For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky

This is just bland. It's a story which exists purely to fill its scheduled 48 minutes of airtime. Star Trek has done worse episodes, and sillier episodes, and more misconceived episodes, but it's difficult to think of a story which shows less ambition.

This is an episode full of generic moments which happen simply because they always happen in an action adventure series. The most original element of the story is Yonada a closed world sealed inside an asteroid while the descendants of a doomed race travel to a new planet. Original is of course a relative term. This is original for Star Trek but generation ships are something of a hoary cliché in science fiction and, as always, the residents of Yonada don't know they are in a generation ship. In 1966 David Gerrold submitted a two part outline called Tomorrow Was Yesterday about a generation ship on a collision course with a star, again the inhabitants of the ship thought it was a world; this is mentioned not to suggest anyone plagiarised David Gerrold's idea but to show how it was simply one of those ideas which floated around.

Beyond that everything is Star Trek by numbers. Yonada is run by a computer called the Oracle who uses instruments of obedience to monitor what the inhabitants say and think. The Oracle is the worst kind of mixed messages ruler doing 180 degree mood changes when required by the script. When Kirk, Spock, and McCoy first arrive it punishes the landing party, “learn what it means to be our enemy before you learn what it means to be our friend,” then welcomes them, “it is the will of the Oracle that you now be treated as honoured guests.” Later when Kirk and Spock go back into the Oracle room it sentences them to death. Despite this exchange earlier.

KIRK: Thank you, Mister Spock. To our good friends of Yonada.

SPOCK: We are very interested in your world.

NATIRA: That pleases us.

KIRK: Good. Then you wouldn't mind if we looked around?

NATIRA: Not at all. The people know of you now. [to McCoy] Are you well enough to go about?

MCCOY: Perhaps not.

NATIRA: Then why not remain here? Rest. We will talk.

MCCOY: You are very kind.

NATIRA: You are free to go about and meet our people.

Would it have hurt Natira to add that the Oracle room was off limits? It's never clear if the computer is malfunctioning. Spock makes a throwaway reference to “a weakness in one of the eight tubes,” but this is in the context of correcting Yonada's navigational error so could just refer to a problem with the engines. The Oracle appears to be functioning normally. It seems the Fabrini just wanted their descendants to be bossed around by a computer with the nature of a fickle two year old. It doesn't really matter. The Oracle is switched off towards the end of the story and plays no further part in the proceedings.

Worshiping the Oracle is Natira, high priestess of the people. Doctor McCoy falls in love with her. When D. C. Fontana wrote Friday's Child she used the situation on Capella to examine McCoy's character, his compassion and his determination to help people even at the cost of his own life. Here McCoy falls in love simply because one of the characters needs to stay on Yonada and learn its secrets. The choice of McCoy makes no difference to the character or the story. It is utterly arbitrary, apparently made simply on the basis that this season Kirk and Spock have already have had love stories. It doesn't matter. The person wandering around Yonada called Doctor McCoy doesn't bear any relation to the character of the same name who appears in other Star Trek episodes. This Doctor McCoy discovers a world whose inhabitants are kept in deliberate ignorance of their true place in the universe. This Doctor McCoy witnesses a man killed for talking about something he did in his childhood. This Doctor McCoy discovers the ruling planetary computer monitors the thoughts and speech of the woman he loves, and can inflict pain on her should she say or think something forbidden. Does he rail against the system of Yonada and try to bring it down? No. He chooses to join this world and has the instrument of obedience implanted in his head, and seems to take seriously Natira's offer, “you can share that world with me, rule it by my side.” That fatal disease he's caught must really be messing with his brain.

Because that's the other big idea of the episode. Doctor McCoy is dying of space-plague. Except he isn't. At the end of the story Spock finds the Fabrini have a cure, so McCoy's incurable fatal disease goes away with no long term effects on his character.

Those are the big problems with the story, but there are plenty of little ones. The Enterprise finds Yonada because the Oracle (presumably) fires missiles at the ship. So, this secret closed world disguised as an asteroid is flying through space and drawing attention by launching attacks at anyone who comes near? And it's not only McCoy who is acting out of character. After McCoy tells Kirk about his illness he says, “I'll be most effective on the job in the time left, if you'll keep this to yourself.” Kirk's first line after the opening titles is, “Captain's log, stardate 5476.3. I have just had the sad duty of informing Starfleet about Doctor McCoy's condition and have requested an immediate replacement.” It takes Kirk the length of the Star Trek theme to decide not to keep McCoy in his job, and tell everyone at Starfleet about McCoy's illness. No wonder McCoy is so keen to leave the Enterprise if that's how Kirk is behaving. And, while we're nitpicking, it sure is lucky that when Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Natira are trapped in the Oracle room looking for the Book of the People the Oracle decides to slowly cook them instead of using the electric shock which proved so effective on the other two occasions it was used.

Cross out some names and this is Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea. The Seaview encounters a strange floating island containing survivors from Atlantis who are drifting across the ocean to a new home. Richard Basehart, David Hedison, and this week's guest star, travel to neo-Atlantis where this week's guest star (who is dying from a disease which is incurable but not distressing to any watching viewer) falls in love with a priestess of the God of Atlantis. Neo-Atlantis is in danger of being washed into a giant whirlpool, and this week's guest star works out how to steer the island to safety. Out of gratitude the priestess of the God of Atlantis uses her arcane knowledge to cure the disease which is incurable but not distressing to any watching viewer, and neo-Atlantis resumes its journey across the ocean while this week's guest star returns to the Seaview.

Oddly, in the middle of all this is one of Star Trek's few sensible debates about the Prime Directive.

SPOCK: Captain, informing these people they're on a ship may be in violation of the Prime Directive of Starfleet Command.

KIRK: No. The people of Yonada may be changed by the knowledge, but it's better than exterminating them.

SPOCK: Logical, Captain.

KIRK: And the three billion on Daran Five.

SPOCK: Also logical, Captain.

One of the worst aspects of the Prime Directive was the way later Star Trek series treated it as a force of galactic natural selection. As if the highest expression of Federation morality was to stand around watching less advanced races suffer or die. Here it takes Kirk and Spock five lines to cut through that nonsense.

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

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.

Friday's Child

The poem says that Friday's child is loving and giving, although when naming this episode D. C. Fontana seems to have been referring back to an earlier version in which Friday's child was full of woe. The unfortunate woe filled child Fontana refers to is the (soon to be named) Leonard James Akaar rather than Star Trek itself which also became Friday's child when it started broadcasting on that night at the beginning of season two.

A briefing from Doctor McCoy gets the audience up to speed on the planet Capella and establishes McCoy as the local expert on its inhabitants. A nasty bunch who McCoy describes as, “totally uninterested in medical aid or hospitals. They believe only the strong should survive.” The few months McCoy spent on Capella offering unwanted medical advice to the locals must have been incredibly frustrating. The Federation is interested in Capella because the planet is rich in the essential mineral topaline but the Capellans put the Federation in an awkward position because all their standard negotiating strategies are interpreted by the Capellans as signs of weakness. Even the Federation's most impressive offer, planetary independence, makes the Federation look pathetic. By the Capellans' logic the best way for the Federation to prove it is worthy of the topaline is to invade and take what they want.

To complicate Kirk's day the Klingons are also interested in Capella, and already have an agent in place who has made good progress negotiating with Maab, a rival to the current leader Akaar. The Klingons, back for the first time since Errand Of Mercy, are obviously in a much stronger negotiating position since they have no hesitation in offering fun things like weapons and tactical knowledge for the topaline. That the Klingons are prepared to negotiate at all is an interesting development. Within the series this is presumably the influence of the Organian peace treaty. The Klingons must feel that simply invading Capella and taking what they want would not be tolerated by the Organians. Plus, negotiating a treaty with the Capellans will allow the Klingons to beat the Federation at their own game. It's not long before the Enterprise landing party are caught in the middle of Maab's coup against Akaar and have to go on the run along with Akaar's heavily pregnant wife Eleen.

This is McCoy's episode. Eleen is as unwilling a patient as the rest of her race. Much of the episode involves McCoy trying to treat Eleen and persuade her to see the baby as something other than a burden. Fontana uses Friday's Child to examine Doctor McCoy, in the same way her previous scripts This Side Of Paradise, and Journey To Babel illuminated Spock's character. After Eleen burns her arm on a brazier McCoy is determined to treat her even at the cost of his own life (it's a death sentence to touch the leader's, or even an ex-leader's, wife). “They can only kill me once for touching her,” McCoy says demonstrating his commitment to medicine and compassion. Then later he shows he's the sort of Doctor who wants to treat the cause, not the symptom, working to convince Eleen she wants the baby when the birth becomes difficult. While Fontana deserves praise for this approach and for focusing a script on someone other than Kirk or Spock the downside is that McCoy simply isn't as interesting a character. He's a dedicated doctor, if slightly grumpy, and that's essentially the limits of his personality. Imagine writing a short character sketch of Spock before seeing This Side Of Paradise, or Journey To Babel. It wouldn't be possible to write the same description afterwards because both episodes give the viewer new information and change the way the audience sees Spock. In the case of McCoy the same character sketch would suffice before and after Friday's Child. This is not a criticism of Deforest Kelly, who makes McCoy engaging and likeable and papers over the more clichéd parts of his character with charm, it's just a recognition that McCoy is one of those characters who never really changes. From Charlie X to his cameo appearance in the first Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Encounter At Farpoint he's always the same. Even the big revelation of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, that McCoy deliberately switched off his father's life support, demonstrates the compassion we already knew the character possessed.

Joesph Pevney is back in the director's chair, and he makes Friday's Child visually interesting. D. C. Fontana's characterisation of the Capellans as nasty, brutish, and tall is used as a springboard to imagine them as a tent-living society, presumably nomadic like Genghis Khan's Mongols. Jerry Finnerman lights the interiors with a flame effect and the result is atmospheric, and claustrophobic. The tent interiors of Capella feel more solid and real than some of Star Trek's other sets. Friday's Child must have been an expensive episode because in addition to studio interiors, and exteriors, there is location filming at Vasquez Rocks. Plus a lot of actors. One long shot reveals 11 Capellans, the Klingon, Kirk and Spock, plus out of shot McCoy and Eleen. That's 15 actors to take on location, plus technical crew.

There are a few production oddities in Friday's Child. These could be a result of budget pressure, or time constraints caused by trying to keep production costs under control. During some of the tent interiors film editor Fabien Tordjmann cuts between two pieces of film shot from very similar angles. This is noticeable just after Eleen's line, “to live is always desirable.” As Kirk says, “alright, let's go,” he turns and the film cuts to a slightly wider shot. The result is a visual glitch, a sort of double-edit, which would normally be covered by cutting to a completely different shot, for example a close-up. Here that additional material doesn't seem to be available to cover the join. Something similar can be seen earlier during Kirk's fight just after he stops Eleen from being killed. As Kirk punches a Capellan in orange fur the film cuts to an almost identical angle. Then moments later a few frames are cut from Kirk's movement as he crouches, this makes the fight move faster, but again the result is a visible jump and the overall effect is of a film editor struggling with a lack of coverage.

Later, when Kirk and Spock are improvising their communicators as sonic grenades, Shatner and Nimoy stand in front of a photographic blow-up of sky (there are what look like pencil marks, or scratches on the sky itself). Finally in a long shot of the Capellan hunting party Tige Andrews, playing Kras the Klingon, takes a tumble. It's covered in the next shot by having Andrews on his hands and knees but he's largely blocked from the camera by a foreground tree and the other actors until he stumbles into shot and dusts himself down; it looks like something improvised on the spur of the moment to cover Andrews' fall. In all three cases, the lack of coverage, photographic blowups, not reshooting the longshot to remove Andews' fall, the impression is of a production which is pressed for time which given the ambitious production requirements is not really a surprise.

William Theiss dresses the male Capellans in a bizarre creation, even by his standards. Over a bottom layer of a cowl, made of what looks like the same material as the crew uniforms, is worn a lurid coloured fur cloak which wraps around the front like a bikini. It's a difficult look to pull off, but a distinctive one. Overall the Capellans are one of the best realised races in Star Trek. They are solidly characterised, and visually distinctive; or to put it another way, they look silly but who's going to tell them?

Crew deaths: 1, Grant, who wasn't at the briefing. That's what you get for missing the staff meeting.

Running total: 36