The Cloud Minders

The ghost of Castles In The Sky haunts this episode. Castles In The Sky was David Gerrold's outline for the episode which became The Cloud Minders and David Gerrold considers Castles In The Sky to be superior to the episode which bears his name; probably not unreasonably. The circumstances of how The Cloud Minders came to be written are widely available on the internet but the short version is that producer Fred Freiberger disliked Castles In The Sky and teamed David Gerrold up with Oliver Crawford to write a revised story outline. Fred Freiberger then decided to start again from scratch by giving Margaret Armen a very broad outline of the story and asking her to produce a revised story treatment which was built up into the finished teleplay. Knowing about the existence of Castles In The Sky makes it difficult to see The Cloud Minders properly because it's too easy to start comparing the finished episode with its unmade precursor; The Way To Eden suffers from a similar problem once you know it is based on an outline from D.C. Fontana for a story called Joanna.

Actually the quality of The Cloud Minders surprises. In the sub-genre of Star Trek stories that David Gerrold called Mary Worth stories (the Enterprise meddles "her way across the Galaxy, solving problems as she goes," The World Of Star Trek) The Cloud Minders comes out very well. It's comparable to A Taste Of Armageddon but lacks that story's sense of place. In A Taste Of Armageddon we meet several representatives of the High Council of Eminiar VII, as well as assorted extras done up as guards and civilians. The Cloud Minders is a little more sparingly populated. Representing the population of Stratos the cloud city is Droxine and Plasus, Droxine's father, and that's it. Still, Stratos may have a low population density but it feels like a real place. Matt Jefferies' sets look lavish, and they are unusual in being split level with a balcony area up some stairs; director Jud Taylor makes good use of this layout. Stratos itself comes via Laputa the flying island from Gulliver's Travels. Margaret Armen ditches the satire of Jonathen Swift's novel for a more obvious metaphor of the ruling class living literally in the clouds, high above the working class they rely upon to sustain their lifestyle.

There may not be many characters but they are well defined. The characters in The Cloud Minders are some of the most interesting and complex we have seen in the third season. Droxine begins as one of Star Trek's more vapid characters, she is considerably less interesting than her costume which is one of William Ware Theiss' more extraordinary designs, but by the end of the story she has questioned her father's actions, expressed a desire to go to the mines, and realised the cost of her pampered lifestyle. Plasus has also changed but for the worse. Through the episode his diplomatic mask slips and by the end he's much more entrenched in his views and open in his bigotry against the Troglytes. Best character of all is Troglyte leader Vanna an angry revolutionary who sometimes even gets frustrated by the limited intelligence of her fellow Disruptors ("can you do nothing but argue?" she snaps at Midro when he suggests killing Kirk and is unable to grasp the value in keeping him alive). It's pleasing to note that at the end of the episode she is the least affected by exposure to the zenite gas. When Kirk and Plasus start brawling she's smart enough to work out what has happened and uses Kirk's communicator to call for help.

The Cloud Minders is also a good story for Kirk. He starts out understandably reluctant to get involved in the dispute with the Troglytes. Then he takes a stand against Plasus' use of torture to locate the missing zenite. Finally he makes a command decision to place the need for zenite above his duty not to interfere with the government of Ardana. His suggestion of masks to counter the effects of the gas is more pragmatic than altruistic and his impatience to get the urgently needed zenite to its destination leads him to mistakenly trust Vanna, who promptly takes him hostage. The scene where Kirk forces Plasus and Vanna to dig zenite with their bare hands is surprisingly shocking and works because it shows how the zenite gas brings out an ugly, cruel side to his personality. It's important to establish the effects of the gas to the viewers as well as Plasus and Vanna, and the best way to do that is to show Kirk behaving as he did in The Enemy Within; to show the gas bringing out the same side of his personality revealed by the transporter malfuction. By contrast Spock seems to get a week off. He's given a lengthy, and unusual, voice over to speculate about social inequality on Ardana but that's his most significant action. For most of the rest of the episode his involvement tends to be restricted to acting as the voice of conscience when debating with Plasus and Droxine about their treatment of the Troglytes.

The ending of The Cloud Minders is pleasantly mature. In A Taste Of Armageddon when Kirk destroys the war computer on Eminiar VII he instantly changes their society. His intervention has an immediate and noticeable effect and he changes their world for the better, although long term peace between Eminiar VII and Vendikar will still depend on the locals. The same is true of other Mary Worth stories like The Apple or The Return Of The Archons. At the end of the episode their respective societies are already visibly different. The Cloud Minders shows how long social change can take. Although Ardana can never be the same after the events of The Cloud Minders the world has not changed overnight. Plasus and Vanna have not become friends after their shared experience. They do not suddenly understand the other's point of view. If anything the lines separating the pair have become more clearly defined. Plasus and Vanna have both begun to realise that the masks will make all Troglytes articulate enough to argue the injustice of the current system and the case for fairer treatment. What's going to happen on Ardana is right, but right doesn't mean pleasant or nice or easy. As Plasus and Vanna argue and snipe at each other we see that the immediate future on Ardana is going to be difficult.

PLASUS: They will all be like her. Ungrateful, vindictive.
VANNA: Yes. Our demands have just begun. 

Enterprise crew deaths: None.

Running total: 56

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

Requiem For Methuselah

Requiem For Methuselah was written by Jerome Bixby who contributed the impressive script threesome of Day Of The Dove, By Any Other Name, and Mirror, Mirror. It contains some of the finest individual lines in Star Trek. "A very old and lonely man. And a young and lonely man. We put on a pretty poor show, didn't we?" Kirk's line deserves to be quoted alongside Spock's, "I have killed my captain and my friend," from Amok Time. Even better, William Shatner responds to the obvious quality of the dialogue and turns in some of his best acting work for a long time. In fact this may be one of the best acted episodes of the series. Guest stars James Daly as Flint and Louise Sorel as Rayna, also turn in sterling work; we're a very long way from the arch performances of Spock's Brain. And Flint is an intriguing creation. An immortal man who began as "a soldier, a bully and a fool," and met the great minds of history, "Galileo, Socrates, Moses," and learned from them. He evolved from cruelty and barbarism and educated himself to become a succession of brilliant men; Leonardo, Brahms, Solomon, Alexander, and so on. He is almost the incarnation of Kirk's speech at the end of A Taste Of Armageddon. "The instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we won't kill today." Flint is the soldier who learned not to kill.

So what's the problem? If Requiem For Methuselah contains such great acting and a scintillating script then why does it drag? The most obvious flaw is that this is a love story for Kirk. Another one. There comes a point where no matter how beautifully you tell your love story it's simply going over the same old ground. How many times can Captain Kirk meet the love of his life and begin an affair which ends tragically? About three. There's an additional issue. To inject some urgency into the plot an arbitrary deadline has been added. The Enterprise is in the grip of an outbreak of Rigelian fever. McCoy has, "four hours to process [the ryetalyn cure], otherwise the epidemic will be irreversible." Unfortunately this results in the problem everyone notices with the story, in the space of less than four hours Kirk falls so deeply in love that at the end of the episode he seems barely able to function. Imagine The City On The Edge Of Forever rewritten so that Kirk and Spock arrive five hours before McCoy, and Kirk and Edith Keeler fall in love across a single afternoon. That's the story presented by Requiem For Methuselah. The script's justification for Kirk's abrupt fall for Rayna is that she is unusually captivating and beautiful and extraordinary. Except that all the women Kirk falls for(as opposed to the ones he more cynically seduces such as Kelinda in By Another Name) are unusually captivating and beautiful and extraordinary. Edith Keeler was. So was Miramanee from The Paradise Syndrome. Kirk has a definite type and his type is the woman who dies tragically around the 48 minute mark.

The plotting of Requiem For Methuselah is spartan. In The City On The Edge Of Forever Kirk has a stark choice; save the future or save Edith Keeler. There is no similar conflict in Requiem For Methuselah. Kirk falls in love with a woman who dies. The end. The Rigelian fever outbreak is a device to get Kirk into the story and is then largely forgotten; like the duplicate Earth in Miri,. There's no attempt to bring the romance and the disease story together and have, for example, Rayna die of Rigelian fever. The developing love story between Kirk and Rayna is the only significant story and it's simply too slender to support an episode all by itself. The City On The Edge Of Forever keeps several plots running simultaneously; the hunt for McCoy, restoring history to the right path, and Spock's attempt to learn the fate of Edith Keeler.

It's tempting to excuse the plot light nature of Requiem For Methuselah by describing the episode as a character study of Flint. Unfortunately Flint simply isn't interesting enough as a character. Yes, he is an intriguing creation but in practical terms his background plays no part in the story beyond the moment when he tells Kirk, "I am Brahms." Flint is a character for a film or a book. We need to explore Flint's life, because the story of how he came to be the person living on this unnamed planet far from the rest of humanity is more interesting than Flint the person. Unfortunately that is a story Star Trek cannot tell. When Doctor Who created a similar, if more humorous, character in the alien Scaroth from the story City Of Death the Doctor was able to travel in time and explore Scaroth's life; on a BBC budget. We saw Scaroth in 1979 Paris, and the year 400 million BC (approx.), and 1505 Florence, and we saw hints of his life elsewhere as an Egyptian god. We get a sense of a life lived. More than that we get a sense of how frustrating it must be for Scaroth to live among these primitive creatures which were created as as result of the accident which destroyed Scaroth's race and made him immortal.

Metamorphosis has a similar problem. The story makes a big deal out of Kirk meeting Zefram Cochrane, the discoverer of the space warp, a man out of time who has been kept alive for 150 years by the mysterious alien Companion but Cochrane's background ceases to have any impact on the story the moment McCoy says, "that's impossible. Zefram Cochrane died a hundred and fifty years ago." Ultimately Zefram Cochrane could be any Joe Sixpack who crashed his shuttle. Likewise there's nothing about the character space occupied by Flint which specifically requires a 6000 year old man who was a succession of famous historical figures. Flint needs to be brilliant but he could still be any 23rd Century robotics genius who decided to drop out and live with his android girlfriend.

Lastly there's the final scene. Your mileage will vary but I find it creepy and wrong. Spock takes it upon himself to edit Kirk's memories and presumably dull the pain caused by the death of Rayna. What frustrates about this scene is that the mind meld is not necessary. Simply showing Kirk grieving is unusual enough to demonstrate the depth of his feeling for Rayna. It establishes that what Kirk has been through is more than just another space fling. The mind meld is there because someone on the production side wanted to show that Rayna meant more to Kirk than all those other space babes, but also wanted to explain why Kirk isn't still prostrated with grief at the start of next week's episode. It's a classic example of over-thinking a problem because simple implied passage of time between episodes will take care of the mourning period. If the audience wasn't bothered at the end of The City On The Edge Of Forever or The Paradise Syndrome then they won't be bothered now. As it is, when Spock starts whispering "forget", I just wonder how many other times has he crept into Kirk's room and done this?

Enterprise crew deaths: Three Enterprise crew die off-screen because of Rigelian fever.

Running total: 56

The Lights Of Zetar

The last hundred survivors of the dead planet Zetar survive through sheer force of will in a non-corporeal form. They have travelled through space for over a thousand years looking for a body which they can take over and live out the remainder of their lives. In the course of their search they killed everyone on Memory Alpha; a planetoid set up by the Federation as a central library containing the total cultural history and scientific knowledge of all Federation members. The lens through which writers Jeremy Tarcher and Shari Lewis focus this story is a romance between Scotty and Lieutenant Mira Romaine a Starfleet specialist supervising the transfer of equipment to Memory Alpha.

A Scotty love story! Has no one learned anything from Who Mourns For Adonais? The answer is yes. A little. This time Scotty is at least involved in a relationship which seems mutual. Unlike the loveless relationship in Who Mourns For Adonais? where Scotty was willing to sacrifice his life for a woman who barely seemed to recognise that he existed; the height of her passion was a reluctant, "all right," when he invited her for coffee.

Apart from that there's very much the sense that The Lights Of Zetar could be Who Mourns For Adonais? with the Apollo plot taken out and the Zetar survivors plot slotted into its place. In both stories Scotty acts utterly obsessed to the extent of disobeying direct orders from Kirk. In both stories there is also the sense that someone on the production team simply looked down a list of episodes and saw there had already been a recent Kirk love story, a Spock love story, a McCoy love story, and a Chekov love story; the only two regular cast not to get a love story are Uhura and Sulu who are both rarely asked to do anything interesting. It's the generic nature of the love plot which really grates; Scotty could be Sulu or Chekov or Lieutenant Kyle. It's like the joke at the end of The Simpsons episode Das Bus where the children are marooned on an island and the narrator says “... eventually they were rescued by, oh, let's say... Moe.”

Star Trek is great at telling unique emotional stories for Kirk and Spock. The City On The Edge Of Forever couldn't be about another character falling for Edith Keeler, and there's something endearing about Kirk's reluctance to talk about Ruth in Shore Leave; as if he is embarrassed by the unexpected reappearance of this ghost from his past. Unfortunately when it comes to other characters the scripting suddenly becomes utterly interchangable. "McCoy falls in love...Chekov falls in love...Scotty falls in love." Anyone could have caught a terminal disease and fallen in love in For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky. Still this might simply be a reflection of how television worked at the time; maybe carefully worked out character stories were strictly for the lead actors. For all I know on Gunsmoke Chester Goode, Festus Haggen, and Doc Adams were all having interchangeable romances on a weekly basis. At the end of the episode Scotty gazes moon-eyed at Lieutenant Romaine and says, "now we have all the time in the world". We never hear about Lieutenant Romaine again.

It's frustrating that Jeremy Tarcher and Shari Lewis have foregrounded the Scotty love story. The other concepts are really interesting. There's a spiritual element to the Zetarians who drift around the universe as disembodied minds, possessing people, forcing them to speak in tongues, and giving Lieutenant Romaine the power of second sight. Their psychedelic colours and appearance in extreme close-ups of Lieutenant Romaine's eye probably springs more from Dave Bowman's trip beyond the infinite in 2001: A Space Odyssey which premièred in Los Angeles on 4th April 1968.

Memory Alpha is the Library of Alexandria for the Federation. It is destroyed because, "when the library complex was assembled, shielding was considered inappropriate to its totally academic purpose. Since the information on the Memory planet is available to everyone, special protection was deemed unnecessary. " The line is probably a quick story fix; like M-5's unexpected and never again mentioned ability to generate a force field in The Ultimate Computer. During story development someone probably wondered why everyone on the Enterprise survived their encounter with the Zetarians unlike the people on Memory Alpha. It makes the Federation seem sweetly naive, as if they never expected anyone to attack a library. The line implies that Memory Alpha has no shielding whatsoever, not even against natural radiation which is strange considering cosmic radiation was a known hazard of space travel by 1968. Apparently anyone using Memory Alpha will be sterilized whenever a nearby star coughs. There's also an odd line from Spock about the loss of Memory Alpha being "a disaster for the galaxy," and "irretrievable," because the memory core is burned out. The script seems to be suggesting that Memory Alpha holds its information in an electronic format which is not backed up. It's easy to watch The Lights Of Zetar today and assume Memory Alpha is like the internet but it's not. It's a genuine space library and Spock's line is a relic of days when information was harder to duplicate.

Enterprise crew deaths: None.

Running total: 53

That Which Survives

Redshirt has become such a generic term for a character who dies soon after being introduced that it has it's own Wikipedia entry. Different script writers use redshirt deaths in different ways. Nine unnamed crew die off screen in Where No Man Has Gone Before because an audience unfamiliar with Star Trek needs to have the damage to the Enterprise put into a context they can understand. "Ship's condition, heading back on impulse power only. Main engines burned out. The ship's space warp ability gone. Earth bases which were only days away are now years in the distance." Kirk's log entry means very little to someone new to Star Trek but nine dead is a concept which can be instantly grasped. An incident which killed nine crew must be serious. When crewman Darnell becomes the first Star Trek character to die in The Man Trap the purpose of his death is to tell us what the salt vampire does. In the case of By Any Other Name a quick and dirty fix to the story -to answer the question what happens to the Enterprise crew when the Kelvans take over- results in the memorable death of Yeoman Thompson.

It's an ongoing problem for Star Trek that in order to underline the danger facing a landing party someone really needs to die but that someone can't be a member of the regular cast. It's not so much a story telling problem as a suspension of disbelief problem. No redshirts die in The Doomsday Machine (Commodore Decker doesn't count being a fully fledged guest character as opposed to the anonymous crew who join the choir invisible in Where No Man Has Gone Before). Despite this lack of crew death The Doomsday Machine is an exciting story well told and the audience allow themselves to be swept along and, for want of a better word, to pretend that they believe Kirk might die when the transporter fails at a crucial moment. In The Apple it doesn't matter how high the death toll rises. A conga line of redshirts could have fallen into Vaal's maw. It wouldn't solve the basic problem that watching the story grind through its four acts is dull. Without that audience engagement The Apple seems stupid and the multiple redshirt deaths simply underline the ludicrousness of the five survivors of the nine person landing party being the four regular cast and one woman who beamed down.

The third season of Star Trek features the fewest redshirt deaths. Only seven by the broadcast of That Which Survives. At first glance it seems as if the production team are aware that regularly killing the supporting cast leaves the series open to parody and have decided to scale back the number of times it happens. Actually this is probably a symptom of the budget problems Robert Justman used to complain about. One simple money saving measure is to eliminate all those minor characters before filming starts. Having said that, looking at the list of third season episodes it's hard to spot ones where a few additional extras might have upped the ante and improved the story. The only obvious candidate is Whom Gods Destroy. If Kirk and Spock had beamed down with a few security guards for Garth to threaten, or confuse with his shape shifting ability, then the story might have seemed less static; the scene where Garth blows up Marta might make more sense if it was an Enterprise crew member rather than a woman to whom Kirk barely has any connection.

With all this in mind the teaser to That Which Survives surprises when a woman appears in the transporter room and kills the unfortunate transporter operator. For the first act we seem to be watching a traditionally structured Star Trek. The landing party is trapped on a planet facing a threat and isolated from the resources of the Enterprise. In Whom Gods Destroy Kirk and Spock are trapped below a security screen. In The Apple it is Vaal which keeps the landing party and the ship separated. The Empath has the Enterprise leave orbit, and the story, because of a powerful solar flare. In That Which Survives the Enterprise is transported, "nine hundred and ninety point seven light years," from the planet. In theory this should make the end of act one, when Lieutenant D'Amato is also killed by the mystery lady, the point where all tension drains from the script. The landing party now consists of Kirk McCoy and Sulu, and there is no way any of them are going to be killed. However the teleplay is written by old hand John Meredyth Lucas, from a story by Michael Richards, and he does his best to make some changes to the formula.

Aware that threatening the lives of the landing party is a dead end for generating tension, the story switches back to the ship. Losira, the strange woman with the killer touch, appears back on the Enterprise and kills an engineer then sabotages the ship. This links the planet side and ship board stories more directly than normal. The story is opened out, rather than closed down when the audience realise no one else can die, and the power of Losira is emphasised. Another interesting variation on the normal story is that both the landing party and the Enterprise crew believe the others to be dead. The side effects of the power which flings the Enterprise across space make the landing party think the ship has been destroyed, and vice-versa. This leaves the landing party focusing on survival rather than simply thinking about getting back to the ship.

Elements of That Which Survives feel like an attempt to tell a ghost story in a science fiction series; there's a mysterious planet haunted by a strange woman whose touch causes death. The recent Doctor Who story Hide was a similar attempt to tell a genre crossing story, and in both cases the shift from a haunted house/planet story to science fiction is a little awkward as the story attempts to find a scientific explanation for the spooky events. One problem is that the climax to the Enterprise plot, Scotty's trip into the service crawlway to shut off the fuel, doesn't have any relation to the rest of the story. It's tense, and a good showcase for James Doohan, but it has nothing to do with the mystery of the strange planet or Losira.

Another problem with That Which Survives is that the dialogue can be over-ripe. It's nicely sharp in places. Kirk's "if I'd wanted a Russian history lesson, I'd have brought along Mister Chekov," is great, as is Scotty's " I know what time it is. I don't need a blooming cuckoo clock, " as Spock insists on counting down the time remaining. Unfortunately in other places the dialogue skids over into the melodramatic. Sulu's "how can such people be, Captain? Such evil and she's so, so beautiful." Or, when McCoy wonders who killed D'Amato, Kirk's insightful, "something or someone did." Spock suffers from several particularly bad attacks of cute dialogue.

UHURA: Mister Spock! Are you all right?

SPOCK: Yes. I believe no permanent damage was done.

UHURA: What happened?

SPOCK: The occipital area of my head seems to have impacted with the chair.
UHURA: No, Mister Spock. I meant what happened to us?

SPOCK: ...Can you give me warp eight?

SCOTT: Aye, sir. And maybe a wee bit more. I'll sit on the warp engines myself and nurse them.

SPOCK: That position, Mister Scott, would not only be unavailing but also undignified.

SPOCK: Mister Scott, you have accomplished your task.

SCOTT: You might at least say thank you.

SPOCK: For what purpose, Mister Scott? What is it in you humans...

SCOTT: Never mind.

SPOCK: ...That requires an overwhelming display of emotion in a situation such as this? Two men pursue the only reasonable course of action indicated, and yet you feel that something else is necessary.

And so on. At times he's so weirdly literal, and funny-logical that it's tempting to wonder if Mr. Spock has been at McCoy's Saurian brandy. He's in character but acting very differently to normal. There are times when Leonard Nimoy seems to be struggling with playing funny-Spock. In the warp eight exchange his emphatic finger pointing is at odds with Leonard Nimoy's normal tight control on Spock's movement. It gives us a glimpse of how Spock might have been handled differently in an alternate version of Star Trek where the character was played much more as comic relief.

Enterprise crew deaths: Three, Ensign Wyatt, Lieutenant D'Amato, and Crewman Watkins. The most crew to die in a single episode since Obsession.

Running total: 53

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

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

Balance Of Terror told this story more effectively. In that episode you've got the outright racism of Lieutenant Stiles who has learned from his family to hate the Romulans for the deaths of some of his ancestors a century ago. "There was a Captain Stiles in the space service then. Two Commanders and several junior officers. All lost in that war, sir." Stiles' attitude is contrasted unfavourably with Kirk's more enlightened perspective, "their war, Mister Stiles. Not yours. Don't forget it." Then once Spock taps into the Romulan bridge Stiles bigotry and paranoia, "we could have Romulan spies aboard this ship," becomes attached to Spock. The focus, as all Star Trek should be, is always on the Enterprise and her crew.

Contrast that with Let That Be Your Last Battlefield in which Lokai and Bele bring their aeons old dispute onto the Enterprise. The pair run around making speeches at everyone while the Enterprise crew raise their eyebrows at the aliens "primitive thinking" and simper about there being persecution on Earth once and how they, "remember reading about it in my history class."

One of the great things about Balance Of Terror is that it reflects flawed humanity. Someone like Stiles can be a good bridge officer but a bad person. He can hate Spock for the wrong reasons but be right about what it means for galactic peace if the Romulan ship is allowed to return home. Presenting the Enterprise crew as beyond racism in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield reduces them to the status of observers. Literally considering the only decisive action Kirk takes in the story is when he sets the ship to self-destruct and makes Bele briefly return control. For the most part he stands around watching Lokai and Bele argue. Understandably he prefers to take the pair to Starbase Four where they will become someone else's problem. The Enterprise crew can see the hatred between Lokai and Bele but it's not something they can understand. This distances the Enterprise crew from the viewer because it's never explained how they reach this enlightened perspective, understandably given that the writers have no more idea than the viewer how this can be achieved; although one point in the episodes favour is that it does make their values aspirational, something which humanity should work towards.

Unfortunately the lofty post-racism of the Enterprise crew also allows the production team to avoid making an unambiguous statement condemning bigotry. Kirk needs to clearly and explicitly condemn the attitudes of Lokai and Bele in the same way he publicly dresses down Stiles. "Leave any bigotry in your quarters. There's no room for it on the Bridge. Do I make myself clear?" In A Taste Of Armageddon Kirk gives a speech in which he admits that humanity, like the people of Eminiar VII, is a race of killers. "We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we won't kill today." Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is crying out for a speech like this from Kirk in which he compares humanity to Lokai and Bele and admits that we are flawed but work to constantly overcome the hatred Lokai and Bele feel for each other. However the script doesn't want to admit that Kirk, and by extension the audience, are anything like Lokai and Bele. This is a story which could explore the Vulcan idea of IDIC more effectively than IsThere In Truth No Beauty?
Worse, the script is determined to be oddly even handed. The anger of Lokai, the oppressed, is presented as being as bad as the bigotry of Bele the oppressor. This massive oversimplification of a complex issue might be necessary to make the episode work but in the end what should be a clear message condemning racism becomes fudged. The story ends up as a shrugged statement that bigotry and hatred are stupid but both sides are as bad as each other. In the end it's redundant to talk about the acting or the direction or the editing or the make-up because the moral lesson is the point of the episode, unlike Balance Of Terror which keeps the moral lesson as a subplot to a larger story, and the episode fails the moment it fumbles the clear delivery of it's own message. It's not clear why Let That Be Your Last Battlefield should fumble its message but it's possible that when this episode was written and filmed in 1968 , which was a terrible year around the world, anything stronger was seen as inappropriate.

Enterprise crew deaths: None.
Running total: 50