“…a framework for utopias”: The Way to Eden
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“Far Out.” |
Well, it’s not quite as youth-hating as “And The Children Shall Lead”. I can at least say that much for it.
Yeah, this one was never going to be any good. You know the routine by now: The Star Trek team (or what remains of it) digs up an old story pitch, it gets turned into a teleplay by one or more writers who had nothing to do with the original submission, the original idea having been extensively rewritten beyond the point of recognition in the process and then this becomes the framework for the finished episode we see onscreen. Last time the show got lucky: Margaret Armen and Oliver Crawford turned Dave Gerrold’s submission into something that wasn’t quite his original idea, but worked almost as well, if not better in some respects (thanks, surely, in no small part due to it keeping Margaret Armen as far away from anything having to do with race politics as is humanly possible). This week, well…it doesn’t.
“The Way to Eden” is loosely (and I mean extremely loosely) based on an old D.C. Fontana pitch entitled “Joanna”, which would have featured Doctor McCoy’s estranged daughter, the titular Joanna, coming aboard the Enterprise and beginning a relationship with Kirk, thus creating tension between him and her father. Despite being one of the more famous unused story ideas for the Original Series, I wasn’t able to find a lot of information on plot details or anything like that, so I’m actually going to keep Fontana out of the discussion for “The Way to Eden” for the most part (and after all, she did dislike the finished episode enough to request credit under her pseudonym): Supposedly Joanna was the character who eventually became Chekov’s love interest Irina Galliulin, but if she were indeed going to be one of the Space Hippies, my guess is that it probably would have played out a lot like “Journey to Babel” where the plot is largely a basic skeleton upon which to frame a character piece (which in this case would have been about McCoy’s relationship with Joanna and Kirk) and it wouldn’t have gone any further than that. And anyway, unlike Gene Coon, D.C. Fontana’s thankfully not going anywhere anytime soon so we’ll have plenty more opportunities to talk about her. This isn’t her final bow in Star Trek, this is, for at least us, the point where it becomes clear who the next showrunner is going to be.
So let’s talk about Space Hippies instead. “The Way to Eden” concerns a group of free-spirited youths who have formed a movement built around peace, brotherhood and an aggressive rejection of modern technology and political structures in favour of a return to an idealized pastoral lifestyle. The youths think that they are destined to travel to the mythical planet Eden, supposedly a tranquil unspoiled paradise where they can live out their lives free of technology and on their own terms. Inconveniently for pretty much everyone, the travellers believe Eden resides in Romulan space.…