"This Side of Paradise" Script: D.C. Fontana Story: Nathan Butler (aka Jerry Sohls) and D.C. Fontana Director: Ralph Senensky Producer: Gene L. Coon
By this point in the production of the series, it was clear that Mr. Spock was the breakout character of the series, receiving several times the amount of fan mail. Not only that, but he was disproportionately popular with the show's female audience.
And I think that says the most of the impetus of this show, where Spock gets to fall in love. Leonard Nimoy was understandably worried about the effect that this episode would have on his character, but once he saw D.C. Fontana's script, he knew there was nothing to worry about.
The premise is that the ship has been sent to check up on a Federation agricultural colony that was placed on a world that, unbeknownst at the time, is actually subject to deadly radiation, but when the crew beams down, they find all the colonists alive and happy. In addition to that mystery, other things don't add up - like the total lack of any kind of progress when the colony was meant to be a "breadbasket". Among the colonists is a botanist, Leila Kalomi, who had fallen in love with Spock several years earlier, but whose advances were rebuffed.
The secret turns out to be a species of plantlife that shoots spores into humanoid hosts, granting them emotional peace and perfect health in exchange for basically existing solely to ensure the plant's survival and transmission to other hosts. When Spock is exposed, the emotional peace also gives him the ability to feel happiness and love, and express that love to Leila.
Eventually these leads to more Enterprise crew being exposed until they all mass mutiny and beam down to take part in the planetwide Eden. All except Kirk of course, whose sudden devotion to his duty essentially keeps him immune. He eventually discovers that strong negative emotions undoes the bond with the spores, and frees Spock by inciting him into a fistfight. When the rest of the planet is freed, the colony realizes they've accomplished nothing in all the time they've been there, and agree to move to another world.
While a big part of the episode's appeal is in seeing Leonard Nimoy get to smile and laugh and make out, and essentially tap into every fangirl's "I can change him!" fantasy, the meat is in the episode's exploration of paradise. Very much in line with the Original Series ethos, Kirk concludes that essentially paradise is bad for you. That human beings aren't meant for idyllic, peaceful edens, but need goals, challenges, and obstacles to overcome.
The episode is as much a showcase for Shatner as it is for Nimoy, giving him the chance to run a gamut from annoyance, defiance, lonliness, anger and triumph. As much as it explores Spock's hidden desires to be happy, and how unhappy his devotion to his Vulcan upbringing makes him, it also explores Kirk's devotion to his ship, his stubborn inability to accept a simple or easy life, his need for the challenge of command -- a character trait that remained embedded in the character ever since.
Also, when McCoy gets affected his Southern accent ramps up to 11 and it is delightful.
"Space Seed" Script: Gene L. Coon and Carey Wilbur Story: Carey Wilbur Director: Marc Daniels Producer: Gene L. Coon
Well, ladies and gentlemen, here he is - Khan Noonien Singh, played by Ricardo Montalban, in his full true glory. In many ways, the character is never better than he is here.
The Enterprise discovers a sleeper ship drifting in space. A relic of Earth's distant past, the occupants were placed in suspended animation due to the extreme duration of space travel before warp drive was invented. The leader, a Sikh Indian, is awakened and brought aboard ship. Marla McGivers, the ship's historian, is assigned to try and figure out who he is and want the purpose of the ship was.
However, McGivers is one of those people who romanticizes figures of the past. She views "modern" men as timid, tame and the "great men" of the past as bolder, more colourful. She wants a man who takes what he wants. Unfortunately for her, Khan is just such a man. The episode is really quite explicit in depicting the way that Khan emotionally and physically manipulates and abuses McGivers into coming over to his side and assisting him in his ultimate goal: the awakening of his fellow sleepers and the takeover of the Enterprise. It is mostly Spock who pieces together Khan's true identity -- the product of a genetic engineering program to create better human beings, which led to the "superior" humans seizing power in many nations, as Spock notes superior ability breeds superior ambition. Khan controlled most of the Middle East, until the tyrants were overthrown in a conflict called the Eugenics Wars. Khan and his followers then stole their spacecraft and launched themselves into exile, hoping to find a new world to win and conquer.
The majority of the episode, effectively, is a battle of wits. Many dialogue scenes pit Kirk against Khan, and the air is electric in their encounters as they trade verbal barbs. Khan's superior intellect learns the Enterprise's systems quickly, and once his intentions are out in the open, he quickly takes over the ship using its own intruder control systems. It's only through McGivers that he's defeated -- she can't bear to see her shipmates killed and releases Kirk, who manages just barely to defeat Khan in a melee battle in Engineering.
The ending of the episode provides the title, and is also probably top on Kirk's List of Retrospectively Bad Decisions. Kirk decides to drop Khan and his followers on an untamed, uninhabited planet, daring them to tame a world. McGivers is given the choice of exile or court-martial, and chooses to go along with Khan.
If you've only ever seen Khan in The Wrath of Khan, Montalban's rendition here is a revelation. It's the same guy, but the feature film version has been twisted by fifteen years of bitterness and blinded by revenge. This initial Khan on the other hand is perhaps an even greater threat: ambitious, intelligent, driven, confident, powerful. He's definitely the most challenging enemy faced on the series by this point.
If you've only ever seen Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, jeez, I'm real sorry for you. Please do yourself a favour and check out this episode and wipe that sad sad excuse for a performance from your mind.
"A Taste of Armageddon" Script: Robert Hamner and Gene L. Coon Story: Robert Hamner Director: Joseph Pevney Producer: Gene L. Coon
This is one of my all time favourite Trek episodes, especially in this final stretch of season one, which is really one home run after another.
Kirk's been put on a mission to ferry a Federation ambassador to Eminiar VII, to open diplomatic relations. This is a reprise of the same character type from "The Galileo Seven", a pushy bureaucrat with authority to impose his will on Kirk and seemingly no care or understanding of situations outside his precise mission parameters. But I'd say it works better in this installment because when the time comes, Ambassador Robert Fox does eventually see the light, as it were.
Eminiar VII warns the Enterprise to stay away, but Fox insists on a party beaming down. Kirk insists on going first (with Spock, some redshirts, and a yeoman of course) because he needs to ensure the Ambassador's safety. The party is promptly put into custody, and the entire starship Enterprise is declared a war casualty in Eminiar's incredible war with neighbouring planet Vendikar.
It turns out that 500 years ago, the planets signed a treaty whereby their long war would no longer be fought with destructive weapons that devastate the planet but instead by computer simulation. Computers calculate the attacks, their effectiveness, and the casualties, and as per the treaty the calculated casualties then report to disintegration chambers to be killed. The people die, but the world, civilization, and culture live on. Kirk is aghast immediately at this, he can't believe a population would be so cavalier as to report to "suicide boxes" voluntarily. But no one on Eminiar sees it that way. This is the way their society works. They're not happy about dying, but no one is looking to change things.
Meanwhile, the chief councilman on Eminiar, Anan 7, is trying every trick in the book to convince the crew to beam down so they can be forced to their deaths -- as a failure of the crew to report would indicate a breaking of the treaty, leading to Vendikar retaliating with real weapons. A stand out moment of the hour is when Ambassador Fox orders Scotty, left in command, to lower the ship's shields so he can beam down, and Scotty outright refuses until he learns what happened to the Captain. Scotty emerges as a real badass in this episode.
Eventually, Kirk maneuvers everyone exactly where he wants them. As we learned from "The Corbomite Maneuver", you don't dare play poker with Kirk because he'll outbluff you every time. Kirk plays to win, ordering Scotty to fire on the planet and burn it to the ground unless the hostages are released. The shiteating grin on Kirk's face when Anan, aghast at the Captain's barbarism, is priceless.
Kirk and Spock blow up Eminiar's war computers, thus forcing a real war between the two worlds. It's either war with the Federation or war with Vendikar, and Anan can't understand Kirk. So he explains it to him. In a triumphant speech Kirk explains that war is meant to be messy, it's meant to be devastating, that's what makes it a thing to be avoided. Eminiar has made war clean and tidy, and that's why they've had it for 500 years. Now they can face obiliteration... or make peace. And for the first time in centuries, peace talks begin. Ambassador Fox offers his services.
It's a brilliant episode, a great showcase for James Doohan as Scotty, but the hour belongs to Shatner, who shows us so many facets of Kirk, a man who will do anything to win. And the sci-fi premise is brilliant, speaking to Gene Coon's vision of Star Trek where man is imperfect, a barbarian with murderous instincts, but all it takes to change and be better is to say you're not going to kill... today. Decide to change and be better than you were yesterday.
Also, bonus points for the fact that Eminiar is one of the few worlds that the Enterprise goes to that's actually futuristic and doesn't have some bullshit reason to be a world of cheap backlot sets and old costumes.
"The Return of the Archons" Script: Boris Sobelman Story: Gene Roddenberry Director: Joseph Pevney Producer: Gene L. Coon
This is one of those Trek episodes that almost has too much going on for its own good. The Enterprise is investigating a planet where a ship called the Archon disappeared a century ago (wow, way to look into those missing people promptly Starfleet) and that a) has a culture apparently equivalent to 1880s Earth, allowing for cheap costumes and sets, b) whose population is apparently peaceful and docile to an almost robotic degree except c) once a year on Festival, when the entire planet explodes into uncontrollable violence, and d) have a seemingly religious devotion/fear to a man called Landru, and his force of Lawgivers.
The planet's population is referred to as "The Body", and those who are "not of the Body" are forcibly converted, becoming as docile and placid as everyone else. It turns out they've been under the rule of Landru for centuries, and the planet is utterly without war, violence, theft, assault, etc, except for the night of Festival. So, y'know, it's a Purge Planet.
Beaming down, Kirk and co. become involved with a resistance movement on the planet that opposes Landru in secret. Eventually it's determined that Landru was indeed a man who brought peace to the planet, but then to ensure the continuation of his message, programmed a computer with his personality and knowledge and set it in charge of the world, bringing technology and culture back to an earlier "simpler" time and leaving all advanced technology in the hands of the Lawgivers. The computer runs the whole planet, appearing as Landru in the form of holograms.
Kirk decides to take Landru down, at which point Spock brings up Starfleet's Prime Directive of "non-interference", the first mention of this concept on the show. So of course the first time the Prime Directive is mentioned, Kirk shoots it down, and proceeds to violate it under the argument that as the planet is a computer controlled culture that hasn't changed in centuries, it's development is arrested and the culture is stagnant and thus the Prime Directive doesn't apply as it refers to living, growing cultures. See kids, the trick to rules isn't breaking them, it's knowing where the loopholes lie.
That brings us to this episode's next major contribution to Trek lore and tropes, as Kirk decides the best way to defeat Landru is to argue it into self-destruction. By reasoning that the computer's role is to do what's best for the people, and that hindering the culture's development and taking the "soul" away from civilization, it itself has been harming the people, Kirk convinces Landru to destroy itself for the good of the planet. It's the first of many instances of Kirk "arguing a computer to death" and while I've always thought it a much more satisfying way to defeat an enemy than simple violence, this also isn't the best example of the trope.
In the end "Return of the Archons" has a lot of sci-fi ideas, but perhaps suffers for having too many of them. A stagnated culture stuck in the past rather than moving forward is interesting. A Purge Planet, where there's no violence except one day a year, is interesting. A world controlled by a computer that has elminated freedom in service to safety is interesting. A world where a starship disappeared and was never heard from again, is interesting (and despite being the source of the title, is also the least explored idea in the show). All of these together and it leaves the episode rich in ideas, but perhaps spread too thin.
"Tomorrow is Yesterday" Writer: D.C. Fontana Director: Michael O'Herlihy Producer: Gene L. Coon This episode brings several new tropes to the Star Trek table. The most significant of which is that this is the series' first major foray into time travel. Time travel had served as a deus ex machina in "The Naked Time", and mentioned alongside various other pointless sci-fi buzz terms in "The Alternative Factor", but this is the first episode to be based solely on the premise. And, establishing a Trek trope, when the crew travels back in time, it's to Earth and fairly near the time period the show is being made in. Other Trek stories that employ this cost-saving method of travelling to an production contemporary period include "Assignment: Earth", Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, "Future's End", and "Carpenter Street". Initially, the time travel at the conclusion of "The Naked Time" was meant to be a cliffhanger leading into this episode, but for various reasons this idea was dropped, leaving the end of that installment somewhat of a non sequitur, and the Enterprise falling backwards in time due to the gravitational whiplash of a "black star" -- referencing the at the time theoretical concept we now call a "black hole", a term which had yet to be popularly coined.
They end up back in the 20th century, and a news broadcast picked up states that the first manned moon launch is scheduled for "next Wednesday". Amazingly enough, the Apollo 11 mission was launched on a Wednesday two years after this episode aired, thus placing the episode's timeframe in 1969! The plot of the adventure concerns the fact that the ship is spotted by the USAF and an Air Force pilot accidentally taken aboard. Thus the Enterprise crew must infiltrate an Air Force base, eliminate all evidence they were ever there, return the pilot to his proper place (his yet to be born son will lead a manned mission to Saturn), and then figure out a way to get back... to the future!
It all adds up to really fun hour of television, with some neat sci-fi time travel paradox ideas thrown in for good measure, but not nearly as complicated or overbearing as some Trek time travel plots will become. I question the idea that if the Enterprise beams someone back to the same momentin time that they left, they loose all their memories of being on the ship, but other than that it's a fun little basic time travel story, and very much I think the model for The Voyage Home, one of the franchise's most popular cinematic outings.
