The Mark Of Gideon

"There is no place, no street, no house, no garden, no beach, no mountain that is not filled with people. Each one of us would kill in order to find a place alone to himself. They would willingly die for it, if they could."

The Mark Of Gideon was written at a time when overpopulation was a common subject in the media; possibly as a result of global population passing three billion in 1960. Harry Harrison's science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room! was published in 1966; it was later adapted as the film Soylent Green. William and Paul Paddock's non-fiction book Famine 1975! America's Decision: Who Will Survive? came out in 1967 and was followed a year later by the best seller The Population Bomb by Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich. 1968 also saw publication of the novel Stand On Zanzibar by John Brunner. For Star Trek, which always liked to have an issue lurking behind the script, a story about overpopulation was as inevitable as one about the Vietnam war or racism. The script came from an unlikely source. While filming The Trouble With Tribbles actor Stanley Adams, Cyrano Jones, talked about the subject to Gene Roddenberry and suggested Star Trek tackle the issue. This episode, via some considerable rewriting, was the result.

Unfortunately The Mark Of Gideon may have started with a sincere desire to explore a topic but the end result is a mess. It's an episode with a lot of superficial resemblances to Wink Of An Eye (Kirk is separated from his crew and 'trapped' on the Enterprise, Spock works to locate and rescue his captain, there's a woman who has an ulterior motive for making Kirk fall in love) but of the two Wink Of An Eye is the better episode. It's more tightly written. The Mark Of Gideon suffers from dangling plot threads which encourage the audience to pick holes in the story. For example where exactly do the Gideons get plans for their exact duplicate Enterprise? If pressure for space is so acute on Gideon then how do they make room to build a full sized Enterprise? How does Gideon function as a world? If these billions of people are living toe-to-toe then where does their food come from, or their sewage go to? Why does Spock very quickly realise the Enterprise replica is completely inoperative while Kirk does not?

The more an audience is left to pick holes in the set up the less likely they are to accept the overall premise. What's frustrating about the above examples is that any of them could be fixed with a line of dialogue; although it's often difficult to pick these things up at the time with the pressure of deadlines. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield has a couple of nice lines covering plot points and helping build the universe. When McCoy examines Lokai he has the line, "the organs are there. They're rearranged to a degree, plus a few I've never seen before," which covers Lokai and Bele's ability to generate shields and electrical charges more effectively than if the audience was just left to assume these were the powers of the aliens of the week. Likewise when Bele's invisible ship approaches the Enterprise Kirk asks, "could it be a Romulan ship using their cloaking device?" This reminds the audience that there is a precedent for invisible space ships in Star Trek and takes some of the sting away from an obvious budget saving measure.

The episode has other problems. A morally dubious acceptance of mass death as a method of population control; maybe Gideon should just have asked Kodos the Executioner from The Conscience Of The King for some suggestions. Also a sense that the scale of the story is too large for Star Trek's resources. This is not like The City On The Edge Of Forever where some stock footage and backlot filming will stand in for a couple of blocks of New York. We are being asked to imagine an entire world and for that the audience really need to see Gideon in all its horror. Odona often describes it to the audience, "thousands pressed in against me. I could hardly breathe. I was fighting for oxygen, screaming to get out," but the few glimpses we do get of Gideon's huddled masses look comic; in their body-stockings they look like the sperm from Woody Allen's film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask. Lastly, there's a sense that in the early stages of the episode the script keeps missing its own plot beats. The mystery of the abandoned Enterprise barely lasts a minute of act one before we see Spock on the Enterprise bridge beginning his hunt for Kirk. Then instead of ending act one on the sudden appearance of Odona the act carries on to finish on her more generic line, "Captain, before I said I wasn't afraid. Now I am.

The abandoned Enterprise portion of the plot, like the idea of being speeded up in Wink Of An Eye, is something which can grab the imagination of watching children. It makes the familiar seem strange and unsettling, and it's a shame this idea is abandoned so quickly; although it probably wasn't practical to make an entire act out of Kirk alone on the Enterprise searching for the lost crew. There's also the irony of a story about overpopulation taking place on an empty starship. When Kirk and Odona hear the heartbeats of the massed Gideons outside the episode verges on gothic horror. As do the scenes of Gideons watching Kirk and Odona. These two moments come the closest to explaining how important this experiment is to the people of Gideon. They've got barely enough space to live and yet they've found room for a replica Enterprise, and once it's built they gather outside to follow the experiment and jealously watch Kirk and Odona walk the empty corridors.

Enterprise crew deaths: None.

Running total: 50

Spectre Of The Gun

CHEKOV: Where are we now, Captain?

KIRK: Spock, evaluation?

SPOCK: Obviously this represents the Melkotian's concept of an American frontier town, circa 1880.

MCCOY: It's just bits and pieces. It's incomplete.

SPOCK: Perhaps the Melkotians have insufficient data about this era.

KIRK: Or perhaps this is all they require to complete the pattern of our death.

The set design is what elevates Spectre Of The Gun. Gene L. Coon's script is fun but run of the mill by his own standards. It's a mash-up of Arena (powerful aliens force Kirk into a fight to the death to punish him for trespassing on their territory, at the end Kirk's refusal to kill convinces them to give him a second chance) and A Taste Of Armageddon. Spectre Of The Gun and A Taste Of Armageddon both use the same mechanism to get the Enterprise crew into the story; the Enterprise trespasses into a sector of space against the express wishes of the inhabitants. In both cases Kirk is under express orders to make contact but his attitude couldn't be more different. In A Taste Of Armageddon Kirk displays clear contempt for Ambassador Fox and his orders, all part of making sure the audience find Fox as unsympathetic as possible, but here his attitude is pragmatic and Kirk displays a lot less concern for the welfare of his crew even though the Melkotian warning is more explicit than the Federation code sent from Eminiar VII. Surprisingly when Star Trek: The Next Generation wanted to spoof the then current vogue for Robin Hood films they ended up writing an episode very much like Spectre Of The Gun; a powerful alien creates a self-sustaining world and drops in our heroes.

The weakest element of Gene L. Coon's script is his use of Chekov who manages to fall deeply in love during his short stay in fake-Tombstone despite knowing he is scheduled to die at 5pm. At the end of the episode he has this exchange with Kirk.

CHEKOV: What happened? Where have I been?

KIRK: Right here, it seems.

CHEKOV: But that girl. She was so beautiful. So real.

KIRK: Do you remember anything else?

CHEKOV: No.

KIRK: Good. Perhaps that explains why he's here. Nothing was real to him except the girl.

“That girl,” was so real to Chekov he can't even remember her name. There's always been a brash juvenile streak to Chekov's character, look at the opening scenes of TheTrouble With Tribbles and Chekov's attempts to impress Kirk, but here he spills over into outright immaturity and it's a mystery why Kirk displays such tolerance for the romance.

The stars of the episode are the sets. Faced with a workable script which called for either location filming or the construction of a Western town set, both unaffordable on Star Trek's third season budget, someone -probably Robert Justman or Matt Jefferies- came up with the idea of the half-constructed town. Director Vincent McEveety carefully uses the resulting sets to make Tombstone feel like a real place with its own dreamlike logic and rules.

Despite the half-constructed sets, no one leaps over any of the waist high walls or has a conversation with someone within a building. Everything is treated as if it were solid. Even the characters seem to appear and disappear when no one is looking. Watch the moment when the Sheriff first appears; on his line, “Ike,” he's already outside the closed door of the Sheriff’s office and walking towards the landing party as if he just popped into existence. Likewise, at the end of his first scene the Sheriff walks off the left-hand side of the frame and it's as if he disappears. A similar trick is pulled when the landing party enter the Tombstone bar. From the street the bar is clearly empty, but as the landing party walk through the doors it is suddenly full of people; including some sitting where they should have been visible from outside. It's a simple directing trick but it makes Tombstone feels strange and disorientating. What makes the moment more effective is that none of the landing party react to the sudden appearance of all these people. The disorientation is only there for the viewer. The set for the OK Corral at the end of the episode is suddenly much more solid and realistic. Possibly this was done to stop the climax from looking too fantastical, there is already the very theatrical effect of lightning casting shadows on the sky and the brilliant visual of bullet holes appearing in wood as the Clanton's fire at the unaffected landing party.

Enterprise crew deaths: None this week.
Running total: 48.

By Any Other Name

When talking about Star Trek it's easy to get hung up on big name stories like The Trouble With Tribbles. While these episodes have come to define the series the real joy often comes from discovering (or rediscovering) the stories which don't persistently hang around in top ten lists. By Any Other Name is one of those episodes and it turns out to be a little gem. 

By Any Other Name has a script which constantly wrong foots the viewer about exactly what kind of story they should expect. The episode starts out looking as if it will be I, Mudd with aliens. The teaser, and act one, focus on the Kelvans plot to take over the Enterprise. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and two other Enterprise crew, are kept hostage to ensure the good behaviour of everyone else while the Enterprise is converted for the 300 year journey back to the Kelvan's home in the Andromeda galaxy. This episode being another addition to the list of stories suggesting the universe outside our galaxy is full of hideous monsters. Spock describes the Kelvans in their native form as, “immense beings [with] a hundred limbs which resemble tentacles."

The Kelvan's main weapon is a nifty little belt device which neutralises nerve impulses to the voluntary muscles leaving the target paralysed. All the elements are in place for this to be a generic Star Trek episode. The conversion of the Enterprise for its intergalactic voyage looks as if is there to add an arbitrary deadline to the story; forcing Kirk to save the day before the Enterprise departs. The aliens main advantage is technological, the belt paralyser, and when head alien Rojan mentions the neural field radiates from a central projector the episode looks set to turn into a game of hunt the power source; like Catspaw. It's easy to imagine how the next three acts will play out. A sequence of captures and escapes as Kirk tries to get hold of a paralysis projector, locate the central unit, and then turn the tables on the aliens by paralysing them until they have learned their lesson.

Still, even at this early stage it's clear the story is more interesting than average. There's an unusual amount of continuity. Spock's prison break technique from A Taste Of Armageddon (using the Vulcan mind meld to trick a guard into believing the Enterprise crew had escaped) is mentioned along with the energy barrier around the galaxy from Where No Man Has Gone Before. We also get to see the Kelvans take over the Enterprise, something which happened entirely off screen in I, Mudd. The takeover is a brisk little 60 second sequence of Kelvans appearing in key sections of the ship and paralysing the crew. It nicely demonstrates the Kelvan's technical superiority and ruthless efficiency. Plus, someone has found some money to give the Kelvans a signature effect. A blue twinkling visual when people are paralysed. This effect is completely unnecessary from a storytelling perspective. It's obvious when the the belt paralyser is used. There's a sound effect and everyone freezes (usually in some exaggerated “oh I can't move” pose, I particularly like Deforest Kelly's finger pointing, opened mouthed, position when McCoy is frozen while turning to say something to Spock). Still it's great that someone found the cash for the effect. It really adds visual interest to the scenes where it features, and its use is positively lavish considering Star Trek's normal frugal use of effects. Where you might see phasers fired once or twice in an episode, the Kelvan's belt paralyser is used twice in the teaser, and then another five times in act one.

The first real indication that events are not going to run as expected comes after the first escape attempt when Rojan tells Kirk, “this cannot go unpunished.” It turns out the Kelvans can reduce humans to small three dimensional objects, “the flesh and brain and what you call the personality, distilled down into these compact shapes.” People distilled down can be restored, but if the shape is crushed the person dies. Rojan demonstrates this on Lieutenant Shea and Yeoman Thompson, crushing Yeoman Thompson's distilled essence and killing her.

Yeoman Thompson's death may be the most disturbing seen on Star Trek. All we see on screen is a three dimensional shape being crushed to powder but somehow it's a weirdly graphic moment. What makes this killing so gruesome? It's hard to describe exactly but it's a combination of causes. There's the demonstration of Rojan's ruthlessness in forcing Kirk to watch a crew member being killed, and his killing of Thompson is literally more hands on than if he had shot her with a phaser, or zapped her with a bolt of lightning. There's the demonstration of Kirk's powerlessness, he cannot do anything except stand and watch. There's also an illogical attachment between Yeoman Thompson and the crushed shape. We've seen Thompson reduced, and we've been told the shape represents her very essence, so it feels as if we are watching Rojan's hand squeezing not just her body but somehow her brain and thoughts as well. On a more physical level crushing the object is not easy. Rojan squeezes once, twice, three times. Each time breaking the object into smaller chunks. Thompson's death would not seem nearly so prolonged or brutal if the shape had immediately exploded into a puff of power, or if Rojan just squeezed it once before dropping the remains on the floor. Lastly it's all too easy to start trying to imagine what the ruin of Thompson's body would look like. Rojan says Thompson cannot be restored to life, but presumably her body could be reconverted back into flesh and blood.

Yeoman Thompson's death is one of those moments which grips the imagination. As the story heads into act two it surprises again when the Enterprise warps out of orbit, and what had looked as if it would be a largely planet based story instead transfers completely to the Enterprise. It rapidly becomes clear that talk of the energy barrier around the galaxy wasn't just to set up the plot. We will actually see the ship attempt to do what it could not in Where No Man Has Gone Before, breach the barrier and head out into intergalactic space. At the same time Spock and Scotty have come up with a suicide plan. The barrier is composed of negative energy. On Kirk's order Scotty will flood the matter-anti-matter nacelles with positive energy and the ship will be destroyed. The result is a tense sequence as Kirk agonises over his decision. It's well edited by film editor James D. Ballas, and made more exciting by simple but effective use of the standard Enterprise control panel beeping noise as Scotty waits for Kirk's order, and by reusing part of Sol Kaplan's score for The Doomsday Machine. The whole sequence is capped cleverly by splitting Chekov's line, “we... made it,” around a shot of the Enterprise zooming towards Andromeda.

Obviously in the end Kirk decides not to blow up the ship, and it's a matter of personal taste as to whether you think his decision was correct or not for the character. As Kirk says in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, “I don't believe in the no-win scenario.” Sacrificing the crew and ship would feel like Kirk was admitting there are no other possibilities. It solves the short term problem of what to do with this Kelvan scouting party, but for all Kirk knows there could be others. Or the failure of Rojan's group to report in could prompt the Kelvans to send another scouting party which the Federation don't know about, or worse a full scale invasion fleet. Plus at this point Kirk still has a full compliment of crew, he doesn't know Rojan plans to reduce them, so the humans outnumber the Kelvans, and the odds are in his favour. 

The scope of the story narrows in the later part of act three, and act four. With only four Enterprise crew remaining, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty, the solution to the problem of defeating the Kelvans turns out to be tempting them with the pleasures of the flesh. Scotty gets Tomar drunk, Kirk seduces Kelinda, Spock expertly plays on Rojan's jealousy of Kirk and Kelinda, and McCoy starts injecting Hanar with stimulants while pretending to give vitamins to the alien. Amusingly no one seems to remember there's a fifth Kelvan on the bridge, Drea. While Tomar gets drunk, Kelinda gets snogged, Rojan gets furious, and McCoy gets Hanar hepped up on goofballs, Drea sits on the bridge patiently steering the ship on its 300 year journey towards Andromeda. She must be baffled to receive Rojan's order to reverse course. These scenes allow for some very good comedy, especially Scotty's drinking contest with Tomar, but there's something disappointing about By Any Other Name ending up as another story in which clever humans outwit superior beings. It's also not helped by repeating similar themes from Return To Tomorrow, although By Any Other Name was made first and is the superior episode of the two.

If the solution to beating the Kelvans is disappointing By Any Other Name does deserve praise for ultimately being resolved by diplomacy and an offer of assistance; admittedly after a fist fight in one of the recreation rooms. A lesser story might have ended with Kirk hoisting the Kelvans on their own petard, maybe paralysing them, or reducing them to cubes and leaving the problem for the future to deal with. One genuinely nice touch about the ending is that the much sought after neural paralysers end up being a Macguffin, and irrelevant to the resolution, to the extent that Scotty passes out just after getting hold of one. Which is probably just as well. The Enterprise corridors are littered with the shapes of the reduced crew. Imagine Scotty trying to deliver the projector while drunk. Kicking a shape here, tripping on one there, knocking off a corner, cracking another, and then probably falling over and crushing a whole load of them at once. 

Enterprise crew deaths: Just one, poor Yeoman Thompson. 
Running total: 44

Misc: More messing around with the closing credits. This time we have a still not from an episode, or a makeup test but a blooper. As William Blackburn peels the Return To Tomorrow android makeup from his head someone, possibly makeup artist Fred Phillips, says, "well, son, you wanted show business. Goddammit, you got it!" and then walks into shot and helps Blackburn pull off some of the latex."

Patterns Of Force

Patterns Of Force was made between 29th November and 6th December 1967, and broadcast on 16th February 1968. A Piece Of The Action was made between 2nd November and 9th November 1967, and broadcast on 12th January 1968. As Patterns Of Force is broadly A Piece Of The Action with Nazis it's easy to assume Patterns Of Force is an attempt to repeat the formula of A Piece Of The Action, but the genealogy of both stories is more complicated.

The concept for A Piece Of The Action first crops up as a suggested outline in Gene Roddenberry's original pitch document Star Trek Is...There a three line description reads, “PRESIDENT CAPONE. A parallel world, Chicago ten years after Al Capone won and imposed gangland statutes upon the nation.” Based on this George Clayton Johnson wrote an outline for an episode called The Syndicate which was refined into a treatment called Chicago II before being put to one side and forgotten while The Man Trap was developed. Separately writer Paul Schneider submitted an early outline for Patterns Of Force in December 1966 which was developed into a teleplay in early 1967. For some reason John Meredyth Lucas then wrote a new outline in June which was further developed through June and July 1967.

In the wake of The Trouble With Tribbles Gene L. Coon rediscovered George Clayton Johnson's treatment and decided it would make a good premise for another comedy episode. It's quite possible another factor in Gene L. Coon's decision to resurrect Chicago II was that the then in development script for Patterns Of Force, and Bread And Circuses, demonstrated stories about planets based on Earth history were practical. Then, for whatever reason Bread And Circuses was made and held back, Patterns Of Force slipped back in the production order, and A Piece Of The Action was broadcast first and looks like the story which originated the idea of doing planets based on historical periods.

So, it's time to raid the Desilu Studios' costume store again. There's no more depth to the use of Nazis in Patterns Of Force, than there is gangsters in A Piece Of The Action. They are just there to allow their costumes and iconography to act as an eye catching visual and grab the attention of any viewer flicking between channels. It works, Patterns Of Force looks great. It has visual appeal and freshness because it looks completely unlike any other Star Trek episode except A Piece Of The Action. The plot of both episodes is a simple adventure tale of capture and escape. There is no depth to the story, no analogy, or moral; beyond possibly the blindingly obvious one that totalitarian governments are bad, and peace is better than war. The subplot involving Federation observer John Gill and his daft plan to unite the anarchic planet of Ekos under a benign Nazi system, because it is “efficient” is as spurious a justification for the costumes as A Piece Of The Action's backstory involving the book Chicago Mobs Of The Twenties. Both are just there to force Kirk's hand in taking action. The situation on Ekos/Sigma Iotia II is the Federation's fault, so Kirk must attempt a repair.

The similarities between Patterns Of Force and A Piece Of The Action are strong enough that it's even possible to imagine a Nazi version of A Piece Of The Action in which the careless crew of the starship Horizon leave behind a book about the Nazi Party. Sigma Iotia II would have been broken up into a territories run by mini-Fhurers with each competing to be top dog. Comedy Gestapo officers would run around shouting at each other and the unnamed women who complain about Oxmyx and the “crummy street lights around here,” and lack of laundry pickup would have instead grumbled about the trains not running on time. The only question is whether NBC would have accepted a comedy Nazi episode? It's unlikely but not impossible. Hogan's Heroes had been running on CBS since 1965, but having said that Mel Brooks' The Producers was released to widespread accusations of bad taste roughly a month after Patterns Of Force aired. By 1968 comedy German soldiers were okay, but comedy Nazis were still a step too far.

In fact humour is the main difference between A Piece Of The Action and Patterns Of Force. A Piece Of The Action is unique because it was commissioned with the specific intention of making a deliberately funny story, whereas the humour in The Trouble With Tribbles appears to have evolved naturally as the script was developed. By contrast the tone of Patterns Of Force is all over the place. There are jokes in there, and some of them are good jokes. As might be expected Spock gets all the best moments. His, “you should make a very convincing Nazi,” to Kirk, and his perfectly timed raised eyebrow when deputy Melakon describes Spock's, “low forehead, denoting stupidity”. These moments sit awkwardly alongside attempts to emphasise the evil of the Ekotian regime.

ABROM: Isak, Uletta is dead. Shot down in the streets.

ISAK: She would've been my wife.

ABROM: She lived for five hours while they walked past her and spat on her. Our own people were unable to help her. Now you ask me to help strangers.

ISAK: If we adopt the ways of the Nazis, we're as bad as the Nazis.

Notice the names Abrom/Abraham Isak/Isaac, and the name of the twin planet Zeon/Zion. In the broadcast version there is no need for these disguised names. They add no depth to the story because what's on screen is literally about the Nazis and their treatment of the Jews. If the Nazi uniforms, symbols, and terminology were stripped out to leave a story about Kirk struggling to avert war between twin planets, then the disguised Hebrew names would add a little depth and point to an analogy. As it is their presence is just gilding the lily. It would be like making the planet killer from The Doomsday Machine, an analogy for nuclear weapons, look exactly the same as a Minuteman ICBM.

It's the realisation that all the Nazi imagery could be stripped from Patterns Of Force, and still leave a workable story which points to the biggest weakness of the episode. The element which makes Patterns Of Force so distinctive, the uniforms and symbols, is also the story's most redundant feature.

Enterprise crew deaths: None again. Seven whole weeks without anyone dying.

Running total: 43

Misc:
More distinctive than the episode itself is the Next Voyage trailer broadcast at the end of Return To Tomorrow. Next Time trailers normally open with a Captain's log voiceover and a shot of the Enterprise. Patterns Of Force begins stylishly with the Enterprise but the soundtrack is Isak's, “hide! They're right behind me. Hide! Hide!” The next image is the reveal of the Ekotians wearing SS Brownshirt uniforms from the episode teaser. Through the entire trailer there is no indication Patterns Of Force takes place on another planet. With the exception of a line from Kirk, “she captured a Zeon spy that was attempting to assassinate the Fuhrer,” the trailer is carefully edited to suggest Kirk and Spock are somehow fighting real Nazis. It would be really interesting to know what viewers at the time made of this. Did they think they were going to get another time travel episode?

Top Ten

The Doomsday Machine

Mirror, Mirror

The Corbomite Manouver
Arena
Amok Time

Balance Of Terror
This Side Of Paradise

The Naked Time
The Devil In The Dark
The Trouble With Tribbles

The Trouble With Tribbles comes in at number ten but apart from that there are no changes from last time. For anyone interested, lurking all the way down the bottom of the list is The Apple.

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.

A Piece Of The Action

“From here on in there is a new producer in charge, and it remains to be seen how this new order will change things.” Those prophetic words ended the review of The Gamesters Of Triskelion, and clearly demonstrate I should never go into the soothsayer business. The next episode is of course A Piece Of The Action with a joint teleplay credit for David P. Harmon and departed producer Gene L. Coon.

[This also seems to be an appropriate point to confess my error in the second to last paragraph of The Gamesters Of Triskelion review. Talking about the difference between stories produced by new producer John Meredyth Lucas and Gene L. Coon I mentioned Obsession, and implied it was produced by Gene L. Coon.

Oops.]

A Piece Of The Action sees Kirk, Spock, and McCoy visit Sigma Iotia II; planet of the Chicago gangsters. Putting the regulars into a story from a different genre, and seeing how they interact with the world, is a storytelling technique used before on Star Trek. The Conscience Of The King is Star Trek does Shakespeare. Kirk dithers like Hamlet, Lenore goes mad like Lady Macbeth, and within the episode itself we see the characters watching extracts from plays which mirror the plot. It's a common technique in television. Buffy The Vampire Slayer took the idea to its extreme with the musical episode Once More With Feeling. Futurama has the superhero episode Less Than Hero and, appropriately, Where No Fan Has Gone Before. Doctor Who used it in the early days to tell adventures in history. The Reign Of Terror is Doctor Who meets the French Revolution (a mashup of A Tale Of Two Cities, and The Scarlet Pimpernell), and The Romans is Doctor Who goes to Rome (assorted historical and biblical epics).

Doing a story from a different genre has its advantages and disadvantages. It allows a cash strapped production to raid the costume store, and save money by using pre-existing sets from other series; A Piece Of The Action uses the Paramount backlot for location filming. The downside is finding a good reason for all the characters suddenly wearing zoot suits and trilby hats. Do it wrong and the result is Miri where much amazement is expressed over a planet which looks exactly like Earth, but no explanation is ever offered for this coincidence. 

This is where Doctor Who has a built in advantage over Star Trek: time travel. To do a story about the Mongols, or the Great Depression, or Nazis the Doctor only has to travel to the appropriate year. For Star Trek to do the same the series has to invent an alien race which is like the Mongols, find a method for the Enterprise crew to time travel to the 1930s, or go to a Nazi planet. It's possible to use any of these techniques a couple of times, but repeated use is going to start pushing the limits of suspension of disbelief. Obviously this is one of the reasons behind the invention of the holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that's a solution which carries its own problems. Imagine A Piece Of The Action done as a holodeck story. For starters you need a reason why we are watching Kirk and co. play dress up rather than going where no man has gone before. Secondly it removes all jeopardy from the story. Those scenes of Kirk being held at gunpoint have no dramatic tension if Kirk can shout, “computer end program at any time.” The only real way to resolve this problem is either to have Kirk not realise he is on the holodeck, or have a reason for it to break down. Again.

Attila the Hun, Professor Moriaty, Jack the Ripper, and Evil Lincoln. "The Holo-Shed's on the fritz again! The characters turned real!"," Damn. The last time that happened I got slapped with three paternity suits."

A Piece Of The Action's solution to having a planet just like Earth history is inventive. The inhabitants of Sigma Iotia II are bright but highly imitative; in itself a good solid science fiction concept. 100 years ago the crew of the space ship Horizon left behind a book called Chicago Mobs of the Twenties, and the Iotians mistook it for a social instruction manual. It's a funny idea but also one which is quite pleasing, and if you are prepared to run with the concept then it's easy to imagine the impact of the Horizon's visit on the Iotians; their first contact with an alien race. If the crew of the Horizon left a stack of technical manuals, plus Chicago Mobs of the Twenties by accident, and made some throwaway comment about the books containing everything the Iotians needed to advance their development then its easy to imagine how the cultural contamination began.

So, a funny concept is at the core of what is for some people the funniest Star Trek story. Right from the start this is an overtly comedic episode and the teaser has a lighter and more comedic feel than The Trouble With Tribbles. In that story the jokes in the teaser come from the characters and their interactions while the situation, at least in the beginning, is treated seriously. In A Piece Of The Action the audience is expected to share Kirk's amusement at a planet leader with the title boss, and his landing site instructions, “there's an intersection just at the end of the block, near a yellow fire plug.” In between these two moments, Shatner sits in his chair and slowly rotates it in a semi-circle first one way, and then the other (some nice direction from James Komack who moves the camera with the chair to keep Shatner facing the camera), as he struggles to explain why it's taken 100 years for a radio message to reach the Federation, and the function of the transporter. Then as Spock and McCoy come onto the bridge Kirk walks between them, and spins them round on the spot leading the pair back into the turbo elevator. Possibly this lighter tone is designed to stop the audience thinking too much about the concept. If they view the story as funny, they are less likely to sit there picking holes in the idea. Scattered through the episode are some very good character based lines, such as Spock's valiant attempt to avoid telling a direct lie when Kirk asks him for the odds of a royal fizzbin, “I have never computed them, Captain,” but the downside of the script is the same as Robert Justman's concern about The Trouble With Tribbles. “Although the concept was amusing, the story was just too cute. I feared that... it would lead to a loss of believability. Kirk, Spock, and the others were real people, and real people just did not behave that way; our finely drawn characters should never parody themselves.”

There's a quote from Douglas Adams which sums up very well the pitfalls of doing an obviously jokey script. “A danger one runs is that the moment you have anything in the script that's clearly meant to be funny in some way, everybody thinks 'oh well we can do silly voices and silly walks and so on'.” Essentially that's the problem here. Everyone is having a wonderful time being silly. Particularly William Shatner who is occasionally allowed to get away with a performance which comes dangerously close to breaking character.

When Kirk is forced into a car by Zabo we get some lines which are a good pastiche of hardbitten gangster dialogue.

ZABO: Hold it! Okay, pally, we're going for a ride.
KIRK: If you don't mind, I'd rather walk.
ZABO: Listen, pally, this could either be a taxi or a hearse. You know what I mean?

Then as Kirk climbs into the car William Shatner uses a massively over the top worried expression, complete with furrowed brow and chewed lip. It's the sort of my-character's-worried emoting which might be expected from a drama student. He's worse while explaining the rules of his made up card game fizzbin. His tone of voice is all over the place on the lines, “oh, look what you got, two jacks. You got a half fizzbin already,” and “oh, look at that. You've got another jack. How lucky you are! How wonderful for you.” It overplays the comedy of the scene. Even Leonard Nimoy isn't immune to what must have been a great atmosphere on set, and his usually iron grip on the character wobbles during the car driving scene when he also starts fishing for laughs. “Oh. I believe they had a device known as a clutch. Clutch, Captain. Perhaps one of those pedals on the floor,” is a moment when he plays Spock far to broadly. Nimoy's Spock is normally very still, and his moments are considered, but here he's all jerky body movement and emphatic head nods. Oddly, Shatner is more tolerable later in the story, when Kirk adopts a cod-Chicago accent and starts using slang; asking Scotty, “can do, sweetheart?” Partly this is because his performance never reaches the extremes it does in acts one and two, but also because this fits the concept of the episode. If Kirk is going to put Sigma Iotia II back on track he first needs to out mobster the mobsters.

A Piece Of The Action looks amazing, nothing beats seeing Kirk and Spock in sharp suits and hats, driving period cars, and packing heat. The episode feels fresh if only because it looks completely different to anything which has gone before. There are no metaphors, or analogies, or moral lessons to be learned. The plot is fairly sparse. Kirk and Spock run around being captured by, and capturing, gangsters, but it's packed with incident (gun fights, fist fights, the car driving scene, the fizzbin rules, characters being phasered) and never gets dull. When the episode doesn't go too far in its quest for laughs it's great fun; and your definition of going too far will depend on your tolerance for William Shatner being allowed to indulge himself.

Enterprise crew deaths: None. 
Running total: 43