this first season for myself though, and when I tuned in later several seasons in, it was to a new female co-star relegated only to being the seductress, beauty, and potential romantic interest for the lead.

Nearly everywhere, women characters are written differently than men, and severely restricted in the roles they can play in a story. Even in the lauded Is There in Truth No Beauty?, the female guest star is primarily interacted with on the basis of her beauty and her ultimate destiny is to fall in love, despite her being a talented ambassador and telepath. Female characters, no matter how intelligent, or complex, or interesting, will always be confined by the expectations of the characters around them and the audience. The first thing noticed about them will always be appearance, and unless they're meant to be the villain, they will always end up in some sort of romantic scenario, because that is the way it is. But Turnabout Intruder made me realize that it's not the way it has to be.

No one calls Janice's body “beautiful”. No one tries to court her. Once the first officers understand her authority, they never question her intent or her orders. And thanks to brilliant acting and slow pacing, there were moments when I forgot that she was meant to be Kirk at all, and simply believed a woman was the Captain of the Enterprise. In much the same way that seeing Uhura on the bridge for the first time was world changing, seeing Janice sit confidently in the captain's chair, or at least the witness chair, which is much like it, was inspiring. She is a symbol that makes me believe that even I could become a starship captain someday.

I can only hope that this is one of many examples to come. Television is a reflection of our larger society. If women of the silver screen can break free from the bonds of limited expectation, then so can those of society. For the positive role model, and a good viewing experience, I give the episode four stars.

Painfully Familiar

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

"Your world of starship captains does not admit women."

That one line hit like a phaser to the back. It was just one of the many times I had a strong, visceral reaction to lines and moments in this episode, vacillating wildly between recognition and revulsion.

It is a hard thing, to hear true words spoken by a villain. Dr. Lester has to be a villain, because she hurts Kirk, and then gloats about it. She killed her team, has never moved past her and Kirk's young connection at Starfleet Academy, and declares that she never loved him but instead loved "the life he led," his "power."

This poisons the powerful truth telling of her words.

Watching Dr. Lester-in-Kirk’s body back up when the officer in orange is menacing her-in-his-body, was so recognizable, so clear an experience known to many of the women and perhaps fewer of the men watching. Likewise, when Dr. Lester-in-Kirk stands over the young communications officer and hollers at her, that too, is painfully recognizable. That she-as-he treats Spock with the same overbearing arrogance is just another reminder how tenuous a protection gender is to anyone deviating even a blue eye shadow’s swipe away from the straight and narrow.

After that dominance-driven performance on the bridge, with all its uncomfortable complexity, we are back to the same sexist clichés that too many people explicitly and implicitly trot out to force women out of so many leadership roles: "hysteria" and "emotional instability" and "erratic mental attitudes." This too is a danger of science fiction, taking cruel characterizations that rarely if ever entirely encompass a real, living human being, but on screen can flow out to fill the edges of a full character, leaving no complex internality to explore or expose.

These characterizations perfectly match what we see on screen, and what we see other women believe about Dr. Lester on screen. I was particularly disappointed by Nurse Chapel's easy agreement that the woman in front of her was insane, with no one but a strange man's say-so. Chain of command means passing little to this crew when it suits the plot, but in this instance it turns Nurse Chapel into a tool as if she has no other purpose or will but to obey.

Setting aside the male chauvinism that made my skin crawl and neck itch throughout the entire episode, if we treat Dr. Lester as a whole person, desperate for a chance to engage in leadership, it is fascinating to see what an incredibly bright woman, kept outside of the power structures that she still chooses to serve, sees as the motions and emotions of power. Though Bones's recitation of Dr. Lester-in-Kirk's body's mental changes is one correct summary, there are other aspects to highlight.

Dr. Lester-in-Kirk thinks that leaders—or perhaps just Captain James T. Kirk—has power by virtue of his title and rank, his smirking glad-handing relationships with his staff, his willingness to bully and raise his voice, his knowledge of and position within the legal and hierarchical systems of Starfleet, and when in a moment of extreme danger to Dr. Lester-in-Kirk's masquerade, his willingness to use violence. Yes, Bones was horrified to see Dr. Lester-in-Kirk hit Kirk-in-Lester. And yes, and Spock brought it up chidingly later. But one slapped Dr. Lester-in-Kirk in irons, threw him in solitary, or drugged him with sedatives because he'd laid hands on a nearly-naked, nearly-dying ill colleague (I would have wished for the actor's sake that the director would have tried for one more take of that scene, perhaps one where her half her bottom wasn't visible when she was lifted by the crew).

This vision of brute-force leadership is both cruel and perhaps one most of us have seen in our own lives or that of our country.

But then I swing back to recognition during the interrogation by Spock and the trial, not from the actions of Dr. Lester or Captain Kirk, but by Spock. Spock's argument and method of discovery are both deeply, traditionally feminine: in a system designed by human men, his forms of evidence are not accepted, the reality of his perceptions are not honored as evidence in their systems of justice, and his entire position is mocked and undermined, from the smirking guards to the giggle of the young communications officer we saw Captain Kirk dominate over earlier.

And yet, in the best of feminine traditions, Commander Spock persists. He insists on hearing Kirk-in-Dr. Lester. He believes his own mind, his own way of knowing things, is valuable, and while he is disappointed not to have it confirmed by the methods and sources acceptable to Starfleet tribunals, he does not waver and does not drift from his convictions.

"Her intense hatred of her own womanhood," is Captain Kirk-in-Dr. Lester's summary of why he dumped her. And that is one way of viewing her. But a fuller version of her, one made less glassy and plastic by the world of our own viewers, has the potential to be more Beatrice than Cruella de Vil.

Beatrice cries out in Act IV, Scene I of Much Ado About Nothing, after the young rake Claudio has ruined the life of Beatrice's even younger cousin Hero:

Beatrice: You dare easier be friends with me than fight with mine enemy.

Benedick: Is Claudio thine enemy?

Beatrice: Is he not approved in the height a villain, that
hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman? O
that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until they
come to take hands; and then, with public
accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour,
—O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart
in the market-place.

That fantasy of Beatrice's is so much more violent and explicit than anything Dr. Lester-in-Kirk ever says, ever does: eat his heart in the marketplace.

Wow.

While Dr. Lester first simply aims to have Kirk warehoused on a strange planet, a cruel and earthbound life for a starship captain that provides some deep irony, it is not as explicitly violent as it could have been.

It is nearly as cruel as having her colleague take ownership over Dr. Lester when she finally loses, her body and life given to him because he promised to "take care of her."

That was a final, deeply disturbing moment in an episode that gave me such a strong and impenetrable mix of feelings, I found myself wishing for a Vulcan mind-meld to sort them all out with me.

I was however heartened by the final lines. "Her life could have been as rich as any woman's, if only … if only."

One read is, "’if only’ she had surrendered earlier in her life to a gender role of vastly limited scope and ambition." But it just as likely could have been, "’if only’ she had lived in a more enlightened time, when her leadership yearnings were treated with respect, honed, corrected, and empowered so she could become the powerful, effective starship captain she so clearly wanted to become."

Three stars.

Love and Ambition

by Joe Reid

If the woman I loved were so jealous of her ex-boyfriend that she pretended to be him to take everything he had accomplished, could I still love her? My answer is a resounding NO! However, in this week’s episode of Star Trek, titled “The Turnabout Intruder,” we meet a man who would answer yes: Dr. Arthur Coleman. I have rarely seen anyone, woman or man, as committed as Dr. Coleman was to Dr. Janice Lester.

We meet both doctors on the planet Camus II. The Enterprise arrives in response to a distress call from the planet. There, we find an infirmed Dr. Lester under the care of Dr. Coleman, the last two surviving members of a research party. Kirk recognizes his former girlfriend and speaks kindly of her. Then, as signs of life appear elsewhere, the crew and Dr. Coleman leave to assist, hoping to find another survivor. Kirk is left alone with Dr. Lester. In the ensuing silence, Lester springs her trap, using an alien machine to swap bodies with Kirk. Lester now inhabits the healthy body of Captain Kirk, while Kirk lies struggling, trapped in Lester’s weakened body. What follows is a secretive cat and mouse game as Lester, in Kirk’s body, tries to eliminate the man trapped in hers, all while avoiding the suspicious gazes of the Enterprise crew and later matching wits against a fully recovered Kirk in female form. Through it all, Dr. Lester could fully rely on Dr. Coleman, who would do almost anything for her.

In this episode, Coleman proved his incredible loyalty to Lester. As someone who had not fared well in his career, Coleman and Lester appear to be kindred spirits, with her feeling held back herself due to her sex. Lester apparently concocted her plan upon discovering the alien mind transfer machine that lured Kirk, her former mate and the man who had achieved all the accolades she felt she deserved, to Camus II. In carrying out this scheme, Lester eliminated the other members of the research party. Through it all, Coleman stood by her side. He himself refused to kill anyone, allowing Lester to pursue her intent. Even when Lester, in Kirk’s body, gave Coleman senior medical authority on the Enterprise and asked him to murder the new Janice Lester. Bloodying his own hands was the only line he would not cross for her. Coleman’s devotion to Lester proved to be heartfelt. At the climax of the episode, the mind switch was reversed. Kirk and Lester being once again in their own bodies, left Lester insane with grief and devastated. It was here where Coleman professed his love for Lester and vowed to care for her going forward.

Coleman’s love for Lester was unquestionable, his loyalty steadfast. This raised the question in my mind of what Coleman would have done had Lester remained a man. Would his love for Lester find expression if she were in a man’s body? Perhaps he hadn’t thought things through, or perhaps it wouldn’t have been an issue for them. We saw, during one of their private moments, how Lester related to Coleman in a feminine manner as she touched his shoulder, attempting to coerce him into killing for her.

In the end, Coleman got exactly what he wanted. He was given permission to love and care for the woman he would go to almost any length for. Arthur Coleman proved more valuable to Lester than all she had hoped to gain in Kirk’s skin. Although her ambition for power failed her his love didn’t.

Overall, “Turnabout Intruder” was very well acted, with heavily nuanced performances by Mr. Shatner and Ms. Smith. Kirk delivered subtle femininity, softness, and female exacerbation convincingly. Lester grew more stoic and strategic as the story reached its climax. For its complex character dynamics and fine acting I’m willing to say this is among the better episodes of Star Trek.

Four stars

The End?

by Trini Stewart

After finishing "Turnabout Intruder", I’m inclined to reflect on Star Trek as a whole. I can’t help but acknowledge that my expectations for the episode are largely influenced by the loss of the beloved series. My first instinct is to be let down by the episode as a finale, since I hold the series so dear and the final episode had a fairly weak delivery as far as the intended message goes. What we got was an antagonist who, despite her compelling acting, I didn’t quite resonate with, even as a woman who regularly faces systematic sexism in a male-dominated work environment. While I found that Dr. Janice Lester’s challenges are inherently relatable and frustrating, her excessively drastic, vengeful means of getting her way made it more difficult to connect with her or understand her exact desires.

Nevertheless, instances of imperfect composition from Star Trek have never been enough for me to write off an episode or feel this kind of complete malaise about one as a result. There were enough ingredients for an enjoyable Trek episode in this one; there was convincing character work from everyone on the Enterprise, good teamwork from the close-knit crew to determine what was best for the well-being of the ship, plenty of Spock being the competent knock-out he ought to be, and an ending that avoids a high-stakes threat for a crew member. Regardless of whether I could relate to her, I was still intrigued by the consequences of Dr. Lester's futuristic and unconventional solution to systemic sexism, and I was curious about what exactly prevents women from being in leadership positions like being a starship Captain in the future.

Maybe what was more disappointing to me than the actual content was that there was a lot of lost hope for something more profound: a grand episode that needn't be perfect or anything, but at least answered some long-standing questions or gave hints of where the crew would be after we could no longer join them. There’s so much in this universe left to discover and explore, and many more discussions to be had with other fans. Not only that, but there is plenty of content I have yet to see from seasons one and two—I realize that my experience of the series is incomplete in more ways than one, and feeling robbed by the series’ cancellation doesn’t help.

Like thousands (millions?) of others, I fell in love with this show for its characters, its sense of adventure in uncharted territory, and the community that has grown around it, and I am simply not ready for all of that magic to end. "Turnabout Intruder" turned out to be a good episode overall, and a decent one to end the series on, all things considered. I’ll be looking forward to the reruns and continuing to celebrate Star Trek with so many others who treasure it, too.

3.5 stars.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[March 12, 1969] Rock Opera (Star Trek: "The Savage Curtain")

March 12, 2024 Erica Frank 6 Comments

by Erica Frank

This episode opened with the Enterprise circling an uninhabitable lava planet with a poisonous atmosphere, but anomalous readings of some kind of civilization or power source. They planned to leave anyway, until they got a message…from Abraham Lincoln.

"Welcome to Washington, Captain Kirk!"

Our crew is now very experienced with meetings with aliens who seem to be people from history or mythology. Most of them wanted to call his bluff immediately, but Kirk played along: he wanted to find out what's happening.

What's happening: A creature made of rock has decided to figure out what good and evil are by pitting four "good" heroes against four "evil" villains for the edification of its people.

Your host for the evening: an Excalbian rock creature that can read minds, terraform parts of a lava world, and shapeshift.

The Excalbian had arranged for Kirk and Spock—two people on the side of "good" (and the only living people involved)—to be joined by Abraham Lincoln, whom Kirk respects deeply, and Surak, the Vulcan philosopher who led the Vulcans out of war into their modern peaceful, logical society.

Abraham Lincoln dresses and speaks like a 19th-century statesman. Ancient Vulcan philosophers apparently dress and speak like the hippies who hang out at Haight & Ashbury in San Francisco today.

They were given opponents: Four of the worst villains from history (three of which we have never heard of before this episode)—two humans, one Klingon, and one other.

The Excalbians wished to "discover which is the stronger" of good or evil, and they had arranged what they call a "drama" with all the delicacy of a small child placing bugs in a jar and shaking it. In essence, "Here, we have put you all together and demanded you fight… whoever lives, that side must be the strongest."

As leverage to force the "good" side to fight, Kirk's crew would all be killed if he fails. The villains faced no such threats. Nor could they; whatever family or friends or honored associates they once had, none are alive today.

The villain line-up, from left to right: Genghis Khan, who needs (or at least gets) no introduction; Colonel Green, a genocidal war leader from 21st century Earth; Zora, a mad scientist from Tiburon; Kahless the Unforgettable, the Klingon tyrant.

At first, I wondered about the inclusion of Zora and Kahless: Is Klingon history so well-known to Kirk and Spock that the Excalbians can draw him from their minds? But the Federation and Klingons have been at odds for some time; they might well be familiar with their most famous historical figures. Zora seemed an outlier—until I remembered where I'd heard of Tiburon. It was the home of Dr. Sevrin, who led the quest for Planet Eden. (Apparently Tiburon has a history of unethical doctors.) Spock might well have known more about the planet's history.

The events that followed were annoyingly predictable. Green briefly attempted to negotiate, which was a distraction for an attack; the villains were driven off; Surak followed to speak to them, which resulted in his death; Lincoln tried to rescue him only to die as well; Kirk and Spock managed to defeat or drive off all four of the villains by themselves.

The Excalbian declared them the winners, but said he does not see any difference between their two philosophies. Kirk pointed out that he was fighting for the lives of his crew but the villains were fighting for personal power or glory. The Excalbian did not seem convinced, but sent them on their way, unharmed.

What was missing: Any mention that the value of "good" over "evil" is not shown on a battlefield, but in day-to-day living. That one strength of "good" is cooperation and shared resources—nearly irrelevant in a fabricated setting, with no time to develop tools, and a pre-selected pool of people who were chosen to play specific roles.

Colonel Green, the only white man on the "villain" team, watches from behind a rock while his companions fight for their lives. Maybe their lack of unity did matter.

I would have liked more consideration of the true nature of the six historical people: Just before they beamed "Lincoln" aboard the Enterprise, Spock said his readings were those of a "living rock" with claws. It seems likely that all the other people were Excalbians playing the part of historical characters. They were offered "power" if they won—but what would that mean? Would the other Excalbians hand them each spaceships and send them along to their respective planets? What could they possibly offer Genghis Khan?

Three stars. Interesting, but the pacing was odd (long, slow buildup to a couple of quick fight scenes), and I wanted more from both the philosophical and science fiction aspects.

Fair to Middlin’

by Janice L. Newman

Star Trek does like its ‘message’ episodes. Sometimes, as with "Day of the Dove or "The Enterprise Incident", the scriptwriter does a pretty good job of addressing the issues of the day. Other times, the scriptwriter does a poor or muddled job of Saying Something, as in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield".

The Savage Curtain falls somewhere between these two extremes. Roddenberry had a couple of pretty clear messages he wanted to send: “violence can be justified if the cause is just” and “peace is an admirable goal, but one that takes time and sacrifice, and in the meantime sometimes violence is necessary”. It’s not surprising that the man who wrote (or re-wrote) “A Private Little War” would want to make these points. But in doing so, he missed the chance to make a much clearer distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, one that would have served the story better.

The ‘evil’ characters in the episode showed an absolutely remarkable amount of teamwork. Colonel Green immediately took charge, and the others simply deferred to him and obeyed him. It stretched credibility just a little to see GHENGIS KHAN passively taking orders without so much as a peep of protest. In order to tell the exact story Roddenberry wanted to tell, characters that should have been backstabbing each other to get ahead or refusing to work together at all instead acted as a well-oiled unit. They had to trust each other, support each other, and listen to each other. In fact, the ‘evil’ characters had to act a little bit good. (While the ‘good’ characters in turn had to commit violence to make the story work, necessitating that they behave in an ‘evil’ way.)

How much more effective could it have been if the ‘evil’ characters had actually behaved in a selfish, anti-social, backbiting manner, and were defeated by people who worked together for the common good? How much more powerful could the message have been if the ‘good’ side found a solution that wasn’t based in violence, using teamwork, cleverness, and the combination of their knowledge and skills?

Maybe it would have been trite, but the idea of good and evil being absolutes is pretty trite, too.

The bit with Uhura explaining that race relations had progressed so far that words were no big deal was nice, though.

Three stars.

By What Right

by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

In an episode that gave us Abraham Lincoln in space, cultural figures from Klingon and Vulcan history, and an amazing alien design, the thing that I kept thinking about after the episode was this:

KIRK: “How many others have you done this to? What gives you the right to hand out life and death?”
ROCK: “The same right that brought you here. The need to know new things.”

The question has been posed before. What right does Starfleet have? As early as season one, in "The Naked Time", a crewman despaired over humanity polluting space and sticking their noses where they “didn't belong”. His distress was exaggerated by an alien liquid, but the question was real. Is the crew—or Starfleet at large—doing harm in their quest for knowledge? The first directive shows that there has been significant thought on this, instructing Kirk not to infringe on cultures and to make repairs when possible if there has been a violation of the directive. It's an imperfect rule, and one that is broken frequently. Kirk or another officer decides that he knows better, or finds a reason why the directive doesn’t apply. There have been times when that directive hampers life-saving action.

The Excalabian’s actions are cruel by human standards, and as a means to understand the philosophy of “good vs. evil” make no sense to me. But that itself works as a mirror. I have no insight into the alien mind, no way to know what metric it judges by, no concept of how it views humans in relationship to itself. Equal beings? The way humans might regard a very clever animal? Insects under a microscope? Maybe even the way humans view other humans that fall outside their range of “people”.

This amoral broadcast brought to you in living color on NBC!

Human history is full of examples of people seeking knowledge and trampling over others to get it. The many places considered “untouched” on Earth that already have inhabitants, lands reshaped and mined for resources, animals hunted to extinction. The victims of experiments done under the guise of “progress”, psychological and physical studies done without permission, or care for the comfort or pain of the subjected person. Plenty of this has been done deliberately, but lack of ill-intent doesn't change the consequences either. As astronauts practice maneuvers in space, it is important for us, now, to remember that everything leaves a trace. The moon is a remarkable example, but hardly the only one. Just because we can doesn't mean we should – and yet, humans have a place in the universe too, and knowledge is part of that.

The question is not one with an easy answer, and might not have a correct answer. I think it is a question we should not stop asking though, because if we stop, that is when we have decided that yes we *do* know better, and stop caring what, or who gets hurt.

Even with all that philosophy, the episode still felt much like re-do of Kirk fighting the Gorn Captain in Arena, with more puzzling pieces than actual interesting plot.

2 stars

Truly Alien

by Joe Reid

“The Savage Curtain" was something unique. We have witnessed previous episodes where alien races test humans to see if they are honorable, or understand empathy, or if they are worthy of something. This week we had an alien race that wished to weigh the concepts of good and evil by playing the parts of the noble and of the wicked themselves; instead of seeking to understand something conceptually, they chose to understand experientially. Coupled with the inhumanity of their physical appearance, they were the most alien aliens that we have seen in a very long time from this show.

If I wished to understand women better, what options would be available to me? I suppose that I could talk to a woman to learn about them. I could go to my local library and borrow a few books about women. Hell, I could even watch women to attempt to learn about them through observation. I don’t have the ability nor would choose to become a woman and fully live as one merely to satisfy my curiosity. Excuse that poor and possibly male-chauvinistic example.

Let’s say I wanted to understand Phantom Limb Syndrome. That is the sensations that amputees experience from limbs that are no longer there. It would be impossible for me to truly understand what it is like without experiencing it. My point being that who would be willing to go through dismemberment to experientially understand something? Although through grave misfortune we could experience such a thing, we would experience it as ourselves. The Excalbians had the ability to learn by becoming who they were not. The very concept is alien.

"Don't look so stone-faced, Captain. Haha. That's an alien joke."

Walking a mile in another man’s shoe is one thing, walking with another man’s legs is entirely different. As novel as this ability of the Excalbians is, what’s more interesting and alien is the lack of judgment they had against the concepts of good and evil. It was as if these creatures never ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as humanity had in the story from the book of Genesis. How would beings such as the Excalbians gain that knowledge? Kirk and crew had a clear sense of right and wrong, the Excalbians seemed to not only lack it, but also held no bias of one over the other. Kirk apparently came to the same conclusion. As the Enterprise left Excalbia at the end of the episode, the crew cast no negative aspersions against the Excalbians for their lack of understanding. They were aliens and they got what they were after. Thankfully no one died.

In this episode the crew clearly found a new lifeform and new civilization. This one being a powerful yet innocent race of aliens whose reasoning is far removed from human rationale. They were refreshingly different and a welcomed change to the way that aliens are usually presented, as humans with some greasepaint.

4 stars

Eclipse Glasses for War

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

On September 11th of this year, people on the west coast of America will see most of a solar eclipse. Adults who are smart or at least a little prepared will be viewing it through special eclipse sunglasses. Those of us with small children will be building cardboard boxes with pinholes in them, since there’s nearly nothing as futile as putting unwanted sunglasses on a toddler.

The boxes work like this: you pick a box big enough for both of your heads — like a home television box — and poke a round hole in it. When the appointed time to look comes, you put the box on your heads with the pinhole behind your right shoulder, aim the pinhole at the sun, and look the other way. The shadow of the earth will then creep across that perfect bright dot beaming onto the opposite wall of the box, allowing you and your child to track its progress without risking young eyes.

The dark box is a child’s version of Plato’s Cave, allowing us to safely view astronomical truths too large and too bright to safely see with the naked soul. It is also a bit like going to the movies: the appointed time, the rising tension, peak, and denouement, the use of light and darkness to tell a story. Most important to the experience is both the smallness and safety of it and of us: the sun is no more in that box than we are on its surface, but viewing it so allows us access to realities we could not otherwise safely imbibe.

That’s how I think of Star Trek’s suite of war analogy episodes, thoughtfully listed by Erica in the head article. The daily truth of America’s war on Vietnam involves numbers so astronomical, forms of violence so molten and charring, it is difficult to look directly at, much less explain to a child. But there are some dimensions of the conflict which can be conveyed in an episode like this, just as that pinhole box can convey the sun’s roundness, brightness, the semi-circular shape of earth’s intruding and then receding shadow, and the emotional excitement of having a Mama put a funny box over your head for 45 minutes during playtime. Likewise, this episode gave us some shapes from the war: the torture of POWs becomes Sarek’s simulated cries over the hilltop; the horror of punji sticks embedded in the darkling trails of the jungle become stakes carved and thrown by the characters. And tens of thousands of soldiers become four against four; brutal still, yes, but grokable. We don’t have Lodges and Westmorelands, Ho Chi Mins and Mao Tse-Tungs, but we can see the flickers of them in the shadows on the wall.

A poor man's Hanoi Hilton

Maybe you didn’t see this week’s episode as an allegory for Vietnam, but remember, we too are in the box or the cave, and what we bring with us affects what we see there. I see punji sticks and you may see the Bataan Death March. I see POWs and you may see a lynched man. But this episode gives space for us to approach different forms of violence and peace, evil and good, as and when we need to.

One way it does this is with the abject silliness of seeing Abraham Lincoln in space, shipless and fancy free. See, the episode seems to say, nothing is real here; this is just a silly sci fi show. But that is part of the box too and of the cave. The silliness of joining a new context shakes us free of our old one and allows us to see the dot on the wall, its roundness, its brightness, and the exact geometries of its transfiguration in a way we could never see the sun directly. The disgust I felt for the rock monster treating our beloved crew as chess pieces and bargaining chips only lightly touched on the incandescent rage I feel towards the Westmorelands and Maos of the world—playing greater power games as children die bloody. But it did allow me to touch it, to engage with it, to see it as small enough to understand the shape of it for once rather than be overwhelmed and blinded by its light.

This was not a good episode, as detailed above. The dialogue and morals were cloudy and at times crudely wrought. But as one in a series of episodes touching on different aspects of our nation’s current war, it did what it was supposed to: give us 48 minutes in the dark and the quiet to think about things we might not otherwise have been able to, see the shape and changing ways of them, and come out of it having touched something far beyond our reach.

Three stars.

[Come join us tomorrow (March 13th) 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

[February 14, 1969] Like a circle in a spiral; like a wheel within a wheel (Star Trek: "The Lights of Zetar")

February 14, 2024 Joe Reid 4 Comments

A Light Storm

by Joe Reid

This week’s episode of Star Trek had me asking myself two questions; the first: will that girl be a woman soon? The second question is how many ghosts does it take to reach escape velocity on the planet Zetar? My answers to those questions: not soon enough (apologies to Neil Diamond) and one hundred respectively. To check my answers and my impeccable math, I urge you to read on.

The Enterprise was en route to a planetoid called Memory Alpha, a place analogous to an outer space branch of the Library of Alexandria. Any foreshadowing on my part for this analogy is intentional.

The captain’s log started with an explanation of the mission to Memory Alpha and then went into the love life of ship’s engineer Mongomery Scott, and how queer it was that he had found a girlfriend at his age.

Lieutenant Mira Romaine was her name. A womanly girl-woman on whom Scotty smoothly spread sugary compliments as if he were frosting a cake. And boy was she ever eating up those sweet nothings, showing the feelings were mutual.

"Do you think it would cause a complete breakdown of discipline if a lowly lieutenant kissed a Starship Chief Engineer on the bridge of his ship?"

While the crew was amusing themselves with the affectionate antics of the elder engineer, the Enterprise encountered what appeared to be a multicolored storm of twinkling lights in outer space. This twinkle-storm, which could move faster than the speed of light, quickly overtook the Enterprise and entered the bridge. The lights then incapacitated everyone in mysteriously different ways, but eerily entered the eyeball of Lieutenant Mira Romaine, causing her to faint on the bridge.

"Blast it, Scotty—you kissed her too hard!"

After the crew recovered and the light storm flitted away, Dr. McCoy examined Lt. Romaine, who at this time was getting agitated by the attention on her and wished to be left alone by everyone except Scotty. Weirdly, this is when the crew took to calling her a girl, but I digress. The chase was on for the twinkle-storm that was soon discovered to be heading directly toward Memory Alpha. The undefended library couldn’t be reached in time and the storm poured out over it, sapping all life signs from the planetoid. While this dreadful situation unfolded, Lt. Romaine was given a vision of a dead humanoid splayed in a chair.

Memory Alpha is known for its wild frat parties

After the lights left Memory Alpha, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scott beamed down to offer help to the staff. All the inhabitants truly had died save for one woman who was still dying and showing similar signs as Lt. Romaine after her encounter with the lights. Kirk summoned “the girl” down to Memory Alpha, and soon Lt. Romaine materialized nearby. To her horror, she found the dead body from her vision and understood that they were all in danger. She also knew that the storm would soon return. The men present didn’t believe the grown woman Lieutenant until Sulu reported that they were indeed about to be overtaken by the deadly light show, which had changed course to return to the outpost. This established that the space lights were not a natural phenomenon as previously believed. Also, that “the girl” was connected to it in some way. The rest of the episode took the crew and “the girl” into mortal danger to discover the true nature of the space lights. That, along with more honeyed proclamations of love from Scotty.

"Lass, I'm not patronizing you because of your sex. I'm patronizing you because of your rank."

Suffice it to say, I found this episode annoying. Not because of Scotty’s antics, which only mildly skirted the line between comedic and pitiful for me. It was the crew constantly referring to this lovely grown woman as a “girl”. Although commonplace in some circles, it has never sat well with me, just as grown men being called “boy” is unpleasant to my ear. The second annoyance of this episode was regarding the revealed nature of the lights of Zetar, and the contrived way that the crew overcame the threat posed by them. The solution to the dilemma seemed to be cut from whole cloth. It was another case of expedient writing to quickly end an episode to fit the hour. This happens more than I would like for this show. “The Lights of Zetar” was lacking due to its character treatment of a trained officer and it could have benefited from better pacing. If they revealed the nature of the threat sooner in the story it would allow the crew to demonstrate their brilliance, finding better ways to solve their problems. Lastly, regarding the 100 ghosts mentioned earlier: watch the episode to find out. Check your local listings.

It's either Trek or reruns of Gunsmoke…"Good night, Marshall Dillon. And you too, Lucy!"

It may sound like I hated the episode, I didn't. It's like pizza or sex. Even when it is not great, you are still glad that you got some. Star Trek is that way in my mind. I thought "Zetar" was worth watching even though it was not great. The performance by the actress that played Romaine was well done. She came off as a good match for Scott. The effects were successful in giving the episode an eerie feeling, and the direction was unique. Despite my personal hang ups, it’s worth a watch.

Three stars

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

A Woman Worth Watching

Like Joe, I found the infantilization of Lt. Romaine irritating. As he said, like the use of the term “boy” for grown men, calling an adult woman “girl” scores of times in under an hour is disrespectful, makes our favorite characters sound painfully bigoted, and is beneath the theoretically evolved culture of the Federation.

But like many women demeaned by men around her, Lt. Romaine is far more interesting than what is done to her or said about her. Her struggle to retain her identity in the face of a force which murdered anywhere from dozens to hundreds to thousands of people — and her success — were profoundly moving.

It was a beautiful example of science fiction how ugly she and the technician allowed themselves to become. The hoarse, reverberating glottal-moan of the Zetarian’s early attempts at control was one of the most eerie and memorable parts of this episode. But what really clinched it for me was her back-against-the-wall death struggle to remain herself in the face of life forms claiming she was their only chance of a second shot at corporeal life.

"I said 'NO VACANCY'"

The abortion metaphor felt both subtle and powerful to me. Two years ago, I wrote a short story for this community’s zine, The Tricorder, about Yeoman Rand getting a futuristic abortion via transporter, storing the fetal life pattern in a computer cluster much like Memory Alpha. The experience of writing that fiction as a fan made me enjoy this episode more I think, though it did make the violent ending feel, as Joe implied, truncated and cheap.

Couldn’t a world like Memory Alpha hold the patterns of the ghosts of Zetar? As transporter beams, as recognized objects of study, perhaps even as medical patients, awaiting an android or sufficiently intelligent dog to take them on one last real-world ride? Why did the crew of the Enterprise need to crush them to death?

Enjoying while not enjoying, seeing what is there and imagining what could be, reveling in the glimpses of true human strength and courage that infantilized women on TV are sometimes allowed to show, these are the voyages of a star story fan, whose enduring mission is to see her sex treated as equals not just in pretty words, but in the world. This episode had its flaws but Lt. Romaine’s performance was a full meal for this woman watcher. I hope to see her on my screen again.

I can’t help but think the woman co-writer of the episode, Shari Lewis, had something to do with Lt. Romaine’s increasingly and incredibly layered character. I also very much hope to see more parity behind the camera on this and other productions. This was a good start.

Four stars.

A Sinking Ship (and a Sinking Heart)

by Janice L. Newman

It’s only been a few days since I watched “The Lights of Zetar”, but already I found myself struggling to remember what happened in it, even needing a reminder from my co-writers. Recent Star Trek episodes have committed the sin, not of being bad, exactly (though I am hard-pressed to call this episode “good”), but being forgettable. I still vividly recall “The Trouble With Tribbles”, “Is There in Truth No Beauty”, “A Piece of the Action”, and many of the other great episodes we’ve watched over the past seasons. Even the early “Naked Time” left a strong impression. Yet somehow, I found myself saying, “Wait, was this the episode with the impractically-dressed outpost commander, or…?” Considering that only a month ago we had the sublime and memorable “Whom Gods Destroy”, it’s amazing how quickly and how far Star Trek has fallen. Hopefully next week’s episode will stop the plunge into mediocrity or worse.

That being said, what really made this episode frustrating was the sharp left turn the plot made three-quarters of the way through. Narratively, a certain resolution was set up from early on. Lt. Romaine (“the girl”) was being taken over mentally by the aliens. Kirk suggested using this connection against them, a logical and clever solution. I had guessed that the connection would be used to predict the aliens’ actions and counter them accordingly, but there were lots of ways the connection could have been used to stop the aliens. The connection gave the crew the option to communicate and potentially influence the beings, after all.

Instead, out of nowhere, Lt. Romaine is put into a pressure chamber with an unrealistic number of Gs pushing on her and…squeezing the aliens out? Which somehow kills them?

"Pressure, Spock. PRESSURE!"

I don’t mind fantastical technology or far-fetched explanations, but I would like some explanation of what’s going on. Why was the relatively interesting thread of “we will use Lt. Romaine’s connection against them” dropped almost entirely for a solution that made no sense?

My theory is that the original script had Lt. Romaine die, and the producer or someone with authority decided he didn’t like that at the last minute, thus requiring a hasty re-write. This is just a guess, though: speculation without data. Mr. Spock would be disappointed in me!

Regardless of the reason why, the poorly-done narrative solution to the story brought the entire thing down. As with last episode, some interesting new special effects were employed, and again, effects alone were not enough to save the story. The clever set up would have netted three or more stars if it had been competently carried through. Instead, it was dragged down to two.

by Gideon Marcus

Return to "Return to Tomorrow"

We've seen the plot where disembodied aliens take over human bodies and then find them too irresistible to relinquish. What's frustrating about this one is that Kirk, who makes a living trying to convince aliens/computers to take alternate, less destructive courses, does not make much of an effort to dissuade the Zetarians.

Which is a shame. These are beings who can travel Warp 10 with ease, evade shields, and communicate telepathically. As friends, they would be tremendous allies. Couldn't they be happy with android bodies? And if not, could we not grow biological bodies for them, or find suicidal volunteers to offer their corporeal forms?

We don't even learn who the Zetarians are, other than that it's a planet where all life had died. There are so many holes in the episode, which suggests on-the-day rewrites or significant edits, as I understand happened in "The Alternative Factor".

Memory Alpha, a repository for all the Federation's knowledge, is a neat idea. While its defenselessness is explained and justified, boy, does that seem like an invitation for a hit and run raid from a hostile race. Of course, now the station is damaged, and most of that information lost. I wish the Enterprise crew had been a little sadder about it than we saw.

Plot holes aside, the biggest problem with this episode is that it's a bit dull. Even when things happening on the screen should have held interest, I found my mind wandering. Again, this points to editing issues and the need to pad.

By the way, I have it on good authority (thanks, Ruth Berman!) that writer Shari Lewis is the Shari Lewis who played Lamb Chop on Captain Kangaroo some years back. And from another authority, apparently Lewis and husband Jeremy Tarcher are currently…shall we say…following in the steps of Dr. Timothy Leary. That explains a bit of the trippiness of the episode.

Shari Lewis and two puppets from Captain Kangaroo: Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse

Two stars.

[Come join us tonight (February 14th) 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

[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 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

[October 31, 1968] How the Western was won (Star Trek: "Spectre of the Gun")

October 31, 2023 Janice L. Newman 5 Comments

by Janice L. Newman

This is Not a Test

Star Trek continues to surf the New Wave in this week’s episode, Spectre of the Gun. While the plot incorporated many things we’ve seen before (both in and outside of Star Trek) it combined and presented these elements in new and innovative ways.

The story opens with the ship encountering a strange object floating in space. All of the crew receive a message, ‘hearing’ it in the language they are most familiar with: Vulcan for Spock, Russian for Chekov, and in a nice call back to earlier episodes, Swahili for Uhura. The message warns them to stay away from the area. The crew, under orders to make contact with the Melkotians (the race who left the warning) choose to disregard it and beam down to the planet. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and Chekov make up the team.

The Melkotian buoy—to Trek's credit, they didn't simply reuse the music from The Corbomite Maneuver

Shortly after they arrive on the planet, a threatening figure appears. It’s one of the aliens, a Melkot. It tells them that they will be punished for disregarding their warning. Since Captain Kirk is in charge, their deaths will be ‘patterned’ on him.

Aliens can be difficult to render convincingly on television, but I was impressed at how effective the Melkot is. The image is of two glowing eyes piercing through a surrounding haze and the suggestion of a bulbous, hairless head on a stalk-like, armless body. Since it’s surrounded by mist and weird lighting, we don’t get a close look at it, which adds to the menacing quality and keeps it from feeling fake or cheesy.

No sooner does the Melkot pronounce judgment, than the five men find themselves in the middle of a western town. Except, it’s not a fully-realized town. It’s made up of pieces of scenery, just enough to suggest a town in broad strokes. It puts one in mind of a theatrical production, where a facade is used to represent a building and one can see inside a shop or house. It’s unsettling in this context: signs and clocks hang on empty air, and unlike the actors in a musical, the crew are well-aware that the buildings are unfinished.

Open air bar

It takes a few minutes and an interaction with one of the ‘locals’ to jog his memory, but Captain Kirk puts the pieces together to deduce that the setup represents the shootout at the O.K. Corral. He and his men are the Clanton brothers, destined to die to bullets shot by the Earps and Doc Holiday. Bullets that will kill them, as they discover when Chekov is shot down in the street.

Our heroes try to avoid their fate through diplomacy, trickery, and ‘the better part of valor’. Nothing works, not even the sleeping gas bomb that McCoy and Spock build together. But the fact that it doesn’t work when it should have worked convinces Spock that none of what they are experiencing is real. The bullets cannot hurt them, he tells the others, unless they believe they will.

In order to make sure the humans are all as convinced that the bullets are harmless as Spock is, he mind melds with each of them in turn. Then they stand, unworried, as they’re shot at. The fence behind them is filled with holes, but they, as Spock promised, are unharmed. Afterward Kirk has the opportunity to kill the Earps and Holiday, but chooses not to, even though he badly wants revenge for Chekov. The Melkotians, surprised at Kirk’s choice, agree to open diplomatic relations with the Federation.

A touching moment

We’ve seen a lot of these bits and pieces before. Westerns are ubiquitous, and the story of the shootout at Tombstone is an oft-visited well for modern-day storytellers. But how many of them cast the Clantons as the good guys? We’ve seen the Vulcan mind meld before, but never on multiple people in turn, and never to convince them of the unreality of their senses. We’ve seen powerful, telepathic aliens before. But unlike many of the others, the Melkotians aren’t messing around with the humans for their own amusement, or to protect us from ourselves, or to ‘test’ us. It’s clear that they don’t expect the humans to survive the punishment, and that they’re shocked that Kirk chooses not to kill the aggressors in the end. Whether the form of punishment was meant to be humane, giving the humans a familiar setting to die in, or whether it was supposed to remove the weight of responsibility from the Melkotians by forcing the humans into a ‘kill or be killed’ situation, or whether it was for some other reason entirely, we cannot know.

What we do know is that these familiar pieces fit together to make an entirely new kind of story, one that’s clever, compelling, and up there with the best of the Star Trek episodes we’ve seen.

Five stars.

Best Western

by Amber Dubin

I was pleasantly surprised that this episode marked another in the inspiring trend of season 3 episodes that absolutely knocked my socks off. The overarching premise is nothing special on its face: a shadowy, menacing entity issues an ominous warning a-la-Dante's-Inferno "abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Kirk promptly ignores the warning buoy, charging head-first into danger like the reckless adventurer we know him to be, and at first we appear to be treated to another "Catspaw"-like simulation with a western twist. This is where the similarities end between the season 2 and season 3 Halloween episodes, because this time around, the simulated world is much more intricate, meaningful and all around well-crafted.

Starting with the aliens' motivation for submerging the crew in this simulation, they explain that "you bring violence like a disease." This is a very valid threat and makes a lot of sense that the Melkotians would want to have this simulation in place to protect their planet from approaching unknown cultural contaminants.The crewmen have already refused to heed the initial warning, so it could hardly be called an escalation to issue this execution edict as judgment for their trespass. They prove themselves to be much more fair judges than some of the other alien species we've encountered, because they essentially allow a loophole in their trial, wherein the participants have one final chance to prove themselves worthy of access to their planet. It is fair too, that they design the interactive tribunal from details found within Kirk's mind, as it was Kirk that chose to disobey their warning and therefore Kirk should bear the bulk of the responsibility for their punishment.

Here come the Judge(s)

This is the first time, in my opinion, that they have found a valid reason to recreate ancient American history, as Captain Kirk has always been a stand-in for the audience's 1960's perspective, and one of the points in our history that Americans enjoy recreating most in film and fiction at this time is the Wild West. This time, incorporating our perspective is neatly explained by saying that Kirk has both the genetic memories of ancient North Americans from this era, and memories from his fan-crazed obsession with all things historical and fictional from American History. I even found it radically creative that the director manages to elegantly justify the half-finished western set pieces, as it was not only necessary that the crew know that the simulation was false, but also it was encouraged that they use that to their advantage to beat the system.

I also love that the trial that the crew endures this time is branded not as a trial but as an execution, further setting up the crew to fail as they would be inclined to see it as an inescapable punishment rather than an simulation whose outcome they could influence. The Melkotians may well have hoped the humans would fail. Certainly, they were surprised when they didn't.

I'm particularly impressed that this episode got me to do something I previously thought unthinkable: enjoy western-themed television.

5 stars

Unexpected Diplomacy

by Lorelei Marcus

Captain Kirk took an unexpectedly persistent talk-before-phasers approach to interacting with the Melkotians and their executioner puppets. At the beginning of the episode, he mentions the importance of contacting the Melkotians and implies the goal of peacefully adding them to the Federation. Given the importance of the mission, and our Enterprise captain's previous track record handling aliens, I can only imagine the training exercise Star Fleet put Kirk through to prepare him for his task:

"Alright, Captain. On the table, you will see a phaser and a communicator. The scenario is you are attempting to make contact with a peaceful alien species. Please choose the object you feel is best suited for this situation."

(Kirk reaches for the phaser and is shocked with an electric buzzer.)

"Ouch!"

"Please choose again."

(Rubbing at his wrist, Kirk reaches for the communicator this time. A green light turns on and a pleasant song starts playing.)

"Very good, Captain. Onto the next task…"

"I can't just kill them! I won't get any candy!"

In any case, I found this episode to be quite fun, particularly our new, diplomatic captain. Four stars.

We Come in Peace

by Erica Frank

"We come in peace," said Kirk… as he raised his phaser. No wonder the Melkot didn't believe him.

The Melkotians were clear that they wanted no part of the Federation. When the Enterprise decided to visit anyway –"establish contact at all costs"–the Melkotians were ready for them. (Kirk, you did establish contact; you met and conversed, and their response was No. If you meant "establish regular communications and diplomatic negotiations," well, that dance takes two willing partners.)

Kirk and his team wound up somewhere that looked more like a movie set or a stage play than an actual town. They thought this was "the Melkotians' idea of a town" rather than "a construct taking place in our own minds," despite having substantial experience with powerful telepaths who can make them experience entire landscapes that don't actually exist.

Why did it take them half the episode to attempt to leave town and discover the force field blocking their exit?

They spent most of their time trying to figure out how to get out of the impending gunfight, instead of looking for loopholes in the "reality" that they should recognize as false. However, even as they accepted the storyline they're stuck in, Kirk looked for ways to avoid the ending.

I don't know if he insisted on not fighting the Earps because he honestly believes it's wrong, or because he recognized that, in this story, once the shooting starts, his entire team will be killed.

They passed the Melkotians' test by refusing to shoot. (…Spock's getting awfully free with the mind-melds, recently.) I'm not sure I'd accept the results: Kirk knew that there was no way to win a shoot-out. Perhaps that was the point–not, "prove you are a non-violent species" (obviously not true), but "prove to us that you can find other ways to solve problems."

I like the Melkotians. They're only the third near-omnipotent aliens we've met that aren't petty tyrants. The Metron had a similar test, making Kirk fight the Gorn–they, too, were pleasantly surprised that Kirk found a way around killing. And we never learned the name of the race that built the Shore Leave planet.

Four stars.

I suppose he is the "Spectre of the Guns."

A Near-Shakespearean Paen for Nonviolence

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

With death served up on the doorstep with the morning paper, I needed this episode this week. Bracketed by political campaign ads crowing about violence in various cities and jungles, I found Kirk's passionate nonviolence struck a powerful chord. The episode's overall contrast with the morning death toll was satisfying but somehow it was Commander Spock's cool lines that I loved the most.

"A radical alteration of our thought patterns must be in order."

In that moment, the episode twists reality to reach the profound fantasies of those of us whose loved ones are – or tomorrow will – lay in the grave, or in the mud, waiting for a G.I. sniper or Viet Cong fighter to take what life they have lived and in all their future lives. To restate it, Spock's idea is that in the constructed world of this week's impossibly powerful alien, if you know you cannot be killed by bullets, you cannot. "Know" because "believe" requires the acknowledgment of the potential for doubt, but knowing requires a perfect certainty. In Spock's psychic certainty there is physical safety and real, true resurrection for the marooned crew.

This is what I love about science fiction, the fantasies that science fiction allows us, fantasies that give us enough breathing room to imagine a better world. Sometimes that world has to be far simpler for the conceit to play out. The world of this episode is much simpler than our own, which is why this trick of Commander Spock's is so intuitively effective. It felt in many moments like a stage play, and made me wonder how the Bard would have set the prologue:

Two families, both alike in indignity,
in fair Tombstone Arizona is where we lay our scene,
from lukewarm grudge break to new mutiny,
where uncivil blood makes uncivil hands unclean.

There is a little bit of a sweet Romeo and Juliet going on with Chekov in this episode, though it doesn’t entirely play out, ending up more of a joke than driving the narrative.

It really is our dynamic trio who make the episode, in their debates as to how to avoid furthering the cycle of violence the alien of the week has thrown them into. Kirk's attempt to explain was so satisfying to watch as he shouted and fought not to fight. His framing of his own family's history added a depth of character for me, as many of the passing references in this season do.

While we can understand that his ancestors were part of the genocide against the Native Americans of the American West, I like to think if Kirk was alive right now and his draft number came due, he would hike over the border to Canada. Draft dodging in this way would be a key way to keep his hands and mind and blood from being complicit in killing, whether of one man or entire families, entire communities. If no one fought, there would be no wars, and we see how that can start with someone like Kirk refusing to fight. In this case, there are no deadly consequences for the draft dodgers, as Spock's science fictional defense is perfectly effective.

In our more complicated reality, it is not so easy. There is no curtain call on the battlefield, and no alien to blame for the violence that engulfs us. So many occupied graves may make draftees feel obligated to fill in a few more before they punch their final ticket. But I do fervently hope that those who are conscripts or reservists or draftees called to slaughter can watch this episode before they board their planes and tanks, before they load up their all-too-lethal guns with human-killing bullets. I hope it inspires them as only science fiction can to consider another path, the all-too-human journey of nonviolence.

5 stars.

The Greatest Show off Earth!

by Gideon Marcus

Most of my colleagues were impressed by the story, the message, and so forth. Those are all laudable topics, and I'm glad they've covered them more eloquently than I would have. However, I just want to comment on how much I've been enjoying the third season of Star Trek, how far this show has come.

1968 is an interesting moment. Laugh-In has infected all other media. Psychedelia is de rigeur It's a time of experimentation and irreverence. As I noted in my last review, the New Wave has made it to Trek. Indeed, my friend, part-time Journeyer Brian Collins said that, if he didn't know better, he'd have thought Phillip K. Dick wrote this episode!

So it's no surprise we get all sorts of neat stuff, visually, aurally, literarily. According to my friend Maurice, the partial "limbo" that comprises the setting actually borrows a lot from the 1953 musical comedy Red Garters. However, "Spectre" uses the setting to unsettle, to connote things unfinished, and also because it's just cool and weird!

The score is once again brand new. That makes it the fourth or fifth new score we've had this season, and as usual, it is excellent and fitting. Trek has the best music this side of Hollywood Palace.

Vince McEevety's direction is, once again, excellent. I don't think it's a coincidence that his episodes ("Balance of Terror", "Miri", to some degree "Patterns of Force") have not only been innovative in their execution, but have also wrung out good performances from its actors. Shatner, in particular, has had a tendency to ham things up (very unkosher!) since the end of the 1st season. There's none of that in this episode. His encounter with Sheriff Behan, when he plaintively yells that he can't kill the Earps, his mourning over Chekov's death, his subtle reactions to his crew, particularly in the gas testing scene…all terrific. Chekov finally gets a role he can chew on, and he's great. Scotty as well. The Big Three are thoroughly in character, up to and including McCoy arguing both sides of the fence—"Cheer up, Jim!" followed by "Shut up, Spock! We're grieving!")

"I am not someone you can marry, although marriage was inwented in Russia."

And the guest stars, particularly the Earps/Doc Holliday, turn in performances that are nearly robotic, but highly emotive nevertheless. It's a hard needle to thread, but they manage it.

I find my esteem for this episode rising in the glow of the morning after, and in the conversations it has sparked with my comrades. I was going to give it 4 stars, but I think it moves up to 4.5 now.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[October 18, 1968] Little monsters (Star Trek: "And the Children Shall Lead")

October 18, 2023 Janice L. Newman 9 Comments

by Janice L. Newman

Star Trek is, first and foremost, a science fiction show. But science fiction is a special genre in that it need not be constrained by the same rules as other genres. A story that’s science fiction can also be a Western, a romance, a mystery…or a horror story, such as Wolf in the Fold and Catspaw attempted to be. On the first Friday in October, we gathered our friends in our backyard and watched on our portable 13" one of the scariest episodes of Star Trek I’ve seen yet.

The story opens with a landing party (which includes the Captain, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy, as has become standard these days) investigating a research colony that has fallen out of contact with the Federation. They find the research team dead, all of them having drunk poison. One member is conveniently still alive, but can only gasp out a few cryptic words before collapsing.

The heroes’ shock is interrupted and then multiplied when a group of children (of varying ages and ethnicities) burst out of the shelter and immediately begin playing noisy games, apparently unconcerned that their parents are lying there dead.

This theme is repeated when the children are brought back to the ship. At first they’re cooperative, but when asked questions about their parents and their family life they ignore or dismiss them, pulling each other into games involving shouting and running.

The whole setup is pretty creepy, with the contrast of the dead bodies and the unconcerned children being particularly effective. Soon, the viewer learns that there’s more going on with the children than meets the eye. Out of sight of the adults, they use a singsong chant to summon an alien who instructs them to ‘control the crew’ and tells them ‘you know how to do that’.

The "friendly angel" exhorts his minions as they pound the table with Nuremberg rally fervor

So begins the truly scary part of the story. The children scatter to different parts of the ship. By making a pounding gesture with one hand, they can force the crew to see what they want them to see, usually an illusion that taps into a deeply-held fear. One by one the crewmembers fall under the spell, even Spock at one point asking the Captain, “Why are we bothering Starfleet?” when Kirk orders him to send out a distress call.

Seeing the normally unflappable crew caught up in the children’s illusions is genuinely disconcerting – Sulu grabs Kirk’s arm to keep him away from the controls, Scotty threatens him, Chekov points a phaser at him – but the children in the background of each shot are the ones that carry the real menace. Whether it’s the red-haired ringleader on the bridge or the tiny boy partially-obscured in engineering, it’s clear that the kids are the ones really in charge, and that’s a terrifying thought. Maybe on a larger TV screen or a well-lit room it would have worked less well. On our small color TV, watched outside on a chilly October night, it was riveting.

Spock and Kirk eventually manage to overcome the control and, after inspiring doubts in the children’s minds about their alien friend, use a recording of the children’s chant to summon the alien. Kirk breaks through the children’s seeming apathy by showing them recordings of their parents, then cutting to shots of their parents’ bodies and gravestones. It’s tough love, but it works. The children turn against the alien and it disintegrates, yelling, “Death to you all!” as it dies.

Kirk comforts the weeping children, telling them, “It’s all right.” I’m not sure it is all right, at least not for the kids. After all, their parents are dead, and they helped kill them. Thus we are left with a lingering horror despite the ‘happy ending’.

I liked this episode more than I’d expected to. Child actors are notoriously tricky to work with, but their performances weren’t too bad. In fact, far worse was the children’s alien friend, who they called ‘angel’ and Kirk called, ‘Gorgon’. He was played by Melvin Belli, perhaps most famous for being the attorney who represented Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald; for an actor, he's a pretty good lawyer. Perhaps the stilted delivery to the children was intentional, but I couldn’t help but feel a better performer could have delivered the lines far more convincingly and with greater menace.

Still, it was a great start to the spookiest month of the year, and a nice return to form for Star Trek. I’m taking off half a star for the Gorgon’s poor performance, leaving it with three and a half stars.

Who's Responsible?

by Lorelei Marcus

There's a new show this season that rivals Star Trek in popularity for us young folks. It's called Mod Squad, and it stars three young adults who work as undercover cops. Unlike most of the police shows on TV, it has a lot of heart, and it's not afraid to tell it like it is. Most compelling, though, is the hope it portrays. It gives us the cops we want to see—diverse, young, relatable, and trying to do good and protect people.

The Mod Squad and their Captain (the Klingon in "Friday's Child")

The Mod Squad leads are a far cry from the militant, "law-and-order" brutes who aim firehoses at kids in a sit-in or beat protestors bloody at the Democratic National convention. All the adults of today are calling for law and order, scared of what the kids will do. Funny enough, I think we all really want the same thing: peace. But to get it, we need to stop shipping our boys to die in Vietnam, stop packing black people into city slums, and stop ogling girls like they're nothing but pieces of meat. We need change, and sadly, I don't think any of the old politicians of today can give us that change.

I feel a kinship with the children of last week's Star Trek episode. Those kids wanted freedom, and the right to happiness, and time with the ones they loved. Yet they also terrified me, because under the right (wrong) guidance, they had great power, and that power was misled. With that power, they plunged the Enterprise into anarchy, rendering each of our beloved and competent crew useless by playing on their fears. Even Captain Kirk was reduced to a dithering, anxious fool for a time. Most horrifying was the children being tricked into causing the death of their own parents. Like those kids, we (me and my generation) are pent up and we want change. We have the power to make it happen. But is it worth it if it costs us our loved ones?

From a recent Nixon for President commercial: how he wants you to see kids

But the thing is, kids aren't inherently scary—just, under the right circumstances, desperate. We don't have money or experience. We're growing up in uncertain times and we're scared to death we won't make it past 20. Ultimately, we don't want to hurt anyone. We just want to save ourselves. But I can see that fear makes us dangerous, and the adults, too. We're all scared, like stampeding zebras, unsure of where we're going, and who we're trampling in our path. I can bet those kids on the Enterprise were scared. How might the episode have ended differently if one adult stopped to see their point of view?

Who will stop to see ours? Or will we have to keep shaking our firsts to be heard, playing on fears until someone gets hurt? Something will bridge the gap, I hope. Maybe it starts with a conversation sparked by this episode. For that, and its compelling pacing, story, and acting, I give this episode four stars.

Successes and Failures of Fear

by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

In the face of overwhelming odds, the core Enterprise crew remains frighteningly efficient. Those same strengths are devastating when turned back on our heroes. Scotty's steady, unmoving presence and protection of the auxiliary control blocks Kirk and Spock from the engines. Sulu's precision is narrowed to keep the ship on course and unscathed, unable to question if the weapons he sees are real. Chekov's loyalty is strained, torn between his Captain and the even higher authority of Starfleet command.

"You die, Captain—and we all go up in rank!"

The odd one out is Lt. Uhura. While her colleagues' fears and perceptions revolved around duty, she was shown a painful death in old age, reflected in a mirror only she could see. This was just the latest time a woman on 'Trek was derailed by loss of youth or beauty. Yeoman Rand, distressed over her legs in Miri, Lt. Galway afraid to sleep after aging rapidly in The Deadly Years (at least the mirror she complained of actually existed). The trio taking the Venus drug in Mudd's Women. Uhura herself already encountered this when she was offered an immortal, youthful robot body in I, Mudd – and importantly, chose not to accept. She's a professional, and there was already the perfect moment to set her fear: when Kirk's instruction to the bridge security came out as garbled nonsense. Communication is her specialty, and she's had to relearn language before when Nomad erased her knowledge in The Changeling.

Pushing the crew in the wrong direction is a masterstroke. These people are exceptional at what they do and they don't know the harm they are causing. This is where the horror crept in. Not only was the crew unaware that they were helping the "angel" towards its destination, they were convinced that they were keeping the ship safe. Modern day propaganda may not manifest visions or change perception so literally, but if everything you know is telling you one thing, how do you begin to question it? A sense of justice or duty isn't enough, and the most well-intentioned can still cause great damage. Kirk orders a security shift change, and two officers are transported to where the planet is supposed to be, only to die silently in empty space, off screen. These deaths feel entirely preventable – no one was shooting at them, there was no need to fight! And yet, horribly, there was no way for any of them to know. Like his crew, Kirk did everything right, and it still resulted in tragedy. The children induced an artificial anxiety, but the aftermath will haunt the crew for much longer. How to know if a future mission is doing more good than harm? Or perhaps even worse, has the Enterprise been an unknowing party to devastation in the past, all while under the impression of a successful mission?

4 stars

Without Followers, Evil Cannot Spread

by Robin Rose Graves

Initially, I was annoyed by yet another “magical children” plot in Star Trek, as in the first season we had "Charlie X", and overall I’m not fond of Trek including magic as a seemingly limitless device. Despite my initial hesitation, the episode won me over with its appropriately creepy tone and mastermind behind the children’s behavior, who I feel has great political relevance to our own history.

To summon the Gorgon, the children chant “hail, hail, fire and snow…” which could possibly be a play on the word “heil.” Perhaps the Gorgon targeting children for recruits was a nod to Hitler’s youth – or maybe it has something deeper to say about the followers who enable such evil men to rise to power. Perhaps the children represent naivete that can be preyed upon, a selfishness that can be manipulated, and a lack of regard to consequences. “Evil does seek power by suppressing the truth,” Spock noted of the children being unaware of what they were doing. “Or by misleading the innocent,” McCoy added. The Gorgon was not just an alien version of Hitler, but every demagogue we’ve known and are yet to know, from Lincoln Rockwell to George Wallace.

"Segregation now, Segregation tomorrow, Segregation forever!"

“They’re children being misled,” Kirk said, in defense of the children, to which Spock replied “they are followers. Without followers, evil cannot spread.” Within these lines, Spock exposed the Gorgon’s strength and weakness, and reminded us that it is the people who give leaders power, but those same followers can take that power away. That, I believe, is the true message of the episode.

Appropriately, this episode was followed by a commercial for Richard Nixon aimed at today's youth.

3 stars.

Un-asked Questions

by Joe Reid

“And the Children Shall Lead” is this week’s episode of Star Trek. It is frankly an episode that leaves much to be desired. It has too many open questions that could have been answered, but in the end were not, coupled with a threat that is so easy to spot that it makes one wonder whether the outcome couldn’t have been avoided by asking a few simple questions. How about we go over a few of the questions that might have saved our heroes a lot of hassle?

Question 1 – “Do you think that these children might be responsible for all the dead adults on this planet?" When you come to a place where all the adults and parents are dead, and you find a bunch of playing and laughing children who could care less, there is something wrong. Perhaps it would not be a good idea to take them to your ship full of adults. Those children are as queer as a three-dollar bill! Leave them on the planet and watch them closely. There is no need to endanger the crew by rushing to rescue ill-mannered brats.

"You do see these bodies, right, kids?"

Question 2 – “Who is letting all of these rude children into restricted areas?” There was a child in Engineering, a child roaming the halls driving crew members around like cattle, and multiple children on the bridge. These children were not invisible and were clearly in areas where visiting children should not be visiting. If Nurse Chapel was to see these children to their quarters and they end up roaming the ship, there should be disciplinary action taken against her. [To be fair, Kirk did order a security guard to watch the kids. Said guard was immediately co-opted by Tommy Starnes. Indeed, this is one of the few episodes with appropriate (though inadequate) levels of security) (ed.)]

Question 3 – “Did anyone else see that glowing intruder over there?” If anyone at all had been alerted to a translucent glowing alien on the ship, folks might have been more careful. Perhaps people might have anticipated a danger to themselves or to the “defenseless” children that were guests on the ship. How about we go to yellow alert until this uninvited alien is abducted? [None of the crew saw the gorgon until the final encounter; by the time Kirk suspected an alien on board, the crew had already been co-opted. (Ed.)]

I find all the things that occurred in this entry to completely lack credibility where this normally overly inquisitive crew is involved. Usually asking a few questions would trigger Kirk’s powers of “Kirk-sposition”, where the captain would exposit to a degree as to turn the very Oracle of Delphi green with envy with his level of accuracy. The fact that simple questions such as the ones presented above were left un-uttered, left me questioning why I failed to switch the television off. It was not good in my opinion.

One star

Give kids a chance

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

This is my first creepy-child Star Trek episode review since having my first child last November and all of it hit so much harder than it would have a year ago. The ages of the kids, their games, their attempts to control the world around them using whatever tools consistently work, much of it reminded me of my little guy.

Which made this exchange so horrifying I nearly turned off my TV:

KIRK: They're children.
SPOCK: Captain, the four hundred and thirty men and women on board the Enterprise and the ship itself are endangered by these children.
KIRK: They don't understand the evil that they're doing.
SPOCK: Perhaps that is true, but the evil that is within them is spreading fast, and unless we can find a way to remove it
KIRK: We'll have to kill them.

Um, what? Have you no brig? Have you no tranquilizers? Have you no compassion? [Have you no stun setting on your phasers? (ed)]

The easy slip from 'they're a danger to us' to 'we must kill them' could only be made by someone without kids, or perhaps without the caregiving responsibility for them. Like many people who give birth, my kid endangered my life during his time entering this world; but I would not more kill him than kill myself. We're a dyad, he and I, less and less biologically the older he gets, but certainly still emotionally. Once one has had that experience of one body becoming two, it is difficult to look at any child and not see the halos of your own. And the cries of children? Not only do they get the milk flowing, but the tears too.

Dr. McCoy laughing in delight at the children crying was nearly as chilling to me as the horrible ways they were manipulated by this week's evil alien.

The alien way in which the children were treated made me realize how strange life on the Enterprise must be. They had no children-sized beds, no play area, no children's library or jungle gym. I wrote in the fanzine Tricorder I about what it might take for Yeoman Rand to seek an abortion using teleporter technology, but even there I had assumed in my heart that this advanced civilization could find a way to keep families intact while allowing parents to be the great explorers we all are every single day (and explainers, and shoe tie-ers, and booty wipers and tear driers…).

There are alien contact specialists on board the Enterprise—perhaps one of them might have been better qualified to talk to them than the fellow who couldn't explain the Birds and the Bees to Charlie Evans…

The fact that the Enterprise has no children is newly shocking to me. So much of the universe must be missed by excluding that unique perspective. So many potential alien diplomatic relationships must be missed when societies first encounter Star Fleet and are confronted by a uniformed crew of mostly-singletons. Of course, there is for many people everything right and nothing wrong in being single, being child free, or some mix of the same. Both are states whose partisans I wish joy to. But parents too have our own well-earned perspectives and skills, as do the children we protect and harbor and launch out into the wide, wide galaxy.

What would this episode have been like if, as Lorelei mentioned, someone had actually tried to communicate with the children: another parent or another child? The best interlocutors are sometimes the ones most closely sited by those to whom they wish to speak, and integrating this troubled and troubling group into an existing, healthy culture of children aboard a starship would have been a fascinating twist to this story. I hope one day to watch a Star Trek where both children and parents have a voice and role in the narrative, beyond guest stars and evil foils.

Three stars for threatening to kill traumatized kids who were being manipulated by an adult. No me gusta.

[Come join us tonight (October 18th) for the next thrilling episode of Star Trek! KGJ is broadcasting the show live with commercials and accompanied by trekzine readings. You won't want to miss it…]

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Fashion, music, politics, sports

[April 6, 1968] The mountain of despair (the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

April 6, 2023 Dana Pellebon 3 Comments

by Dana Pellebon

On April 4, 1968, my world changed and I wasn’t even aware of how much. My day was as any other. Go to work, come home, make dinner, do a little reading, and go to bed. Yet, on April 5th, the horror of opening my newspaper made my world stop. Front Page. Dr. King Murdered. As the paper slipped from my hands, gravity took my body and the tears now flowing to the floor. Who? How? I tried to read the words on the now wet pages, but I couldn’t escape the feeling of intense pain and sadness. When you’ve lived through a man shepherding you and the world through progress, what does it mean when he’s not here? I ached for his wife and children. I dreaded the moment I had to move my body to figure out what was next.

Civil rights leader Andrew Young (L) and others on balcony of Lorraine motel pointing in direction of assailant after a shot mortally wounded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Photograph by Joseph Louw

Somehow I got off the floor to ready myself for work. The bus there was filled with other Negroes like me silently crying. At the next to last stop downtown, a small group of men came on the bus and were very loud about ridding the world of another one of “them”. I straightened my head, methodically dried my tears, and looked right in their direction. My steel gaze was met with some chagrin on their part and blessed silence. It was in that moment that I knew I would never let another one of them see me cry ever again.

I hear there is a work strike coming up. Already people are mobilizing. There’s rumblings on the radio about the riot in Memphis and DC. I read the words of Robert Kennedy talking about his brother’s death and how he too was killed by a white man. How we should not take this time for violence but instead for compassion. I want to take in these words of reconciliation but my heart is cold and distant from such talk.

I believed in the dream of Dr. King. Nonviolence begets understanding and peace. He may be targeted but he was special. Malcom X was killed because of who he was. Dr. King would stay alive because of who he was. Or, so I thought. My naïveté was on full display as I realized that him dying was the only inevitable outcome for whites who hated his message. My new understanding that peace and conflict are natural bedmates. As I step into this world without Dr. King, I must ask myself, what is next?

This is the question for the Negro. Without our great Shepherd, how does this flock move through the pasture? Who leads the next part of the movement? What legacy of his can we grab of our own to continue to shape the world into a just and equitable future? I don’t know what the path forward is and how to get there, but I think of the last words Dr. King said the night before he was murdered and I know in this moment and the next and the next, every thing I do will be to realize the vision of our collective promised land.

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Dr. King, giving his last speech at Mason Temple, Memphis, on April 3.

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

When morning finds me, I read the newspaper. Earlier and earlier these days, as my newborn moves towards infancy and begins to make his own dawn schedule.

It was one of Will Roger’s favorite lines: “All I know is just what I read in the papers.” As a Cherokee man born in land that was treaty promised and greed taken, he knew better than most how wrong the press can be. But still, it’s the only first draft of history many of us are privileged to see.

Which is what makes reading it while nursing my baby so strange some days. Like a few weeks ago, when, on a single page, these were the headlines:

"Policeman Admits He’s a Klansman"
"‘Oakland in 1983: Over Half Negro’"
"Commission Warns: Spend Billions or Face Rebellion"
"‘Had To Tell It Like It Is’ — Riot Report Jolts Congress"
"Policeman’s Lot Not a Happy One"

On mornings like this when decency weeps, a page like that perhaps only has one or two truly true things in it. One, I suspect, is from the "Commission" report breathlessly exaggerated in the headlines, whose full and proper title is “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders;” that commission includes the former Illinois governor Otto Kerner Jr., leading Congressmen from both parties, and Atlanta Police Chief Herbert Jenkins. The paper says of the report:

“For instance, the commission said, belief is widely held that riot cities were paralyzed by sniper fire. Of 23 cities surveyed, there were reports of sniping in 14. And probably there was some sniping, the commission said, but: “According to the best information available to the commission, most reported sniping incidents were demonstrated to be gunfire by either police or National Guardsmen.’”

There’s a lot of passive voice in there, unfortunately common with newspapers’ coddling of police officers’ egos (see the unsourced and useless sob piece in the bottom left hand corner). But those “sniping incidents” included a mother shot in the back and murdered inside her own home during a riot as she tried to pull her 2 year old to safety, away from the glass window.

I hold my baby tighter as I read that.

In another powerful moment, the paper says:

"Asked why the panel made such a hard-hitting report, Harris said: 'We all knew these things intellectually – but we didn't feel it in the pit of our stomachs.

'We want people to see this as we did. We thought we had to tell it like it is.'

Another commissioner returned from a ghetto inspection tour and switched his position on one issue, remarking:

'I'll be a son-of-a-gun. You might be 99 miles further to the left than I thought I would be.'"'

Another bit of truth came from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, as it so often does. He called the report “a monumental revelation of what we had seen since the burning fires of Watts.”

The report laid the blame for the riots on centuries of white racism and systemic lack of funding in Black communities. It prescribed deep and meaningful investment in those communities to try to make back some of the time that was stolen (the “billions” listed in the third headline, as if we don’t spend “billions” in Vietnam every year).

Reports of commissions like that are the second, or even third drafts of history. I suspect they get it right more often than they do not.

I heard on the radio last night that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and murdered in Memphis. The radio report wasn’t even the first draft of history, maybe just the notes for a future draft. Later, Bobby Kennedy came on, said something like:

“My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”

Robert F. Kennedy, speaking in Indianapolis, April 4.

I don’t know what the headlines will read today or tomorrow or when the killer is caught, if he is caught. A lot of people hate Dr. King, blame him for the riots. God knows the newspapers did in their first drafts. But reports like the Kerner Commission, they tell us the true causes, lay blame at the right doors.

Until then, until we know more about what happened than we read in the newspapers, I’ll stick with Senator Kennedy, who knows at least something about surviving deaths by violence. I'll try to find some wisdom in the awful grace of God. I’ll try to think about one of Will Roger’s other great quotes, “It's not what we don't know that hurts. It’s what we know that ain’t so.”

I’ll keep trying to teach that to my baby, the things I thought I knew from the papers that I now know aren’t so. I'll try to tell it like it is, as much as I can for someone of his small size. And I'll hold him just a little tighter.

by Mona Jones

My husband calls me from the living room. Any other day, I might think him or Big Mama needed a drink of water. But something about his voice sends a shiver down my spine. He calls me again.

“Mona, you better get in here.”

I walk into the living room just in time to hear a recording of Robert Kennedy over the radio say, “Some very sad news for all of you and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis. . .”

The rest of his words are drowned by the deafening cries of those in attendance of his last-minute press conference. Mabel must sense a change in the air because she leaves her uncle in the kitchen to come wrap her skinny little arms around my waist. “Mama, what’s wrong? Did something bad happen?”

She’s looking up at me for answers and I have no idea what to say. Even if the cries of the people on the air hadn’t drowned on Mr. Kennedy’s voice, I’m sure the blood rushing in my ears would’ve done the same. Thomas walks up to stand in the archway with me as Mr. Kennedy keeps talking.

“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause for that effort.”

Even from our little home in Indianapolis, I can already imagine the streets of my hometown in D.C. filling with people with a whole lot of rage and hurt with nowhere to direct it but at themselves. I clutch my little girl closer to my side.

“On this difficult day and in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.”

Hasn’t this country already chosen? A great man was killed tonight, I think as my lips tremble and my eyes well up with hot tears. I don’t feel like a mother or a wife or even a sister right now. I feel like a child clinging to another child trying to figure out what’s gonna happen now that the one person who was allowed to care isn’t allowed to care anymore.

“For those of you who are Black – considering the evidence evidently is that there were White people who were responsible – you can be filled with bitterness and with hatred and a desire for revenge.”

Sounds of people yelling and crying echoes around the neighborhood. I fear it's only gonna get worse. I only hope that Thomas doesn’t get any ideas about running out there to help or hurt. He may not have agreed with the Reverend’s methods, but I could see it on his face that he was feeling it, too, plus all the anger that rushes out from inside of him whenever the position of Black people in this country comes up.

“We can move in that direction as a country. . .”

Easy for him to say. He’ll wake up tomorrow and still be a White man. We’ll wake up tomorrow and be Black people without a leader. We’ll wake up not knowing what tomorrow is gonna bring. If the Reverend Martin Luther King was killed, what’s gonna happen to us if we speak out? I can’t tell where this country is headed, and neither can Mr. Kennedy. But I have a feeling it’s nowhere good. Nowhere good at all if a man like that can be taken from us so very, very soon.

by Victoria Lucas

Mel and I grieve that Martin Luther King, Jr. has been taken from us. The turmoil of the day only underscored the tragic events.

It’s not like NYC where mimeographed newsletters were hurried out to the streets with the hour’s news—it takes time for the Berkeley Barb or other newspapers to be ready to distribute. What a difference a Gestetner makes.

Thus, it’s quite possible to drive into something unexpected, as we did on the day of the assassination. People glared at us, yelled at us, even threw things until we stopped and asked someone what was going on. It seems we were supposed to have known to place a black ribbon on our radio antenna or someplace else on our car, as a memorial to Dr. King. We had no idea. We hurriedly found a ribbon and attached it.

Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement a few years ago.

The lack of timely information and the increasing violence here are driving us out. Not only are the police getting more violent, but the Panthers are violent, the protests are getting violent; I cannot pass UC Berkeley's Sather Gate without seeing and hearing a male speaker getting purple in the face about “the pigs” (which now includes both the police and the UC Berkeley administration). What’s more, we're finding we cannot drive or walk around Berkeley at all and feel safe.

And so, we shall soon be leaving tumultuous Berkeley for points north. Our family member is staying, so we will be back to check on him and see friends. But living here has become too scary.

Maybe everywhere has gotten a little more scary.

by Joe Reid

Dr. King was loved by many for what he did with his life. I thought I loved Dr. King for what he did, but I think that I really must not have. For the thing I called love was ineffective and unhelpful. It was empty in that it let another carry a burden alone, without me stepping forward to help. While this man was walking around doing for others; walking around with a bullseye painted on his back, I only looked out for myself and mine. It was good that Dr. King was doing the work of leading protests. Organizing folks. Giving speeches to inspire others. Writing books so that others might understand our struggles. All that I did was say that I loved his work, but I did nothing to help. I worked and took care of my family and had the nerve to call another man brother when I didn’t lift a finger to try to make that man’s life better.

Dr. King was clearly not like me. When he called you sister, it was because he cared about what happened to you. If he called you brother, it was because he saw you as family. He was able to see another man’s struggles as his own and was willing to use what talents he was given to do something about it. When I see another man’s struggles, I see it as that man’s struggles. How does that make me any different than most white folks? People that might not hate me; might not call me a nigger, but who don’t see themselves in me. They don’t see my struggles as their own. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was not that the kind of man that I have found myself to be. He clearly possessed something that I lack.

Dr. King, flanked (from left) Hosea Williams, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy on the Lorraine Motel balcony in Memphis on April 3. Photo by Charles Kelly.

I think that my problem is that I don’t love God. How could I say that I love God, if I don’t love those who God loves? Like how if you love your friend, you will help your friend's family because of that love. That I am not willing to step away from my own life to take up the cause of another shows me how fruitless my love is. It shows that I don’t love my neighbor, I don’t love my coworker, I don’t love my family, I don’t even love myself. If another man is fighting a battle for me that I won’t fight for myself, then I must not love myself. I really don’t love myself, if I haven’t walked with the man. My inaction proves the point that I must not love God.

Dr. King was not only fighting for negroes in this country, but also for poor folk of all stripes. This man truly loved others. His actions showed that. He loved his children. His speeches showed that. He loved his brother. His hands demonstrated that. Lastly, it is now obvious to me that Dr. King really and truly loved God. His life was a testament to that.

So, if I am going to claim to love God, as this man clearly did, I need to stop seeing people as separate from myself; realizing the truth that if anyone is being denied participation, representation, opportunity, or even their very life, I am being denied those things as well. It was very unloving of me to let others fight on my behalf without me. It’s time for me to start loving God and those who He loves. Dr. King, thank you for your example of how to love. You will be missed, but you will never be forgotten.

by Tom Purdom

I was doing the dishes and listening to our local all-news station, KYW, when the news came over the radio. The first thing that leaped into my mind was Carl Sandburg’s poem Upstream:

The strong men keep coming on.
They go down, shot, hanged, sick, broken.
They live on, fighting, singing, lucky as plungers,
The strong mothers pulling them on,
The strong mothers pulling them from a dark sea, a
great prairie, a long mountain.
Call Hallelujah, call Amen,
The strong men keep coming on.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[February 28, 1968] Zero for the Price of Two (Star Trek: "By Any Other Name")

February 28, 2023 Janice L. Newman 6 Comments

by Janice L. Newman

This week’s Star Trek episode starts in one genre and ends up in another, ultimately making a promise it just can't deliver on.

The story opens with the Enterprise responding to a distress signal and landing on an out-of-the-way planet. They encounter aliens that appear human, who immediately commandeer the ship. When the landing party attempts to resist, the aliens make a chilling example: they turn two members of the landing party (both garbed in red) into small, strangely-shaped objects, apparently by removing all the water from their bodies and leaving the concentrated essential salts and minerals. One of these objects is crushed before Captain Kirk’s eyes, while the other is restored to his normal human state.

I want to take a moment to note how compelling this part is. It could have been corny in a different kind of show. Yet it’s unexpectedly effective as Kirk crouches over the powdery remains of one of his crewmembers, shocked. There’s no gore or blood, yet it is genuinely horrific.

This promising beginning leads to a promising next act, where the aliens have successfully taken over the ship. Scotty and Spock work out a method to blow up the ship rather than let the aliens take it back to their home planet and start an intergalactic takeover. Kirk nixes the idea, apparently unable to bear the idea of destroying the Enterprise and everyone aboard. Instead of bluffing the aliens or coming up with some clever solution, Kirk flails helplessly, especially when the aliens proceed to turn the entire rest of his crew into salt sculptures. This is once again very creepy and effective, particularly when Kirk comes upon a hallway filled with the fragile objects. Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Spock, and Scotty are the only ones who remain un-salted.

Spock is, appropriately, the one who identifies the aliens’ weakness: they have taken the forms of humans and are now subject to human weaknesses, desires, and emotions. Together, the four hatch a plan to wrest back control of the ship from the aliens.

This is the point where the episode takes a hard left turn into comedy from horror. Of course I expected that the crew would ultimately win, but the tonal shift from creeping horror and despair to wacky high jinks is jarring. Not only that, but the crew’s plan doesn’t make much sense.

McCoy injects one of the aliens with something that will gradually fray his temper, making him angrier and angrier until he snaps. But why didn’t McCoy just use something to knock him out?

"Hey! Did you put knock-out juice in there?" "Rats! Why didn't I think of that?"

Scotty introduces one of the aliens to alcohol, eventually drinking him under the table. These scenes are funny; James Doohan is a talented actor. But since Scotty collapses shortly after his drinking buddy does, ultimately he makes no difference to the plot. Also, why didn’t Scotty just put something in the alien’s drink to knock him out sooner?

"Shay… Did you put knock-out juice in the booze?" "Ach! Why didn't I think of that?"

Kirk calls ‘dibs’ on the female alien and repeats the technique he’s come to use on any woman who has captured him: he seduces her (see: “Catspaw”, “Gamesters of Triskelion”, etc). In a nice switch, at first she seems completely uninterested and cold. Disappointingly, this doesn’t last, with her soon falling into his arms again. By the way, Kirk was definitely close enough to have knocked her out with his standard chop to the neck (which he had already used this episode!)

"Say…your lips wouldn't be drugged would they?" "Why didn't I think of…I mean…why, yes!"

Spock plays on the alien leader’s jealousy, making him angry enough to eventually attack Kirk with his bare hands. Spock has several opportunities to neck-pinch the leader, but does not.

"Say…my shoulder is tense. Would you mind gripping it?" "No thanks."

Captain Kirk then gives a monologue which almost makes up for everything in the episode I disliked up to this point. If the aliens are behaving like this after just a day of being human, he says, what will they be like after the 300 years it will take them to get back to their home planet? They won’t even be the same species anymore, they’ll basically be humans, and therefore invaders.

"Aren't you… glad.. you use Dial? Don't you wish everyone did?"

Sadly, this cleverness is ruined by how easily the once-intractable aliens agree and give in and how quickly everything is wrapped up.

This almost feels like two halves of different episodes. Moreover, the solution is far too pat and comes too easily to have real emotional impact. I assume the scriptwriter wrote himself and the crew into a corner by making the aliens too powerful, then had to do something implausible to get himself out of it.

Three stars, mainly for Scotty and the salt effect.

A Convenient Escape

by Joe Reid

Do you remember that age-old riddle, “what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?” I promise to answer that at the end of this piece. The question for this week’s Star Trek episode is, what happens when an undefeatable adversary meets an undefeated crew? In “By Any Other Name”, our heroes were set upon by an enemy that had them outclassed and beaten in every conceivable way. They faced technology that they could not understand or overcome and a foe that was unrelenting and capable.

When Rojan of Kelva made his appearance, with the female Kelinda at his side, he calmly got right to the point and made his demands clear. Then he followed up by showing the potency of their power, making the crew impotent. Impotence in that within a minute and a half he'd paralyzed the team on the planet, making it impossible for them to fight back. Then he conquered the ship, taking over the critical functions before Kirk had a moment to understand how outmatched they were. Before we knew it the crew of the Enterprise were slaves on their own ship, most of them converted to mineral polyhedrons.

Facing a technologically superior baddie that forced them to play red-light green-light or turned them into bouillon cubes, there should have been no way the crew could have gotten out of this trap. Yet before the end of the episode, the momentum completely shifted to benefit Kirk and company.

This shift happened when Rojan and his associates suddenly became grossly incompetent. In a short amount of time the Kelvans went from calculating, strategic, and disciplined conquerors that were always in control to drunk, horny, jealous, and rebellious teenagers. After failing to subvert the Kelvan technological advantage both on the planet and on the ship, Kirk’s strategy to win boiled down to getting the Kelvans to succumb to human faults.

Drea, the one remaining competent Andromedan

In the end this episode allowed the crew to escape their unbeatable dilemma too easily. I think that more time was needed to unravel a foe of this caliber. After being introduced to such a credible threat, allowing said threat to beat itself so quickly was a real lost opportunity. Perhaps this provides us with that answer to that age-old riddle that I promised at the start. The irresistible force and the immovable object must both yield in order to remain what they are upon meeting. Answers to ancient puzzles aside, having this unbeatable threat beat itself in the final minutes of the show failed to deliver the payoff that I expected from Star Trek. The Kelvans lost all credibility in the end and so did this episode.

2 stars

A Generation of Idiots

by Erica Frank

The Kelvans planned a 300-year journey to the Andromeda galaxy. That's a long time, so the trip was planned to involve multiple generations. The Kelvans were born among the stars, and their children would be born en route to another world.

This is a neat effect.

"Generation ships" have been addressed in science fiction before: Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, Brian Aldiss's Starship ("Non-Stop" in the UK), Judith Merril's "Wish Upon a Star" among them.

In both novels, the "crew" has long forgotten the purpose of their journey. In Merill's story, the arrangement of officers is very different from a standard exploratory mission: the rules have been adapted for multi-generation space travel. In all of them, the authors considered that the great-great-great grandchildren of those who set out will have different goals and priorities than the initial crew.

I do not believe that was considered in this episode.

Set aside that the Enterprise is not designed for this–it does not have food for hundreds of years; its equipment isn't designed to last that long. Pretend that whatever they do to improve the engines will remove the need for repairs or spare parts, and that Sulu's garden will provide enough food. Let's pretend the Enterprise and a small crew can make this trip safely.

The "small crew" is three men and two women. That's not a large breeding pool. But let's pretend that, since they made "perfect" human bodies, they have no troublesome recessive genes; there are no issues with inter-breeding. They designed these bodies with a generation ship in mind, after all.

Do they even know how human breeding works? They didn't know kissing. Are they planning to use the Enterprise's medical records to teach them childbirth, child-rearing, and so on?

They'll need about 4 to 5 new generations per century, depending on what ages they are when they start having children. If they wait until they are 30 or so, they'll have fewer generations–less distance from the original crew. But in that case, the fourth generation will barely remember the originals, and the fifth will not know them at all.

Are they going to have children in neat, exact generations, all births within a 5-10 year period followed by a long gap? How will they enforce that, eight generations down the line?

Nothing about their "generation ship" plan makes sense.

The episode had some good points: Scotty drinking Tomar under the table; Kirk and Spock subtly cooperating to push Rojan into a jealous rage. But the Kelvans' basic plan is so deeply flawed that I watched to see how, not whether, our heroes would foil it.

Two and a half stars. Everything was great… except the actual plot.

Seven Deadlies

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Spock, and Scotty's plan to use the Andromodeans' newfound humanity against them takes rather a dim view of our (mostly) shared species. It seemed like they each picked a Catholic Deadly Sin to specialize in: the Andromodeans already had more pride than they knew what to do with, plus ample greed on tap; to that potent mix, Scotty served gluttony, McCoy provoked wrath, Spock worked with Captain Kirk on engendering envy, and Captain Kirk spiced things up with lust. The only missing sin by my count was sloth, though there is something kind of inherently parasitic, if not explicitly lazy, in their approach to finding themselves a ride home.

"Get off me! You don't rank me and you don't have pointed ears, so just get off my neck!"

I wonder what a version of this story might have been if they had instead focused on virtues, on appealing to human curiosity, ingenuity, empathy, even entrepreneurialism, cleverness, or wisdom. Janice is right, the hard left turn to comedy stripped this episode of all of its potential insight into the human condition, taking us from the meaningful deeps and leaving us in frothy waters. But it is fun to imagine what other species-level traits visiting aliens might be saddled with: Our taste for adventure? Our tendency to anthropomorphize ships? Our habits of collecting pets? There are so many more things that make each and every one of us "human" than the sins the officers of the Enterprise honed in on.

Three stars.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[November 2, 1967] Trouble and Toil (Star Trek: Catspaw)

November 2, 2022 Joe Reid 3 Comments

Such stuff as dreams are made of

by Joe Reid

For the first several episodes, this second season of Star Trek was solidly impressive. We got to attend a Vulcan wedding. We saw a mythological deity from human antiquity in a sci-fi setting. We saw a transistorized deity faced and defeated. Then a dark alternate universe, followed by a giant cornucopia of doom! I regret that I must mention the episode with the red colored rock lizard worshippers, since that was undoubtedly the low point of this season. Sadly, this week’s episode, titled “Catspaw” comes very close to hitting the low that “The Apple” achieved.

Dear readers, in my opinion, futuristic sci-fi shows should avoid doing holiday themed episodes. I have no desire to watch sci-fi episodes about Christmas or Thanksgiving. Nor Easter, the 4th of July, Passover, Saint Patrick’s Day, or Columbus Day. So, watching what clearly stood out as "made for Halloween" was disappointing. Especially since I do not feel that the episode was served by the inclusion of said theme.

We started this seventh episode of the second season on the bridge of the Enterprise as our heroes awaited a report from the landing party composed of Scotty, Sulu, and a Crewman Jackson. A message came in from Jackson, with no word about the others. As Jackson beamed up to the ship, he arrived on the transport circle dead on arrival. Then from the non-moving mouth of the dead man came a ghostly warning to leave the planets and that the Enterprise was cursed.

"There is a curse on you! Also, you've left the oven on"!

Determined to find out the fates of Scotty and Sulu, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy beam down to the planet to find their people. Arriving on the surface they find that it was a dark and foggy night. What comes next, I was not expecting: As the trio begin their search, they are confronted by three ugly witch apparitions, and wouldn’t you know it they have a poem to share. “Winds shall rise, and fog descend, so leave here all, or meet your end.” Poetry so bad that it even garners a negative review from Spock.

"Hail Captain Kirk, Thane of Cawdor!"

If that isn’t a blatant enough holiday reference, Kirk and the others soon find themselves at a dark and eerie castle. Upon entering they are startled by a black cat which leads Kirk to make the first explicit Halloween reference of the night about trick or treat. They follow the cat hoping to see where it would lead them only to be knocked unconscious as the floor collapsed below their feet.

"There's my litter box!"

They awaken to find themselves chained to the walls of a dungeon next to a skeleton that looks exactly like what it is: a Halloween decoration, or maybe a model skeleton from my kid’s science classroom. As the doors to their cell open, we get our first looks at Scotty and Sulu as they enter the dungeon. Both are under some sort of magic spell and can’t speak but make it clear that they will take Kirk and the others to the people in charge.

I hope they weren't paid by the line for this one…

They meet two aliens that have taken the forms of a wand-sporting wizard named Korob, and the beautiful witch, Sylvia. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy find themselves at the mercy of powers that could endanger the Enterprise in orbit, conjure items out of thin air, and mind control their crewmembers.

Korob and Sylvia–a tale of two coiffures

It is here that the spooky themes began to subside as the magicians reveal themselves as truly alien, with little understanding of humans or even having physical bodies. They need humans and our minds to allow them more of the new experiences that they had created. An interesting premise, but since this is Halloween, it is drowned in hocus pocus.

In the end, Kirk is able to learn about and destroy the magic wand…er…transmuter, the item that allowed their powers to work. The defeated aliens returned to their original forms and promptly die. The conclusion of the episode comes fast with virtually no transition, save for a brief explanation from Kirk to his newly liberated crew.

"The missing pages of the script are right there."

Outside of the unnecessary holiday theme, this episode managed to stay true to the elements of what makes Star Trek good. The characters' behaviors were consistent with what we have come to expect. Kirk was smart and brave. Spock was insightful, and others, so long as they were not mind controlled, behaved as they should. Also the aliens had actual, explained reasons for their actions. All this combined made this episode passable and not the absolute debacle that “The Apple” was.

3 stars.

A fool thinks himself to be wise

by Janice L. Newman

It wasn’t a surprise to learn that the same author who wrote "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", one of the worst episodes of the first season, also wrote "Catspaw". Robert Bloch is famous for his horror writing, particularly the movie Psycho. But his horror fantasy scripts simply do not translate well to the grounded science fiction of Star Trek.

"Catspaw" was a frustrating experience. Not just because it didn’t feel at all like a Star Trek episode (and naysayers in the fanzines will no doubt comment, as they did with "Miri" in the first season, that they happened to catch this episode and weren’t impressed), but also because it had the potential to be an interesting episode but simply couldn’t make it work.

Firstly, the idea that the ‘collective unconscious fears’ of our species would be reflected in a gothic castle, Shakespearian witches, and black cats, is simply ridiculous. If there is some kind of collective unconscious for humanity, the reflection of it must necessarily be both much more chaotic and universal to the human experience. This flaw could have been overcome either by saying that the aliens drew their ideas of us from our popular culture, or perhaps that they drew on one particular crewmember’s unconscious fears. Alternatively, rather than using the traditional gothic symbolism, the show could have tried something more innovative, imagining what might frighten any human anywhere throughout all of history.

Another flaw was the pacing. The scene of Sulu unlocking everyone’s chains took far too long, for example, while the final scene felt rushed. The scenes on the bridge were dull, especially with the wooden DeSalle in charge.

"I am acting!"

A particularly annoying problem with the episode was that it set up situations to be resolved and then didn’t follow through. The most egregious example of this occurs when the bridge crew finally manage to ‘dent’ the forcefield around them—only to have the forcefield lifted by one of the aliens before they can escape it on their own. While I would have been mildly irritated at the similarity to "Who Mourns for Adonais?" if the crew had cleverly managed to escape, I was far more irritated that the crew was set up to escape and then not given the opportunity to do. What was the point of those scenes on the bridge, then?

The ‘horrific’ aspects to the story often came across as comedic instead. Perhaps the ugly witches might scare a young child watching the show, but the room full of adults I was watching with chuckled at their appearance and their sung proclamations. One of the saddest pieces of wasted potential was the aliens’ true appearance. They looked like little birds made of pipe cleaners, and when they came on the screen they got the loudest laugh of the evening. A scene which could have and should have been poignant or grotesque was again turned comedic by poor writing, pacing, and framing.

I’m torn as to what rating to give this episode. On one hand, it didn’t even feel like an episode of Star Trek. On the other, there were some interesting elements, and it wasn’t confusing like "The Alternative Factor" or dully exasperating like "The Apple". Plus, there was a cat. Still, when all is said and done, the wince-inducing scenes between Kirk and the Sorceress canceled out what good there could have been. I can’t give it more than one star.

Signifying Nothing

by Amber Dubin

It's ironic that this episode is called "catspaw" because the plot is about as cohesive as a heavily pawed ball of yarn; a tangle of threads that don't hold together or go anywhere.

The acting quality of the episode peaks early with the deeply convincing collapse of ensign Jackson off the transporter pad. Yet the fact that he is the only non-essential crewman sent down to this clearly hostile planet makes less than no sense. Continuing the madness, after Jackson's corpse is used to deliver a message of warning that's immediately ignored, Kirk, Spock and McCoy are subjected to another gratuitous display from disembodied witch heads spouting Shakespearian-esque poetry. You would think this theme of theater-obsessed eccentric illusion-projectors would continue, but you would be wrong, as the only further theatrical implications come in the form of the heavily made up and costumed Korob, whose appearance is given no explanation.

Though you must admit: the camera loves him!

In further defiance of explanation, the crew wakes up chained to the walls of a dungeon after the floor of the castle they enter haphazardly collapses beneath them. Next ensues an absolutely mystifying scene where a zombified Sulu painstakingly unlocks their restraints cuff by cuff. This gesture is immediately made unnecessary when they are teleported into a throne room with Korob, one of their captors. As we've seen in "Squire of Gothos" or "Who Mourns for Adonais?" Korob reveals himself to be overpowered alien attempting to understand the nature of man. He doesn't get too far in his speech, however, before he is upstaged by the real star of the play, the necklace-wearing black cat that transforms into Sylvia, a beautiful woman.

I was hoping Sylvia's introduction would lead to a McCoy-centered episode, as Bones seems to be unable to take his eyes off her.. necklace.. from the moment she enters. That theory is immediately banished as they are all teleported back to the dungeon and McCoy re-enters as a zombie (a role to which he is well-suited). The task of seducing the femme-fatale then predictably falls on Kirk, who delivers his clunkiest and least believable performance in the series so far as he outright fails in his attempt to make her feel too pretty to harm them any longer.

Despite this entirely nonsensical plot, somehow the biggest disappointment of the episode is yet to come as the aliens descend into madness. Korob is killed by a giant door, which is as easily avoidable as it is imaginary, making it therefore harmless to a being capable of casting such illusions. Even more absurdly, these magical beings, who are said to be powerful conjurors with no abilities of sensory perception, are suddenly revealed to resemble tiny, delicate bundles of exposed nerves.

Jim Henson presents: rejected muppets!

The episode abruptly ends, nothing is resolved, no one understands anything better and I'm baffled by the fact that a simple framing device of a crewman explaining Halloween to Spock at the beginning of the episode could have cleared up where these aliens got material for all the imagery in the episode. Instead, we spent more time watching Sulu unlock imaginary restraints than we do deciphering the nature or motivations of crusty blue pipe-cleaner puppet-gods.

Ridiculous. Two stars.

by Gideon Marcus

The Play's the Thing

I must confess–I did not hate this episode. Not because it was good; heavens no! It wasn't even Star Trek. Just our favorite characters having a Halloween lark. In fact, in my mind, I've completely disregarded it as a Star Trek episode. Just as Spock and Uhura sometimes jam together in the lounge (why haven't we seen that this season?), and just as Kirk insists that real turkey be served on Thanksgiving, I've concluded that it is an Enterprise tradition that Halloween is celebrated with a big todo.

I can see Sylvia actually being Lt. McGivers' replacement, and with a minor in theatrics. Once aboard the Enterprise, she began penning her magnum opus: a play involving all of the senior officers of the ship. Suddenly, all the nonsensical bits make sense. The beaming down of Scotty and Sulu as a landing party, the spooky settings and effects, the endless kissing scenes ("Oh, but Captain, these are vital to the plot! Really, it won't breach protocol at all…")

"Did I hear a door slam? Darn. We'll have to do the whole take over!"

Taken as such, suddenly the episode is palatable. It does move pretty well. Theo Marcuse is always a delight (and a genuine war hero, and he has a great last name; he's probably my cousin). The score was nifty, particularly in the fight scene. Less so in the five minute bit when Sulu unlocked Kirk's fetters.

And there was abundant display of a cat. That, alone, is worth a star.

So, again, "Catspaw" isn't a good episode. But I would watch it in reruns three times before I suffered through "The Apple" again…

Two stars.

Something Wicked this way Comes

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

I rather enjoyed this episode. As Amber said, it wasn't good. But it was fun. Maybe it's because I enjoy camp. I liked Theo Marcuse's silks and jewels and perfectly shaved eyebrows. I liked the kitschy sets – perhaps borrowed from a recent vampire flick? – and as other writers have noted, the cat was a special treat.

I was less impressed by how many of the so-called ‘collective unconscious fears' involved woman-hating. Crones and seductresses, liars and cheats, the non-crewwomen in this episode were like something from Jesse Helms' fever dreams, no collective I'm a part of.

Janice's proposition that the episode would have been better if it had featured truly universal fears sparks my imagination far more than anything in the episode itself. What truly scares everyone? In a world with apocalypse-worshiping churchgoers, can we say everyone is afraid of death? I would say that many, many of us are afraid of a nuclear attack from our friends across the Bering Strait, but people living outside of the blast zones could be reasonably excused from the universality of that fear.

Stepping away from the philosophical mindtwister Janice gives us and back to this rather silly episode, I am looking forward to seeing this one in reruns. There's just something so fun about our heroes getting tied up – several times – like maidens in a gothic novel.

I think the Captain is starting to enjoy it…

Watching Captain Kirk once again try to kiss his way out of trouble was made all the more fun when his captor/target caught him at his game and refused to play anymore. Despite Sylvia's embodiment of a mushy handful of cruel gender stereotypes, I found myself enjoying her time on screen more than almost anyone aside from the core cast. Cheers to Antoinette Bower for taking a two-dimensional role and turning it into something fun and memorable.

There were many, many, many ways this episode could have been improved. I would be disappointed if next week's episode shared in the same nasty stereotypes of women. I fear it will, as it centers on one of my least favorite characters in this series, Mr. Mudd.

Perhaps Sylvia will make a guest appearance and turn him into a toad before he hurts more women.

Three stars.

I don't know how likely it is that Mudd will get his comeuppance, but we can certainly hope!

The episode airs tomorrow night. Here's the invitation! Come join us.

Also, copies of The Tricorder are still available — drop us a line for details!

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Galactic Journey

Tag Archives: Jessica Dickinson Goodman

[June 12, 1969] Heavy on the Bitters (Star Trek: Turnabout Intruder)

[March 12, 1969] Rock Opera (Star Trek: "The Savage Curtain")

[February 14, 1969] Like a circle in a spiral; like a wheel within a wheel (Star Trek: "The Lights of Zetar")

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

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

[October 31, 1968] How the Western was won (Star Trek: "Spectre of the Gun")

[October 18, 1968] Little monsters (Star Trek: "And the Children Shall Lead")

[April 6, 1968] The mountain of despair (the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

[February 28, 1968] Zero for the Price of Two (Star Trek: "By Any Other Name")

[November 2, 1967] Trouble and Toil (Star Trek: Catspaw)

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction