STAR TREK: "THE CORBOMITE MANEUVER" (1966)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In later years Gene Roddenberry was pleased to claim that he never meant STAR TREK to be any sort of military drama; that he only did so reluctantly due to network demands, and really wanted to have the Enterprise be a vessel devoted primarily to exploration,

THE CORBOMITE MANEUVER, the first regular episode to be filmed following the show's two pilots, would seem to put the lie to that assertion. CORBOMITE is a military drama in every way, though it still keeps the Federation's sociopolitical realities obscure. True, the apparent dilemma of the story is solved with guile rather than with force. Yet the importance of soldierly discipline aboard the Enterprise goes beyond the level of simple survival, as exemplified by THE NAKED TIME.  Discipline is the manifestation of reason, represented as the hallmark of what intelligent species aspire to, as Kirk states to his crewmen:

Those of you who have served for long on this vessel have encountered alien life-forms. You know the greatest danger facing us is... ourselves, and irrational fear of the unknown. There's no such thing as 'the unknown,' only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.

Kirk does not quite advocate the level of emotional suppression favored by his Vulcan science officer, but pure emotion-- represented in the episode by newly assigned navigator Lt. Bailey-- doesn't come off too well here. Doctor McCoy remonstrates with Kirk for having placed such a green officer on bridge duty, and accuses the captain of doing so because he Kirk sees something of himself in the raw young man. Kirk does not deny it, and in effect, Bailey becomes Kirk's negative alter ego, hesitating when the ship is threatened by an alien artifact, or becoming distraught under threat of death from the artifact's owner, the alien ship-commander Balok.  Bailey's dismissal from the bridge for breaking military discipline is much more the core of the drama than Kirk's attempts to out-maneuver Balok. And when Kirk is proven correct-- that "the unknown" is actually knowable-- the script neatly dovetails the plot of Bailey's validation and that of Balok's desire to suss out the representatives of the Federation.

CORBOMITE is also the obverse of the first Shatner pilot, since WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE suggests that there may indeed be some unfathomable mysteries in the universe; mysteries that mirror those of the ambivalent human heart. CORBOMITE asserts a much simpler "can-do" philosophy, but arguably one of the strengths of STAR TREK was its ability to alternate between diametrically opposed philosophies, rather than falling into any single dogmatic stance.

There are some decent dramatic exchanges: McCoy quarreling with Kirk, and Spock dryly commenting upon Bailey's emotionality, but nothing goes too much beyond the routine. Spock is also given a peculiar "what-were-they-thinking" line: at a point when the alien Balok is threatening the entire ship with destruction, Spock remarks that Balok reminds him of his father, apparently for no reason but so Scott can shoot back: "Then may Heaven have helped your mother!" Even taking into account the likelihood that in these early days Roddenberry probably had no firm take on Spock's parents, the line proves jarring, as if it exists as no more than a se-up for a lame joke.

STAR TREK: "MIRI" "DAGGER OF THE MIND" (1966)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, psychological*


The objective significance of "Miri" as a script is that it's the first time the show dipped its toe into science fiction's "if this goes on" trope: that is, extrapolating some current trend into some exaggerated form. But, speaking purely from a subjective viewpoint, I find it to be the first falling-off from the high level of the first seven episodes.

In some ways the title of the previous episode would have suited this one better. for "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" is not really about the nature of the feminine. "Miri," however, inverts PETER PAN, J.M. Barrie's story of eternal, blissful boyhood, in order to relate the story of a science-fictional Wendy Darling-- one whose womanhood is awakened not by a boy but by the forbidden fruit of a mature male.

When the Enterprise answers an automated distress call, they find themselves examining an uncharted planet that seems to be morphologically identical to the culture of the United States circa 1960. Rather chauvnistically, Kirk and his landing party (including regulars Spock, McCoy, and Rand) speak of the city they encounter as being characteristic of "Earth of the 20th century." The city, though once a major metropolis, seems to be an uninhabited shambles, destroyed by some great conflict. The crewmen meets a savage, deformed looking man. He assaults them because they've been examining an old tricycle, which he considers his property, but before they can question the man, he dies of a seizure. It's soon revealed that the entire city suffers from a virus; the legacy of the almost vanished civilization-- but the disease only kills the humans living there when they advance to a mature age. This disease becomes the episode's "ticking clock," for the crew of the Enterprise must figure out some way to cure the malady before it kills them.

The only other humans are all teenagers who have supposedly not yet undergone puberty, though many of the actors are a good deal older than the typical "Lost Boys" of Barrie. (For instance, Kim Darby, playing Miri, was about seventeen, while Michael J. Pollard, the leader of the juvenile "onlies," was in his twenties.) In order to stave off the effects of the prevalent disease, the "onlies" have mutated so that their bodies only age one month every hundred years, and they nurture a long-standing grudge against the "grups" (grownups) who caused the devastation. Unike the Lost Boys, though, the onlies can't stave off aging forever; eventually they do age enough to contract the virus and to perish. Yet everything in the onlies' game-oriented culture rejects the adults modes of duty and responsibility. Only Miri, like Wendy Darling, is fully aware that they all will have to grow up someday. Yeoman Rand puts her finger on the cause of her maturation, saying that "[Miri's] becoming a woman" because she's taken with Captain Kirk.

Kirk, naturally, doesn't do anything untoward with the blossoming adolescent: he's just naturally charming to the female gender. Because there's no real romantic arc here, the conflict centers instead upon the doctor's efforts to combat the disease, while the captain struggles to educate the kids in the necessities of adulthood. The episode also features another scene teasing the audience with a Kirk-Rand vibe, and one of the earliest developments of the affectionate quarreling of Spock and McCoy.

"Dagger of the Mind," despite its Shakespearean reference, is a pretty simple thrill-ride, without much room for philosophical reflection. Kirk and his crew come to the planet Tantalus-5, renowned for its humane treatment of the mentally ill. Naturally, though Kirk initially believes that it's a haven for the unfortunate, the planet's mythological name-- derived from that of the arch-sinner Tantalus, who suffered torments in the Greek underworld-- tells the true tale.

A prisoner named Van Gelder manages to sneak aboard the Enterprise. Since Van Gelder was once a psychologist who worked along Adams, the director of the Tantalus facility, Kirk chooses to investigate how the institution's being run. Against his will the captain's obliged to take with him a certified Starfleet psychologist, Helen Noel.

During the course of the episode the nature of the relationship between Kirk and Helen is murky at best. Helen states that during a Christmas party the two of them danced and Kirk "talked about the stars," but nothing more seems to have happened between them. Yet Helen initially shows signs of wanting some validation from Kirk, and in the episode's most memorable scene, she indulges in some mind-games while testing a supposedly "safe" brain-treatment device on the captain. The episode's greatest weakness, though, is that Adams really has no well defined reason for playing fast and loose with the mental health of his patients. He's little more than a standard mad scientist, while his flunkies seem to have no solid reason for joining him in his criminal endeavors.

On a minor note, this was the first episode in which Spock performed his mind-meld technique.

STAR TREK: "WHAT ARE LITTLE GIRLS MADE OF?" (1966)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, psychological*

"Little Girls" was both produced and broadcast after "The Naked Time," the first episode in which Christine Chapel showed up, but "Little Girls" seems much more like an introduction of the character in comparison to her arbitrary appearance in the earlier episode. Wikipedia asserts that Chapel's character was simply inserted into the original script for "Time" to give his girlfriend Majel Barrett a recurring role, which would explain why Chapel's infatuation with Spock proves seems poorly foregrounded.

There's no trace of Chapel's passion for Spock in "Little Girls," and it would be tempting to suppose that "Time" transpires after this episode, as it would be easier to explain Chapel's love for the Vulcan as a rebound affair. The backstory for Chapel isn't much better in this episode than in the last: we're simply told that she's (1) engaged to a famous exobiologist, Roger Korby, who's been incommunicado on the planet Exo III for five years, and that she (2) could have had a distinguished career in exobiology, but gave it up to join Starfleet. It's been suggested that she hoped that someday the Enterprise would happen to get the assignment to investigate Korby's mission-- that of unearthing the remnants of a long-extinct civilization. It's just as well that this rationale wasn't put into words, since the Federation had a lot of starships that might've received the same assignment, and the idea that Chapel's ship would just happen to be chosen would have seemed an insane exaggeration of coincidence.

When the ship approaches Exo III, it initially appears that the assignment will be an anti-climactic one, for Korby speaks to the ship by radio and enthusiastically invites Chapel to descend-- though he wants only Kirk to come with her. Kirk is given a strong respect for Korby's scientific contributions so as to justify the captain complying with this request. Kirk's decision to indulge the doctor costs him two of the crewmen he beams down with him, as well as almost spreading a plague of androids to all parts of the Federation.

Chapel and Kirk encounter Korby's assistant Brown, who strangely doesn't remember Christine. And when it turns out that Korby has also acquired a very slinky assistant named Andrea, there's not much doubt that Korby has met the fate of many a scientist: let them get away from society for too long and they go mad for one reason or another. It does make one wonder why Chapel, if she was engaged to Korby five years ago, didn't choose to go with him on his expedition, but her career-choices are not investigated in depth.

The spectre of danger looms when Kirk and Chapel also meet Ruk. a towering android left over from the days of Exo III's now-extinct inhabitants-- following by the discovery that both Andrea and Brown are androids, created by the leftover alien technology. Korby has brought Kirk down alone so that he can try to persuade the captain to use his ship to disperse the scientist's androids throughout the Federation-- and if Kirk won't cooperate, Korby can just make himself a new Kirk, one that will do what he wants.

This is a decent "thrill-ride" episode, but the Robert Bloch script, undoubtedly rewritten by Roddenberry, is pretty shallow on the characterization horizon. Because the story puts so much emphasis on the unsurprising Big Reveal-- that Korby is himself an android, having transferred his mind into such a body when his original form was crippled-- there's no time to reflect on his missionary zeal to take over the Federation and, essentially, remake it to be more in his image. Kirk and Korby go back and forth a little on the necessity to protect humankind from its own evils, and Korby's indefensible position might've assumed a tragic air had it jibed with his experiences as a medical researcher. The thing that most hurts the episode, though, is that Christine Chapel is a dull, vacillating character. At one point, she tells the captain (actually the Kirk-android) that she couldn't possibly betray her fiancee, despite the fact that she knows he's planning to take over the Enterprise, to which service she's also sworn fealty. Given my viewpoint that Majel Barrett wasn't much better an actress than Chapel was a character, it seems feasible to me that Roddenberry didn't want to strain her talents by forcing her to, you know, do the right thing in this situation.

On the plus side, Kirk gets to express some mild racial baiting against Spock, albeit in a good cause, as if to make up for Spock's statements in "Naked Time."

STAR TREK: "MUDD'S WOMEN" (1966)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, psychological, cosmological*


Though "Charlie X" and "Enemy Within" had focused on particular examples of sexual obsession, "Mudd's Women" is the first broadcast episode to deal with the way sexual attraction works in the world of the Federation. Given that Roddenberry sold the series as a "space western," it's not surprising that the first thing we see of male-female relationships in this futuristic culture derives from the model of the historical western. To some degree there were already implications that "the final frontier" was primarily won by men, just like the western frontier, and that women followed in the wake of those men. The script of "Mudd's Women" is credited to Stephen Kandel, but the basic idea has been attributed to Roddenberry, who evidently based his science-fiction scenario on the American custom of "mail order brides."

Though Roddenberry was a progressive thinker, he clearly enjoyed putting beautiful women on display, if only in keeping with the familiar Hollywood mantra that "sex sells." Still, there's more going on in the script than either pure pandering or even the intellectual critique of pandering.

The story opens with what amounts to the first portrayal of the Enterprise crew as "space cops." The starship comes across an unlisted freighter-craft and calls upon the ship to identify itself. Instead the ship flees, overloading its engines. In one of the series' least impressive "ticking-clock" perils, the Enterprise is only able to save the four occupants of the freighter by over-extending its own engines, resulting in the loss of all but one of the lithium (later dilithium) crystals powering the ship.

The ship's pilot is a flamboyant rogue, soon revealed to be a slick operator named Harry Mudd, guilty of assorted infractions against Federation law. His three passengers-- or "cargo," as he calls them-- are three voluptuous women: Ruth, Magda, and the mythically-named Eve. All three hail from poor planets lacking in male populations, and all have agreed to let Mudd convey them to frontier-planets with more testosterone.

The women provide the second assault on the Enterprise's integrity, for all of the males, except for Spock, are beguiled and somewhat stupefied by all the feminine glamour, (The episode doesn't show any of the crew's women reacting in any way to this hyper-feminine invasion: Yeoman Rand does not appear and Uhura has only a few lines.) Later it will be revealed that this glamour stems from an illegal "Venus drug" administered by Mudd; a drug that enhances the masculine or feminine qualities of those who take it-- sort of a "gender essentialist" version of a steroid. Without the drug, the three girls begin to look haggard and less than comely-- all of which means that Mudd isn't just a transporter of women: he's a pimp, and one selling "sizzle" in place of "steak." However, the men don't see this. Kirk in particular is mesmerized by Eve, and she, unlike the other two "traveling brides," reciprocates somewhat (making her the captain's first romantic conquest in the series, not counting Yeoman Rand).

Mudd is given a rather one-sided trial (no lawyers for civilians, Starfleet?) However, because the arch-swindler knows that the ship needs new lithium supplies, Mudd makes arrangements to use his "cargo" as bargaining chips with the lonely men of the nearest lithium-mining planet. Mudd is so wily and Kirk so duty-bound that it's something of a pleasure to see the series' hero forced to deal with the miners to get the ship's fuel, as well as having to dismiss charges against Mudd.

The nub of the intellectual argument comes late in the story. The miners-- conveniently three in number-- hold a party with the three prospective brides. Ruth and Magda are entirely good-time girls, but Eve displays discontent with being sold as a sex-object. She runs off into a storm, while head miner Childress and the Enterprise crewmen try to find her. Childress overtakes Eve and takes her to his personal quarters nearby. At this point Roddenberry upends his own idolization of feminine pulchritude, for without the drug Eve begins to look ordinary. At the same time, without the haze of sexual stimulation in the way, Childress is able to relate to Eve as a person rather than an object.

The final scene reverses this conclusion a bit, as Roddenberry allows Childress, the far-future descendant of Western miners, to have his cake and eat it too. Kirk, with Mudd in tow, arrives on the scene and exposes the secret of the Venus drug. For no clear reason-- except to throw some light on the magical capacities of changeable women-- Kirk brings along a fake version of the Venus drug, and when Eve takes it, she spontaneously asserts her own feminine glamour, without any steroidal assistance. Kirk gets the fuel he needs for his ship, and though he has presumably kept his bargain to dismiss Mudd's earlier charges, is now able to toss Mudd in the brig for the use of an illegal drug. Interestingly, as Eve plights her troth to Childress, she alludes to her almost-romance with Kirk by implying that he's married to the Enterprise. "Mudd's Women" was third in production but sixth in release, so presumably Eve's line was something Roddenberry decided to develop further in the sixth-to-be-filmed episode, "The Naked Time."

As all TREK fans presumably know, Mudd made one more appearance in the show's second season, but that narrative didn't involve his role as a galactic pimp.

STAR TREK: "THE ENEMY WITHIN" (1966)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, psychological*

ENEMY WITHIN, the fifth broadcast episode, is less mythic and more intellectually schematic than previous entries. The Richard Matheson script is the first one to posit difficulties arising from the Enterprise's teleportation technology. As in "Naked Time," these denizens of a star-civilization seem remarkably obtuse about taking precautions against contamination. One of the crewmen, part of an expedition to a deserted planet, gets magnetic dirt on him on the planet's surface, but no one suggests that he even take off his contaminated clothes before beaming up. The crewman makes it up to the ship without incident, but the next person to beam up-- the good captain himself-- is split into two duplicates of himself, one a vacillating "Jekyll" and the other a remorseless but passionate "Hyde."
Further, until the transporter's irregularities are fixed, the rest of the expedition on the planet can't beam up-- and the planet's getting freezingly cold as night falls.

It takes Spock and McCoy a little time to figure out that they have one too many Kirks aboard-- particularly the one who accosts Yeoman Rand in her room and tries to rape her. However, "good" Kirk has his own set of problems: without his passionate side, he lacks the ability to make decisions. In the episode's most memorable scene, Spock advances the argument that this may mean that man's "evil side" is most necessary for a commander, while McCoy counter-argues that Good Kirk's intellect provides the greater necessary qualities. The first argument really doesn't sound much like the Vulcan science officer-- after all, isn't he the one who's always advocating the ability of the rational mind to control unruly emotions?  I'd hypothesize that Spock's visually appropriate role of "devil's advocate" came about only because Matheson and Roddenberry couldn't imagine McCoy, that defender of sentiment, assuming such a philosophical posture.

It's a decent episode, though I would conjecture that modern ultraliberals would want to see Rand's almost-rape treated with much more attention to the female character's feelings. I'd admit that even I felt a little leery when Rand tells Good Kirk that she might have concealed the assault because she "didn't want to get him in trouble." At the same time, though, one must keep in mind that Roddenberry was teasing his audience with the possibility of a "love connection" between Kirk and Rand, though it's unlikely that one would have ever come about, even if the Rand character had not been written out of the show later. In any case, while she clearly doesn't want to be raped, the audience is supposed to believe-- no matter how scanty the evidence-- that she does have some erotic feelings for Kirk, just as he does for her. "The Naked Time" episode makes this romantic impasse even more explicit, but though it was broadcast before "Enemy," "Naked Time" was actually filmed somewhat later. Still, Roddenberry certainly had some idea of where Rand's character-arc was headed from the beginnings, and so I find that her romantic leanings do make a difference in her defensiveness of Evil Kirk-- though she still comes across as something of a doormat.

STAR TREK: "THE NAKED TIME" (1966)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, psychological*

The action in “Man Trap” begins because two archaeologists are investigating an alien world; the home to a nearly extinct species. In “Naked Time” the ship seeks out a planet doomed to break apart, in part because a contingent of scientists have set up operations on the planet's surface. The scientists' purpose is to gather data regarding the world’s impending destruction. But to study destruction is to court it as well. An Enterprise landing-party descends to the planet, garbed in protective suits to shield them from the elements, but they find all of the scientists dead, apparently as the result of their having lost their minds. Once again there's a fear that an alien contagion will spread, though this time only the Enterprise and the closed society aboard it will be affected.

Early in the story, the ship’s officers stress their need to be able to clear of the disintegrating planet at a moment’s notice. Engineer Scott is particularly confident that they can escape without a hitch. However, he doesn't know that one man in the landing-party, a fellow named Joe, proves himself to be "the weakest link." Even though everyone in the landing-party wears protective suits, Joe decides to pull off one of his gloves for a moment, with the result that he’s infected by some virus native to the planet. (This would not be the last time when a member of the Enterprise crew performed an action of supreme recklessness, apparently for no good reason but to get the story moving.)

Within less than an hour, the organized military hierarchy of the Enterprise breaks down, as crewpersons begin to act out their fantasies. Interestingly, Joe acts out a fantasy of inadequacy and pessimism that forms a polar opposite to the Federation's  can-do optimism. “We don’t belong here,” Joe complains, at first threatening his colleagues and then knifing himself. However, as McCoy observes, Joe perishes not from his wounds but from having lost the will to live.

In this episode at least, indulging the impulses of the Id has the cumulative effect of giving up on the real world. Some of the responses to the disease—transmitted from one person to another through the medium of sweat—are largely harmless, as when Sulu fantasizes that he’s a Muskeeteer and threatens crewmen with a rapier. Riley, another crewman to have direct contact with Joe, seems to be in a similar mode when he convinces himself that he’s the captain and starts issuing ridiculous commands to his crew. However, in his delirium he shuts down the ship’s engines—the very thing Scott needs to whisk the Enterprise out of the clutches of the doomed planet. Thus, in a very real sense, Riley is every bit as suicidal as Joe, but he wants to take everyone else with him, under the delusion that they’re all going to have more fun under his command.

Almost as damaging as male ego is feminine eros. The only female to become infected is Christine Chapel, introduced to audiences in this episode as a sick-bay nurse who’s desperately in love with the half-human Spock. The disease emboldens her to profess her love to Spock, who feels compassion for her but nothing else. However, because she touches him and transmits the disease, Spock’s logic is rendered inert by an outpouring of uncontrollable emotions. This leads to the highly regarded centerpiece of the narrative.

Kirk, not yet infected, seeks out Spock, hoping to utilize Spock’s scientific acumen to re-start the Enterprise engines and save the ship. In the process of trying to slap some sense into the demented Vulcan, the two men apparently exchange sweat—a scene which must be a great favorite with fans of Kirk-Spock slash-fiction. Spock, initially maudlin over his inability to confess his love for his mother, becomes racially hostile, telling Kirk that he sometimes felt “ashamed” of being friends with a human. He returns Kirk’s blows with one of his own, and almost immediately, the worst effects of the disease pass out of Spock and into Kirk. If anything, Kirk’s confessional is more extraordinary—and less human—than that of the half-human Spock, as the captain reveals that he feels bonded to his ship as if it were the only real love of his life. This psychological issue is never substantively raised again, but it might go a long way to explaining Kirk’s later status as a player who never finds a permanent beloved.

Only at the end does the title take on significance. Up to this point, the “naked” part of the title clearly signified the way all of the crewpersons were revealing their inner selves to their colleagues. But when Kirk and his allies succeed in re-starting the engines, they also accidentally propel themselves backwards in time. When the ship returns to normal time, Spock comments that they now have “three days to live over again.” Kirk wryly comments that he certainly doesn’t want to re-live the same three days. In a symbolic sense, though, the travel in time—from a plot-;perspective, not really necessary so that the ship can escape danger—may also represent a “triumph over time.” Time is the medium through which all mortals gather experience, which in turn leads them to build up fantasies of what-could-have-been or should-have-been. By escaping the orbit of the dying planet, Kirk and his crew have also metaphorically escaped, at least for a little while, the tyrannical  dominion of time over their lives, even if their ultimate goal remains that of service to the “jealous god” of reality.

STAR TREK" "WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE" (1966)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *superior*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

The third broadcast episode of STAR TREK—actually the show’s second pilot, after NBC passed on the first one— stand as one of the best 20^th century treatments of the Greek concept of hubris, of the idea that the gods would punish men whenever they stepped outside the bounds of mortal limitations. Of course Roddenberry, a professed atheist, patently did not believe in gods. However, it’s been said that in wartime there are no atheists in foxholes. Similarly, in the art of writing there are, so to speak, no atheists amid plot-holes. Thus even a writer who doesn’t believe in gods has to create hem, in order to fill the symbolic voids in his narrative.

As the episode begins, the Enterprise is about to cross into unfamiliar terrain: an area “outside the galaxy.” Within a purely materialistic view of the cosmos, there should be no “forbidden worlds” in outer space. Yet Kirk and his crew—which does not yet include either McCoy or Uhura-- encounter evidence that a previous ship, the Valiant, has suffered destruction while attempting the same feat of extra-galactic exploration. According to Spock’s analysis of the data from a recording-unit, the Valiant encountered some sort of “storm” that affected members of the crew adversely. In addition, Spock learns that before the ship’s captain initiated a self-destruct sequence, he was intensely researching information on human ESP potentials. Nothing daunted, Kirk refuses to be cowed by the Valiant’s fate, and orders the Enterprise to cross into the unknown galaxy. The ship encounters a field of force with contradictory tendencies—"deflectors say that something’s there; sensors say there isn’t." The force-cloud causes a massive breakdown of the ship’s power units, and two crewpersons are struck unconscious: helmsman Gary Mitchell—a close friend of Kirk from their days in Starfleet Academy—and psychologist Elizabeth Dehner. Dehner seems to recover without ill effect, but Mitchell’s eyes turn silver. Soon it will emerge that both of them possess high ESP potential, and that the mysterious cloud has boosted that power to godlike levels.

Though Mitchell and Dehner are the antagonists with whom Kirk and his crew will contend, the finished script gives the audience little detail about them. They have just one exchange on the ship’s bridge, suggesting that they know of one another but are not friendly. After Dehner makes a remark about studying new populations, Mitchell puts a sexy spin on her scientific orientation, asking her if she wants to improve the breed. She says that “that’s more in your line—and I do mean ‘line.’” He mutters to a friend that she’s a “walking freezer unit,” thus establishing their personas as “oversexed playboy” and “undersexed female professional.” In addition, when the cloud first starts to affect the ship, Mitchell is seen briefly holding hands with a female crewperson. This suggests that she may be his current conquest, though she has no substantive role in the story.

During Mitchell’s recovery in sick bay, the script expands on his character in conversation with his old friend Kirk. Their badinage reveals that even as a normal human Mitchell possesses a manipulative streak, which will have dire consequences for a man given the power of a deity. As his psychic abilities increase exponentially, it becomes evident to Kirk and Spock that their former colleague has become alienated from humanity. Spock argues that Mitchell’s inhuman power makes him a threat, while Kirk sentimentally wants to find a way to save his old friend. Dehner, for her part, has become infatuated with Mitchell the victim, as she never was with Mitchell the player.

In contrast to many subsequent scripts in which Spock’s remorseless logic proves insufficient to provide solutions—notably “The Galileo Seven”—Spock is proven to be incontrovertibly right. Even Mitchell agrees, darkly predicting a dire fate for his former kindred when he states that “mankind cannot survive contact with a race of true espers.” Up to this point no one has been talking about Mitchell propagating a new and more deadly species, for he seems to be the Adam of a new species, without an Eve in sight. But as Mitchell breaks free of his prison on the Enterprise, Dehner’s own boosted potential comes to the fore.

The Adam-Eve parallels are made explicit when the divine pair descend to a planetoid, one on which Kirk had planned to strand Mitchell. It’s not entirely clear why they don’t use their powers to either seize control of the Enterprise or to destroy it. The closest thing to an explanation occurs when Mitchell states in an earlier scene that he’s not quite sure what to do with his power yet, though he’s clearly already begun to think of himself as a god. With a wave of his hand Mitchell causes the barren earth of the planetoid to turn into a Garden of Eden. The psychic gods even eat from a plant with apple-like fruit, sealing their resemblance to the original couple of the Bible. Kirk, feeling guilty for having failed to obey the logic of command, pursues the divine couple, hoping to slay two gods with no more than determination and a phaser-rifle. Mitchell overcomes Kirk with ease, but Kirk manages to sway Dehner to his side. He dispels her vision of divine ascension with an appeal to Freudian basics: “You know the ugly, savage things we keep buried; that none of us dare expose. But he’ll dare! Who’s to stop him? He doesn’t need to care!”  Dehner, her loyalty to the human race reactivated, uses her powers to drain those of Mitchell. This makes possible a knock-down drag-out battle in which Kirk manages to slay Mitchell, moments before Dehhner perishes from her fight with Mitchell. As in “Man Trap,” the story ends with the heroes briefly mourning the victims of human progress.

The original STAR TREK is replete with many irresponsible gods. Some of them merely abuse their powers out of a sense of caprice, as in “Charlie X” and  “The Squire of Gothos.” Mitchell is a more profound threat. According to Kirk’s rhetoric, human beings keep one another in balance via a social contract: they “need to care” what others think because all humans have roughly the same power to retaliate against one another. Mitchell’s Olympian indifference to human culture is assumed to be the seed of tyranny or even genocide. Indeed, Kirk’s most persuasive argument to Dehner dispels the myth of Adam and Eve, for the captain argues that “there’ll only be one of you in the end—one jealous God!” Kirk successfully convinces “goddess” Dehner that her prospective mate is not Adam but Yahweh, who will have no other gods in his presence, either before or beside him. It’s an interesting turnabout in the script, that while Spock has counseled that Kirk must not forsake his duty out of feeling, the only thing that saves the Enterprise—and implicitly all of humanity—is that Kirk is able to spark empathetic feeling in a would-be goddess. The TREK narrative is full of women whose basic function is be temptresses or vampires, but Dehner provides an interesting contrast: the goddess who sacrifices herself out of her feminine sensitivity.