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Episode 79 – TOS 3×24: “Turnabout Intruder”

Welcome to the VERY LAST EPISODE of the Original Series of Star Trek. On these episodes was based the entire, larger, extensive body of the Star Trek franchise. And while there is more Trek made after TOS than there is TOS, TOS was still the first to go where no one had gone before. Are you tearing up yet?

Great, because this week is definitely enough to make grown adults weep. Our villain of the week is Dr. Janice Lester, who spends 90% of the episode yelling that she should have been a man, which is either a wayyyyyyyy-ahead-of-its-time commentary on gender dysphoria or… just a sloppy, confused and contradictory version of Feminism By Men.

Basically, the Enterprise comes to Camus II on an emergency call, because the archaological expedition has been exposed to deadly radiation. Chief researcher of the expedition? Kirk’s old flame Dr. Janice Lester, who… really really hates him now.

Fair warning: we mess up pronouns allllllll over the place on this one, mostly because the POV is squarely Elsewhere from where it should be.

Basically Janice hates Kirk because… okay, we’re really, honestly not sure. Because she dreamed of becoming a starship captain and was forbidden from doing so? Because she failed Starfleet’s famously-dreaded Psych Test? Because she… apparently specialized in Space Archaology? Because James Kirk scorned her and left her? Because she literally wanted to become James Kirk, up to and including killing him and wearing his skin as a suit?

Janice is an incredible villain. She’s bombastic, clever, and she plans way, way, way ahead. She’s been plotting revenge for twenty years (though again, for what, exactly?), and may or may not have hunted down an ancient alien body-swapping machine for the express purpose of seeing that revenge to its fruition. The main problem with this story, though, apart from its pretty flagrant sexism, is that her motivations are never made at all clear. Janice is definitely depicted as being mentally unstable, and there are certainly notes of “female hysteria” layered over and under and through everything from the costume design to Janice’s dialogue to the other actors’ interpretations of her lines and their body language in relation to her. It’s definitely a relic of the time in which it was created, and the prejudices of its creators are really, really, really obvious, which is both depressing and bad writing.

This would be a very understandable, sympathetic motivation if it were made in any way clear. If this story was about a woman whose ambitions were thwarted for no reason other than her gender, we’d be cheering her on all the way. By all means, steal that guy’s body! Roam the stars with your scientist boyfriend! Become a space pirate!

But we can’t, because the writers couldn’t decide why she was doing anything she was doing, and because of the episode’s other big, big problem: no part of this episode, which is nominally all about Janice Lester’s Grand Revenge, is from Janice Lester’s perspective. When Janice’s body is on screen, it’s being inhabited by James Kirk. And even when Janice-in-Kirk’s-body is making speeches, everything is from the POV of the crew, and Kirk’s closest friends, seeing Kirk psychically possessed by a madwoman. Janice-as-Kirk gets no time alone without the Enterprise crew, and the one scene that contains only Janice!Kirk and her scientist boyfriend, the scene is from the boyfriend’s point of view, and is all about his moral dilemma re: Janice’s Safety vs. Janice’s Happiness (apparently body-swapping is hard on the nerves).

Basically this episode, of all episodes, we wanted to be better, because if it had been from Janice’s POV, it would have been a lot easier to parse and understand and enjoy. As it stands, it comes out as a mess of men writing stories about women’s issues when they have never, to all appearances, either spoken to a woman or looked up the word “feminism” in the dictionary.

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Episode 78 – TOS 3×23: “All Our Yesterdays”

IN THIS, THE PENULTIMATE EPISODE OF THE ORIGINAL SERIES, we visit the planet Sarpeidon, a planet whose star is about to go supernova. Setting aside the crucial travel advisory that three hours out from a supernova, kids, do not beam down to the surface of a planet, this feels like a little late to be trying for… a last-minute anthropology scan? Last-ditch rescue attempt? We never know exactly what their plan was, only that they “came as soon as [they] heard” that the star was going nova.

Anyway, Kirk, Spock & McCoy beam down to find the planet… abandoned. Spookily, entirely abandoned. Except for this one guy, the last person on the planet, who is, in keeping with what one might expect of our own reality, a librarian.

Well, technically, we’d argue that Mr. Atoz is actually an archivist, but he describes himself as The Librarian, in charge of sending people “wherever they wanted to go.” Our heroes’ first conversation with Atoz is rife with frustration and accidental misdirection, wherein Kirk, Spock or Bones asks “uhhhhh where did everybody go? you definitely don’t have space travel,” and Atoz says “they left,” and then tries to hurry them along towards choosing their own destinations.

Long story short, the Library is a repository of periods of the planet’s past, and the Librarian’s primary duty is running the Atavachron, a time portal that sends its passengers to any period in the planet’s past whose details are contained in the Library.

So naturally, our three stars immediately end up blundering through the portal and accidentally travelling back in time to variously shitty periods in Sarpeidon’s history: Kirk by himself to some weird combo of Victorian Dublin and pre-Revolutionary France, and Spock and Bones to the planet’s last ice age.

Naturally this episode boils down to a) the wacky hijinks of our heroes while stranded in the past and b) the emotional conflict encountered by one or more of said heroes upon their return to the present. Specifically, we get an intensely soapy romantic interlude between Spock and the female guest star, Zarabeth, who was deliberately exiled to Sarpeidon’s ice age and has been physically altered so that she can never return.

In the end all is resolved, and the Enterprise, with its full complement, floors it out of Sarpeidon’s solar system in the nick of time. Narratively satisfying, if astrophysically dubious.

Tune in next week for the very last episode of TOS! Are you excited? We’re pretty excited.

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Episode 77 – TOS 3×22: “The Savage Curtain”

So hey guys, spoiler: this episode is total nonsense. Basically, the Enterprise is at A Planet. Why? It’s never explained. But almost as soon as they arrive, a bunch of sentient-lava aliens kidnap Kirk and Spock, spontaneously generate them two new BFFs in the form of their personal long-dead historical Faves, and pit them against four Black Hats from Space History. White Hats vs. Black Hats, Space Gladiatorial History Edition.

Oh, and did I mention Kirk’s Space History BFF is Abraham Lincoln?

Yeah, this is that episode.

Yes, we’ve seen this before. Frankly, we’ve seen this done better: The Gamesters of Triskelion at least had some interesting world-building and a great female character in it. This time? The plot amounts to the two teams throwing rocks and sharpened sticks at each other and having vague, totally-unanchored-to-the-story conversations about the nature of Good and Evil. That’s why the lava-monsters are doing all this, by the way: apparently they evaluate the founding philosophies of passing alien races by… pitting them against one another in guerilla combat.

Setting aside the minor quibble with the idea that “Good” and “Evil” are somehow equal, fundamental human philosophies, this is a totally nonsensical way of evaluating alien cultures. I mean, blah blah relativism, but wouldn’t it be simpler to just call up passing ships and ask them to explain themselves? Plus, we’re never told whether the lava monster is evaluating Human ideas of Good and Evil (capital letter, for once, appropriate!) or like, humanoid ideas of the same two ideas. Team Good includes two Vulcans (one Spock and the other the ancient Vulcan philosopher and Doomed Pacifist Surak) and Team Evil includes two human (Genghis Khan and a genocidal psychopath from the dark and mysterious Early Twenty-First Century that Star Trek canon likes to dance around and never explain directly) and two aliens, one of whom is Kahless the Unforgettable, Klingon culture’s most significant and legendary figure.

Aside: we can say a lot about wartime propaganda informing the interpretation of Klingons as evil and barbaric vs. the Noble Warrior Poets we know and love from later outings, and the relative, overall shittiness of the portrayal of Klingons in TOS vs. every later portrayal of Klingons, but I’d like to take a moment to register my outrage at this, our first experience of Kahless, who later is seen and portrayed and discussed as a very different and much more nuanced character than we get here. Here, we get this asshole in really bad brownface makeup, who is all about dishonourably stabbing everyone in the back.

The problem with this so-called contest of philosophies is that the parameters are meaningless. The lava-monsters don’t want to understand the differences between Good and Evil (because apparently a species advanced enough to generate living beings out of pseudo-inanimate matter has never heard of an artificial cultural binary), it wants to see which is stronger, but both its contenders and its rules for the fight are constantly changing and totally fail to establish themselves as a solid binary. Nobody “evil” thinks of themselves as Evil. And the two teams are fighting for different outcomes: the Black Hats for “power” and the White Hats for the safety of those they’re sworn to protect.

We’re supposed to see the victory of the White Hats as some meaningful statement about the fundamental superiority of Good for Good’s Sake, but it’s really, really not; it’s the victory of rational minds over a fucking irrational conversation on par with the one you have about immigration policy or income tax over Thanksgiving dinner, which as we all know, is a battle no one can win, because you’re having two different conversations. You can only escape.

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Episode 76 – TOS 3×21: “The Cloud Minders”

Now in our home stretch for The Original Series, we come to a genuinely kinda good late-series episode, in which the Enterprise gets caught in the middle of a civil rights struggle that not-at-all-subtly mirrors the American civil rights movement, but in a floating cloud city.

Federation member planet Ardana has a special mineral that happens to be the only thing that can stop a “botanical plague” on another Federation member planet. There’s a ticking clock, of course; they have maybe a day to get this done, or billions will die. So naturally, Ardana’s rebel faction of oppressed mole people (we here at NSMTNZ have a solid “never trust a mole person” policy but arguably they are wearing sunglasses and therefore not mole people) chooses right now to throw a wrench into the works.

So, on Ardana (which, given its deeply ingrained class stratification probably should never have been allowed to join the Federation in the first place??), those who enjoy the benefits of labour (city-dwellers) are separated from those who do the work (Troglytes). And my “separated,” I mean the wealthy elite live in a literal floating cloud city and the working poor are confined to the mines on the surface, where a gas given off by the planet’s only industry causes brain damage that the cloud people use to justify their oppression of the miners because they’re “mentally inferior.”

Yeah, late Original Trek was not at all subtle in its criticism of institutionalized inequality. After all, cancellation was only four episodes out at this point.

There is some really amazing dialogue in this episode! We even get to see aliens talking to each other about their own cultural issues, which is bafflingly rare in TOS despite its explicit focus on, y’know, addressing cultural issues. There are some genuinely moving speeches about privilege and internalized -isms and racial bias in medicine and the cognitive dissonance necessary for casual oppressors and even some conversations that might qualify as proto-intersectional. There’s a lot of criticism of anti-intellectualism and some straight-up championing of socialist policies that would have been pretty damn risky at the time this was airing. It is one of the most self-aware episodes of Trek we’ve seen yet.

In the end, Kirk, driven to the edge of reason by both sides refusing to actually reason, ends up solving the problem through creative kidnapping. But since he mainly only really endangered himself, and did it for the purpose of saving an entire other planet who didn’t ask for any of this, and also because it’s a plan that Jean-Luc Picard would have absolutely co-signed and rewarded with a bottle of wine, we’re going to give him a pass.

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Episode 75 – TOS 3×20: “The Way to Eden”

So this week’s episode is about checking your privilege!

The Enterprise trips over a stolen ship full of young space hippies who have fled the oppressive embrace of socialist Federation utopia, where all their needs and desires were met for free, to… start a commune in the desert.

Sound familiar? I mean, no, this isn’t about the Manson Family – the episode predates the most sensationalized event in Manson Family history by something like a year – but it’s definitely saying something about middle-class kids who ran away to Los Angeles in the 1960s and fell under the sway of acid-peddling “gurus” and their ilk. In the real world, these kids largely got lied to, taken advantage of, and sometimes, uh, dead of various preventable diseases. In this case, the desert commune is the never-explained mythical “Eden,” and the part of the guru is played by a cauliflower-eared anti-vax douchebag who is knowingly exposing unprotected people to his deadly, drug-resistant space syphilis, something he’s sure the Eden “primitives” can cure him of, with their “pure” and “simple” lifestyle (ah yes, the racist cherry on top).

Maybe it’s just that we’re all old, but nearly everything about the space hippies was infuriating. Their complaints about the oppressive society they’re fleeing ring somewhat less than true, since nearly all of them come from hyper-socialist 23rd-century Earth. Their leader’s ulterior motives are totally self-serving, to literally no one’s surprise.

And they hate technology, saying it’s taken us too far from our roots/nature/oneness/that high they’ve been chasing since undergrad, I guess? Now I, personally, am sent into a towering rage by luddism (there is nothing romantic about the past, the past sucked), but even I would have been totally fine with these space idiots jetting off to die in deep space if they hadn’t initiated their grand quest by straight-up stealing someone else’s space ship, which they then proceed to drive straight into Romulan space, risking interstellar war and the deaths of billions of innocent people, but who cares, right? They have a destiny! It’ll all work out!

In the end, it turns out that beautiful, unspoiled Destination Eden was a sham all along – worse, it’s a poison planet where literally everything is made of ultra-corrosive acid. Two space-hippies, including Leader D-Bag, gets exactly what a real life in the fake-idyllic pre-technology past will get you: an existence that is nasty, brutish, and short.

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