With this post, I begin a multi-part series of short entries, Greatest Moments of Trek. Now I want to tell you why I’m doing this, other than the fact that everyone, and I mean everyone, has their own favorite episodes. I feel, in this age when action and sexual tension outstrip meaning in star trek, as though we’re losing something vital, something never meant to be lost in star trek, and I know I’m not alone in feeling that way. I want to build up some credibility with all of you and to show you that I appreciate how great and masterful star trek has been, so that when I start slamming some of its latest incarnations, you’ll understand that I’m not just some guy on a rant, that I am, in fact, deeply offended and bothered as a fan and I hope, if you have loved the show long and long, that by the time we get to something like Star Trek Enterprise and I get royally ticked off, you will be ticked off too, or at least inclined to listen. In short, this is a reflective look at star trek as it has been and hopefully, as it may one day be again, though not as long as J.J. Abrams has anything to do with it. We’ll get to him. This little mini-cycle of blog posts will concern themselves with a different series in turn, and this being the first in the cycle, we go back to the original series. From each series, I’ll talk about the themes and questions and great moments of two episodes. First I’ll paste in the Wikipedia summary of each episode that I want to discuss, just so we all have a common frame of reference, and besides, the Wikipedia summaries are pretty good and they save me some work even if I do edit the summaries a bit now and again. Then I’ll talk about whichever episode it is. Two eps per blog post means that I will have discussed 8 all told, 10 if we include the Animated Series, and I will because it’s both cute and quite underrepresented, 12 if we include Star Trek Enterprise, and I’m saving a really special post for that one. But it’s not part of the Greatest Moments of Trek, series. Finally, my salute to you die-hard fans of the original series, including the cast. Yes, I know it’s been overlooked by a lot of folks in recent years, kind of getting shelved in favor of more modern stuff. And like Leonard Nemoy, I think that fact is a damned shame and that he and his fellow cast members need their contributions refreshed in many minds today. I also know that many of you weren’t overly thrilled with Star Trek 2009, and that those of you who were, liked it mainly because somebody was trying to deal with old trek again. Fair enough. I won’t say more about Star Trek 2009 here. But I put the original series first in my series not only for reasons of chronology, but because I, young though I am, agree with you and share your love for it. So here goes.
The Original Series. Well of course it wasn’t called that in 1966. There was no need to call it that, obviously, because it was the only trek on television and in 1966, no one had envisioned the long history it’s had. Originally, Jean Roddenberry was envisioning a sort of Wild West in space. At first, he wanted to call the show “Wagon train to the Stars,” and the original name of the ship was to be the Yorktown. Just goes to show you how some great ideas change from conception to actualization. The original pilot episode, “The Cage,” starring Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike, was, as we all know, rejected by NBC and the series didn’t take off until NBC’s acceptance of the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” These aren’t the two episodes that I choose to feature in this blog post, but I had to begin at the beginning, and each of them is a good piece of star trek. If you’ve never seen “The Cage” in its entirety, please do so.
Now, I’m only 28, so the original Star Trek wasn’t something I saw on television. It wasn’t even the first series I came to know. First I came to know TNG and the movies and at the same time too. Then I went back and watched the original series. I watched it in a span of about two weeks over one summer break, making trips to the Clarksville Tennessee Public Library, which carried it, and checking out as many videos as the librarians would allow. They tolerantly allowed me to go over the limit. I’d bring the episodes home 15, maybe 20 at a time, stack the tapes up around the sides of the TV out of Mom’s way, and wait for her to go to work. I’d even get up early to maximize my viewing time, and I’d start watching. Being blind, I never knew which cassette I was slipping into the VCR, so it was a surprise every time. Also a bit frustrating if I wanted to see a particular one. You see, the tapes weren’t mine, so no braille labeling allowed, and I generally forgot to ask Mom to help me order the tapes on the shelf. Oh well, I thought. I’d watch them all anyway, and I did. I watched the greatest ones, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” “A Taste of Armageddon,” “Journey to Babel.” I watched the average ones, “The Corbomite Maneuver” “The Apple,” “Who Mourns For Adonis.” And I watched the ones that fans and cast alike considered drop dead flops, among them such gems as “Spock’s Brain.” I got to know the rather impetuous and headstrong Captain James Kirk, the ever logical Spock and the crusty and compassionate Doctor Leonard McCoy as well as anyone ever did who saw them in the 60’s, if I may get away with saying that. And now it’s a pleasure to pick out two of the finest episodes and talk about them with you.
“Mirror, Mirror”
Story by Jerome Bixby
Wikipedia Summary: After failing to persuade the Halkan Council to allow the Federation to mine dilithium crystals on their planet, Captain Kirk, along with Dr. McCoy, Scotty, and Lieutenant Uhura, return to the Enterprise. An unexpected ion storm causes a transporter malfunction, and the landing party beams aboard an unfamiliar Enterprise. The group realizes something is amiss as they arrive on the transporter pad: a goateed Spock harshly disciplines the transporter operator, Lt. Kyle, for carelessness in nearly losing the ship's captain. Parallel universe crew members carry "agonizers", which superior officers use to punish them for dereliction of duty. Kirk deduces that they must have switched places with their mirror-universe counterparts, that the landing party from this universe must now be aboard his Enterprise, and that his landing party must impersonate their counterparts until they can find a way home. In this alternate universe, the USS Enterprise is called an "Imperial Starship" or ISS Enterprise, and a brutal Terran Empire is in power rather than the Federation. Officers rise in rank by assassinating their superiors (as Kirk discovers when Chekov nearly succeeds in assassinating him), and as a result all high ranking officers must hire a personal bodyguard. Uniforms in this alternate universe are very different; side arms and daggers are standard issue, while the clothing itself is much more revealing. Torturing subordinates - by flogging, agonizer, or the “Agony Booth” is an acceptable form of discipline.
Meanwhile, on board the USS Enterprise Mr. Spock notices the changed personalities of the landing party and orders security to take them to a holding cell. The mirror Kirk tries to bribe Spock with offers of power, money or even a command of Spock’s own if he, Kirk, is freed, but Spock simply replies, "fascinating," and continues investigating. Spock comes to the same conclusion as Kirk: the ion storm must have opened a barrier between parallel universes, and the two landing parties have switched places.
Back on the ISS Enterprise, Kirk goes to the captain's quarters, which are quite different from his own. He discovers that the mirror-Kirk has been ordered to annihilate the Halkans if they refuse the Empire's "request" to mine dilithium; horrified, he studies his counterpart's records further. In this universe, Kirk gained command of the ISS Enterprise by assassinating Captain Christopher Pike and was responsible for massacring 5000 colonists on Vega IX, among many other atrocities.
When Mirror-Spock informs Kirk that the ship is ready to attack the Halkans, Kirk orders a 12-hour delay. This piques mirror-Spock's curiosity, and although he obeys the order; he does report the suspicious activity of his Captain to the imperial Starfleet Command, and receives orders to kill Captain Kirk if he does not carry out the order to destroy the uncooperative Halkans.
Having failed to sabotage the weapons systems, Scotty and McCoy work secretly to figure out what happened with the transporter. While Scotty searches for a way to return them to the correct universe, Kirk goes to his quarters and meets the beautiful Lieutenant Marlena Moreau, who refers to herself as the "Captain's Woman". It appears that female crew members may attach themselves by agreement to particular men - Marlena is evidently tiring of her Kirk. Marlena shows Kirk the Tantalus Field, a device in the captain's quarters which can secretly monitor anyone on the ship and "eliminate" them. When he prevents her from eliminating the mirror-Spock, she realizes something is wrong — her Kirk would not have hesitated.
Kirk stalls the mirror-Spock while his crewmembers search for a way home, but Spock is suspicious. Spock, not wanting command of the ISS Enterprise as it would make him an instant target of assassination, decides instead to study the Captain as long as he can.
Scotty has, with the aid of McCoy, rigged up the necessary connections to make a return switch. Mirror-Sulu, the security chief, is distracted from his monitors at the vital moment by Uhura. Kirk reaches the transporter room, but the mirror-Spock leads him at phaser-point to sick bay, where the landing party has gathered. In two ensuing fights, Kirk sequentially knocks the Vulcan and the mirror-Sulu unconscious (Marlena has "eliminated" Sulu's thugs with the Tantalus Field). Uhura, Kirk, and Scotty head for the transporter room again, while McCoy stays behind to make sure that mirror-Spock is all right. In the transporter room, they meet Marlena, who now knows the facts and asks them to take her with them. Kirk refuses on the grounds that the energy is set for four people. Marlena persists and is disarmed by Uhura.
Mirror-Spock suddenly comes to and quickly mind melds with McCoy in search of answers. He discovers the switch, and decides to operate the transporter so that the entire landing party may return to their own universe. This convinces Kirk that this universe's Mr. Spock is still an ethical Vulcan guided by logic. He suggests to mirror-Spock that a Federation-like system is more logical than the ruthless barbarian Empire. Spock objects that one must have power; Kirk informs him of the Tantalus Field, and Mirror-Spock agrees to consider the idea.
On board the USS Enterprise, Spock decides to attempt the beaming sequence at the same time the ISS Enterprise attempts theirs. The switch is successful. As the episode ends, Kirk meets his own universe's Lieutenant Marlena Moreau, who is quite a different woman from her counterpart in the other universe. Kirk tells Spock that Moreau "seems like a nice, likable girl" and that he thinks they "could be friends". The real Spock also comments that the ruthless attitude of the Mirror Kirk, Dr. McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura were refreshing, and "the very flower of humanity".
Aside from getting Spock’s quote at the end of that episode somewhat mixed up, that summary’s pretty good. That episode really started something, apart from its themes and questions that is. Both Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Enterprise dabble in that same alternate universe with DS9 devoting 5 episodes to it. That particular alternate universe has also spawned quite a number of books and short stories including at least one short story anthology. What’s obvious is that fans have remained darkly fascinated with what they perceive as a universe gone awry. I’m one such fan. I admit it.
What really strikes me is the notion that things in that universe are not so implausible as we’d like to believe. As the alternate O’Brian comments a century later in that universe’s timeline (see DS9’s second-season episode, “Crossover”), “It made me start thinking … how different each of us might be if history had been different just a little …… If the conditions we live in were slightly changed.”
We look at an episode like “Mirror, Mirror,” and we say to ourselves, “Thank Heaven that’s not me. That couldn’t be me.” Couldn’t it? To what extent are we products of the moral and ethical zeitgeist that we inhabit during our lifetimes? That is not to negate the role of free will or free choice, but the morays and ethics of the cultures and times in which we live play their parts in shaping the basic frameworks in which we operate, deciding that this course of action is ethical and right, and that some other is wrong. Even if we choose a framework wholly opposed to the beliefs and customs of our own time, as some people do, those beliefs and customs had to shape the framework we choose to live by, even if what they did is to insure that we choose to set ourselves apart from them, if that makes sense. You have to have something to be apart from before you can say, “I’m going to live apart from this culture’s ideals and values.”
So, a militaristic culture where officers advance in rank via assassination, where exploitation of new civilizations is the norm and is policy, a culture where greed and ambition are considered wholesome and healthy parts of a human being’s character. Well, we don’t need to look into space for that. We can see elements of that sort of thinking in many cultures of our own past, from ancient Rome to Nazi Germany. And we have to ask ourselves this: if you and I had been born into a culture like the one in “Mirror, Mirror,” if we’d been born as average people into that culture, how would we feel about the ethics of assassination or exploitation or cruelty? My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that even the most decent among us, decent by our actual standards today, would condone the culture’s ideals to one extent or another. Even Spock, who in the alternate universe is still a logical being, was shaped by its morays. As he reminds our captain Kirk: “Terror must be maintained or the empire is doomed. It is the logic of history.” And in that time and place that was indeed the logic of history. It was also, as Kirk points out at the end, the logic of waste. Ultimately, “Mirror, Mirror” shows us that humanity, even in Jean Roddenberry’s universe could be savage, unprincipled and barbaric, as Spock mentions, and that often times, the accidents of history are the only things that make us turn out any better. I take it as a warning. Wouldn’t you?
“The Enemy Within”
Story by Richard Matheson
Soon afterward, Captain Kirk beams back to the ship. The transporter seems to work smoothly, but Kirk feels disoriented. Scotty escorts him out of the room, leaving it empty. A moment later, a second Captain Kirk materializes on the transporter pad and no one is aware of his arrival. This Kirk is the "other half" of the Captain's split persona: a physical manifestation of his more selfish and evil qualities.
The first thing the "evil" Kirk does is head to sickbay, where he demands a bottle of Saurian brandy from McCoy. McCoy doesn't understand this sudden, aggressive mood swing.
Back in the transporter room, Scotty beams up an animal specimen from the landing party, which appears to be a small, horned, dog-like creature. Two "dogs", however, arrive on the transporter pads. One is extremely vicious, while the other is very timid, yet both look identical. Confirming that the team only beamed one animal to the ship, Scotty realizes that something is very wrong with the transporter system. He is forced to leave the remaining landing party (including Lieutenant Sulu) on the planet until further notice.
Meanwhile, the evil Kirk, appearing drunk and out of control, enters the quarters of Yeoman Janice Rand and lies in wait for her. When she arrives, he grabs and assaults her. She manages to fight back, scratching his face with her sharp fingernails, and then tries to escape. She cries out for Crewman Fisher to call Mr. Spock. Unfortunately, the evil Kirk incapacitates Fisher before he can help. Simultaneously, elsewhere on the ship, the good Captain Kirk begins to show signs of weakness, apparently losing his ability to make decisions and give orders, the so-called "power of command".
The evil Kirk acquires a phaser from a crewman, whom he also incapacitates, and then hides on the lower decks of the ship. Anticipating his moves, the good Kirk finds the evil Kirk on the Engineering Deck, and Spock disables the latter with a Vulcan nerve pinch. Spock is unsure how to proceed until he observes the evil Kirk showing signs of fatigue, which indicates that he may be dying.
It is quickly surmised that neither Kirk can survive for long in his separated state. Time is running out not only for the Kirks, but also for the stranded landing party, the members of which are slowly freezing to death as night falls on Alpha 177.
Scotty reports that the transporter unit ionizer is damaged and would normally take a week to repair; however, he and Spock rig up a connection to power the transporter from the ship's impulse engines. They recombine the dog-creature, but it dies as a result of the strain. Not giving up hope, Scotty continues to work on the problem.
In the meantime, the good Kirk releases his opposite's bindings in Sickbay when the evil Kirk promises not to fight back. However, the opposite does just that: he overpowers the good Kirk and rushes off to the bridge, where he orders the ship to leave orbit. The good Kirk follows and confronts him. The evil Kirk soon collapses from the strain. Good Kirk takes him to the transporter room. With fingers crossed, Spock dematerializes both Kirks, and finally a single Kirk returns. Demonstrating that his power of command has returned, along with his intelligence and compassion, Kirk's first words are: "Get those men aboard fast." The landing party members are beamed up, and aside from a "little" exposure and frostbite, they are fine.
Among its other notable features, this first-season episode demonstrates the use of the Vulcan nerve pinch. Originally, the script called for Spock to sneak up on the evil Kirk and club him over the head with a phaser. But Leonard Nemoy, feeling that that would be too savage a gesture for such a cultured and logical Vulcan, proposed a nerve pinch that would be best performed by a Vulcan as the means to render the bad guy unconscious. And so it was.
The great theme that this episode explores is the positive role that the darker sides of the human psyche play. How would it be, the show asks, if we could just strip away our anger and fear and fight or flight instincts and all the rest and leave the rest of the human machine as it is? What kind of people would result? Well, utopianists would like to tell us that we’d get a race of passive individuals that don’t hurt each other and we’d have a world in which war didn’t happen. Remember this was during the Vietnam era, so the notion of peaceful co-existence was on a lot of people’s minds. Now, don’t take that to mean that this episode is in favor of violent conflict. It’s not. This episode’s essential message is that the human being is what he is, and that if he is to be an upright and ethical and moral person, he needs all of his faculties, including his less pleasant ones.
Kirk, without his violent alter ego, is indeed passive and probably wouldn’t swat a fly if it were on the end of his nose. True enough. He is also crippled by indecision. The, “power of command,” that Spock refers to consists of his decisiveness, his ability to make judgment calls and his ability to lead and give orders. Not to say that he has to be a raging lunatic like his evil counterpart to do those things, but those qualities are missing from this passive, tired, weakened Kirk. The alter ego, meanwhile, is incapable of prudence, restraint, rational decision-making or considering the consequences of his decisions. He is an impulse-driven being, wholly caught up in his emotions, none of which are moderated and all of which are exhibited in the extreme. Without the checks and balances that are placed on us by what I suppose would be our higher brains and higher cognitive skills, we would, in all likelihood, spend our lives behaving as the alternate Kirk did. I’m neither a neuropsychologist nor a psychologist of any stripe, so I couldn’t say for sure.
The point that this episode drives home, though, is that neither Kirk alone can accomplish a thing. Only when the two halves, light and darkness, good and evil, ying and yang if you want, operate in unison can the man get anything done. It seems we need our rationality and our anger, our fear and our reason, to function as parts of a single gestalt. In short, don’t dismiss the negative qualities you have within you; make them work together for positive good. That they can work together for positive good, is the uplifting note on which the show ends.
I probably didn’t choose someone’s favorite episode in here, but I did say I was going to limit myself to only two. If you see other themes in the two shows I mentioned, post a comment and tell me about them. By no means do I consider my own word on the subject to be the final, definitive commentary. I agree with what Leonard Nemoy said in a recent interview, that the original series has been overshadowed, and if this blog post is a bit longer than the ones coming up, hopefully it serves to draw the original series back into the light. I hope you enjoyed it. Next we’ll talk about the animated series.
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