Story: Laurence N. Wolfe
Script: D.C. Fontana
Director: John Meredyth Lucas
Producer: John Meredyth Lucas
This is absolutely one of my all time favourite episodes of the entire series and I might just descend into gushing about it. The fact remains that it has one of the strongest scripts of all 79 episodes, incredibly good dialogue and character work, a strong central premise, and exciting tension and drama throughout.
At first, the anti-technology stance of the episode seems at odds with the positive futurism of the franchise. The Enterprise has been outfitted with a new supercomputer that renders all but a skeleton crew redundant, and may even put Captain Kirk out of a job. Naturally, Kirk is opposed to it and in the end human decisionmaking abilities are proven superior to the machine when it naturally runs amok.
But the story makes one absolutely brilliant decision -- it brings the computer's designer onboard too, and allows him to speak for it. And for once the justifications aren't straw man arguments or obvious fallacies, they're impassioned, understandable, human reasons. Dr. Richard Daystrom, considered the most brilliant computer mind in the Federation (and a man of color as well), is given more character insight, depth, and development in this one hour than almost any other character on Star Trek aside from Kirk and Spock.
We learn Daystrom's backstory, his passions, his hopes, his motivations for creating this computer, all of it beautifully acted by William Marshall. How his initial computer breakthroughs happened when he was so young, that he's spent his whole life trying to live up to his early successes. How he longs for computerization to take man out of space exploration, so that "Men can live and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take!"
Of course, the computer goes haywire. It starts attacking starships, killing people, etc. But instead of being a triumphant vindication for Kirk, the episode becomes a heartwrenching tragedy for Daystrom, who can't understand what has happened. The secret to how his new system is so much more capable is that he imprinted his own thought patterns onto the computer so it could have the capacity for the invention and imagination of human thought - but in doing so it gave it all his human flaws as well, and like so many of us, he cannot see his own flaws. Ultimately this is what saves the day as well, though, as it is Daystrom's regret over the deaths the computer has caused that lead to it shutting itself down.
"The Ultimate Computer" is superbly written and directed, with multiple wonderful character moments and asides. The characterizations in the "trinity" is excellent, with McCoy serving as an excellent foil to both Kirk and Spock in revealing their reactions. Kirk gets a fantastic speech about the joy and adventure of captaining a ship that strikes to the heart of what Star Trek is all about. And Spock gets the wonderfully terse remark "computers make excellent servants, but I have no wish to serve under them."
But ultimately, what starts as a character study of Kirk becomes a successful episode when it shifts instead to a character study of Daystrom. For an episode about a computer, it is one of the most human installments in the series. I love every minute of it.
Rating: 4 out of 4
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