something queer going on

Spoilers under the cut for "The Lights of Zetar," "Requiem for Methuselah," "The Way to Eden," and "The Cloud Minders."



"The Lights of Zetar"

Another dull episode that didn't make much sense (why would a pressure chamber kill disembodied creatures?). Scotty in love is adorable, though. And for once Kirk gets the best line of the closing banter, with his faux shock at seeing Spock and McCoy in agreement: "Can I stand the strain?"


"Requiem for Methuselah"

Up until the very ending, I kept wishing this story had focused on the shipboard epidemic. I'd have loved a story about the medical team trying to cope, the Enterprise limping along with most of its crew incapacitated, people trying not to panic but sometimes failing, McCoy and Spock having to work together on a cure, etc. Instead, it's another "trapped on-planet" episode with another implausible love affair for Kirk. People over the age of sixteen do not fall in love after half an hour's conversation, damn it.

At first I thought Rayna was Flint's daughter and that the story was a nod to The Tempest, with Flint as Prospero and Rayna as Miranda. Then Flint tried to kiss Rayna and I was hugely creeped out. Learning the truth didn't help much, because he's her father in every way but biological--he raised her, taught her, has authority over her (and considers such authority his right, as she initially does).

Despite the icky incestuousness, the story nearly manages to be feminist, since it focuses on Rayna's developing agency. And then she dies. *sigh*

Her death brings the episode's true love story into view. I mean, of course, the one between Spock and Kirk. Spock, throughout, discourages Kirk's interest in Rayna, even when he still believes she's human. "I respectfully suggest that you pay less attention to the young lady," he says, reminding Kirk that they need Flint's good will. And when Kirk fights Flint and tells Spock to stay the hell out of it because they're fighting over a woman, Spock answers, "No, you're not. For she is not." The key thing about this is that it isn't true. Although she's not human in the biological sense, she's clearly a person with her own intelligence, desires, and will. It's unlikely that Spock, who's always the open-minded one, doesn't realize this. He's just tired of Kirk "falling in love" with every woman he meets. (And aren't we all?)

There's another of those lovely moments where Spock wants to risk his life to keep Kirk safe (by going into the room where the ryetalyn is hidden). He actually tries to order Kirk to stay put, which works about as well as you'd expect. Something I especially love is McCoy watching all this and saying, essentially, "What the hell's the matter with you, Spock?"

This leads up to the strange, amazing scene at the end, when Kirk is in despair over Rayna's death. He falls asleep at his desk while talking to Spock, McCoy comes in, and this conversation ensues.

McCoy: You wouldn't understand that [the "eternal triangle"], would you, Spock? You see, I feel sorrier for you than I do for him, because you'll never know the things that love can drive a man to. (Spock raises an eyebrow.) The ecstasies, the miseries, the broken rules, the desperate chances, the glorious failures, the glorious victories. All these things you'll never know, simply because the word "love" isn't written into your book. (sadly) Goodnight, Spock.
Spock: Goodnight, doctor.
McCoy: I do wish he could forget her.

McCoy goes, Spock stands for a moment, uncertain, and then he quietly walks over to the sleeping Kirk, establishes a mind-meld, and whispers, "Forget."

This scene only makes sense if we read Spock's actions as an answer to McCoy's accusation that he can't feel love. Spock breaks what's got to be one of the major rules of his culture by melding with someone who hasn't explicitly consented, out of a desire to ease his pain (mingled, I suspect, with a more selfish desire to erase Kirk's love for Rayna, which Spock clearly didn't like). Nimoy's performance underscores the love--the way Spock moves and speaks throughout the scene is gentle, and he touches Kirk with obvious tenderness.

Spock's love for Kirk is canon. It's text, written right into the script. The word itself isn't used, of course, and there's a built-in deniability factor ("they love each other like cousins brothers and only the dirty-minded would think anything else"). But McCoy's speech is about romantic love, not brotherly love, which strongly implies that Spock's love for Kirk is of the same kind as Kirk's love for Rayna. I've no idea how the scene made its way past the network; I'd argue that Spock's highly implausible romance with a woman in "The Cloud Minders" was a panicked retcon, except the "The Cloud Minders" was actually produced before "Requiem."

And if my reading of this scene isn't the intended one, what the hell did everyone involved think they were doing? (For intepretative purposes, I don't actually care about intent. The text speaks for itself and sometimes says things its creators didn't intend. But I do believe intent is an interesting question in itself.)

To return to the scene: McCoy's speech makes me wonder if he's completely clueless or a brilliant, rather Machiavellian matchmaker goading Spock into some kind of declaration. I prefer the latter, but for all McCoy's embrace of emotion, he often seems to understand other people's feelings and interactions less well than Spock does. McCoy is a bit of a solipsist, unable to comprehend emotions that are different from his own.

Spock, on the other hand, is highly "human" in this episode. He drinks brandy, appreciates human art, and unjudgmentally acknowledges the power of emotion when he says of Rayna, "the joys of love made her human, and the agonies of love destroyed her." And we see him play music. I've been thinking a lot about the well-established importance of music for Spock. Music is both scientific (since its basis is mathematical) and emotional, and I think Spock uses it as a way to reconcile what he sees as a fundamental conflict in his nature between Vulcan rationality and human feeling.

After he makes Kirk forget, I think he goes to his room and plays Vulcan music all night.


"The Way to Eden"

The notorious space hippies episode, with bonus points for the really obvious Timothy Leary parallel. And the songs, OMG the songs. I love how the episode is simultaneously trying to malign hippies and to show the kids that Star Trek is down with the new music (even if it distracts people and allows the ship to be hijacked, thus proving it to be the work of the DEVIL). Also, why does everyone on the Enterprise stare at the hippies? They (and their outfits) don't look any stranger than any other non-Starfleet characters.

The depiction of Severin stacks the moral deck against the hippies--Severin's both stupid and completely selfish, and they look like idiots for following him. On the other hand, I did like that Spock, always the relativist, has a lot of sympathy for the essence of their cause. Star Trek depoliticizes the cause--there's no parallel to the real-world movement against the Vietnam War--but it's a rare moment of self-questioning about the show's supposedly utopian, perfected, scientific future.

And Spock gets to play music again. Obviously someone remembered "Hey, wait, wasn't Spock a musician back in S1?" and decided to incorporate it at bit. It's a hell of a lot more continuity than the show normally bothers with.

I mostly disliked the Chekov and Irina subplot, because I find Chekov the least interesting of all the recurring characters and Irina was a cardboard cutout. But this bit of dialogue at the end was sweet:

Irina: Be incorrect occasionally.
Chekov: And you be correct.
Irina: Occasionally.

"The Cloud Minders"

I was really enthusiastic about this episode for the first fifteen minutes. It seemed to have Actual Political Analysis, which would've been unprecedented for Star Trek. (Which can only get politics right when it doesn't try.) But this happy state of affairs didn't last. Instead of actual thoughts about power and how those with power justify it by proclaiming the supposed inferiority of those without, we learn that, hey, those miners really are inferior! It could've been worse--at least it's an environmentally-produced IQ gap rather than an innate one--but it was still a bad storytelling choice leading to a bad ending. The miners will have filter masks now! Awesome! They'll be smarter! Except they'll still be in the mines, with no political representation and apparently no tools either. But they'll be smart people being forced to tear apart very soft rocks with their bare hands!

I did like Plassus being worried about how uppity all the smart miners would be, though. And Vanna's bound to go on pushing for change. But Kirk's attitude of disgust towards both sides (because, as in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," fighting against oppression is as bad as committing it, unless you fight nicely) was meant to be definitive, I think.

On checking Memory Alpha, I learned that David Gerrold was really bothered by how his original, much sharper script was depoliticized in rewrites (it's here and well worth reading; scroll down to the section titled "Story and Production"). I presume the network intervened, and maybe it's not fair to blame Gene Roddenberry at this stage (apparently he'd basically left the show?). But I do think it highlights how the famed Political Wisdom of Gene Roddenberry, which amounts to "We should all be nicer to each other, and also women should wear extremely short skirts and be sexually available unless they already belong to a man," is a touch light on actual politics.

As far as I know, Gerrold's original script didn't give Spock a girlfriend, either. Seriously, who thought this was a good idea? Who thought it was in character for Spock to say "extreme feminine beauty is always disturbing," and to make puppy eyes at a person who watched her own father torture someone and was completely untroubled by it? (Also, WTF is up with naïve little cloud girl knowing about pon farr when in "Amok Time" nobody in Starfleet did? Did whoever doctored Gerrold's script [Margaret Armen, but maybe others as well] just not watch the show? And yes, I know this was before anyone gave a damn about continuity. It still irks me.)

In other fail, Kirk holding Droxine down (after she tried to kill him) and then saying how much he was enjoying himself was icky as hell. I get the need to hold her down, but it was sexualized and rapey and gross.

All in all, not an episode I enjoyed.


*****