The Enemy Within (TOS)

This episode really wants to be dealt with in three parts: The good, the bad, and the silly.

The good:
This is a big episode of firsts for Star Trek. The first transporter malfunction episode. First utterance of "He's Dead, Jim." First exploration of the duality of man.

Basically, a transporter malfunction splits Kirk into good Kirk and evil Kirk. Evil Kirk wants to drink medicinal brandy, rape Yeoman Rand, and basically make trouble. He doesn't want to command the ship, until the very end of the episode. He doesn't have ulterior motives, just animal instincts. Good Kirk wants to command the ship and do Kirk-y things, but he's lost the ability to make decisions and he seems kind of confused.

The audience might be a little confused too, but this strikes me as an impressively sophisticated way to handle such an inherently silly plot. Kirk's "evil" side is superior in some ways to his good side. It's the source of his ability to command. This is actually a very dark suggestion when paired with our normal view of Starfleet Captains as paragons of good.

Of course, the most sophisticated way to show a Captain wrestling with his dark side is a little less... literally. But, taking the sci-fi format for what it is, this is a pretty nice exploration of an age-old literary theme.

The bad
When Yeoman Rand complains to Spock that the captain just tried to rape her (not in those words, of course), no one is aware of the double. Starfleet apparently doesn't have any procedure in place for this kind of situation. No guard is placed on Rand's quarters, no guard is placed on Kirk, Kirk is told about the accusation and allowed to come see Rand in sickbay and interrogate her about the attack. To her credit, Grace Lee Whitney plays that interview jut about as traumatized as she should.

To make matters worse, the story seems to play up the insult on Kirk's character as more grievous than the really traumatic breach of trust and attack on the poor Yeoman. No wonder her character disappears from the show; I'd request a transfer too! Ship needs a counselor, yo.

The silly
Meanwhile, while Kirk is playing cat and mouse with Evil Kirk up on the ship, the rest of the away party (read: Sulu and some other guys) is stranded on the planet surface, because until they fix the transporter they can't beam them up. The planet's surface is getting colder and colder in order to build tension that the up-on-the-ship story doesn't have. So far, so good. Of course, the actual scenes of Sulu standing in the cold, getting progressively colder, and inexplicably cracking jokes at the Captain and anyone who will listen send a somewhat mixed message in the tension-building department.

So what did the away team do during the mission? Well, they captured a creature that looks like a Pomeranian wearing a unicorn horn and a reptilian tail. It's as classic a cheezy TOS animal as you ever saw, but what really makes it work is just how many scenes the animal is in. It's as if the director said "We're spending good money dressing up these dogs, we're damn well going to use them." In several scenes, Kirk is talking to his crew, and one of them is just holding a dog-monster for no reason. It's awesome.

Oh, did I mention that the dog monster ALSO got evil doubled? Because it did. In fact, they use the dog monster as a guinea pig for the de-doubling procedure, and when they try it on it, it dies. (First utterance of "He's Dead Jim" on the show? Refers to a dog monster.) I think this might have been the inspiration for the "But the alien is inside out ... and it exploded" gag in Galaxy Quest.

To sum it all up:
Good, bad, and silly all together, I had a lot of fun watching the episode straight through. It's easy to find criticisms, but it's also so easy to see what people loved about this show while it was on the air. The mix of action, cerebralness, and goofiness is a complex formula made to look easy, and it all adds up to an eminently watchable show.


Random Observations:

- A lot of no Uhura going on lately. Sulu and Scotty and Rand all get to shine here, but Uhura gets I think 5 seconds of screen time.

- Shuttlecrafts, man. There is absolutely no reason not to pick up the away team with a shuttlecraft. Which sort of suggest that maybe they just don't like Sulu very much.

- Speaking of which, theory: Sulu is the Miles O'Brien of TOS. I think he's gonna get tortured a lot.

Mudd's Women (TOS)

Last night my father and I rang in the New Year with the widely-panned 1998 Lost in Space movie. It was, all told, a lot worse than I remembered, which I guess comes from the fact that this time I wasn't 10.

One of the big problems with the attempt to reboot Lost In Space was that when you think about the show, when you think about the cultural touchstones it spawned, you think of the evil, cowardly ham Dr. Smith, the boy wonder Will Robinson, and the robot. Maybe the daring space ranger Major West and maybe the intrepid Captain Robinson.

But the womenfolk in the original show were an underwhelming lot. Maureen Robinson was a highly stereotypical 50s housewife, Judy was a love interest and a damsel in distress and Penny ... well, Penny was also there.

So the reboot had to more or less invent characterizations, meaningful roles, and acceptable 90s niches for the women of the cast, which makes it feel like a completely different show. I think it was the right choice, but it was a big hurdle.

What does all this have to do with Star Trek? Only this: Of all the ways in which 60s sci-fi ages badly, none is so hard to overcome as the casual sexism of the era. This is my experience with Heinlein's otherwise masterful Stranger in a Strange Land, too. What do women do in space? The same thing they do down on Earth: cook, clean, look pretty, and let the men work.

I cringe when I see it on Lost In Space, but when I see it on Star Trek, my home, the idealized future I choose to buy into on a weekly basis, it pains me. And that's how I feel about Mudd's Women. It's a sexist mess.

Of course, it's also the debut of one of the most celebrated peripheral players of the Original Series: Harcourt Fenton Mudd. And he's actually a pretty good, compelling character. Star Trek is not Star Wars, and it's never gotten a handle on the criminal element or the civilian spacefarer. Star Trek stories tend to be clashes of governments. What Joe the Plumber does in the 24th Century is just not in our purview. Episodes like TNG's "The Outrageous Okona" try to give us a Trek Han Solo and miss the mark.

But somehow Mudd works. He's funny without being grating and he's scheming without being villainous  He's a foil for Kirk's sense of law and order, which is an important quality in a Captain and one that can sometimes get lost up against Kirk's more well-known penchant for daring, risky maneuvers. But he doesn't suffer fools in his crew or on his ship, if he can help it.

The Enterprise ends up with Mudd as an unplanned passenger when they rescue him from his exploding ship (which he did not have a license to fly). He has a "cargo" of three beautiful women in tow (dressed more or less like Vanna White) and they have an almost hypnotic affect on the crew. The women, Mudd claims, are wives for space settlers and Mudd is basically their pimp.

There aren't really any twists after that. The Enterprise is running low on lithium crystals. (it seems like it ought to be dilithium, but this time, lithium. Just go with it.) They find a lithium mine in range, with three miners working in it. Mudd manages to contact the miners ahead of time, and when Kirk and crew arrive the miners won't exchange the dilithium for anything but the women.

This is sort of a lot like buying and selling people, but that point is never really addressed in the episode. Instead, the big Star Trek conceit is something called the Venus drug, which makes women more beautiful. See, these space bimbos aren't really beautiful at all. They're uggos! And Mudd is deceiving the innocent miners with drugs. I mean, yes, they're still smart, brave women, still skilled at cooking and cleaning, and not actually that bad looking, but they're NOT IMPOSSIBLY GORGEOUS and Mudd almost tricked these miners into marrying them. Isn't he evil?

The drug works kind of like make-up, actually. And I guess it also does their hair?

This is a case where the slight that the show is trying to sell us is so laughably dwarfed by the sexism the show ignores that it's all pretty dumb. Who cares if these women are taking drugs that makes them look prettier? Shouldn't we care that their only aspiration in life is to live on a desolate rock in space cooking and cleaning for skeezy space miners? (Where, of course, the Enterprise leaves them at the end, happily ever after.) And that's not even to mention the part where Kirk gives Eve a placebo and it works just like the Venus drug because it was self-confidence all along that made them pretty, apparently.

I liked Mudd. But that's about all there was to like here, for me. I'm not entirely sure what the show was swinging for, but I do think it missed. I'm looking forward to the other Mudd appearance, which, if I recall correctly, has less sexism but still some, and also robots.

Random Observations:

- Vanna White comments aside, the costume designers on TOS do nice work here.

- The women of the crew are barely in this episode, which is a shame because they provide a nice counterbalance as women with careers who aren't just in space to find husbands. Apparently a scene where Mudd tries to talk Uhura into taking the drug landed on the cutting room floor.

- For that matter, the crew is barely in this episode. There are several scenes that are just guest stars including a pretty long sequence between Eve and the miner. I think the episode suffers from the regulars being so badly sidelined.

- Because I took Christmas off, our schedule is sort of messed up; this ought to have been a Deep Space Nine week. Expect a double Tuesday or an extra mid-week review at some point to get us back on track.

Where No Man Has Gone Before (TOS)

Welcome to the first official Original Series review. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” is the second pilot, although it wasn't aired until third or fourth. (Those of you watching along on Netflix, take note. Netflix sticks to the airdate order, so it will deviate from this blog here and there.)

Although much closer to the cast we know and love than “The Cage,” we're still fussing with the formula here. No sign of Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura, another “old country doctor” type standing in for McCoy, and Scotty and Spock in somewhat off-putting yellow tunics. George Takei, presumably as Hikaru Sulu, makes an appearance, but he's not the helmsman and he doesn't get a name.

So who's the guy in this pilot we're focused on? The new Captain of the Enterprise, James T. Kirk. Kirk's name will become synonomous with Star Trek, with command, and with testosterone. This isn't the washed-up Priceline-selling Shatner of 2012. This is a hot young Canadian with a sparkle in his eye. This is the Captain that the girls want and the boys want to be. And although this pilot is still fussing with the formula for almost the whole rest of the cast, James T. Kirk (or James R. Kirk, as his fake headstone mysteriously reads) is on from Day 1.

We're starting to notice a pattern of Star Trek pilots dealing with God-Like Beings testing humanity. This one is no different. The premise here is that the Enterprise is hanging around the edge of the galaxy for no particular reason when they detect the little black box of the last starship to hang around the edge of the galaxy for no real reason. After determining that a trip across the galactic barrier caused the Valiant's destruction, Kirk naturally orders the ship to do exactly the same thing, with predictable results.

I'm not saying the crew of the Enterprise is being incredibly stupid here, but they kind of are. We'll see a lot of this in Star Trek episodes – the plots are great once we get into them, but the set-ups strain credibility. Who cares? I'm trying hard to watch this in the shoes of a person who has never seen or heard of Star Trek before, just as the people in my father's generation first watched it. And from that perspective, it's a good showing!

It helps a lot that Shatner and Nimoy have settled into the characters incredibly well for a first episode. (Well, second for Nimoy.) The opening of them playing 3D chess together (another Trek cliché in the making) establishes the logic vs. emotion conflict, but also their mutual respect and even love for one another. That relationship is the emotional heart of the show, and it's the heart that seperates Star Trek from the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon space fantasies that came before. Yes, spaceships and aliens! But also, humans.

And speaking of humans and the God-Like Being we mentioned before, we have a few guest stars among the crew, Gary Mitchell and Dr. Dehner, who are regular humans with higher than usual ESP-scores (this is a thing in the Star Trek universe, apparently. We'll just forget about the fact that it will never be picked up on again in the 40-some year history of the franchise.) Something about the galactic barrier amplifies that ESP-potential and turns Mitchell (and later Dehner) into glowy-eyed god-people.

With a speed that strains credibility, Mitchell's absolute power corrupts him absolutely and he starts messing with ship's functions and muttering about crushing his friends and shipmates like insects. Spock wants Kirk to kill him before it becomes impossible. Kirk would rather maroon him. The first payoff of the Spock-Kirk conflict.

There's a lot of Trek-style speechifying about the next step of human evolution and the relationship between power and morality, but ultimately we're headed for a showdown. It's the kind of showdown James T. Kirk eats for breakfast, mano a mano with a being vastly more powerful than himself.

Mitchell is beyond being talked down, but Kirk is able to talk Dehner into using her power to sap Mitchell of his, and while he's down Kirk does what he does best: He gets his shirt ripped somehow. And then he punches Mitchell in the face.

This is probably a good time to talk about my relationship with the original Star Trek, referred to by fans as The Original Series, or TOS. Nathan and I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). That's the Star Trek we got used to and acclimated to. We watched the TOS movies first, and then whichever odd episodes could be found at Blockbuster.

I guess it's pretty silly to call TOS cheesy compared to TNG, now that TNG screams 80s as loudly as TOS screams 60s. But at the time, my Star Trek was cool, and this other one was … weird. The universe was less consistent, the plots and costumes were often much sillier, and, most of all, the Captain was not the same kind of role model.

Star Trek was encouraged in my house because Captain Picard would never resort to violence unless he had exhausted all the diplomatic options, and because phasers were always set on stun and fists rarely came out. And that was part of it's heart for me. So, while I realize how cool it is that Kirk basically always punches evil in the face, it still sort of makes me yearn for a different Enterprise.

But part of this project for me is fostering an appreciation for the parts of the canon I've neglected, and for the next 2 ½ years, that's going to mean TOS immersion.

Back to the plot. Kirk saves the day by having moral integrity and being clever AND being good at the punching (and looking good with a ripped shirt, I guess). The Enterprise sets its course for adventure and exploration, and we're off and running! I'm really looking forward to taking this journey with all of you. Stay tuned Thursday for 100-odd year jump to “Encounter at Farpoint” with Nathan, where, awkwardly, you'll encounter Dr. McCoy before you've actually met him here. Well, the format is a compromise.

Random observations:

- Apparently, Kirk was a bookworm at Starfleet Academy until Mitchell set him up with a little blonde lab tech he almost married. Here's the ways that's interesting: (1) This draws a clear distinction between the alpha timeline and the one we see in J.J. Abrams 2009 film, where Kirk is anything but a bookworm. It makes me wonder how else the chip on Chris Pine's Kirk's shoulder will change his character in the upcoming films. (2) A lot of fans have speculated that the little blonde lab tech is Carol Marcus, the mother of Kirk's child in the TOS films. Why not?

- Speaking of the 2009 film, the planet of Delta Vega, where Kirk tried to maroon Mitchell, shares a name with the planet where Zachary Quinto's Spock tries to maroon Kirk. Fans have decided that unless the planet somehow got towed across the galaxy and underwent a dramatic climate change, it's probably just a different planet of the same name. Abrams admits he did it on purpose as an homage.