Views from Crestmont Drive

The Enterprise comes to the aid of a colony planet – where Kirk’s brother lives with his family – that has been invaded by alien neural parasites that cause mass insanity.

• The last episode of the 1^st season, both in production order and airing order.
• This is a somewhat grim episode; it has a solid SFnal premise, and it benefits from location filming in an urban setting, but its resolution involves a huge, unforgivable scientific blunder.
• We begin as the Enterprise approaches the planet Deneva — note the planet itself has a name, instead of being referred to via its star, as designations like Beta V or Omicron City III — which has gone radio silent. Spock provides relevant background: how a pattern of planets has suffered mass insanity over the past few hundred years, with Deneva, a human colony world, being apparently next in line.
  • Spock illustrates this by pointing to a ‘star map’ of sorts on the screen above his station. It’s very crude; a photo of several clusters of stars, each slightly differently colored, which Spock points to, one by one, as being different planets.
  • It’s curious how this pattern goes back *hundreds* of years; is this within the awareness of the Federation or Starfleet? Or are some of these from archaeological records?
• The episode has a personal angle in that, as McCoy recalls and Kirk confirms, Kirk’s brother Sam and his family are stationed on this planet. This kind of personal angle was used perhaps a bit too frequently in Trek; it’s a useful device for writers to heighten the stakes of whatever drama or threat that ensues, but used too often it becomes improbably coincidental.
• The opening teaser ends with a dramatic scene involving a Denevan ship flying directly into the sun – with its pilot crying out, “I’m finally free of it!” just before his ship incinerates. (In the enhanced graphics of the remastered episode, we see a tiny image of the ship, which I don’t think was there in the original.)
• Trek physics: As the Enterprise, trying to rescue the Denevan ship, approaches its sun, Spock advises that the “gravimetric pull is increasing” and then when they pull away, that gravimetric pull is “approaching tolerance level.” Trek writers and producers never took physics 101.
  • (To spell it out: there’s no such thing as “gravimetric pull” from being close to the sun that would tug at the ship, as Spock seems to imply; there is only the effect of the sun’s gravity on the Enterprise’s path through space near it. No one aboard would feel increased ‘pull,’ nor would the ship experience any kind of ‘gravimetric’ strain.)
• Kirk’s log at the beginning of Act 1 mentions that the planet Deneva is “one of the most beautiful in the galaxy,” a claim which ties to the production filming on location, at the TRW site in Redondo Beach, a campus facility with modern buildings surrounding grassy plots and ponds. More about that in a moment.
• Kirk has Uhura try a private transmitter channel, and gets snippy when contact is broken. That personal angle.
• Kirk and his landing party beam down, into the center of that TRW office park. (See image above.) What I didn’t realize until seeing the episode in high-definition Blu-ray (and seeing it for the first time in 30 years or so), is that those futuristic sculptures, the red spiral and the white teardrop shapes, are actually small structures *on top of a roof* in the immediate foreground. They are not on the ground, and scaled to the size of the buildings we see in the background, as I’d always thought. It seems obvious now, but on ’60s TV my impression was this was a beautiful city with huge sculptures the rivaled the surrounding buildings.
• There’s a moment when Kirk points to a building and says that’s where his brother’s lab is. There’s a short establishing shot of the building – and it’s not at the TRW office park, it’s the Knudsen Hall of Physics at UCLA, which I recognized when watching this episode ever since I attended UCLA in the ‘70s (and took many physics classes in that building). Here’s an image: http://www.publicartinla.com/UCLAArt/knudsen1.jpeg. You can recognize the building by the panels of tiles along the top between the columns.
• They walk around the seemingly empty area, until attacked by four men with clubs, and subdue them. They hear a woman scream, and follow the sound, into a building, where they find (coincidence!) Aurelan, Kirk’s brother’s wife, screaming about the invaders, as Kirk’s brother lies dead on the floor, and his nephew Peter lies still barely alive. It’s a heart-rending scene, as Shatner expresses Kirk’s grief, yet determination to duty, effectively. Shatner really was, in those days, a terrific actor.
• Aurelan is subdued and is beamed up, along with Peter, to the ship, where in sickbay she provides background: the creatures appeared 8 months ago, carried by a vessel from another planet, Ingraham B (the same Spock identified earlier as last before Deneva), by taking over the vessel; not their [the crew’s] fault, she says; the creatures control them through pain. And then she herself gives up to pain, and dies.
  • There’s a striking angle here: the creatures were an *invasive species* brought by a ship from one environment [planet] to another. The same thing has been happening on Earth, over the past few centuries – the past century especially, with air travel – and the effects have been almost equally disastrous, on smaller scales. See Elizabeth Kolbert. (my review: https://www.markrkelly.com/Blog/2015/06/30/elizabeth-kolbert-the-sixth-extinction/”)
    
• Kirk returns to the landing party, as it tries to locate the invaders. We see an interior room, with a short flight of steps down into an anteroom, as they follow a buzzing sound. Pull back and we see the creatures: flat, pancake-sized white globs, pulsing, adhering to a ceiling in the foreground. One of them flies into the air and hits Spock flat on the back, and he collapses in anguish.
• Act II: Back in sickbay, McCoy and Chapel operate on Spock, lying back-up, until McCoy gives up, to Nurse Chapel’s distress. He takes a specimen to the bridge to explain to Kirk: the creature implanted a stinger, like a wasp or bee, that grew tentacles entwined throughout the body, impossible to remove by conventional surgery.
• Spock loses control, breaks out of sickbay, makes his way to the bridge, and tries to “take the ship down” by overpowering Sulu, until Kirk and the others overpower him, and return him to sickbay.
• Where Spock, being a Vulcan with (as always) superior physical and mental abilities than humans, learns to control his pain, and insists he’s able to return to duty. Kirk hesitates. Spock prevails; he makes his way to the transporter room, insisting on beaming down, and convinces Kirk and McCoy that a specimen must be captured and he’s the only man for the job.
• Spock returns to the surface. There’s a lame act break as a local threatens Spock with a club, until after the commercial, when Spock subdues and pinches him. He gets a specimen.
• Back on the ship, we’re in a new set, a new medical lab (perhaps the decompression chamber from “Space Seed” is off the left side?), with a containment device into which Spock has placed the specimen. He explains that it’s like a single brain cell, one that connects with all the others. Kirk says, “like something from a different galaxy”; Spock replies, “or from a place where our physical laws do not apply.” Ecch. Both comments are unjustified or nonsensical.
  • To spell it out: First, there’s no reason something unlike anything ever seen before need be from another galaxy; it might as well be from the next planet. (Somehow ‘galaxy’ just seems more intense, I guess.) The second comment is a cop-out, since there’s no reason to expect that any such place exists, and every reason to think such a place is logically impossible. Unless we’re talking alternate branches of the multiverse, perhaps, a concept ahead of Trek’s time.
• In any event, several scenes go by as McCoy tries to find ways to kill it, unsuccessfully. He gets exasperated. “I’m sorry, Captain. I’ve tried everything I can. Varying radiation, intense heat…” Effects which would kill the human hosts, anyway.
• Kirk realizes if they can’t find a way to kill this infection, he’ll have to wipe out the million people on the planet, lest it spread to yet another planet.
• And so they brainstorm—what else was there about the sun, that the Denevan who flew his ship into it seemed to become freed? Maybe…light?! So McCoy rigs up a chamber to pour “a million candles per square inch” of light on…Spock, who’s the only logical test candidate. Spock enters the chamber.
• McCoy hesitates—they realize what this will do to Spock, right? He tells Kirk, “Mr. Spock’s the best first officer in the fleet.” Kirk tells him to proceed.
• The test is successful. Spock emerges from the chamber, free of the creature. But he is also… Blind. Stumbling into a table.
• Now, this is inexcusable since, boys and girls, light *is* a kind of radiation. If McCoy tested all types of radiation, he would have tested all types of light. Worse, as the screenplay acknowledges moments later, as Nurse Chapel walks in with “results of the first test on the creatures,” visible light is only a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The story here ratchets up the tragedy of Spock going blind by having McCoy realize that he didn’t have to throw the “total spectrum of light” at Spock. As we learn a bit later, only UV light is needed to kill the creatures.
• Kirk stares daggers of hatred at McCoy for this blunder. It is McCoy’s fault, but it’s really the scriptwriters’ fault, for making such a boneheaded mistake. McCoy had already tried “radiation,” but apparently the scriptwriters didn’t realize that radiation would have included, oh, say, UV light. This is the kind of mistake a bright high-schooler would have caught, had he read the script before filming. (I made a similar comment about the boneheaded scientific mistake in Danny Boyle’s 2007 film Sunshine.)
• And so the Enterprise, very quickly!, deploys 210 UV satellites in orbit about the planet, to project the light that will disinfect the million inhabitants there.
  • Sulu explains they’re put in orbit at 72 miles altitude, “permanent orbit”. This isn’t plausible—it’s too low. Typical “low Earth orbits” begin about 100 miles up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orbits). This is ironic since Trek is always worried about the Enterprise’s orbit decaying if the ship isn’t kept under power. A 72 mile altitude orbit would indeed decay pretty quickly; a typical Enterprise orbit, suitably high, would not decay and would not need ship’s power to maintain itself indefinitely.
  • The remastered episode’s enhanced graphics visualize the scene of the Enterprise deploying these satellites – a scene only implied in the original episode. But the new scene is a prime example of intuitive, wrong, Trek physics. A panel opens at the very bottom of the ship’s lower hull – like a bomb bay door on a plane – and these little satellites drop out, as if dropped downward in gravity, and then sorta bob into place behind the ship, like objects being dropped into the ocean from an aircraft carrier and following in its wake. Wrong in so many ways.
• The satellites work, of course, and soon all is well on the planet below.
• Even Spock is well. The tragedy of him going blind wasn’t just the result of a stupid scientific blunder, it’s also a dramatic cheat. We knew, in a 1960s TV series like this, that the major characters will survive each episode, in order to return fresh for the next. Knowing this, even a viewer at the time might cynically wonder, without worrying in the slightest that Spock will be OK, what explanation the writers will concoct for taking back the consequences of that earlier tragic scene.
• Why, it’s the little-known fact that Vulcans have an inner eyelid, because of their planet’s bright sun, of course! So Spock’s blindness was temporary.
• The writers even seem to acknowledge this handy Vulcans-are-special gambit, as McCoy mutters to Kirk, “I might have known he’d turn up with something like that.”
• And, to conclude… there’s a mild Gene L. Coon joke about what McCoy said about Spock earlier, and Spock’s hearing.

Blish adaptation, in ST2:

• This is likely the best example of how very different Blish’s stories could be from the broadcast episodes – and now that we have Cushman’s books, the best verified example of how those differences were due to Blish being sent early drafts of the scripts.
• (One wonders why the people at, where?, presumably Desilu, would not have taken care to send only final shooting scripts. My guess is that TV in the ‘60s was ephemeral, no one at the time had any idea Trek would become an eventual hit, or that it would quickly attract fans who would notice the discrepancies between Blish’s versions and the broadcast versions, and complain, as they did. In contrast, about the same time there were paperback versions of Time Tunnel and Lost in Space that had nothing to do with their show’s scripts, but with stories, only vaguely consistent with the shows they were based on, invented by their authors. For that matter, there was a Trek book like that too, by Mack Reynolds — https://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Horatius-Mack-Reynolds/dp/B000EX7CAO/ — but it was marketed as a kids’ book and no one cared.)
• In Blish’s version, there’s a character named Aurelan on Deneva, but she’s not the wife of Kirk’s brother or the mother of a son; the family connection to Kirk was added late in rewriting by Gene Roddenberry.
• More substantially the story here doesn’t end with the experimental blinding of Spock, and the deployment of UV satellites around the planet, and the silly cop-out ending of Spock not really being blind. Rather, the theorizing of the nature of the creatures leads them to conclude that they are all connected to some central core, light years away at the far end of the pattern of mass insanity described at the beginning. So the Enterprise heads off for this planet, launches two (in Blish’s words) “fully-armed planet-wreckers,” and destroys the planet, whereupon the infestation in Spock dies – and the same thing happens back on Deneva, they verify, its inhabitants fully recovering.
• Cushman’s Season One book (https://www.amazon.com/These-Are-Voyages-TOS-Season/dp/0989238105/) describes this and other earlier drafts of the script, including the final additions by Roddenberry of the family connection and Spock’s blindness.
• There are some nice concluding lines in Blish, presumably from the earlier script, about the nature of parasites and evolution.
• This version was better than the broadcast version, I think.
• Cushman’s Second Season book, pp310-312, describes the production staff’s reactions to James Blish’s first two Trek books. They were not pleased. D.C. Fontana – story editor and writer of several of Trek’s best scripts, including “This Side of Paradise” – wrote a long memo to Roddenberry, in which she complained especially about this episode, but also about the lack of action scenes at the ends of “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” and “Court Martial.” TV writers have different priorities than prose writers.
• Roddenberry had a Desilu exec send Blish a copy of the Trek Writers’ Guide, along with an admonition not to downplay Dr. McCoy’s character, as Blish had done. (McCoy, not Uhura, should have been the third major character described inside the front cover of Blish’s second book.)

The Enterprise comes to the aid of an underground mining colony where miners are being killed, and machinery destroyed, by an unseen monster that moves through solid rock.

• This is a justly famous episode that challenges our assumptions and overturns our preconceptions about who the victims are and who the devils are, in classic Trek fashion.
• It’s also famous as being a story inspired by a stunt man (Janos Prohaska) wearing a funny suit, who came through producer Gene L. Coon’s office, that inspired Coon to crank out, in his typical fashion, a script in four days; and it went before the cameras just six weeks later. (In contrast to many Trek scripts, that went months between initial outline and final script.)
• At the same time the script is rather talky – with characters repeating in dialogue things we already know – and with lapses of credibility, as Cushman’s book notes, with mining guards being stationed *alone* and not in pairs even after 50 others have been killed. And limitations of production: how the floors of the mine are completely flat and smooth; how the tunnels the Horta make are perfectly round. This was TV in the ’60s, with a limited budget.
• The story opens — in a rare example of an episode not beginning aboard the Enterprise — in the mining tunnels of Janus VI, as a miner put on guard post is attacked, off-screen, and found by mining chief Vanderberg moments later as having been “burnt to a crisp.” Memory Alpha (http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_Dark_(episode)) notes that this is the only teaser in TOS that does not include any of the Enterprise crew.
• At the same time, it’s notable that the besieged miners mention that “the Enterprise is on its way”. Perhaps we haven’t realized the reputation the Federation’s starships have, perhaps especially the Enterprise.
• In Act 1, the Enterprise has arrived, and Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down, where they are briefed by Vanderberg. Spock is fascinated by a silver sphere, about a foot across, displayed on Vanderbeg’s desk (this is the episode’s proverbial gun on the mantel).
• We then see another monster attack, of a man stationed outside the mine colony’s reactor room.
• As Kirk and the others receive this news, and learn that the reactor’s circulating pump has been stolen (by the monster, apparently), we have Kirk walk up to the camera to declaim about their choice between asphyxiation and radiation poisoning. (An identical dramatic resolution ends Act 1 of Coon’s next script, “Errand of Mercy.”)
• As Scott works to install a replacement pump, Spock speculates about “life as we know it” and the possibility of other forms of life based on silicon. It’s an idea that goes way back, to SF of the 1950s I’d guess (Arthur C. Clarke?), and the script has McCoy voice a couple obvious objections to the idea. (“Especially in an oxygen atmosphere.”)
• Nevertheless, Spock adjusts his tricorder to register silicon—and picks up a life form. As an Enterprise redshirt is killed by the creature, Kirk and Spock pursue the signal—and see the monster. A rock-lumpy blob, skittering across the floor, with a fringe of hairy tendrils. Kirk fires his phaser at it, and breaks off a chunk, before it slithers away.
• Spock examines the surrounding caverns, and observes that there is only one creature, and far too many tunnels to be the result of one creature. Is it, perhaps, the last of its kind? (Trek was prone to this device, which I’ve always found implausible; e.g. in “The Man Trap”. We would see it again in 2^nd season episodes that involved, if not last surviving specimens, then apparently unique creatures or devices without any concern about how they came about – “The Doomsday Machine”, “Metamorphosis”, “Obsession”, “The Immunity Syndrome”.)
• And so Spock notes that to kill this creature, the last of its species, would be a “crime against science.” Kirk insists the creature must be killed, anyway, to protect the miners [or perhaps protect the mining operation!], and Spock is forced to agree. (I might think if this story were made now, or even anytime in the past 30 years, there might indeed be a motivation to shut down the mining operation to protect an endangered species. The rationale might well be different on another planet than here on Earth…. Yet…)
• Then there’s a bit about whether Kirk and Spock should stay together, or split it, due to the risk of being killed by the monster. Of course this begs the larger issue of why the senior Enterprise officers are always beaming themselves down into danger – a flaw of TOS that, as I’ve noted, was addressed by TNG. (Perhaps due to David Gerrold’s contributions, as he’d described this flaw in his 1973 book The World of Star Trek.) Here, though, we have a Gene L. Coon moment: Spock claims the risk of their both being killed is 2278.7 to one. Really?, Kirk asks, and repeats the number. Really. There’s an identical scene in Coon’s next script, “Errand of Mercy.” It’s absurd, and implausible.
• Kirk and Spock explore…and Kirk finds a cavern of nodules, those silver spheres we saw one of which in Vanderberg’s office. Spock, without explaining what he suspects, advises Kirk not to damage any of them.
• And then the creature emerges to confront Kirk. It’s smart enough to know that Kirk’s holding up his phaser is a threat, and shuffles back.
• Spock catches up with Kirk, and understands they can be near it without danger (as long as Kirk has his phaser)…
• And then ensues a long scene, alternatively creepy and moving, in which Spock ‘mind melds’ with the creature. He initially experiences **pain!!**…. But quickly understands that the creature, calling itself a “Horta”, is intelligent, and sensitive. Spock channels its feelings – it’s despairing, on the verge of a sort of suicide: “the chamber of the ages!… the altar of tomorrow!…. murderers… devils… kill!… strike back!” And then “It is the end of life… eternity ends…”
• Meanwhile Kirk has McCoy beam down to treat the creature, which has a large scar from Kirk’s earlier phaser fire. McCoy is aghast, but quickly pursues a plan – he beams down some concrete, and patches the wound with that. “By golly, Jim! I’m beginning to think I can cure a rainy day!”
• And Spock explains the big reveal. Those silicon spheres are the Horta’s eggs. Babies. It only started attacking the human miners when they started destroying its eggs.
• And—every 50,000 years the entire race dies, except one, this one, who is left to regenerate her race.
  • Ahh… this is evolutionary nonsense, of course. No species dies every few thousand years and regenerates through a single specimen. The risk of survival, of a single specimen, is too great.
  • The only vaguely analogous situation on Earth is plants, or insects, who die off and regenerate every few years, via seeds or eggs. But not via just one.
• The story ends as Kirk makes a deal with the miners – not to kill this ‘monster’, but to let her live, and have her babies. The tunnels those babies build will open up this mineral-rich planet, for the miners’ benefit.
• This is the classic Trek reveal and reversal – the alien isn’t the monster; to it the humans are monsters; to understand the monster is the benefit of everyone.
• The final, scene, back on the Enterprise bridge, cements the story’s theme. Kirk takes a call from Vandenberg, who says that though the miners find the Horta’s appearance “revolting,”, he thinks nevertheless they can get used to it.
• Spock responds to Kirk, “What Chief Vanderberg said about the Horta is exactly what the mother Horta said to me. She found humanoid appearance revolting, but she thought she could get used to it.”
• It’s the classic Trek – and science fiction’s in general – tactic of undermining human assumptions of normality, and superiority.
• And then there is a Gene L. Coon joke about Spock’s ears, in the final moments.

Blish adaptation, in ST4:

• Blish supplies details about pergium, including its atomic number – 358 -!
• Of course Blish skips the opening teaser scene (set entirely on Janus) and opens with the meeting between Kirk and Vanderberg. And he skips later scenes of isolated men in the caverns being attacked by the unseen monster.
• Blish has the miners identify the caustic agent as ‘aqua regia’ and even has Spock suggest how to store such a substance – in Teflon.
• Blish has Vanderberg mention that their reactor is fission, very old-fashioned, using uranium. In the broadcast script, Scott calls it a PXK pergium reactor.
• Blish has McCoy go into some detail about the possible biological make-up of a silicon creature, and how it might kill men by simply spitting at them.
• Blish retains Gene Coon’s gag about the odds of them both being killed, but changes them from 2228.7:1 to 226.8:1.
• Blish follows the balance of the script very closely, but he totally omits the epilogue, with Kirk and company back on the ship hearing from Vandenberg, with Spock’s remarks about how the Horta found humans revolting in the same way they found it. With the joke about Spock’s ears.

The Enterprise visits a planet run by a computer in the guise of religious belief to the all-seeing “Landru”, a computer Kirk defeats through a battle of logic.

• This is a fascinating episode because it encapsulates, as well as any episode does, the tension between the supposed ideals of the Federation, and Kirk’s mission, with the ideals of the writers and producers of 1960s TV.
• It begins in media res: Sulu and another crewman, O’Neil, dressed in, what, 19^th century?, period clothes, are on the run from some threat, in some town on an alien planet. (These scenes were filmed on the same Desilu backlot as “Miri” was.) Sulu calls the ship for an immediate beam-up, but it doesn’t come quickly enough: sinister men in robes, carrying long metal rods, steadily approach him, and touch him with a rod. Sulu experiences some kind of transition – a relaxation of all his worries – just as he is beamed up.
• (Why is Sulu in a landing party? He’s the ship’s helmsman. Well, just to give Sulu, i.e. George Takei, something interesting to do, most likely. In the context of the show’s premise, it doesn’t make much sense.)
• Sulu appears in the transporter room, now rather spacey. He sees Kirk and the others, and observes “You’re not of the Body!” Kirk asks what he means. Sulu replies, “They’re wonderful. They’re the sweetest… friendliest people in the universe… It’s paradise, my friend… paradise.”
• Watching these episodes slightly out of order, I’m struck now by the similarity of the theme in this episode with that in “This Side of Paradise.” Both episodes feature some kind of ideal world, in which everyone is happy and content. But at what expense? And in both cases, the suggested philosophical explanation is arguable.
• The Act I captain’s log reveals the backstory: this planet, “Beta III” (pronounced Beta Three), was where the starship Archon disappeared 100 years ago; that’s why the Enterprise is here to investigate.
  • A starship named Archon? A peculiar name.
  • 100 years ago? Were there starships like the Enterprise 100 years before the era of the series we’re watching? Or does ‘starship’ refer to some earlier kind of craft?
  • A captain’s log at the end of the episode mentions that Beta III is in the star system C-111 (pronounced See One Eleven). Trek never settled on a consistent scheme of naming planets, and designations like these were especially uninformative. Note comments about Bayer designations in previous post.
• And so, two of his crewmen having been lost or somehow converted, *Kirk* himself, along with Spock, McCoy, and others, beam down to the planet. The notion that Kirk, the captain of the ship!, and senior staff would continually put themselves in danger was a flaw in the premise of Trek TOS, one which David Gerrold examined in his book The World of Star Trek, and one which Trek TNG tried to address.
• Like many other episodes, this one assumes that locals on an alien planet speak English. This was another grievous flaw that I’m not sure even later Trek series fully addressed. (At some point in Trek TOS it was alluded that landing parties carried some kind of translator devices.)
• Kirk and party beam down and observe all the locals walking through the town in zombie-like slow motion. Spock notes they exhibit “mindlessness” and “a vague contentment.”
• But then the clock strikes 6pm, and suddenly a ‘Festival’ ensues – in which all the slow motion zombies burst out into exuberance and violence, smashing windows, assaulting each other.
• Kirk and company take refuge in a local house, and watch the violence outside throughout the night. At 6am it abruptly stops – all the rioting locals suddenly revert to their previous slow, zombielike, states.
• Interesting aside: Spock apparently sleeps with his eyes open. If you can draw that conclusion form the brief shot we see of Kirk, in the morning, waking up the others.
• The most interesting thing about these opening scenes is that, as Kirk and his crew pursue the identity of “Landru” and the fate of the starship Archon, the idea and purpose of the “Festival” is never referred to again.
  • In a tightly controlled society, it’s easy to understand that citizens might need some kind of relief valve, a way of releasing their pent up emotions, periodically. It’s a reasonable premise. Yet it’s odd that this idea is never addressed later in the episode, with this or any other explanation.
• This episode has as provocative a theme as any in the series in that it challenges passive religious dogma (by revealing that that dogma is based on delusion and trickery). When Kirk and the landing party take refuge, and ask about the violence outside, they are told “It’s the will of Landru”; when one of the men in that house, Hacom, is suspicious about these newcomers, he asks “Do you say that Landru is not everywhere??” Another, timid, man, Tamar tries to assuage Hacom’s suspicions. “Surely the Lawgivers already know. Are they not infallible?” Hacom spits back, “You mock them! You mock the Lawgivers!” A more potent mocking of puritanical religious fundamentalism could hardly be imagined; it’s one of many examples of how Trek dealt with political and philosophical issues by placing them in the context of science fiction, where they seemed nonthreatening compared to analogous stories set in the present of 1960s TV.
• Reger, head of the safehouse where Kirk and party have spent the night, is alert to their strange appearance. He asks, “Are you… are you..?” but can’t quite say it. But Hacom realizes, “You are *not* of the Body!” And runs off to alert the Lawgivers. We quickly gather that the society here, all these zombie-like people, are part of some group-mind, ‘the Body’, that is overseen by someone or thing named Landru. And later Reger has the courage to ask, “Are you…Archons?” That starship’s visit a century ago has attained legendary, prophetic status.
• The Lawgivers – two men in robes, carrying long metal staffs – show up to challenge the meek Tamar, and kill him. The Lawgivers then tell Kirk and his party that “You will be absorbed. The good is all. Landru is gentle. You will come.” We gather that this metaphor of ‘the body’ treats any threat, outsiders, as infections to be absorbed, or destroyed.
• Kirk refuses. The Lawgivers don’t know how to respond. Kirk and his party leave the house, walking slowly outside through the town to try to fit in, until they see all the townspeople freeze — Reger explains that Landru is “summoning the Body” – and these townspeople slowly pick up weapons and then converge on Kirk and his party. It’s a very creepy scene. Kirk and party use a couple phaser blasts to escape.
• Reger takes them to an underground room, built of large stone blocks, where he takes out a flat square panel that exudes light – obviously an example of high tech. “From a time before Landru.” Further dialogue explains that the earlier starship Archon was “pulled out the sky”; later dialogue that Landru was a savior, some 6000 years ago, who rescued a war-torn world by returning it to a simpler way of life.
• Kirk checks in with the Enterprise and learns from Scott that the Enterprise is under attack from some kind of heat rays, that could pull the ship down from its orbit in 12 hours. Is this plot development a reasonable consequence of the Landru theme – or an excuse for Kirk to take extreme measures to bring down the local society in order the save his ship? (The latter.)
• And then, the image of Landru appears – a truly striking image, a calmly voiced man with hugely swept back hair, preternatural. “I… am Landru,” he says, calmly and confidently. “You have come to a world without hate, without fear, without conflict. No war, no disease, no crime. None of the ancient evils. Landru seeks…tranquility. Peace for all. The universal good.”
• But Landru treats Kirk and party as infections, and knocks them out with hypersonics. When the party awakes, their phasers and communicators have been taken, and McCoy and two others are gone. McCoy soon returns, spaced out like the locals. “Can I help you, friend? We all know one another in Landru. He knows. He watches.”
• Kirk is taken next, and then Spock. But they meet Marplon, a dissident aligned with Reger, who only pretends to ‘absorb’ them. Kirk and party manage to overcome a couple Lawgivers, don their robs, and have Marplon lead them to the “Hall of Audiences” where they might speak with Landru. Except that Spock has already deduced that Landru is not an actual person.
• Marplon and Reger, despite their dissidence, are afraid in their cores; somehow they still ‘believe’. Marplon is obsessed by prophecy. Kirk brushes his concerns aside.
• Spock mentions the prime directive, the Federation’s non-interference directive; and Kirk replies that that only applies to a “living, growing culture.” This is the core of the problematic thesis of this episode. (What’s wrong with a living, stagnant culture, that might be stable forever? A living, growing culture might easily outlast its planetary resources, and die.)
• Kirk and Spock are led the “Hall of Audiences” and use phases to blast out the wall to see that – Landru is a computer. Of course. One created by the original Landru, 6000 years ago; but a computer that regulates a human society as a computer would.
• Then we get the climactic scene, in which Kirk argues into destruction a computer – a theme that recurs three or four times in the series.
• Landru argues that “the good of the Body is the prime directive”. “The harmonious continuation of the Body. The good is peace, tranquility.”
• Kirk challenges Landru: “The body is dying. *You* are destroying it. … Without freedom of choice, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life. The Body dies. The fault is yours.”
• –There’s a huge philosophical issue presumed here. Landru is sustaining a calm, orderly society – without freedom of choice or creativity. Is that bad? The culture sustains, perhaps indefinitely. There’s a parallel here to the calm colonists in “This Side of Paradise”; the presumption, here and there, is that such societies are ‘stagnant’ and thus somehow inhuman. Kirk presumes that individual creativity, self-determination, is key to a healthy society. I think this is a luxury of 20^th and 21^st century western cultures; many Asian cultures might disagree, those that stress social conformity, as well as religious communities in the US that try to be insular and resist outside secular influences.
• The interaction between Kirk and the computer Landru derails logically when Kirk states “You must create the good. That is the will of Landru. Nothing else.” And then Landru replies, “But there is evil!”.
• Non sequitur. Evil? At what point did Landru think there was some ‘evil’ present? Landru might otherwise have reasonably argued that its strategy for maintaining social order was more important than individual creativity and self-determination. Certainly some actual societies have determined that.
• Nevertheless, Kirk’s battle with the machine plays out dramatically. The computer Landru, confronted with an apparent paradox, self-destructs, dramatically – not by simply freezing up, as our PCs do occasionally, but by bursting into flames and emitting smoke.
• And in the final scene, back on the Enterprise bridge, Kirk repeats the central theme about computers having no ‘wisdom’, or ‘soul’. Spock replies, “Predictably metaphysical. I prefer the concrete, the graspable, the provable.” And then Kirk responds with a Gene Coon joke: “You’d make a splendid computer, Mr. Spock.”
• And we hear from the crewman left behind on the planet: “Already this morning we’ve had half a dozen domestic quarrels and two genuine knock-down drag outs. It may not be paradise, but it’s certainly human.”
• Spock: “How often mankind has wished for a world as peaceful, and secure, as the one Landru provided.”
• Kirk: “Yes. And we never got it. Just lucky, I guess.”

• Music notes:
• As Sulu appears in the transporter room in the teaser, we hear Vina’s theme. Same them when the townspeople are ‘summoned’ to attack Kirk and his party.
• As Kirk and company watch the ‘Festival’ violence outside, we here the “Corbomite Maneuver” cube theme.
• When the light panel appears, we hear the Corbomite child theme.

Lawrence adaptation, in ST9:

• The adaptation briefly sets the scene, with background about the starship Archon. Then in the scramble by Sulu and O’Neill, Sulu actually refers to their pursuers as ‘lawgivers’, which he didn’t in the broadcast episode.
• There are some additional scenes: after Reger wonders who they are and departs, Lindstrom expresses eagerness to study the locals, Kirk constrains him, and they check in with the Enterprise about Sulu’s condition.
• After the group is led to the hidden quarters and O’Neill is put back to sleep, there’s more dialogue between Kirk and Spock about the nature of Landru, before Kirk asks Reger how they’ve survived.
• The adapters here cheerfully switch location and POV just as the TV scripts did, something Blish astutely avoided.
• There’s a major addition at the end, as Kirk calls Lindstrom back on the planet: he asks if Lindstrom has found anything to account for the festival, and Lindstrom replies with speculation about the festival as a kind of cancer that would address population control. Spock concurs. One wonders why the festival was never addressed at the end of the broadcast story; perhaps the explanation was cut for time.

The Enterprise visits an Earth colony whose inhabitants, infected by alien spores, live in idle contentment, one of whom met Spock and fell in love with him years before.

• The Enterprise approaches the planet Omicron Ceti III, where a group of colonists from Earth settled several years before, prior to the discovery of deadly “Berthold rays” there that by now should have killed them all. But when Kirk and company beam down, they’re greeted by the happy, healthy head of the colony, Elias Sandoval.
• It’s curious to see on the bridge yet another navigator, this time named Painter. Chekov became the regular navigator in the 2^nd season, but the first season, perhaps it was cheaper to pay bit players to say a line or two each than to pay a regular cast member; and of course the expansion of regular cast members only came as the show succeeded to get to a 2^nd season.
• Naming the planet here Omicron Ceti III is curious, because Omicron Ceti is a real star, more commonly referred to by the name Mira, and perhaps the most famous variable star in the sky. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira) It’s fairly unlikely a habitable planet would be in orbit there. It’s also odd that the settlers on the planet, or any planet with a Bayer designation (e.g. Alpha Centauri, Gamma Orionis, etc.), wouldn’t have invented a single commonplace place for their new home (like “Earth” instead of “Sol III”).
• The episode is shot on location, partly at Golden Oak Ranch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Oak_Ranch), a large facility owned by Disney specifically for film and TV production, and located just off Highway 14 in Newhall (on the way to Vasquez Rocks, from LA). The script has the colony devoted to a ‘simple way of life’ to justify the appearance of wooden farm buildings, and lack of 23^rd century technology.
• Coincidence! One of the colonists is a young woman named Leila Kalomi, who met Spock on Earth 6 years ago – and fell in love with him, despite his inability to reciprocate. Spock recognizes her but remains impassive.
• The landing party notices the lack of animals. McCoy gives the settlers physicals and is amazed by their excellent health. Kirk gets orders from Starbase to evacuate the colonists – but Sandoval, unconcerned, refuses.
• And then Leila takes Spock to ‘explain’, and takes him into a field where the large flowers explode their pods into Spock’s face. Spock collapses in pain – “I am not like you!” – but the effect takes hold, and Spock realizes to his amazement he can respond to Leila’s feeling for him. “I love you… I can love you!” And they kiss.
• This episode has a nice balance of threat, emotion, and humor, as in the next scene when Kirk comes looking for Spock, finding him hanging from a tree branch, and can barely believe his eyes. “I gave you an order to report!” he barks. Spock replies casually, “I didn’t want to.”
• McCoy and Uhura both get turns expressing the effects of the spores; McCoy turns into a southern gentleman, drinking mint juleps; Uhura into a spacey saboteur, as she wrecks the communications panel (so Kirk can’t call for help).
• Kirk, the last one left uninfected, tries debating. Sandoval talks about their “complete health and peace of mind.” And that’s paradise, Kirk asks? They have no wants or needs. “We weren’t meant for that,” Kirk says, “Man stagnates if he has no ambition, no desire to be more than he is.” This is an interesting philosophical premise – though not an inarguable one. So what if “man stagnates”? Most of human history has been only about getting enough to eat, surviving diseases, and ensuring the next generation. It’s only the adventurers like Kirk who think that’s stagnation.
• At the same time, the issue reflects the difficulty of telling stories without conflict. Trek had by this time already established the idea of “prime directive”, the idea that the Federation should not interfere with other societies – but individual episodes keep finding reasons to ignore it, as in “The Return of the Archons”, and in 2^nd season’s “The Apple”.
• Kirk has a great scene on the bridge, as he realizes he’s the only one left on board. He can’t pilot the ship by himself; he’s marooned. “I’m beginning to realize just how big this ship really is, how quiet.”
• But then he’s blasted by the spores and converted, just like all the others. “I’ve joined you” he tells Spock. There’s a strong undercurrent in the theme here of the effects of drug culture – remember this is the 1960s.
• But then there’s a scene I’ve never entirely understood – despite summaries of it. Kirk is ready to activate the transporter, to beam himself down. He flicks some switches; something seems to be wrong. Some kind of fury wells up within him, and he cries out in frustration, “I… can’t… LEAVE!”
• Wait, why? I’ve understood this before as Kirk reacting to some problem with the transporter. (But why?) Or is it instead that Kirk’s inner devotion to his ship wells up against the idea that he is about to leave the ship forever? If the latter, I don’t think it was well enough played.
• In any case, something gives – you see Kirk realize it — and he realizes he’s free of the spores’ effects. And quickly realizes how to make this happen for the others.
• And then the famous scene in which Kirk instigates a fight with Spock, via crude insults, to instill powerful emotions that will overcome the spores. And then the plan to beam subsonic transmissions to make everyone on the planet irritable and fight-prone.
• Meanwhile there’s the very sad scene in which Leila is beamed aboard the ship and realizes that Spock is free of the spores. Spock seems genuinely sorrowful, and tries to explain. “I am what I am, Leila. And if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Mine can be no worse than someone else’s.”
• And Leila’s anguish and sorrow causes her to be freed from the spores as well.
• She asks Mr. Spock if he has another [first] name. Spock ruefully replies, “You couldn’t pronounce it.”
• The concluding scenes confirm Kirk’s opinion of this supposed paradise. After a scene in which Sandoval tells McCoy his services as a doctor will no longer be needed, and McCoy replies, with one of his best lines in the entire series, “Would you like to see how fast I can put you in a hospital?”, they fight, and Sandoval comes to. And immediately realizes, about their original plans for the colony, “We’ve done nothing here.”
• And Kirk underscores it as the Enterprise departs. “Maybe we weren’t meant for paradise. …”
• But Spock gets the last line, asked about his experience on the planet, he says, almost wistfully, “I have little to say about it, captain. Except that for the first time in my life, I was happy.“

Music notes:

• We hear the “Charlie X” wonder theme as the landing party initially is led through the settlement.
• Most of the scenes with Leila Kalomi are scored with the one prominent love theme Trek had by that point, the one written by Gerald Fried for “Shore Leave”.
• Sights of the pod flowers are accompanied by the twangy Talosian theme from “The Menagerie”.
• Two or three times with hear the “Miri theme”, the library track by Joseph Mullendore first heard, IIRC, when Kirk discovers the girl Miri hiding in a closet.
• Spock’s infection by the spores, and his pain, is scored to “Vina’s theme” with a throbbing pulse underneath.
• As fights break out on the planet, we hear the “Corbomite” cube theme.

Blish adaptation, in ST5:

• The landing party has a couple different characters: Lt. Timothy Fletcher, a biologist, and a crewman named Dimont. (in the show it was De Salle and Kelowitz.)
• Blish has Spock, when meeting Leila, say “The years have seemed twice as long.”
• (note Spock’s line about the beauty of rainbows)
• Blish passes over Spock’s scene hanging from a treelimb, and only summarizes how the other crewmembers are also hit by the spores, before Kirk returns to the ship. Blish actually claims Kirk was hit by the spores too, but implies his anger at the situation kept the effect away. (In the filmed show the spores did *not* seem to hit him on the planet.)
• Blish completely rewrites the scenes in which Kirk is first hit by the spores, is overcome, and then is frustrated in the transporter room and thereby recovers. Instead, Kirk takes a sample of the spores to McCoy’s lab and discovers that the spores are soluble in adrenaline. He gets a plan—and then he calls Spock (claiming) to have joined them, and asking for Spock’s help aboard the ship.
• But then Blish plays out the confrontation with Spock as filmed.
• Blish passes over the scenes on the planet where the subsonics cause people to start fights; in fact he mentions the “modified Feinbergers” used to generate signal, using Trek production slang for the props designed by Irving A. Feinberg.
• And then Blish totally omits Spock and Leila’s farewell scene. Jumping straight to the bridge with McCoys comments about being thrown out of paradise. Blish does at least include Spock’s final line, about being happy.