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[March 6, 1969] Different points of view (Star Trek: "The Cloud Minders")

March 6, 2024 Janice L. Newman 3 Comments

Just Bad

by Janice L. Newman

Star Trek has given us some amazing episodes over the past three seasons, episodes that made us think, made us gasp, made our hearts bleed for the characters and made us laugh out loud. Unfortunately, we’ve also had many kinds of bad episodes, from ridiculously, gloriously bad, to offensively, teeth-grindingly bad, to bizarrely bad, to pathetically bad. Yet somehow, The Cloudminders manages to be a different kind of bad than any we’ve seen before.

The story opens, as it so often does, on the Enterprise. A plague has affected a planetary member of the Federation, and the cure requires a substance found in only one place in the galaxy, the planet Ardana. (Is it just me, or have there been a lot of plagues recently?) When Kirk and Spock beam down to Ardana, however, instead of finding the precious shipment of zenite waiting for them, they are attacked.

In the heat of the moment, Mr. Spock has forgotten how to do a Vulcan Neck Pinch

The attack is interrupted by Plasus, the High Advisor of the planetary council. He brings the two of them to Stratos, a city in the clouds, where they meet Droxine, his daughter. Kirk and Spock go to the quarters prepared for them.

"Don't fret, my dear. We only have two more scenes like this where we tell each other things we already know for the benefit of the audience."

Once they’re gone, two guards bring in a “Troglyte”, a member of the underclass who work in the mines. Plasus starts to interrogate him, but he breaks free and throws himself over the balcony.

"Anything to get out of this picture!"

There follows one of the strangest and clumsiest bits I’ve ever seen in a Star Trek episode. Spock has a voiceover where he talks about the split between the haves and have-nots on the planet, overlaid atop flashbacks to scenes we just watched. He also has some highly un-Spocklike thoughts about Droxine’s charm, purity, and sweetness.

And speak of the devil, Droxine appears and proceeds to flirt with him. Having watched nearly three seasons of Star Trek we expected him to politely brush her off. Defying everything we have ever seen and learned about the Vulcan, Spock responds in-kind, flirting back and using what Gideon calls, “the boyfriend voice”. The dialog would have been eye-rollingly bad enough if Shatner had been spouting the lines, but it was unbearable with Spock doing it.

Speaking of Shatner, the scene (thankfully) cuts to where he’s taking a nap. A woman creeps up to him, a weapon in her hand, but he grabs her and immobilizes her before she can do anything. He tells her he’ll release her if she’ll answer his questions, and she agrees.

Yvonne Craig returns to reprise her role in "Whom Gods Destroy" sans green paint…

Unfortunately, the scene now returns to Spock and Droxine, where they are discussing (groan) the Vulcan mating cycle, and whether anything might ‘disturb’ it. Spock actually says, “Extreme feminine beauty is always disturbing, madam.” If this were a ploy, like The Enterprise Incident, maybe I could forgive it (though the writing in that episode was far better than this one). If Spock were intentionally seducing Droxine to get the much-needed zenite, taking a page out of Kirk’s book, maybe I could believe that he would say these words. But there is never any indication that Spock’s words are anything but sincere.

"Can't I do anything? Perhaps some Plomeek soup…or some Tranya?" (or) "Mrs. Droxine, you are trying to seduce me…"

Kirk calls out for Spock and Spock hurries to respond, so I guess at least one thing is still right with the universe. Droxine, Vanna, and Kirk argue politics for a while, and then Vanna is taken away to be tortured for the names of her associates. At her scream, Kirk and Spock come running. Kirk and Plasus argue about whether torture is an effective way to get information until Plasus orders them to return to their ship.

Back on the Enterprise, McCoy helpfully explains that zenite gives off a gas which makes people stupid and violent, but that the effects can be nullified with a face mask or removal from exposure. Kirk tries to explain this to Plasus, who unsurprisingly refuses to listen. Kirk then sneaks back down to the planet, getting beamed directly to Vanna’s cell. He makes a deal with her to trade masks for zenite, but she betrays him as soon as they’re beamed down to the mines. Snatching off his mask, she forces him to start digging. She gets too close to him with her stolen phaser, though, and he overpowers her and triggers a cave-in, sealing them in. Determined to prove to Vanna that the gas makes people stupid and violent (something which her own experiences should probably have convinced her was true, given that she went between the floating city and the mines regularly) Kirk has Plasus beamed in with them and makes him start digging.

"Hear that, Plasus? That's… the sound of… the men… working on the… chain… gang."

Plasus and Kirk, overcome by the gas, start fighting. Vanna gets a hold of Kirk’s communicator and calls the Enterprise for help. Vanna screams that the gas is affecting them as the crew beam to their rescue.

The final act takes place in Stratos once more, the city in the clouds. Vanna has agreed to supply the zenite, and Kirk will give the Troglytes the masks. Spock and Droxine have one final, nauseating moment, Kirk and Plasus snipe at each other unpleasantly, and then the crew leaves with just three hours to spare to save a dying planet.

"That's all for now. Tata!"

Well. That was an episode.

It’s hard to explain just why this episode was so bad. The writing was clunky, with every conversation going on three times longer than necessary. The guest characters felt like childish caricatures, while our beloved crewmembers (especially Spock) felt nothing like themselves. The pacing was bad, the acting not good, the directing clumsy. It was just…bad. In every way. There was no good episode inside trying to get out this time.

If I thought that NBC were the evil masterminds that some believe, I would say that they saved this episode for late in the season deliberately. Really, who’s going to complain about Star Trek’s cancellation after seeing this garbage? But I’m guessing that the sub-par script, sub-par direction, and sub-par acting were actually due to budget cuts, as NBC has shown they don’t much care what the fans think or want or say, no matter how many postcards we send them.

One star.

Not Bad

by "Greenygal"

I have mixed feelings about "Cloudminders", mostly relating to the xenite gas. It's a terribly convenient plot device; it means that I have to sit and listen to McCoy–McCoy!–talk about how the lower class really are mentally inferior to the upper class, which is such an ugly idea and is particularly jarring in this episode about bigotry and social inequality; and even though the stuff is "shipped all over the galaxy" (did no one do any testing on unprocessed xenite?) and the Troglytes mine it all their lives, apparently McCoy is the only one who's ever noticed that raw xenite can affect people's brains.

On the other hand, the Stratos sets and outfits are lovely. I thought the actors for Plasus, Droxine, and especially Vanna put in excellent performances. I really appreciated that Kirk is just not a part of Vanna's emotional story; she's not romantically or sexually interested in him and she doesn't learn love or mercy or responsibility or anything like that from him. Eventually she is convinced that he's telling the truth about the masks and that's as far as it goes. Bonus points for her ending the episode looking at Droxine, the other metaphorical half of the planet's future, instead of Kirk.

And oh, the message. Yeah, yeah, the xenite is clumsy, but it doesn't stop this episode from being sharp and fierce and clear about what it's portraying. Plasus and Droxine are pleasant and intelligent and educated, and they're also terrible bigots who talk so reasonably about how of course it's just natural for the Troglytes to do all the work and have no rights while the Stratosians get everything. Everything Plasus says is awful, but Droxine expressing the same horrible ideas in sweet, reasonable tones is chilling, and emphasizes both that this is a societal problem and that it doesn't matter how nicely you express your bigotry, it's still bigotry.

Also, we've got the Troglyte in the beginning being willing to throw himself off Cloud City rather than be taken, and Vanna being strapped to the torture pillar, as a clear show-not-just-tell for how bad things are under the surface.

Not as fun as Barbarella's torture…

And as a counterpoint to all this awfulness, we've got Kirk and Spock saying in no uncertain terms "What? They do all the work and they don't get the same advantages? They don't get light? That's awful. That's unthinkable. What do you mean they don't understand things like loyalty and justice? Obviously they do, if you're the one behaving like violence is the only option that's your problem, Jack, and also you're not going to lay a hand on her unless you go through me." Our Heroes absolutely refused to tolerate a single bigoted statement, and it just made me so happy to hear. (And in particular I appreciated it in contrast to Last Battlefield's "well, really, when you think about it, aren't both sides equally to blame for racial conflict?")

And what I think really saves the xenite gas from sabotaging the message is that fixing it does not suddenly fix everything. The Troglytes are still working in the mines, and Vanna says they're still going to be fighting for their rights, and Plasus is still talking about how awful they are. (And how "ungrateful"; I really enjoyed seeing Vanna flatly deny that she owes him anything for her training.) The masks will make things better for the Troglytes, and Droxine shows that the Stratosians can change. But there's still a real conflict here that didn't get an easy science-fictional solution, and I appreciate that.

I think 3.5 stars is fair. It's a flawed episode, no question, but the things that I like about it, I really like.

Skin Deep Rationale

by Joe Reid

The notion that a presumed higher group gets to benefit from the labor of a presumed lesser group while giving no thought to the lives and wellbeing of that lesser group is premise of this week’s episode of Star Trek. “The Cloud Minders” is a funny title for this episode, seeing as how the title itself even ignores the existence of that lesser group. This episode wasn’t named “The Dirt Miners”. It was those in the clouds who held the authority, and those under the surface who challenged that authority. At first glance this premise sounded compelling. On review the whole premise fell apart due to one simple fact—the Troglites really didn’t need the Stratosians for anything.

The episode began with Starfleet in need. They needed the mineral, zenite, to save people on another world. The Stratosians, who somehow had authority to represent all Ardana to Startfleet, promised that they would provide the mineral that they themselves would not take part in gathering. The loathsome long haired Troglites were tasked with collecting the zenite. The complete lack of anyone being compensated for anything was the real head scratcher here. The Federation was giving the people of Ardana nothing for their zenite. The Stratosians appeared to offer the Troglites nothing for their labor in mining the zenite. From what I gleaned, the Troglites seemed as if they were entirely self-sufficient and had no need of anything from the Stratosians. Granted, they did come up with a plan for capturing Starfleet officers in order to ransom them for weapons to fight the cloud people for the sins of talking down to them. Outside of emotional slights, the Troglites didn’t appear to require food, clothing, or shelter from the Stratosians. Why bother with fighting them?

"We need nothing from you—certainly not these stupid-looking masks!"

Looking at the Stratosians themselves: people with time to pursue art, learning, and leisure, but utterly lacking the ability to do labor or automate labor. If they were truly learned, they would have had a method to keep the people that they depend on happy.

The reason that this episode logically fell apart for me, outside of the fact that any real motive for conflict was absent, was that the conflict was resolved by the Enterprise crew, by forcing both sides to learn of a problem that neither side even knew existed. The knowledge that zenite poisoning caused the retardation of the Troglites didn’t truly change the circumstances on the planet. It didn’t even remove the bigotry of the Stratosian leader. It just made Kirk and the Troglites happy, and that fixed everything.

Setting aside the flawed logic and lack of rationale in this episode, the costumes and sets felt very original. The premise of the story was worthwhile as an ideal, but its shallow execution detracts from the weight that this episode could have carried. I would like more from my science fiction.

2 stars

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

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[March 4, 1969] Here Endeth The Lesson (Doctor Who: The Seeds Of Death [Parts 4-6])

March 4, 2024 Jessica Holmes 1 Comment

By Jessica Holmes

“The Seeds Of Death” draws to a close, and time is running out for planet Earth. Let’s check in with the Doctor and company to see how humanity’s fate unfolds, and whether the human race will learn anything from this whole ordeal…

In Case You Missed It

At the end of the last episode, the Ice Warriors began their attack, sending a seed pod to the London T-Mat control centre. The pod soon bursts, instantly killing the nearest man, and leaving the rest struggling for breath. They’re able to disperse the cloud of spores, but realise too late that they’ve dispelled it into the open air. And soon the seeds take root, growing, bursting and expanding across the grounds outside. And it’s not just London—it’s happening to T-Mat centres across the northern hemisphere.

Maybe these seeds are why the Ice Warriors always sound so terribly asthmatic? Poor things have allergies.

Meanwhile on the Moonbase, Jamie and Phipps sneak around the base, successfully snatching an unconscious Doctor away from under the Ice Warriors’ noses. They also attempt to reach the temperature controls, but find the vent too small to wiggle through. Zoe is small enough, however, and volunteers for the job.

Back on Earth, the autopsy report on the dead man comes back, and Radnor and Eldred are baffled to find that he died of oxygen starvation. It takes several minutes for the brain to start dying from lack of oxygen, so how can he have died instantly? Unfortunately, this is never adequately answered. And they don’t get much chance to mull it over, because the invasion has begun. An Ice Warrior suddenly bursts from the London T-Mat booth. Eldred and Radnor watch in horror as it kills their guards before heading out to terrorise the rest of the facility.

Starting to worry about how long Zoe and Phipps are taking, Jamie is about to go after them when an Ice Warrior stumbles upon the room in which they are hiding. He and Kelly attempt to take it down with the heat trap, but it seems that its power supply is depleted. All they can do is hide.

Fewsham spots Zoe and Phipps as they open the vent, and pretends not to notice, instead choosing to distract the Ice Warrior guarding him so that she can sneak past. However, the Ice Warrior turns as she tries to sneak back out. It guns down Phipps, then turns its weapon on her. Fewsham finally finds his backbone, trying to stop the Warrior. He’s no fighter, but luckily the rapidly increasing temperature overwhelms the foe. He assures Zoe that he will help her and her friends get back to Earth, and she slips back into the tunnels.

Meanwhile in the hideout, the Doctor picks the worst possible time to regain consciousness, alerting the Ice Warrior to the group’s presence. But the Ice Warrior is feeling a little hot under the collar, and soon collapses. They’re as sensitive to heat as I am.

Zoe makes it back to the group, and they all head back to the control room, free of Ice Warriors for the moment. They’ll have to be quick, all piling into the T-Mat booth. Fewsham beams them down, but chooses to stay behind. The others don’t understand why at first, but it becomes clear soon enough that he’s actually being brave. He’s spying on the Ice Warriors.

The others are back on Earth in the blink of an eye (the Doctor is quite disappointed by how boring the trip is), where things are not going well. Having killed the T-Mat control guards, the invading Ice Warrior is now wandering the complex, killing anyone who gets in its way. Its latest target is the Weather Control Station.

The Doctor is eager to start analysing the mysterious fungus rapidly spreading outside, and soon discovers that it contains a compound that absorbs oxygen very efficiently. And it’s very aggressive. A pod starts growing out of the sample, and the Doctor throws everything in the lab at it. The only thing that works…is water. Gosh, it would be a terrible pity for the Ice Warriors if they’d decided to use their water-vulnerable biological weapon against a planet where water covers about 70% of the surface.

… Oh.

At least they thought to do something about the rain. That’s why they attacked the Weather Control Station. The rain has been cancelled for the foreseeable future.

Not realising there is nobody there, Zoe and Jamie go to tell the Weather Control people to bring down the mother of all rainstorms. What’s worse, they inadvertently lock themselves in with the Ice Warrior.

Meanwhile on the Moon, the Ice Warriors, pleased with Fewsham’s apparent loyalty to them, show him their communications device. They assure him that as long as he continues to serve them, he will be spared. The Warriors discuss the final phase of the invasion with their grand marshal, and unseen, Fewsham activates the video link with Earth.

Radnor and Kelly are preparing to launch a satellite to act as a relay to enable T-Mat to be controlled from Earth, albeit at a lower capacity. Fewsham’s transmission changes things, however. The Ice Warrior fleet will be following a signal from the device on the Moon in order to join up with the advance party. If that signal were to be muddled or interrupted, the fleet would miss the Moon and end up in orbit around the Sun (should I point out that the Sun is quite a lot further away than the Moon?). At the Doctor’s urging, Radnor and Kelly immediately start preparing the satellite to send out a false homing signal.

As for poor Fewsham, his act of bravery earns him the wrath of the Ice Warriors.

Half the battle is won! But there’s still the fungus to deal with. The Doctor’s horrified to learn the lone Warrior was last seen at the Weather Control Station, and he takes off as fast as his silly little run can take him.

Finding the door locked, he hammers on it as he struggles against a sea of fungus. He pulls some terribly funny faces as the tide rises. All his banging and yelling distracts the Ice Warrior from hunting the still-trapped Jamie and Zoe, allowing them to escape their hiding spot. As Jamie leads the Warrior on a wild Scot chase, Zoe gets the door for the Doctor. He glides in majestically on a wave of foam… and promptly slips and goes head over heels.

Did I see Zoe laughing at him, or Wendy Padbury corpsing? Who’s to say.

Jamie meets back up with the group, and they all hide in the solar energy room as the Ice Warrior starts attempting to breach the radiation door. Radnor is sending a squad of guards, but will they get there in time?

For that matter, will they do any good? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Ballistic weapons seem to have no effect on the thick armour of the Warrior, and the squad are soon forced to retreat. However, the Doctor and Zoe have made good use of their time, converting a couple of energy cells into a portable heat gun. It makes short work of the Warrior.

The Doctor figures he can get the Weather Control working again by bypassing the control panel. It’s fiddly work, but he thinks he has it right. Probably.

With the rain taken care of, the Doctor has one last little thing to do. Once the satellite is in orbit, he’s going to T-Mat himself to the Moon and destroy the Warriors’ homing device. He almost looks cool with the heat gun strapped to him, confidently getting into the T-Mat booth. Almost. This is still the Doctor we’re talking about.

Unfortunately he’s interrupted, and the Ice Warriors destroy his weapon. And it seems the device is still transmitting. The Ice Warriors decide to keep the Doctor alive for the time being— they still need someone to operate the T-Mat for them. And yet the Doctor doesn’t seem all that worried.

He has no reason to be. His plan has worked. The device is still transmitting yes—but only within the confines of the control room. The fleet, following the false signal, has missed the Moon entirely, and is rapidly heading towards the Sun, with no means of course correction.

The Ice Warriors are outraged at him for killing an entire fleet. The Doctor simply retorts that they tried to destroy an entire world.

The Doctor’s saved Earth, and now it's Jamie's turn to save the Doctor. Arriving in the nick of time to distract the Ice Warriors, the Doctor and Jamie finish off the last two with their own weapons and a power cable. They return to Earth as the rains start. This storm is going to be truly Biblical.

All that’s left for the people of Earth is to, uh, get T-Mat back up and running (with some safeguards this time) and otherwise go right back to how they were doing things before this whole fiasco started. Eldred points out that having access to alternative means of transportation would have made this whole situation a lot easier, but nobody seems to agree with him. Nobody other than the Doctor, but he isn’t sticking around to make any supporting arguments.

Naturally.

Yes, that sounds a fairly accurate assessment of humanity. We’re not very good at learning from our mistakes—or when we do, we take home the wrong lessons.

The Right Lessons

Well, we got plenty to enjoy in the last half of the serial. Action! Suspense! Patrick Troughton pulling really funny faces! It’s a pity however, that the debate that drove the first half of the serial was forgotten towards the end. Even though old technology ended up saving the day, Radnor and Kelly never really acknowledge that fact. In the end, even the near-ending of the world couldn’t break through their arrogance.

That said, the old technology vs new technology conflict didn’t die entirely. I suppose you could say it moved to a different venue. It’s not just the humans who are over-reliant on new tech. It’s the Ice Warriors, too. See, space travel is good ol’ Newtonian physics, and physics is basically practical maths. It’s lots and lots of maths. When we engage in space travel, we don’t have homing signals to rely on, just cold hard sums. I can only assume that the Ice Warriors have all but forgotten how to do this. Why do difficult calculations when you can just blindly follow a signal? Unfortunately, as with T-Mat, this technology which makes travel so much easier is also subject to tampering. And now they’re too dead to have learned their lesson.

I’ve been a little confused over the past few serials as to how much of a pacifist the Doctor actually is. Sure, he states himself to be against violence, but he has absolutely killed people, both directly and indirectly. But I'm coming to think of it not as character inconsistency, but character development. When his adventures had much smaller stakes, or had other people nearby who were willing to do the dirty work, he certainly was a staunch pacifist. I don’t think I could have imagined William Hartnell’s Doctor using a heat gun like that. I think he’d be horrified at the new (well, not so new any more) Doctor for even thinking of it. That’s not to say that I think it was the wrong thing to do. Rather, I think the Doctor has learned that sometimes he doesn’t have good options. For him, pacifism is an ideal. It’s something he always aspires towards, but sometimes cannot reach.

Sometimes there is more at stake than his own morality.

And that, I think, brings me to another thing that the serial delves into: the nature of cowardice. There’s a lot to be afraid of in this story, and I think the serial makes clear that it’s perfectly all right to be afraid, as long as you still do the right thing. Look at the Doctor, he’s often frightened. Not just in this serial but in more or less all of his stories. Put him in a threatening situation and he’ll pull all sorts of faces while clinging to the nearest Scotsman for moral support. But he always steps up when there’s more at stake than his own safety. He might be a bit of a scaredy-cat, but he’s certainly no coward.

Nor is Phipps, who we see in the latter half of this serial is struggling to cope with the stress of the situation. While leading Zoe through the tunnels, he suffers an attack of nervous exhaustion. Zoe deals with it in her characteristic matter-of-fact manner. It’s not any kind of failing, it’s a symptom. They rest, he calms his nerves, and they get back to it. In his story, we see that even the bravest can only keep it up for so long—and that’s okay.

So what is cowardice? Surrendering to fear, and allowing others to come to harm in your stead. And that’s what we see with Fewsham. I cannot blame him for being scared, but I can blame him for collaborating with the Ice Warriors to save his own skin at the expense of his friends, colleagues, and the human race. And yet even for him, there’s a chance for redemption. He doesn’t have to somehow stop being scared, and he never does. To his dying moment, he’s terrified. But he does the right thing, and that makes all the difference. He might have spent most of the story a coward, but he doesn’t die as one.

Final Thoughts

That was fun, even if nobody learned anything. But having given it thought, I don’t think it matters. These people are not real. The lesson isn’t for them. The lesson is for us.

Not that there are many world leaders eagerly tuning into a low-budget science fiction serial for moral lessons. (Except Lizzie in Buck House. I bet she loves it.)

But this is a programme aimed at young minds, and I think it is trusting them to watch and listen thoughtfully. By not allowing the characters to come to a definite verdict, it invites the young audience to consider for themselves. Hopefully they will draw some useful conclusions, and perhaps one day avoid the mistakes of an imagined future.

4 stars out of 5 for "The Seeds Of Death".

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[February 28, 1969] We Reach (Star Trek: "The Way to Eden")

February 28, 2024 Amber Dubin 4 Comments

The Corrosive Threat of Antidisestablishmentarianism

by Amber Dubin

US-world relations have been growing increasingly concerning as we venture cautiously into the first couple of months of 1969. From never having quite gotten back on the right foot since last year's Tet offensive (and with this year's edition currently ongoing) to the aftermath of the Pueblo incident, to the newly renewed Moon Race, it sometimes feels like America is standing on the world stage with shaky legs. It is easy to react to these uncertain times by pining for a prelapsarian epoch in human history.

It’s rather apropos, then, that Star Trek writers have once again turned to the often-referenced biblical Garden of Eden. Here, however, I'd argue that “The Way to Eden” approaches this subject in an unique way by suggesting, as Spock does here, that all advanced societies “hunger for an Eden, where spring comes.”

What happens when you set transporter coordinates for Haight/Ashbury

The episode opens on a familiar scenario where the Enterprise is hotly pursuing a stolen vessel that is overheating its engines to alarming levels. They manage to beam over the occupants just before the fleeing vessel explodes, and the crew of the Enterprise is confronted by a motley crew of ragamuffins. Kirk greets the strangely dressed, wild, love-and-peace-preaching, anti-authoritarian naturalists by informing them that they were only spared consequences for stealing and destroying a Federation ship because the wayward son of a political figure is among them.

"Don't trust the Fuzz, man!"

They respond to Kirk’s mercy without gratitude, disrespectfully requesting that the Enterprise act as a ferry in their quest to reach a planetary Eden and relocating to sickbay with extreme reluctance.

Meanwhile, Ensign Chekov discovers that a lovely dark-haired Russian beauty from his Starfleet Academy days is among the band of miscreants. Irina Galiulian and Chekov lost touch when she dropped out of Starfleet to chase nebulous and flighty pursuits, a choice that Chekov deeply disapproves of. They have an angry, yet charged, discussion which resolves nothing before she returns to her more amiable family of choice.

Is Chekov going through captain's training? Because I thought it was Kirk's job to be so enamored of the pretty lady that he forgets to protect the ship.

Back in sickbay, the situation has descended into chaos. The group’s leader, ex-research engineer Dr. Sevrin, has been determined to be a carrier for a superbug that is both incurable and created by the advanced sterilization techniques used to sustain Federation environments. He is thus quarantined and isolated from his flock, an action against which the rest of the group protests heavily.

Acting as both the snake and the snake charmer, the now deemed insane Dr. Sevrin spurs on the rest of his group to break him out of isolation and seize control of the Enterprise, knowing their musical seductions and rapscallion ways will cause the crew to lower their defenses and underestimate any hidden, nefarious intentions.

Tonight on Hullabaloo!

Furthering this goal, Irina isolates Chekov and effortlessly steps into the role of femme-fatale, doing little else other than batting her lashes and breathing lightly on Chekov’s lips to get him to spill his guts about every single operating mechanism of the ship’s security and navigational systems. Next, the group minstrel, Adam, begins a pied piper act, strumming and singing his way through the whole ship. He even convinces Spock to display his instrumental talents in a seemingly impromptu concert that gets broadcast over the ship’s speakers, in a very effective misdirection campaign that covers for his comrades as they disable ship security and free their leader.

Now in control of the Enterprise, the group barrels into Romulan space towards a planet that ship’s scanners have defined as Eden, setting a trap to disable the crew and allow them time to escape. There is a brief pause where members of the group try and fail to dissuade the power-mad Dr. Sevrin from making this trap fatal for the Enterprise crew, but thankfully this is the one part of their plan that the crew is able to disrupt before succumbing to those permanent consequences.

Asleep on the job

The band briefly appears victorious in the acquisition of their fabled garden, but find the paradise hostile to humanoid life, and the bare-footed hippies literally get burned by the acid-coated plants growing in an Eden that was supposed to welcome them. Faced with the devastating failure of his quest, Dr. Sevrin willfully consumes the deadly fruit, very plainly demonstrating that the insanity brought on by his dual lust for anarchy and power was fatal.

The metaphorical apple (still much better than "The Apple")

I think boiling this episode down to “the one about beatniks in space” is both simplistic and disrespectful to the subtlety of the message it’s trying to convey. I see how, on its face, it could appear that the plot of this episode is a ham-fisted attempt to judge the reactions of the Enterprise crew when introduced to hippies from our time, but I’d argue their role here is to demonstrate the corrosive nature of antidisestablishmentarianism. I think the fact that such a small group of humanoids, with no greater powers of intelligence or manipulation than any other aliens we’ve met so far, was able to so swiftly and effortlessly take control of the ship, speaks to the power of hiding in plain sight.

Rather than the loudly chanting overtones that kindness can be fatal, the more subtle message here is that these intruders merely awakened seeds that were pre-sown into the mind of every being in known society. The unspoken fear that our zeitgeist whispers, is that every established system only functions as long as the seeds of hedonism, anarchy and sedition do not grow to destroy it. It is the reason power fears the rhetoric of communists, cultists and anarchists; why it tries to silence the rabble-rousers, quell the mobs, round up and isolate the dissenters, and burn the witches.

The wolf is efficiently hidden in sheep's clothing when love-drunk, starry-eyed hippies prove themselves not to be peaceniks –but weapons. Weapons so effective that, in a matter of hours, they reduce an advanced, peaceful, orderly, military vessel to the plaything of a handful of gleeful, half-naked, singing fools.

If only they let Bob Hope tour the Enterprise, the crew wouldn't be so starved for entertainment. Then again, they might…

This episode very effectively warns against the dangers of what can happen when a charismatic, silver-tongued leader sinks his fangs into the impressionable minds of restless sycophants. It demonstrates how powerful that sharp-witted leader can become when he knows how to wield such universally disarming weapons as pleasant music, a righteous and honorable cause, and the promise of affection and approval from smiling, scantily-clad, untamed youths.

Despite its disarming façade, this episode is not a light romp. It is a cautionary tale; and in my opinion a particularly well-woven yarn.

5 stars.

Space Hippies

by Erica Frank
We only see six of the Edenites, but they must be part of a larger movement: Spock knows their greeting and their philosophy, and "reaches" them well enough to be the ship's liaison with them. Either they are very numerous, or very influential, or both.

Clockwise from center: Dr. Sevrin, a brilliant engineer; Adam, a musician; Tong Rad, son of the Catullan ambassador, who plays drums; nameless blonde musician who plays the stringed wheel; nameless brunette woman; Irina Galliulin, Chekov's former girlfriend.

Spock respects their goals even when he recognizes that Sevrin is manipulative and deceitful. At least three of them are well-educated, talented, and lauded in their fields; we have no reason to suspect the others are random dropouts. These aren't people who have failed at mainstream society and are chasing myths to make up for their inadequacy–rather, they have judged the Federation and found it wanting in soul and harmony. As Spock says, "They regard themselves as aliens in their own worlds… a condition with which I am somewhat familiar."

They have lost their leader and their Eden, but four of them remain, and they need not give up their quest for a peaceful community, away from a technological, regimented society.

We've seen at least two places they could go: One where people can live a mellow and gentle life, but slowly lose their drive for creativity. And one where they could have fantastic adventures, but none of it would be real. Or they can keep searching for a tropical paradise planet that's not full of acid and poison, although any of those in Federation space are likely to be populated ("exploited," I'm sure they'd say) unless there's some reason not to go there.

…Maybe paradise planet is being used as a retirement facility now, and is too commercialized for the hippies. Maybe the Shore Leave planet is restricted – the aliens who run it don't want the Federation trying to figure out their technology. So perhaps they need to look for somewhere else. But on their quest, they can visit other planets and find people looking for a simpler, gentler life.

They'll need to find a new lead guitarist.

Five stars (but I'm probably very biased). I loved the music, and that the ending, although touched with tragedy, wasn't "it's all ruined." There's room for hope that someday, they will find their Eden.

Back to the Beginning

by Gideon Marcus

Remember first season Star Trek? When Kirk was a "a stack of books with legs", stiff and Hornblower-like? When Spock was cold on the outside, hot on the inside? When other members of the cast had lines? When the Enterprise halls were filled with crew members and guests? When music was a fundamental part of the show? (viz. Uhura singing in "Charlie X" and "The Conscience of the King")

There are many reasons to like "A Way to Eden", and they are well-represented in the above entries by my colleagues. But what I loved about the episode the most was that it felt like a return to the Trek I liked best. After so many episodes in which the characters acted contrary to their nature, when plots were half-baked, when technology was inconsistent, when our favorite vessel seemed sterile and incomplete—finally, the Enterprise feels alive again.

You can even see the relief in the crew. The fellow guarding the brig was mesmerized listening to that (quite excellent) jam between Spock and the exquisite and talented Deborah Downey. He must have been just parched for entertainment. No wonder they all were so susceptible to the influence of One.

I'd watch this episode of Jazz Casual any day…

Spock's heart-wrenching expression of support of the Edenites' quest, his solidarity with their feeling of alienation within utopia, was worth the price of admission all on its own. The space hippies weren't characterized as naive, pampered rich kids who didn't know what was good for them. They are the free spirits for whom middle class American values just don't wash. A key message of this episode: surely, the Federation must be big enough for them, too. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, ¿qué no?

And finally, if Charles Napier and Deborah Downey ever release an album of their performances on this show (I can absolutely buy that Adam's space guitar provides perfect acoustics and amplification for his voice), I will be the first in line. Also, if anyone's started a Deborah Downey fan club, I want to be a charter member. Otherwise, I might have to make one myself…

Four stars.

[Come join us tonight (February 28th) 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 20, 1969] The Old Man and the She (Star Trek: "Requiem for Methuselah")

February 20, 2024 Joe Reid 4 Comments

by Joe Reid

This week’s episode of Star Trek will likely turn many members of the audience into devout Buddhists. It’s an episode which stands as a reminder of the destructive nature of desire and why the devotees of the Buddha eschew that emotion. “Requiem for Methuselah” showcased a level of desire that proved more contagious and damaging than any infectious fever.

The show started with the Enterprise in orbit of Holberg 917-G, in the Omega system. 3 crew members had died and 23 were sick with Rigelian Fever. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beamed down the planet in search of ryetalyn, a mineral that could cure the ill.

As they were about to split up to locate the vital substance, a hovering robot reminiscent of Nomad, from “The Changeling”, showed up and fired on them. It rendered their weapons useless and had them cornered until “Do not kill!” was shouted by a voice whose owner was out of view.

"You are the Kirk? The Creator?"

A finely dressed older man with a Caesar haircut revealed himself, demanding that they leave the planet. Kirk and crew would not be deterred and threatened they would take the ryetalyn if they had to. The man, named Flint, said that he could kill Kirk, implying that the crew and the starship were no threat to him. McCoy pleaded with Flint, saying that Rigelian fever was on par with Bubonic plague. This caused Flint to think back to the city of Constantinople and what the plague had done to the people there. Flint relented and allowed the crew to stay, while his flying robot, M-4 (likely unrelated to M-5 from “The Ultimate Computer”), went off to gather ryetalyn. Flint promised that M-4 could gather the materials faster than they could. Being that those who were sick on the Enterprise had only four hours before the disease progressed, McCoy and the others agreed to allow it.

"What else can I get you? A bag of reds? Keys to my Mercedes? An original copy of the U.S. Constitution?

Flint took the trio to his castle. Inside Spock noticed a treasure trove of classic art. Art from DaVinci. Music from Brahms and other fineries. Flint left them alone to enjoy some brandy, after telling them that he lived alone with only M-4 as company, while in another part of the castle, a lovely young woman watched Kirk and the others on a screen.

"I do so love that Johnny Carson!"

Flint entered the room and spoke to the young beauty, named Rayna. She looked on the other men with desire and said she wanted to meet them, since she had never met other people besides Flint.

As M-4 returned with the ryetalyn, Spock continued to marvel at the priceless art pieces housed in the castle, but he also noted that they were created using modern materials and not ancient ones. Flint then entered and sent M-4 away to prepare the ryetalyn, with the promise that it would be completed faster than it could be on the Enterprise.

As an apology for his initial rudeness, Flint introduced Kirk and the others to Rayna, her very presence being as a gift to the men in attendance. At first sight, desire for the beautiful young woman flooded Kirk’s eyes. Flint’s method of apology apparently landed well with Kirk in particular.

Rayna teaches Kirk how to hold his stick

The introduction of Rayna started the main arc of the episode in earnest. Her beauty and intelligence seemed to have stirred something in Kirk rather quickly. She in turn began to explore emotions that she had never felt before due to Kirk’s focus on her.

The desire between Kirk and Rayna was visible and out in the open, whereas Flint was a man filled with deep desires that he protected viciously. The story also revealed him as a man of many secrets, holding so many of them that it was not until we finally learned the truth about him and also about Rayna, that the real danger of the episode took hold.

In the end, the painful desire and vast longing on display in this episode brought one character to complete ruin and threatened to destroy the rest in their wake.

In conclusion, outside of the insane speed at which Kirk falls for Rayna, this episode had an interesting plot and premise. The characters seemed compelling and the type of people that would be tempting to see on adventures of their own. Suffice it to say, that Rayna and Flint didn’t feel disposable to me as other characters often do. Also, the narrative twists and surprises near the end were not overly foreshadowed. They took me by surprise and I appreciated that. Now, if I can just find a Buddhist temple to ensure I remain free of what happened in this episode.

Four stars

What Could Have Been

by Janice L. Newman

“I’m tired of broken episodes,” my daughter said wearily after the credits had finished rolling. I couldn’t help but agree. For the past several weeks, we’ve had frustrating episode after frustrating episode, made all the more dissatisfying because in every case, we can see what could have been.

With shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the plots are generally silly enough not to be taken seriously. But we’ve seen just how good Star Trek can be, and it’s obvious that the script writers are trying. Sadly the most recent batch of episodes has been filled with poor characterization of our beloved crew, plots that made no sense, stories that tried to Say Something but stumbled over their words, and things that…well…just didn’t feel like Star Trek!

The most recent episode suffered from many of these ailments. For one, it had two conflicting plots: the epidemic on board the ship and the mystery of the old man and his ‘daughter’ on the planet. A competent version of the script would have played these two threads off of each other, keeping the viewers in suspense about whether the captain and his men would be able to bring back the cure in time. But since all three crewmembers treat the epidemic situation casually, it’s hard for the viewers to take it seriously or become invested in it. We never see anyone sick on the ship, so it’s up to Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley to give us a sense of urgency. Instead, Spock is intrigued by the mystery surrounding Flint and Kirk far too quickly becomes enamored with Rayna. Their constant distraction feels out of character and irresponsible to the point of dereliction of duty. Yet it could have been good with a few changes.

Then, too, the plot thread of Rayna’s humanity could have been great. Star Trek has played with the idea of androids or computers with emotions before, but mostly it's used the concept as a plot device where such feelings can be leveraged as tools to trick or confuse hostile mechanical beings. Rayna’s awakening to human emotions could have been poignant and meaningful. Instead it felt cheap and forced. I could even have accepted her becoming infatuated with Kirk since he was one of the first humans she’d ever met besides Flint. But Captain Kirk returning her feelings is patently ridiculous, particularly given the extremely short amount of time they knew each other, her utter lack of personality, and the fact that his entire crew were hours away from painful deaths. By making the story mainly about Kirk’s feelings instead of hers, the writer really missed the mark. Two of the major problems could have been easily fixed if Kirk was focused on helping his crew while Rayna actually expressed her growing feelings for him (or for another character—either Spock or McCoy would have been a more interesting choice).

Flint watches his home-made stag film; good thing his peep show has a good cinematographer!

The interplay between Spock and McCoy was good as always, partly because Kelley is such a pro in his delivery, while Nimoy’s ‘stoic face’ is excellent. But Spock’s choice at the end killed any good will the story had managed to scrape together. The idea that Kirk, no matter what he said in a moment of weakness, would willingly submit to having his memory erased is ludicrous. Even setting aside the events of Dagger of the Mind, where he had his memory toyed with, this is a starship captain we’re talking about. I cannot believe that he would truly want a memory, even a painful one, removed. And I likewise cannot believe that Spock would do such a thing without permission. It was an interesting idea, but once again the execution fell flat because it felt all wrong. If it had been a different crewmember, McCoy for example, and if he’d given his permission, it could have been an amazing moment. Instead, it was ugly and nauseating. Quite simply, it didn’t feel like Star Trek, or at least not the Star Trek I love: where women are treated with respect, Spock would never take advantage of his captain even in the name of ‘helping’ him, and Kirk actually cares about his crew.

Two stars, because inside the bad episode there was still a good episode trying to get out.

Just Another Pretty Face

by Lorelei Marcus

I found Louise Sorel's depiction of Rayna to be vaguely reminiscent of another blonde android I'd seen on TV a few years before: her stiff head tilts and unfocused gaze reminded me of Julie Newmar's Rhoda, the superhuman, do-it-all robot thrust into Bob Cumming's unwilling care on My Living Doll.

As Rhoda's guardian, Cummings had to ensure her artificial nature was kept secret, but this became increasingly difficult due to Rhoda's extraordinary abilities. The show shouldn't have worked, but despite Cummings' off-putting performance and his character's incompetence, it hung together—thanks to Julie Newmar's incredible physical comedy and skill. Be it the countless amusing ways Rhoda misinterpreted commands, or her incredibly mixed up piano performance, or the way she instantly slumped whenever anyone pressed the little "off button" on her back, Rhoda was a wonderfully funny character and (more importantly) individual, and she was the reason I tuned in every week to watch the show.

The same, sadly, cannot be said for Rayna. While it's true that wacky humor wouldn't suit the character nor the tone of the episode, any form of charisma would have made Rayna better than the blank slate we got. The only details we know about her are the number of degrees she has, and that she would have liked to have had a conversation with Spock—something she never actually gets to do.

Instead, she's whisked into a forced, 20-minute romance with Kirk, in which we continue to learn nothing about her personally. Then she dies, unable to make a single choice for herself because of the clashing desires of other people. Bleah.

For all that we've had too many Kirk love interests this season, I'm going to make the unpopular assertion that this one could have worked. I think Rayna could have so bewitched Kirk that he would lose sight of the urgency of saving his ship and crew, but for that to work, she would have needed to make us fall in love with her, too. Reduced to a pretty face, without initiative nor personality, I can't imagine she'd be able to seduce Ensign Chekov, much less Captain Kirk! For the missed opportunity of an interesting character, and the loss of integrity of everyone else's character as a result, I give this episode 1.5 stars.

"Train up a child in the way that he should go" — King Solomon

by Erica Frank

I planned to write about Rayna – about the utter ridiculousness of "the equivalent of 17 university degrees in sciences and art" as judged by one man. About her claim that Flint is "the greatest, kindest, wisest man in the galaxy," based on her vast experience of… an hour spent in the company of three other men.

Those made more sense after she was revealed as an android, programmed rather than taught. Others have already mentioned how bland her robotic tabula rasa personality was, without managing to be quirky or entertaining.

I find myself more interested in Flint. The man who claims to be (presumably is, in the Star Trek universe) Methuselah, Solomon, Lazarus, Alexander the Great, Merlin, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Brahms. An artist, inventor, and wizard: his ultimate creation is the woman he falls in love with.

Did he invent the paper-thin large-screen television as well? Can I get one of those?

…Whom he promptly loses to a broken heart; he failed to teach her anything about how to make hard choices, how to find a solution when both options will hurt someone. …Just what did those 17 degrees cover? Any study of history should be packed with examples of art made in despair after facing choices with no good outcomes.

But why should she be facing a no-good-options choice? After six thousand years of human life, in an array of different cultures, can he not contemplate a relationship with more than two people? Solomon had 700 wives, but Flint today cannot handle the idea of a wife with two husbands?

Flint despairs that Rayna might care for someone other than him.

Ah, but Rayna doesn't see him as a husband yet—no surprise, since he's been telling her he raised her from childhood, like a parent. If she was to be his mate, why didn't he teach her that: "Someday, when you are ready, we will be married—full partners who love each other." She would've been looking forward to some unknown change, some nebulous marker of full adulthood, to take her place by his side. (With or without Kirk as a harem-boy on the side.) Instead, he treated her like a daughter, like a student, not like someone intended to be his peer.

Setting aside all of that—and much more that I didn't mention—once he had perfected Rayna, why didn't he just make another one after Kirk left? Even if he's limited to a normal human lifespan now, there's time to try again.

The current Rayna is 17. One more and she's legal!

Two stars. The idea of Methuselah changing identities and living throughout human history is fascinating, but it is bungled here.

Too Many Beaches to Walk On

by Gideon Marcus

One of our readers sends us letters after every episode. He has developed a rating system not on quality, but on the number of times an element or device is used in an episode. For instance, "Wig Trek" (if there are wigs in evidence), "Cave Trek" (if there is a subterranean setting), etc.

He recently introduced a new scale: "Love Trek". More and more often, we see one member of the crew or another falling in love. This theme has been used to good effect in shows like "This Side of Paradise" (Spock falls in love, or at least, is able to express his love), "The City on the Edge of Forever" (a better case of "Tahiti Syndrome" than "The Paradise Syndrome", honestly), and "Spectre of the Gun" (Chekov and the saloon girl, whose name I can't remember.) It is less tolerable in any case involving Scotty, as the engineer, when lovelorn, becomes a moron. C'est l'amour, I guess.

It is least tolerable when it's Captain Kirk. Oh sure, the Enterprise's skipper has developed a reputation for randiness over the course of the last three years, but usually, said reputation is actually undeserved. For the most part, Kirk is the pursued rather than the pursuer, or he uses sex as a weapon, kissing antagonists until they submit. First season Kirk was positively chaste, and he recognized that his supreme obligation was to the Enterprise. Afflicted by the alcohol-like effects of the Psi 2000 disease in "The Naked Time", Kirk laments that he has no time, no capacity for love—"no beach to walk on."

It's something of a tragedy, but it's also a poignant and useful character trait. The scene in "This Side of Paradise", when Kirk's fidelity to his ship shakes the influence of the Lotus-Eater spores of Omicron Ceti Three in "This Side of Paradise", is still perhaps my favorite of the series. In "Elaan of Troyius", when Kirk is made a thrall of Elaan by her love-inducing tears, the audience knows he will break their influence once his ship is put in danger—and he does.

So howthehell does Kirk find the love of his life in less than five minutes of dancing with ~~Rhoda~~ Rayna the Robot? Especially such a bland, nonentity of a not-woman? (If she'd been played by Julie Newmar, there might have been some—not much, but some—justification.) Kirk's entire crew is dying. He is dying. His crew is his ship. Yet he carouses, drinks brandy, banters about Brahms and Da Vinci with Spock, and generally acts as if he is on shore leave rather than less than four hours from the death of his first and greatest love.

These three really look like they're worried about the imminent death of the Enterprise crew…

The episode is not utterly horrible. As Janice notes, there are some intriguing elements. That it has some resemblance with Forbidden Planet doesn't do it any favors, but both share an ancestry that goes back to The Tempest, so I can forgive that.

But the utter savaging of Kirk's character, not to mention Spock's uncharacteristic blasé attitude, his sudden role as a love guru, and his casual use of the Vulcan Mind Touch (remember when using such was all but tabu?) makes me hate this episode in hindsight all the more.

1.5 stars.

[Come join us tomorrow (February 21st) 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

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

February 10, 2024 Jessica Holmes 1 Comment

By Jessica Holmes

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

Let’s take a look.

In Case You Missed It

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

Say, for example…an alien invasion?

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

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

Why, a museum of course.

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

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

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

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

It doesn’t inspire confidence.

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

Or helmets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then the Ice Warriors send a seed to London…

Incuriosity and Obsolescence

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

But we’ll have to wait and see.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

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

January 31, 2024 Lorelei Marcus 3 Comments

by Lorelei Marcus

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

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

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

And "That Which Survives" is no exception.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Gideon Marcus

Full reverse!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blech.

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

2.5 stars.

by Janice L. Newman

Slivers of Silver

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

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

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

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

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

Are There Men on This Planet?

by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

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

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

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

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

3.5 stars

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

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

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

January 24, 2024 Gideon Marcus 3 Comments

by Gideon Marcus

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

Unfortunately, Gideon has other plans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three stars.

Deeply Creepy

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even Spock is incredulous of this episode

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

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

2 stars.

How Crowded Is This Place?

by Erica Frank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old Fools

by Joe Reid

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

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

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

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

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

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

One star

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

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

January 20, 2024 Jessica Holmes 2 Comments

By Jessica Holmes

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

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

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

In Case You Missed It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beep boop.

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

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

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

A Few Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Finally…

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

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

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

3.5 stars out of 5 for The Krotons.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

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

January 16, 2024 Janice L. Newman 6 Comments

by Janice L. Newman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rarely seen "tickle" setting of the phaser

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow, this racial metaphor is so nuanced and clever!

A punchline not worth waiting for

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

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

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

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

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

The ashes of Detroit still smolder after 50,000 years

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

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

Bones beneath the fat

by Lorelei Marcus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One star.

An end to war

by Jessica Dickinson Goodman

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

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

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

But what of Lazarus?

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

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

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

Three stars.

You've Come a Long Way, Baby

by Mx. Blue Cathey-Thiele

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

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

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

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

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

"Preach it, Lokai."

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

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

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

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

3 stars

Rich Tale to Poor Tale

by Joe Reid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy memories of traipsing through the streets of Dresden

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

Two stars

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

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Tag Archives: television

[March 6, 1969] Different points of view (Star Trek: "The Cloud Minders")

[March 4, 1969] Here Endeth The Lesson (Doctor Who: The Seeds Of Death [Parts 4-6])

[February 28, 1969] We Reach (Star Trek: "The Way to Eden")

[February 20, 1969] The Old Man and the She (Star Trek: "Requiem for Methuselah")

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

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

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

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

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

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

55 years ago: Science Fact and Fiction