Elaan Of Troyius

John Meredyth Lucas was Star Trek's renaissance man. He produced the episodes from Journey To Babel to The Omega Glory, wrote The Changeling Patterns of Force and the teleplay for That Which Survives, and directed The Ultimate Computer and The Enterprise Incident. He also wrote and directed Elaan of Troyius. It would be interesting to know the combination of circumstances which allowed John Meredyth Lucas to write and direct his own episode; a degree of creative freedom not given to anyone else on Star Trek or any of the subsequent spin off series. The combined fee for John Meredyth Lucas to write and direct might have been less than the cost of paying him as a writer and hiring a separate director. That might have been appealing during production of another episode which looks like it is pushing the boundaries of Star Trek's strained finances with alien make-up, a lot of speaking parts, extensive costume requirements, and a brand new Klingon ship model.

Whatever the reason for allowing John Meredyth Lucas to direct as well as write it represented good value for money. He's a very functional director in terms of shot composition but he gets some brilliant performances from his actors. France Nuyen's portrayal of Elaan is charismatic and she makes Elaan likeable. This sometimes requires working against the intention of the script which is quite an acting challenging considering the man directing her performance also wrote her lines. When she's eating her dinner after stabbing Ambassador Petri the intent of the script seems to be "look at this awful woman" but she gives Elaan a strength which works against the undercurrent of the scene and makes her lack of interest in good table manners admirable. France Nuyen also throws away some lines which could have been played more broadly. "So, Ambassador Petri is going to recover? That is too bad." And a great zinger at Gene Roddenberry's concept of infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

KIRK: It's been my experience that the prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get to know each other.
ELAAN: It's not in my experience.

Contrast France Nuyen's delivery with the way William Shatner overplays some of his lines and facial expressions. He and Jay Robinson, playing Petri, bounce off each other to try and wring as much humour as possible from their scenes together and the result is Petri never feels like a real person. He's a caricature of an oily diplomat, rather than an oily diplomat. The best thing about France Nuyen's performance is that her presence seems to force William Shatner to raise his game and in the second half of the episode we see a more subdued performance from him than we have for some time. For the rest of the cast it is largely business as usual. Not to be dismissive of the hard work they put in each week but, for example, DeForest Kelley long ago worked out exactly how to play Doctor McCoy and there's nothing in this episode to challenge his acting ability. Likewise Leonard Nimoy knows exactly how to deliver his performance and without breaking Spock's emotionless facade he is expertly able to inject whole worlds of suffering into a line like, "Captain, the Dohlman is dissatisfied with the quarters provided."

John Meredyth Lucas' script starts out as The Taming Of The Shrew via Pygmalion in space before becoming something marginally more nuanced in the second half. John Meredyth Lucas has cited the Helen of Troy myth as a source, unsurprising given the Helen/Elaan Troy/Troyius naming. If that is the case then the myth has been carefully inverted because the kidnapping of Helen of Troy by Paris caused the Trojan war while here the marriage of Elaan to the ruler of the planet Troyius will bring peace. Elaan's situation is more that of a European princess being married off to an eligible prince in the name of diplomacy; similar to Henry VIII's marriage to Anne of Cleeves to provide England with a potential ally in case of a Roman Catholic attack.

Whether The Taming Of The Shrew is a good starting point for a Star Trek script is a whole separate question. Academics have spent years arguing if Shakespeare's play is misogynistic or a satire of the views espoused by the male characters in the play, and some Star Trek blog on the internet is not the place to debate that issue. There are uncomfortable lines in the script. Nurse Chapel's line "if Elasian women are that vicious, why are men so overwhelmingly attracted to them? I mean, what magic do they possess?" is particularly offensive because it's dialogue written by a man for a female character assuming that some women are so awful the only way they can ensnare a man is by trickery. Kirk's slapping of Elaan is unforgivable. No doubt similar scenes can be found in any number of contemporary shows but Star Trek is unfortunate enough to have endured and what would have been acceptable on broadcast is now dated and uncomfortable to watch. As fans we want Star Trek to be better than it sometimes is, and it's disappointing to be reminded that the series was written and produced by sixties men, mostly, and reflects their attitudes.

That said thanks to France Nuyen Elaan often comes across less as a shrew to be tamed than as a strong woman frustrated by finding herself trapped in a situation which renders her powerless, and there's a case for arguing that her most unappealing behaviour is an act to try and get the wedding abandoned. She switches tactics when this doesn't work and plan B is to use a biological advantage, as Petri explains, "it's biochemical. A man whose flesh is once touched by the tears of a woman of Elas has his heart enslaved forever.

Based on how Star Trek has told stories in the past, acts three and four should feature Kirk becoming increasingly obsessed with Elaan while Spock and McCoy fret and speculate about the change in his behaviour, and worry about whether to relive him of command. McCoy's search for an antidote to Elaan's tears would be the resolution to this plot crisis when he cures Kirk of his obsessive love. That this doesn't happen is of some credit to John Meredyth Lucas. Instead there's a sub-plot about a Klingon attempt to destroy the Enterprise, and Elaan, to gain control of Troyius; a planet naturally rich in dilithium. Kirk puts his command duties before his love for Elaan and by doing so proves his point that responsibilities and obligations come before personal wishes. In the end Elaan is not some broken woman who is fixed by teaching her how to hold a knife and fork properly and say please and thank you. She's a person in her own right who learns that the honour she values so highly takes many different forms. Best of all she learns this lesson not from a long winded speech from Kirk, as was the case with the Vians in The Empath, but from observing the way he behaves. She learns that very Star Trek lesson that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.

Enterprise crew deaths: One, engineer Watson killed by Kryton as he sabotages the warp drive.
Running total: 50

Is There In Truth No Beauty?

Each of the three core Star Trek directors had their own speciality. Marc Daniels' strength was making the most of the Enterprise sets, producing his best work on bottle shows like The Doomsday Machine, or Mirror, Mirror. Joseph Pevney was great at big set piece stories, ones with lots of location shooting like Arena, but he also had an excellent eye for composing individual shots as in Amok Time and the scene where Spock tries to explain the pon farr to Kirk (“The birds and the bees are not Vulcans, Captain”).

The Star Trek production team seem to have viewed Ralph Senensky as the actor's director and tended to give him scripts with lots of character moments; This Side Of Paradise and Metamorphosis. He also has an astonishingly good sense of cinematography. In script terms Metamorphosis is frankly dull. Like This Side Of Paradise it's a love story between two mismatched people but Cochrane and the Companion are no Spock and Leila. However regardless of the faults of the script the finished episode looks stunning and judged on its visuals alone the story would be one of Star Trek's ten best. Ralph Senensky's real strength appears to have been in inspiring the people around him to do their best work; in the case of Metamorphosis the art director Matt Jefferies, and director of photography Jerry Finnerman.

What's true for Metamorphosis is also true for Is There In Truth No Beauty? The episode looks stunning and there's a constant sense that Ralph Senensky is always looking for a more interesting angle. Most notably with his and Jerry Finnerman's use of a 9mm fish-eye lens to capture point of view insanity shots. However where Metamorphosis was dull, Is There In Truth No Beauty? is a much better paced story. Like The Enterprise Incident it is full of plot and keeps the attention of the viewer by constantly moving the story in new directions. Ultimately Is There In Truth No Beauty? is a better episode than The Enterprise Incident because the story is much neater. Where The Enterprise Incident ends up being overbalanced by the weight of too many coincidences, Is There In Truth No Beauty? carefully sets up its story. If Jean Lisette Aroeste's script has a fault it's a little predictable in places. In the opening Captain's log when the Medusians are described as, “beings who are formless, so utterly hideous that the sight of a Medusan brings total madness to any human who sees one,” it is immediately apparent that someone is going to see one and be driven insane. Likewise it's clear Ambassador Kollos' navigation skills will be required when Kirk later asks Miranda Jones, “do you feel any way may be found to employ Medusan navigators on starships? It would certainly solve many of our navigational problems.” One surprise the script sucessfully pulls off is the end of act three moment when Spock accidentally catches sight of the Medusan. Early on it is established that Miranda Jones is jealous of Spock's superior ability to mind meld with Kollos but it remains unclear if Spock/Kollos accidentally forgets to wear the visor when Kollos returns to his box or if, as Kirk later accuses Jones, she deliberately made him forget.

The cast are in fine form, and there are two excellent guest stars. Most obviously Diana Muldaur, back again after appearing in the earlier Ralph Senensky directed episode Return To Tomorrow. She makes Miranda Jones spiky and unpleasant without being irremediable. For half the episode Diana Muldaur is given the extremely difficult task of playing a blind character without giving away that her character is blind; her condition is not revealed until act three. The odd vulnerability Diana Muldaur succeeds in giving Miranda Jones is an accomplished piece of acting. More easy to overlook is David Frankham as Larry Marvick who makes the most of a smaller role. his sweaty hysteria once Marvick goes mad is really well done, especially his delivery of the oddly creepy line, “We mustn't sleep! They come in your dreams! That's the worst! They suffocate in your dreams!”

 

The two behind the scenes stars of the episode are film editor Fabian Tordjmann and George Duning who composed the additional music. Fabian Tordjmann's editing work on the episode is tremendous. Watch the scene where Larry Marvick is driven mad by Ambassador Kollos. In the 30 seconds between the slow zoom to Kollos' container and the shot of Miranda Jones sitting in her cabin there are something like 20 cuts, but the sequence is more than just simple rapid cutting. Everything works together to create a sense of dislocation; the lurid green light; the headache inducing animation; and cutting around within a single shot so that, for example, we see Larry Marvick twist in agony, before Fabian Tordjmann cuts back to the beginning of the shot and then suddenly to the end, so that Marvick appears to jerk around the frame as if time is out of joint. Played over the top of this is George Duning's frantic score. The discordant trumpet stabs and electric organ would sound ridiculous on any other episode, but perfectly fit the mood and pace of Is There In Truth No Beauty?

Act two encapsulates why Is There In Truth No Beauty? works as well as it does. Running at a brisk six minutes the pace never lets up and showcases the work of Ralph Senensky, Fabian Tordjmann, Jerry Finnerman, George Duning, and the cast. The act begins with a tracking shot following the now insane Larry Marvick as he runs from the Medusan Ambassador's quarters to a turbo elevator, and then cuts between Marvick heading to engineering with, first, Miranda Jones investigating the Ambassador's cabin, and then Kirk, Spock, McCoy and two security guards walking down the same corridor with the camera tracking backwards. There is no dialogue for the first minute of the act, but the mood is captured by the camera movement in the shots used, Duning's score, and the body language of the actors; David Frankham, distressed and disoriented; Diana Muldaur hesitant and unsure; and Kirk and the security team purposeful.

At this point I'm going to have to politely disagree with Ralph Senensky. Over on his blog he describes when he first saw the episode on television, “I was appalled. Who had ordered the horror film flickering green light and the comic strip animation?” I can understand why he feels they are an unnecessary addition to his director's cut. His opinion is that they represent a “vulgarizing technique [that] had never intruded into STAR TREK before." The green light and animation are b-movie techniques but I don't think Star Trek should be above using these techniques, and I also think they are an important part of why the episode works. The green light and animation give the audience a sense of something incomprehensible in the Ambassador's container. This is not just some rubber suited monster but literally something indescribable which the human mind cannot cope with, and it's important to have this conveyed with a visual cue.

Enterprise crew deaths: None this week. Although recurring extra Billy Blackburn does get punched in the face by the insane Larry Marvick.

Running total: 48.

The Enterprise Incident

On 23^rd January 1968 the USS Pueblo was boarded and captured by North Korean soldiers. The ship had been monitoring Soviet Union naval activity and gathering signal and electronic intelligence from North Korea. The United States maintained the USS Pueblo had always remained in international waters while North Korea claimed the ship had violated its territory. For D.C. Fontana this was the inspiration for the story which became The Enterprise Incident. Star Trek has dealt with contemporary issues before but this is bold even by their standards. The Pueblo incident, as it has become known, bubbled away through 1968 as the script was written, filmed, and broadcast. The crew were finally released from North Korea on 23^rd December 1968, some three months after The Enterprise Incident was first aired.

The main strength of The Enterprise Incident is that the plot barrels forwards at top speed. By the end of the teaser the Enterprise is surrounded by Romulan ships, then act one ends with Spock betraying Kirk, act two with Kirk being pronounced dead, and act three with Scotty in a race against time to install the stolen cloaking device on the Enterprise. There's very little slack in the script. Unlike the act one Enterprise bridge scenes in Spock's Brain where the bridge crew work through the problem of locating Spock's purloined organ; those scenes don't do anything except pad out the running time to the required length. Although it's great to see the bridge crew working as a team it's the work of the actors, and Marc Daniels inspired decision to use back projection for the bridge viewscreen, which makes those bridge scenes interesting. In The Enterprise Incident each time the viewer thinks they've got a handle on the plot something new is thrown into the mix. The most obvious example being the act three reveal that this is all a big bluff to steal the new improved Romulan cloaking device. Then Kirk is disguised as a Romulan, and the episode turns into something more like Mission: Impossible; a spy/caper story in space.

The big advantage of keeping the plot moving like this is it stops the viewer noticing how conveniently everything falls into place. Kirk and Spock are consistently insanely lucky. Under orders from the Federation to steal a cloaking device they fly into Romulan space and are intercepted by a ship which has exactly what they need. Rather than destroy the Enterprise, “standard Romulan procedure” according to Spock, the Romulans decide the ship would make a great prize and invite Kirk and Spock across to the flagship. The Romulan commander is a woman who is attracted to Spock, which gives him a chance to distract her. When Spock “kills” Kirk his body is returned to the Enterprise before Spock's nerve pinch wears off. When the theft of the cloaking device is noticed the Romulan commander delays any action for 20 minutes while she takes Spock's confession, giving Scotty time to fit the device on the Enterprise, and Chekov time to locate Spock with the sensors. There's nothing wrong with having a character saved by a moment of luck but there's only so long a script can rely on coincidence before it starts to feel contrived, and as The Enterprise Incident moves into act four it does feel as if the coincidences mount up too much.

Worse, as the coincidences pile up it makes the viewer more sceptical and less willing to allow the story the required suspension of disbelief. Essentially it encourages them to actively pick holes in the story, and there do seem to be plenty to find. It sure is lucky that the Romulan cloaking device is compatible with the Enterprise systems. Just as it sure is lucky the Romulans don't search Spock and find the hidden communicator he is carrying. Just as it sure is lucky the Romulans notice Spock's transmissions but don't notice Kirk beaming over from, and back to, the Enterprise. Just as it sure is lucky the Romulans bring Kirk and Spock onto their ship. It would have wrecked Kirk's plan if the Romulans had kept everyone on board the Enterprise. The Enterprise Incident is a good script, but there's just too much narrative cheating for it to ever be great.

Another strength of The Enterprise Incident is that it paints the Federation with a little more grey than we normally see. The Federation is prepared to use sneaky and underhand tactics to gain an advantage and by ordering the Enterprise into Romulan space on a spying mission the Federation risks the crew of the Enterprise and, more seriously, war with the Romulans. This acknowledgement that sometimes even the good guys have to use morally dubious methods is a sign of maturity not always seen in Star Trek. Standard practice is simply to not discuss the subject. It's just taken as read that the Federation is a force for good. Which is fine until something comes along which makes the Federation look bad. How many lousy Federation officials have we met? Or insane starship captains?

At its worst Star Trek will assume that anything its heroes do must be right, simply because they are the heroes and therefore incapable of doing anything wrong (and this is true of any television series not just Star Trek). Look at The Apple where Kirk's destruction of Vaal is presented as heroic because now the Feeders of Vaal can kiss and have babies; never mind that the entire planetary population is 15 people and their world is a lethal death trap. Or compare the way the Terran Empire's threatened standard procedure (“phaser barrage on Halkan cities”) is presented as evil in Mirror, Mirror but Kirk's threat to use Starfleet General Order 24 (“the entire inhabited surface of your planet will be destroyed”) is a heroic way to force Anan 7 to listen in A Taste Of Armageddon.

This pragmatic Federation feels more realistic. A return to the complexities of episodes like Errand Of Mercy where every decision Kirk makes is for the right ethical reasons, but at the end of the story he is on the side arguing for war. What's particularly pleasing is that none of the characters are used to justify the Federation's actions. There is no The Apple style speech telling us that the Romulans are so bad that anything the Federation does against them is justified. Instead Kirk and Spock are carrying out orders they have been given as part of what seems to be routine toing and froing of secrets between the Federation and Romulans and, as Spock acknowledges at the end of the episode, he and Kirk went to all that effort and exposed themselves to danger for what was probably only a short term gain. “Military secrets are the most fleeting of all.”

Enterprise crew deaths: None again, Kirk's risky plan works perfectly.
Running total: 46

Spock's Brain

The weirdest thing about Spock's Brain is that anyone thought this was the ideal episode to open season three. The second weirdest thing about Spock's Brain is how close the episode comes to working.

To stick with the second point. Yes, the premise is dumb. An alien woman scoops Spock's brain out of his head and runs off with it because they need its processing ability to run their city. Still Star Trek has taken less promising ideas and turned them into workable stories before. Spock must have sex or he'll die; that's Amok Time. Or there's the incident Leonard Nimoy recalls in his memoir I Am Spock. “But that day in 1967, when [D.C. Fontana ] came onto the Star Trek soundstage and told me, “Hey I have an idea for a Spock love story,” I was taken aback. Worse than taken aback – I was frightened... the very phrase “Spock love story” seemed oxymoronic.” “Trust me,” Nimoy reports Fontana saying to him, “there's a way to pull it off properly,” and of course she was right, This Side Of Paradise was the result. 

Taken individually each element of the story feels like it could work. The goofiest idea is the women of Sigma Draconis VI exiling unneeded men to the icy surface of the world. This war of the sexes concept is one other programmes have played with but no one has ever really made it work sucessfully; there's Power the series four episode of Blake's 7, and the Doctor Who story Galaxy 4.

In isolation everything else works. The idea of a brain as the central processing unit of a complex machine can be seen echoed in films like RoboCop. The idea of a pampered civilisation cared for and surrounded by the technology of their ancestors which they no longer understand is straight out of E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops (on YouTube you can find BBC2's outstanding 1966 adaptation for the series Out Of The Unknown). The idea of aliens harvesting organs for their own purposes occurs again as the basis of the Vidiians in Star Trek: Voyager.

Gene L. Coon's script (writing under the pseudonym Lee Cronin) characterises the regulars very well. McCoy gets some great lines which Deforest Kelly uses to good effect. Most notably after using The Teacher to gain the necessary surgical knowledge, “a child could do it. A child could do it.” There's the discussion on the bridge as the crew work through the problem of which of the three inhabited planets in the Sigma Draconis system is the correct one. There's also a scene which perfectly captures Kirk as the man who never gives up even in the face of insurmountable odds.

KIRK: Then we'll take him with us.
MCCOY: Take him? Take him where?
KIRK: In search of his brain, Doctor. From what you say, the moment we find it we must restore it to his body, or we lose him.
MCCOY: Jim, where are you going to look? In this whole galaxy, where are you going to look for Spock's brain? How are you going to find it?
KIRK: I'll find it.
MCCOY: Even if you do, I can't restore it. I don't have the medical technique.
KIRK: It was taken out. It can be put back in.
MCCOY: But I don't know how.
KIRK: The thief that took it has the knowledge. I'll force it out of her.
MCCOY: If you don't find it in twenty four hours, you'd better forget the whole thing, Jim.
KIRK: You and Scotty have Spock ready.

Scrape away the melodramatic dialogue, “in this whole galaxy, where are you going to look for Spock's brain?” and you'll find a perfect sketch of Kirk's “I don't believe in the no win scenario” personality. He's got two impossible problems to solve, finding Spock's brain and then getting it back inside Spock's head, and his immediate reaction is to solve them one at a time.

Yet, even though that scene captures the essence of Kirk it's next to impossible not read it and die a little inside. Somehow almost everything Gene L. Coon writes turns to ashes when realised on screen. The same is true of Marc Daniels' direction. As in The Doomsday Machine Daniels uses back projection for the bridge viewscreen, but where it was a throwaway moment in that story it's used repeatedly in Spock's Brain. It looks brilliant, and it really adds to the believability of the bridge to see the crew interacting with the images. The best moment may be a single close up of Kirk standing right in front of the screen with stars moving in the background. Unfortunately very little else of Daniels' direction works as intended. The episode has no clarity of tone. Star Trek has done silly stories before, but even in an episode like The Apple it's always clear that Vaal is a threat. Unless he's stopped he can, and will destroy the Enterprise. Here the tone is all over the place, the characters are treating the danger to Spock as real but the editorial style of the story is very arch; as if the audience are meant to be laughing at the characters for taking it so seriously.

Probably the biggest mistake of the episode is bringing the remote controlled body of Spock to Sigma Draconis VI. At various times both Marc Daniels and Robert Justman have gallantly taken responsibility for this idea. Again on paper it makes perfect sense. The episode is called Spock's Brain and Leonard Nimoy is one of the real assets of the series. Why wouldn't you want him on screen as much as possible instead of occasionally cutting back to Spock unconscious in sickbay with Nurse Chapel looking concerned? Unfortunately as with much else in the episode, it's an idea which doesn't work. Mistake one is adding a ticking effect to the remote controlled Spock which is probably meant to suggest the clicking of electrical relays but actually sounds like he is now run by clockwork. Mistake number two is having Spock's body on screen while Kirk is talking to his disembodied brain. Again in theory it's a good idea, that Spock can be physically present and also absent in the same scene, but the result is a slack-faced Nimoy who distracts from the scene precisely because he is motionless or left gazing in the wrong direction. Possibly the silliest decision comes from film editor Bill Brame who occasionally cuts to Spock for reaction shots; pointless when the whole episode is about Spock's body being incapable of reacting. 

It's easy to understand why at the planning stage this episode seemed like a good curtain raiser for the third season. Exactly the same rationale was behind choosing Amok Time to open season two. Spock is Star Trek's breakout character, probably the most identifiable character from the series. Why wouldn't you start a new season with a story based on him? However once the episode was finished it's amazing anyone still wanted to run it first. Spock's Brain was the sixth third season episode made, also available to air would have been Spectre Of The Gun (made first) and The Enterprise Incident (made fourth). Both are superior Spock heavy stories. There's some logic behind holding Spectre Of The Gun back to air near Halloween (what better night to broadcast a story in which Captain Kirk dresses up as a cowboy?) but 31^st October 1968 was a Thursday so Spectre Of The Gun ended up showing over a week before on Friday 25^th. Far enough away that the Halloween link was vague. The Enterprise Incident would have been a good first episode, but presumably it wasn't wanted because NBC only ever seemed to value stories set on planets and, whatever its faults, Spock's Brain is a planet story. 

It's something of a cliché to hold Spock's Brain up as an example of everything rubbish about Star Trek. Just as it's also something of a cliché to try and be all revisionist and pretend this episode is good. Boringly the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Spock's Brain has too many bad moments to be good, but too many good moments to be truly bad. In the end it fails even to be the worst episode of the third season. 

Enterprise crew deaths: The third season starts with no one dying.

Running total: 46