They resurrected Star Trek for this? Original series, Season Three

(Combining a couple of old posts from my own blog)

Back in the early 1970s, SF TV meant syndicated Star Trek reruns and not much else. I watched them a lot. And then rewatched them. Rinse, repeat, then rinse, repeat again.

I have no idea if the episodes were aired in the same order as the original broadcasts. I had no resources for finding out: the first episode guide I read came out in 1977. I knew (I think) that the show had run three seasons but I had no idea which episode went in which season. Being madly devoted to the show, I bristled like hell whenever a book about the show would assert the third season wasn’t very good. Come on, it had to be good — it was Star Trek!

During the pandemic I took advantage of Netflix streaming the show to watch the entire series in order. Except Netflix lost the rights to Paramount + and I had to binge the library’s DVD set for S3. After finishing I have to admit the critics were right: it’s not good.

Flaws began to show in the second season, though from the network’s perspective the biggest flaw was the ratings. Roddenberry saw the writing on the wall and turned the season’s final episode into a contemporary science fiction backdoor pilot, Assignment: Earth. That series didn’t happen but fan support saved Star Trek from cancellation. On the one hand I’m glad because that gives me another season of a show I love; on the other hand, most of the season runs from mediocre to bad, though nothing as bad as S2’s Omega Glory (TYG thinks Spock’s Brain is worse, but she’s wrong).

Part of the problem, as David Gerrold once observed, is sloppiness in characterization. Spock, Kirk and McCoy all have some great scenes this season, but Spock had a huge fan base, particularly women, and that led to him playing way out of character to get some romantic scenes. The Cloud Minders (above). The Enterprise Incident earlier in the season. The next-to-last episode, All Our Yesterdays — though if anyone could shake him out of his logical ways, the incredibly charming Mariette Hartley is the one.

While romance was a part of the show from the beginning, S3’s writers rely on it too much. McCoy falls in love in For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky; Chekhov falls in love in both Way to Eden and Spectre of the Gun. Kirk falls in love in The Paradise Syndrome and Elaan of Troyius. The Lights of Zetar is a dull episode but it’s worse, as Gerrold says, for having Scotty fall in love with a generically pretty woman crew member.

S3 also cuts costs to the bone. Cheap worked in The Empath, in which aliens torture Spock, McCoy and Kirk to see if an empath is willing to give up her life to heal them; the dark underground chambers where everything happens come off like an episode of Outer Limits. Having the crew on a Wild West set for Spectre of the Gun? Not so effective. All Our Yesterdays has no scenes on the ship, no regulars but Spock, McCoy and Kirk (we get Scott’s voice over the communicator) and some time-travel adventures that I suspect let them scavenge the studio’s costume closet.

Still, S3 wasn’t as unwatchable as I’d anticipated. Even some of the poor episodes have some redeeming feature, such as Kathie Browne, who plays Deela in Wink of an Eye. She’s a delight, a fun-loving tragic villain (using the Enterprise as breeding stock to save her dying race) who happily puts moves on Kirk. While the final episode, Turnabout Intruder, is appallingly sexist, William Shatner gives an amazing performance as a Kirk possessed by an unstable woman’s mind.

Plato’s Stepchildren is best known for having the first interracial kiss on TV. The Enterprise arrives on a planet ruled by psionic immortals whose past visits to Earth exposed them to Greek philosophy. They’ve modeled themselves on Plato’s ideal society, except that Parmen (Liam Sullivan), the leader, is a brutal tyrant. He smugly proclaims a society that grants authority based on mind-power is ideal — which has totally nothing to do with his having the strongest mind, no sirree!

At the bottom of the hierarchy is Alexander, a dwarf played by Michael Dunn, the great Dr. Loveless of Wild, Wild West. Alexander has no psi-power and he lacks the physical perfection of the other Platonians; he accepts it as natural they look down on him as an inferior. It’s only when they start torturing Kirk, Spock and McCoy that Alexander realizes it’s not him — they’re bullies who’ll push around anyone they can dominate.

The episode isn’t great. They spend far too much time on the Platonians tormenting the Enterprise crew, using their TK power to manipulate them like puppets (the interracial kiss is one example of that). But Dunn’s performance makes it worth watching and Sullivan does a fine job playing an arrogant, entitled prick.

Then again, Let This Be Your Last Battlefield went down several notches from the cutting-edge episode I remember. This is the one people routinely mention when twits complain Star Trek only recently got into dealing with politics because of SJW or the woke mob or whatever (the name changes, the whining doesn’t). This episode shows the Trek-verse was always political, but that doesn’t make the politics good.

First the crew capture the alien Lokai (Lou Antonio) when he tries to steal a shuttle, then Bele (Frank Gorshin) shows up and demands custody of Lokai. Bele claims Lokai is a revolutionary with the blood of hundreds on his hands. Lokai replies that he’s a political refugee: Bele’s people kept his in slavery and denied them equality even after slavery ended. Bele insists that Lokai’s people would have been granted equality if they deserve it.

The twist: to Kirk and Spock, the racial marker — Lokai’s black and white halves are the opposite of Bele’s — is trivial but to the two aliens it’s everything. When they return to their homeworld and find race wars have wiped both sides out, they can’t give up their hatred: Lokai keeps running and Bele keeps pursuing.

Coming in the late 1960s, after increasing racial conflicts, protests and riots (the Watts riots of 1965 were still a vivid memory), the message is clear: two races warring against each other can only bring death and destruction. We have to get past black and white to colorblindness or we’ll ravage our world like the aliens did. And besides, is there really that much difference between us?

As presented here, it’s a bad message. It reminds me of Bishop Desmond Tutu’s quote that if the elephant has its foot on the mouse’s tail, neutrality only benefits the elephant. Bele’s people kept Lokai’s as slaves, then penned them up ghettos; Lokai’s people fought back. One of these things is not like the other but the show implies they’re equivalent.

Bele dines with Kirk and Spock; Lokai dines with the crew, and uses the opportunity to deliver rabble-rousing speeches about his people’s suffering. Nothing comes of this but it seems to imply that Lokai’s nothing but a race hustler (though I don’t think that term existed back then). Kirk seems to take that view, pointing out that while Lokai’s followers may have died, Lokai himself survived unharmed. Which proves nothing about the right or wrong of Lokai’s cause; hell, I could make the same observation about the Enterprise’s red shirts.

Rewatching gave me the feeling the script sided with the Americans — there were no shortage of them — who just wanted all that racial conflict to stop! Not by ending racism and protecting equal rights but having those angry black radical stop being so angry. If only they’d stop stirring things up. If only they’d stop resisting oppression. Seriously, white people are angry, black people are angry, can we really say one side is worse than the other?

Well, yes. As one Martin Luther King quote says, asking black America to keep things calm and stop making things tense is like asking Moses to stop making demands of Pharaoh. Egypt wouldn’t be so tense if the Israelites went about quietly making bricks like they’re supposed to.

It’s an episode on the side of the elephant, not the mouse.

#SFWApro.