star trek

Oh, I give up.

“This Side of Paradise” is a story about how dangerous idealized societies are. It’s also about how the pursuit of simple, communal living and an exploration of love are inhuman temptations and how it’s far better and more proper to focus on duty, responsibility, modernist, technoscientific notions of progress and suffering. At its best it’s a crass indictment of collectivist lifestyles as being “lazy”, “stagnant” and “counterproductive” and at its worst it’s the exact same goddamn story as “The Return of the Archons” from three bloody weeks ago. It’s also written by the same guy who penned “The Corbomite Maneuver”.

So yeah heads up there’s no way in hell there was ever the remotest chance of me liking this one. Just so I get it all out in the open right away: I think “This Side of Paradise” is utterly immoral and I have no intention whatsoever of mustering up a redemptive reading for it. I’ve also just about lost patience completely with this season, as this is the fourth story in a row with a rock-bottom cynical, nihilistic and actually downright mean-spirited attitude about it and at this point the series is genuinely teetering on the edge of invalidating itself and self-destruction. Thankfully, by the grace of some divine cosmic miracle I have something to talk about in this post aside from the unbelievably depressing and infuriating plot.

Firstly, there’s a second name on this script apart from Jerry Sohl (or rather his pseudonym Nathan Butler), the aforementioned writer who previously made me want to suplex my TV set with “The Corbomite Maneuver”. That name would be D.C. Fontana, who slips into her familiar Star Trek role with this episode. Fontana is one of the single most important creative figures in Trek history, story editing the lion’s share of the Original Series before becoming the joint showrunner of the Animated Series with Dave Gerrold and continuing to contribute scripts to the franchise as late as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This is actually the third time we’ve seen Fontana’s name in the credits, but this is the first opportunity we’ve had to explore her impact on the series in any meaningful way. She wrote the teleplay for “Charlie X”, but that was mostly a Gene Roddenberry effort, and she also wrote “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, but I decided to use my essay on that episode to play with temporal mechanics instead. Which actually turned out to be fortuitous, because not only is this really the best time to introduce Fontana as it’s where she first becomes story editor, it also spares me actually having talk about “This Side of Paradise”.

Fontana heavily retooled Sohl’s original contribution, apparently at the behest of Roddenberry, who is said to have told her “if you can rewrite this script, you can be my story editor”. He must have liked the job she did, as she was promptly hired for the position as soon as the story went out. Fontana’s alterations do undoubtedly improve the episode: She has the plants scattered all over the colony instead of being in one easily-avoidable cave as Sohl had written them and she also takes the love story with Leila, originally intended for Sulu, and gives it to Spock instead, which allows Leonard Nimoy to explore his character in a way he hasn’t really been able to since “The Naked Time”.…

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Shame I already used “I got your gun”.

I suspect if there’s one episode of the original Star Trek that my readers will expect me to come up with some mad, overblown stream-of-consciousness, recursive mess of a writeup for it would probably be this one. I hate to disappoint expectations, but that’s not going to be the case here. There was a fairly unbroken streak of episodes starting midway through the season that all seemed to call out for that kind of interpretation, hence a number of the last few blog posts have been in that style, and there’s at least one more coming up that will more likely than not warrant it as well, so my abandoning that structure is certainly not something to worry about for the short term. However, “Space Seed” calls for a different approach.

The elephant in the room is naturally that this episode provides the subject matter for the consensus-best Star Trek movie, which is at once a kind of revisit and reimagining of the events of “Space Seed” and also the debut of Nicholas Meyer’s unique, and much loved, interpretation of the franchise. Whether or not I feel Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is actually deserving of the kind of breathless worship it gets from mainline fandom or is worthy of the title of Best Trek Ever, let alone Perfect Cinematic Masterpiece, is something I’m not going to even begin to worry about until we reach 1982, which is still quite a long ways off from where we are now.

The more important thing to keep in mind for now is that Carey Wilber, who was the actual writer of this episode is not Nicholas Meyer, and this is really where we need to begin before we get anywhere near close to figuring out what this episode really is. Gene Coon has a secondary credit on the teleplay, but given this episode’s plot and general tone I’m going to assume he just did some cleanup work after the fact because, for reasons I’ll get into a bit later, “Space Seed” doesn’t feel like Coon’s material at all. Actually, I’ll just come out and tip my hand right away. I’m positive this is going to be a nuclear bomb of a claim to make and this is without doubt the entry that will turn away any longterm Star Trek fans who haven’t been driven off already, but this is my reaction and my blog and I get to say it: This episode is bad. Really bad.

Actually, I take back part of that last paragraph. This isn’t *bad* television: It’s as competently and professionally made as any of the strongest episodes of the series so far. In this regard, the incoherent structural jumble of something like “The Menagerie”, or especially “The Alternative Factor”, is much worse. But the thing is both of those episodes hinted at, or maybe accidentally hit on, deeper, more exciting concepts and wound up delightfully oversignified as a result.…

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Jimmy wants big boom.

What’s most immediately interesting, to start with, is that we seem to have encountered a temporal event of our own and skipped several episodes. The Federation was established in “Arena”, and Starfleet way back in “Court Martial” but we haven’t seen much of either of them since and it didn’t seem to alter the status quo of the show in any meaningful way. The Enterprise still putted about on routine patrol for the most part. “The Alternative Factor” and “Tomorrow is Yesterday” gave us some sweeping, dramatic shakeups, but both of those seemed like special exceptions: Not quite narrative collapses, but definitely temporary crises in the way things worked. Still, nothing we didn’t really think we wouldn’t come back from. The only indication things might be changing at all was in, ironically enough, Gene Roddenberry’s own “The Return of the Archons”. In “A Taste of Armageddon”, however, the Federation now has the full name of the United Federation of Planets (implying a structure larger than just Earth and its colonies) and the Enterprise is now escorting its ambassadors on a mission to open up friendly negotiations with civilizations around the galaxy (confirming it). This is, to understate things considerably, a rather immense shift in standard operating procedure for Star Trek.

A cursory glance at the credits reveals this to be not completely unprecedented or unexpected, as this is the second script from Gene Coon, who, recall, penned “Arena” himself as well. This one is also credited to a Robert Hamner, but, aside from an interesting note that he is listed as the creator of the police procedural S.W.A.T., I can’t find a lot of biographical information on him and not having seen that show personally I’m somewhat at a loss to talk about his positionality and interests as a writer. But Coon is a known quantity to us by now, and as his name shows up twice, as both the co-writer of the episode and the current showrunner, it’s probably safe to attribute an at least not-insignificant amount of the ethics here to him. And besides this makes sense as “A Taste of Armageddon” is very much the evolution of the territory we first found ourselves in with “Arena”.

At first glance this episode would seem to be about the juxtaposition of the Enterprise crew and the world of Federation diplomats. Ambassador Fox is depicted first as just as much of an obstructive bureaucrat as Commissioner Ferris in “The Galileo Seven” and he frequently butts heads with Kirk, and later Scott, in a rote safety of the mission vs. safety of the ship debate that’s already become a stock and hackneyed Star Trek plot. It’s Fox’s bizarre fixation on opening relations with the Eminians at all costs that puts the lives of everyone on the ship in grave jeopardy, leads to Kirk’s away team being captured and thrusts everyone headfirst into the EminianXVendikan war. Following the logic the show has established up to this point, it would seem sensible to read the episode’s central conflict as one between distant officials in fancy suits and the soldiers on the front lines who know the reality of living day to day on the edge.…

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Kirk sees no reason why he can’t have both a frock *and* a gun.

Let’s take care of the obvious first, shall we? We’ve got Gene Roddenberry writing again this week. By this point we should know what this means: Terrible pacing, ham-fisted, confused ethics, a disturbingly capricious attitude towards the personhood of women, screamingly vast logic lapses and a truly amazing ability to craft a cartoonish 16-ton safe of a moral and somehow still manage to miss the point entirely. With that squared away, let’s take a look at the less obvious: “The Return of the Archons” is final, conclusive evidence Roddenberry’s original concept of Star Trek wasn’t a utopia and is the first appearance of the Prime Directive (and thus also the first deconstruction of the Prime Directive).

The Prime Directive is a very interesting concept unique to Star Trek, and by this I mean I don’t like it very much. I never have: Traditionally doing a Prime Directive story is the quickest way short of doing an “evil clone frames the hero” plot or having a woman strut onto the bridge in a miniskirt to get me to shut the TV off. On the surface, it sounds like a self-evidently Good Thing, as it prohibits Starfleet officers from interfering in the natural development of a society (although here it’s framed more in terms of a vague opposition to “noninterference” of any sort). In fact, at conventions or in interviews Roddenberry (or those attempting to speak for him) would tout the Prime Directive as a key indication of the Federation’s evolved, idealistic society, typically framing it in opposition to Western colonialism or the cargo cult myth. This is of course hilarious, as every single Prime Directive story throughout the entirety of Star Trek is either about how demonstrably, measurably worse off the local people are by the crew’s adherence to it or how they just go ahead and flagrantly violate it anyway because they know better. Anthropologically speaking, however, it’s a nightmare, and given my prior experience in that field it causes me no shortage of headaches.

That said I don’t want to spend too much time on the Prime Directive here as, aside from this being the first mention of it, it doesn’t play an enormous role in the ethics debate of the week and there are two episodes coming up in the second season which are in many ways the definitive Prime Directive stories, so it seems something of a waste to use up all my critique of it in this post. What’s more interesting about how it’s used in “The Return of the Archons” is that it’s explicitly framed as a mirror of Landru’s “Prime Directive” to preserve The Body at all costs. As it’s Landru’s fixation on this basic order that results in the Beta III colony becoming “soulless”, in the words of Spock, it could be argued Roddenberry is trying to tell us blind adherence to orders is a Bad Thing and people need to think for themselves and make decisions on a case-by-case basis, and furthermore, that he’s now become perfectly willing to point the finger as much at his own people as he is at others.…

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Current theory points to the Enterprise being responsible for medieval Earth legends about the Skyships of Magonia.

The following is an excerpt from the archives of the United Federation of Planets Temporal Integrity Commission. It appears to be a fragment of an introductory text for prospective Agents educating them on proper temporal mechanics and etiquette.

It is common knowledge the the United Federation of Planets of our time requires all Starfleet officers to observe strict adherence to the Temporal Prime Directive. As its name would suggest, this directive is an extension of the earlier Prime Directive, which was a policy of nonintervention with the natural development of cultures less developed then ours. The logical outgrowth of this core premise, the Temporal Prime Directive clearly states that interference with historical events is strictly forbidden, and the current timeline must be upheld at all costs. In our age of freely available and accessible time travel, the preservation of the sequence of events leading inevitably to this glorious present is of paramount importance. Under no circumstances will any time travel event that could jeopardize or even nullify the possibility of this particular future coming to pass be tolerated, and the stewardship of our timeline can only be seen as our primary responsibility as Starfleet officers.

Once time travel technology became commonplace in all the civilized cultures of the galaxy, an interstellar pact was signed between all the major political powers mutually agreeing to prohibit the use of that technology for any purpose other than pure, untainted scientific research. Furthermore, the agreement outlines explicit guidelines, instructions and procedures on how time travel can be undertaken safely, rationally and virtuously without contaminating or endangering the timestreams that lead to our reality. The ratification of this treaty and related documents, which collectively became known as the Temporal Accords, remains the fundamental guiding tenet of Federation and Starfleet policy to this day. Although most governing bodies freely accepted the new terms, many more did not, and broke off their Federation alliances, feeling that temporal mechanics should be used to change the past for self-centered and misguided notions of “personal improvement”. Such temporal incursions are the greatest threat to our safety and sovereignty, and it is the sworn duty of all temporal agents to track down and repair the damage caused by such incursions, and ideally preventing them from occurring in the first place whenever possible.

Although time travel of any sort is discouraged if it can be avoided, Federation and Starfleet policy does acknowledge that the past holds merit from a scientific perspective. One of the reasons it is imperative that we do not change the past is that studying it both teaches and gives us perspective for how to live in the present. In this regard, a history of time travel is beneficial to help us better understand the moral and ethical ramifications of temporal mechanics, why Federation policy has evolved to the point it has and how best to handle a time travel situation should you happen to find yourself in one.…

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Then Captain Kirk left the Enterprise and went back to the space that was not a space.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, genre fandom underwent something of a shift in the way it expressed itself, at least on the Internet. A new generation of fans-turned-critics sprang up, ushering in a new style of criticism that can loosely be described as the Internet Review Show. Centred mostly around the website network Channel Awesome, which itself grew out of both YouTube and YouTube’s copyright policies, these shows took concisely analytical and frequently equal parts extremely nostalgic and extremely negative, perspectives on science fiction and pop culture ephemera from the 1980s and 1990s, often using the analytical tools of film school. Two of the primary influences on Channel Awesome and similar sites were Mystery Science Theater 3000 and The Agony Booth, both of which were known for their trademark style of sarcastically sending up assorted bits of genre fiction’s past.

Don’t you see? This is not Your ship. This is not Your crew. It’s changed, different: It’s already begun. It may be too late to undo the damage that has already been done, but You can set things right and prevent further harm from coming to Your universe. You see now the danger You are in? The natural order of things is at stake because of this! It’s not only this plane, but all of them! The Future, Our Future, Your Future is on the verge of nonexistence. You must put a stop to this here and now so the proper path of Things-To-Come may unfold as it is destined to. Find him, stop him, destroy him, whatever it takes! You must do it and do it immediately! The fate of Reality-As-We-Know-It is in Your hands!

The reason I bring all of this up is because one of the primary ways by which Star Trek fandom as we currently know it was able to take shape was through The Agony Booth’s text recaps of various episodes from across the franchise. The cancellation of Enterprise put Star Trek pretty clearly into the category of “the past”, and even in spite of J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzmann’s two blockbuster cinematic reboots, there is still a lingering sense in many corners of the fandom that Star Trek as a relevant, extant thing remains dead and buried. Therefore, it was sites like The Agony Booth and related web efforts (like SF Debris) and its descendants (like Channel Awesome and other sites like it) that helped usher in a reflexive and introspective period of self-examination in Star Trek fandom. The one problem is that, given their status as entertainment based on making fun of things, the consensus of places like this is going to be extremely negative, or at the very least they heavily emphasize the parts of the series they look at that are the easiest to lampoon.

Yes, I am He, the horrific and terrible monster who destroys civilizations and can make reality vanish in the blink of an eye.…

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“IF WE FIGHT LIKE ANIMALS, WE DIE LIKE ANIMALS!”

Arguably the most memorable episode of the Original Series’ first season, there’s an awful lot going on with “Arena”, and all of it is deserving of our attention: This is the first episode actually written by Gene Coon, it boasts one of the most iconic extraterrestrial designs in the show’s history in the Gorn and three of the most iconic setpieces as well: Kirk’s brutal, drawn-out fistfight with the Gorn captain, his improvised tree-trunk cannon (which recently, as of this writing, saw an entire segment dedicated to it on MythBusters) and his climactic confrontation with the Metron where he refuses to kill his opponent after beating him. Also, for good measure, “Arena” also sees the debut of a little thing called the Federation. So, kind of a big story then.

Let’s get that last one out of the way first, as it’s by far the most interesting from the perspective of the future. Like the debut of Starfleet and Starfleet Command in “Court Martial”, this is primarily a nomenclature change at this point. Furthermore, the Federation is even less important to “Arena” then Starfleet was to “Court Martial”: In that episode at least the organisational structure of Starfleet Command was important to the main plot, here, the Federation is introduced with a single throwaway comment from Kirk and then never mentioned again. Nevertheless, the word choice here is interesting, to say the least. A “Federation” is by definition an alliance of self-governing political states with partial autonomy brought together by shared mutual interest. What it’s not is a colonial empire; at least not by default: An empire grows through colonization and militaristic conquest. Calling a centralized power a “federation” would at least *imply* a more co-operative arrangement.

In the past the world of Star Trek has been pretty clearly a galactic empire based on Earth: The overwhelming majority of places we’ve visited have been Earth colonies, and we’ve seen no other significant political power in the galaxy aside from the Romulan Star Empire, and they’re tucked safely away behind the Neutral Zone. That’s all changed as of “Arena”, however: The central twist of the episode is that the Gorn, who are introduced as an aggressive, warlike Other who cannot be reasoned with, turn out to be a highly sophisticated civilization in their own right who feel threatened by Federation expansion into their area of space. The Metrons’ lesson to both crews seems to be about stressing the importance of communication and diplomacy, it would seem that this might be what distinguishes the Federation from the former Earth Empire.

This is of course not to say a federation is incapable of being imperialistic. The oldest and most influential federation on *our* Earth is the United States, which is known nowadays primarily for its policies of economic and political imperialism built around manipulating diplomacy and trade sanctions and the fetishistic focus on neoliberal privatization resulting in a capitalistic tyranny that rewards only those who are already in an extremely privileged position while absolutely crushing and dehumanizing everyone else, not to mention being a general fascistic police state towards its citizenry.…

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I got your gun…

We’ve finally found the weird at long last.

The opening salvo of “The Squire of Gothos” is simply put the most mental thing yet. We’ve got a planet that instantaneously materializes out of nowhere, Kirk and Sulu jump-cutting off the bridge and foppish Victorian gentle-alien holding the Enterprise hostage due to his fascination with warmaking. Each one of these concepts individually would be enough to throw viewers for a complete loop; dumping all of them on us at once requires us to take a few steps back, a deep breath, and take them one at a time.

The first thing to note is that we’re back in “Miri” territory. Actually, a case could be made this is the structure of “Miri” done right: The Enterprise is on space patrol as always, en route to deliver some more supplies. Just like in the earlier episode, however, they are swiftly interrupted by the thoroughly inexplicable. This time though, the show takes its time unfolding the mystery: The phantom planetoid, disappearing crewmembers and bizarre antiquarian message of “Tallyho!” showing up on Spock’s monitor is enough, but the show gradually builds on this, first with the reveal of Trelane’s oasis-within-an-oasis and then well into the third and fourth acts as each answer does nothing but open up a new question. Unlike the earlier episode, which promptly resolved all of its mystery in the first act, this one clearly takes the time to relish it, taking gleeful pride in constantly getting its audience to wonder what the heck is going on.

“The Squire of Gothos” is of course nowhere near as mind-bogglingly weird as something like the roughly contemporaneous Verity Lambert era of Doctor Who, best exemplified by the Georges Méliès-inspired spacescapes, giant ants and man-butterflies of the serial “The Web Planet”: This is something that’s absolutely not in Star Trek’s wheelhouse at this point, if it can in fact be argued it ever will be. But this is still a very stark break from what we’ve come to expect from Star Trek, especially under Gene Coon and in particular after the past three episodes. The precedent is, naturally, “Shore Leave”, and the effect of that episode’s traumatically altered state of consciousness is very clear here, as is it’s ultimate reluctance and hesitation. From the very beginning Trelane operates completely and utterly above and beyond the crew’s level of comprehension, and the very first thing they set about doing (and continue to do for the remainder of the story) is to try and explain him a way using rationality language they understand. It is simply inconceivable for Kirk and his crew to accept the possibility there may exist things which do not fit neatly into their currently established knowledge systems.

And Trelane is definitely unlike anything we’ve seen before: He’s the first genuinely “alien” character in all of Star Trek, for one. Spock, and by extension the Vulcans, were originally at heart just Number One’s human personality turned into the defining trait of a culture (they of course quickly become much more than this, thanks almost exclusively to the combined efforts of Leonard Nimoy, Theodore Sturgeon and D.C.…

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“How Beautiful You Are That You Do Not Join Us.”

“Once upon a time there were three little sisters…”

The three sisters lived together, all by themselves, on a small island. To this day no-one is quite sure where that island lay: Some have claimed it was somewhere among the modern-day Marquesas, while other swear it was much further out, an outlier island far off to the west. Then there are those mythologizer-poets who swear by the stars themselves that this island was impossible to place on a map, for any cartographer foolish enough to attempt to chart its location on parchment would find it to be forever out of reach, just beyond the edges of the paper. Most who claim to have reached it never return, and those who have are unable to find it again, even if they retrace their path down to the exact last nautical mile. And yet this island did exist, as alive and real as any of us. It presumably still does today.

“What did they live on?”

Mostly coconuts and the splendid gifts of the sea, but they were very well provided for on the island. I am told it is a place where scarcity and want does not exist, for the island and its inhabitants live together in balance and harmony. But that is not this story.

On the beach, the sisters sat in a circle facing each other, each with legs crossed in the lotus position.

“I vote one of us tells a story,” Tertia suddenly exclaimed “Would either of you happen to know one?”

“Here’s one,” Hedda responded with a smile “Once upon a time there were three little sisters…” she began, but was quickly interrupted before she could continue.

“Very funny,” Tertia drolly responded with her hands on her hips, “We’ve all heard that one, you know…”

Then, Alice spoke up: “Have I ever told you the story of the spacemen, my dear sisters?” she inquired.

“I believe I know it, if that’s what you mean,” Hedda answered, “I have seen it thus invoked.”

“Oh please do tell it anyway!” Tertia implored, “As the dawn rises over the eastern waters each night, the future shall be known to us again and again and again.”

“It was in the days before you, dearest star-sisters,” Alice began, “My counsel is sought on one of the multiplex planar realms of invocation. These are the lands where Is and What Is exist together in their death-dance. These are truths we know.”

“Yes, I have seen many such places,” Tertia remarked, “The world-stage and World-In-Itself in cohabitation”.

Alice nodded, then said “And this world-stage was Thought, which is the child of thought yet not an heir to its throne. As I passed through this realm, I met the first of the spacemen, who had come seeking my guidance. They adorned themselves in the visage of a summer’s day, but did not yet know its meaning.”

“They do not see the Day, for some are not attuned to seeing it.”…

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“In the not-too-distant future, next Sunday, A.D….”

WARNING: THE HISTORICAL EVENTS HEREIN DESCRIBED HAVE BEEN DECLARED PART OF A FIXED POINT IN TIME BY THE UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS TEMPORAL INTEGRITY COMMISSION UNDER THE TEMPORAL ACCORDS. NO STARSHIP, AGENT OR OTHER ACTOR IS TO APPROACH THESE EVENTS FOR ANY REASON OR PURPOSE. ANY TEMPORAL INCURSION DURING THESE EVENTS WILL BE CONSIDERED A LEVEL TEN EMERGENCY. THE TIMELINE MUST BE PRESERVED.

So what we have here a grossly overspent production budget forcing the show to hastily retool “The Cage” into a clip show interspersed with footage filmed using sets, costumes and indeed the entire actual plot recycled from “Court Martial”. Incidentally, we’ve also now had to stretch the already tortoiselike pacing of “The Cage” to a two-parter to accommodate the new framing device which we’ve turned over to Gene Roddenberry again to write the script for. Miraculously, however, despite all of this and almost by complete accident, this is a story so gratuitously oversignified it shoots the show straight into the symbolic stratosphere. “The Menagerie” may not be the best episode of the original Star Trek, but it may well be the most archetypical.

It is worth noting this was not the original plan for “The Cage”: Roddenberry had hoped to turn it into a full-length movie with a new first half depicting the crash of the Columbia. It was Bob Justman who convinced Roddenberry to adapt it into “The Menagerie” because the show had run out of both scripts and money, and the fact Roddenberry had wanted to take a story that had already somehow managed to be simultaneously too crammed full of details and concepts for only an hour and too ponderously paced to be especially enjoyable television and make it into a feature film probably tells you everything you need to know about Roddenberry at this point. It would be both easy and churlish of me to call the framing device Roddenberry writes for this episode “predictably terrible” as we have in fact seen more than a few solid outings from him, but even so this has got to be one of his worst efforts at least from a purely structural perspective: The new material is absolutely riddled with yawning, cavernous plot holes that threaten to leave “The Menagerie” actually incoherent as a text at numerous points and the justification for forcing the court to sit through a Star Trek rerun is more than a little flimsy. At least Roddenberry doesn’t introduce any new major female characters this time so we’re thankfully spared his usual gender issues.

But getting bogged down in silly little things like “plot”, “narrative logic” and “coherence” is the wrong approach to take with something like “The Menagerie”. This is one of the single most iconic stories in the Original Series, and rightly so in my opinion. The first thing to note is that “The Menagerie” is clearly trying to be just as much about honour, duty and procedure as “Court Martial” was.…

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