STAR TREK: "AND THE CHILDREN SHALL LEAD" (1968)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


While some of the plot-points of "And the Children Shall Lead" are rather muddled, this episode is reasonably successful at evoking the "Peter Pan" trope that informed the first-season episode "Miri."

The Enterprise responds to a distress call, sent by the leader of a scientific expedition on the planet Triacus. Once there, Kirk and company find almost all of the adult members of the party dead by apparent self-poisoning. One adult, the leader who sent the message, lives only long enough to utter an ambiguous warning. However, the five youngsters who came with their parents are all alive and seemingly healthy, though they show no reaction to the presence of their progenitors' dead bodies.

The children are taken aboard the Enterprise, but McCoy can find nothing anomalous with them, though he warns that the psychological consequences for such repression of reality may be dire. Once the viewer learns that the kids are being mentally controlled by an alien being, their behavior is somewhat more comprehensible, though one might've thought their controller would've made things a lot easier, had he told the kids to make a show of feigned grief. The only thing close to a rationale is that Kirk plans to drop the kids off at a starbase, and the controller wants his pawns to start a new movement on an inhabited world, full of many potential converts.

The kids, gifted by their benefactor with a variety of mind-altering powers, begin interfering with various crewmen in order to get what they want. One may argue that their course would've been simpler had they managed to mesmerize Kirk, since being able to command him would've paved their way to their desired destination. However, the script makes the point that the children's new powers depend in part on being able to bring out "the Beast" in adults, to make them imagine terrible things that they've repressed via adult reason-- in effect, reducing the adults to the status of nightmare-ridden kids. With the exception of their manipulation of Uhura-- who's made to see herself old and on the brink of death (also a consequence of adulthood)-- most of the nightmares are unimpressive.

The alien apparently can do nothing on his own, but can only work his will through the children by playing on basic resentments of their being subjected to adult control-- though they also use their status as kids to deflect suspicion. In one strong scene, the children frustrate Kirk's inquires but pretending to act like very "busy" bees, possibly parodying the way they felt about their parents' devotion to work over play, However, once Kirk is aware of the nature of the alien's power, he's able to exorcise the creature's control of the children, returning them to the status of normal kids and banishing their "demon."

The alien deserves a little discussion on his own. When the children summon their immaterial ally, they call him "the Angel," which is most probably meant to evoke the idea of Satan, fallen angel and tempter of innocents. In the episode's last segment, Kirk suddenly addresses the alien as "Gorgan," which name was evidently explained in some dropped portion of the script. Since Greek Gorgons were repulsive creatures, presumably this was conceived as a reference to the inner ugliness of Gorgan, revealed once the children turn from him. Spock provides some background, albeit of a legendary status, as to the long dead inhabitants of Triacus. They were, the legend says, a race of ruthless marauders, who oppressed other alien worlds but were almost wiped by those they had pirated. Supposedly only one Triacus native survived, though how anyone could've learned this fact and passed it into legend goes unanswered. Gorgan's influence is first felt (by Kirk) in a dark cave, which location might suggest in this context the status of being buried, both physically and as a repressed aspect of the human psyche. Since TREK's sci-fi universe would not admit of the survival of ghosts, much less actual devils, the basic idea may have been that Gorgan survived his natural death via some super-science method, though the script is silent on this point.