“The Mark of Gideon”
Written by George F. Slavin and Stanley Adams
Directed by Jud Taylor
Season 3, Episode 17
Production episode 60043-72
Original air date: January 17, 1969
Stardate: 5423.4
Captain’s log. The Enterprise has arrived at Gideon, a planet whose entry into the Federation has been delayed by the natives’ refusal to allow any delegations to the planet, nor any sensor surveys (which makes you wonder why they’re being considered in the first place). They’ve finally agreed to a delegation of one: the captain of the Enterprise, requested specifically.
Spock beams Kirk to coordinates provided by Gideon and relayed to Spock by Uhura. Kirk dematerializes and rematerializes on the transporter platform—but the room is empty. As is the rest of the ship. According to the viewscreen, the ship is still in orbit of Gideon, but the other 400+ people are gone. He also has a bruised arm that he doesn’t know how he got, and based on the Enterprise chronometer, he’s missing nine minutes.
Ambassador Hodin contacts the Enterprise, wondering where Kirk is, as he never materialized in the council chambers. Hodin confirms the coordinates provided, and refuses to allow Spock to beam down to investigate. He promises that they will search for Kirk on the surface while Spock should check the ship for malfunction. Spock grumpily tells Uhura to contact Starfleet while ordering Sulu to search space for Kirk just in case.
Kirk finally finds another person on the Enterprise: a woman named Odona, who doesn’t know how she got there, and assumes Kirk brought her. The last thing she remembers is being in an overcrowded place. She’s thrilled at all the space and freedom of the Enterprise corridor. Odona has never heard of Gideon, and has no idea how she got on board. Kirk takes her to the bridge, only to see they’re no longer in orbit of Gideon, but moving through space.
Hodin contacts Spock and assures him that Kirk is nowhere to be found on Gideon. Spock manages to convince Hodin to let Spock beam down to test the transporter. Hodin first asks that they beam one of his fellow councillors, Kroda, to the ship. Scotty does so—but the coordinates provided have two numbers flipped from what Uhura received earlier.
Even as Uhura attempts to Starfleet Command, who have been slow in responding to their requests for orders on how to more effectively get their captain back, their captain tries to contact Starfleet Command also. But of course he receives no response, though he is able to take the ship out of warp speed.
Odona would love to stay alone on the ship with Kirk forever. She loves the open space, and Kirk playfully assures her that there’s enough power and food to last a lifetime. Odona dreams of being alone, which surprises Kirk. But she sadly proclaims that there is no place where one can be by oneself where she’s from. He comforts her and smooches her—and when he’s busy staring at her, the viewscreen changes to a huge number of people watching.
Kirk takes Odona to sickbay so he can treat the bruise on his arm. But he hears a noise, one the Enterprise doesn’t make—and which seems to be coming from outside the ship. They go to a viewing port, and they see more faces staring at them—but then it reverts to a star pattern. Odona is frightened, and Kirk wonders if the noise was thousands of people pressing against the ship. But if they’re in space, people can’t be out there.
Odona starts to feel faint, and she collapses. Kirk tries to bring her to sickbay, but he is stopped by Hodin and two guards, who take her away. Odona is Hodin’s daughter, and she is ill—but Hodin is grateful for it. He takes Odona away. Hodin explains that they requested Kirk specifically because he once contracted Vegan choriomeningitis. They extracted the virus from his blood and infected Odona.
Admiral Fitzgerald refuses to grant Spock permission to beam down, even though he now knows that Kirk wasn’t beamed to the council chambers. Spock decides to disobey orders and beam down anyhow. He goes to the original coordinates, and also arrives in the transporter room of the faux Enterprise.
Hodin brings Kirk to the council chambers and explains the situation: Gideon’s atmosphere is germ-free, and the people suffer no disease, are able to regenerate, and grow to extreme old age. It has resulted in horrible overpopulation, as they also believe life is sacred—and apparently they’ve never heard of condoms and diaphragms. (More invasive birth control wouldn’t work, thanks to their regenerative capabilities.)
Odona’s fever rises, and she calls for Kirk. Hodin had been hoping Kirk would stay willingly having fallen in love with Odona—apparently the same intelligence about his medical history also mentioned his rather extensive love life—but he refuses to dedicate his life to making them all terminally ill.
Spock takes down the Gideon guards and has Scotty beam himself, Kirk, and Odona to the real Enterprise, to Hodin’s dismay. McCoy cures Odona, and she apologizes for deceiving Kirk. However, now that she has the disease in her blood, she can serve the purpose Kirk was going to: being the carrier of the disease for all who want to volunteer to die to make Gideon livable again. She and Kirk exchange pleasant goodbyes and Odona goes down to the surface.
Fascinating. For someone whose father is a diplomat, Spock sure has a lot of nasty things to say about the profession over the course of this episode.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy offers to beam down with Spock to Gideon, but Spock refuses because he can’t allow someone under his command to disobey Starfleet orders.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu expresses dismay at Starfleet’s rather bland reaction to Kirk going missing.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura shows initiative by going straight to the Bureau of Planetary Treaties, though they insist she go through Starfleet channels.
It’s a Russian invention. Chekov mostly gets to sit around and fret. Oh, and copy down the coordinates that Hodin provides, for whatever reason.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty is outraged at the accusation by Hodin of the transporter malfunctioning. This prompts Hodin to make a delightfully snide comment about Spock’s “excitable repairman.”
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Kirk and Odona flirt pretty impressively, and Kirk remains charming even after he finds out she lied to get infected by him. He respects her sacrifice, even if he doesn’t agree with it, and they part on remarkably mature terms.
Channel open. “We must acknowledge once and for all that the purpose of diplomacy is to prolong a crisis.”
A 100% out-of-character comment for Spock, given (a) who his Dad is and (b) the oft-stated Vulcan preference for talking over violence.
Welcome aboard. Gene Dynarski, last seen as one of the miners in “Mudd’s Women,” plays Krodak; he’ll return on TNG as Quinteros in “11001001.” Richard Derr, last seen as a commodore in “The Alternative Factor,” plays an admiral here. Sharon Acker plays Odona and David Hurst plays Hodin, along with recurring regulars George Takei, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, and Walter Koenig.
Trivial matters: This episode grew out of Stanley Adams’s concerns about overpopulation. He expressed them to Gene Roddenberry when he was on the set playing Cyrano Jones in “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Roddenberry encouraged him to write a story treatment for an episode that addressed the issue, and this was the result. It is one of the few times an actor from the show has received a writing credit in Trek.
Vegan chroriomeningitis will be mentioned again in the novels Invasion!: Time’s Enemy by L.A. Graf and Gateways: Doors Into Chaos by Robert Greenberger and the videogame Voyager: Elite Force. The Federation Bureau of Planetary Treaties will be referenced again on TNG in “The Ensigns of Command.”
There is a scene in James Blish’s adaptation in Star Trek 6 that is not in the episode that may have been in the original script, in which Odona scorches off the tip of one of her fingers and it regenerates. It’s possible that it was not included for budgetary reasons.
To boldly go. “I already have one serious problem to resolve with upper echelons.” Only in the budget-razed third season of Star Trek could you have an episode about the dangers of overpopulation in which the primary visual is a bunch of empty corridors.
Which is one of many ways in which this episode doesn’t make sense. The Enterprise is huge—a thousand feet long—and you expect me to believe that the folks on Gideon just built a perfect replica in the middle of their incredibly overpopulated planet? I’m sorry, but there’s no way it makes sense that a world whose overpopulation is so bad that there are no surfaces left to be alone in that they would then construct an entire flipping starship and leave it empty.
Also, why does the Federation even want these people? It’s not the best idea to let a world into your little club that won’t even let you look at the planet.
While the verbal fencing back on the Enterprise has its moments, it’s all fairly rote, and mostly is there as episode filler. It also makes very little sense that Starfleet Command would be so blasé about Kirk’s disappearance and not view it as a major diplomatic incident. Nothing about Gideon indicates that it’s important enough to cater to them as much as Starfleet does, certainly not enough to justify not investigating a captain’s disappearance. In addition, hearing Spock dismiss the profession of diplomat is just wrong on every level. Plus, the fact that it takes so long for anyone to say anything about the changed coordinates is maddening. Spock or Uhura should have said something the moment Krodak’s coordinates were provided, yet Spock waits until after he hears from Starfleet and even then, he has to explain it to the crew, who all seem surprised. (Weren’t any of them paying attention????)
The one part of the episode that works is the chemistry between Kirk and Odona. Sharon Acker and William Shatner play off each other quite well. In addition, David Hurst does a superb job as the deliberately obfuscatory Hodin, from his oily fake politeness to Spock and the crew to his paternal concern for Odona to his passionate defense of his idiotic actions to Kirk. In fact, it’s a good thing that Acker is so compelling, because she’s the only reason why anyone should even consider the possibility of caring what happens on Gideon. As it is, the people come across as assholes who should be left to stew in their own juices. There are so many better solutions to their problem (Kirk mentions a few, plus some people could, y’know, relocate) than people volunteering to die of an awful disease.
Warp factor rating: 4
Next week: “The Lights of Zetar”
Keith R.A. DeCandido will not go gently into that good night.
The big problem with this episode is overpopulation doesn’t work like this. Of all the resources these people run out of, room is the last one. If we turned the Grand Canyon into apartments, most of us would end up with a significant upgrade in living space. Food, water, air, potassium — those are the things you’d run out of. Not physical space.
“It has resulted in horrible overpopulation, as they also believe life is sacred—and apparently they’ve never heard of condoms and diaphragms. “
Yes, life is so sacred they’ll allow people to contract what is doubtless a horrible disease. I’d leave and let them stew.
People have been pointing out the “how could they build a replica of the whole ship when they have no room?” paradox for 48 years now, but a couple of decades ago, I hit upon the obvious explanation: It’s actually a holosuite!
Although that still leaves many huge conceptual problems. How could the Gideonites have obtained such precise, probably classified information about the layout of a Federation starship, if the Federation knew so little about them in turn? And how come the Enterprise couldn’t see their overcrowded population from orbit? Just use a telescope to image the surface and see the huge crowds? Does the whole population live underground? If so, why don’t they move to the surface? (This is perennially frustrating about a lot of sci-fi — they keep talking about “sensors” but assume that those sensors don’t include simple visual detection, so we constantly hear about “sensor jamming” preventing ships from detecting what any decent telescope could discover.)
The original outline didn’t include the duplicate starship, and had the Gideonites actually board the Enterprise, take the crew hostage, and force McCoy to find a way to give them mortality. It would’ve probably worked better than the episode we got. I surmise they rewrote it for budgetary reasons, to minimize new sets and guest stars by focusing more on Kirk and Odona on an empty ship.
Implausibilities aside, there’s some interesting stuff here. It was really pretty daring for a ’60s TV show to acknowledge the dangers of overpopulation and to even use the word “contraception,” an idea that still draws down the wrath of the religious right to this day. The underlying situation that the Gideonites face is quite chilling and tragic, despite the flaws in the execution. And Sharon Acker is terrific as Odona and has excellent chemistry with fellow Canadian William Shatner. The third season had a lot of impressive female guests, and she’s one of the best. (By the way, she also played Della Street in the ill-fated The New Perry Mason reboot from 1973, with Monte Markham in the title role. And she’s not related to Amy Acker.)
If you took the plot holes in this script, stacked them on top of one another and arranged them side to side, the Gideons would have more than enough space in which to live.
“For someone whose father is a diplomat, Spock sure has a lot of nasty things to say about the profession over the course of this episode.”
Or rather, he says these things because of who his father is. :)
Spock disobeys orders again! Someone should have done a count.
Apart from the problems already mentioned, I find it unlikely that Kirk wouldn’t notice at some point that the ship he’s on is “completely inoperative”. Also that Spock wouldn’t search for Kirk in the vicinity of the beam-down coordinates earlier using the Enterprise’s sensors.
@1/SeanOHara: Yes, that’s another thing – Where do they get their food? And if there’s no spot left on the planet that isn’t full of people, how can Gideon ever become “once more the paradise it was”? Most of their plants and animals are probably extinct by now.
@3/Christopher: The original outline sounds much better.
I like the costumes with the hexagonal ornaments worn by Hodin and his subordinates.
@6/Jana: Hmm. Just occurred to me to wonder if the hexagonal patterns were meant to suggest a beehive-like culture.
As for where they get their food… ever see Soylent Green? ;) Or, no, I guess that couldn’t work, as they’re essentially immortal and revere life. They may be willing to bend that enough to introduce a disease and let nature take its course, but doing it themselves would be too much.
Good thing the virus affects humans the same it way it does Gideonites. For all they knew, their regeneration might overcome the virus, or worse, it might have weird side effects such as making them even harder to kill, or more fertile than they already were.
@8/grenadier: I assume the Gideonites did some research into viruses and picked one that would work. Why else choose such a rare illness? There must have been lots of others available.
Here’s a theory that isn’t true in Roddenberry-verse: Starfleet was in communication with the Gideonites all along, knew exactly what was going on all the time, and deliberately put Kirk into a situation he might not have voluntarily gotten into. He’s got ethics, you know, and this “help us kill a lot of each other so the rest of us can live without using that birth control you are obviously using a lot of” thing might’ve offended his sensibilities.
Was there any explanation why this elaborate scheme to kill some of the population off was used? You can do a suicide much easier?! Or can’t they be killed by hitting them over the head or hanging themselves or something? It’s probably not worse than this rare illness, might be a faster death and less painful in fact. And if they only want to infect people who volunteer, then any suicide method should be just as good?
@11/Joana: As I suggested before, I think it’s because their reverence for life makes them unwilling to inflict open violence on themselves or anyone else, but they can rationalize a disease as nature taking its course, even though they deliberately introduced the disease. It seems arbitrary and irrational, but then, so is being simultaneously opposed to both abortion and contraception, as many American conservatives are, even though contraception is hands down the most surefire way to make abortion unnecessary. So maybe it’s a function of their religious beliefs.
Gideon should talk to Eminiar 7 about buying some used disintegration chambers, which probably aren’t needed there anymore.
Christopher: A holosuite isn’t a bad solution, though it doesn’t fix everything, especially the perfect replica.
SeanOHara: Also true, yes.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I remember being disappointed when this first came on and it didn’t match the TV guide blurb, which implied Kirk was on the real Enterprise but everyone had disappeared from his perspective, and vice versa for the rest of the crew.
So, they join the Federation, start mixing with the greater galactic population, and build up immunity to the new diseases – in a few centuries won’t they have become the majority population everywhere?
My big question hasn’t been addressed yet – why the subterfuge at all? Have Kirk beam down, meet with him, expose plenty of people (who volunteered) to him, then let him beam back, none the wiser.
@5 – Bingo. As a Foreign Service brat myself, I grew up adjacent to the diplomatic sausage-making factory. Guess how I feel about it? And I’ve always gotten along with my father, which is most emphatically not the case with Spock and Sarek.
@16,
Apparently the virus exists in Kirk’s blood, but he is immune, but the virus is also non-transmissible as no one on the Enterprise seems particularly concerned that they might be exposed to a deadly disease. (The writers seem to have confused the idea that a person who is exposed and then cured may carry immunity, but not the actual live infectious agent.) [Although there are so many weird pathogens that I won’t rule it out as a blanket statement.] And it was apparently not enough that Kirk be near the Gideonites or even kiss (them), transmitting the infection required an injection.
In any case, they intended to use Kirk as a living petri dish and virus incubator. They also apparently planned to kidnap Kirk and hold him incommunicado indefinitely, pretending that he had never arrived and blaming the Enterprise faulty equipment. They were apparently prepared to give up Federation membership just to get Kirk (or maybe their membership application was a ruse all along)
Would it have been easier to send Odona to Vega than to build a fake Enterprise?
If it’s a holosuite, why can they see people outside the window?
@18/StrongDreams: I think they never wanted to join the Federation, they merely wanted the virus.
“And it was apparently not enough that Kirk be near the Gideonites or even kiss (them), transmitting the infection required an injection.” When did Odona get an injection? I thought they injured Kirk’s arm so that Odona could get infected by touching it. Maybe that was also why she kissed him – they were not sure how the virus was transmitted and tried several methods.
“They also apparently planned to kidnap Kirk and hold him incommunicado indefinitely […]”. Plus they hoped he would stay voluntarily after falling in love with Odona. Just imagine – he would spend a short time with her, fall in love, see her become fatally ill and die, and that would convince him to spend the rest of his life on their planet infecting others. Most stupid plan ever.
@19/sps49: If it’s rare, it’s rare. Perhaps it has been exterminated in the Vegan system. Or perhaps it’s named after the doctor who first described it.
It just occurred to me that in this episode, near-immortality is portrayed as a bad thing, whereas in The Omega Glory, it’s something to strive for.
I’ve always thought that this is the most forgettable episode of the entire series, though it’s far from the worst, and my opinion did not change when I watched it a few weeks ago. I do like a few of the small moments such as Scotty coming perilously close to insulting the Gideon Council.
@12: As I suggested before, I think it’s because their reverence for life makes them unwilling to inflict open violence on themselves or anyone else, but they can rationalize a disease as nature taking its course, even though they deliberately introduced the disease. It seems arbitrary and irrational, but then, so is being simultaneously opposed to both abortion and contraception, as many American conservatives are, even though contraception is hands down the most surefire way to make abortion unnecessary.
Disregarding the broader political merits, this isn’t really sound logic– many people are opposed to both mass incarceration and the death penalty, even though liberal application of the latter would naturally reduce the former. You could say the same thing about being opposed to both drone assassination and carpet bombing, or being opposed to both payday loans and illegal loan sharking, or really a lot of policy preferences that are observed in fact. Or, hell, being opposed to both abortion and infanticide. It’s not necessarily a contradiction to oppose both A and B, even if supporting A would lead to less of B.
And while we’re left to wonder about their logic, there is some merit to having a disease pick who lives and who dies. If they cull the population selectively, then someone has to decide who lives and who dies, and that process is inevitably going to lead to accusations of favoritism, bias, corruption, etc.– to say nothing of the adverse effect on whoever made the decision. Even a supposedly random protocol wouldn’t be completely above suspicion. But a virus? At least in the context of this story, it’s about as fair and random as you’re going to get. And using the daughter of a presumably important ambassador may also ease whatever class tensions they have. So it requires a bit of imagination, but I think we can explain why they would prefer the virus. The other logical problems, of course, remain.
15: So, they join the Federation, start mixing with the greater galactic population, and build up immunity to the new diseases – in a few centuries won’t they have become the majority population everywhere?
Great question. To the extent the Federation is a democracy, then short-lived races and those who don’t have many children are pretty much automatically going to be marginalized. Perhaps it’s a bit like the US Congress– each “planet” gets two senators, then it’s done elsewhere by population as a compromise. More directly to Starfleet, wildly different lifespans would play hell with the promotion track. They either have to calibrate the promotion track based on alien lifespans (e.g., Vulcans have to spend twice as much time as a human Lieutenant before getting promoted), accept that the highest ranks will be dominated by long-living races (say, a Vulcan who has spent seven decades as an admiral), or institute outright racial quotas so the mayfly races have a shot at power. Star Trek has pretty much always ignored the political problems that would be created by alien biology.
@20/Jana: They could only see the people outside when the starscape projection broke down. We’ve seen episodes where parts of a holodeck projection failed and revealed the walls behind it; this could be the same thing, just with a window built in so people outside could look in and watch.
And the “bruise” to Kirk’s arm was the result of the Gideonites taking a blood sample from him while he was unconscious. Implicitly, they knocked him out when he beamed down, took their blood sample, then revived him and made him think he’d rematerialized directly onto the vacant Enterprise.
No doubt Odona was infected sometime before Kirk first met her. As you acknowledge, they were put together as a psychological tactic, not as a means of infection.
As for this vs. “The Omega Glory,” it wasn’t longevity per se that “Gideon” was protesting, but the failure to balance it out with birth control, and the runaway overpopulation that produced. Even back in the ’60s, it was understood that reducing the birth rate was essential to curbing overpopulation. That may be why they were allowed to get away with mentioning contraception at all — because it was so central to the theme of the episode.
@22/darmok: “Disregarding the broader political merits, this isn’t really sound logic– many people are opposed to both mass incarceration and the death penalty, even though liberal application of the latter would naturally reduce the former.”
That’s not true, because the death penalty does not actually reduce crime rates. Homicide rates are actually higher in states with capital punishment. So the difference is that contraception has been statistically demonstrated to actually work at reducing abortion rates, whereas capital punishment has been statistically demonstrated not to work at reducing crime.
After all, contraception is prevention, so obviously the better analogy here would be things that prevent crime in the first place, like improving education and economic conditions, fighting child abuse, and rehabilitating offenders before they become more hardened.
@23/Christopher: I think darmok just meant that you could reduce prison populations by killing off all the prisoners. :P
@23/Christopher: Good point about the window!
I realise that I’ve always misunderstood the dialogue you quote. I thought it meant “We cut your arm so that Odona could get infected by your blood during your time together.” But then the line about medical practitioners would make no sense, and besides, it wouldn’t take nine minutes.
I don’t know that Spock’s comment on the purpose of diplomacy is 100% out of character. Vulcans are supposed to be honest after all.
As for the comments regarding the “religious right” and contraception, saying that conservatives oppose birth control is both an oversimplification and inaccurate. First, most conservatives AREN”T opposed to contraception per se. There are some Catholics who for religious reasons disagree with the use of birth control, but most mainline and evangelical Protestants don’t have a problem with people using contraceptives. There is, however, a distinction to be made on the different types of contraceptive. The ones that work by preventing an egg from becoming fertilized in the first place (whether it be by physical means such as condoms or diaphragms or by preventing ovulation via hormones) are not themselves controversial. (Conservatives may oppose programs involving them, such as distributing condoms at schools, but the issue is the distribution to children and not the condoms.) Other less common methods which prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus (such as an IUD) and abortifacients that will trigger a spontaneous miscarriage after the embryo has implanted are different. Being opposed to these methods is completely consistent with being opposed to abortion if one believes that life begins at conception, since from that point of view there’s no difference at all. But the majority of contraceptives are just fine in the view of most conservatives these days. No wrath incurred.
@23: The death penalty may not reduce crime, but it does reduce mass incarceration, in that dead people are not incarcerated. Yet many of the same people who oppose the death penalty are also on the front lines fighting mass incarceration. Similarly, there would be no need for drone strikes if it was still considered politically acceptable to carpet bomb the enemy and not worry that much about civilians, yet it’s a hardly a QED against those advocating against drone strikes to point out that they also oppose carpet bombing. “You oppose x, therefore you must support y that would reduce x” is illogical, because y might be odious for other and/or similar reasons.
Spock is probably snarky because he had another argument with his dad since Journey to Babel. It is canon that Spock and Sarek’s relationship is basically a series of bitter passive aggressive arguments, so slipping another one in is no problem. Also prolonging a crisis is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if ending it quickly will result in immediate violence (regarding the crisis over Iraq in 2002-2003 and their compliance with UN sanctions, if we’d let that crisis run a little longer instead of jumping in with both boots on the ground we’d probably all be in a better place) or worse knock on effects. It sucks for those in the crisis situation, which is where Spock is, but it can work to the greater good (the good of the something is greater than needs of the…I forget how that goes) in the end. Spock knows this, just doesn’t like it and is using the opportunity to get rid of that emotional frustration over the situation and over his dad and him having another argument that he says he does not have.
I recall watching this episode when I was younger, and even then I questioned the logic of how the episode depicted the planet’s overpopulation. It’s pretty much impossible to run out of space to the point where you’d feel like you were trapped at a crowded rock concert. It doesn’t work that way. Plus, wouldn’t they start building ships and moving towards populating the ocean?
I’m an optimist and believe in non-violent solutions, but I don’t buy for a minute the idea that these people wouldn’t be capable of killing each other, especially in the wake of potential shortage of natural resources. Still, I have to give them credit for even mentioning the concept of birth control.
Even taking into account the flawed depiction of overpopulation, the episode still falls short thanks to NBC’s decision to slash the show’s budget. Even Voyager’s Twisted is more entertaining than endless scenes of Kirk wandering around empty corridors (at least they employed the whole cast to pad that particular hour). If he didn’t have chemistry with Odona, this would have been even more forgettable, even though it was an intriguing concept.
@3/Christopher: This reminds me of Star Trek: Insurrection, in which the Federation planned on fooling the Ba’ku into believing they were still on their planet by shoving them unawares inside a cloaked holoship, replicating their home. Of course, they only had to dupe 600 people. This still raises questions of how long would they be kept inside, and how long until one of the Ba’ku children bumped into a holodeck wall, therefore figuring out they were being duped. If anything, Admiral Dougherty really didn’t think that plan through. Thankfully, Picard blew the whistle before it could be carried out.
“how long until one of the Ba’ku children bumped into a holodeck wall”
Like in that TNG episode with Worf’s foster brother, you mean?
Opposition to contraception was pretty much a Catholic position at the time this episode aired. For that matter, most Protestants had no objection to abortion at that time, or at least it was nothing like the political issue it has become.
Since then there has been an increasing trend among the Protestant right to misrepresent all or most contraceptives as “abortifacients” even though that is not how they actually operate.
As a kid, I was really creeped out by the scene with the faces staring in the window. I kind of like it for the strangeness of those scenes, and the ones where Kirk wanders an empty Enterprise. But it really makes no sense as a story.
Uncontrolled overpopulation is certainly a viable premise for a good Star Trek episode, but this isn’t a good episode. I can’t suspend my disbelief to accept the premise that a planet where there is no disease and the people are physically invulnerable and virtually immortal would otherwise be pretty much just like Earth. Those are some pretty major biological differences, even a few lines of further explanation could have helped. Did the Gideonites wipe out the diseases, or have there never been diseases on the planet? Is all animal life on the planet physically invulnerable, also? Or did the Gideonites also somehow bestow that on themselves without considering the unintended consequences? It’s an example of an episode with a potentially effective underlying concept that doesn’t pay off (A pretty common problem with third season episodes).
@32/cosmotiger: According to Hodin, “the atmosphere on Gideon has always been germ-free.” So it seems they were just lucky (or unlucky), and the other animals are equally healthy. Perhaps it also means that they don’t have cheese, or alcohol, or gut bacteria.
@26/Nick31: That’s why I said “many American conservatives.” I don’t like blanket generalizations.
“Being opposed to these methods is completely consistent with being opposed to abortion if one believes that life begins at conception, since from that point of view there’s no difference at all.”
In the abstract, maybe, but in practice, passing legislation against contraceptive availability and in favor of “abstinence-only” education has the proven effect of increasing unwanted pregnancies and increasing abortion rates, so it’s counterproductive. The problem with ideologically based legislation is that reality is not reshaped by ideology. If something provably doesn’t help, then the rational option is to find a more pragmatic alternative that does work at saving lives, even if it requires bending one’s ideological purity a little.
@27/Darmok: “The death penalty may not reduce crime, but it does reduce mass incarceration, in that dead people are not incarcerated.”
That is not even close to true, because only a very small percentage of the prison population is on Death Row. The total US prison population is a staggering 2.3 million, while the Death Row population is about 3,100, or about 0.13% of the whole. There are immensely more Americans in prison for drug offenses, property crimes, or nonviolent offenses than there are for capital crimes. So unless you’re proposing a universal death penalty like in TNG: “Justice,” capital punishment has a statistically inconsequential effect on the prison population.
Also, as I showed before, there are more homicides in states that have the death penalty, which probably means there are more violent crimes in general in those states, which probably means their prison populations are higher, canceling out whatever slight reduction in prison population that executions would produce.
@29/Eduardo: Generally, holodecks are supposed to have force-field “treadmill” effects in operation below the users’ feet so that they can’t run into the walls — they just keep moving “forward” as far as they can walk, with the simulated landscape adjusting around them.
@34: Agreed. But would a system be capable of tracking hundreds of people within the same area, especially when they’re moving in completely different directions?
Given how advanced computers are in the 24th century (to the point of creating adaptable sentient holograms like Voyager’s Doctor), I could see it working despite the many variables to be overcome.
@33/ JanaJansen: Thanks for the quote (I haven’t watched the ep recently, to be honest). That seems very improbable to me.
Even accepting as a given that this planet’s biosphere evolved without disease causing germs, I think it would be a very strange place. I would expect something else to come along and counterbalance out-of-control animal populations. Or is their entire ecosystem based on immortal lifeforms that multiply out of control until they cover the whole world, use up all the resources and go extinct due to mass starvation? It all seems to me like sloppy writing, introducing improbable elements and logical problems that didn’t really need to be there in the first place.
@35/Eduardo: I was thinking that those instances where someone did hit a wall could’ve been cases where they got too far from the other people in the holodeck and reached the limits of what it could fake.
@36/cosmotiger: Well, the different animal species could still eat each other.
No cheese? What an awful world.
It seems to me that Kirk should have suspected the fake Enterprise a lot sooner. Even if the Gideonites were somehow able to obtain superficial plans of a Constitution class starship, what about Kirk’s personal effects? At some point he should have gone to his quarters and by chance discovered something missing that should have been there. Or even going through the halls, he should have noticed something wrong, such as crewmembers’ names outside their quarters. For example, in The Enemy Within we saw a sign with Rand’s name outside her quarters. Did the fake Enterprise really have over 400 names right? And, assuming the Gideonites didn’t take Kirk’s communicator and replace it with a fake during the nine minute theft of his blood, the real Enterprise should have been able to call him at any time. (If they didn’t replace it with a fake he’d know that there was something fishy going on as soon as he discovered it missing.)
@@@@@ 38 and 39: I kind of wonder how the natural decay process would work on Gideon, too. Or are the microorganisms that cause decay and fermentation “good,” and therefore not considered germs. Because yeah, being immortal on an overcrowded planet with no beer, wine or cheese would really suck.
@39 “No cheese? What an awful world.”
As compensation, though, the episode itself is quite a big piece of cheese. ;-)
I chalk this planet up to the long and proud star trek tradition of planets that 1) could never possibly exist (there. is. no. way. to. not. have. any. microbes. on. a. planet.) 2) only exist to illustrate a problem and therefore weren’t thought about logically when they were written.
It’s tempting as a modern audience to ignore every part of it except Kirk’s speech on why they should allow birth control, but keep in mind that they may also have been making a point about how terrible leaders who deliberately spread infectious disease to get rid of “surplus” population are. That’s been done historically, and I see no reason to think that the leaders of this planet wouldn’t attempt to make sure that the people they thought weren’t as worthy got in the way of the disease. (Even though the selected carrier is related to one of them.)
On the other hand… it’s otherwise a fairly forgettable episode.
I am, frankly, surprised to find over 40 comments here and absolutely no snark about veganism. Are Trekkies just that more polite, that they don’t squawk about people’s dietary choices? As a vegetarian, I see vegan jokes all the time, I thought for sure someone here would pick up on the Vegan/vegan thing and crack a joke. I’m quite pleased to see that’s not the case.
Although my connection may have been strengthened by the fact that captions are usually displayed in all caps, so I first read it as VEGAN CHORIOMENINGITIS and perhaps that nanosecond of confusion before figuring out Vegan/vegan adds to my perception of it.
Then again, I just looked up choriomeningitis and apparently the chorion is the protective membrane of a fetus, so I’m a bit lost on that whole count anyway.
Meredith: Never even occurred to me, since the disease modifier is pronounced “vay-gun” rather than “vee-gun.” And I wasn’t using captions….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@44 When I read the post, I had completely forgotten that the astronomical Vega had anything to do with this episode (it’s not one I’ve seen recently), and I’ve certainly seen vegan (dietary) used more recently than the other use, so I did have a moment of wondering if the overpopulation had led to some kind of vegan type diet. It wasn’t called that in the episode, but our fearless recapper could, if there’d been some detail in the ep about what they ate. My misreading didn’t last long, but for that little while, I was thinking about how they could possibly be feeding their population with algae/seaweed aquaculture, and that’s how they people could all be bunched together on land, while the sea was all given to farming, etc.
Anyway, it was a little disappointing to realize I had the wrong ‘vegan’ in mind.
@46/Ellisande: That is why I hate it that they even coined that silly term “vegan” for non-dairy vegetarianism. It’s already taken, people! And why the hell is it pronounced “vee-gan”? They don’t eat vee-getables.
Then again, it could’ve been worse. Apparently the other candidates they considered “included allvega, neo-vegetarian, dairyban, vitan, benevore, sanivores and beaumangeur.” (I’m surprised to learn it was coined in 1944. I don’t think I ever heard the term before the ’90s.)
@47/Christopher: When I first heard the term (also in the ’90s), I actually thought those people had named themselves after the star system for some weird reason.
Incidentally, the star is spelled “Wega” in German, which means that both words are spelled differently, but pronounced the same.
@44/Meredith:
Personally, the connection to “veganism” never crossed my mind. It actually took me several long seconds to understand what you’re saying, because the star Vega is a such an integral part of the Star Trek universe.
So I think it’s more a situation of the average Trekkie inner continuity nerd refusing to make the connection, rather than any form of politeness. After all, Trekkies don’t usually make jokes about geology whenever they here the word “Vulcan” either.
(and yes, I know that Vega isn’t anywhere as important as Vulcan in Star Trek. Vega does get bonus noteworthiness points, though, for being such an astronomically absurd site for a colony)
@49/OThDPh: Vega is no more absurd a candidate for habitation than Rigel or Deneb or Omicron Ceti or many of the other inhabited star systems in Trek. That’s the problem with picking familiar star names, which mostly belong to really bright, intense, short-lived stars that are terrible candidates for life.
Also the absurdity in “The Cage” that Vega Colony was the closest place to get medical treatment after a fight in the Rigel system, even though Vega is farther from Rigel than Earth is. And that’s even before later epsiodes established that three or four other planets of Rigel are inhabited and friendly. TOS’s obsession with using the name “Rigel” over and over again was quite bizarre. I tried to make some semblance of sense of the Rigel system in my novel Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel, but I couldn’t make any sense of the Rigel-to-Vega Colony thing and I just avoided it.
@6,8 Oh I get it, with their robust rehabilitative abilities they could basically eat each other for food! So someone cuts off their arm or leg, everyone nearby gets a quick nutritious meal, and the donor instantly grows back the limb to be eaten later! Easy? ( smiles) (vomits) (smiles)
@10 – Kirk has ethics? The same Kirk that told Scotty to kill everyone on Eminiar VII and delberaly broke their agreement with Vendikar? That Kirk? The same guy that ignored warnings and invaded the First Federation, the Eminiar system and Melkot space?
@50 – There’s nothing that says Vega Colony has to be in the Vega system. Trees Nova colony isn’t in the Sol system. Neither is Terra 10. Since it’s a colony and this episode shows that there’s life in the Vega system, there could also be Vegans who colonized a planet near Talos.
However, none of that changes the fact that this is a very silly episode.
@52/kkozoriz: The existence of microbial life in the Vega system doesn’t remotely prove the existence of sentient Vegans. Microbial life existed on Earth for 3.5 billion years before the first multi-celled organisms showed up, another half billion before intelligence came along. For that matter, it could’ve been an Earth microbe that mutated under Vegan conditions.
kkozoriz: Kirk follows orders he is given because he is a captain in a military organization. You can argue the First Federation, but in the cases of Eminiar VII and Melkot, he was specifically following orders given by people of higher rank than him.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Because “I was only following orders” worked so well at Nuremberg. Military officers have to follow lawful orders and are under no compulsion to follow illegal ones. When someone puts up a big “No Trespassing” sign, unless you’re there to save lives that are in imminent danger, you stay out. Eminiar even used a Federation code that Kirk specifically said means under no circumstances.
KIRK: Code seven-ten means under no circumstances are we to approach that planet. No circumstances what so ever.
The Federation was trying to establish a Treaty Port, which is imposed on a weaker power by a stronger one at the barrel of a gun. The Federation has space stations, bases deep in asteroids or planets (Balance of Terror, Devil in the Dark) and various other options. There was no reason for them to establish a port on an inhabited planet that didn’t want it. And that also doesn’t excuse Kirk’s order to destroy the planet. The whole thing was just the Federation throwing their weight around and using Starfleet to back them up, regardless of the legality of it. In Peter David’s DC comic run,Kirk’s actions led to the war between Eminiar and Vendikar returning to actual weapons that rendered Vendikar unihablitable and lifeless. But Kirk was just following orders so it’s totally OK…..
53. ChristopherLBennett – The presence of microbial life also doesn’t prevent there being an advanced form of life. The presence of a microbe that is capable of causing a disease in a human can be seen as evidence that there is such an advanced form/ If there wan’t such an advanced form, it’s unlikely that a microbe would have evolved to take advantage of them as a host.
There’s no definitive proof either way so it’s entirely possible that Vega Colony is a colony established by Vegans and that it’s somewhere other than the Vegas system. After all, the existence of Kaferian apples doesn’t mean that there’s not an advanced spices on that planet either.
@55/kkozoriz: “In Peter David’s DC comic run,Kirk’s actions led to the war between Eminiar and Vendikar returning to actual weapons that rendered Vendikar unihablitable and lifeless.”
I know that Peter David is a much beloved author, but I don’t like his attitude.
In defence of Peter David, he was the one who finally put Janeway out of all our misery. If only he’d been a staff writer on Voyager.
Going back to fighting with weapons makes sense, it is not like the grudge has gone away. They still have all the stuff that led to war to deal with. They forgot how brutal war really was, there is only one real way to remind them.
@50 CLB
Yeah. It’s a very common Trek trope, unfortunately.
Wait a minute… Didn’t Enterprise establish that the “Rigel” of TOS is an alien name for a star within a few dozen light years from earth? I know it’s a retcon, but:
1. It was explicitly stated onscreen and therefore it is canon.
2. It is – pretty much – the only explanation that makes any kind of sense. Especially since “Rigel” is often mentioned as a very busy an central place in the Federation, which wouldn’t work if that star system was as far as the real Rigel is from earth.
And unless I’m mistaken, the actual direction from earth to this “Rigel” was never established. So this solves the Rigel/Vega problem too.
Several Enterprise episodes (including the 3rd season episode Twilight) clearly establish that Vega Colony is a human colony. Which, come to think of it, might actually make more sense than Vega being the home star of an alien civilization. After all, I don’t recall anybody ever implying that Vega Colony was built on a Class-M planet… and I guess there may be advantages to having a central colony close to a very bright star which (1) gives the colony plenty of energy and (2) can be seen clearly without instruments from many light years away.
@57/random22: “They still have all the stuff that led to war to deal with.”
But they never mention the initial reason for the war. After five hundred years, it has probably become obsolete. According to Anan, they have simply accepted that “there can be no peace” because they’re “a killer species”.
“They forgot how brutal war really was […]”
No, they didn’t – Anan talks quite passionately about the horrors of “real” war: “Disaster, starvation, horrible, lingering death, pain and anguish!” It makes sense, too – keeping mindful of the horrors of war is what causes the population to accept the disintegrator system in the first place.
The thing is, the episode is supposed to deliver the message that instincts can be overcome, that it’s possible to get along peacefully, that people should keep trying and not settle for less. Perhaps also that “sanitary warfare” is a dubious idea. And I find that the way the story is constructed, the hopeful ending actually works. (Unlike, for example, The Return of the Archons, where I have a hard time believing that those people won’t all kill each other in the next months.)
Having the peace talks fail is to turn this message on its head. Rendering Vendikar “uninhabitable and lifeless” on top of that is worse. It’s cynical. Peter David must like completely different things about Star Trek than me.
We should have this talk in the Taste of Armageddon rewatch.
@57/random22: It was editor Margaret Clark’s decision to have Peter David write Janeway’s “death” — and to have Kirsten Beyer bring her back a few years later.
@58/OThDPh: Yes, the ENT pilot was, frustratingly, written by people who didn’t bother to do basic research and thought that Rigel was a made-up star. But that actually works well, because the real Rigel is too far and too short-lived to support life. Geoffrey Mandel’s Star Charts posited a nearer star called “Beta Rigel” to represent the Rigel from ENT and TOS, and the novels have picked up on that. Based on its position in Star Charts, I identified it in my ENT books as the real star Tau-3 Eridani. (I would’ve rather gone with Mu Virginis, a.k.a. Rijl al Awwa, which is only 60 light years from Earth. But earlier novels had already been published using the “Beta Rigel” position from Star Charts, and Mu Virginis is too far away from that region.)
And no, “Beta Rigel” does not solve the Vega problem, because it’s still closer to Earth than it is to Vega. And, as I said, because TOS later established several friendly inhabited worlds around Rigel itself.
Jana: I haven’t read that Peter David comic, but all the Star Trek stuff I’ve read by him makes me think he gets Star Trek pretty well. You’re basing your opinion on him not on his actual work but on what kkozoriz is telling you here in a couple of lines.
Enterprise also established that Kronos is closer to Earth than Alpha Centauri is. 5 days at warp 4.5 using the wf cubed formula that works for their estimate of the time to Neptune and back. It works out that Kronos is less than 2 light years fro Earth. Also, you can be on the edge of the neutral zone and be close enough to the planet to see detail with the unaided eye according to Into darkness.
Star Trek isn’t based on our reality. It’s supposed to be close enough to not be utterly ridiculous but there’s way too many inconsistencies for it to be our reality. (Antimatter is much more powerful in ST. It’s possible to interbreed species that not only evolved on other planets but also have radically different biochemistries. Habitable planets can orbit stars that they’d never be able to do in ours.) The list grows with pretty much each instalment. Just accept it as it is and don’t try to stuff the square peg that is Trek into the round hole that we live in.
@61/MaGnUs: Oh, I didn’t mean to say that he doesn’t “get” Star Trek – after all, it’s not my place to define Star Trek. Only that I can’t find the things I like about Star Trek in his works. I could say the same about John Byrne.
And I have read some of his books. I’ve read The Captain’s Daughter and The Disinherited and had issues with them. Although the latter had three authors, so I don’t know what was contributed by whom. I’ve also read one of his TNG novels, but that was such a long time ago that I don’t remember anything about it.
61. MaGnUs – Don;t get me wrong, I’m, a fan of most of Peter David’s Trek work. He tends to overdo the comedy bits from time to time but it can’t be said that he doesn’t “get” Star Trek.
The main reason I pointed out his follow up to A Taste of Armageddon was to show one possible way things could have gone after the episode.
Hodin: There are Earthers out there, there are Klingons,
There are Vulcans and Horta and then,
There are those who call themselves Romulan, but
I’ve never been one of them.
‘Cause me, I am a Gideon,
And have been since before I was born,
And the one thing they say about Gideons is:
They’ll take you as soon as you’re warm.
You don’t have to be a six-footer,
You don’t have to have a great brain,
You don’t have to have any clothes on,
You’re a Gideon the moment Dad came!
Because…
Every sperm is sacred,
Every sperm is great,
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate…
@63 – Jana: I can wholeheartedly recommend his New Frontier books.
@66/MaGnUs: Thanks for the recommendation! At the moment I mostly read TOS novels (and non-Star Trek books), and I plan to give the S.C.E. series a try first, but it’s always good to have a long reading list.
The SCE is pretty good, too.
Not much to say that hasn’t already been said. But I will say this to our Humble Rewatcher:
Rage! Rage against the dying of the light!
So they don’t want to use contraception and their planet is being overpopulated. They choose to get people sick and basically kill them? I feel like this wasn’t a well-written episode because those weren’t their only choices. The Prime Directive would prevent the Federation from asking them to join unless they have warp capabilities. So they could take their surplus population and colonize some other planets. Those other planets would have germs and some people would die. Heck, opening up trade with other planets or joining the Federation and actually traveling and accepting travelers would cause germs to migrate to their planet naturally. There are a lot of other ways to do this without changing their cultural taboos. The way they chose is so stupid it’s like the committee sat down and made it their goal to come up with the most hypocritical, convoluted way of dealing with their problem possible.
@70/Jennifer: “The Prime Directive would prevent the Federation from asking them to join unless they have warp capabilities. “
No, the Prime Directive only prevents the Federation from initiating first contact with a pre-warp world, on the assumption that such a world would be unaware of aliens. And the idea that warp capability was the threshold for contact was not introduced until TNG’s “First Contact” in 1991. In TOS, the rule was simply that you didn’t interfere in other cultures, so if they didn’t know about the existence of aliens, you didn’t reveal it to them. TNG made the assumption that “unaware of alien life” meant “not having warp drive,” but that’s a silly equivalence if you think about it. There are certainly ways that a pre-warp culture could be aware of alien life. Heck, in real life, we’ve spent decades running SETI, listening for signals from space, and now we’re actively searching for habitable exoplanets or the signatures of alien constructs like Dyson spheres. In the Trek universe, where aliens and starships are all over the place, it shouldn’t be hard for a pre-warp culture with radio astronomy and powerful telescopes to detect the existence of at least a few of those aliens. Not to mention that there are plenty of spacefaring cultures that don’t have the Prime Directive, so a pre-warp world could’ve been contacted by someone else and been made aware of alien life long before it encountered the Federation. As long as a world has already made contact with aliens, by whatever means, then the Prime Directive no longer prohibits revealing the Federation’s existence to them.
Indeed, this is implicit in the episode. Hodin tells Spock, “Your Federation must be aware of our jealous tradition of isolation from all contaminating contacts with the violent nature of planets of other star systems.” To which Spock replied that those wars between star systems no longer prevailed. That makes it pretty clear that the Gideonites have been familiar with larger galactic affairs for a very long time, since before the rise of the Federation and the era of relative peace it ushered in (the Pax Federatica?). It’s not that they lack the advancement for warp drive, it’s that they have a societal policy of isolationism by choice. Sometime long ago, their peace-loving people went out into space and saw the violence of other worlds, so they retreated within their atmosphere and closed their borders. The irony of the situation is that their own fanatical love of life and peace is what’s condemned them to live in a hell of their own making.
Am I the only one that noticed that Kirk and Odona are getting out from former quarters just after the bridge scene where they kiss…? I guess there has been more than vegan choriomeningitis interchange.
Maybe vegan choriomeningitis is an STD.
@73/kkozoriz: According to comment #23, they knocked Kirk out to take his blood and infect Odona prior to their meeting, so probably not.
Kirk was just making sure. After all, Odona was unfamiliar with disease. How would she know?
Where did they get their food
Some type of replicators? Imports?
The fake Enterprise as a simulation
No, it seemed like a physical copy of the real thing designed to confuse Kirk and keep him occupied, probably built off-planet or maybe on a moon, or perhaps at one of Gideon’s poles or in their ocean(s)? Also the holodeck can create the illusion of space with movable floors and transporter technology.
How were they able to copy it?
Spies? Which doesn’t make them great candidates for membership.
Spock’s feelings about diplomacy
This isn’t the first time he’s expressed his frustration with distant diplomatic bureaucrats; he joined Starfleet against his father’s wishes although he became an ambassador himself later on.
At any rate, they did an impressive job of showing an overpopulated planet on a lower budget via the corridor scene in Hodin’s office (if you look closely you can see several of the same extras moving back and forth). Also pretty ambitious way of dealing with birth control at a time when it wasn’t even mentioned on TV for the most part.
The screen on the bridge is not a window, so the only way the screen can show Gideonites is if the Gideonites installed a camera on their fake Enterprise to deliberately put their images on the screen.
Or if it is a holodeck re-creation, and the Gideonites are only visible through a flaw, how likely is it that the flaw would only show within the bounds of the screen, and that it would become transparent? Sheesh.
@77/BeeGee: But this isn’t the Enterprise. It’s a replica where nothing works. Perhaps the fake screen is a window. Of course it showed the stars first, so there probably was some film-projecting device involved which then malfunctioned.
Honestly, this episode has bigger problems than that.
@78/Jana: Maybe the shot of the crowd was just a security-camera video feed that someone in the fake-Enterprise control room accidentally switched over to the “bridge viewscreen” monitor for a few seconds.
@79/Christopher: A control room could also explain why Kirk didn’t notice that the ship was “completely inoperative”. Perhaps the controls worked for him, with the people in the control room supplying the responses.
I’m sure this was mentioned, supra: I find it odd that Gideonites have such a high respect for life, but little concern for the quality of their lives. What’s the point of having a long, healthy lifespan if it’s lived in a crowded elbow to butt-hole world? Or, for that matter, in abject poverty? How could a life philosophy like that of the Gideonites ever come about in reality?
@81/Paladin: It’s hardly uncommon in real life for a philosophy to be embraced to such an extreme degree that it leads over time to detrimental and unintended consequences. Hell, that’s basically human nature — we take everything to unhealthy extremes that screw things up, then we react against that by racing to the opposite extreme and screwing things up a different way, rather than finding a healthy balance in the middle somewhere.
After all, the Gideonites didn’t start out so overcrowded. They got that way as a long-term result of their reverence for life and their refusal to use contraception. By the time it got to be a problem, they were so set in their ways that they couldn’t admit the need to change, and by the time they were forced to admit it, it was too late.
Remember, the episode was written as an allegory about the fears of overpopulation that were being talked about in real life at the time, the Malthusian projections that if human population growth continued to accelerate, it would lead to an unliveably overcrowded world in which people didn’t have enough to eat. Soylent Green is probably the most famous example of an overpopulation allegory, but it’s one of many. So the way the Gideonites got there was basically by being just like us — by clinging to their “be fruitful and multiply” belief system even after it had become a clear and present danger.
(Fortunately, Malthus’s projections proved largely unfounded, because we’ve been able to expand our food production capabilities to compensate for population growth. While there is certainly a great deal of poverty and starvation in the world, it’s because of social and economic inequality and the actions of governments and elites to prevent food and resources from being distributed fairly to those who need them, rather than from genuine scarcity of food or water.)
@82/CLB: Agreed.
Well, the whole Malthusian Horror is also based on the idea that WOMEN view contraception the same way men do and when presented with effective, affordable, safe and available contraception they would never DREAM of using it, Something that has proven to not be true as men believed. Increasing food production helps, but population control when put in the hands of your average Jane or Joe, is a lot more popular than 1960s Star Trek realized.
Two words to this episode.
Logans Run
@85/Thanos: Or Soylent Green, or “The World Inside,” or various others. There was a lot of SF about overpopulation fears in the ’60s-’70s.
I was fine with simply finding this another forgettable episode, but then they had to bring overpopulation into it and I reach the credits angry. For one thing, this is an utterly contrived setup where the living standards for the Gideons are so high they’ve achieved near-immortality yet at the same time retain a high level of fertility. This is not how it works; as life expectancy and standards improve, fertility decreases to prevent this exact scenario from occurring. Secondly, fears of overpopulation carry subtexts of eugenics and genocide, and it’s particularly jarring to have that in any Star Trek series.
Sigh, seven more episodes to go…
@87/Fujimoto: Yes, in a rational society, fertility would decrease as standards improve, but ideological dogmas often lead to self-destructive behavior. See my remarks in comment #12.
@87/Fujimoto: When the episode was made, people didn’t know yet that fertility decreases when living standards improve. This was even written before “The Limits to Growth”. I agree that the solution offered is somewhat unfortunate. On the other hand, I like that immortality is presented as problematic, and planets as finite. It’s a clumsy mix of good ideas and bad ones.
@89/Jana: In the episode’s defense, we weren’t supposed to admire the Gideonites’ solution. The story was a cautionary tale — it was the Gideonites’ poor decisions in the past, their ideological resistance to birth control, that had trapped them in a desperate situation where there was no good way out. The good solution was the one they’d failed to adopt centuries before, and now a drastic, horrible option was all they had left.
Really, this is an atypical episode in that it faces Kirk with a dystopian society and doesn’t have him overthrow it. The only real difference he and his crew make beyond his own rescue is to save Odona’s life. I guess that’s because the problem isn’t as simple as an oppressive state or computer god or whatever.
@90/Christopher: He didn’t overthrow the oppressive state in “Bread and Circuses” either.
I guess he could have offered the Gideonites a second planet for their growing population. But that would have ruined the message about growth on a finite planet.
@91/Jana: Oh, great — unleash the population expanding out of control on the rest of the galaxy. Starfleet Command would’ve loved that idea… ;)
The Gideonites seemed advanced enough to build starships of their own, and not just models. They probably had some dogmatic ideological reason not to populate other planets.
@93/BeeGee: As I mentioned in comment 71, Hodin told Spock of “our jealous tradition of isolation from all contaminating contacts with the violent nature of planets of other star systems.”
@92/Christopher: Why shouldn’t they spread out? Humans are doing it too.
@93/BeeGee: Perhaps so. And of course forced relocation wouldn’t be a good solution either.
I wonder if they would keep their longevity on a planet with germs.
@95/Jana: “Why shouldn’t they spread out?”
Ask the folks who introduced rabbits to Australia…
@96/Christopher: Let’s not liken people to rabbits.
@97/Jana: Taking me way too seriously there.
CLB, your analogy was highly problematic. You don’t get excused criticism on the “I was just joking” grounds.
@99/kayom: Hmm, well. I was trying to make a joke about how the Federation might not be crazy about unleashing a population breeding out of control onto the rest of the galaxy. Although now that I reflect on that, I can see how it might be taken to resonate with racial stereotypes about immigrants, which wasn’t my intent at all. I guess I didn’t think the joke through. Consider it withdrawn.
@95 They just need a Genesis torpedo. Without the protomatter, of course.
To quote an episode of Castle “Hey, don’t ruin a good story with logic!”
LOL. Yea, I know this premise has flaws, but I still really like this episode. I just remember how haunting the moment was for me when we saw the people staring through the window.
I find it fitting that this was broadcast immediately following “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” Both stories tackled major issues of the time (The Population Bomb had recently been published) by cranking them up to absurd degrees.