Views from Crestmont Drive

The Enterprise accidentally travels back in time to Earth in the 1960s, where it’s seen as a UFO, and then struggles to erase records of its visit and to return to its own time.

• This is a fun episode that doesn’t bear close examination of its plot points or theoretical basis.
• The episode opens, as “The Conscience of the King” did, with a brief scene without reference to the Enterprise – in this case, a contemporary US Air Force base reacting to the appearance of a UFO, and scrambling a jet to approach it. (No date is mentioned, but it’s presumed it’s contemporaneous with the viewer’s present, in early 1967.)
• And then it’s quite striking to see that the UFO is – the Enterprise! One of the best episode teasers ever.
• Despite Memory Alpha (http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Tomorrow_is_Yesterday_(episode)), Kirk does *not* say ‘subjective time’ in his log entries. After all, in the first one, he doesn’t yet realize the ship has been thrown back in time. It does however raise the question of what ‘stardate’ actually means, but this is a topic that, though raised many times, has no satisfactory resolution.
• There are two areas of mind-boggling coincidence in this story. The first is the sheer physical exactitude with which the Enterprise, having encountered a “black star” and then been thrown some light-years, presumably, off its course, should happen to land *just within the extremely thin atmosphere* of Earth – not smashing into the planet, not arriving at some random point in space billions of miles away – and furthermore, not still moving at some great speed — but rather, as we see, limping slowly upward into Earth’s sky. (The image above is from the original show; the enhanced graphics on the currently available Blu-Ray discs greatly improve the images of the Enterprise among the clouds.) And over the US, another coincidence!
• Later, at the end of the episode, similar miraculous exactitudes are achieved when the Enterprise, having slung-shot around the sun to accelerate and reproduce the time effect (though for some reason this time in the other direction, toward the future), passes quickly by the Earth and while doing so manages to time the beaming down of both its accidental tourists from this era who’ve managed to get aboard the Enterprise—to exactly the spots, or close enough, from where they were first beamed up. And via a chain of vocal commands! To achieve such precision is, to put it mildly, amazing.
• A nit: Captain Christopher is beamed out of his jet in flight position, yet appears on the transporter pad standing up.
• Christopher, 1960s US Air Force pilot, is appropriately amazed by appearing aboard the Enterprise, as he gradually gathers what kind of ship it is. Cushman suggests this is part of the charm of this episode – it visualizes a viewer fantasy for a contemporary person to actually *be* on the Enterprise.
• A female crewman? Wow. Kirk mentions that there are only 12 like this ship in the fleet. It was an accident that the Enterprise is here; Christopher replies, “You seem to have a lot of them,” referring to the prevalent speculations about UFOs at the time.
• Spock quickly realizes the consequences of Kirk’s rather rash decision to beam Christopher aboard: now that Christopher has seen the future, he cannot be returned to Earth of this time, lest he use that knowledge to make certain speculations that might change history – and wipe the Enterprise and all aboard out of existence, like a soap bubble. There are of course many, many theories of time travel among science fiction stories, of which Spock’s worry is a common one, but far from the only one; there are many other possibilities. (Examples: the past is fixed and cannot be changed, so that Christopher’s efforts were he returned would have no effect; or, the past might be changed and branch a separate timeline.)
• This episode features a gratuitous humor element that I’ve never cozied to: the computer Kirk speaks to replies in a sultry, female voice, and calls him “dear”. Cpt. Christopher, hearing this in Kirk’s cabin, observes how people of his era have such interesting problems. Spock drolly explains that the computer system was programmed by the female society on Cygnet XIV, which gave it, of course, a female personality. And that to fix it would require a complete three-week overhaul at a starbase. But really: three weeks?? Whereas now we can change the voice option on our phone or in our car with a few swipes, in a few seconds. Failure of imagination.
• Anyway, the voice is sexist. But fans at the time – and the producers, and NBC – loved it.
• Act 1 ends as Scotty repairs the engines, but observes: “We have no place to go in this time!”. A startling observation, but… how could this be true? Did the entire Federation of Planets, as we later understand it, arise only because *Earth* emerged into the galaxy? Weren’t there other races who’d developed space flight and colonized other worlds before humans, whom the Enterprise might have sought out in Earth’s 1960s? Surely one would think so, but Trek producers and writers never thought very deeply in these directions, or avoiding doing so to not complicate scripts.
• In a sloppy bit of plotting, as in “The Alternative Factor”, Cpt. Christopher is allowed to wander around the Enterprise decks on his own. Allowing him to knock out a crewman, steal his phaser, and use it to try ordering the transporter room guy to beam him down. Kirk shows up to belt him.
• Leading to the scene in which Spock reveals that Captain Christopher’s *son* — not yet born! – will have an effect on history, heading the first successful Earth-Saturn probe. Christopher says he doesn’t have a son. McCoy, with a twinkle in his eye, says “You mean yet!” And Christopher realizes what this means. “I’m going to have a son…!” It’s a legitimately charming moment.
• Then we have Kirk and Sulu beaming down to the base to try to retrieve whatever camera recordings and other data that would leave evidence of the Enterprise’s visit. It’s always struck me as amazingly coincidental that, by opening up a computer unit with tape reels, they can identify which reels contain evidence of their visit; and a bit later, find the photographic evidence too, so easily.
• This episode is regarded as the first deliberately semi-comedic episode – the result of D.C. Fontana’s script. The next scene (after the female computer voice) that displays this is Kirk’s being captured and playing dumb. “I popped in out of thin air.” He’ll be locked up for 200 years. “That ought to be just about right.”
• The episode’s endgame has the Enterprise trying to recreate the slingshot/time travel effect by swinging around Earth’s sun (though, as above, they think it will throw them forward in time, not back). In the original episode, there were no special effects to support this – we never saw the sun itself, just the Enterprise jiggling in space. The enhanced graphics for this episode do show the sun, and in fact shows the Enterprise banking closely around the sun – but in a nonsensical way that echoes the way the Enterprise has always been shown to ‘bank’ around planets it orbits – visibly arcing, and banking like a jet fighter would do in an atmosphere.
• A recurrent Trek bad physics theme: “Since we passed Mercury… the sun’s pull has increased on us greatly.” No. The Enterprise is flying though space; the “sun’s pull” is only a matter of being in orbit, or doing a flyby; it’s a matter of the trajectory the Enterprise will take around the sun. It’s not a matter of the sun *pulling* on the Enterprise, as if it were an object not moving relative to the sun.
• Anyway, this sun flyby works, as the Enterprise accelerates through the warp drive, and then passes Earth and achieves those amazing precise beam downs….
• The Enterprise “passed Pluto”. Well, no; this presumes that the planets around our sun are somehow lined up, so that the Enterprise entering the solar system, or leaving it, would pass by the planets in order. While of course, at any given moment, the planets are in their orbits but scattered around the sun in their orbital arcs. Would have been better to say, “passed Pluto’s orbit.”
• Of course, the Enterprise might well have been heading somewhere in the galaxy not along the Sun’s ecliptic; that is, at some acute or right angle to the plane of the planets. So ‘passing Pluto’ or ‘passing Pluto’s orbit’ would be an academic point, since the ship might well be headed in some relatively perpendicular direction. Trek routinely assumed – to the point of visualizing the Enterprise’s encounter with other spaceships, and the way it departed planets at the end of episodes – that the galaxy lay in some flat plane. Yet even the Milky Way galaxy’s plane doesn’t match the solar system’s. A prominent Trek example of how complicated physics and astrophysics is simplified for intuitive, non-scientific viewers.
• And finally, the story ends as the Enterprise winds down its warp-drive thrust into the future… and gets voice confirmation from Starfleet that they are back in their age. Really? Exactly back in their age? The exact time they left from, before encountering that ‘black star’? Don’t ask.
• Again, a fun episode that does not bear too close examination.

• Music notes: the whirling music as the Bluejay 4 pursues the Enterprise is the ‘spinning cube’ music from The Corbomite Maneuver; and in the next scene, Cpt. Christopher’s view of the Enterprise is underscored with the ‘Fesarius’ theme from that same episode score.
• The music as Kirk and Sulu slowly wander the hallways of the air force base is the slow, creepy version of the main Mudd’s women theme. We hear the “Shore Leave” bunny music as a wandering security policeman is beamed up.
• The fight in the photo lab is scored with Finnegan’s fight theme from “Shore Leave”.
• When the security policeman gets his chicken soup in the transporter room, we hear a version of the “Shore Leave” theme; the following scene, back at the base, opens with Courage’s “No Man” theme.

Blish’s adaptation, in ST2:

• Blish omits the initial off-ship scenes of the US air base detecting the ‘UFO’ and sending up a fighter to bring it down. But he does spend a couple long paragraphs at the beginning providing some astrophysical background about the notion of “black star.”
• In passing, Blish establishes that warp 4 is 64 times the speed of light.
• On the one hand Blish describes the Enterprise as being in a “fixed orbit” around Earth, but on the other hand that the ship is “too low in the atmosphere to retain this altitude,” which doesn’t sound like an orbit at all. So even Blish doesn’t seem to have a reasonable understanding of orbits or how things move through space.
• As Blish does several times in his books, he describes Uhura as a “beautiful Bantu girl,” which surely was never in any script.
• In the scene in which Spock relates his research in the future contributions of this Air Force pilot, Cpt. John Christopher, Blish (unlike the scriptwriters) has Spock note that “There was a popular author by that name, but it was a pen name; you are not he.” He’s referring to http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/christopher_john.
• Similarly, Blish adds a bit of background or perspective that didn’t occur to the scripters. When Scott says the engines are working, but “we’ve no place to go in this era,” Blish has him go on: “Mister Spock tells me that in the 1970s the human race was wholly confined to the Earth. Space outside the local group of stars was wholly dominated by the Vegan Tyranny, and you’ll recall what happened when we first hit them.” Fascinating.
• And Kirk clarifies, for Christopher: “There is no such solar planet as Vulcan… Mr. Spock’s father was a native of The Vulcan, which is a planet of 40 Eridani.” 40 Eridani being a real star, only about 16 light years from the sun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/40_Eridani). But no Trek episode ever established Spock’s Vulcan as being a planet of 40 Eridani. Anyway Spock warns: “If we took the Enterprise there, we would unwrite their future history too.”
• Blish omits the entire subplot of Kirk and Sulu beaming down to retrieve Air Force evidence of the Enterprise, their capture by a policeman, and the inadvertent beaming up of yet another local.
• As they discuss the idea of slingshotting back into the future, Blish has Kirk made an extraordinary concession: “I would rather destroy the Enterprise than the future.”
• And as Christopher expresses distress for possibly losing his memories of this glimpse of humanity’s future, McCoy offers some advice, which at first repulses Christopher, then deeply impresses him. McCoy: “In perhaps sixty more years, or a few more, you will forget things many times more important to you than this—your wife, your children… You will forget every single thing you ever loved, and what is worse, you will not even care.” Christopher is shocked; but McCoy goes on: “I’m only trying to remind you that regardless of our achievements, we all at last go down into the dark. …I’m trying to call to your attention the things that are much more valuable to you than the fact that you’ve seen men from the future and a bucketful of gadgetry. You will have those still…” He goes on; it’s quite a passage.
• Blish, more than once, refers to a “navigation tank” located presumably at the helm and nav station – a suggestion that a depiction of 3-dimensional space would need a 3-dimensional image, not a flat, round panel.
• And Blish implicitly acknowledges the absurdity of the crew manually timing the beam down of Christopher as the Enterprise flings past Earth: “This was going to have to be the most split-second of all Transporter shots. No human operator could hope to bring it off; the actual shift would be under control of the computer.”
• And Blish avoids the question of whether the Enterprise returns precisely to its own time, by not mentioning it at all, nor having the Enterprise contact star fleet command. Instead Blish ends with Spock alluding to the poet Omar, and the passage about the moving finger that, having writ, moves on.

Kirk wrestles with a bizarre pair of near-duplicate antagonists whose meeting threatens to wipe out the entire universe.

• This is in the running for worst Trek episode ever, with an incoherent premise, overwrought acting, and sloppy writing and direction.
• The story set-up is routine: the Enterprise is conducting a survey of an ordinary, albeit arid, planet. (With an “oxygen-hydrogen” atmosphere, says Spock – really? Presumably scripters meant oxygen-nitrogen.)
• Then some violent event rocks the ship, and who knows what else, which we see depicted as an image of the Trifid Nebula (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifid_Nebula) – not the galaxy, as Cushman says – that is superimposed over our view of the bridge, and whirls in and out for a few moments, then stops. What was that? Spock announces that it’s as everything suddenly ‘winked-out’ – a moment of nonexistence. Moreover, the formerly barren planet below now shows evidence of a single human on the surface.
• Three plot lines commence.
• First, a crew beams down to the planet surface – yet another episode filmed at Vasquez Rocks – where they discover a lone human, a crazed man named Lazarus who talks about battling an enemy in a ‘holy cause’, an enemy who destroyed an entire civilization and who must be killed. They take him up to the Enterprise.
• Second, a Lt. Commander Charlene Masters reports to Kirk that the event has drained the ship’s dilithium crystals, without which the ship’s orbit will decay in 10 hours. [Another instance of the Trek physics issue that orbits decay unless the ship maintains constant power.] Kirk orders her to ‘reamplify’ the crystals, and subsequently we see Masters and her assistant doing so in a special Engineering set we’ve not seen before.
• Third, Kirk learns from a commodore at Starfleet Command (apparently they have instantaneous communication) that this blinking-out effect has appeared over a wide area, “and far beyond”, and this commodore is ordering evacuation of all Starfleet units and personnel within 100 parsecs. (Really?? 100 parsecs? *Evacuation*? Of hundreds and people and facilities out of an area 100 parsecs around?) Leaving the Enterprise to handle this problem all by itself.
  • Because it was dumb luck that the Enterprise just happened to be near the planet where this cosmos-threatening winking-out event occurred. What greater coincidence could there be in all of literature or pop-culture?
• Sloppy writing: once aboard the Enterprise, Lazarus is allowed to just roam around the ship. We see the ‘blinking out’/Triffid Nebula effect again and again, and though no one else apparently notices, we see that Lazarus changes: the raving maniac with a bandage on his forehead is switched for a calmer, rational Lazarus with no wound to the forehead. McCoy does notice, but by the time he notifies Kirk, the effect has happened again.
• For some reason Lazarus hears about the dilithium crystals, and for some reason they are exactly what he needs for his own little ship – a bubble-headed saucer prop perched down among Vasquez Rocks – and plots to steal them. (Curiously, there’s never a plot point about investigating this little spaceship.) This involves Masters and her crystal recharging room.
• Once Lazarus installs the crystals in his own ship, he’s able to activate his ship and appears in some kind of negative/magnetic corridor, fighting another person – these scenes shot in negative effect, with a tilting camera to make the scene look unsteady.
• In a scene with Spock and Kirk in the briefing room, the two make a series of remarkable deductions: that since there are (they realize by now) two Lazaruses, and since the radiation they detect from the planet is not from their universe…that there are therefore two parallel universes. That they must be positive and negative. Like matter and antimatter. Meaning if the two Lazaruses meet, that would result of complete annihilation – of *everything*.
  • This is a series of analogies masquerading as scientific deduction. For instance – why might there not be an infinite series of parallel universes?
  • Anyway, no, the two Lazaruses meeting would not result in complete annihilation – it would only result in the annihilation of the pair of Lazaruses.
  • Ironically, the idea of anti-matter shows up later in the series, not mentioned as yet, as being the source of power of the Enterprise engines, i.e. a fuel source, not a danger to the existence of the universe.
• Further scenes on the planet, i.e. at Vasquez Rocks, involve Lazarus falling off a high rock a second time, Kirk accidentally transporting into the ‘magnetic corridor’ that connects the two universes, and Kirk wrestling the evil Lazarus into that same corridor – with two security guards standing placidly in the background – in order to trap him there.
• Kirk meets the rational Lazarus, who explains what’s going on, how his civilization discovered the existence of a parallel, opposite universe, and this so enraged the maniac Lazarus, he became obsessed with destroying his duplicate.
• The plan to resolve this is to trap the two Lazaruses in the corridor, and then for the Enterprise to destroy Lazarus’ ship on the planet, so they can’t escape. Leaving the two trapped in the corridor forever.
• Which they do.
• Why not just destroy the ship in the first place, cutting off the transfer?
• Why is there one scene, the one with Kirk and the sane Lazarus, obviously filmed on a sound stage? And why in this scene is Kirk standing with casually folded arms, as if they are not talking about the existence of all existence?
• Cushman’s book has two back-stories to the production of this episode that are more interesting than the episode itself.
• First, the character of Charlene Masters was written in early drafts to be a love-interest to Lazarus. This was rejected by Coon because of the similarity to a plot point in another script in development, “Space Seed”; and thus some of the scenes here, such as the one in the rec room, are stubs of their original selves. Also, it was a tad daring for the time, apparently, for the actress to appear with a natural ‘afro’ hair-style, however short, rather than the stylized straight hair that black actresses at the time, including Nichelle Nichols, typically wore.
• Second, the actor who played Lazarus, Robert Brown, was a last-minute recruit to replace the actor originally hired, John Drew Barrymore, who objected to late changes in the script and refused to show up for filming. Brown was hired the Monday night before filming with his character began on Tuesday.

Lawrence adaptation, in ST10:

• Another late adaptation that follows the broadcast script very closely.
• The adaptation reverses the order of the early scenes between Kirk and McCoy and Kirk and Charlene Masters.
• The first meeting of Kirk and Lazarus occurs in sickbay, not in Kirk’s quarters.
• The adaptation omits the scene between Lt. Masters and her assistant. Instead, there’s a scene between Lazarus and Spock, in which Lazarus describes his civilization, and Spock refers to an experiment he has in progress (which is his discovery of the ‘rip’ in the universe).
• But we do get the scene of Lazarus breaking into the engineering room and subduing Masters and her assistant.
• In Act Four as Kirk meets the second Lazarus in the alternate universe – at the point where the dialogue lapses and the scenes dissolves to a bit later with the same two characters – the adaptation has a short scene in which Spock beams down to the original planet and confronts the mad Lazarus.

Kirk is pitted in a one-on-one contest with the reptilian alien captain of a starship that destroyed a Federation outpost.

• This is the famous episode, filmed on location (again at Vasquez Rocks), in which Kirk battles this green reptilian (though standing upright in humanoid fashion) ‘Gorn’ in hand-to-hand combat, with stunts and effects that look dated 50 years later, but which became classic and remains instantly recognizable. There was nothing else like it, in Trek, or any other show up until then.
• Fully half the episode, though, is padding—the events leading up to Kirk and the Gorn being isolated. These scenes begin as the Enterprise arrives at a Federation outpost on Cestus III and discovers that the base has been wiped out.
• (So the voice messages from Commodore Travers on the base inviting them down were faked? There’s a lot of that going around in recent episodes; and this time they must have been faked by the Gorns!)
• The impressive live set of the Cestus III outpost had been built in 1956 for a TV series about a British Calvary unit in India, per Cushman’s book. It remained for many years before being torn down when Vasquez Rocks became a county park.
• These early scenes include several innovations, first-time mentions of familiar concepts in Trek, including the first use of ‘photon torpedoes’ (with their distinctive sound) by the Enterprise, and the first mention of the term ‘Federation’, both contributions of scriptwriter Gene L. Coon. We also see Spock wearing an earpiece like Uhura, and uses of the terms ‘azimuth’ (for directions on the ground) and ‘parsecs’ (for distances in space); also some odd nomenclature in which the ship position is specified as 2279 PL, which a planetary system ahead is placed at 2466 PM. No idea what these were supposed to mean.
• Trek astronomy vs. rote special effects: as the Enterprises approaches a solar system ahead, and stars still stream past in the special effects.
• The set up scenes strike me as rather hasty in jumping to the conclusion, based on a destroyed base and a fleeing alien ship, that the Federation faces invasion—and, Kirk decides, the Enterprise must therefore pursue and destroy the alien. Spock does caution concern for other sentient life, in a nod toward Trek humanistic values.
• In a dramatic if implausible scene, both the alien ship and the Federation are forced to an abrupt halt, rapidly decelerating from high warp speeds to a complete standstill. Sulu calls out their falling warp velocities. (Does dropping in warp speed involve everyone on the bridge being thrown forward somewhat, but not enough to splatter them against the front wall of the bridge? Apparently.)
• And then an alien presence appears on their screen, a Metron, accusing both ships of invading their planet’s territory. We don’t see the alien itself, just some rapidly swirling lights, but hear the voice, in English, a calm, placid, wise voice. Somehow I haven’t remembered, if I ever knew, that the voice here is that of Vic Perrin, most famous for narrating the “Control Voice” opening of the earlier TV series “The Outer Limits” – in fact, here it is — and just as in that narration, the voice says “We are controlling transmission…” in this episode the Metron, explaining the duel to commence, says, “We will control them…”
• Cushman’s book even states that the producers deliberately wanted to emulate the Outer Limits Control Voice, and so hired Perrin.
• In a sexist bit, as Kirk vanishes from the bridge, Uhura, the only woman around, screams.
• The clever and arresting premise of the show, alas, was not original, and famously the screenwriter, producer Gene L. Coon, wrote the first draft over a weekend and sent it to the network, NBC, for initial approval, after which NBC’s staff discovered that the script shared the basic premise and many plot points with a 1944 short story by Fredric Brown with the same name. So the studio contacted Brown for approval. He gave it, and was given retroactive ‘story’ credit for the show. Coon, presumably, had read the story years before and remembered the idea, but not the source.
• Another new device: both Kirk and the Gorn are given handheld translator devices to communicate with each other. These props turned up in later episodes as standard issue Enterprise equipment, for the same purpose.
• The groundside battle commences. The Gorn is strong, but slow; Kirk is nimble, but not strong enough to land effective blows.
• At some point the Enterprise bridge crew is given a view of the battle on their main monitor. They see, as Kirk discovers, deposits of various minerals and other substances strewn among the rocks: white powder, yellow powder, diamonds, coal, bamboo. The Metron advised that resources would be present to make weapons. And so as Kirk deduces what can be done with them, Spock watches in admiration, and says to McCoy: “He knows, Doctor, he has reasoned it out.” (But how many people today, let alone 300 years from now, would know enough basic chemistry to be able to recreate gunpowder?)
• Meanwhile time Kirk and the Gorn talk, and the Gorn accuses the Federation base of intruding on the Gorn territory. McCoy, watching, is taken aback: “Then we could be in the wrong.” The Gorn were just protecting their territory.
• This is a nice sentiment, another nod toward Trek values that don’t automatically assign aliens to be the bad guys; but it doesn’t quite excuse why the Gorn would have simply wiped out the human outpost without warning.
• In the finale, Kirk creates a weapon, a kind of cannon, and brings the Gorn down. Kirk can use a diamond blade to stab the Gorn to death… but does not. He pauses, and calls up into the sky, to the Metrons, No, I won’t do it!
• And so the Metron appears, in the guise of young boy (with Vic Perrin’s voice), casually mentioning that he is 1500 years old, and expresses admiration for Kirk’s compassion. “By sparing your helpless enemy who surely would have destroyed you, you demonstrated the advanced trait of mercy. Something we hardly expected.” And, “You are still half savage. But there is hope.”
• This, as with the previous episode, is one of the great Trek reveals, and a signal indicator of the broad vision Trek takes of humankind’s capability for growth, and its junior presence in the galactic scheme of things.
• And both Kirk and the Gorn captain are returned to their ships, with an implication of later diplomatic contact.
• In a final, almost gratuitous plot twist (made presumably just to avoid the imminent diplomatic contact just implied), the Enterprise is hurled 500 parsecs across space. Sulu is shocked at the positions of Sirius, Canopus, and Arcanis. (The last star name is fictitious.) And so the Enterprise sets off, back to Cestus III (why?), at warp 1 (i.e. the speed of light, which will entail some 1700 years to travel 500 parsecs; but Trek was never very careful about these issues).

Blish’s adaptation, in ST2:

• Blish jumps to the chase, so to speak, omitting nearly the entire first half of the broadcast episode that concerned the discovery of the destroyed outpost on Cestus III and the pursuit of the alien vessel. All of this is summarized in the first page of Blish’s prose. (Blish makes no attempt to rationalize how alien beings could have faked voice recordings of the outpost’s commander inviting the Enterprise crew down.)
• After that, the dialogue and action follow the broadcast script pretty closely. Per the focus on Kirk, though, we never see that the Enterprise bridge crew gets to watch the action down on the planet.
• One big plot difference: Blish retains a line (from an earlier version of the script, presumably), in which, as the Metron reveals himself at the end, he explains that he lied earlier – that the Metrons’ plan all along was the destroy the winner of this battle, since the winner would obviously be the greater threat to the Metrons.
• But since Kirk refused to kill the Gorn, the Metrons were left with no clear winner. The Metron does offer, after all, to destroy the Gorn ship—and Kirk hastily explains that that’s not necessary.

The Enterprise encounters a remote planet where a foppish ‘squire’ insists on entertaining (and studying) them and challenging them to the death when they refuse.

• I’m fascinated in retrospect by how episodes open, about what is going on before the Enterprise and its crew encounter whatever challenge will form the basis of this week’s story. Sometimes these are just as interesting as the main story, for what they reveal about how daily life aboard the Enterprise works, or what the writers and producers imply about the ship’s mission.
• In this case, the opening establishes that the Enterprise is crossing some kind of ‘star void’ on its way to Beta VI, which it will reach in 8 days, and that they’re 900 light years from Earth. Routine on the bridge: we see a (female) yeoman passing out coffee; we have yet another navigator, this time DeSalle (for some reason they didn’t settle on a regular navigator character – Chekov – until the second season).
• The ‘star void’ notion is a curious one, of no particular importance (and such an idea is never mentioned in any other episode), except presumably to underscore how odd it is for the Enterprise to come across a lone planet ahead in their path, as they do. As they approach the planet, Sulu, trying to change course, abruptly vanishes from the bridge, and then so does Kirk. Spock shouts out “full reverse power!” a bit oddly since they haven’t actually reached the planet yet. End of Teaser.
• Spock orders the ship to orbit the mysterious rogue planet, as messages begin to appear on their screens, e.g. “Greetings and Felicitations.” Spock sends a landing party down to the planet, to the one small area that seems livable – McCoy, DeSalle, and a geologist named Jaeger – and the planet we see, in this episode, is a staged planet set (unusually, featuring numerous trees instead of sand and fake boulders). Nearby is the front of a small castle.
• They enter the castle and discover Kirk and Sulu, frozen in position, and then Squire Trelane, playing a harpsichord, a foppish chatterbox who releases the frozen men and welcomes them all as examples of the savage Earth culture he’s been studying. As he admires humans for their missions of conquest, noting them as a “predator species that preys even on itself,” Kirk and the others realize Trelane knows only what Earth was like 900 years ago, given the distance this planet is from Earth. The subtext here is in line with Trek’s progressive vision of the future: that the violent past of the human species has been overcome.
• William Campbell is great in the role; Cushman’s book mentions that Roddy McDowell was originally considered, and he would have been good too.
• Spock, disapproving of Trelane’s antics, has a good line: “I object to you. I object to intellect without discipline. I object to power without constructive purpose.” To which Trelane replies, delightedly, “Why, Mr. Spock, you do have one saving grace after all—you’re ill mannered!”
• Kirk keeps insisting they be allowed to depart, and Trelane keeps forcing them to stay, until the situation devolves into a personal duel between Trelane and Kirk, with antique pistols. Kirk takes the opportunity to destroy a mirror he thinks is the source of Trelane’s power.
• The Enterprise departs, only to have the planet Gothos appear in their path again and again, as if by magic (or superfantastic alien powers). There’s some typically wrong intuitive physics going on here, as the Enterprise veers first one way, then another, to evade the planet, and everyone on the bridge *sways* first one way, then the other, as this happens. As if the velocities and accelerations involved have only that very minor effect on the bridge crew’s ability to keep standing.
• A brief trial scene between Kirk and Trelane leads to a chase through the woods outside, until Kirk realizes he can call Trelane’s bluff, and simply breaks Trelane’s sword. Trelane reacts in childish hurt, and Kirk scolds him like a child. “You have a lot to learn about winning, Trelane. In fact, you’ve got a lot to learn about everything, haven’t you?”
• Which sets up the story’s resolution, with a blatant deus ex machina that is also one of the best Trek reveals: two glowing lights appear above them, shining a light down upon Trelane, and speak as his parents, “It’s time to come in now, come along.” Trelane complains, “I haven’t finished studying my predators yet!” and the parents reply, “This is not ‘studying’ them. If you cannot take proper care of your pets, you cannot have them at all.” Trelane whines, “I was winning! I coulda won!” The parents apologize to Kirk, and let him return to his ship, as Trelane fades away.
• This is great because it undermines the simple premise that Trelane is some powerful, malicious alien – he is that, but he’s also a child, and that explains what’s gone on so much more completely. It also echoes a recurring Trek theme, one also just mentioned regarding “Shore Leave”– that the universe is filled other powerful races whose presence only incidentally overlaps human exploration of space. It’s this repeated demoting of humanity as being the boss of outer space that gives the Enterprise’s missions their own special but limited significance, a certain humbleness to the human endeavor, and gives the show such open-ended potential. (A potential that, I think, was lost in later Trek series that devolved into politics between the Federation and the Klingons, e.g.)
• Music notes: “Vina’s theme” underscores Trelane’s parents; the cat and mouse between Enterprise and Gothos is set to the Fesarius theme. A lengthy post about TOS first season music will soon be posted.
• And then the episode ends with the by-now obligatory humorous note. Kirk wonders if Spock didn’t also play pranks as a boy—“Dipping little girls curls in inkwells. Stealing apples from the neighbor’s trees. Tying cans on…”, before Spock gives him a droll look. Anachronistic, too.
• Final thought, watching the end credits of this episode: I wonder if anyone has explored the idea that the stills of scenes from other episodes, shown under the end credits, often revealed episodes that had not been aired yet. Teasers of a sort, for not just next week’s episodes, but for other episodes yet to come! In this case, the end credits show a scene from “The Return of the Archons”, four episodes on from “The Squire of Gothos” in production order, though presumably done by the time final post-production of “Gothos” got it ready to air.

Lawrence’s adaptation, in ST11:

• The adaptation omits the opening lines discussing the ‘star desert’ and the urgency of getting to Beta 6; the latter is summarized.
• Also omitted: Spock’s shouting “Emergency! Full reverse power!,” and the Act One log entry. Instead he initiates the full search of the ship mentioned by Scott at the beginning of Act One.
• (Again, we might wonder why the navigator, De Salle, is suitable to lead a search party, but that’s a routine Trek issue. At the same time, at least Spock allows that both he and Scott are needed on the ship.)
• The opening scene of Act Two on the bridge is included, by oddly has Spock refer to the planet as Gothos—something he has no way of knowing.
• In the following scene on the planet, the adaptation has Kirk call Spock to update him—even though earlier it was established that their communicators weren’t working.
• A couple scenes later, back on the bridge, Uhura also mentions the name Gothos.
• When the Enterprise crewmembers are taken back to the planet, McCoy has some lines about how Trelaine would have been considered a little god of war, 3000 years ago on Earth.
• (We might wonder, at the beginning of Act Three, how Kirk has the time to make this log entry, while apparently about to duel with Trelaine. Or is he retroactively retelling the story?)
• The adaptation condenses, or is missing, much of the dialogue between Trelaine and his parents; in the broadcast version Trelaine had about a dozen lines; in the adaptation, only half a dozen.