1665

“Captain, they are limp wristed running towards the transporter.”

“Yeah, so what.”

This is an interesting episode. A thinly veiled allegory for the times, with hatred being the thing that binds them, and an appeal to move away from hatred to conciliation. I’m not sure I buy this 50,000 years fugitive on the run thing. I guess I missed that line, I thought it was more like a couple of months, like the second guy was a space cop.

I’m kinda glad they didn’t make the oppressed guy an absolute helpless victim or goody two shoes. He was complicated and full of rage, which he had a right to be, but at the same time committed some minor crimes against the Federation (he didn’t kill anyone, just stole a shuttle, right?). So he’s awaiting trial/jail but the space cop steps in with a heavy hand.

I don’t think Kirk was bluffing about the 5 second rule, as stated above he was trying to get the guy to act quicker. I think he would have blown up the ship. I loved the destruct sequence too, all the checks and codes and gravitas of the crew were great. “Welp, this is it.”. They all acted with dignity, no one freaked out they were about to die. Starfleet discipline in action.

A pretty good episode, and I get what they were doing with the half black/half white reversed thing, as to outsiders these differences don’t matter. They are internal divisions among that society. I didn’t care for their costumes though, instead of badass 50K year old superpowered aliens they came across as mimes. Maybe that was a budget thing but it made me guffaw a bit.

1666

Yeah, you just want to scream “Hey, didn’t your ancient super-civilization ever invent MIRRORS?”

1667

But that makes even less sense. Kirk’s mission was to decontaminate the atmosphere of another planet, to save the lives of millions. A potential diversion to some far off planet certainly isn’t helpful for that mission, but blowing up the ship carrying the fix is not really any better. No, we’ve seen in the past that Kirk is an old hand at the bluff. Not to mention the fact that he’s showed many times the lengths he would go to in order to protect his crew. I don’t believe for a second he was seriously planning to destroy the Enterprise over a power struggle.

1668

Yeah, I liked that too. Like I said in my post, it reminded me of someone who was part of the Black Panthers, or Malcolm X, as opposed to someone like Martin Luther King Jr.

1669

The next one is ok and tries to make a point about overcrowding and population growth. The shot of the people milling around behind the council members was very artsy, like they were putting on a play or something. I actually think it might make more interesting story if they delved into population problems a bit more and maybe showed some huge sea of humanity shots. Global overpopulation is a very sci-fi subject.

But the one after that? Yuuuuck. Pure garbage. Worst one I’ve seen so far.

“I’m for you, Kirk.”

1670

If you want to watch the quintessential movie about overpopulation, see if ZPG is available. It came out not long after TOS. Was definitely in the zeitgeist of the time. Soylant Green is another good one.

1671

Soylent Green actually comes across as a climate change movie, too. Not that they talk about climate change, but the sweltering environmental affect of the film feels that way, what with constantly sweaty Heston, no food, no water.

1672

Wow, nice find.

A science fiction movie I’ve never heard of until today. I wonder why Logan’s Run got so famous and entered the pop-culture consciousness and this one didn’t?

1673

It’s Scandavian, I think. Also sounds pretty cerebral and not the action of Logan’s Run.

1674

I would consider ZPG a classic of the genre, but then my scholarly work was largely in SF.

1675

Finally, you too can learn Kirk Fu:

1676

The first time you try the interlaced finger chop will be the very last time. I learned this as a child playing Star Trek.

1677

“The Mark of Gideon” Season 3 Episode 16.

One reason I appreciated last week’s episode so much (Let that be your last Battlefield) is that it reminded me of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was an episode that was more about ideas than it was about action. So when Guap mentioned that this week’s episode was about over-population, I was looking forward to another intellectual episode that made me think.

Well, it is sort of about over-population, eventually. But really this episode is a haunted house episode. Kirk is transported to Gideon as the lone Federation representative allowed on the planet. And he ends up on an empty Enterprise with a mysterious scar and a few minutes of lost time. Meanwhile Spock and the crew are on the bridge of the Enterprise (also?) trying to deal with the diplomats of Gideon and trying to find their captain.

You could make the argument that there’s a point in the episode where Spock and Bones lament dealing with diplomats and bureaucrats and say that’s a repudiation of the types of episodes TNG specialized in, perhaps. But that’s precisely the kind of episode this is. For the bulk of this episode, Spock is dealing with these people, and Kirk is alone on the Enterprise, with a mysterious young woman who wears her underwear over her dress. She comes from a society that’s so crowded that there’s almost literally no room to stand. That’s … a comically hilarious representation of over-crowding. I guess back in the 60s they hadn’t envisioned that perhaps a planet eco-system would collapse a lot sooner before we’d ever get to the point where there’s no more standing room.

Once again the 3rd act of this episode is a bit weird, as has been the case a few times on the show now. I’m still not sure why stealing Kirk and luring him to stay was even important if all they were trying to do was to re-introduce a deadly disease to the planet so that people would start dying again and it wouldn’t be so over-crowded.

Still, the standout moments of this episode for me were in Spock dealing with things as acting Captain, and mostly Kirk being alone on the ship with Underwear woman. When they show a whole bunch of people watching as Kirk first kisses her. The way they show many of them looking through a window of the enterprise, it’s all really creepy and very mysterious. Whoever did the direction in this episode really got the tone just right. It’s an excellent haunted house, one that’s actually implemented better than most other haunted house episodes on future Trek shows. Other ones that come immediately to mind are the binar episode where Riker is lured into the holodeck while the Binars steal the Enterprise, and episodes where the crew devolve into other lifeforms. I believe TNG had one of those and so did Voyager, and I think maybe Enterprise too. Those all sucked. This episode knows that to do a proper haunted house, you should keep your mystery high and keep your nonsense science to a minimum.

1678

See Soylent Green mentioned above. This idea or statement, common enough today (and kind of patronizing, and certainly a recency-bias typical of the age of Wikipedia - sorry @Rock8man, no offense intended to you in particular) is just wrong. It speaks far less to “they just didn’t know stuff in those ‘60s Dark Ages” and more to the fact that S3 scripts and execution were spotty at best due to the budget slashes, Gene’s tapping out due to his demoralization and NBC’s determination to throttle the series to death.

1679

I was making fun of the premise, not really going after the 60s. :)

It’s going to get so overcrowded, there will be no more room to stand!

On the other hand, it made for a really creepy looking scenario. I love the use of green lighting and … whatever it was that they were all wearing. I think if it’s so crowded you have no personal space, you’d better all wear spandex or whatever that was.

1680

Agree, the execution of the idea is as ham-handed and dumb as a hog that had a lobotomy. Noble effort, dumb episode.

1681

“You have answered what and where. I’m waiting for your explanation of why.”
“Since the planet is shielded from our sensors, we cannot establish that without on the spot investigation.”
“Do you have evidence the captain’s life is threatened? Permission denied.”
“Admiral, I wish to state for the record that your decision is completely arbitrary.”
“So noted.”

All right, this week we have “The Mark of Gideon”. I must say, this episode is a first for me during this rewatch - up to this point in the series, I can’t say I had never seen an episode that actively pissed me off. I can no longer say that. Hoo boy, where to start.

First, holy shit does the writer of this episode have an axe to grind against diplomacy/bureaucracy/red tape in general. I don’t know if the writer spent all day at the DMV or got held up by city council trying to add a new deck onto his house but this episode takes a general idea and continues to shove it into our faces until it pretty much betrays the character of Spock so he can jump into “man of action” mode and save the day. I will say McCoy’s remark about Spock’s diplomatic career did amuse me, considering where Spock ended up in the TNG era.

Second, the plot makes absolutely no sense. What was the plan here? Get a person from outside their civilization, infect them with a deadly disease, have them infect one of their people, millions die and the rest maybe have their underlying health altered so that the course of civilization shifts and overpopulation is cured, and profit??? First of all, how does any of that make sense - they have spaceships, why couldn’t they just start shipping people around the galaxy, there’s lots of planets out there. Also, if they’re so damned set on the sacredness of life business, why are they suddenly comfortable with wiping out a large chunk of their population with disease? And why bother with this whole duplicate Enterprise? Why manipulate Kirk into falling in love with the girl? Why did they need him as an infection vector to begin with, and why rely on a single vector at all?

And in the end, Gideon gets to go ahead with their plan to infect and wipe out a decent chunk of their civilization, with Odona taking Kirk’s place as that vector! Yay, we got our captain back, hey good luck with the meningitis! And fuck you, prime directive! Sure, I know Gideon is aware of and negotiating with the Federation but I would imagine at least the spirit of the prime directive would have to be ‘try not to wipe out an entire civlization with disease’. Hey nice job curing Odona, shame about the rest of the planet.

I hate this episode.

1682

Apropos of nothing, Manu Intiraymi just started following me on Twitter, which I thought was pretty cool.

He’s this guy:
image

1683

I don’t have access to TOS on demand but I have been following this thread from my own memory with a bit of help from Memory Alpha. For this particular episode, it just so happens it was recorded on my DVR recently. I watched it, and it was all new to me. I’ve never watched TOS in any organised fashion so it somehow either completely slipped my memory or I missed it in all of my rerun viewings.

I watched this before seeing divedivedive’s post and had the same reaction. The plot is just one continuous WTF and the diplomatic bureaucracy thing was done a couple of times too many. Overall, just a dreadful episode.

1684

What did you guys think of the part with Kirk alone on the Enterprise and Kirk alone with a mysterious girl? I agree with you guys on the other parts of the episode being poor, but I liked what I felt was the bulk of the episode where they kept you in the dark before the third act revealed everything and became idiotic.

Another positive comment: there was something about the main actor on Gideon that I really liked. Aside from a good performance, the guy has a natural charisma I think. Very likable.