Writer: John Meredyth Lucas
Director: Vincent McEveety
Producer: John Meredyth Lucas
"Your writers were so preoccupied with whether they could do a Nazi episode, they didn't stop to think if they should do a Nazi episode." - Dr. Ian Malcolm, Noted Trekkie
This is yet another "parallel Earth development/let's used leftover costumes and sets" episode. And I mean if you're going to do a "what if an alien planet, but [Earth culture]?" episode, a Nazi episode is pretty tempting. But is there any reason to do it besides "the costumes will be easy to come by"?
The problem is this episode never gets around to having anything worthwhile to say about Nazism. The premise is that an Earth historian comes to planet divided by anarchy and unites it by using Nazi ideologies, trying to use the efficiency of facism without any of its evils. It of course backfires.
There are a lot of problems with even the central premise. For one thing, while it is true that under the Nazis Germany went from being a bankrupt and defeated nation to one of the superpowers of the world, it had nothing to do with "efficiency", and everything to do with utilizing propaganda to unite the people against a common enemy in a use of racism (not something you can do "benevolently") and then just pure brute force and terror. Forcing things is not efficiency, it is violence. Of course, the scope of Nazi Germany's failures as a an actual state, the complete mess of competing bureaucracies and inadequacies, wasn't really known to the American public in the 1960s. The idea of facism as efficient, if wrong, was a popular one at the time.
But even then, the idea that Nazi imagery would unite an alien culture is nonsense. Nazi imagery worked because it was so solidly based in German and "Aryan" folk cultures. Anyone seeking to be a Nazi on an alien world would have to co-opt that culture's imagery. And if you were trying to create benevolent Nazis, why copy things like the fucking Skulls on the uniforms? But then, the fun of the episode is seeing Kirk and Spock fight Nazis (and also spend a good portion of the episode dressed as Nazis, due to infiltration tactics).
The episode is largely meant as a parable about the importance of the Prime Directive, not interfering with the affairs of others, and the way that history repeats itself if we don't learn from our past mistakes. Of course, this last point, that of forgetting how bad the Nazis are to the point where we start emulating them, wasn't exactly as big a problem in 1968 as it somehow fucking is in this year of our Lord 2017.
Ultimately, the Nazis are defeated when Kirk and Spock manage to reveal that the human historian who kicked everything off is a drugged puppet of his alien second in command, and the people turn against him. It's honestly way too easy and pat of an answer for the problem of "a human turned an entire alien world into Nazis", and the episode ends way too hopefully.
But the fun is supposed to be in seeing our future characters interact with these ideas. So ultimately, my biggest problem with the hour is that it has nothing to say about Nazism or its dangers. Oh sure, it says Nazis are bad, and that efficiency isn't worth brutality and racism, but those aren't exactly biting critiques are they?
Writer/Producer John Meredyth Lucas said he wrote this episode to explore the question of why the ordinary average citizen would accept something as clearly evil as Nazism. That is a useful, important, and again somehow fucking timely problem to explore. Unfortunately, the episode doesn't really address this. It basically seems to say that people accepted Nazism because it led to an efficient, well-ordered society. Which it didn't. Neither did communism under Stalin, or any of the 20th century dictatorships. They were garbage messes as nation-states.
So while I appreciate the "Nazis are bad" and "learn from history or else be doomed to repeat it" messages, I just wish this episode had more to it than the entertainment value of essentially dropping Kirk and Spock into a WWII spy thriller.
Rating: 2 out of 4
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