The Way To Eden

Space hippies! Like Lazarus from The Alternative Factor, The Way To Eden is perceived as being locked in an eternal struggle with Spock's Brain over which is Star Trek's most notoriously bad episode. Actually watching both stories is an anticlimax because neither represents Star Trek at it's worst. The pair are not the most stupid episodes ever, or the most boring, or the ones which most completely fail to tell an ordered story. In the end they are just a pair of below average Star Trek episodes; and statistically 50% of all Star Trek episodes must be below average. Admittedly some episodes of Star Trek are more below average than others. Spock's Brain and The Way To Eden both stand out as representatives of everything which went wrong with Star Trek. The tone of Spock's Brain is the problem. For the first time the series seems to have taken on a Batman like self-mocking quality, and if the show is mocking itself then by extension it must also be mocking the viewer. "You actually like this stuff? But look how stupid it is!"

In the case of The Way To Eden the most obvious problem is the concept; Captain Kirk versus the space hippies. It's a symptom of the way Star Trek dumbed itself down that what used to be a strength of the series, its ability to comment on contemporary issues with allegory, has now become a weakness.

Star Trek always aspired to for stories to have a ripped-from-the-headlines element and given the events of 1968 an episode about youth in revolt becomes as inevitable as a story about overpopulation, or the loss of jobs to machines. It's a good technique for generating stories but it's not a guarantee of success. Mirror, Mirror one of Star Trek's best episodes isn't an allegory of anything. The Ultimate Computer worked at the time, and still works today, because, "we're all sorry for the other guy when he loses his job to a machine," but what lets the story down is some fuzzy characterisation. With the distance of history Star Trek's endorsement of the war in Vietnam in A Private Little War just seems muddle-headed, but it must have been actively offensive to any watching 18 year old worried about the imminent arrival of their draft card. "War isn't a good life, but it's life," indeed.

Where The Way To Eden stumbles is that its use of hippies is incredibly lazy. These space hippies are not an allegory they're just hippies. It's all to easy to imagine someone seized on the description of "23rd Century Flower Children," from D. C. Fontana's outline for a story called Joanna and expanded those four words into an episode which relied on a whiff of topicality to add freshness to what would otherwise be routine Star Trek. The creative process appears to have stopped right after some said, "hippies are in the news, we should do a story about them". The result is a compilation of 1968-style hippies greatest hits; they have crazy lingo that grups can't understand, they dress strangely, they sing constantly, they scorn authority figures, they have a sit-in in the transporter room, and the scene of them outside sickbay demanding to see Doctor Sevrin is meant to look like the protests outside of the 1968 Democratic National Convention/the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square/Paris (unfortunately being made at the fag-end of the third season means there's no money for extras so Doctor Sevrin's five followers are being held back by two security guards and Chekov, the scale of the protest is small enough to be laughable).

Significantly what these hippies don't do is is mess around with mind altering substances. Doctor Sevrin is probably meant to be an amalgam of various counter culture figures; Ken Kesey, or someone from the Yippies, or Timothy Leary; Sevrin is explicitly referred to as an academic Doctor. In one way or another they and the hippie movement are associated with the use of drugs although you'd never realise that from watching The Way To Eden. This is understandable considering NBC's Standards and Practices Department would never allow it, but it highlights the limited ambition of the script. No one involved in writing The Way To Eden has any interest in the counter culture movement or exploring why people attempt to drop out or rebel against the system, or imagining how this might happen in the future.

Phyllis Diller and Bob Hope: The Last Hippies on Earth... in 1997

They just want to do a story about hippies because hippies are in the news. In 1967 a television special called The Phyllis Diller Happening was broadcast which featured Phyllis Diller, Bob Hope, Sonny Bono, and Cher in a sketch called The Last Hippies on Earth…in 1997. Frustratingly the sketch isn't online but I'm willing to bet that if it ever becomes available it won't hit any different beats to The Way To Eden (slang, protests, sit-ins, etc) because the people responsible for The Way To Eden don't understand the difference between exploring a contemporary issue and lazily referencing something the viewers at home have heard about.

This sense of laziness and limited ambition runs right through the script. The initial set up is promising; Sevrin is insane, his followers are naive, the Enterprise crew resent the disruption to the smooth running of the ship, and Spock attempts to act as a bridge between the two camps but over the course of the episode nothing changes. Characters do things because the plot doesn't work if they don't. The Way To Eden apes the complexity of a story like Charlie X but doesn't seem to understand what this means for the characters. It means that when Irina, Chekov's ex girlfriend from Starfleet Academy, wants to help Sevrin take over the Enterprise she should feel guilty about manipulating the feelings he still clearly has for her. Choosing between Sevrin and Chekov should cause Irina emotional conflict but it doesn't. At the end of the episode she and Chekov have a reconciliation of sorts and her betrayal is never mentioned. Irina and Chekov's feelings for each other, and Irina's part in Sevrin's takeover of the ship are two separate plot strands and nobody involved in writing the episode saw any reason why these plots should intersect. In the same way there should be consequences for Rad when he tells Sevrin that he knows Sevrin's plan to use ultrasonics against the Enterprise crew will kill, and not stun. Sevrin has lied to his followers, and Rad acknowledges that lie and is complicit in the attempted murder 430 people. Yet the script continues to paint all Sevrin's followers as naive dupes led by a lunatic, as if Rad hadn't even spoken.

The problems with The Way To Eden ultimately come down to a sense that Star Trek has been massively simplified. In Charlie X the script and the actors work to make the audience realise that although Charlie is the antagonist of the episode he's not evil. What happens to Charlie is for the best but also a tragedy; and the audience is capable of realising this without having it pointed out to them directly. In Errand Of Mercy the script emphasises both the differences and similarities between Kirk and his Klingon opposite Kor as does the script for Balance Of Terror when comparing Kirk and the Romulan commander but no one feels the need to lecture the viewer. By contrast The Way To Eden steps on any potential moment of subtlety. "His name was Adam," says Spock in one of the most plonkingly awful lines of the script when the landing party find the body of one of Sevrin's followers; poisoned after eating deadly fruit. As in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield the Enterprise is reduced to a galactic taxi with Kirk and the crew unwilling spectators. There's no conflict for Kirk here, no decision for him to make. He just sits around unable to take any action.

Frustratingly The Way To Eden contains glimpses of a better story. When McCoy tells Kirk Sevrin is a carrier for Synthococcus novae, a lethal disease which evolved due to Star Trek's "aseptic, sterilised civilisations" we now think about antibiotic resistant diseases like MRSA. In writing about a charismatic leader who establishes himself as the manipulative guru to a group of hippies The Way To Eden prefigures Charles Manson and his Family. Film Editor Fabian Tordjmann does brilliant work at the end of act three. Adam starts singing as Sevrin's deadly ultrasonics incapacitate the Enterprise crew. "Steppin' into Eden. Yea, brother. Steppin' into Eden." As Adam grins and sings with two unnamed female hippies we cut to a tracking shot of the bridge with the crew lying on the floor and the song continues, slightly filtered to suggest we are hearing it through a speaker on the bridge. "No more trouble in my body or my mind. Gonna live like a king on whatever find. Eat all the fruit and throw away the rind. Yea, brother." Finally we cut to a big close up of Doctor Sevrin who says, "now we may leave." 

Enterprise crew deaths: None.

Running total: 56

Day Of The Dove

Day Of The Dove is one of those episodes Star Trek occasionally produces where all the interesting stuff is going on at the edge of the story. A Private Little War's dull central idea of nice hill people vs nasty villagers is much less interesting than the motivation of Krell the Klingon. What's does he want from the planet? Is he helping build a network of satellite planets to act as a buffer zone against the Federation? Are the Klingons also excited about the, “interesting organic compounds,” McCoy has found? Is he just messing up the planet for sheer devilment? The concept of the Gorgon, and its vague resemblance to H. P. Lovecraft's ideas of ancient corrupting evil, is far more interesting than anything else to be found in And The Children Shall Lead.

Day Of The Dove is a better episode than either A Private Little War or And The Children Shall Lead but the central message is spelled out so clearly it becomes obvious and trite. Peace is better than war. Far more interesting is the unnamed and unexplained alien.

At the start of the episode the Enterprise is investigating a distress call. One hundred men, women, and children have been wiped out by an unidentified craft. No trace of the colony, or any residue of the force used to destroy it, remains. The implication seems to be that the distress call was faked by the alien (in fact there probably wasn't even a colony) and that the alien is also playing with the perception and memories of the Enterprise crew to stop them noticing any holes in this scenario. At the same time the alien has also faked an attack on a Klingon ship. Physical damage has been inflicted on the ship and, again, the crew's perceptions altered to make them believe the Enterprise crew is to blame.

This is an astonishingly powerful alien. It can manipulate memories emotions and matter, and yet here it is setting up a fight between 38 humans and 38 Klingons to turn the Enterprise into an eternal all it can eat hate buffet. How did it end up here, in reduced circumstances, faking distress calls in some galactic backwater? It's fun to imagine what it got up to in the past. Perhaps it visited the Eminiar system to provoke the war between Eminiar VII and Vendikar. It probably fed off that conflict for years until both planets instigated the simulated war we see in A Taste Of Armageddon, and the alien found that computer controlled wars were too emotionless for its taste.

The story isn't about the alien, it's about Kirk and the Enterprise crew and the Klingons breaking their cycle of prejudice and hatred. It's fun, and the message is meant well and delivered sincerely, but ultimately the storytelling is too convenient to make for a great episode. The all-powerful alien becomes oddly powerless at times. When Kirk, Spock, and Mara find it in the Enterprise corridors it cowers as if trapped in the corner of the ceiling although we've already seen it move effortlessly through walls. Then while the three watch it demonstrates its dependence on hostile emotions before floating away. Several times in the episode the alien provokes Enterprise crew members into mutinous rages, Chekov on the bridge when he talks about his non-existent brother Piotre and Johnson just before he is knocked out by Spock, and yet a simple command across the ship's intercom from Kirk and Klingon Commander Kang is enough for all fighting to immediately stop.

It's also difficult to square the anti-war message of Day Of The Dove with earlier episodes especially A Private Little War in which Kirk argues for war when he says, “war isn't a good life, but it's life.” A Private Little War writer Jud Crucis (actually Don Ingalls hiding behind a pseudonym) cannot be blamed for the contradictions caused by a later episode but it's a good demonstration of how little overall continuity there was between different episodes of Star Trek.

Enterprise crew deaths: None again.
Running total: 48.

And The Children Shall Lead

“We're writing radio shows. All the actors can do now is stand around and talk to each other.” Maybe no episode better demonstrates Robert Justman's complaint about season three Star Trek than And The Children Shall Lead where the script itself actively works to prevent Kirk from taking any meaningful action.

The central premise of writer Edward J. Lakso's script is that an evil alien called the Gorgan is using children as its agents of evil. Not a bad idea in itself. Creepy kids have a history in science fiction, The Twilight Zone episode It's A Good Life or the 1960 film Village Of The Damned, an adaptation of John Wyndham's book The Midwich Cuckoos. The problem is that here the children are used in such a way it becomes impossible for Kirk to take any substantial action against them without looking like a bully, or a monster. Kirk's standard operating procedures of fighting, or seduction, are certainly off limits. The whole plot could be wrapped up in five minutes if Kirk stunned the kids with a phaser, or got McCoy to sedate them, but that's something no network would be prepared to show. When McCoy also forbids Kirk from questioning the children on psychological grounds, Kirk is effectively unable to act or investigate. One of the reasons this story feels so static is that Kirk becomes a spectator. He's unable to do anything except react; react to the children taking over the Enterprise, react to footage from Professor Starnes' tapes, and react as he loses command.

There's also a production decision which adds to the inert feel of the story. The Gorgan is realised using special effects. On screen he is always semi transparent and covered with a glowing green special effect. This limits Marvin Belli's movement, and also stops him from interacting properly with the other characters. If Marvin Belli was the world's greatest actor he might be able to overcome the limitations of not being on the same set as the principle cast, and a costume which restricts his body language to the extent he is just a talking head, but he isn't the world's greatest actor; he's a celebrity lawyer who unsuccessfully defended Jack Ruby. It turns out stunt casting isn't a new development

Having written a script which actively works to prevent the lead characters from doing anything except watch footage from the doomed Starnes Exploration Party, Edward J. Lakso is then faced with several problems.

A) Kirk must learn why the children are behaving so strangely.

B )Kirk must learn about the true source of the children's power.
C) Kirk must learn how to summon the Gorgan.
D) Kirk must learn the Gorgan's plan.

Lasko's solution results in one of the silliest Star Trek scenes committed to film. It's certainly the laziest scripting since The Alternative Factor. In context the scene just about works, as does the whole episode thanks to director Marvin J. Chomsky and film editor Donald R. Rode (genuinely one of the unsung heroes of Star Trek his work lifts otherwise average episodes like Return To Tomorrow or A Private Little War), but out of context the scene where the children summon the Gorgan to the bridge of the Enterprise is ludicrous.

The problems with this scene are many. Firstly none of the crew react in an even slightly human way. When Kirk dashes onto the bridge, having discovered the Enterprise is no longer orbiting Triacus, the children are in the middle of the ritual to summon the Gorgan. Uhura is gazing placidly at them as if this is the most delightful thing she has ever seen, while Chekov is oblivious to the din going on just behind his right shoulder. Then when the Gorgan appears everyone looks surprised, but that's pretty much the minimum required level of reaction. There are two armed guards on the bridge what are they there for if not to point their phasers at intruders who materialise out of thin air?

Secondly, no one says anything. Not a, “kids please don't play in here,” as the children conduct their ritual, or a word from Kirk. It's genuinely ludicrous that Kirk doesn't try to engage with the Gorgan but instead stays silent for almost 90 seconds. William Shatner rightly gets a lot of criticism for his performance in this episode but frankly given the material he's working with it's not really a huge surprise he's given up and is apparently just trying to amuse himself. Watch this scene from the beginning of act three as the Gorgan appears, delivers a speech, and disappears again, before the children leave the bridge. Compare the silent statues who passively watch all this with the bridge crew we've seen over the previous 58 episodes; how do you think those characters would have reacted? By wondering how those characters would react, you've already put in more work than Edward J. Lakso. He needs a scene in which the Gorgan infodumps his entire plan in such a way that Kirk learns it, and so that's exactly what he writes. Only the Gorgan has information to pass on so none of the other characters are given any lines. We're back at the scripting level of The Alternative Factor where McCoy allows Lazarus to walk out of sickbay because the plot will grind to a halt if he doesn't.

Thirdly what dialogue there is, is terrible. “Friends we have reached a moment of crisis. The enemy have discovered our operation, but they are too late,” says the Gorgan, apparently misunderstanding his part to be the role of narrator. The enemy haven't discovered your operation, you've revealed yourself to them. The only reason you have reached “ a moment of crisis” is because your followers decided to conduct their secret ritual in public.

Fourthly, despite now knowing the Gorgan's plan no one makes use of the information. At the end of the Gorgan's speech three of the children are allowed to just walk off the bridge. One of the security guards even follows the children into the turbo elevator. Presumably he's following the captain's orders to the letter. “Post a guard on the children. They're to be kept under constant watch.” Obviously he's not going to intervene as the children take over the Enterprise, he's only been ordered to watch.

There is the core of an interesting premise in And The Children Shall Lead, but the finished episode never comes close to realising that potential. The script never makes it clear if the Gorgon is somehow one of the marauders who operated from Triacus surviving in psychic form, or the entity which inspired the marauders to their centuries long reign of terror pillaging the Epsilon Indi system. If it's the latter there's an intriguing H. P. Lovecraft aspect to the story. The idea that a cave on the planet Triacus is the home of an ancient corrupting evil, and that evil has now latched on to the children of the Starnes Exploration Party; corrupting them, turning them against their own parents, and ultimately encouraging the children to focus its power against their own parents and drive them to suicide. Unfortunately, something else the script never makes clear, is what exactly did happen to the parents of the Starnes Party. Did they kill themselves to escape the horrific illusions and tricks of the Gorgan, or did their own children summon up their parents darkest fears and drive them to suicide?

Enterprise crew deaths: Two security guards are accidentally beamed into space. The most unpleasant crew death since Yeoman Thompson.
Running total: 48.

The Paradise Syndrome

Location filming is always guaranteed to make an episode look lavish, and that's certainly the case with The Paradise Syndrome. The opening 30 second pan across a lake, with tree covered hills in the background and Gerald Fried's specially composed score, could come straight from a nature documentary. With that said, it's surprising the immediate opening shot looks so terrible; a blank white washed out sky and murky contrast making the trees nearly indistinguishable. This must have been a tricky shot to capture because the light levels need to be correct for the end of the pan when the landing party beam in, but the opening picture quality is so ropey it looks more like badly shot stock footage and dilutes the immediate impact.

The story itself has the same problem as A Private Little War. There are lots of intriguing ideas in play around the fringes of the episode but the core story for Kirk is dull; we've seen him have romances which end tragically before. The point of the story is to grant Kirk's wish for a simple life, as is clearly set out in the teaser. 

MCCOY: What's the matter, Jim?
KIRK: What? Oh, nothing. It's just so peaceful, uncomplicated. No problems, no command decisions. Just living.
MCCOY: Typical human reaction to an idyllic natural setting. Back in the twentieth century, we referred to it as the Tahiti Syndrome. It's particularly common to over-pressured leader types, like starship captains.

Unfortunately as soon as Kirk gets inside the mysterious obelisk his mind is wiped, so the person we see running around, living free of complications and command decisions, and falling in love isn't really Kirk. The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Inner Light hits similar story beats to The Paradise Syndrome but deals more effectively with an Enterprise captain being assimilated into a different culture without using amnesia as a crude plot device. Using amnesia to drive the plot also carries the disadvantage that the audience knows Kirk's memory must be restored at some point. The episode becomes about waiting to see how Kirk's memory comes back and, when it does, what additional plot device will be used to break up the relationship with his Native American wife Miramanee.

Much more interesting is the B story. The Enterprise came to this planet to deflect an asteroid which is due to hit in 59 days. With Kirk missing Spock takes command of the Enterprise and pushes the ship beyond its limits, burning out the star drive. Now running on impulse power the Enterprise spends the next 59 days limping back to the planet, with the asteroid only four hours behind. At this point the two stories come together because Spock believes the alien obelisk holds the key to deflecting the giant rock, and Kirk in his new position as village medicine chief is expected to, “go inside the temple and make the blue flame come out.” 

There's any number of things Margaret Armen's script gets right. It's well paced. The crisis point comes at the end of act three which leaves the whole of act four to wrap up the plot; reuniting Kirk Spock and McCoy, restoring Kirk's memory, getting inside the obelisk, deflecting the asteroid, and mourning the death of Kirk's pregnant wife. The episode takes place over nearly two months giving enough time for Kirk's relationship with Miramanee to develop credibly. The passage of time is also handled very stylishly. Just after Spock has burned out the Enterprise engines McCoy angrily confronts him in Spock's quarters. When McCoy leaves we cut to the events around Kirk's wedding to Miramanee, before returning to the Enterprise. Only three minutes of screen time have passed and when McCoy walks back into Spock's cabin it looks as if he wants to continue the earlier argument, but then it quickly becomes clear 58 days have passed in the space of a single cut. There's also an excellent attempt to explain the number of humanoid aliens and parallel Earth civilisations the Enterprise has encountered. The obelisk is the product of an alien race called The Preservers.

MCCOY: Were you able to make sense our of the symbols? 
SPOCK: Yes. The obelisk is a marker, just as I thought. It was left by a super-race known as the Preservers. They passed through the galaxy rescuing primitive cultures which were in danger of extinction and seeding them, so to speak, where they could live and grow.
MCCOY: I've always wondered why there were so many humanoids scattered through the galaxy.
SPOCK: So have I. Apparently the Preservers account for a number of them.

For everything Margaret Armen's script gets right the problem remains that the B story on the Enterprise is more interesting than the Kirk in love A story. It's a shame because this is one of those episodes where everyone is putting in a lot of effort. The alien obelisk looks fantastic. It's huge. One of the biggest set elements the series has built, even the stone plinth appears to be specially constructed, and on location it looks solid and part of its world. There's also an attempt to do something new with the transporter effect. Standard practice is to cross fade from a freeze frame of the location without the landing party, to a freeze frame of the location with the characters in place and start running the film normally once the transporter effect has finished. This can be seen when the landing party arrive at the start of the episode. Watch one of the trees in the background, the branches are blowing in the wind and then freeze, and then fade to a slightly different position before starting to move again. This almost unnoticeable when the motion of the background is very slight, but at the end of the episode when tree branches are thrashing around it would be really obvious. It's not clear how the effect is achieved but at the end of the episode as Spock and McCoy, and later Nurse Chapel, beam into the storm the background stays in motion. In both cases the scene carefully cuts away from the materialisation effect before it is complete, so there's obviously some editing slight of hand taking place.

It's odd to realise how the asteroid impact/deflection story is way ahead of its time. It's taken for granted now that Earth is the subject of regular impacts but Luis and Walter Alvarez's mass extinction theory which really brought this idea into the public domain was not proposed until 1980. The Paradise Syndrome pre-dates all the best known fiction on the subject; the Sean Connery film Meteor was released in 1980; Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven's novel Lucifer's Hammer, 1977; Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama, 1972. Some idea of how unfamiliar this idea must have been for the contemporary audience can be seen in this exchange.

SPOCK: Doctor, that asteroid is almost as large as your Earth's moon. Far enough away, the angle necessary to divert it enough to avoid destruction is minute, but as the asteroid approaches this planet, the angle becomes so great that even the power of a starship 
MCCOY: The devil with an asteroid! It won't get here for two months, Spock!

SPOCK: If we arrive at the deflection point in time, it may not get here at all.
MCCOY: In the meantime, what about Jim?
SPOCK: Once the asteroid has been diverted, we'll return here and resume the search.
MCCOY: That may be hours from now. He may be injured or dying.
SPOCK: [picks up two stones] Doctor, assume this is the planet we're on. This is the approaching asteroid. If we don't get to that deflection point in time, it will become physically impossible to divert this asteroid. In that case, everyone on this planet will die, including the captain.

MCCOY: Can a few more minutes matter, Spock?
SPOCK: In the time it's taken me to explain the problem, the asteroid has moved from here to here. The longer we delay, the less the likelihood of being able to divert it. Beam us up, Mister Scott.

How often has Star Trek stopped to explain how tractor beams work? Or time travel; or warp drive; or phasers; or artificial gravity? These are all science fiction concepts familiar to the audience through films or other television programmes. But in 1968 something as simple as the mechanics of diverting an asteroid is new enough to require an explanation for the audience.

Margaret Armen's inspiration for the asteroid impact plot may have come from a 1967 Time Magazine article Systems Engineering: Avoiding an Asteroid. The article was based on a student project set by MIT Professor Paul Sandorff. His systems engineering students were asked to devise a plan to destroy the asteroid Icarus; assuming the asteroid was on a collision course with Earth. Alternatively Margaret Armen may have watched a repeat of The Wandering Asteroid, an episode of 1963 British puppet series Space Patrol. This series was definitely shown in some American television markets; Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski has said it was his favourite series growing up in New Jersey. 

Enterprise crew deaths: None again.

Running total: 46

The Omega Glory

For 35 minutes The Omega Glory plods along before abruptly taking the end of act three turning to Crazy Town. This is the episode where the savage Yangs of planet Omega IV are revealed to be misunderstood Yankees who have been engaged in a war with the Kohms (Communists, do you see?). This is the episode where the Yangs recite a corrupted version of the Pledge of Allegiance, complete with hand on heart gesture. This is the episode where the Yang's leather bound Bible, with Holy Bible written on the front, contains a picture of the Devil looking uncannily like Mr. Spock. This is the episode where Captain Kirk reads aloud from the Yangs' copy of the Preamble to the United States Constitution (which also establishes that the Yangs' country was called The United States because the document is perfectly readable on screen). This is the episode where the Yangs of the United States of Omega IV have the same flag as Earth's United States of America. This is also the episode where this astonishing duplication of Earth's history and artefacts is never explained.

The split between acts one to three and act four of The Omega Glory is so extreme it's almost two different episodes. The first two thirds of the story are A Private Little War but with the focus of the storytelling shifted. A Private Little War is about Kirk attempting to find the best way to intervene in the Klingon driven conflict between the hill people and the villagers. The Omega Glory is about Kirk attempting to find the best way to deal with rogue starship captain Ron Tracey who has gone native and spent the last six months directly helping the Kohms in their war with the Yangs. A similar shifting of the story focus can be seen between Obsession and The Doomsday Machine where Obsession is about Kirk's determination to hunt down and kill the cloud vampire at all costs, and The Doomsday Machine is about Kirk dealing with Commodore Decker who is determined to hunt down and kill the planet killer at all costs.

The teaser and opening act form the strongest part of the episode. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Lieutenant Galloway investigate the mystery of the abandoned USS Exeter. Subdued lighting, and a simple echo effect sells the idea that these familiar sets are actually a different starship. These sequences are atmospheric and the mystery of what has happened to the Exeter's crew is well handled. The empty crew uniforms and piles of crystals are instantly reminiscent of the previous episode By Any Other Name, and the Kelvan's ability to distil bodies down to crystal-like shapes. It would be interesting to know if any contemporary viewers jumped to the not unreasonable conclusion that aliens were responsible. After finding a message from the Exeter's medical officer the landing party make haste to the surface of the planet Omega IV where they meet the Exeter Captain Ron Tracey, and learn they are infected by a virus held in check by some unknown environmental factor. The landing party can never leave Omega IV.

Gradually the story gets less interesting. Kirk has a fist fight with Ron Tracey, then he has a fist fight with Cloud William leader of the Yangs, then he has another fist fight with Tracey. So many different plot strands are picked up and discarded it's difficult to tell what the story is about. There is the empty starship, the mystery of the vanished Exeter crew, the virus, the hunt for a cure, the rogue starship commander gone native, the post-apocalyptic battle between two tribes, the search for the fountain of youth, and the 'savage' Yangs and 'civilised' Kohms. More frustrating is the indifferent way these plots are resolved. The apparently fatal virus is contracted by beaming down to Omega IV, and then cured by hanging around on Omega VI a bit longer. The natives of Omega IV live for thousands of years and Ron Tracey's motivation is provided by his search for the environmental factor responsible. Until it's revealed there is no fountain of youth. People on Omega IV just live longer. The war between the Yangs and the Kohms ends off screen. All the story lines which run across the first three acts are resolved before act three ends which again gives the impression of two separate episodes crushed into one 48 minute slot.

It's the performances which hold the attention. Particularly Morgan Woodward as rogue captain and sole survivor of the USS Exeter, Ron Tracey. He sells the idea of the Yang Kohm war ending off screen. “They sacrificed hundreds just to draw us out in the open. And then they came, and they came. We drained four of our phasers, and they still came. We killed thousands and they still came.” In fact all three actors in this scene turn in terrific performances, Woodward, William Shatner, and Deforest Kelly; Spock is unconscious at this point so Leonard Nimoy gets to sit this one out.

MCCOY: He'll live, but I'll have to get him to better facilities than this.

TRACEY: Impossible! You can't carry the disease up to the ship with you.

MCCOY: He's fully immunised now. We all are.

KIRK: We can beam up at any time. Any of us.

TRACEY: You've isolated the serum?

KIRK: There's no serum! There are no miracles! There's no immortality here! All this is for nothing!

TRACEY: Explain it to him, Doctor.

MCCOY: Leave medicine to medical men, Captain. You found no fountain of youth here. People live longer here now because it's natural for them to.

TRACEY: Outside. Or I'll burn down both your friends now.

William Shatner's furious delivery of “there's no serum..” is perfect. Suddenly Kirk has a depth of anger we've not seen before, and Deforest Kelly is just as good on “leave medicine to medical men...” All three actors are working really well together and the performances mesh perfectly.

On the other side of the camera Jerry Finnerman's lighting also adds a lot of atmosphere. He uses shadows very well, and his best moment comes during Woodward's “ they sacrificed hundreds...” speech. Finnerman keeps Woodwards face and body in shadow but his white hair is illuminated from behind and looks like a crazed halo. Director Vincent McEveety is also trying to keep scenes visually interesting, he's fond of using a quick zoom to add impact to a shot.

Then at the end of act three a Yang warrior carries in the United States flag, accompanied on the soundtrack by The Star-Spangled Banner. Suddenly the rest of the episode is utterly overshadowed. It doesn't matter if this is the worst Star Trek episode ever or the greatest because this is the episode in which the aliens have the United States flag and it's never explained! It's like coming home and finding the Mona Lisa on your living room wall. You're not going to stand there talking about the composition of the painting, or use of symbolism, or the enigmatic smile. You are just going to wonder how the hell the Mona Lisa ended up on your living room wall.

First season story Miri (ironically also directed by Vincent McEveety) suffers from the same problem. The episode begins with the Enterprise discovering a world exactly like Earth. An exact duplicate. As Kirk says, “not the Earth, another Earth.” The viewer sits patiently waiting for an explanation which never comes. The “another Earth” material is just there to hook the viewer. After that Miri's writer Adrian Spies is confident his plot about the landing party catching a disease and meeting kids gone wild will so grab the viewer's imagination that they will forget about the duplicate Earth. This proves not to be the case. The episode is caught in a trap of its own making. The script has established Miri's world looks like Earth so every time the episode cuts back to the Enterprise in orbit the viewers are reminded of the lack of a solution to the mystery.

Worse, not attempting even to suggest a solution, makes the Enterprise crew look like idiots with no intellectual curiosity. At the start of Miri everyone is amazed by this cosmic coincidence. By the end, because the writer doesn't want to draw attention to his lack of an explanation, no one mentions it. So apparently the Enterprise crew have forgotten about the duplicate Earth even if the audience hasn't. Kirk makes a weak joke about not dating older women, and the Enterprise warps out of orbit. Kirk says he's contacted, “Space Central,” who will send teachers and advisers to Miri's world, but not scientists. No one suggests sticking around and investigating. Why are these people even in space?

The same problem affects The Omega Glory. Once Kirk has taught Cloud William the true meaning of the Preamble to the Constitution the episode is over. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were amazed when the Yang soldier walked in carrying Old Glory, but they're over that now and they leave. The anthology nature of Star Trek means the events on Omega IV are forgotten. On Omega IV the Kohms (and presumably the Yangs) live for at least 1000 years. For Cloud William to mangle the preamble as he does (he says, “ee'dplebnista norkohn forkohn perfectunun” in place of “we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union”) it must have been passed down through generations, so Omega IV had the flag, and the pledge, and the Constitution of the United States even before the United States existed on Earth. You can understand why no one thought any of this was worth investigating.

Another reason why act four totally overshadows the previous three acts is because the end of act three ad break is like a fault line running across the episode. Before that the story is about dealing with Captain Ron Tracey, afterwards it's about the correct way to treat the Yang's holy artefacts. The whole story is suddenly distorted. The appearance of the flag of the United States of Omega IV isn't a plot twist it's the moment the story wrenches out of shape. By Any Other Name is about the conflict between the Enterprise crew and the Kelvans. The location of the story shifts from planet, to Enterprise, to intergalactic space but the story is always about that conflict. The climax of the episode is the resolution of the conflict between the two sides. The Doomsday Machine is about Commodore Decker's obsessive need to destroy the planet killer, when Decker sacrifices himself his death provides Kirk with the information needed to destroy the planet killer at the climax of the story. The climax of The Omega Glory is Kirk reading aloud the Preamble to the United States Constitution and telling the Yangs they must also apply its principles to the Kohms, but the Yang's holy artefacts were only revealed ten minutes ago; literally in this case, since the last act of The Omega Glory appears to play out in real time.

Gene Roddenberry wants to tell a story about symbols and what happens when the symbols are valued but the philosophy and meaning behind them is misunderstood, or forgotten. That's a good starting point for a story, and tying that story on to the cultural artefacts of America is a bold move. The result is a story which warns Americans that saluting the flag, and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is pointless without also allowing the principles they represent to apply to everyone. 

Unfortunately a story like that doesn't really fit the Star Trek format. It might work for The Twilight Zone where the story could be set in a post-apocalypse America but Star Trek never goes to Earth so immediately the story has to be set on an alien world. Then you have the problem of getting the Enterprise crew involved, and then somehow you have to get Kirk to remain and stay close to the heart of the action so he can be there for the denouement. Gradually the story starts to accrete round the original idea and becomes more and more cumbersome. Which is why The Omega Glory consists of so many different plot strands. Plus for the story to work as television it must be exciting and interesting on a visual level. It would make for a more sensible episode if the Yangs had their own flag and constitution. Kirk could explain how they've forgotten the true meaning of their artefacts, and the values of their ancestors, and draw the comparison with the United States. Then once the episode is done the landing party can beam back to the Enterprise and say, “Yangs and Kohms, I wonder,” and everyone can scratch their chins and look thoughtful. However having someone say, “that flag.... why it's an allegory for the United States flag,” is no match for the visual impact of actually having an alien walk in carrying the Stars and Stripes. Which is of course where we came in. 

Enterprise crew deaths: Lieutenant Galloway, vaporised by Captain Tracey.
Running total: 45

Return To Tomorrow

The Enterprise crew are in pursuit of a mystery and going where no man has gone before. Something beyond the limits of known space has activated the Enterprise distress relays and given the ship a course to follow. According to Spock the Enterprise has travelled, “hundreds of light years past where any Earth ship has ever explored.” It will take over three weeks for Starfleet to receive any messages the ship sends. As a concept this is pure distilled Star Trek, like the reception for the interplanetary ambassadors in JourneyTo Babel, but as a whole Return To Tomorrow is horribly slow, and dull.

Basically there simply isn't enough story to fill the 48 minutes running time. The core concept of the episode is a mindswap. Sargon, the sender of the mysterious signal, is a disembodied intelligence in a sphere who wants to borrow temporarily the bodies of Kirk, Spock, and Doctor Ann Mulhall; Diana Muldaur making the first of two Star Trek appearances, plus she'll be back as Doctor Pulaski for the second series of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Into the crew's bodies will be placed the minds of Sargon, his wife Thalassa, and Henoch, sole survivor from the other side in the conflict which destroyed their race and planet. The borrowed bodies will construct androids which will become the permanent homes of the three minds.

That's the set up to the story, but the transference itself doesn't take place until 22 minutes into the episode. It brings to mind associate producer John D. F. Black's advice to George Clayton Johnson about The Man Trap script, “you don't get the creature aboard the ship fast enough.” Here it takes too long to get to the scene where Sargon, Thalassa, and Henoch once again feel the pleasure, and temptations, of being alive. Weirdly, having moved at a snails pace until now, the story suddenly leaps into action and two and a half minutes from the first mention of a metabolic inhibitor (the presence of these alien minds places great stress on the host bodies, Spock's body can easily cope but it's killing Kirk and Mulhall) act two ends by revealing Henoch is a bad'un. He plans to keep Spock's body for himself and will kill Sargon/Kirk with a doctored metabolic inhibitor. This stop/start storytelling continues into acts three and four. About 90 seconds pass between Kirk announcing, “Spock's consciousness is gone, we must kill his body, the thing in it,” to his regretful, “Spock,” as he examines what he thinks is the corpse of his first officer and friend. The lasting memory of Return To Tomorrow is of an episode which carefully ekes out moments of incident between scenes where the story stops and the characters make speeches at each other.

Some of the speeches are very good. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and Doctor Mulhall gather in the briefing room and debate the dangers of agreeing to Sargon's plan in a scene which ends with a line from Kirk which is a mission statement for Star Trek. “Risk is our business. That's what the starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her.” But that line follows four minutes of back and forth about whether to go ahead with something which the audience knows is going to happen because it's the subject of this week's episode. It's great to see the crew chewing the fat like this but by episode 49 the inter-character debate needs to do more than just pad out the running time. Here McCoy objects and is talked round by Kirk while Scotty is tempted by the promise of technological advances. The result is a four minute character scene which doesn't advance the plot or tell the audience anything new about the characters. The only new development is that it is Mulhall rather than Spock who gets to describe Sargon's offer as, “scientifically fascinating.” 

Scenes with Sargon and Thalassa are particularly trying on the patience. Taking their cues from the script both William Shatner and Diana Muldaur opt for measured, declamatory performances; as if they were auditioning for the Charlton Heston role in some Biblical epic. In addition these scenes are often smothered in George Duning's heavy on the strings music which crushes what little subtlety exists in exchanges like:

THALASSA: Oblivion together does not frighten me, beloved. Promise we'll be together.
SARGON: I promise, beloved.
THALASSA: Together forever.
SARGON: Forever beloved. Forever.

Leonard Nimoy makes a better impression as Henoch. While the novelty has worn off seeing Spock act out of character Nimoy makes the script work by playing against the evil intention of the lines. He's charming, pleasant, and sarcastic. His best moment comes early on when praising Spock's body: 

SPOCK: This is an excellent body, Doctor. I seem to have received the best of the three. Strength, hearing, eyesight, all far above your human norms. I'm surprised the Vulcans never conquered your race. 
MCCOY: Vulcans worship peace above all, Henoch.
SPOCK: Yes, of course, of course. Just as we do, Doctor. 

Nimoy plays Henoch like a politician who realises he has gone too far. His “of course, of course,” complete with a reassuring touch on McCoy's arm is very well done. 

Doctor McCoy is also very well written in this episode. With Kirk and Spock both acting out of character he is our link to regular Star Trek. He's the sardonic voice of sanity in the early scenes. Not only pointing out the insane risks of agreeing to Sargon's plan but also lightly mocking the plot as if he is also playing the voice of the viewer at home, “that's the most ridiculous statement I've ever heard.” McCoy's character is just going over old ground, in addition to the briefing scene above there is also a pre-beam down scene where he frets about the danger of using the transporter, but Deforest Kelly plays him very well, and makes the effort to add small moments like his glance at Scotty when dismissing “a list of possible miracles,” as a reason for allowing the transfer to take place.

On the other side of the camera Ralph Senensky is directing again. His work is more distinctive here than it was in Obsession, possibly this is a less demanding script which allows him more time to compose shots. When Sargon/Kirk 'dies' there's a fantastic low angled view of Kirk on the floor with Thalassa, McCoy, and Nurse Chapel kneeling by his body. There's also a great shot of Scotty and Thalassa discussing the android filmed through the framework of the android body. Senensky also seems to be one of the few directors to give director of photography Jerry Finnerman time to really indulge himself with the lighting. The Enterprise sets look brilliant in Return To Tomorrow, and are lit with great slabs of colour; purple in the transporter room and green in the briefing room.

Film editor Donald R. Rode also does some great work with the cutting, and tries to inject some pace into a story which tends towards the languid. There are two brilliant jump cuts, one from Sargon telling the crew they are free to leave to Scotty's outraged, “you're going to what?”, and the second from Kirk's, “we must kill [Spock's] body, the thing in it,” to Uhura screaming. Rode also knows when to allow Ralph Senensky's footage to work on its own terms. Kirk's, “risk is our business,” speech plays out almost uninterrupted as a slow zoom into a close-up of Kirk. Then once Kirk is done Rode cuts to reaction shots of McCoy (looking very unimpressed), Scotty, Mulhall, and Spock, before cutting back to the same big close-up of Kirk which he follows with a matched close-up of one of Sargon's spheres in sickbay. Rode's first work on Star Trek was The Doomsday Machine, and since then he has also worked on The Deadly Years, The Immunity Syndrome, and A Private Little War. He's one of the unsung behind the scenes heroes of Star Trek's second season, and frankly he deserves to have his praises sung as often as possible.

Enterprise crew deaths: It's now been six episodes since any member of the Enterprise crew died, matching the six episode death free period between Errand Of Mercy and Who Mourns For Adonais? If the crew can get through next week without anyone buying the farm it will be the longest death free period in Star Trek.
Running total: 43

A Private Litttle War

A Taste Of Armageddon is an allegory of Vietnam war body counts, and more generally about the dangers of making war easy. The Doomsday Machine is an allegory about nuclear weapons. A Private Little War is a 1968 allegory of the Vietnam war itself. However where A Taste Of Armageddon and The Doomsday Machine are both clearly against the subject of their allegories A Private Little War surprises by being very much a pro-Vietnam war story.

The allegory is most clearly stated by Kirk towards the end of the episode when he decides the only solution is to begin arming the hill people with the same flintlock rifles the Klingons have been secretly supplying to the villagers.

KIRK: .. What is your sober, sensible solution to all this? 
MCCOY: I don't have a solution. But furnishing them firearms is certainly not the answer.
KIRK: Bones, do you remember the twentieth century brush wars on the Asian continent? Two giant powers involved, much like the Klingons and ourselves. Neither side felt could pull out.
MCCOY: Yes, I remember. It went on bloody year after bloody year.
KIRK: What would you have suggested, that one side arm its friends with an overpowering weapon? Mankind would never have lived to travel space if they had. No. The only solution is what happened back then. Balance of power.
MCCOY: And if the Klingons give their side even more?
KIRK: Then we arm our side with exactly that much more. A balance of power. The trickiest, most difficult, dirtiest game of them all, but the only one that preserves both sides. 

There's an often used quote from Gene Roddenberry, “I realised that by creating a separate world, a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek: we were sending messages and fortunately they all got by the network.” In the case of A Private Little War it's hard to believe the network would have cared about the message if it had been spotted. 

Star Trek's contemporary audience is often described as containing a large proportion of  high school and college students. How did they react to being lectured about the importance of the Vietnam war by Gene Roddenberry? There's nothing wrong with confronting your audience with ideas and opinions to which they may be opposed. It makes the audience think about why they disagree with the message, and stops them being just passive consumers. That said there is something distasteful about a 46 year old man, well outside the 18-26 draft range of men eligible for selective service, lecturing about the importance of a war which was a very real worry for a large chunk of their target audience. 

What we have here is an actual, genuine generation gap. In 1968 the Second World War had ended 22 years ago. Gene Roddenberry, Robert Justman, and Gene L. Coon had all fought in different branches of the armed forces. Gene Roddenberry volunteered for the United States Army Air Corps, and took part in missions in the South Pacific. Robert Justman served two years in the Navy. Gene L. Coon was in the Marines from 1942 to 1946, and then having enlisted in the Marine reserves was called back to serve in the Korean war from 1950 to 1952. Unlike their young audience World War Two was a reality to them, as was the development and use of atomic weapons, the rise of the Soviet Union, and the Korean war. To a 20 year old viewer even something as recent as the Cuban missile crisis, took place when they were 14; a quarter of their life previously. Seen in this context A Private Little War seems less like the polemic of a typewriter warrior, and more a warning from someone who had fought in World War Two and didn't want to see it refought with atomic weapons. It also explains the odd, slightly dismissive way anti-war protesters are treated in The City On The Edge Of Forever.

Moving away from the tricky area of politics A Private Little War see the Klingons back after their last appearance in Friday's Child. In Friday's Child Kras the Klingon hoped to persuade the natives of Capella IV to cede to the Klingon Empire by backing the more aggressive tribal leaders. Here Krell, who isn't named on screen, is repeating the trick in a slightly more subtle way by supplying weapons primitive by Klingon standards to the villagers, and encouraging them into a war against the hill people. Friday's Child and A Private Little War both show the Klingons beginning to react to the peace forced upon them by the Organians in Errand Of Mercy. They can no longer add planets to their empire simply by invading them. Instead they act as agents of corruption, feeding on people's greed, and turning them into proto-Klingons by using existing disputes to their advantage.

KRELL: You are late, my friend Apella.
APELLA: A quarrel by my people. A division of some skins and a hill woman taken this morning. It's hard to divide one woman.
KRELL: Give her to the man who killed the most of her people. The others will see the profit in bravery. I'll make a Klingon of you yet. 

and 

APELLA: I thought my people would grow tired of killing. But you were right. They see that it is easier than trading and it has pleasures. I feel it myself. Like the hunt, but with richer rewards.
KRELL: You will be rich one day, Apella, beyond your dreams. The leader of a whole world. A governor in the Klingon Empire. 

It's not clear why the Organians tolerate this subversion of their treaty. Maybe it's only direct war they care about, but in Errand Of Mercy it was the act of violence itself they found distasteful so presumably they just don't know. There must be some limit to the Organian's ability to detect and prevent conflict between the two sides, and the Klingon's actions here are part of the process of working out exactly what are the Organian's limits.

The script of A Private Little War is a little confused about the exact nature of the peace treaty. Kirk talks about it as if it was an actual physical object signed by both sides, “if the Klingons are breaking the treaty it could be interstellar war,” he says. According to Errand Of Mercy the one thing breaking the treaty cannot lead to is interstellar war. Later when Kirk and McCoy sneak into the village they gather evidence as if there is some Galactic United Nations they can appeal to, and hand over any proof they find. This is a little more consistent with earlier episodes. The Trouble With Tribbles established that Sherman's planet would be given to whichever side could develop it most effectively. Possibly if Kirk can prove the Klingons are cheating then the Organians will enforce some penalty on the Klingon Empire in the disputed quadrant referred to in The Trouble With Tribbles. 

The Klingons motivation for all this secret interference is unclear. In Friday's Child both sides are interested in Capella IV because it is rich in the mineral topaline. At the start of A Private Little War McCoy talks vaguely about interesting organic compounds with medical benefits, and presumably the Klingons are also after these compounds. However they could just be interfering out of sheer devilment. Maybe they read the planetary survey report Kirk wrote 13 years ago, using more of their surgically altered spies, and know Kirk has a fondness for this world. Perhaps it is just a way to expand their empire while keeping within the provisions of the treaty. To extend the Vietnam analogy, if the Klingons are the Soviets then they will want their own Warsaw Pact; dependant territories to act as a buffer zone and provide defence in depth against invasion. 

The skimpy character motivation extends to Nona, Tyree's wife. She is frustrated by Tyree's pacifist ways, and wants him to get some “firesticks” and do to the villagers what the villagers are doing to the hill people. So why did she marry him? Tyree says he married her after she cast a spell over him, so he must have had something she wanted. In the end she's just a power hungry woman who is willing to sell out her husband, and his tribe. There's some poetic justice in the way she ends up dead at the hands of a village hunting party who do not understand the advantage Kirk's stolen phaser would give them.

If Krell was going to all this trouble to turn the planet into a Klingon satellite state then there is also no small irony in the fact that he taught the villagers to act like Klingons. If they had been more interested in the phaser than Nona, they might have brought it to him. He could then present it to the Organians as 'proof' of Federation interference, arming the hill people with superior weapons, and gain whatever benefit Kirk thought would come from exposing the Klingon plan.

This is an episode with a lot of stuff going on in the background, but unfortunately what is foregrounded is a rather dull tale of goodies and baddies in which the nasty villagers wage war on the nice hill people. The morality really is that simplistic. The hill people are the goodies because they are the underdogs in the war, and Kirk is friends with one. The villagers are nasty because they have aligned themselves with the evil Klingons. It's a western, and while the goodies and baddies may not wear white and black hats the hill people do have blonde hair, and the villagers black hair; as does nasty Nona. 

Extensive location work cannot save this story. Nor can some excellent editing from Donald R. Rode. The Mugato may look silly, think albino gorilla with spines and a single giant horn growing from the top of the head, but its attack on Kirk is well handled and comes out of nowhere. The introduction of Krell is also striking. A cut to a big close-up of the Klingon gazing into the camera as he waits for Apella. 

Is Kirk right? Yes within the confines of the script and the extremely narrow set up of the world. A balance of power is the correct solution. Maybe if the war between the hill people and the villagers can be maintained as a stalemate for long enough then both sides will learn it is unwinnable and return to their peaceful ways. Maybe. But how long can the Federation keep sending down flintlocks every time the Klingons send down flintlocks? What if the Klingons send grenades, or automatic weapons? What happens if the leader of the villagers invites the Klingons to help out by sending in military advisers? Will the Federation follow Kirk's plan and match the Klingons bomb for bomb, adviser for adviser, conscript for conscript? Evidentially not because if it had the space hippies who turn up in The Way To Eden would have sat on the transporter pad, burnt their draft cards, and chanted, “hey, hey JTK, How many kids did you kill today?” 

Enterprise crew deaths: Once again none, the Enterprise crew start making plans for the future. 
Running total: 43

Misc:
Lots of shenanigans with the closing credits this week. To start with the most confusing one, this is the producer credit for the episode.

 My understanding is that the previous episode made, Journey To Babel, marked the first episode produced by John Meredith Lucas so I'm not sure why Gene L. Coon is suddenly being credited as the producer again. The only explanation I can think of is that before he left Gene L. Coon did the bulk of the production work on A Private Little War, and it was felt more appropriate to give him the credit than John Meredith Lucas.

One of the closing stills appears to be a make-up test for a Tellarite from Journey To Babel.

Lastly, the Mugato is credited as the Gumato. Apparently this was the original name for the creature but DeForest Kelly could not pronounce the name so it was changed. Evidently the change never reached whoever did the closing titles: Gumato/Mugato Mugato/Gumato, let's call the whole thing off.