TOS Season 1

“I’ve just seen it happen too many times.”

Finally.

After weeks of stumbling half-starts, frustratingly retrograde moves and absolutely awe-inducing spectacles of catastrophic, system-wide failure, we at last have the very first episode of Star Trek that can be unambiguously called an absolute masterpiece. “Balance of Terror” is an unmitigated triumph on all accounts and is exactly what the series needed to make up for the misfires of the past few episodes. In a bit of actually lovely irony, this still doesn’t save this incarnation of the show. Not only does it not save it, it gives even stronger evidence that it should be killed off and retooled as quickly as possible: Far from redeeming the Star Trek we’ve been watching since “The Corbomite Maneuver”, everything that makes “Balance of Terror” work as well as it does is something that decisively proves Gene Roddenberry’s original version of Star Trek is completely unworkable. We’re nine episodes in and we already have the show’s definitive deconstruction.

“Balance of Terror” is almost the inverse of “The Corbomite Maneuver”: While that episode went out of its way to glorify militaristic bravado and the chain of command, this one shows us in stark, terrible detail the tragic consequences of this way of thinking at a very intimate, personal level. Where Balok was an unseen Other throughout the majority of “The Corbomite Maneuver” before being revealed as friendly baby Clint Howard at the last minute, half of “Balance of Terror” is dedicated to the Romulan crew. We get to know each and every person on the Bird-of-Prey personally, especially Mark Lenard’s commander, and their tired, beaten down and world-weary demeanor bleakly, and all too well, foreshadows their ultimate fate.

Ah yes, the Romulans. A reveal so historic it threatens to overshadow the rest of the episode (though perhaps not as much so as that of the Klingons will to their debut episode later in the season). As one of the pre-eminent alien cultures in Star Trek, it would be beneficial to spend some time talking about them, although in this sentence I’ve already touched on the first important thing about them: The Romulans are a culture, and that’s a significant milestone for the series. Up ’til now, aliens in Star Trek have been portrayed as blunt metaphors for the show’s moral-of-the-week: The Talosians are an extension of the Platonic cave theme of “The Cage”, Gary Mitchell was absolute power incarnate, Charlie Evans embodies the troubles of puberty and Salt Vampire was…a Salt Vampire. Or a buffalo. “The Man Trap” wasn’t especially clear about that. Anyway, if they weren’t straight metaphors, they were Deus Ex Machina: The Thasians exist primarily to provide a convenient way to get Charlie Evans off the Enterprise so he wouldn’t blow it up. We don’t get any sense of what their culture or lifestyle is. Balok is just an Other for Kirk to practice his manly command skills with, albeit one who happens to be friendly We get no idea of what the First Federation is like, though the design of the Fesarius is certainly imaginative.…

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Genies and Ladlemen, presenting the Kevin Thomas Riley Revue…

An argument could be made that “The Naked Time” is the first “proper” Star Trek episode, at least to a certain number of fans. It’s definitely the first truly memetic one: Everyone remembers Sulu fencing, Uhura’s “sorry, neither” line (which is, admittedly, brilliant) Nurse Chapel professing her love for Spock and Spock’s subsequent meltdown and Kirk’s “I’ll never lose you! Never!”. I’ve even read reports of Trekkers going full Rocky Horror Picture Show on this episode when it’s screened at conventions, hissing along with the PSI 2000 virus and cheering at appropriate intervals, although being a lonely shut-in who spends their time marathoning Star Trek and flailing desperately at a keyboard into the wee hours of the morning I wouldn’t have any hands-on experience with that.

This episode was also Bob Justman’s choice for the premier on the grounds that the reduced inhibitions brought upon by the disease would be a good introduction to the characters and their personalities. Justman has a point and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the thinking that went into making an unapologetic remake of “The Naked Time” the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation twenty years later. There are issues with Justman’s argument here I’ll look at a little later, but I do agree with him in the broader sense that the strength of “The Naked Time” is in the fact it’s an Actor Showcase Episode, which is a good thing to put near the beginning of a TV series. Before I get into that though, I want to square the plot away because, well, it has all the same problems every other Roddenberry-produced Star Trek episode does. It’s not as bad in this regard as something like “The Corbomite Maneuver”, “Charlie X” or “The Enemy Within” so I don’t need to go into the same level of detail as I did with those episodes, but it is worth mentioning if for no other reason then to point out how systemic a problem this has become for the show.

The PSI 2000 virus works by producing an effect similar to serious intoxication and strips the victim of all inhibitions. “The Naked Time” thinks this is absolutely disastrous. The Enterprise quite literally spirals out of control because the bridge crew can’t keep their heads about them (a plot point telegraphed in the bluntest, most obvious manner known to mankind by Scott in the briefing room in the first act). It’s clear the episode is treating this as another reiteration of the logic vs. emotions conflict, and given how upfront it’s being about its symbolism we should take this as the definitive statement of Star Trek‘s position on the matter, or at least that of Star Trek under Gene Roddenberry. While there was some room for debate when Spock touts the superiority of logic in something like “Where No Man Has Gone Before” or “The Corbomite Maneuver” because it’s Spock and we’re always meant to be at least a little suspicious of him, there’s really no other way to read the Enterprise screaming towards a fiery death because the crew can’t control their emotional desires.…

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Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction to this episode too.

“The Enemy Within” plays like an almost paint-by-numbers example of how Star Trek works at the moment. This of course means it’s terrible. It has a crassly simplistic and poorly thought out moral delivered with zero semblance of tact, form, structure or good sense and almost painfully earnestly and gamely conveyed by the cast. This leaves me in a really frustrating position: It’s bad, but it’s bad along exactly the lines I’ve been drawing over the past several posts. This one manages to fall face first into rape apologia, which I will of course take it to task for, but only for the same reasons the show’s been reactionary so far. It’s a particularly egregious execution of this formula, but other than that, “The Enemy Within” brings nothing new to the analytical table.

However, I have a job to do here so let’s see what I can make with this. First of all, if “Charlie X” doing a melodrama about teenage issues irritated me, “The Enemy Within” doing an evil lookalike plot where the baddie frames our hero and gets his friends to turn against him for half the episode before he clears his name is enough to send me straight into smash-the-television-in-blind-rage mode. Ignoring the plot for the moment, which I would sorely like to scream and yell about but shall restrain myself from doing, “The Enemy Within” could possibly be described as something I call an Actor Showcase Episode: These are special episodes, meant to give a specific cast member or members the opportunity to play against type and and show off their reach. These are typically made when shows get a particularly skilled cast who are normally pigeonholed into very tight, programmatic roles to let the audience know the full extent of their range. Actor Showcase Episodes tend to crop up either at the beginning of a show’s run (to get the audience used to the new cast) or in the middle (to let them see a side of the cast heretofore unseen) and they’re usually delightful changes of pace from standard operating procedure (indeed these become characteristic of Star Trek: The Next Generation once Michael Piller becomes showrunner).

In that regard, calling “The Enemy Within” an Actor Showcase for William Shatner is tempting, especially as the highlight of the episode is arguably Shatner’s performance as both crazed madman Evil!Kirk and gentle, thoughtful Good!Kirk. However, as this episode seems consumed by a desire to thwart my attempts to say anything intelligent about it whatsoever at every turn, it comes literally right before an episode seemingly custom-tailored to be a full Cast Showcase, so there goes that reading.

So Roddenberry Ethics it is then. Although this problem is systemic throughout Roddenberry’s entire tenure as showrunner, “The Enemy Within” is probably the most clear-cut example of just how badly this can go for the show (so far). The core theme of Richard Matheson’s script is a kind of grade school retelling of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr.…

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Rare Playmates Cage-era “Innerspace” toy prototype.

“The Cage” occupies a strange space within Star Trek lore: As a pilot created by Gene Roddenberry and those closest to him to demonstrate to NBC what they envisioned Star Trek to be all about, but one that never actually aired on television, it is at once the progenitor of the entire franchise and also the only part of it impossible to reconcile with the rest of the series’ canon. “The Cage” is a very strange specimen indeed then: It’s not quite Star Trek, at least not the Star Trek that fans would come to recognise and love years later, but, by virtue of it being a pilot designed to embody the show’s core values and themes made before executive compromises changed the tone of the series, it is in many ways the purest Star Trek of all.

The one individual irreducibly linked to “The Cage”, what it is and what it does, far more so than in anything else bearing the Star Trek name, is Gene Roddenberry. Over the years mainline fandom has all but deified Roddenberry, and people tend to hold him up as a figurehead for everything they want Star Trek to embody and strive for (particularly so in the years immediately following his death in 1991 and the cancellation of Enterprise in 2005). This is also not helped by muddy and at times completely contradictory historical accounts of key moments in Star Trek history and Roddenberry’s own biographical details perpetuated by what can frankly best be described as rampant hearsay and cult of personality. As a result, it can be hard to actually get a solid critical handle on who Roddenberry was, what the extent of his contribution to Star Trek was and what exactly he wanted it to be.

“The Cage” then really is the best place to talk about Roddenberry and his influence on Star Trek, because no matter what Star Trek is going to become over the next several decades it will never again be as closely tied to Roddenberry’s personal conception of it as it is here. There are several reasons for this, the most immediately obvious one being its aforementioned status as a pilot, but also the fact that even as of the early Original Series Gene Roddenberry had a lot of help and input in shaping the direction of Star Trek that he didn’t have as much of here. The fact he was willing to entertain and genuinely listen to everyone’s ideas for, and criticisms of, his project is telling, but so is the fact their influence has been all but effaced from the history of the franchise to the point Roddenberry is, implicitly at least, held up as the source of every single good idea the series ever had, which is simply and flatly not true. But there is a reason Majel Barrett called “The Cage” her favourite episode and “Pure Star Trek”, and anyone who is seriously interested in the history of the franchise and Gene Roddenberry’s “vision”, whatever that may turn out to be, really ought to study it.…

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