“The Mark of Gideon”
Written by George F. Slavin and Stanley Adams
Directed by Jud Taylor
Season 3, Episode 16
Production episode: 3×17
Original air date: January 17, 1969
Star date: 5423.4
Mission summary
The Federation has been trying to negotiate the admittance of Gideon, a secretive and isolated planet that assures us it has absolutely nothing to hide. In the spirit of mysteriously acquiescing to terms it should never otherwise agree to, Central Command has consented to allow only one delegate to beam down to the planet: Captain Kirk. But don’t worry, the planet doesn’t have any dark secrets. They’re a veritable paradise, say secondary sources. Phew.
Kirk beams down to the coordinates the council leader, Hodin, gives them. But when he arrives… he’s in the transporter room. Still. Only Spock’s not there anymore. In fact, no one’s there anymore. Kirk uses the transporter console to try and contact Spock or the bridge, but his first officer is nowhere to be found. In fact, no one responds. Kirk searches the ship and doesn’t find a single soul anywhere. I’m sure his party invitation just got lost in the mail, right? Even more strange is that his arm hurts and he can’t remember the last ten minutes–which for anyone else might indicate something pretty awesome happened, but for Captain Kirk probably points to foul play.
When Kirk fails to appear in the council room on Gideon, Hodin rings up Spock to find out what’s taking so long. They repeat the coordinates and sure enough, they were the right ones, yet no one seems to know where the captain could have gone. Spock asks to be allowed to search the planet himself, but Hodin was squeamish enough about having one Federation delegate poking around, nevermind two. They refuse the suggestion but promise, cross their hearts, that they’ll search for him themselves.
Spock checks all the machinery and doubles down for a long search:
SPOCK: Institute a sensor scan 360 degrees, one degree at a time.
MCCOY: You mean you’re going to scan space for him?
SULU: But, sir, that could take years.
SPOCK: Then the sooner you begin, the better.
On the empty version of the Enterprise, Kirk runs into a dancing queen–a vacant-looking blonde named Odona who also seems confused about where she is and why. She doesn’t think she’s from Gideon, but she probably also couldn’t tell you how many toes she has. Kirk thinks that they’ve been engineered to meet in this place, but Odona is utterly useless and offers no clues about their situation. Must be a coincidence.
Spock, meanwhile, is having a hell of time playing diplomat with the council leader. Hodin says they’ve completed their search of the planet and Kirk is nowhere to be found, but Spock still wants to do things the old-fashioned way: in person. He tries to get Starfleet to intervene, but the bureaucracy is so ineffectual he’s left twiddling his thumbs waiting for an official Federation response. In the meantime he proposes an exchange: one Gideon will beam aboard the Enterprise, to prove the transporters are functioning, and Spock in turn will beam down to the planet. But once the Gideon arrives Hodin refuses to allow Spock to beam down!
HODIN: Forgive me, Mister Spock, but I overstepped my authority when I made that agreement. However, your request will be taken up at the next full session of Gideon’s council.
He hangs up.
Kirk is just as frustrated, trying desperately to get in touch with Starfleet (or anyone, really). Odona, meanwhile, seems oddly gleeful at the whole ordeal. She says her people dream of being alone like this in the vastness of the universe.
KIRK: Odona, can you remember why your people dream of being alone?
ODONA: Because they never can be.
KIRK: Why? What makes it so impossible to be alone?
ODONA: Because there are so many of us. So many. There is no place, no street, no house, no garden, no beach, no mountain that is not filled with people. Each one of us would kill in order to find a place alone to himself. They would willingly die for it, if they could.
Huh. That’s sort of interesting but clearly irrelevant to the current situation. Mm-hmm. I mean, I tell people I’m not trying to manipulate about things I would die for all the time. Just to mix things up. The two kiss, and as Kirk leads Odona away the viewscreen they had been looking out is filled with creepy, condom-hatted faces. That’s normal, in space. Right?
But the engine seems to be making strange noises, and Kirk begins to feel like maybe things are not what they seem. He knows every sound the ship makes and that’s not one of them. They go to a viewing port (what viewing port), but when they open it they discover dozens of condom-hatted people pressed against one another, shuffling futilely in a confined space. Kirk demands to know what’s going on, but Odona isn’t feeling so great:
ODONA: Is this the way one looks when one is developing a sickness?
KIRK: There’s no sickness on your planet, remember?
ODONA: Now there will be. There will be sickness. There will be death.
She collapses in Kirk’s arms. Cue Hodin at the door, explaining that his little experiment has gone perfectly. Kirk has successfully infected his daughter with vegan choriomeningitis (which sounds like a terrible fad diet), a rare and deadly disease that Kirk once had long ago. It has a cure (which is why Kirk is still here), but Hodin has no intention of curing Odona–his daughter. He means to use her as patient zero for a mass infection of his planet to cull the population down to a more manageable size. That’s why Kirk’s arm is sore, and he’s missing ten minutes. They harvested his blood for a mass infection.
Odona seems excited all of this, but is bedridden with her illness. Her father thanks her for what she’s done.
HODIN: What is it like to feel pain?
ODONA: It is like, like when you see the people have no hope for happiness, Father. You feel great despair, and your heart is heavy because you know you can do nothing. Pain is like that.
HODIN: Your courage gives me great pride.
Ladies and gentlemen, Father of the Year!
Spock, meanwhile, has finally managed to get through to Starfleet. But the Admiral has no patience or sympathy for his situation. He doesn’t want to start a war, and orders Spock not to provoke the Gideons and beam down in search of the captain. This is obviously the wrong decision and so our Vulcan friend decides to tempt a court martial and beam down anyway. The coordinates that the Gideons had given Kirk, however, don’t match the coordinates they gave Spock when their own man beamed up to the ship. Clever. So Spock beams down to the coordinates Kirk went to and finds the empty Enterprise. He sets off in search of his friend.
Kirk doesn’t seem to be enjoying his time on Gideon. He tries to tease some meaninging out of Hodin’s seemingly senseless plan. But, well, the thing about senseless plans is that they make no sense.
HODIN: The people flourished in their physical and spiritual perfection. Eventually, even the life span increased. Death became almost unknown to us. It occurred only when the body could no longer regenerate itself, and that happens now only to the very old.
KIRK: Those are conditions most people would envy.
HODIN: But Gideon did not find it enviable. The birth rate continued to rise, and the population grew, until now Gideon is encased in a living mass who can find no rest, no peace, no joy.
Okay, well that makes sense. But they why didn’t they just…?
KIRK: Then why haven’t you introduced any of the new techniques to sterilise men and women?
HODIN: Every organ renews itself. It would be impossible.
Ah, gotcha. But couldn’t you…?
KIRK: Then let your people learn about the devices to safely prevent conception. The Federation will provide anything you need.
HODIN: But you see, the people of Gideon have always believed that life is sacred. That the love of life is the greatest gift. That is the one unshakable truth of Gideon. And this overwhelming love of life has developed our regenerative capacity and our great longevity.
KIRK: And the great misery which you now face.
HODIN: That is bitterly true, Captain. Nevertheless, we cannot deny the truth which shaped our evolution. We are incapable of destroying or interfering with the creation of that which we love so deeply. Life, in every form, from fetus to developed being. It is against our tradition, against our very nature. We simply could not do it.
KIRK: Yet you can kill a young girl.
WHAT.
Kirk doesn’t understand this reasoning (AND NEITHER DO WE), but before he can think about it too much, a man comes in to let them both know that Odona is near death and crying out Kirk’s name. He goes to her to try and persuade Hodin one last time to allow him to save her life, while there’s still time.
It doesn’t matter, though, because Spock is a ninja and has managed to nerve-pinch his way into Odona’s quarters. With his communicator, he tells Scotty to beam them up–with Odona.
Later (and cured), Odona lowers her head at Kirk, who has come to check on her. She thinks he should be angry with her for what she’s done, but Kirk doesn’t seem to harbor that kind of grudge. The good news, of sorts, is that Kirk is no longer needed on Gideon. With Odona’s antibodies now matching Kirk’s, they can use her as the death merchant–a position she seems outright eager to accept.
ODONA: Are you going to stay on the ship?
KIRK: Yes, Odona, I have to.
ODONA: As crowded as my planet is, I could wish for it to hold one more person.
KIRK: Kirk to transporter control. One to beam down to the planet Gideon.
ODONA: I will miss you, Captain James Kirk.
Analysis
The plague spreading idea is supposed to be a difficult, unimaginable, but ultimately necessary solution. Unfortunately it makes absolutely no sense and comes off as the workings of a deranged leader willing to sacrifice his own daughter in a grossly misguided sense of purpose. There isn’t one iota of this plan that doesn’t sound like it came from a weekend bender, from Kirk’s magical antibodies1 to the blatantly imaginary lack of options that Hordin presents. How is it that the Gideons are superlatively regenerative, and yet not immune to this particular disease? If they’re so overpopulated, how did they never confront a lack of resources–food, medicine, shelter–necessary for the survival of their species? What do they live on? How could a place with such a premium on space afford to create an Enterprise-sized empty zone? How did they get the blueprints for the ship in the first place?? And why is the Federation sharing the medical histories of its Starfleet captains with anyone, let alone non-member governments? Doesn’t the Federation have HIPAA laws?
But really, nothing comes close to Hordin’s bone-headed assertion that they can’t control their population. Even if they have no technology of their own, Starfleet could easily help them colonize local planets to ease the burden on Gideon. And, okay, so they’re not hot on abortions and life is sacred–fine–what the hell is wrong with birth control?! This entire episode can be summed up by a Monty Python song. How is it even remotely moral, in any conceivable sense of the word, to import death to their world rather than encourage birth control? They’d rather let existing life die en masse than allow anything to jeopardize a possible fertilization. Who’s in charge here, the space pope? There’s absolutely no regard for quality of life over quantity of life. The bizarre fertilization worship at the cost of actual compassion is just mind-boggling.
Anyone who thought about actual overpopulation for more than five minutes would immediately recognize two things: a dearth of resources is the greatest threat in that situation; and with space technology, it can be solved with relative ease. This episode wouldn’t be nearly so stupid if it hadn’t aspired to address real issues. “A Taste of Armageddon” is a superb example of how this kind of story can be done right. Take an interesting idea to a possible extreme. What if we were constantly at war, with no hope of peace? What if our world were being laid waste by this war? The solution on Eminiar VII is eminently reasonable given the state of affairs; it’s just appalling to those of us at home who don’t face the situation they’re in. Star Trek has even done the aging thing well, in TNG’s “Half a Life.” There, people commit suicide at age 60 as part of a public ritual. They celebrate their lives, say goodbye to their families and friends, and die with dignity. There’s no uncertainty about when they will go, no fear of leaving things undone or forcing your children to care for you in your infirmity. It’s awful to think about but, in its own way, makes sense. If, say, the people of Gideon had instituted a similar policy–some kind of forced suicide that became a necessary part of their culture–one could see that as, again, ghastly on its surface, but reasonable to the people involved, and the conflict between that seeming ideal and the horrible reality would be a great reason not to admit them into the Federation. But there’s nothing reasonable to this particular plot.
This is another one of those episodes, much like “A Piece of the Action,” that relies on everyone in it behaving like a complete tool. Kirk wanders aimlessly around the Enterprise and yet doesn’t notice that none of the instrument panels work. He decides to walk the length of the ship rather than simply conduct a sensor sweep. He meets a strange woman and never even asks if she’s from Gideon. He somehow doesn’t have a communicator when he beams down (but of course Spock does when he goes, so that they have a way back). On the bridge, there’s no log of transports that could tell Spock and company where Kirk got to, and they can’t manage a single scrap of information persuasive enough to convince the admiral that something terrible is probably going on?
The whole diplomacy game was filler, a repetitive and tedious dick-waving contest thrown in to meet their 50-minute quota. Bureaucracy sucks, yeah yeah. Why are the Gideons even being considered for membership in the Federation? Do they have anything to offer? They don’t seem to want anything, either. I can’t imagine what situation prompted these negotiations to begin with.
Highlight: the game of Catan going on on Hodin’s jacket. Lowlight: the least sexy outfit I’ve ever seen on Star Trek, courtesy Odona. Summary: not worth the price of admission, and it’s free. Final thought: why the title? There’s Gideon, who had too many soldiers… but that doesn’t even seem remotely related to this story aside from a sloppy keyword match. What mark?
1 First, ANTIBODIES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. Second, if anyone Kirk ever came into contact with that hadn’t had the disease suddenly contracted the disease… wouldn’t everyone on the Enterprise be infected by now?
Torie’s Rating: Impulse Power (on a scale of 1-6)
Eugene Myers: I suspect any success this episode can claim hinges on its reveal that Kirk is on an “exact duplicate of the Enterprise,” but if you already know the surprise, the episode is largely tedious. The rest of the plot isn’t particularly memorable, but it’s certainly ludicrous; the Malthusian fear of overpopulating the planet must have taken a strange hold in the 1960s, judging by Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room, Make Room, which was adapted into the classic science fiction film, Soylent Green, seven years later. As in last week’s episode, this intriguing concept is pushed to laughable extremes: the images of people in colored jumpsuits bumping against each other in tight spaces should be chilling, but at best it comes off as utterly improbable.
And yet, Odona’s yearning for a place to herself on a crowded planet, for even a moment, is somewhat moving–especially resonating with modern city dwellers who are used to living in cramped quarters. There are fleeting glimpses of real sentiment, such as Odona’s touching farewell to Kirk: “As crowded as my planet is, I could wish for it to hold one more person.” The episode also manages to sustain a fairly unsettling tone, with Kirk’s confused wanderings on an empty starship, his mysterious arm injury, and Spock’s frustrated dealings with recalcitrant and arbitrary bureaucracy on every side. The horror lies in the familiar turned unfamiliar: the Enterprise devoid of its crew, a ship with only a captain and no purpose.
I would have liked it more if we had stayed with Kirk’s perspective, focusing on his wandering the ship looking for an answer, perhaps considering making a life for himself alone. If only the episode had allowed him time to despair over the imagined fate of his crew, which is implied only briefly with Shatner’s understated but powerful reactions, especially when Odona says, “I want to ease your feeling of dread, your fear that all your crew no longer exists.”
For this viewer, some of the ominous nature of the episode comes from the obviously religious mindset of the inhabitants of Gideon, itself an overt reference to the Bible. Their complete reverence for life, which ironically dooms them all, again shows an extreme, negative outcome of embracing a particular belief. It seems a bit strange for Star Trek to openly criticize religion, but it may simply be a warning against blind faith of any kind. For all his adherence to Starfleet protocol and regulations, Spock is willing to act against nonsensical orders when logic dictates it.
At the heart of it, this episode just doesn’t make any sense, and I found myself thinking that several times while watching it–never a good sign. The plot to cause a worldwide epidemic via a rare disease that is dormant in Kirk’s blood is too elaborate and far-fetched to be believed, and too silly to work. Perhaps it’s just quibbling over semantics, but in my opinion, artificially introducing a deadly virus and then refusing treatment is tantamount to committing suicide, so why not just start installing the suicide booths and lining people up? Or maybe they could start a war–that’s proven pretty effective in clearing out excess population.
Paradise or no, what does Gideon have that makes Starfleet bend to its whims so completely? They have the technology to recreate a Starfleet vessel down to the tiniest detail, not to mention the room to hold it on an already burdened planet, but they don’t have spaceships of their own or a means to colonize other worlds? Did they buy the Enterprise Technical Manual from the Starfleet Gift Shop online? Why can’t they just ask the Federation to help them offload people to colonies on other worlds? Why haven’t they exhausted all of Gideon’s natural resources and food sources by now?
Ultimately, the most entertaining aspects of the episode were sparkling lines of dialogue like, “Can you make it last a long, long time?” Fortunately it doesn’t go on forever–all bad episodes come to an end.
Eugene’s Rating: Warp 2
Best Line: SPOCK: We must acknowledge once and for all that the purpose of diplomacy is to prolong a crisis.
Syndication Edits: None
Trivia: In the original outline, Kirk, Spock, and others had their blood harvested by the locals for use as immortality nullifiers. This involved even more handwave mumblemumble SCIENCE!, in which the crew’s antibodies “canceled out” the regenerative power of the nearly immortal Gideon physiology. Once they got the antibodies, the Gideons used Odona and two others to create deadly germs. Somehow.
Other notes: We should all remember Stanley Adams, the episode’s co-writer, as Cyrano Jones in “The Trouble With Tribbles.” Richard Derr has played a bureaucratic douchebag twice now: here as Admiral Fitzgerald and previously as Commodore Barstow in “The Alternative Factor.” Gene Dynarski, who plays Krodak, appeared in “Mudd’s Women” as Ben Childress.
Previous episode: Season 3, Episode 15 – “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.”
Next episode: Season 3, Episode 17 – “That Which Survives.” US residents can watch it for free at the CBS website.
Boring and senseless, yup that’s this episode. It’s another clue-by-four episode to warn of the dangers of our current folly. Last week, racism is bad, this week watch out the population bomb is ticking! Even for the science of the times this makes no sense. That grab themselves a James T Kirk for the virus in his blood. (I do believe Hodin said virus at one point.) Okay that could actually work as retro-viruses can hide out in your cells for practically forever. (A point used in good SF by Greg Bear in Darwin’s Radio.) They want to use the virus to make a malthusian adjusting plague. Sick, but doable, However once they have Kirk and the magic blood, they now need him to wonder aimlessly about with their intended patient zero. hmmm why? They’ve got the virus, they’ve got patient zero, they don’t need the donor any more. And only ONE patient zero? Not even a back-up if the first one gets corrupted? “You Gideons are Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”
Clearly not only was this a whack at the population bomb it was also a whack and the religious objections to the solutions. As we saw later in TNG with the protovulcans and Picard as a god, Star Trek is not sympathetic to religion.
Given that disease is the only solution. Immigration doesn’t reduce population size, and War would have to be planetary to be effective. After WWII there were more people in planet Earth than before.
The most amazing thing about this episode is that they tackled overpopulation without once addressing any of the actual issues. No resource depletion, no competition for food or water, not even overcrowding makes you crazy. At most, there’s a backhanded reference to a lack of privacy.
I’ll give them being able to recreate the disease from Kirk’s blood. A retrovirus as bobsandiego@1 pointed out or they’re biological superscientists and are able to reverse engineer the disease-causing organism from the antibodies. But how do they know he had the disease in the first place? Did they somehow have access to his personnel file? Did they ask Starfleet to give them the complete medical records of the entire crew? And couldn’t they just have ordered the virus from their local interstellar scientific supply company? Research labs can buy all sorts of nasty pathogens, they could have created some sort of cover agency.
The Gideons’ wacky philosophy regarding the sacredness of life is, alas, not that far out. Consider, for example, the Quiverfull movement. There are plenty of people who wouldn’t find the Gideons’ approach strange at all.
As near as I can tell, the title is semantically null. I’ve heard of the mark of Cain and I’ve heard of Gideon, but this seems to be the only combination of the two.
Still, as Eugene notes, they did manage to maintain a pretty unsettling feel for a long time and some of the dialog wasn’t too bad. It was also an interesting approach to a bucket show. I’ll give it a 2.
Malthusian Dystopia FAIL.
I was doing some back-of-the-envelope math while standing in a packed subway this morning which looked to have about the population density depicted on the surface of Gideon. I’m estimating that crowd was about 2 square feet per person, which is probably a generous underestimate, seeing as how I’m exaggerating the size of my arm-reach (don’t we all) and many of the people were wearing backpacks.
Now, the world population is about 7 billion. But the land area of the state of Texas is about 7.5× 10^12, or 7,500,000,000,000 — so, at purported Gidean population densities (assuming we weren’t just seeing the inside of Grand Central Gideon Station at rush hour), the state of Texas alone could hold 550 TIMES the entire world population.
Well, okay, let’s assume that Gideon is an Earth-sized rock, with Earth-like land surface area. That’s 148,300,000 sq. km, that’s about 1.6 x 10^15 sq. ft, or enough to hold 8 x 10^14 Gideons, 100 times our current world population — okay, a little less
Gideons look pretty well-fed, let’s say they’re the size of average Americans. Average weight for men in 1960 was 166.3 lbs, for women, 140.2 lbs, let’s say that the average weight of a Gideon is 150 lbs, or 68 kilos, meaning the total Gideon biomass is projected to be about 5.5 x 10^15 kilos. That’s a LOT of Gideon — sure, it turns out to be “only” .0000001% of the total mass of Earth, but still.
One wonders why they didn’t just build skyscrapers. Or tunnel deep into the Earth’s surface. Or colonize their oceans. Or build an orbiting platform in SPAAAAACE. Or any of the TENS OF THOUSANDS OF OTHER LESS STUPID SOLUTIONS which science fiction has provided, HAD provided by the time of this episode, to this problem.
I mean, c’mon, people. Population pressure was one of the DRIVING MOTIVES of Heinlein’s fiction, and universally (even in his weirdest or stupidest work) dealt with more intelligently and thoughtfully than here.
The problem with this episode is that nobody thought about it for more than three minutes straight before just shooting the thing.
. . . Actually, I just realized the weirdest thing in this episode.
Hodin et al. only need Kirk, really need him, for about an hour. WHY do they tell Spock that he’s missing? Him without a communicator, the Enterprise would never have known anything was up until the virus was secure and Kirk besmitten enough to stay.
Spock only sticks his nose in BECAUSE HODIN SAYS SOMETHING. What? Why do that? Why did this happen?
This episode is so boring, it doesn’t even have any interesting trivia! But if you had any doubts as to Fred Freiberger’s delusions about the show, Memory Alpha records that he actually praised it: “I felt if we had to do the show under those restrictions, we had to come up with good stories and that one worked.” If your criteria is delivering 51 minutes of filmed material with all the act breaks in the right place, then yeah–good job.
DeepThought@3: The January National Geographic was devoted to the impending 7 billion population and they included the factoid that if everybody in the world got together for a picture, they’d all fit in the city of Los Angeles. And if you give them 6 square feet a piece, you still only need 1500 square miles, which is like Rhode Island or Dubai. I suppose you could argue all those people were crowded against the places they could look into the empty ship in a desire to see that space and densities aren’t normally that high.
It also occurred to me that Odona’s time in the ship with Kirk is her reward for being patient zero. She gets to spend her last few hours luxuriating in all that room. But the whole thing makes no sense. Why do any of this after Kirk’s 10 minute blackout? Tell him there was a minor transporter problem and he blacked out. That’s how he hurt his arm. Sorry. Now let’s get down to business. It makes a lot more sense.
And I also noted that next week we will be looking back at this episode rather fondly. At least they tried.
@ 1 bobsandiego
Forget patient zero–if they’re advanced enough to backwards engineer a rare disease, aren’t they advanced enough to build skyscrapers? I find it interesting that you note this episode is anti-religion. I felt like we were supposed to sympathize and understand Hodin’s position on this, and agree with him that of course every sperm is great. I didn’t get the impression that his position was supposed to be as reprehensible as I found it to be.
@ 2 DemetriosX
Right. Like I said, forget shuffling around in small areas–how do they feed themselves?
Apparently Hodin got Kirk’s medical records through some kind of diplomatic channels. He says, “Our prime minister learned about you during our negotiations. That’s why we brought you here. Your blood provided the micro-organisms which infected her.” In which case, why is Starfleet sharing this information??
-1000 points for linking to that movement. Now I’m going to have trouble keeping down lunch.
@ 3 DeepThought
I mean, it doesn’t make sense. If you had a billion times the number of people we had, how is there room for crops? Factories? Water treatment? Trees for oxygen? ANYTHING? Maybe city centers are like that but you can’t have an entire planet that crowded.
And no, there’s no reason for the whole ruse with his daughter. They got the antibodies when he beamed down so they should have just given him the little memory loss, gone through with the negotiation, and not jeopardized their entire project with their weird matchmaking scheme.
@ 5 Eugene
Yeah, I saw that. Can you imagine having so little perspective on your own work?
@ 6 DemetriosX
Haha, looks we posted the same thing at the same time.
I’ve got nothing. Really. What would be the point?
But, as DemetriosX says, if you think this was bad, wait until next week!
I think the whole purpose of the third season was to make me so very happy when the first season started back up again in the reruns.
Well, okay, one thing: What’s up with Odona’s hairdo? Does she wind up with a skull that looks more like an egg than even Vincent Price as Egghead on Batman or what? Between the hair and that outfit, I feel completely sorry for the poor thing.
The episode had a few creepy moments I remember from childhood: The viewscreen with the faces of hundreds peering in from space, the sounds of their heartbeats pressed against the ship… the general feeling of oppression and isolation… so I give it that.
Agreed the plan makes no sense on any level. The idea that Kirk could be fooled by a replica, that said replica could be built and would be built to advance such a plan. Yet we know if the Gideons really wanted to inflect Odona they could have injected the disease directly into her and there’d be no need for Kirk. He was unconscious for a bit when they extracted his blood, and that is all the time required for him to be MIA. End of story.
Guess the Gideons don’t latch on to the idea that the simpler the solution the more likely its success. You can kinda see that at all levels in their society.
If we’re to believe anything of what Hodin says about his people, their beliefs and their plight, he and he council are prepared to be totalitarian mass murderers on a genocidal scale against an unwitting and unwilling people. How can it be these “leaders” do not share their people’s views of the sanctity of life?
As for the irrationality of Gideon’s cultural/spiritual beliefs, I’m afraid I do not find that all that incredible. Not to get too political, but in the U.S. we have a very strong belief, held by a plurality of citizens, that every sperm is sacred and life begins at conception. Within that same group is the equally strong belief that health care is not a right and should be offered only to the healthy who can afford it.
So in this country, the right to life begins at conception and ends at birth. That’s not much crazier than Gideon.
@ 7 Torie Oh, I do not think the writers/producers meant for Hodin’s view to by sympathetic. I think it was a veiled warning about where we, Earth, was heading. i.e. we are going to be very overcrowded if we listen to people like this. remember Roe v Wade was 4 years off in the future and Griswold V CT was just 4 years earlier. There still was a very strong push against the idea of contraceptives.
I think they posed Kirk as the rationale hero, and Hodin as the reactionary voice of tradition and religion.
I do not remember the 10 minute/ arm sting bit. Why not send Kirk back afterward? We could then get on to the next episode.
I kept mentally leaving this episode, as young as I was, because the backstory was such BS. It’s that crowded? How do you sleep? Where do you poop? Where is your food? Are there roads? How do you get to work/ school/ etc.? Why not send someone off-planet, then return with a nice STD? Does the Enterprise have windows or viewscreens? Why not cover any windows with black cloth, or give false feeds to viewscreens? How is there room to build a fake starship? How is is so exact? Aaaaauuuugh!
And who would try to trick Spock with different sets of coordinates?
@ 8 Torie
ouch. (please overlay the entire reply with a humorout tone.) I just got back my rejected novel which 18 months ago I thought was ready for publication and looking at it now I can see it was not. (Started another round of sentence level revisions.) So I kinda of will cut of Fred the Fink some slack on his lack of self-perception.
@ 9 NomadUK
The hair had a sort of Barbara Eden/I Dream of Jeannie feel to it, which is cutesy but not terrible. It’s the outfit that’s just awful. It looks like someone painted a cubist bikini onto a beaded curtain.
@ 10 Lemnoc
I have to wonder what kind of “leaders” they are. Hodin seems to share a room with maybe three people, and then they have that sick room where Odona is, and of course the entire concourse of the empty Enterprise. They have so much space! Are they just tyrants, keeping all the open space for themselves?
The present day parallels weren’t lost on me, I assure you. Maybe that’s why I assumed the audience was supposed to “agree” with Hodin’s view on life.
@ 11 bobsandiego
Right, but given Roddenberry’s aversion to beatniks I didn’t assume that Star Trek was siding with the hippies on this one. Kirk’s suggestion to use BC is immediately discarded. Since Kirk is the moral compass of the show, his viewpoint is usually validated. I don’t know if that happened here. Are we supposed to understand now, finally, why their death importation scheme is a good idea? Are we supposed to think they’re awful genocidal dictators?
Re: the novel, there’s a difference between thinking you’re god’s gift to television and having trouble with revisions. :)
@ 12 sps49
Try not to think about it too hard. It’ll only hurt more.
I have a few things to say. First, to DemetriosX @2. In an indirect way, they did address that problem of overcrowding. Their plan is crazy. They may get an epidemic started but how long will it be before the Gideon immune system overcomes it? As others have pointed out, did they think they could implement their plan with no questions asked? And that brings me to my second point.
Maybe the Gideons (Gideoners?) were afraid of the possible responses to any request to the Federation for help and they came up with this plan to avoid the possibility of any of those responses. But, if that was the case, then why wasn’t their reasoning addressed within the episode the way it was in the Next Generation Episode “11001001”? (“Because you could have said no.”)
My third point is that, to me, this episode plays like a 50 minute PSA. (Public Service Announcement) As with the Z-12 physical fitness spot I mentioned in the discussion of Plato’s Stepchildren (but still cannot locate), many of the PSA back then and throughout the 70s were nifty little morality plays. Some of them were wild and outrageous, while others were simple and thought provoking like the famous “Like Father, Like Son” spot. (You can see it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmzDLzqQ-A0 ) These spots were designed to catch the viewer’s attention and – they hoped – lead to thought, conversation and action. There was at least one overpopulation spot that made use of staged overcrowding suggestive of what we saw in this episode but I can’t remember if that one appeared before or after this episode. I’m looking for that one now. Thinking about it, this episode does fit in with the messages we (the kids) were hearing in the PSAs and in discussions in Social Studies classes in school at the time. And, despite all its storytelling problems, this episode would have been considered at least average if not above average when compared to everything else running at the time. However, the purpose of this discussion is to look at this episode in comparison to everything else Star Trek. In that context, I agree that this episode mostly fails.
a far better treatment of the dangerous of overpopulation and just 4 years later was ‘Soylent Green.” (Yeah I know Torie you haven’t seen and you SHOULD.)
Not only did it deal with Overpopulation in a much more realistic manner it also touched on global warmer decades before it became fadish.
(hmmm it might have to be my Sunday Night Movie this week.)
You don’t have to even think about the mass of all those people. As people have pointed out in regard to the world-cities of Foundation and Coruscant in their respective works, the body heat of that many humans alone would quickly overwhelm the planet’s ecology, such as might be left from trying to feed and deal with the wastes of those people.
Very, very silly episode. Third season just gets worse and worse, doesn’t it?
bobsandiego @16: The novel that Soylent Green was (loosely) based on was from 1966, earlier than this episode. But there was plenty of SF about overpopulation, much of it even interesting. John Brunner’s novel Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is a classic, but it’s more of a realistic near-future Earth story.
Something a little more like the “Gideon” premise, except good, is Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside (1971), where there’s a culture that’s got an ideological objection to birth control despite being compulsively hedonistic. They haven’t hit their resource limit yet, so they just keep building humongous skyscrapers, which they think proves how awesome they are.
@ 6 DemetriosX, @9 NomadUK
Sorry, I have to disagree. This episode had no redeeming features, and wraps the Stupid-o-meter around the peg unnecessarily, at every turn. Next week we at least get Lee Merriwether and the classic camp line “I am for you, Sulu”. Plus that go-2D-and-vanish effect, which I thought was way cool when I was 10.
@17 Caitiecait I once did a back of the envelope calculation for the population of Coruscant, using Earth surface area and Manhattan population densities. It came out to 41 trillion beings. I never even considered the wattage of all those bodies. wow
@18 Eli B oh yeah I know about ‘Make Room, Make Room’, but I was keeping it to media SF, otherwise there are no new ideas. Media Sf is nearly always behind print.
DrDave@19: I forget where in my post I mentioned any redeeming features….
And, yes, there is Lee Meriwether coming up, and the 3D-to-2D effect, and all of that … but — no, sorry. It’s just going to be awful.
And, Torie, you simply must sign on to Amazon (or whatever) and order yourself a copy of Soylent Green and watch it, like, right now.
DrDave@19: Some of the dialog here isn’t bad. Odona’s line about wishing there was room for one more may be slightly cheesy, but it works. And my general response to the next episode, Lee Meriwether and all, is “I am for… changing the channel.”
It’s not quite all downhill from here, but the lows are very low and the highs aren’t very high.
@21 Nomad UK
We don’t know she hasn’t watched it. I just kind of assumed it when our discussion of 70’s on another threat yielded so many misses. Soylent Green is also available via Netflix and is now out on blu-ray. (though I have the DVD and my sweetie-wife does not like it when I replace the DVDs with Blu-rays unless I get new material.)
That settles it though, Soylent Green is going to be this week’s Sunday Night Movie
bobsandiego@23: I’m with your sweetie-wife on that one. I simply refuse to even buy a Blue-Ray player on principle. DVDs are plenty good enough. Hell, the iPod-quality downloads I get from the BBC iPlayer are good enough for my television screen. Which is plenty big enough, thank you. Frankly, nobody — and I mean nobody — needs more than what I’ve got. And I’m not even sure I need that.
I’m really getting tired of these people coming out with minor variations on storage media designed to convince us that we need to throw out our libraries and buy all new ones every 10 or 20 years. DVDs and CDs now take up a fraction of the shelf space of laserdiscs and LPs. The replacement for spinning discs and laser beams will be solid-state storage. End of story. Can we spend the money and talent on something worthwhile for a change, please?
Rant aside, your choice of Saturday Night Movie is a fine one.
And my advice to Torie remains the same: If you haven’t seen it yet, get a copy.
@ 15 Ludon
I really can’t imagine that the Gideon folk were worried about Federation intervention. I mean, if they want to join the Federation, they have to assume that a) they’re going to be scrutinized; and b) they’re willing to allow some Fed interference.
@ 17 CatieCat
I hadn’t even thought of that. Maybe they’re endothermic! Er. Yeah. It’s pretty stupid.
@ 18 Eli B
Proof that thinking about it for more than five minutes gives you a much better story.
@ bobsandiego & NomadUK
It’s in my queue already! Alas, my queue has over 350 movies! It’s hard to keep up with current movies AND the 75 years of cinematic history before my birth. I’ll get there…
I don’t have a Blu-Ray player, but I still use my VCR sometimes… do I get cred for that?
@24 NomadUk
You are not of the body. My sweetie-wife is in your camp she considers the increase in resolution not that important, I however have a different opinion. Watching a film on DVD si sort of likely looking at a xerox of a painting. Yeah you can see it, but not the details that were intended by the artist. (Blu-ray is not full film quality, but its the best we have now.)
@26 Torie VHS? How 2-0, what do you do for texts, smoke-signals? ;) Again I understand my sweetie-wife was happy watching her copies of Blake’s 7 on VHS under her player broke down and I replaced it with a region free DVD player and no we have the UK DVDs.
bobsandiego@27: I don’t argue that the resolution on BlueRay is superior; I simply say that it’s not worth the cost of replacing my existing library with yet another format that will be made obsolete in fairly short order. Spinning plastic discs and motors and lenses? Spare me. It’s all going to be on a chip soon enough, and you’ll just download the thing (assuming we don’t all get conned into leaving all our data up on some stupid ‘cloud’ thing…).
Torie@26: Definite cred. The first VHS tape I ever bought was Dark Star, and it cost me $80. I still have it, and have yet to replace it with a DVD. But it has been about 30 years, and the copy I have isn’t letterboxed, so maybe it’s time….
I don’t argue that the resolution on BlueRay is superior
Clearly, that should be ‘isn’t’, not ‘is’.
@NomadUK #24 —
As soon as the studios get over the quixotic quest to find technical solutions to piracy and the enforced-through-governmental-capture notion that you’re never buying anything, but merely temporarily licensing certain carefully defined rights at the studio’s great sufferance, then we’ll get decent solid-state storage. So, in other words, a couple years after the point where we could’ve just had it all beamed directly into our brains or what-have-you. (Not that the situation with blu-rays is that much better.)
As to spending the money and talent on something worthwhile, hey, I live in New York. Around here all the money and talent go to creating ever-more-elaborate financial frauds, then convincing the government to make the rich people whole again at taxpayer expense. We might be better off if we stuck to messing with the tiny lasers. . .
My, I’m cranky today.
If you’re not cranky, you’re not paying attention.
@28 NomadUK
I doubt it will be ‘fairly short order’ before Blu-ray is superceded simply because the NTSC TV standard (Here in the US and other places) is 1080p for max resolution and there no market for players with resoluiont that excede your monitor. :)
I hear you about the costs. I have about 250 titles currently in my collection, the vast majority are DVDs. But all my new stuff is Blu-ray.
I don’t think non-physcial storage will replace the collectors physcial media. (not without easy backup to a physical medium.) But I do think it will repleace the rental market.
Torie@26: I sympathise with the queue size. I have 470 in mine. Since I usually get to one a week, it’ll be 8 years before I finish just the ones that are there now, and I have a feeling the list isn’t going to stop growing anytime soon.
Torie @26
Maybe I missed something but I got the feeling that Gideon was not all that hot on joining the Federation. They were taking advantage of an opportunity unknowingly offered with the Federation advances. This is just guessing on my part but maybe the Federation’s courting of Gideon was another move in their cold-war game with the Klingons – or maybe with the Romulins. This idea fits in with the Federation’s involvement in local affairs in Elaan of Troyius. Courting a society in order to gain access to either strategic resources or a location for a spying outpost, or, maybe doing it just to confound the Klingon’s apparent plans. And this in the sort of thing that the US and the USSR had been doing throughout the cold war so it’s not like this would have been just a crazy new idea from the writers.
Also. When checking out Soylent Green and Make Room, Make Room, you might also want to look for Arthur C. Clarke’s 1961 short story The Food of the Gods. I can’t help wondering if this short story held some inspiration for those later two works.
Yeah, this is an odd episode. It’s classic TOS anvil-dropping, but it’s not so clear, in hindsight, that the anvil needed to be dropped.
I would agree that it’s at heart a humanist take on population solutions, in that Kirk provides the ‘obvious’ answer, but it’s rejected for cultural/mystical reasons.
A lot of the rest requires some serious suspension of disbelief, but that’s pretty much Trek for you. Especially TOS.
I had to really think about it, but I’ll give it a Warp 2.
Next week will be… interesting.
@ 26 bobsandiego
The jump from standard to HD is a huge one, I agree. And forget smoke signals–I used to do 35mm and 16mm projection, so “HD” is a joke in comparison! I might get a blu-ray at some point, but I don’t own many videos anyway. You should see my bookshelves, though…
@ 28 & 33 NomadUK
That’s the most user-friendly option and the one I prefer, but unless they can wrap their Lovecraftian tentacles around the data with soul-destroying DRM, we’ll never get standalone data. In any case, I like the ability to lend out things. That’s the whole point of a library!
I used to watch 5-6 movies a week, but now I’m lucky if I fit in one. I find that most of the movies in my queue are in the “I want to have watched it” category, rather than the “I want to actually watch it” category. But sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised.
@ 34 Ludon
I don’t see that. The first thing we hear is Kirk’s log, where he says: “We are orbiting the planet Gideon, which is still not a member of the United Federation of Planets. The treaty negotiations have been difficult because Gideon has consistently refused the presence of a delegation from the Federation on its soil, or any surveillance by the ship’s sensors.”
The reference to treaty negotiations implied to me that after some amount of time they’re “still” not able to gain admittance. What would they be negotiating if it didn’t want to be a member? It’s not like they have resources to trade or anything to share.
@ 35 ChurchHatesTucker
Having seen next week’s, it really doesn’t compare to how pointless and boring this one is. But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. :)
What would they be negotiating if it didn’t want to be a member? It’s not like they have resources to trade or anything to share.
I don’t think that’s a requirement. You just have to sign up with the Fed gameplan, which seems to have been the sticking point (as we see.)
Sorry, just catching up on comments…
@8 Torie
Whenever I look back on my writing, even my good work, I usually think it’s terrible. But that man has been defending his contribution to the series for decades, so what else is he going to say?
@10 Lemnoc
Agreed that the image of the faces looking in was creepy! It reminded me of the end of the Twilight Zone episode, “People Are Alike All Over.”
@13 bobsandiego
The thing is, you’re always going to see something you could have done better when you look back on your work. That’s the danger of entering an endless revision cycle. I think it’s more useful to say, “This is as good as I can make it right now,” and send it out at some point. (Good advice from Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy.) If it comes back with editorial feedback you agree with, by all means, revise. But you shouldn’t send it out when you know it needs a lot more work hoping someone will tell you how to fix it.
@15 Ludon
I’m always surprised (and pleased) when someone other than me or Torie mentions TNG around here :)
@24 NomadUK
Don’t get me started ranting on BluRays. I didn’t adopt laserdiscs until it was already a dying format, and didn’t get DVDs until years after that. BluRay content and quality still doesn’t justify the higher cost, and you can get comparable video quality with an upconverting DVD player. I just have no interest in replacing my media either, though I’m still digitizing some old rare VHS tapes.
@36 Torie
If I could manage it, I would watch one movie a day! But I also manage only one a week, if that, and a scattering of TV shows. At least I have this re-watch to make sure I get to watch my Star Trek DVDs regularly… Speaking of which, anyone want to buy a used copy of Season 3 in a couple of months?
@ 38 Eugene re: 3rd season DVDs, sorry I’ll have to pass as I already own all 3 on Blu-ray. ;)
Thought to make it through the rest fo the season I may have watch two episodes every week, the next re-watch and something good from arlier in the series to cleanse my mind. (Or break down completely and put in a Blake’s 7 DVD.)
The only clever thing in this episode ( and I’m being generous ) is the design of Hodin and his cronies outfits, which I always thought was supposed to look like collections of cells.
@40 Dep1701
The costumes were frequently the better features of the episodes…and sometimes, the worst.
Why dont the stupid people just colonise other planets instead of bobbing about and trying to catck kirk aids?
I like the images of Kirk alone on the apparently deserted ship. That’s about it, really. Nothing else to like. Tolkien once compared stories with “It was all a dream” endings to good paintings set in bad frames. This is the opposite, a cool framing device setting off a broken story.
Eugene’s being way too generous. Even Torie’s Impulse Power rating seems too generous. This is the least believable, worst thought out premise for an episode of the original series. The plot is unintelligent and monotonous. The dialog is often painful. Sharon Acker’s performance is dull.