“Well, I’ve only got these two d12s. We need more dice to make a complete set.”

This was most likely one of the first episodes of the Original Series I ever saw-One of the VHS tapes I rented from the local video store when I was first getting really into Star Trek: The Next Generation to see what all the fuss over this older show from the 1960s was. Although I certainly knew the Original Series existed, my practical experience with it came mostly from pop culture references and the numerous books and video games I had about or set during the show’s time period. I never saw this show in syndication (in fact the first time I got to see it in order was when the Sci-Fi Channel picked it up sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, perhaps a consequence of possessing about four TV stations during my more formative years), so these scattered and assorted VHS tapes were my first real window into Star Trek’s past. It may well have been among the first two tapes I got, along with “The Trouble with Tribbles”, although I may be blurring memories of multiple rental events into one due to the passage of time.

What I do remember most vividly about this episode is how the brightness and colourfulness of the Original Series contrasted with the look of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now, I’m not one to claim the 1980s and 1990s shows have a drab, dull, faded or Grey look about them: I am in fact very much in love with the look-and-feel of at least both Star Trek: The Next Generation and early Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. As far as I’m concerned there’s a vastness of scale and a sense of wonder to those shows the other Trek eras simply don’t possess, but which is mitigated by a genuine feeling of warmth, intimacy and welcoming. The Maurice Hurley- and Michael Piller-era shows were also shot in a very filmic style (and this doesn’t just refer to the use of film stock) and the Enterprise and Deep Space 9 from that period feel radiant and alive. If you need further convincing, I more than encourage you to check out the recent Blu-ray transfer of Star Trek: The Next Generation: 1980s broadcast technology hamstrung that show’s sensory impact significantly, as did the previous less-than-acceptable home video transfers of steadily decreasing quality (the DVD transfer is taken from the original VHS transfer, for example, and following several generations of signal decay to boot). On Blu-ray, the show looks the way the creators intended for the very first time.

However, this is very unlike the sheer 1960s primary colour gaudiness of the Original Series, and I don’t mean this in a bad way at all (I mean at least as a general rule: There are some episodes coming up next season that look astonishingly trashy in a way the Original Series’ theatricality usually manages to avoid). I found the Crayon-bright uniforms on Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty combined with the verdant planet where they respond to the Kelvans’ fake distress signal to be quite striking at the time (although upon watching it both in the order and in the rapid succession I’m going at it does look rather a lot like a number of other Class M planets the crew has landed on, probably because it was in all likelihood the same location).…

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“We rock.”

OK yes, it’s absolutely delightful.

Actually, it’s better than it lets on, and to find a reason why look no further than that second writing credit. Gene Coon had decided that, given the success of “The Trouble with Tribbles”, Star Trek could use more episodes with a larger and more overt focus on comedy (and it’s worth noting it was Coon who saw the potential in young Dave Gerrold’s script, encouraged him to keep submitting to Star Trek and who helped him shape “Tribbles” into the masterpiece it became). George Clayton-Johnson, the author of “The Man Trap”, had written an early version of this story as a treatment early in the first season called “Chicago II”. The actual idea for the episode is frequently attributed to Gene Roddenberry due to a two-word pitch (among many others like it) in his original 1964 proposal for Star Trek, Star Trek Is…, entitled “President Capone”, but as it’s a rather strangled path from that to what we can watch on screen, it’s tough for me to give him full credit for it. Coon discovered Clayton-Johnson’s script, liked the idea and decided to retool it. Coon’s writing partner here is David P. Harmon, whose previous Star Trek credit was “The Deadly Years”, which is not especially encouraging, but thankfully, “A Piece of the Action” turned out actually beautifully: It’s a highlight of the season, deservedly one of the most iconic stories of the series and exactly the sort of thing the show needed right about now.

The knee-jerk way to read “A Piece of the Action” is through its Cargo Cult undertones, and as it turns out this is what I expected I’d be spending this post going on about. In the most pleasant of surprises, “A Piece of the Action” manages to avoid the majority of the flak involved with this kind of prompt, (I know this is the second week in a row I’ve underestimated Star Trek, but given this season has made me sit through “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, “Friday’s Child”, “The Apple”, “The Deadly Years” and “The Gamesters of Triskelion” I maintain I had some right to lower my expectations) but first let’s talk a bit about what we mean by Cargo Cult. A Cargo Cult refers to what happens when, following contact with Western colonial powers whose presence results in a short-term burst of material prosperity, non-Western peoples establish a new religion based around worship of specific aspects of Western materialism in a hope this will bring about a return to that period of prosperity. The most famous example of a Cargo Cult took place in Melanesia following World War II, when natives began worshiping spiritual versions of US servicemen prophesized to return to teach them how to to live in plenty.

Obviously, as a particularly blatant example of how callous and thoughtless Western expansion thoroughly wrecked traditional Oceanian societies, Cargo Cults are not a phenomenon I’m not especially fond of, especially when they’re so frequently treated in the West as a source of mild paternalistic bemusement.…

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Sometimes you really do have to go with the obvious screenshot.

Well, here’s something I wasn’t at all expecting. Given how Star Trek has been seriously underperforming the last few weeks as well as the fact the series has been steadily but noticeably running out of steam since midway through the season I fully anticipated that the episode about the Giant Space Amoeba would be another silly runaround, especially as my memory of it consisted mostly of some agonizing debate over Spock taking on a suicide mission from which it was eminently clear he was going to come back, as well as of the aforementioned Giant Space Amoeba. I was totally prepared to glibly take the piss out of this one as another example of Star Trek‘s inevitable march towards cancellation.

It turns out the memory does in fact cheat, and I’m thankful it does in this case because “The Immunity Syndrome” is actually properly excellent.

In some ways the episode “The Immunity Syndrome” is most immediately comparable with is “The Doomsday Machine”, from which it inherits its thriller structure. Once again, we have a tense countdown to destruction that is narrowly averted at the last possible second and which keeps us on the edge of our seats throughout the entire story. Perhaps as a result, this is a laudably tight and exciting production, and, like its predecessor, a sterling example of what an “average” (to use a potentially loaded term) episode of Star Trek in its second season ought to look like. However it’s a great deal more than that: In this regard (and uncannily so given “A Private Little War” is still relatively fresh in the memory) “The Immunity Syndrome” may actually be closer to “The Alternative Factor”, because the threat posed by the Giant Space Amoeba for almost the entire runtime of the episode is an honest-to-goodness narrative collapse.

We’ve come perilously close to narrative collapse a number of times in Star Trek so far: “The Alternative Factor” is, naturally, the most obvious example, but as I mentioned in its corresponding post, “The Menagerie” at least flirted with the iconography of collapse, though thanks to a combination of the approach of the early Gene Coon era and Gene Roddenberry’s general writerly incompetence that’s not quite what we got. “The Immunity Syndrome”, however, is the closest we’ve gotten yet, and while it ultimately stops just short of becoming one, for the vast majority of the episode it seems like it just might go all the way. The telltale sign comes in the very first act, when the Enterprise discovers the aptly named Zone of Darkness, which immediately begins to sap the life force of both the ship and its crew. Within the zone, there is no starlight, either because it’s been blocked by something or all the stars have simply gone out. Now a lot of calamitous things can happen on Star Trek: The show threatens the destruction of the ship or the death of crewmembers on a seemingly weekly basis.…

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“What did you see, old man?”

“Obsession” is Moby-Dick for Star Trek again, so firstly all of the comments I made the last time we talked about this kind of story in “The Doomsday Machine” still apply. There is fundamentally not a whole lot to add to that (except for one issue I’ll discuss a little later). The primary problem is, as always, the idea of doing a blind vengeance story in a setting that’s supposedly more enlightened, idealistic and utopian. With Commodore Decker this worked, because we could get a character study about the tragic fall of someone consumed by a need for revenge without jeopardizing one of our own: Imagine, for a moment, that Decker’s role in “The Doomsday Machine” had been filled by Kirk, McCoy or Sulu: There’s no way the show could come back from that the next week, because the nature of serialized anthology television necessitates hitting the reset button in the last two minutes of every episode and doing that after that kind of intensely personal story would have been catastrophic. Furthermore, by essentially casting the Enterprise crew as Ishmael, this upholds the narrative reiteration structure that helped make the episode successful and also helped push the series towards the idealism it will soon become famous for.

In short, this is the problem “Obsession” is continuously grappling with. It’s doing Moby-Dick again, except this time with Kirk as Ahab. Aside from this being, ultimately, a bit lazy and more evidence Star Trek and other US TV shows really need fewer episodes a year in order to better vet their scripts (at least this one is actually somewhat coherent and isn’t a total write-off like the past few weeks have been), it risks breaking the tenuous solid ground the show’s carved out for itself in the wake of “Mirror, Mirror”, “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Journey to Babel” because now Star Trek is more indebted to idealism than it’s ever been before. It’s not fully in that camp yet, it will take the fans to actually put it there, but it is now self-evidently the kind of show that someone could conceivably and plausibly draw that reading from. Hell, even “The Gamesters of Triskelion” portrayed the world of the Federation as something positive and worth striving towards, even if it was appallingly modernist and teleological about it. “Obsession” now has to deal with the challenge of doing a mad vengeance story with a main character on an anthology show that’s started flirting with utopianism, which is something not even “The Doomsday Machine” had to worry about.

The success or failure of this was always going to hinge on how the script handled conflict, and to its credit “Obsession” at least doesn’t totally blow it-It handles the problem about as well as could have been expected of it. It helps greatly that Kirk’s turmoil isn’t just vengeance here but guilt and self-doubt about his hesitation when facing the Vampire Cloud eleven years prior and his inability to save the crew of the Farragut.…

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