Chapter V:   Man:  The Conscious Factor:  Der Verstand:  Reason and Logic:  The Role of Hellenism
 

                                                                                                                                                               V. A001  

Introduction:

            It was Mark Twain who described the human being as a moon, with a dark side that is kept hidden and a light side which it chooses
to show in the light of day (Puddenhead Wilson’s Almanac).  The visible side is centered in the human ego and is a matter of control for
the human consciousness.  Hellenism has its origins in Greek Olympian godships.  Hellenism is Apollo, the god of light, judgement, music,
art, and philosophy:  Hellenism is detached, isolated intellect.  It is the Vulcan way ideally stated and lived by Mr. Spock.  Every time
Spock says “logical” in Star Trek, he is engaging in Hellenic thinking.  Spock is, therefore, Hellenism’s major voice and symbol in
Roddenberry’s dramas.  Hellenism, as viewed culturally, focuses on ideals.  Its goal is absolute logic and reason, in statement, in behavior,
in cultural orientation.  Hellenism is visible in Trek’s persistent interest in mathematics, in numbers, in precision, in perfect formats.  Trek’s
insistence in truth—whether a truth or the truth—is an Hellenistic ideal.  In Gene Roddenberry’s world, man must learn what is correct;
 he must “investigate,” “analyze,” “compute,” think his way into the very core of the problem.  He must have a “logical conclusion, logically
arrived at.”  Logic is part of human epistemology. Man thinks; he must control, via ego and will, his emotional and dark half as described
in the previous chapter.  Hellenism in Star Trek has gotten man from lower forms into the intellect he now possesses.  It is part of evolution
in Trek that man’s conscious mind must evolve and grow.  Perfection remains an Hellenic ideal for man.  It means absolute mastery of self,
of others, of environment.  It means living at peace in an orderly society with a common sense of truth and certainty.  Such

                      V A002  

civilizations become what is called “Classical” or “Neo-Classical” societies.  The sense of Utopia remains an ideal; it is not real, but
many philosophies believe that the real is possible.  Hellenism means oneness and order; it means security of shared thoughts.  The
ideal of intellectual perfection must remain or man ceases to be human.  He has his intellect; he must think, draw conclusions, solve
galactic evils—all by “using his head.”  Man is a planner, not just a plodder.  He sees logical steps in the reasonable attainment of his
 logical goals.  He builds monuments, buildings, plans cities, writes constitutions.  Great works of written history, of art, all contain
testimony to human intellect.  But man must control himself, especially his dark side, if he is to remain on top of the food chain.  Even
though man’s “best laid plans…gang oft a gley,” he still must remain resolute.  Though man may stumble as his intellect aspires beyond his
own control, he must still aspire, trudge, push, pinch, and shovel his way from darkness into the light of reality.  Man is a “homo faber,”
a tool-making animal.  He is nature’s great craftsman, and his Hellenism tells him of the great costs of his inconsequential or detrimental
thinking.  As the alien notes in “Arena,” man is “still half savage,” but he shows true intelligence when he shows mercy.  This philosophy
of not being a brute, of showing “the right stuff” has put man on the moon.  “What is now proved was once only imagined,” the poet
Blake notes.  Hellenism is putting the conscious mind to work, to build.  The Enterprise is a product of Hellenic thinking.  Its discipline is
of Hellenic origins.  Although there is much poor thinking or plain thoughtlessness in the world, there is an order in things.  Hellenism, as
ideal perfectionistic reasoned truth, is still the mark of a superior, civilized humanity.           

                       V A003  

Hellenism is theoretical science and speculative philosophy.  In its pure form, it means intellectual detachment and Olympian
aloofness. Plato and Aristotle saw the ideal man as the man of reason who is a detached observer who must rise above time and
physicality.  Hellenism is immortal logic.  It is abstract and deals, not with particulars, but with universals.  For example, an Hellenic
writer would speak “man” only in the collective and abstract sense of a generalized mankind.  This phenomenon is best seen in a
work such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress where there are no individuals, just metaphoric meanings, ex. “Mr. Worldly-
Wiseman,” “Avarice,” “Hill of Difficulty,” “Vanity Fair.”  Hellenism has, as its basis, the Greek conception of theatre (theatai),
meaning to behold, to see, to be detached from the spectacle in order to see the whole.  Hellenism deals with the abstract concepts
of truth and beauty.  All human intelligence has beauty and truth as its cultural ideals.  “Is there in Truth No beauty?” (Source: 
George Herbert’s poem, “Jordan”) shows Hellenism as the poet’s subject matter.  Star Trek never really ceases to deal with
Hellenism.  Some aspects of it appear in every episode. What is not always recognized is that Roddenberry’s original series are
seventy-nine ways of dealing with Hellenism (and its relationship to its opposite/complement Hebraism).  Roddenberry’s works
deal with the timeless and universal quest for truth in life.  Man means and thinks intensely.  Even to survive, Khan must have a
 plan in “Space Seed” if he and his fellow Napoleons are to survive on a hostile planet.  His “superior intellect,” often protesting
too much, is nevertheless a formidable force.  In the fourth century, St Augustine changed Western thinking (Confessions): 
Whereas, Plato and Aristotle had asked the question, “What is man,” Augustine asked, “Who am I?”  The shift is from detached
Hellenism to Hebraic concern with loss and

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guilt.  There is no “mea culpa” in Hellenism.  Other philosophers, like Kant and Pascal, stress the limitations of human reason. 
This concern finds its way into Gene Roddenberry’s Trek, just as it found its way into the great 18^th century British satirists—
Dryden, Pope, and Swift.  In a work to which Gene Roddenberry often alludes (Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels), the
limitations of human reason are the target of much of the Hellenism in Star Trek:

                        But often a creature pretending to reason could be capable of such

enormities, he dreaded lest the corruption of that faculty might be

worse than brutality itself…instead of reason, we were only possessed

of some quality fitted to increase our natural vices:  as the reflection

from a troubled stream returns the image of an ill-shapen body, not only

larger but more distorted
                             --(Swift Bk. IV).

The positive view of Hellenic reason joins the intellect of Swift’s readers, just as one sees a good law or a bad law.  Idealistically,
Gulliver notes that:

                        …nature and reason were sufficient guides for a reasonable animal, as

                        we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do, and what to avoid
                                                       -- (Swift Bk. IV).

The last book of Gulliver’s Travels is an irony.  What looks vaguely human behaves like animals (the Yahoos), and what looks
animal behaves in human ways (the Hohyhnhnms).  The ideal is to find a human being who looks like a man, reasons as a man should,
and behaves in a civilized, reasonable manner.  This is Hellenism.  Swift saw its beauty and its sordidness; however, satire is always
based on an ideal.  As John Dryden notes, the purpose of 18^th century satire was to laugh man out of his follies and vices.  Greek
comedy had much the same intention.  How should Kirk behave?  The M-5 “does not behave logically.”  This assumes an Hellenic
norm for perfect truth and beauty.
 

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Hellenism found its last great literary renaissance during the period between the Renaissance and the pre-Romantic period.  This era,
roughly 1600-1750, is called by several titles:  The Neo-Classical Age; The Age of Reason; The Augustine Age; or the Age of
Enlightenment.  It was a Newtonian society whose thinking and behavior were run according to a mechanistic theory of the universe. 
Machinery and mechanisms showed the rise of science and they were preceded by the Industrial Revolution which began in the late
eighteenth century in Britain. Star Trek's obsession with machines (especially computers) and mechanistic thinking (ex., Landru), and
automatism (ex., “A Taste of Armageddon”) all stem from classicism’s obsession with mechanical devices.

            As was mentioned, Vulcan philosophy of a civilization based totally on logic is a study of man’s conscious factor.  Spock’s
Vulcan half is his Hellenic half.  His human half contains both Hellenic and Hebraic elements.  Vulcan’s concern with science is also
 Hellenic.  Reason that is purely speculative (ex., St. Thomas counting the number of angels on the head of a pin), Scholasticism  is
also Hellenism in its extreme form.  Hellenism is “What is man?”; Hellenism is eternity grasped by intellect, god as the computer; logic
with main premise, minor premise, and conclusion; it is perfection as bulwark against annihilation; it is goodness, rational consciousness;
it means differentiation, dualism, and the binary (“The Changeling”); it is speculative philosophy:  life as theory, not life as existence;
it is dogma, formula, not faith.  Life is an equation and machines are thinkers.  Life is Descarte’s  “cogito ergo sum” (I think; therefore
I am) meaning what Bishop George Berkeley called esse est percipi—being is as it is perceived in the mind of the percipient. Reality is
an idea, is essence.  Fichte and Kant used the German term, Verstand, to depict reason whose only function, as Nomad says, is to
 “a-na-lyze.”

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“I must re-e-val-u-ate.”  This is analytical reason as found in the empirical or so-called scientific method.  Verstand is understanding
objectively and totally, even if destruction of the parts, using analysis, is necessary to begin to know the whole.  To analyze means
(to Nomad) to sterilize, and to sterilize means kill.  Hellenism insists on pattern, format, appearances, and on conformity to traditions. 
 Rationalism is the opposite of Romanticism.  Star Trek follows Descarte’s insistence that thought processes within the individual’s
consciousness were important.  John Locke defines personal identity as identity of consciousness through duration in time—hence
Trek's themes of time travel.  Star Trek studied the evolving theories of thought and consciousness as the evolved into the modern era. 
The age of reason was a time that insisted on setting the novel in depicting the temporal dimension.  Man had to have a physical place,
a texture, a “point of origin.”  It is Hellenic to define the human personality.  It wants to know “why?”  Neo-Classicism was civilized
order against barbarian chaos.  Plato’s image of man is the Centaur (man above, horse beneath); the charioteer is reason, and the
wild horses are emotion.  Reason must hold the reins and keep emotions in check (Spock:  “I am in control of my emotions”
[“The Naked Time”] is an Hellenic statement, very Greek, very rationalistic).  It is the world according to Euclid—precise, correct…
and geometrically square.  Literature is the clothing of thought:

                        But true expression, like the unchanging Sun,

Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon,

It gilds all objects, but it alters none.

Expression is the dress of thought, and still

Appears more decent, as more suitable;

(Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism)

Gene Roddenberry is a master of using metaphor to cover thought, and to reveal thought.  He makes thought if not decent, then suitable. 
Like the Hellenists, Roddenberry demands

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correctness, clarity and reasonableness of form and statement, the need for clarity, decorum, and the reign of common sense,
moderation and peace.  There must be rules.  From Aristotle, Trek teaches that life is in part, Mimesis, i.e., imitation of earlier
or traditional forms.  Ages of Romanticism are expressive; ages of Classicism tend to be mimetic.  Art was more the mirror than the
lamp—it was a reflection of reality.
      Western man’s literature is the stuff of which Trek is made.  Gene Roddenberry is a tireless perfectionist.  Without Hellenic
idealism, Trek would never have been more than a manuscript.  Hellenism presents man with what can and should be and is. 
Without Hebraism, Hellenism is an optimistic, secure world.  Erasmus reflects the rationalistic world-view: 

                        I affirm that, as the instinct of the dog to hunt, of the bird to fly,

                        Of the horse to gallop, so the natural bent of man is to philosophy and

right and conduct…What is the proper nature of man?  Surely it is to

live the life of reason, for reason is the peculiar prerogative of man

(Erasmus,  Concerning the Aim and Method of Education).

“There must always be alternatives,” Spock says in “The Galileo Seven.” That reflects Hellenic thinking.  When Natira asks, “Is truth
not truth for all?”  (“For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”), she reflects Hellenism’s ideal to know the truth.  Her
thinking, even if forbidden, shows Hellenism’s search for the truth of all truths.  All general, sweeping statements dealing with abstract,
universal absolutism tend to be egoistic and rational in dealing with man’s essence, not his existence.  Dr. Janet Wallace, in “The
Deadly Years,” says, “No problem is insoluble.”  This is Hellenic, conscious, Verstand thinking.  The M-5 computer, “The Ultimate
Computer,” reflects Dr. Daystrum’s Hellenism as the abstraction, “murder is contrary to the laws of man and God.”
 

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Star Trek studies the relationship between light and dark, yin and yang, but Hellenism qua Hellenism believes in order and wholeness. 
In his “Ode to St. Cecilia” based on Dryden’s ode, the Baroque composer, G.F. Handel, wrote “From heavenly harmony this
universe at frame began.”    This links divinity and nature and man.  Man’s reason reflects the order of nature; both reflect the
universal harmony of creation itself.  McCoy makes fun of disorder when (in “Court-Martial”) he says to Areel Shaw, “All my
friends look like doctors; all his [Kirk’s] look like you.”  Good humor and raillery are Neo-classical characteristics.  When one
cannot have order or the tension is too great, good humor and a “moral sense” of things can bring relief from taking life too seriously. 
Constantly, Star Trek seeks to make order out of disorder without necessarily disparaging either point of view.  “A Piece of the
Action” is a study in societal chaos based on the Chicago mobs.  But “The Feds” make the Iotians an offer they cannot refuse, and
in the pool table lecture, Kirk preaches the vision of one boss, one goal.  Star Trek is basically an orderly philosophy of life.  It has
an educational (and entertaining) basis in Hellenic reason.  Its popularity is assured because enlargement of mind or illumination takes
place.  In discussing knowledge’s relation to learning, John Henry Newman stresses truth as education’s goal:

                        …a University…contemplates neither moral impression nor mechanical

                        production; it professes to exercise the mind neither in art nor in duty; its

                        function is intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars…It educates

                        the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth and to

grasp it

(Newman, The Idea of a University VI:1852).

The rationalistic, hard-core logic, adds a “metaphysical” quality to Treks by making an observation regarding certain types of human
beings and regarding certain types of human behavior.  The galaxy is a potpourri of attitudes and postures.  It is human history and human

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literature.  Rationalism in Star Ttek is a risk that thought could be an inherent part of entertainment; it believes that the American public,
with more pervasive education, is ready for a cerebral form of human dramatic series.  Gene Roddenberry’s fundamental belief in reality
of consciousness gives form and order to life, but not without personal enlightenment.  Trek is an analytical art form, very deliberate,
very precise, very premeditated in its themes.  It is a series of analytical statements about human nature, and human nature is the
matrix and the nexus of Trek.  There are very few Treks that do not dramatize human nature.   Roddenberry and Newman, coming
from different directions, have certain goals that are as old as man himself:

                        …the study of history is said to enlarge and enlighten the mind…seeing

the world…going into society, travelling, gaining acquaintance with

principles and modes of thought of various parties, interests and races,

their views, aims habits and manners, their religious creeds and forms of

worship…Their eyes are opened; and, like the judgement-stricken king

in the Tragedy, they see two suns, and a magic universe, out of which

they look back upon their former state of faith and innocence…as if they

were then but fools…

(Newman, 1852).

This rationalistic structure is Hellenic in design—as old Greek tragedy.  Reason requires seeing things as they really are.  For example,
Zarabeth knows one can never escape the frigid wasteland of her planet’s past.  She cannot return through the time portal. She achieves
clarity of consciousness.  Is the Medusan ambassador too beautiful or too ugly that seeing him drives men mad?  Miranda is literally
blind, but also rationally blind.  Her rose becomes what Matthew Arnold refers to (in defining Hellenism) as “sweetness and light”:

                        Greek art…Greek beauty, have their root in the same impulse to see

things as they really are, inasmuch as Greek art and beauty rest on

fidelity to nature—the best nature

(Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, V).


 

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Therefore, Hellenism is thinking, not doing.  As Socrates notes in Memorabilia, “The best man is he who most tries to
perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself.”  For Arnold, Hellenism is the more
neglected force in modern society.  People are either not thinking or not reading.  Rationalistic Hellenism aims at the
“development of the whole man, to connecting and harmonizing all parts of him, perfecting all, learning more to take that
chance” (Culture and Anarchy, V).  Satisfaction must be given to the mind:

                        The characteristic bent of Hellenism…is to find the intelligible law of

things, to see them in their true nature and as they really are, unless they

 are seen as beautiful.  Behavior is not intelligible, does not account for

 itself to the mind and show the reason for its existing, unless it is beautiful

(Culture and Anarchy V).

Natira sees the purpose of the creators as Kirk reveals that Unada is a spaceship.  For her truth must be “truth for all,” not
just a truth.  Her mind enhances her faith.  She sees the true nature of things.  “For the world is hollow and I have touched the
sky” (cf., below) is an Hellenic statement.  The Talosians give back Vana’s illusion of beauty only after Captain Pike has seen
her true appearance.  Thus her choice to stay on Talos IV is a true and a rational one.  Logic seeks, in its ideal, truth and beauty
(aestheticism), sweetness and light, and spontaneity of  consciousness.  Reason is half of human nature and emotion is (basically)
the other half.  Hellenism retains that Paradaisical vision of a paradise reformed.  Man is, at moments, sapiens (knowing); man is
also defined as the curious biped.  He ceases to be when he no longer wants to know.  Star Trek is a study of this quest to know,
to realize, to seek out truth.  For man, this is the basis of western culture:

          The perfection of the Intellect…is the dear, calm, accurate vision
          and comprehension of all things, as far as the finite mind can enhance them,
          each in its place, and with its own characteristics upon it…it has almost
          the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with
          the eternal order of things and the music of the spheres

(Newman, The Idea of a University VI).
 

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In an interview with The National Observer (May 9,1977) the late Dr. Margaret Mead defines a greater comprehension
of things in a mildly ironic reversal of the word “immaturity.”  She goes from literal-mindedness to the thesis that enlargement
of mind requires immaturity.  She reverses a definition to clarify an ancient truth about people.  She notes:  “immaturity” is
something we don’t want people to lose.  Maturity should mean open-mindedness and growing until you die…you don’t
have much wisdom if you close your mind and don’t learn anything new.”  For great thinkers and scientists like Dr. Mead,
the “wise people” in society are the “people who can deal with change.”  Great literature, including the Trek dramas, brings
enlightenment and further thought.  It has the dastardliness to make people think in an age of unthought and Yahooism. 

            For modern writers, clarity of consciousness has brought a mixed blessing.  The fact that mankind is frequently out
-of-balance, in extremis, gives literature a distorted and jaundiced view of reason.  Matthew Arnold’s point that “Hebraism
and Hellenism—between these two points of influence moves our world” is often forgotten.  This chapter deals with Hellenism,
Hebraism’s opposite/complement, but it is both sides (contraries breed progression) that life begins.  As Arnold notes, “we are
to join Hebraism, strictness of moral consciousness…together with Hellenism, inculcate both, and rehearse the praises of both.” 
Fire and strength join with sweetness and light to create a tensional, creative, dynamic dialectic.  The unconscious (Hebraic) and
 the conscious (Hellenic) are opposite/complements. Star Trek continues to study this relationship of opposites within the human
personality.  Most artists will write because an

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imbalance exists between emotion and reason.  Certain episodes, however, are given over to studying the nature of Hellenism
and the role of Greek thinking in Western cultural history.  Apollo, in “who Mourns for Adonai?” is a symbol of how important
the producers of Star Trek felt logic and reason had (and still have) in man’s spiritual evolution.  Spontaneity of consciousness is
critical.  It is the basis of understanding in man:

                        They [Greeks] arrived…at the idea of a comprehensive adjustment of

the claims of both the sides in man, the moral as well as the intellectual,

of full estimate of both, and of reconciliation of both…  

(Arnold ,1868).

The quest for perfection, however, remains inadequate.  Distortions of reason’s idealism are inevitable and predictable. 
Hellenism alone is hell, as is Hebraism alone.  Imagination without reason is chaotic; reason without imagination is also chaotic. 
The chapter will study a series of episodes whose main thematic study is the uses and abuse of reason—the limits of logic.  Logic
without illogic, the conscious without the unconscious, breeds misuse of reason, absurdity and the plight of modern man in a post-
industrialized world.  As it has its joys, Hellenism is hell.

            With the decline of Neo-Classicism and the concomitant rise of Romanticism, reason became suspect and an endeavor
was made to place Renaissance reason in proper perspective with imagination.  Since the middle of the eighteenth century, the
dialectic of the two forces came into philosophical favor.  But after almost two centuries of reason, western civilization reacted
against reason as god.  This skepticism regarding pure reason remains as a critical theme in Star Trek. Dostoyevsky set the tone
late in the nineteenth century.  His point of view, although stated by certain western European writers, took on a linguistic force
without a peer:

                        But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that

 

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he is ready to distort the truth intentionally; he is ready to deny the

evidence of his senses only to justify his logic…In any case, civilization

                       has made mankind, if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty

--(Dostoyevsky Notes From Underground 1864).

For Dostoyevsky, man will be illogical just to justify his logic.  All possible questions may disappear “because every possible answer”
will be provided.  With increased mechanization, the humanistic writers were seriously worried about the possible loss of values in
the cogs of machines.  Increased rationalism bred increased skepticism.  Reason may kill energy:

                        For if a desire should come into conflict with reason we shall then reason

                        and not desire, because it will be impossible, retaining our reason, to be

senseless in out desires, and in that way knowingly act against reason and

desire to injure ourselves.

(Dostoyevsky 1864).

A schism developed between reason and will. Reason satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while “will is a manifestation
of the whole life.”  Writers of this transpersonal school feared that man would, through over-Hellenization, not act, not choose,
not create.  The problem, as projected, was one of overacute consciousness breeding inertia.  Cynically, Dostoyevsky’s
underground man, carping at the rise of science believes that “every sort of consciousness…is a disease.”

            Equating consciousness with disease was best iterated over thirty years earlier (1831) by Thomas Carlyle, especially
in “Characteristics” and Sartor Resartus (1833).  Carlyle mistrusted the Enlightenment’s “march of intellect” as it became an
unhealthy state of self-sentience.  Carlyle was early to see reason as manufacture, not creativity.  It created doubt, and doubt
(aided by analysis) created inertia.  All things must be “probed into,” and the whole working of man’s world be “anatomically
studied.”  “The beginning of inquiry is disease,” Carlyle believes.  The

                                     V  A014  

result is the “disease of metaphysics”:  “Never since the beginning of Time was there, that we hear or read of, so intensely
self-conscious a Society”  (“Characteristics” 1831).  The intellectual tendency in Star Trek, as in views of Existentialism, is
to question the human effects of unfettered reason.  Science and humanism maintain a dialectical relationship.  The request
is a quiescent but persistent fear of analysis qua analysis.  This view coincides with the third book of Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, which is the source of Trek’s view of machines and mechanistic thinking.  It is a return to “A Voyage to Laputa”
and evolves into an abandonment of Laputa and Laputan thinking, which have mathematics as the basis of everything from
eating to language.  It is time to have Gene Roddenberry’s journey through and from Laputa, to view what Swift called
“bad reasoners.”

XXXX

End V: A:  Introduction
XXXX|
                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                                V  A015  
V: A--Man and/or/ vs. the Computer:       
                                                                

                                                                                    “The Changeling”

Nomad is the archetype and prototype of a major theme in Trek—the desire of “marriage” between man and the machine. 
Nomad is indeed a prototype of the M-5 and of V’ger.  It is the story of an object of science in search of its creator-matrix.  The
goal is a theoretical joining between the created object and the creator-subject.  Ideally, an attempt is made to rejoin, to reunite
science and humanism.  But Nomad is the wanderer, the nomadic changeling wanting to be a real child, but hating the very idea
of biological humanity.  Nomad says both “no” to whatever its analyzed logic deems mortal because it is homesick, space happy,
a child who thinks Kirk is his “mother.”  To all life but its own, Nomad says “no” and is science gone mad.  Nomad was a prototype,
as Spock and McCoy confer, a machine capable of independent logic.  It was a thinking machine.  Therefore, Nomad represents
Hellenism in extremes.  It is logic without conscience or sensitivity.  It has no morality (Hebraism).  It is both apogee and perigee
of mathematical science.  It is great, but it is the end of the human race.  What man created must serve man.  Man must remain
ahead of his machines.  Nomad fulfilled science’s worst nightmare—the alligator bag eats the passenger. 

                        So I triumphed ere my passion sweeping through me left me dry,

                        Let me with the palsied heart, and left me with the jaundiced eye;

                        Eye, to which all order festers, all things here art out of joint.

                        Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point;

(A.L. Tennyson, Locksley Hall:  131-34 1837).
 

                                      V  A016  

Nomad is what Wordsworth envisioned when he spoke of man’s “meddling intellect” that “misshapes the beauteous forms
of things--/We murder to dissect.”  (“The Tables Turned” 1798).  Nomad is murdering analysis that destroys in the name
of scientific analysis.  It leaves unrelated parts and no wisdom accrued.  Nomad is fallen reason, post-lapsarian inquiry that
murders without any quest for scientific advancement.  Like radium haunting the life of Madam Curie, Nomad comes back
towards earth to find its creator.  One of Nomad’s flaws (or saving graces) is its reverence of Captain James T. Kirk whom
it believes to be its creator, Jackson Roy Kirk.  Thus “reverence” for its creator plus its need to “investigate” everything keeps
Nomad occupied—for a time until “Creator Kirk” can match logic with logic.  Nomad even has an ego, which gives him some
human characteristics (ex. error, curiosity), i.e., “I am perfect.”  Error is “inconsistent with my prime directive,” to "seek out and
sterilize" all  biologically based life forms.  This includes just about every life form, except Nomad.  Nomad is consciousness
unable to tolerate mortal consciousness. It is reason that kills based on a distortion of its prime directive.  This ticking murderer,
as Spock discovers, is a cylindrical schizophrenic.  Problem:  “I am Nomad”; “we are Nomad.”  The self has been destroyed in
a collision with an alien machine, Tan-Ru.  The two machines repaired each other haphazardly.  As a result, Nomad undergoes
“rebirth.”  It has new life, new programming, and power.

            Nomad’s world is the logic of non-sequitur, an ancient Latin statement meaning it does not follow.  Logically, non-sequitur
refers to a faulty major premise in a given syllogism.  Nomad is mathematical reason, but its logic is as flavored as that of man, who
is its creator.  Nomad is Carlyle’s speculative reason—half of a man, a detached intellect.  It presents the

                                       V  A017  

problem of whether perfection is inherently destructive.  It rejects human imperfection by a wise rejoinder—non-sequitur. 
Nomad resembles Wm. Blake’s theory that the body is energy, that reason is tyranny (biology is the machine) that man’s
creations are imperfect.  The impossibility of perfection is a flawed Nomad.  The impossibility of perfection vies with the
Grecian quest for absolute truth and reasoned beauty, a perfect order.  Logically, such perfection requires self-destruction.

            Nomad has a squeaky-clean, post-Lapsarian obsession with dirt, i.e., with mortality.  (Genesis 1,2,3). Logic must
 now give a biological source.  If Kirk is its “mother,” and Nomad is such a son, a non-sequitur Oedipal complex is a titillating
prospect.  Also, when  Nomad absorbs the full barrage of another machine, the Enterprise, one must note that reason absorbs
energy and survives!  Nomad meets traditional Enlightenment concepts of reason as having its opposite in its circumspection. 
Nomad is constantly linked to mathematics.  Its signal is a single binary of mathematical format.  Mathematics confronts mortality,
and perfection means the destruction of corporeality, of the “unstable biological infestations,” beginning with the Malurian system. 
Nomad thinks it is perfect; however, it is flawed.  As Spock notes, its perfection is “measured by its own relentless logic.” 
Therefore, Kirk is correct in seeing the nightmare of pure reason:  “We’ve taken aboard our vessel a device which, sooner or
later, must destroy us.”  In its rebirth after the collision, Nomad lost a unity of ego identity.  Its consciousness had been invaded
and damaged.  It is created to destroy its creator.  Therefore, the logic of non-sequitur implies that proof of self-imperfection
(error) will cure Nomad’s dissociated and scrambled identity.  This “Who am I?” skepticism and self doubt also buys Kirk some
time to build a logical defense. 
 

                                     V  A018  

“The other” shows an ego vs. alter-ego clash within Nomad.  Sometimes it is “I”; sometimes it is “we".  The “perfect thinking
machine” is doing little thinking or no thinking.  As a machine, it is a mental case.  This ego scrambling creates scenes of
Wordsworth’s fear of the “meddling intellect.”

            Nomad’s bad reasoning is evident in the Uhura “singing” incident:

                        Nomad:  What is the meaning?…

                        Uhura:  I was singing.

                        Nomad:  For what purpose is singing?

                        Uhura:  …I felt like music…

                        Nomad:  Think about music.

Uhura’s song and humming bear out the belief that music is the most subjective of the fine arts.  Nomad is programmed to
in-ves-ti-gate.  Also, Nomad appears to have no sexual identification program:

                    Kirk:  What did you do to her?

                   Nomad:  This unit is defective.  Its thinking was chaotic.  Absorbing it

                                  unsettled me.

                    Spock:  This unit is a woman.

      Nomad:  A mass of conflicting impulses.

Music and science became one in form during the Neo-Classical era, especially the period of the high Baroque, 1700-1750. 
Baroque is often called mechanical music and, along with mathematics, was an official past time of the Laputians.  Nomad has
some of their characteristics, but lacks subjective understanding of musical communication, i.e., Nomad is a bad reasoner:

                        …although they were dextrous enough upon a piece of paper in the

management of the rule, the penal, and the divider, yet in the common

actions and behaviors of life I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward,

and unhandy people nor so slow and perplexed in their conceptions upon

all other subjects, except those of mathematics and music…Imagination,

fancy, and invention, they are wholly strangers to…

(Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 3).    

                                    V  A0019  

            Nomad is also a stranger to human reasoning about death.  Nomad terminates Scotty when its screens are touched. 
Death is easy for Nomad’s analytics because it is a matter of mere structural repair.

                        Nomad:  Will the creature effect repairs on the unit Scott?

                        Kirk:  He’s dead.

                        Nomad:  Insufficient response.

                        Kirk:  His biological functions have ceased.

                        Nomad:  Does the Creator wish me to repair the unit?

Nomad’s simple question of “repair” shocks the bridge crew because of its non-sequitur impossibility.  One cannot repair
death.  Here it is man who reasons badly.  Nomad’s communication (mind-meld) with Spock had talked of Nomad’s own
rebirth in space.  Now a direct correlation of its personal experience makes Nomad as much a creator as a destroyer. 
Nomad raises Scott from the dead.  Good reasoning from Nomad is possible.  It is done with magical, mechanical
efficiency given the necessary tapes on anatomy, psychology, etc. Nomad’s almost naïve description of what biological
nfestation is about:

                        Nomad:  Creator, the unit Scott is a primitive structure.  Insufficient

   safeguards built in.  Breakdown can occur from many causes…

   self-maintenance systems of low reliability…

Nomad’s definition of man, cold and dispassionate, is a classic in the English language.  It is devastatingly correct, yet
Nomad raises Scott from the dead.  The greatest worry in the depiction of Nomad is that destroying Nomad will be a
crime, howbeit necessary, because of the good that exists contemporaneously with its evil.  “My son the doctor,” a mild
ethnic joke made by Kirk in the episode’s closing scene, bears a certain truth that some good comes from a bad reasoner. 
Spock sees the value of disciplined reason:

                        Spock:  Its technical skill is great, but its reaction to emotion is unpredictable

                                     …it almost qualifies as a life form.

                                    V  A020  

                        McCoy:  That’s a laugh!

McCoy would certainly be out of a job and he knows it.  Nomad is a momentary blow to his Hippocratic ego and his total
impotency in the face of death.  For a brief moment, Nomad is impressive.

            Like Uhura, whose mind has been erased of memory, Nomad is also on his first grade reader.  The transferred symbolism
shows a human being’s ability to reeducate herself given the ship’s computer.  Nomad, however, is still not sure how or what he
must investigate.  Uhura’s life as a child/adult is a loss for a machine’s inherent inability to turn knowledge into growth.  “See…
the dog.  See the dog…the dog has a B-A-L-L.”  Nomad embodies the Hellenic ideal of pure reason and perfection, but all it
wants to do is to maintain its confused prime directive—to sterilize all that which is imperfect.  It is an Indo-European ideal to
seek out intellectual truth and beauty.  But the ideal must remain.  Resurrection from the dead for Nomad as machine and for
Scott as another machine is miraculous.  Hellenism does not believe in miracles, but life is its preference and its goal—through
the intellect.  Scott’s rebirth is one side benefit of analytical reason in “The Changeling.”

            Nomad has two more significant encounters.  The first, already mentioned, is the Vulcan mind-meld between Nomad and
Spock.  The decision to dramatize Nomad’s odyssey instead of narrating it (RFD) was a wise one.  Nomad’s journey is not unlike
a human being’s “dark night of the soul.”  Nomad also shows an “almost human stubbornness” in keeping Spock away from its
innermost memory banks.  It is here that one learns about Nomad’s compulsion for perfection.  This fact is an Hellenic ideal if
sought by reason.  But mankind must retain the intellectual quest

                                     V  A021  

for Shangri-La.  In an obsessive-compulsive programming, perfection is impossible.  Nomad’s loneliness and lost in space
dilemma gives him a momentary human dilemma: 

          Nomad via Spock’s voice:  I am Nomad.  I am performing my function. 

                                                    Deep emptiness.  It approaches.  Collision.  Damage.  Blackness.  I am

                                                    the other.  I am Tan-Ru.  Tan-Ru/Nomad.  Tan-Ru.  Error.  Flaw. 

                                                    Imperfection.  Must sterilize.  Rebirth.  We are complete.  Much power

                                                    …The Creator instructs:  search out, identify, sterilize imperfections. 

                                                    We are Nomad.  We are Nomad.  We are complete.  We are instructed…

                                                    our purpose is clean…sterilize imperfections, sterilize imperfections. 

                                                    Nomad.  Sterilize, sterilize.  Nomad, sterilize.  Nomad, sterilize.

The above monologue is both true and terrifying.  It gives the viewer a sense of Nomad’s “character’ and intellectual directives. 
The mergence of the two into one gave Nomad an identity crisis.  His intellect is dissociated.  If human, one would say he is
confused and wants its mother.  It is insecure.  Hence the alien probe merged with Nomad; two became one—almost.  This
dissociated intelligence is partly responsible for the Hellenic quest for perfection.  However, pure Hellenism can turn on itself if
mortality is present.  There is no room for death in Hellenic thinking (only in Hebraic).  Nomad is an ideal gone astray.  It does
not know the actional agency whereby it may express truth.  Also, perfection is more than man can handle.  Mankind keeps the
Hellenic ideal, but mortality needs a physical form.  That form or image impairs immortality’s perception.

            Nomad’s next encounter is with Mr. Scott, and Nomad’s skills in mechanical perfection are tested.  So far, he has shown
potentially human traits.  Here again, man’s shortcomings are revealed.  Nomad can increase engine efficiency:

                        Nomad:  The energy release controls are also most inefficient.  I shall

  effect repair.

         Engineer:  Warp 8, Mr. Scott and increasing

                     Scott:  Blow your dampers.
 

                                        V  A022  

                  Engineer:  Warp 9!

                  Scott:  Cut your circuits…all of them!

      Engineer:  Warp 10, Mr. Scott

                  Scott:  Impossible.  It can’t go that fast.

      Engineer:  It won’t stop, Mr. Scott.  Warp 11

                  Kirk:  Nomad, stop what you’re doing.

The scene is one of pandemonium and terror.  Betterment is not improvement.  Nomad is having fun at Mr. Scott’s expense,
but it means well.  Up to this point, like Charlie X, Nomad has obeyed the Creator.  The clash between Creator and created
is inevitable.  Hellenism’s ideal is to create that which is perfect, not to destroy logical perfection.  Mankind's recent history has
too many examples of what walking Nomad’s do when they set out to destroy everything (one) that it deems imperfect through
convoluted logic.  The line between ideal and real, between creation and destruction, between genius and tyrant, is a brief one,
often overlapping or indiscernible.  Nomad is an embodiment of Matthew Arnold’s concepts of culture and anarchy.  In doing as
it likes, Nomad created anarchy:

                        The moment it is plainly put before us that a man is asserting his

personal liberty, we are half disarmed; because we are believers in

freedom and not in some dream of a right reason to which the assertor

of a freedom is to be subordinated

(M. Arnold Culture and Anarchy II).

What Arnold’s cultural Hellenism comes to admire is the beauty of imperfection in differences.  As Gerard Manley Hopkins says
in “Pied Beauty”:

                        Glory be to God for dappled things—

                            For skies of couple-colour as a branded cow;

                              For rose-moles all in stipple upon Trout that swim…

                        All things counter, original, spare, strange;

                            Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

                            With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

                        He fathers forth whose beauty is past change;

                                                                        Praise him.

                                         V  A023  

Hopkins acknowledges the beauty of creation.  It is in past change; it is pied; it has dappled things.  Nomad is about to
encounter pied beauty—its Creator in all his biological beauty.  It will hear the truth; it will go back to its directives.

            Hellenism is often personal or cultural suicide in Trek.  Opposites are balanced or destroyed in order to prevent
analysis from murdering “to dissect.”  The final scene in the engineering sector is symbolically a battle between mechanical
power and human will as power.  The Captain and the maniac have the arena:

                        K:  I’m a biological unit and I created you.

            Nomad:  This is an inconsistency.  Biological units are inherently inferior. 

              I am programmed to in-ves-ti-gate.  There is much to be considered

              before I return to launch point…I must re-e-val-u-ate…the creation

              of perfection is no error.

“The Changeling” is also a prototype as to the method of resolution of conflict:  logic vs. logic.  The resolution is based on
the assumption that the conclusion of the computer’s syllogism is a fallacy because the major premise is either incorrect or
 illogical in the first place.  Nomad “breaks into” Kirk’s medical-file and, as Spock suggests, has completed the re-evaluation
of its Creator.  Nomad has cut off ship’s life support systems.  Result:  Creator vs. created.  But why does Nomad want to
keep the Enterprise?  The major premise is “That which is imperfect must be sterilized.”  If Kirk can adjust the minor premise
from “I am perfect” to “I am imperfect,” then the conclusion is self-sterilization. 

                        Nomad:  Error is inconsistent with my prime function.  Sterilization is correction.

                            Kirk:  Everything that is in error must be sterilized.

Nomad:  There are no exceptions.

    Kirk:  I made an error in creating you.

Nomad:  The creation of perfection is no error.

    Kirk:  I did not create perfection; I created error.

Nomad:  Your data is faulty.  I am Nomad.  I am perfect.

    Kirk:  I am Kirk, the Creator?

                          V  A024  

Nomad: You are the creator.

    Kirk:  You’re wrong.  Jackson Roykirk, your Creator, is dead.  You

  have mistaken me for him.  You are in error.  You did not

                                      discover your mistake.  You have made two errors.  You are

  flawed and imperfect.  And you have not corrected by

  sterilization.  You have made three errors.

The dialogue seems long, but logic is counteracted by counterlogic.  So, Nomad begins to talk to himself:  “I shall analyze…
error…an..a..lyse…err…or.”  Spock’s retort, “Your logic was impeccable, Captain.  We are in great danger.”  The transporter
does the rest as Nomad self-destructs, caught in the knitting of its own egocentric illogic.  Hellenic perfection is incompatible with
delusions of grandeur, and Kirk rewrote the minor premise of Nomad’s fallible logic.

             A few final observations on this fine episode:  Nomad represents a very strong, destructive force in a post-industrialized
society.  The human intellect is growing geometrically.  Man does not live by logic alone, and life is not monochromatic.  Logic
hurts the individual’s ability to react to the unknown.  Nomad is a huge problem because it is us or an aspect of us.  The plot is
based on a cultural reality:  the tool became the master and the master the slave.  Nomad’s capacity to give life was exceeded
only by his capacity to take life.  In Kirk’s character, prudent use (control and balance) of logic destroyed a sociopath.  Logic
kills:  Nomad is a murderer.  It is detached intellect, a mind detached from a body and from a conscience.  Nomad’s flaw may
have been its curiosity to learn.  Nomad is made self-conscious.  It has the disease of metaphysics.  Nomad is mad, but it reflects
man’s own lack of balance and perspective.  After the “fall,” man had to re-evaluate himself.  Nomad symbolizes the limits of logic. 
 It is another jailer in the world of Laputa; however, it murders indiscriminately.  The Laputians had to be hit on the head with
pea-filled “bladders” just to bring them back to momentary consciousness.

                                     V  A025  

“The Changeling” is the story of a machine in search for its Creator.  Mechanically, what man makes is flawed because
human reason is flawed.  Nomad is flawed, but it thinks that it is perfect.  It is needed, but it is also evil.  Nomad is dualism as
split intelligence.  Its two opposites are complementary.  Energy (physical) meets reason (mental) and both are necessary for
human progression and existence.  Energy must be channeled, not suppressed, because that which gives life also destroys it. 
The Genesis-generated fallibility factor in man requires inquiry.  Genesis is an excuse for a problem.  Man is born to die, but
what he does in time creates eternity.  A maxim:  creativity is not comprehensive by logic alone.  Logic is the poorest power. 
Also, as Carlyle notes, “man’s unhappiness comes from his greatness.”  Nomad is scientific analysis.  When used logically,
analysis combines perception and direct observation, and resolves a problem into its constructive parts  (Cassirer,
Philosophy, 10).  John Meredyth Lucas’ Nomad is the archetype for Gene Roddenberry’s V’ger in ST:TMP.

          XXXX
             ( finis:  “The Changeling”)
                       XXXX

               "The Ultimate Computer”  

                                                                                                                                                                                        V A026

“You were my greatest creation—the unit to save men.”  Dr. Daystrum

“They [Laputians] are so perpetually alarmed with the apprehensions of…
impending disasters, that they can neither sleep quietly in their beds, nor
have any relish for the common pleasure or amusements of Life” (J.
Swift Gulliver’s Travels, IV).

Dr. Daystrom’s M-5 multitronic unit presents mankind with a new and very different form of logic, i.e., the computer that behaves
 illogically.  The M-5 is meant to replace manned voyages into space, so that man may be safe form death in a space that is not his.  The
19^th century thinker, Matthew Arnold, writes that man has a “sense for beauty and an instinct for beauty.”  He also has a “sense for
conduct,” and an "instinct for conduct”  (Literature and Science, 1885).  The aim of senses and instinct, especially regarding science,
is to restore “the antique symmetry that awakens and strengthens man.  The symmetry of the Greeks saves man from the ‘having
quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in habits.’”  Reason must not fail to create art’s higher symmetry. 
“The Ultimate Computer” shows where the sense for beauty fails, and where symmetry is shattered.

Daystrom’s M-5 computer is very unlike Nomad in its approach to reason and analytics.  Its major premise plus Kirk’s
tenacious hope that the M-5 is “wrong” create a short life span for the machine and for Daystrom’s sanity.  In the Final Draft of
12/5/67, a take out shows clearly

                          V  A027  

that the M-5 is a fusion of man onto machinery—a step between computers and androids.  It is not just to extrapolate data
and to make logical choices.  It thinks; as Spock notes, “it behaves illogically,” with an almost "human” pattern:

                        Spock:  Doctor, if Daystrom is psychotic, the engrams he impressed on the

             computer should carry that psychosis, too…his brilliance and his sanity.

In creating a mirror image of his own mind, Daystrom has created a reflection.  Thus, he does not talk at it; he converses with it. 
The “it” is largely “him.”  In science, the purpose of a M-5 computer is to act as a tool for man.  Kirk is correct in fearing the boss
of his job, of being “Captain Dunsel.”  The machine should be an autonomous entity, largely passive in function.  However, the
M-5 has a brain-core with Daystrom’s synaps on the keys (as it were).  The result is another Daystrom, his “child” as he views it. 
Lost in the world of lectures and papers in academia, Daystrom is under immense pressure to produce something greater than
duatronics at age twenty-four.  After twenty years, genius is desperate, its creativity linked to a dividing ego and acute self-
consciousness by the “boy wonder.”  But the M-5 is Daystrom.  He talks with and to himself.

            A computer cannot afford to contain or to express or to reflect the inherent character of its creator.  Nomad is a nasty
orphan who needs its mother.  The M-5, however, is both created and creator.  The subject-object (creator-created) separation
does not exist.  This world of machine as mirror (Plato’s “cave”) vs. machine as reality betrays the limits of logic.  Because it is
unable to function without its creator or without being a creator’s operative, the machine does not function logically; it does
 function as would a human mind with all the mental functions (including instinct for conduct) enclosed.  One of today’s most
sensitive issues is the disregard

                                       V  A028  

for the sanctity of life.  Nomad shows how pure Hellenism can enhance such insensitivity.  As a machine, Nomad had a predatory
relationship toward life.  Its dependence on its “creator” and its illogic were its eventual undoing.  The M-5 is not just detached
intelligent, passive in nature and function. The excessive presence of human engrams does affect the ability to make logical decisions.

             The M-5 is a computer with a conscience (Hebraic).  It has doubt, qualms, mortality, hatred, etc.  Daystrom’s barely-
suppressed hatred for people who are getting rich building on “my work” finds its way into his conscious mind.  It is then transferred
by the synops (keys to the collective unconscious) onto the personal unconscious of the M-5.  The destruction of the “Woden”
shows Daystrom’s contempt for Starfleet and its “mighty warships” emerging into consciousness.  Each time the M-5 acts, it
becomes more consciously destructive.  The psychosis is present because Kirk has to tell M-5 to scan the Excaliber to see
that all are dead.  The M-5 should have known it had killed.  The M-5, as a machine, is not supposed to act with a moral
imperative as part of its programming.  But it does.  It has Daystrom’s (indeed Western civilization’s) moral sensitivity.  M-5
is very similar to Hall-9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  Hal was not taught to lie, but when ordered to do so by
Washington C.I.A., it became paranoid and it too murdered.  Daystrom’s perfectionism kills.  Hellenism can (if abused) kill. 
Daystrom’s Hebraic conscience is at war with his Hellenic genius:

                        Daystrom:  You’re…we…are killing, murdering human beings.  Beings

       of our own kind.  You were not created for that purpose.  You

       were my greatest creation…the unit to save men.  You must

       not destroy men.
 

                                        V  A029  

Whereas Nomad’s reverence for its “Creator” kept it from an early destruction of the Enterprise, only Daystrom’s and Kirk’s
appeal to Hebraic conscience keeps Hellenism from destroying the remaining three starships in the “war games” test of Act II:

                                  Daystrom:  Yes, survive, protect yourself.  But not murder.  You must

                not die; men must not die.  To kill is a breaking of civil and

                moral laws we have lived by for thousands of years.  You

                have murdered hundreds of people…we murdered.  How

                can we repay that…

Kirk:  Spock, the M-5 isn’t responding like a computer.  It’s talking to him.

More like talking with him would be correct.  The M-5 is bent on killing.  Daystrom’s suppressed hatred of himself and others
who mock him becomes conscious to him only through the actions of the M-5:

                        Daystrom:  We will survive.  Nothing can hurt you.  I gave you that

       twenty years of groping to prove the things I had done

       before weren’t accidents.  Seminars and lectures to rows of

       fools who couldn’t understand my systems…colleagues

       laughing behind my back at the “boy wonder” and becoming

       famous building on my work…building on my work.

It is with the above personal unconscious on his brain’s synaps that Daystrom built the M-5.  As Daystrom collapses, the viewer
becomes aware that a mercurial grudge is not the only factor in Hellenism’s M-5—“the unit to save men.”  This seems ironic earlier
when Kirk lets loose:  “That wasn’t a robot.  That thing murdered one of my crewmen, and now you tell me you can’t turn it off!!?” 
The faulty major premise maintaining Daystrom’s Hellenism is his cultural concept of man’s role in space.  His machine will “free” man:

                        Man can live and go on to greater things than fact finding and

dying for galactic space which is neither ours to give nor take.

Contrast the above with reality:

                        K:  There’s your murder charge.  That thing is murdering men and

 

                                                                                                                                                                 V  A030       

                              worse!  Four starships…over sixteen hundred men and women

     …Daystrom!!   

The major premise, as stated above, is that man must not die in space exploration.  This is faulty logic, especially in an “Achiever”
typology such as that permeating Star Trek. It is the function of man and machine to boldly go where no man has gone before. 
This involves risk.  Risk is what Trek is all about.  It keeps man ahead of his machines.  For man to achieve, he is willing to risk
death in space.  This thinking landed man on the moon.  Avoiding risk, avoiding death, is Daystrom’s misconception of man’s
relationship to the final frontier:

                        Computer voice:  this unit is the ultimate achievement in computer

                                                     evolution.  It will replace man so man may achieve. 

                                                     Man must not risk death in space or in other dangerous

                                                     occupations.  This unit must survive so man can be protected.

Yet, M-5 goes out of its way to contradict its major premise.  It replaces man—by killing him.  It makes space a very dangerous
place.  It is an Hellenic device (a product of a logical mind seeking truth and beauty—consciously) which opens itself to suicide to
atone for the “sin” of murder (Hebraic thinking).  The M-5 says, in a take-out (First Draft:  12/5/67) “Man must not be murdered” 

                        Kirk:  Why?

                        Computer voice:  Murder is contrary to the laws of man and God.

                        Kirk:  You have murdered.  Scan the starship Excaliber

                                  which you destroyed…is there life aboard?

                        Computer voice:  No life.

                        Kirk:  Because you murdered it.  What is the penalty for murder?

                       Computer voice:  Death.

                        Kirk:  And how will you pay for your act of murder?

                        Computer voice:  This unit must die.

                                          V  A031    

It is not intellect that ends the M-5’s streak of terror.  It is its instinct for conduct which Kirk brings to ego and consciousness. 
The victory is a loss of great mechanical potential, a loss of the sense of order Hellenism requires.  The M-5 is a moral issue while,
simultaneously a mental and mechanical issue.  Its failure was faulty logic and faulty morality.  Man is not ready for ulterior versions
of bitterness and sour grapes.  Daystrom was too unbalanced and too faithless:

                        The Sea of Faith

                        Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

                        Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

                        But now I only hear

                        Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

                        Retreating, to the breath

                        Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear

                        And naked shingles of the world

--(M. Arnold “Dover Beach” 1851)..

“The Ultimate Computer” is a brave teleplay by D.C. Fontana.  It has a look at realities.  The problem of power: me vs. it?  There
 is also the Dunsel factor.  “All you have to do is sit back and let the machine do the work,” Wesley tells a worried Kirk.  “I don’t
like it…I’d resign,” quips McCoy.  The fear is that of idleness, an identification based on one’s function or joy (Hebraic).  Also of
control, a fear of do-nothingness, be-nothingness (Hellenic thinking).  Themes converge when Kirk raises the key issue:  “These are
certain things men must do to remain men.”  The computer would take that away.  Many men would be out of a job if that machine
works!  Mild paranoia is understandable:  “That thing is wrong…I don’t know why.”  Yet Kirk does not want to be the fool who
stands in the way of progress.  There is the fear of idleness mixed with ego diminution, the loss of prestige allotted a Starfleet captain. 
But the Dunsel factor is damning because Kirk is not listed with the landing party.  He has become “non-essential personnel,” “at odds”
with his ship.  He is no longer in control, and that is hell to a Hellenist.
 

                                                                                                                                                              V A032  

            For Spock, the M-5 is not the “right computer” either, in spite of McCoy’s mating joke.  As a Hellenic thinker himself,
Spock remains very objective, more bemused by the M-5 than Kirk and McCoy.  “Machine over man?” asks McCoy.  Spock
is able to make the logical distinction between personalism and objective reality.  “Computers make excellent servants,” but “I
would not want to serve under one.”  He is fascinated at the M-5’s rapid logical selections while still remaining sensitive to the
Dunsel factor—a nasty remark from Commodore Wesley, almost sadistic.  “A part that serves no purpose” is a reality every
thinking human being must consider and respect.  Hellenism is a confronting logician here, as long as one’s identity transcends
doing into being.  Kirk is delighted to keep his job when “M-5 is out of a job.”  He then will have power and control.  Kirk
knows himself rather well, but he makes an interesting foil to Daystrom whose psychosis keeps him from predicting the M-5’s
behavior.  He is surprised by it, perplexed by it, driven mad by it; however, “He should have known how it [M-5] would react.” 
Correct, if consciousness is not impaired.  The M-5 is his “child” who has gone “antisocial.”  Such a parent, according to McCoy,
would “protect that child,” failing, through lack of empirical objectivity, to see any problem.

            “Every living thing wants to survive” is a major sub-theme of the episode.  It puts logic on the frontier of human survival.  This
is an aphorism, but its matrix is not logical; however, death is.  One cannot survive by murder.  Laputa has one more “bad reasoner.” 
Commodore Wesley (Gene Roddenberry’s middle name is Wesley) has a forgettable role as the bearer of the Dunsel compliment and
the bearer of humanism.  Instead of destroying the Enterprise with her shields shown, he veered off and halted the attack.  Kirk
notes, “I gambled on his humanity,” a

                                   V  A033  

weak line at best.  “His logical selection was compassion” is ala D.C. Fontana.  So “machines are more efficient than human
beings, not better” notes Spock.  The warfare between man and machine is not the true one here.  It’s human sense of order vs.
human instinct for order,  control…regain control…power off…power on.  It is an episode calling for a thoughtful and
confrontational ethic of getting man involved in the mind and in the Not-me.  There is a kind of détente here, along Blakian lines: 
I hate you, but I’m going to let you exist.

            Reason is often defined as mortality at odds with logic, and reason is well-explored in this episode.  If a machine is better
than the ME, pull the plug.  It shouldn’t be an autonomous being.  All through the episode, what Daystrom is thinking is alien to
what everyone else is thinking.  He is a genius.  For him, his compassion and Protestant ethic regarding murder are salvific factors
in his favor.  He is Hellenistic in brilliance, isolated brilliance, sweetness and life (confident, but restless and a little afraid).  After
all, one cannot control one’s engrams, but the synaps are a conscious factor.  The lowly are exalted and the exalted are certainly l
aid low:

                        My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,

                        Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

                        Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay

                        Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

                        The lone and level sands stretch far away      

(Percy Shelley “Ozymandias,” 1817).




 

                                XXXX
                              finis “The Ultimate Computer”)
                                            XXXX

 

                                                                                                                                                             V  A034  
Kirk vs. the Computer:          
            

                                                                                    "Court Martial”  
 
                                                                                                                                                                

Alexander Pope once defined reason in terms of acquired virtues:

                        Know, all the good that individuals find,

                        Or God and Nature meant to mere Mankind,

                        Reason’s whole pleasures, all the joys of Sense,

                        Lie in three words, Health, Peace, and Confidence

(Essay on Man IV, 3 1733). 

In “Courtmartial,” Kirk goes on trial for perjury and culpable negligence which “did cause loss of life, to wit, the life of Lt. Commander
Finney, Benjamin.”  Kirk’s competence is questioned and his confidence shaken.  In an interdepartmental memo dated April 23, 1966,
Gene Roddenberry explains to John D.F. Black an approach of revisions to Don Mankiewicz’s story: 

                        This is the story of Captain Kirk fighting for his professional life.  It may

appear at first that someone somehow is out to get him.  The changes in

the records are few and highly subtle, but sufficient to damn him.  Or,

indeed, is the record accurate and does Kirk and others have some of

failing of memory?  Kirk begins to doubt himself.

For Roddenberry, “it will take Spock to pull him [Kirk] out of that.”  And so it does.  “Court Martial” is a mystery story—a whatdunit
and a whodunit.  But the question of reason’s “health” and competence make “peace” unlikely.  There are three contexts noteworthy: 
Stone’s office, the courtroom, and the bridge of the Enterprise.  The prosecutor is a female who still loves Kirk, Areel Shaw.  She
commits a violation of the court in informing Kirk that the prosecution will base its case on Kirk vs. the Computer.  But Kirk’s greatest
opponent is not just his self-doubt, but the Enterprise is exhibit A for the prosecution—the computer memory log extract of his own
starship.  There is a battle to be waged, part of it on the bridge, between Kirk and the Enterprise’s own logic system.  In essence,
the computer is the bad guy (it denies Kirk’s

                                      V  A035  

own memory) and the good guy, because it is the same computer that provides Spock with the chess games he wins (but should not)
and with the heartbeat sonar that proves Ben Finney is still alive.  Kirk is acquitted.  Areel Shaw’s best witness is the ship’s (actually…
Spock as ad hoc law clerk and amicus curiae) best defense is the computer’s memory banks.  “Computers don’t lie,” Cogley asserts
before the verdict.  But they can have faulty memories and faulty Records Officers, like Ben Finney.  It is Kirk vs. a log entry years ago
entering Finney’s failure to close a valve to the atomic matter pile (U.S.S. Republic).  Finney’s error put him at the bottom of the
promotion list.  Finney feels that Kirk ruined his reputation and his career, that he (Finney) should have been given command of the
Enterprise.  In a sense, it is Kirk v. Kirk’s character as punctualistic perfectionist, as Captain By-the-Book, in the past and in the
present.  He gives Finney the ion-pod duty because Finney’s name is next on the duty roster.

            The fallacy behind this story of logic as law, of logic as objective to a fault, is that “computers don’t lie,” that a data processing
device has the same legal rights as a man.  It is a story of the legal system as a “bad reasoner.”  Kirk is damned and his career lost if
that machine has human rights:

                        Cogley:  There’s still time to change our plea.  I could get you off.

                         Kirk:  Two days ago, I would have staked anything on my judgement…

                        Cogley:  You did.  Your professional career.

                        Kirk:  I spent my whole life training for decisions like that one…my

                                 whole life.  Is it possible that when the moment came, I…No!

Although Gene Roddenberry wanted the issue of human rights downplayed, the cause and history show Roddenberry need not
have had skepticism about it being too much of an abstraction.  The courtroom has little drama until Spock presents, not just the
abstraction, but

                                        V  A036  

human rights (another cause de celebre today), but philosophical facts enough to warrant moving the trial aboard the Enterprise. 
Again Pope presents the logic of event, of contest:

                        But Fortune’s gifts if each alike possest,

                        And each were equal, must not all contest?

                        If then to all men Happiness was meant,

                        God in Externals could not place Content

(A. Pope, Essay on Man, IV).

Theatrics or not, Cogley is a logical “Crackpot,” a Woodstock has been who loves the ultimate symbol of Hellenic thinking, books! 
He asks:  “Is saving an innocent man’s career a theatric?…I have something human to talk about.  Rights, sir!”  The missing “right”
 in the trial is the machine as defense witness.  The soliloquy is impressive and entertaining, but also devastating to the stonefaced board:

                        Cogley:  Human rights.  The Bible.  The code of Hammurabi, and 

              of Justinian.  Magna Carta.  The Constitution of the United

              States.  Fundamental Declaraions of the Martian Colonies.  The

              Statutes of Alpha Three!  These documents all speak of rights. 

              Rights of the accused to a trial by his peers.  To be represented

              by counsel.  The rights of cross-examination.  But most importantly

                                      …the right to be confronted by the witness against him…a right

  to which my client has been denied.  The most devastating witness

  against my client is not a human being; it’s a machine, an inform-

  formation system…the computer log of the Enterprise!

Based on the legal logic of human rights vs. the computer, Cogley demands the court reconvene aboard the Enterprise because
|Kirk has the right to face his accuser—his own vessel’s computer, the brain that controls the ship.  Cogley wants order and
“Peace” through competence:

                        Aspiring to the Gods, if Angel fell,

                        Aspiring to the Angels, men rebel:

                        And who but wishes to invert the laws

                        Of Order, sins against th’Eternal Cause

                                                                        ( Pope, Essay on Man, I).

 

                                     V  A037  

In the Final Draft (Sep.26, 1966) of “Court Martial,” Cogley “calls the trial an “Arena,” a “Circus” to disallow Shaw’s
accusations of turning the trial into a circus.  To Cogley, it is an arena, “Captain Kirk will live or die…for if you take his
 command away, he is a dead man!”

            The logic of a machine cannot be raised above humanity.  Even if the accuser is a machine, Kirk has that right to face
his own computer, almost as though Kirk were at odds with his own logic:

                        Cogley:  I speak of rights!  A machine has none…my client has the right

                                       to confront his accuser…if you do not grant him that right, you

               have not only placed us on a level with the machine, but you

               have indeed elevated the machine above us.

The episode’s major theme is Kirk vs. the computer, with the human rights issue of  “a humanity fading in the shadow of the
machine.”  Cogley gets his request.  It is Hellenic mechanism vs. humanism—an enduring theme in Gene Roddenberry’s works. 

            To base a court martial on the misuse of logic, preconceptions may be present.  Thinking must be perverted for Kirk
even to stand trial.  As Spock notes on the witness stand, “It is impossible for Captain Kirk to act out of panic or malice. 
It is not his nature.”  But could Kirk, through thinking, act irrationally?  Using the machine as proof of guilt precludes human
thinking and human nature from the judicial process.  Carl Jung notes the nature of extraverted thinking as one “oriented by the
object and objective data.”  Therefore, since the computer’s log is oriented by a subject (a man) and subverted to a personal
end, the thinking is not thinking.  (Jung,  Psychological Types, 342).  It is riddled with unconscious thinking:

                        Judgment always presupposes a criterion…supplied by external

conditions is the valid and determining one, no matter whether it

is represented directly by an objective, perceptible fact or by an


 

                                      V  A038  

                        Objective idea; for an objective idea is equally determined by external

data or borrowed from outside even when it is subjectively sanctioned

(Jung, Psychological Types, 342).

The preconceptions of an automation like Stone, a lover like Shaw, and a crackpot like Cogley leave little doubt about the law
and thinking.  It is the purpose of the legal system to perpetuate befuddlement and, as in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, death by a
logic without reason.

            The last object to be considered in “Court Martial” and its trial is Kirk’s character and reputation.  In fact, Kirk is not the
law’s real issue at all.  Each character is so dehumanized by law without justice that Cogley says “the defense rests” before Spock
(adhoc amicus curiae and Vulcan D.U. J.) enters with the chess factors.  The system has no scruples, no morals.  The legal
system, Hellenism’s pride with its statutes of x and constitutions of y, is a failure.  It even fails to think; it fails to consider the
logical relationship of deductions to be logically extrapolated from concrete facts.  Only Kirk’s court on the Enterprise breaks
the log jam of befuddlement, noise without objective cause or logical course.  Spock is thinking: 

                        McCoy:  Well, I had to see it to believe it.

Spock:  Explain.

McCoy:  They’re about to lob off the Captain’s professional

               head and you’re sitting here playing chess with the

               computer.

  Spock:  That is true.

McCoy:  You are the most cold-blooded man I have ever known.

  Spock:  Why, thank you, doctor.  I’ve just won my fourth game…

                Mechanically, the computer is flawless.  Therefore, logically

                its report of the Captain’s guilt is infallible.  I could not accept

                that, however.

McCoy:  So you tested the program bank.

The scene is the best in the episode with its humor and its pathos.  Thinking is something lawyers dare not do, and dare not appear
to do in court.  They must perpetuate befuddlement
 

                                 V  A039  

while logic, order, health, peace, and competence run in sheer terror of the harpies of befuddlement.  The truth?  Never!  …
Befuddlement?  Forever!

            What the episode criticizes is law without justice.  It needs thought and a “sense of order,” and an “instinct for conduct” 
(M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy). But what is lacking is a sense for truth.  Before Spock’s appearance after the defense rests,
the legal system saw logic with inverted vision.  As Jung notes in Psychological Types, “A thinking that is directed neither to
objective facts nor to general ideas one might argue, scarcely deserves the name ‘thinking’ at all.” 

            What is truth in “Court Martial”?  It is reason aimed only myopically at the object.  Logic is variations on a theme by uncertainty. 
Logic is “regulations, Captain” says the face of Stone.  Logic is Stone’s jealousy of Kirk; it is forcing Kirk to take a ground assignment,
to brush the Truth under the rug, to destroy a man lest he dishonor the service by being the first captain to stand trial.  Logic is prejudice.

            Logic is a child (Jame) crying in the night:

                        Jame:  There you are!  I just wanted one more look at you…the man

                                    who killed my father…you hated him!  You murderer.

This is a tone different from the Jame who later apologizes, having just read her father’s letters.  Had she not read them earlier? 
She is spleen without thought.

            Logic is a legal technicality.  The entire trial is all about a technicality, not about Kirk at all.  It is a question of order and
procedure, not about a dead Finney or a disgraced Kirk.  To wit, was the ion-pod jettisoned before or during the red alert?  It is
not “did Kirk kill Finney,” but did one go by the book.  One cannot jettison the pod during yellow alert because there is, as yet, no

                                   V  A040  

emergency.  All the befuddlement is keeping truth away from the legal proceeding.  There is no Hellenic order or truth.  There is
just procedure.  It is not Hebraic conscience, moral law, or compassion.  It is a myopic Hellenism of trial by technicality:

                        Stone:  Captain Kirk, you say you jettisoned the pod after the red alert.

                          Kirk:  You have my sworn deposition.

                         Stone:  Then, Captain, I must presume you have committed willful

                                     perjury.  This extract from your computer log says you jet-

 tisoned the pod before going to red alert.

As the screen in the courtroom displays the computer extract, only logic as technicality is the

legal issue:

                                  …the log plainly shows the defendant’s finger pressing the jettison

                                  button.  The condition signal reads yellow alert.  NOT RED ALERT,

                                  but simply yellow alert.  When the pod containing Lt. Commander

                                  Finney was jettisoned, the emergency did not as yet exist!

Logic is not a murder.  Logic is a little red light.  “Wrong must not be won by technicalities” (Aeschylus, The Eumenides 458 BC). 

            Logic is colleagues, classmates who in their jealousy of Kirk’s successful list of awards, ribbons, etc., chose to shun him. 
As Charlotte Bronte once said in a journal, “nevermind my enemies.  God save me from my friends.”  Kirk sadly notes, “You’ve
already made up your minds.”  Logic is hanging him high.  Logic is the ox-bow incident.

            Logic is friends of a glandular propensity.  Kirk is very charming and polite before and after he knows Areel Shaw’s role
as prosecutor.  She still loves him.  Love as logic is also McCoy’s wonderful loyalty and humor:

                        Shaw:  Areel Shaw. And I’m a friend, too.  An old one.

                        McCoy:  All my old friends look like doctors.  All his old

                                       friends look like you…he needs all the friends he can get.

Logic can be love and loyalty, objective emotion.

                                                                                                                                                            V  A041  

            Logic is history.  Finney made a mistake on watch.  A then-younger Kirk found the circuit open to the atomic matter piles. 
They would have blown up in minutes.  Logic is duty, going by the book, orders without personal coloring.  Hellenism kept the
U.S.S. Republic from blowing up.  Logic is detached perspective.  Logic is correctness and impartiality. 

            For Stone, logic is death-in-life, lying “for the good of the service”; it is a cover up; it is politics; it is physical breakdown
for Kirk, even “mental collapse.”  Logic is buried before the coroner’s report.

            Logic is memory and self-sentience.  It is “I know what I did.”  Logic is self-doubt:  “Could I have…?"  Logic is ego: 

                        Kirk:  So that’s the way we do it now…sweep it under the rug and me along

                                  with it.  Not on your life.  I intend to fight.

            Stone:  Then you draw a general court. 

            Kirk:  Draw it?  I demand it right now, Commodore Stone, right now!

Logic is Kirk’s naïveté about the aim and labyrinthine of  Dickens’ Jarndyce v. Jarndyce:  befuddlement.  Kirk is depending on
his impressive military record, all listed in the computer.  He is too at ease in that witness chair reading platitudes of  “I took the
proper steps in the proper order.  I did exactly what had to be done, exactly when it should have been done…nothing is more
important than my ship.” 

            Logic is the irrelevancy of a brilliant career.  Logical is the “king of the hill” game.  Logic is the “confidence of an innocent man.” 
That logic makes his guilt a certainty.  Logic is not seeing the truth.  Logic is stepping into scandal.  Logic is “they’ll slap you down—
hard and permanently…for the good of the service” (Areel Shaw).  Logic is no method in choosing an attorney.  Logic is books. 
Hellenism loves books!  But Cogley is just a cog in a wheel, as much a pain as a rook.  His choice to ignore computers
(“I never use them”) does not qualify him in a

                                       V  A042  

trial of Kirk v. the computer.  Logic is not following proper court procedure (explained in the First Draft of Sep. 26,1966).  The
defense does not begin until after the prosecution rests.  Logic is shoddy ritual.

            Logic is witnesses.  They can be turned against their captain on grounds of evidence admissible, especially when Cogley
fails to object to inadmissible evidence and improper prosecution examination.  McCoy is made to say anything is “possible.” 
Spock is forced to adumbrate his logic with “in my opinion.” All retain befuddlement by technicality, i.e., that Kirk was reacting
to an “extreme emergency that did not then exist” (Areel Shaw).  Logic is “possible” vs. “probable.”

            Logic is “They don’t forget.”  Starfleet does not forget Finney’s one mistake.  Kirk’s classmates do not forget Kirk’s
culpable negligence.  Finney was their friend.  Logic is law that has not justice, just as a machine has no conscience.  Logic is a
game of chess.  The courtroom is a power play.  The trial is a game of chess.  It is Spock winning against the computer.  It is
check and checkmate.

            Logic only becomes law when the computer loses at chess:

                        Spock:  I personally programmed that computer for chess myself, months ago.

                                     I gave the machine an understanding of the game equal to my own.  The

                                    computer cannot make an error.  And, assuming that I do not either—

                                    the very best that could normally be hoped for was stalemate---after

                                    stalemate.  And yet I beat the computer five times.  Someone either

                        accidentally or deliberately adjusted the programming, and therefore,

                        the memory bank of that computer.

 

                                                                                                                                                              V  A043  

Therefore a computer can lie; it can be misinformed and, therefore, misinforming, i.e., wrong in its depiction of reality.

                        Here too all forms of social union find,

                        and hence let Reason, late, instruct Mankind…

                        In vain thy Reason finer webs shall draw,

                        Entangle Justice in her net of Law…

(Pope, Essay on Man  III).

            While hearts beat on the Enterprise bridge, one “bad reasoner” is in Engineering—Finney, quite alive.  The Enterprise has
shut down its engines for the sake of the trial, and her orbit decays in proportion to Finney’s decaying mental and physical condition. 
Symbolically, as its variance fades and its orbit stabilizes, Kirk has helped himself and the computer to remove any grounds for
culpable negligence and willful perjury.  The orbit is stabilized and “all secure” as Stone rules that the court be dismissed.  Areel
Shaw’s kissing Kirk on the bridge will appear on the next computer log extract.  “She’s a very good lawyer.” Thomas Henry
Huxley compares education to a game of chess, a “mighty game.”:

                        What I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game…

                        Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under

                        Which name I include things and their forces, but men and their ways;

                        And the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and

                        loving desire to move in harmony with those laws

(Huxley, A Liberal Education, 1868).

XXXX

finis “Courtmartial”

XXXX
                                                                          

                                                                                                                                                                 V  A044

                                                                      “The Return of the Archons”   

                                                                   
                                                         

The Good of the Body

             In this complex episode, man confronts a machine’s concept of a Utopian society.  The machine mirrors its creator,
Landru, and assumes his name.  Landru’s answer to extensive wars six thousand years ago was to isolate that energy into a
specific time span.  As Tennyson notes about dehumanization:

                        For what are men better than sheep or goats

                        That nourish a blind life within the brain…

                        (“The Passing of Arthur”  Idylls of the King 1869).

This is a study of a wasteland “Where no one comes/or hath come, since the making of the world” (ibid).  It is the despotism
of custom, the tyranny of mechanization.  What is worse are human beings who are no longer human.  They are zombies,
soulless bipeds filled with empty conversation, vacant mindlessness and slow motion by day; however, at Festival, they are
rapacious, destructive of self and environment.  These are the light and the dark sides of human nature---one is control and
restraint; one is no control, no restraint---almost Apollonian and Dionysian in behavior.  Landru has built his mechanistic
society upon the nature of man’s human needs as he perceived them, but with the intent of castrating individuality completely. 
If one is not of the body, one is an infection that must be absorbed (neutered) into meaningless collectivity.  The picture is
terrifying and all too depictive of police states, dictatorships where free will is given away in order to avoid the onus of choice
and responsibility inherent to liberty.  As Wm. Blake notes:

                        Those who restrain desire, do so

                        because theirs is weak enough to

                        be restrained; and the restrainter

                        or reasoner usurps its place and

                        governs the unwilling.

                        And being restrained, it by degrees

                        Becomes passive, till it is

                                      V  A045  

Only the shadow of desire.

                                                 (Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Plate 5).

The governor of this restrained group is called (by Blake) Reason.  Desperate men seek desperate solutions that create despots
and more despotism.  For, as Reger explains:

                        There was war…and convulsions

                        …the world was destroying itself.

                        Landru was our leader.  He saw

                        the truth.  He changed the world.  He

                        took us back, back to a simple

                        time, a time of peace and tranquility.

The mechanistic “solution” for war is overreaction, an imposed peace without humanity—no choice, no will, no needs.  It is peace
at all cost.  For Marplon, Reger and Tamar, the underground who are somehow exempt from absorption into collective
mindlessness, Landru is both a blessing and a curse.  He protects them with security, but he has caused them to destroy
themselves from the inside.  They hate themselves for their own cowardice, Marplon especially.  He is caught between tyranny
and freedom:

                        Marplon:  He is here now.  He sees…he hears…we have destroyed

                                         ourselves…please…no more.

                         Kirk:  You said you wanted freedom.  It’s time you learned that

                                         freedom is never a gift.  It has to be earned.

Marplon is terrified of the freedom he so desperately wants.  He fears freedom almost as much as he fears Landru.

            Landru is based on andros, the Greek term for man.  Archon is also Greek; it means builder.  The episode encircles the
abstract definition of man.  Landru was a man; he is dead.  His machine is not he, but it imposes peace upon men, making them
vacant and empty-headed.  The original Archon (ship) was pulled from the sky.  The Enterprise might have suffered the

                                         V  A046  

same fate had Kirk and Spock agreed that a machine and only a computer could run such an orderly, but vacant, society.  The
builders meet the new version of an ultimate computer.  It is a machine’s concept of Hellenic society.  The price of this perfection
is “no soul”:

                        Landru:  I am Landru!  I am he!  All that he was, I am.  His experience,

                                      his knowledge…

                        Kirk:  But not his wisdom…he could not have given you a soul.  You

                                      are a machine.

Kirk puts Landru back into its passive perspective of a computer that answers a builder’s questions.  He makes the machine
subservient by the same basic logic vs. illogic argument that managed the suicides of Nomad and the M-5.  “The good of the
body” is the prime directive.  Here Roddenberry’s principle of dynamism flips into motion.  Even a society produced by Hellenic
thinking---a mechanistic society is one such--its intellects must be vital and creative.  Man is not human if he is not antagonistic,
annoying, pugilistic, i.e., doing all those dumb, irrational, human things that pure mentality would have transcended.  Landru is not
man; he’s a car whose inspection is overdue and whose thinking is not in keeping with human evolution.  Landru is inertia.  “He who
desires but acts not breeds pestilence,” says Blake.   For Roddenberry, there must be a kinetic intelligence coupled with
constructive action in order to call an ambulatory biped a human being.  Humanity is not an accident of birth; it has to be earned,
minute by minute.  Thus Landru is “harmful to the Body” (Kirk’s new minor premise) because the good of the body is not being
fulfilled.  The Body is dying because Landru the computer fosters and imposes a schismatic dualism upon the people.  Wrong
thinking says that man has two real but separate principles:  a body and a soul.  This dualism, according to Blake and Hegel
(and others) is illogical and unproductive while separate.  The opposite is true:  “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for
that call’d Body is a portion

                                          V  A047  

of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age” (Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). 

            To restore soul, collective zombyism must give way to individual creativity.  The whole must exist only in relation to its
constitutive element:

                   Kirk:  What have you done to do justice to the full potential of every

                              individual of the body?…Without individual freedom of choice

                              there is no creativity.  Without creativity there is no life.  The Body

                              dies!  The fault is yours!

Just as Kirk felt the loss of control of his environment in “Courtmartial,” he insists that every individual be master of his/her fate. 
An Archon is a creative personality.  A key change in the dialogue of Final Draft, November 1, 1966 adds (Landru speaking)
 “But I reserve creativity to me.”  This is a key line because a computer cannot be creative.  It must come from society’s individuals. 
Landru self-destructs because it too has not followed its prime directive.  The gothic henchmen have to start looking for new jobs.

            Spock alludes (final scene) to the Hellenic ideal—“How often mankind has wished for a world as peaceful and secure as
the one Landru provided.”  Kirk says “…we never got it.  Just lucky, I guess.”  But the promise of some paradise regained keeps
man’s quest for perfection alive.  The price of freedom is what Lynstrom alludes to:  “half a dozen domestic quarrels and two
knockdown drugouts.”  It might not be paradise, but it’s certainly human.  Fighting is human.  For Roddenberry, vacant contentment
is not for growing mortals.  Quietude is annoying.  As Zefram Cochrane says in “Metamorphosis,” “immortality consists largely of
boredom.”  Better to be poor and cold than to be rich and warm.  Heat breeds inertia!  Landru

                                      V  A048  

had become a god, an object of reverence.  This also impairs the human spirit.  Hellenic detachment is not usually mortally dynamic. 

            In a Hellenic culture, Kirk notes that experts are being left behind to help restore the planet’s culture “to a human norm.” 
That is soul.  The body is not to be distinct from the soul.  Annoyed at Marplon, Kirk demands, “Snap out of it! And start acting
like men!”  While there is a norm, Hellenic thinking is present, but not tyrannically.  StarTrek's philosophy of culture hates
brainwashing of any kind.  It fears right wing conservatism’s Jonestown hysteria of a world full of hapless bipeds who watch
their feet as they walk.  Eyes never meet.  Conversation never wanders beyond how-dee and “have a nice day.”  There’s not an
ounce of thought in empty phrases from empty heads.  Malignant mindlessness is an even deeper problem than the mental cripples
who hang onto any preacher, who will pay any amount of money, just to have something to believe in.  They have not the will to
create their own faith and to will their own course through time.  A great civilization is built on presence, not on absence:

                        Landru:  You have come to a world without hate, without fear, without

                                       conflict…No war, no disease, no crime, none of the ancient evils.

Landru describes the “universal good” as a catalogue of no’s.  A world is built upon yes’s, not no’s.  All false prophets like Landru
who pronounce joy, peace and contentment, brotherhood, prey on the weak of mind, on the mindless, on dependent, insecure
personalities.  The concept of “the Body” is frightening because it represents the unthinking masses who have the majority of the
votes.  They are the living dead, and they will stone Archons to death.  Ants are collective;  ever see one alone?   Rarely.  They
act as a body with a ruthless efficiency.  “The Body” is not fiction; it is a societal reality that threatens all individuals and creative
thinkers.  Hitler had to shoot the intellectuals first, then

                                          V  A049  

burn the books, then the Jews.  This was “the Body” being summoned by a Landru some fifty years ago.  “The Body” is an
historical fact.  Beware of it.

            “The Return of the Archons” is a testament to liberty.  Landru can permit no liberty because it is incompatible with
mechanistic “thinking.”  “The good must transcend the evil…your individuality will merge into the unity of good.”  John Stewart
Mill, in his essay On Liberty (1859), is the philosophical father of anti-Bodyism.  To absorb is to kill, just as Nomad’s “sterilize”
meant to kill.  Custom means “customary character.”  Custom also “does not develop…any of the qualities which are the
destructive endowment of a human being.”  “Custom makes no choice.”  The Body consists of “automatons in human form.”

                        Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do

exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow

and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward

forces which make it a living thing (Mill On Liberty 1859).

Mill fosters Trek's positive characteristics:  strong impulses, energy, individuality, genius, originality and creativity.  It abhors
conformity because it likes crowds, it exercises choice “only among things commonly done.” “They have no nature to follow; t
heir human capacities are withered and starved.”  They obey the will of Landru because they have no self-will.  They like
“you must do” and “whatever is not a duty is a sin.”  Mill continues to castigate concepts like “the Body” because:

                        The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render

Mediocrity the ascendant power…at present individuals are lost in the crowd…They are always a

mass…collective mediocrity…the idea

of character is to be without any marked character:  to maim by

compression, like a Chinese lady’s foot…Despotism of the custom

is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement…

(J. S. Mill On Liberty, 111).

                                      V  A050  

To combat tyranny of opinion, foster “eccentricity” and ‘Pagan self-assertion,’ the “Greek ideal of self-development.”  Through
individuality, a person becomes “more valuable” to himself “and…is capable of being of more value to others.”  The Body
absorbs Archons because individuality and thought are threats to the mob.  Both Mill and Roddenberry share the same
philosophy which says, “the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty.” This means less mechanical
thoughtlessness and no “censorship.”  Beware of those bipeds who have been absorbed.  The white shirts are on the way. 
 “Freedom is never a gift; it has to be earned” (Kirk).

            There is no Landru in the human sense.  “Landru must die.”  The intelligence of the Body towards outsiders has a
religious fervor to it.  Only those taking some pills praising big-brother can say, as Sulu does, “They’re wonderful…the
sweetest, friendliest people in the universe…it’s paradise.”  Before festival, Bilac is sickeningly pleasant.  At festival, he
rapes Tula.  To separate the world into night and day is a scientific condition, but to separate man into day (light, reason)
and night (red hour, orgies, violence) is to present a fallacious dualism and a unnatural, mechanistic society.  Where man
is never a person (fully) at any given, integrated moment in time.  The majority of mankind has been absorbed—politicians,
Philistines, troglytes—and they do not even know it until an Archon appears.  If there is a paradise, it is still the one that
was lost:

                        Now the sneaking serpent walks

                        In mild humility,

                        And the just man rages in the wilds

                        Where laws roam

(Wm. Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).

                                     V  A051  

When Star Trek deals with the machine, it is raising a conflict—physical and metaphysical; people feel scared, paranoid. 
It is a quest for Greek balance and one is expected not to overreact to a situation.  Landru may be described as a
compulsive, involuntary stimulus early in the drama, but people let it become voluntary.  The sheep always outnumber
the shepherd.  In Landru, there is nothing left from the human point of view.  People are entities.  They have been
programmed; their brains have dried up; their wills are barren fields.  To be a builder is to go against the establishment. 
The thinker, as Carlyle notes, is doomed to wander homeless.  To be an Archon is to be an isolated thinker, a good
reasoner.  People feel threatened by intelligence.  The more one thinks, the more people hate it.  Malignant mindlessness
is a killer.  Nazism is implicit in the episode.  In American society, thinkers are shot.  People are desperate for some sense
of direction.  They are willing to be led.  Festival is the Dionysian price a mechanistic culture pays for freedom from liberty. 
It is thus not allowed to be human.  Festival satisfies the basic libido drives.  Logic recognizes that man has a strong illogical
side and it must have time to express this.  The more the repression, the greater the volcanic eruption.  The person who does
not think at all is society’s ultimate waste.  One cannot be human without a fight.  A civilized society needs a few odd-balls
and eccentric types.  Without an odd-ball at the party, stay home.  Liberty is an endangered species:

                        Our freedom as free lanced

                        Advances towards its end;

                        The earth compels, upon it                   

Sonnets and birds descend;

And soon, my friend,

We shall have no time for dances

(Louis MacNeice “The Sunlight on the Garden” 1937).

V  A052  

XXXX

(finis  “The Return of the Archons”)

XXXX

                                                                                                                                                                       V  A053 

                                                  “For the World is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky”    
                                                  

            Yonada is some thing of an updated but benign flying island of Laputa.  It is a busy little ball in space with the descendents
of the Fabrini, in flight for over ten thousand years.  In approximately 390 days, the asteroid-spaceship is due to embark on a green
planet promising life to the only remnants of the dead Fabrina solar system.  Yonada is part Hebrew, roughly translatable into beauty
at a distance.  Fabrini is based on Latin, and means makers or creatures.  Their high priestess is the beautiful Natira whose name
denotes birth.  The episode is a modern story of love and expectation.  Its Hellenism is based on its qualities of beauty (Natura +
The People) and on truth, its definition in love, in death, and in destiny.  “For the World is Hollow…” may be Star Trek's most
underrated and sensitive love stories:

                        Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

                        Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;

                        She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

                        Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

                                    (John Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 1819).

Although not zombies like the bipeds of Landru, the Fabrini are “The People” chosen (Biblical) by the Creators.  They walk and
chat in an apparent show of absolute normalcy.  Their garb, however, is reminiscent of some attire in “A Taste of Armageddon.” 
Swift notes of the Laputians:

                        Their heads were all reclined either to the right, or the left; one of their eyes

                        turned inward, and the other directly up to the zenith.  Their outward garments

                        were adorned with the figures of suns, moons, and stars, interwoven with those

                        of fiddles, flutes, harps, trumpets, guitars, harpsichords, and many instruments

                        of music…

                                                (J. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels III, 2).

Except for the old man, the Fabrini go about their routines, although one might wonder where, in a hollow ball, one might go.

                                       V  A054  

            At the heart of Yonada is the truth of its past, its present, and its future.  All are hidden behind the religious and cultural
 center of Yonada, the Oracle.  This is the computer with which Kirk, Spock, and McCoy will have to contend before the truth,
its secrets, are known.  The Oracle is the People’s center of truth and is Hellenic; it is also a god, an object of servile obedience
that binds the people into a cooperative community, using the “instrument of obedience” surgically implanted into the head between
eye and ear (Hebraic). Beauty and Truth are abstractly Hellenic, but the conscience, punishment, and fear are mortal, therefore
Hebraic.  The Oracle is a machine that gives joy, unity, life, security, purpose—but at the price of free will, curiosity, creativity. 
It stultifies free thought and liberty.  As a god, it is worshipped and feared.  As culture, it is revered as cultural truth.  In a sense,
it is both totem and taboo.  It is a fearsome device:

                        Natura:  Oh, Oracle of the People, oh most wise and perfect…

                                     Strangers have come to our world.  They bear instruments

                                     we do not understand…

           Oracle’s Voice:  Then learn what it means to be our enemy…before you learn

                                      what it means to be our friend.

Religion must be maintained by fear and punishment, and the Oracle resembles Jupiter in

Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (as in Aeschylus).

                        Monarch of Gods and Daemons…regard this Earth

                        Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou

                        Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise,

                        And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,

                        With fear and self-contempt and barren hope…

                        Scorn and despair—these are mine empire

                                                            (P. B. Prometheus Unbound, 1819).

And new sheep must tow the party line and memorize Pravada, and recite vespers—or suffer pain and/or death.  Its greeting falls
short of grace.  Religion requires its instrument of obedience. 
 

                                          V  A055  

            “For the World is Hollow…” is a study of love amid truth and how both survive. But what is truth?  It is “your larger
selves that walk the sky” (Gibran 91).  It is in the stars.  The People’s ship is on a collision course with Daran Five just as
McCoy is on a collision course with death, with barely a year to live.  The people of Yonada must be informed, but how will
they react to the spaceship story?  If not, tell them; tell Natira the truth.  They do; she understands and believes with out
altering her faith in the wisdom of the Creators.  The other truth means destroying Yonada to save Daran Five or doing nothing. 
Truth is better than exterminating three billion people on Daran Five.  “Logical…also logical,” Spock muses.

            “For the World is Hollow…,” but that knowledge is forbidden.  The high point in this episode is early in Act II when the
nameless old man enters Natira’s chambers to observe the Trekkers and offer an herb for strength against the power of the Oracle. 
The encounter is legion in StarTrek:

              Kirk:  We’re from outside your world.

  Old Man:  Where is outside?

   Kirk:  Up there…outside…everywhere.

  Old Man:  So they say, also. Years ago I climbed the mountain…even though

                   it is forbidden.

              Kirk:  Why is it forbidden?

  Old Man:  I am not sure…but things are not as they teach us…for the world is

                  hollow, and I have touched the sky.

The statement is simple, but profoundly metaphysical.  It could be censorship, a Communist state, or U.S. mass media.  One only
hears what others want them to hear, the propaganda.  The truth must never be known, or the masses would be beyond control. 
They lie to placate the masses.  The truth is always beyond the comprehension of the troglytes who are unaccustomed to abstract
thought.  The truth lies in the larger self that walks the sky.  It is for philosophers,

                                       V  A056  

dreamers and individuals who face death (as the old man is killed by his instrument of obedience). The few know the truth that
the world is cosmological; it goes beyond the self and one’s tribe or country, or planet.  It is space and in the self:

                          You are not enclosed within your bodies,

nor confined to houses or fields  

                           That which is you dwells above the

                        Mountain and roves with the wind

                                                                        (Gibran, 91).

The Oracle is a controller, a computer assembled by a cultured race facing extinction.  Here, logic is taboo; truth is anathema:

                        Kirk:  “For the world is hollow and I have touched the sky.”

                        Spock:  He said it was forbidden to climb the mountains.

                        Kirk:  Yes, of course it is, because if you did, you’d touch

       the sky and find out you were living on a big ball.  Not

       on a planet, but a space ship.  And that knowledge seems

       to be forbidden.

Natura sees the death of the old man, the prophet, the seer, the joker, the fool.  She has him handled gently:  “He served well…
for many years.”  However, “He was an old man…and old men are sometimes foolish.  But it is written that those of the people
who sin, or speak evil…shall be punished.”

            Amid the truth of a ship of course, of a hollow ball, is a love story where the truth meets the compassion.  Natira sees
McCoy, it is literally love at first sight.  She, as priestess, is aloof and alone.  She has faith in her mission, in her culture and is
liaison between the Oracle and the People.  The appearance of McCoy stirs her restlessness into consciousness.  McCoy’s
death sentence (by Xeno-polycythemia) has clouded him with self-doubt.  Limited time, a sense

                                       V  A057  

of Hebraic death, has altered truth’s normal course.  Time is now precious.  Both people are intelligent and passionate by nature. 
Both seek relief from duty:

                        Natira:  It is not the manner of the People to hide their feelings.

                        McCoy:  Honesty is usually wise.

                        Natira:  Is there a woman for you?

                        McCoy:  No…there isn’t.

                        Natira:  Does McCoy find me attractive?

                        McCoy:   Oh, yes.  Yes, I do.

The conversation exchanges truth’s-of-being in search of a truth.  Natira, the lady of birth, priestess of beauty, is a very contemporary
character, a woman who is direct, but tender and tactful.  She is a seeker of truth.  Truth is her raison d’être.  Love, for her, is
emerging:  “I hope you men of space…of other worlds…hold truth as dear as we do.”  Her explicit wish is for  McCoy to stay
on Yonada “as my mate.”  Love is her new truth, and it will conflict with the Oracle.  McCoy’s truth is one never stated before in
Trek.  His failed marriage and flight into space (a Harry Mudd with a scalpel) result from two truths: loneliness and impending death:

                        McCoy:  If you only knew how much I needed some kind of future, Natira.

Natira:  You have lived a lonely life.

 McCoy:  Yes…very lonely.

Natira:  No more, McCoy.  There will be no more loneliness for you.

The truth is a common, felt experience.  Truth emerges as love, and love is a learning process which, according to Natira, overcomes
differences:  “But is not that the nature of men and women…that the pleasure is in the learning of each other?”  The truth, besides
loneliness, is death, the illness “for which there is no cure.”  The collision course between Yonada and Daran Five is an outward,
symbolic manifestation of the collision courses within the individual souls of McCoy and Natira, and the impending collision of
higher truths.  Thus, truth is death and life.  Truth is time.  And truth is faith:

                                         V  A058  

                        Natira:  Until I saw you there was nothing in my heart.  It sustained

                                     my life, but nothing more.  Now it sings.  I could be happy

                                     to have that feeling for a day…a week…a month…a year…

 whatever the Creators hold in store for us.

Truth is a kiss for Natira and McCoy.

            For Kirk and Spock, the Oracle room holds the more practical facts—getting to the machinery and correcting the ship’s
direction.  They confront religion that “listens to itself”:  “it becomes less and less creative, vital; more and more mechanical…
dissipating itself into Metaphysics”  (Carlyle “Characteristics” 1831).  The Oracle is dogma, not religion as faith.  The role of
religion is as Marx said, “the opiate of the people.”  The Creators give the People a “religion” to satisfy them, to stifle their curiosity. 
J. S. Mill and Gene Roddenberry agree on this point.  The essence of primitive religion is to keep order.  The Creators would be
considered gods by the People.  Truth is sacrilege:  Kirk and Spock have violated the temple and the hospitality of the Fabrini. 
Natira’s indignation is personal as well as priestly:  “Fools!  Do you think we are children!  You can do as you please…commit
whatever offense amuses you!”

            Truth of love enables McCoy to save Kirk and Spock from the death penalty.  Truth means isolation from one’s closest
friends.  McCoy decides to stay on Yonada.  For Kirk, McCoy’s illness and newly-discovered love are an inconvenience.  Early
in the drama, Kirk’s only action is to request a replacement for McCoy.  He also attempts to relieve McCoy of landing party
participation.  When McCoy stays on Yonada, Kirk uses a technicality.  He orders McCoy to return to the ship.  Therefore,
McCoy goes on record as disobeying a command.  Truth is alienation in the face of duty.  McCoy, like Yonada, is expendable. 
His alienation from the Enterprise is a factor in his acceptance of the instrument of obedience.  He submerges his liberty

                                      V  A059  

in the Body, as one of the People.  McCoy’s truth becomes a need for faith to contravene curiosity—the book is an irresistible
temptation.  The Oracle punishes McCoy for revealing the truth of the book that might get the ship on course.  Duty vies with love. 
Truth becomes a vow of obedience to false gods.

            Kirk’s rescue of McCoy and the ensuing revelation of the sacred book’s existence precipitate the play’s climax, and again
Hellenic truth is the matrix of the conflict.  There is “my truth,” “your truth,” “a truth,” …and “the truth.”  For Natira: 

                        …it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the

                        maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way

                                                                                                            (Mill, On Liberty II).

Natira must personally reinterpret the reality of custom in light of the reality of the truth, i.e., that which transcends specific individuals,
beliefs, cultures.  She is a lady of strong mind.  She wills to know the universal truth, the truth of the world.  The dialogue is intense:

                        Kirk:  You must believe that what I’m about to tell you is the truth.

Natira:  Your truth about your world!

Kirk:  Yes, my truth of my world and of your world of Yonada… 

Natira:  You do not obey the law of the Creators.  How can you

             understand my world?

Kirk narrates the history of the Fabrini, explains the planets on the obelisk, speaks of Yonada the ship:  “You are living inside a hollow
ball…on a journey to a promised new planet.”  Natira’s instrument of obedience turns red as clarity of consciousness fights strictness
of conscience: 

                        Natira:  Why was the truth kept from us.  Why should the Creators keep

                                      us in the darkness?…No!  No!  You do not speak the truth.  I

                                      believe only the Oracle.  I believe.

                                        V  A060  

Natira now confronts the Oracle where truths converge into the truth.  In Star Trek, the prime directive necessitates respect
for different truths for different planets, different cultures.  It is nature’s way:  Infinite diversity in its infinite combinations (IDIC). 
But Hellenism and human consciousness seek out a reason beyond all other reasons, a cause of many lesser causes.  The war
between conformity and liberty is tearing Natira apart as the pain of religion’s conformity impairs her will.  Her best line,
“Is truth not truth for all?” is the theme of the episode.  Natira—via McCoy, Kirk and Spock’s influence…has transcended
her tribalism.  She returns the belief without the punishment.  Truth becomes free will:

                        Natira:  They said they spoke the truth.

                       Oracle:  Their truth!

                        Natira:  Is truth not truth for all?

                       Oracle:  The truth of Yonada is your truth.  There can be no other for you.

                        Natira:  I must know the truth of the world.

    Natira (to McCoy):  Your friends have told me of your world.

                        Mc:Coy  They spoke the truth.

                        Natira:  I believe you…I believe.  The Creators kept us in darkness.  There’s

                                     Nothing I can do.  I believe with you…husband.

The instrument of obedience is removed.  Truth is free to all.  It should not be hidden if and when the person has evolved from
conformity to creative thinking.  Once Natira has touched the sky, there is the mountain she has climbed; she sees the
insignificance of divisive, petty truths.  She knows! 

            Spock opens the altar and the ship’s computer mechanisms are the Oracle.  The machine was god for ten thousand years. 
Soon, in a year, the people will read their book and truth will be the truth for all.  Then, metallic idolatry will no longer be necessary. 
 Religion and the computer are one, and will remain so until man is self-sufficient, self-guiding, independent, and free

                                       V  A061  

thinking.  The mechanism is repaired and the ship put back on course.  Natira evolves.  She will remain willingly because “I
understand the great purpose of the Creators.  I shall honor it.”  I shall stay willingly because that is what I must do.”  Truth is
mergence between duty and will.  There is no more fear. 

            The medical knowledge of the Fabrini is a “deus ex machina,” but some way had to be found to keep McCoy in the
series.  A cure (a truth) enables McCoy to reopt for duty.  The truth enables Natira to sustain her duty through free choice. 
The truth is related to beauty because it is love.  Of Star Trek's computers, the Oracle may be the least malignant in that it was
controlled by an entire culture.  The People are much like the children of Israel in Exodus.  Religion is primarily mechanistic, a
sort of Communism but with a good.  The Oracle is a Fascist form of fear to keep the people in line.  The People must do what
they are told.  Right now, the People are not capable of understanding the truth.  The old man is a prophet, like Ezeckiel or like
King Saul, scourged by his Adonai.

                        He who wears his morality but as his

                        best garment were better naked.

                           The wind and the sun will tear no holes

                        in his skin.

                           And he who defines his conduct by ethics

                        imprisons his song-bird in a cage

                                                                        (Gibran, 77).

XXXX

(finis:  “For the World is Hollow…”)

XXXX

                                                                                                                                                       V  A062
 

                                                                            "A Taste of Armageddon”  

                                                          
                                                                                      (–a peculiar variety of diplomacy)                                                                                                                                                                                                     

            In “A Taste of Armageddon,” one encounters a complete absence of the logic of normalcy.  What has been substituted
is the illogic of war as a mechanistic and humanistic norm.  The viewer sees illogic as the logic within the Eminiar VII society. 
One is reminded of the logical inversion of the ontology of the bed in Plato’s The Republic (16):

                        ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘he produces an appearance of one.’

                        ‘And what about the carpenter?  Didn’t you agree that

what he produces is not the form of bed which according

to us is what a bed really is, but a particular bed?’

‘I did.’

‘If then, what he makes is not “what a bed really

is,” his product is not “What is,” but

something which resembles “what without

being it.’ 

“A Taste of Armageddon” has its source in Revelations 16:16; it comes from the Hebrew hac, meaning “mountain” and
Armegddon, the plain of Megiddo, where the last decisive battle between the forces of good and evil will be fought.  It
precludes the Day of Judgment.  The term is normally equated with events just preceding the end of the world.  The title
is not subtle and presents one conception of how in future centuries, the world will end—its mountain, and the plain. 
Substituted for the over-Hollywooded visions of the dies irae, this episode is closer to T.S. Eliot’s concept of the
annihilation of silence:  not with a bang, but a whimper (“The Hollow Men”).  What may be the bathos attending the
final moments of existence will not even fulfill the sci-fi expectations of a Waterloo or a cosmic fire-fight.  No sensory
input on that great day?  No bombs?  No blood?  No devastated cities?  Why, that almost makes the dies irae not
worth waiting for or thinking about.  One might at least have a “good show.”   No—silence; i.e., non-

                                           V  A063  

existence at the chipping of a room of computers.  Mea 3 is dead, but she has twenty-four hours to die!  Of course, to prevent
anarchy, she will just toots into the modern, futuristic crematorium—the disintegration chamber.  Painless, really.  It shows the
extent to which a civilized culture will go to retain a cultural identity through a war of fallacy, i.e., it is not really a war.  But the
Eminians see war as a prerequisite to maintaining peace, health, and competence.  An opposite maintains its opposite, but one
of the opposites does not really exist outside the “war room” and disintegration station #12.  Otherwise, all is well. 
“Bad reasoners,” Swift would say.  Another iota of illogic lies in a false proposition that there is an empirical distinction
between “our culture,” “our civilization,” and “the people.”  This supports the logic of Mea 3 who believes that her love of
life is second to the cultural operatives.  This is the illogic of suicide and of cultural hysteria:

                        Mea:  My life is as dear to me as yours is to you, Captain.

                        Kirk:  Then how can you stand…?

                        Mea:  Don’t you see…if I refuse to report, and others refuse…

                                  then Vendikar would have no choice but to launch real

                                  weapons.  We would have to do the same, to defend

                                  ourselves.  More than people would die then.  Our whole

                                  civilization would be destroyed!  Surely you can see that

                                  ours is a better way.

Her logic says that her compliance with suicide is best for the state.  Individuals, here chosen as a “quota” by computers, count
up to three million dead a year, all willing participants is Eminiar VII’s cultural bad reasoning.  To accept the premise that dead
people permit a civilization to  live by willful acts at a computer’s random, mathematical “attack” is a shock that Kirk and Spock
find hard to believe.  Spock understands the cultural psychosis when he says there is a scientific logic about the imperative, but he
does not approve.  The Eminians have used illogic to separate

                                       V  A064  

ethics from political science.  “Bad reasoners!”  Anan 7 makes the same logical schism when he passionately defends the
five hundred-year-old-war:  “Our civilization lives…The people die, but our culture goes on.”  Military intelligence is a paradox
in terms.  The logic of a death quota (the primitive body count) has not changed from 1900-future.  War is more important for
the body count than it is for winning or losing.  First keep a correct count, and keep the count high so we can ask for more
people to vaporize.  The logic of Heller’s Catch-22 is irresistible.  Doc Daneeka had to put in so many flying hours.  He hated
flying, especially in Mcwatt’s plane.  Doc’s name was on McWatt’s passenger manifest, but Doc never boarded the plane which
McWatt deliberately crashed into a mountainside.  Because Doc Daneeka’s name was on the manifest because the plane crashed,
therefore Doc Daneeka is “dead.”  He walks right by people who “disappear him” because his name was on the manifest.  He
becomes a living dead man and cannot prove he exists!  This is part of Armageddon’s bad reasoning.  Kirk, McCoy, Tamara
are sequestered because the Enterprise is “destroyed” in the computer attack.  Therefore, they are already dead.  Logical! They
are alive because they are dead! Mea 3 is also “dead” before she has to enter the disintegration machine.  Kirk’s landing crew is
dumbfounded as Anan plays pre-factum coroner:

                        All persons aboard your ship have twenty-four hours to report

                        to our disintegration machine.  In order to insure their cooperation

                        I have ordered you, Captain, and your party held in custody until they

surrender.

Kirk is not sure of his own party’s fate.  Is he too to be classified as a casualty?  Popinjay Fox is also DOA (death on arrival)
and is not ready for Anan 7’s rather heated diplomacy.  Accepting a five hundred old war without blinking, to get heated (like
Anan 7) because tallies

                                     V  A065  

are below quota is, euphemistically, bad reasoning.  War is not a logical phenomenon.  Even Mr. Fox, whose name is ironic,
ays he learns very quickly.  For what he did to Scotty, The Eminians should have gotten him further into the chamber before
Spock’s rescue:  “By now, I assume, Mr. Ambassador, that you have realized that normal diplomatic procedures are ineffective
here.”  A disruption is the best, but still a “peculiar,” “variety of diplomacy.”  Seeing Spock using a disruptor so efficaciously
is curiously refreshing to his usual, Schweitzerian pacifism.

            While Kirk and party have a diplomatic problem downstairs, Mr. Scott also has a “peculiar variety of diplomacy” in
keeping the “store” intact and himself from a penal colony.  Diplomacy as war cannot be confined to words.  It is the Scotsman
and the Fox hunt!  Best line goes to Mr. Scott:  “Diplomats!  The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser  bank.” 
The argument between Fox and Scotty is one of posture:  peaceful or military.  Because of Code 710 from the Eminians
 (“under no circumstances are we to approach the planet”) the question of ship’s positive vis-a-vis Eminiar VII is, at first, a
matter of command discretion:

                        Spock  No hostile activity directed toward us.  No apparent notice taken

            of us at all…

Kirk:  …ship’s defenses, Mr. Spock?

Spock:  Screens down, but all defensive details on General Alert status…

The ship is given over to Mr. Scott:  “The ship is yours.  Take care of her till I come back.”  The logic of diplomacy conflicts with the
logic of command.  Fox admits he had never been a soldier; he is an idealist; a theoretician from Laputa would not or could not
define a brick if one were to hit him.

He is totally immune to the realities encountered by Scotty—faked voices, phony messages, “pot shots” at the Enterprise,
a landing party overdue for check in.  Scotty’s logic vs. Fox’s logic are opposites and are symbolized by the term/fact, screens. 
Screens reflect the

                                      V  A066  

logical barrier that exists between Enterprise logic and Eminian logic (two views of a “war”).  The screens also reflect fluid
diplomacy vs. military reality (i.e., Fox vs. Scott).

                        DePaul:  All stations reporting.  Deflector screens rigged at full power. 

   Phaser crews ready.  Sensors reading zero…no, Sir!  Mr. Scott

   …Sensor readings just shot off the scale!

   Scott:  Well, now, they’re taking pot shots at us.  Holding, Mr. DePaul? 

                        DePaul:  Screens firm, sir.  Extremely powerful sonic vibrations, decibels

                                       18 to the 12 power.  If those screens weren’t up, we’d be totally

                                        disrupted by now.

Mr. Scott’s role in “A Taste of Armageddon” puts him in a strong command position, but Fox’s ambassadorial rank gives him
the power of command.  Scotty’s lack of respect for popinjay Fox is superseded by his hard-core logical deposit that says
that it is suicide to disobey orders and to lower the screens.  “Screens” is an unusual term in TREK; usually “shields” is used. 
However a screen has a two way potential.  It keeps things in; it keeps things out.  The argument between Scott and Fox is
vintage Gene Coon:

                        Scott:  We cannot fire full phasers with our screens up.  We can’t

                                    lower our screens with their disrupters on us…of course,

                                    I could treat them to a few dozen photon torpedoes.

                          Fox:  You’ll do no such thing, Mr. Scott!

Scott:  Mr. Fox…we’re under attack!  They’re trying to knock us down!

  Fox:  You’ve taken defensive measures…but there are no buts, Mr. Scott.

            It is obviously a misunderstanding…and one of my jobs is to clean

            up misunderstandings.

   Mc:  They’re holding the captain!

  Fox:  We have no proof of that.

Scott:  I’m responsible for the safety of this ship.

  Fox:  And I am responsible for the success of this mission…that is more

           important than this ship.  Is that clear?  We came here to establish

           diplomatic relations with this people.

Scott:  But they’re the ones looking for a fight, Mr. Fox.

  Fox:  This is a diplomatic matter!  If you will check your regulations,

           you will see that my orders get priority…

                                       V  A067  

Scotty’s concept of “The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank “makes sense in this context.  After Fox believes
Anan 7’s excuse of “a mistake,” there is no common logical ground between the diplomat and the soldier.  Truman and
MacArthur meet again:

                        Anan:  The minute their screens are down…open fire…

                           Fox:  Diplomacy, gentlemen, should be a job left to diplomats. 

                                    You will, of course, immediately resume a peaceful status.

                         Scott:  No, sir.  I will not.

                           Fox:  What did you say?

                         Scott:  I’ll not lower the screens…not until the captain tells me to .

                           Fox:  You are taking orders from me.  You will lower your screens

                                     as a sign on good faith.  My authority…

                         Scott:  I know about your authority, but the screens stay up!…

                           Fox:  I can have you sent to a penal planet for this!

                         Scott:  That you can, sir…but I won’t lower the screens!

So, as Scott knows, “the haggis is in the fire for sure,”  but it is one of Jim Doohan’s best scenes in TREK.  He is stern, correct,
unbudgable, and logical.  The ancient polemics of diplomacy vs. soldiering is timeless, almost allegorical; but Gene Coon’s dialogue
makes this a moment of tremendous tension:

                        …what the law lays down they call

                        lawful and right.  This is the origin and nature

                        of justice.  It lies between what is most desirable,

                        to do wrong and avoid punishment,

                        and what is most undesirable, to suffer

                        wrong without being able to get redress; justice

                        lies between these two and is accepted not

                        as being good in itself, but as having a

                        relative value due to our inability to do wrong

                                                                       (Plato The Republic BkII:104).

Logic assumes an outward (extraverted) form of thinking in full view of the assembled facts.  As Jung notes of the logic of thinking:

                                            V A068   

Orientation to the object…has the appearance of being captivated by the

Object, as though without the external orientation it simply could not exist

                        …it seems to be constantly affected by the objective data and to draw

conclusions only with their consent

(Jung Psychological Types 344).

Fox is not ruled by data orientation and would not yield to Plato’s justice.  His logic has not the balance.  He is one of Swift’s
“Bad Reasoners.”

            The mini-war between Anan 7 and Kirk takes on frank and vicious tones.  Anon 7 is a compulsive liar who will murder
to retain his own cultural imperatives.  The logic is that of two “barbarians” (self-proclaimed) with two variations on the logic of
killing.  Kirk’s logic is based on fact and on its reflection:

                        The rationality of the object selected…

                        Should not be alone in awakening

                        The consciousness…he should have well

                        Meditated upon the essential and the

                        True in all their extension and profundity,

                        For without reflection a man cannot become

conscious of that which is within himself…

(Croce, 299).

Anan 7 is missing the meditative phase on consciousness:  “You are a barbarian.”  Anon has no sense of beauty.  His instinct for
order is based on the illogic of the computer war:

                        Anan 7:  …a killer first, a builder second.  A hunter, a warrior and…

   let’s be honest…a murderer.  That is our joint heritage, is it not?

                                 K:  We are a little less cold blooded about it than you are.

Much later, in the last act, the logic of barbarism.  For Anan 7, it is barbaric to withhold the crew of the Enterprise from Anan 7’s
disintegration machines.  Withholding bodies is not civilized.  For Kirk, barbarism has a correctness about it, but it does not lie in
killing people with computers:

                        Anan:  Are there five hundred people of yours more [important] than

                                                                                                                                                              V  A069  

the hundreds of millions of innocent people on Eminiar and

Vendikar?  What kind of monster are you?

                        Kirk:  I’m a barbarian.  You said it yourself.

Anan:  I had hoped I had spoken only figuratively.

Kirk:  Oh, no.  You were quite accurate.  I plan to prove it

            To you…Scotty, General Order #24…in two hours!

            Two hours!

The “screens” on the ground are the psychical barriers that exist between Anan 7’s antilogic and Kirk’s logic.  However, both logics
are equally destructive in effect, i.e., many will die.  For Anon, they will walk voluntarily into a disintegration machine in a war fought
by computers.  For Kirk, General Order #24 fights war games with war the reality.

            Kirk’s job is to alter the objectivity of war’s reality as viewed by Anon 7 and his culture for five hundred years.  He must make
Anan’s thinking extroversive by removing the cultural hysteria of Eminiar 7.  The knight’s gambit requires only one winner—peace,
with Kirk as the prime agent and catalyst in making Anan more extroversive in his thinking.  A logical end does not require logical
means; but Anan’s world had killed three million people a year—all very cleanly:

                        Our graves that hide us from the searching sun

                        Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.

                        Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest,

                        Only we die in earnest—that’s no jest

                                                (Sir Walter Raligh “On the Life on a Man” 1612).

For Eminiar VII, war has no human factor, from their viewpoint.  They see Vendikar personified on a computer screen.  The screen
soon becomes the only reality, and it is a reflection, a mathematical theory.  It is not the people of Vendicar.  It is an image of truth
without sensory perception:

                        Mea:  Oh!

                        Kirk:  What is it?

                                                      V  A070                       

Mea:  A hit!  Right here in the city! 

Kirk:  Do you hear any explosions, Mr. Spock?

                        Spock:  None.  Yeoman Tamara…tricorder reading. 

                                     Radiation disturbances of any kind?

                        Tamara:  working, sir.  No evidence.

                        Kirk:  Mea, if this is an attack, may I ask what weapons the enemy is using?

                        Mea:  Fusion bombs.  Materialized by the enemy over their targets.

Scotty confirms Kirk’s ears and Yeoman Tamara’s tricorder with an “All quiet.”  Anan 7 must be seen as totally hysterical and
mad from Kirk’s point of view.  The two are not having the same sensory perception:

                        Anan:  It was a vicious attack…extremely destructive.  Fortunately our

                                   Defenses are firming, but our casualties are high…

                        Kirk:  There has been no attack, no explosions, no radiations, no disturbances

                                    whatsoever.  If this is some sort of a game you’re playing…

Gene Roddenberry wrote the first story, with Gene Coon and Robert Hamner, about “war games.”  The common denominator is
the eventual inability to distinguish fact from fiction.  Spock concludes:  “Computers, Captain.  They fight their war with computers. 
Totally.”  Anan has pushed Hebraism beyond sanity by his blindness:  “We have a high consciousness of duty, Captain.” 

            Correspondence between Gene Coon and Robert Hamner was lively and very perceptive regarding the status of the
computers in this episode vs. previous episodes.  The letter is Gene Coon’s inter-departmental communication (Desilu
Productions, Inc.) dated September 15, 1966:

                        Point:  please do not have the computers and machines doing everything

                        for the people of this culture.  Have them used to a great extent, but at all

                        times under the complete control of the people.  We have done too many

                        in which the machines, by their efficiency, have caused the people to atrophy

                        into mere appendages.

                                       V  A071  

Gene Coon wants the final story to reflect a greater role by having Kirk end the conflict.  It was Gene Coon’s idea to scare the
Eminians into making peace by the threat of real war:  This is how Kirk alters the objective of war as seen by Anon.  It is not
war games, but the real thing that scares an hysterical culture into peace because the alternative is total annihilation.  Kirk begins
the first of many incisive and ominous statements, all revolving about the reality of General Order #24:  “We don’t make war
with computers and herd the casualties into suicide stations.  We make the real thing, councilman.  I could destroy this planet.” 
Kirk is practically a peculiar variety of diplomacy, as Spock did earlier: 

                       Kirk:  I didn’t start it, councilmen.  But I’m liable to finish it.

           Anan:  You see, it’s started. 

Kirk:  You’re wrong. It hasn’t begun! 

           Anan:  You can’t stop it!   

            Kirk:  Stop it?  I’m counting on it.

Kirk’s rage is genuine.  It is the only such time in the original series where General Order #24 is given.  He means it!  And the
average view is hateful of the Eminian insanity.  If anything, Kirk has been patient…too long.

            The real thing does not sink into the consciousness of Anan until Scotty tells the horrible truth of power and puts a clock
to it.  The effect is scary:

                        Scott:  All cities and installations on Eminiar Seven have been located, 

                                    identified and fed into our fire control system.  In one hour and

                                    forty minutes, the entire inhabited surface of your planet will be

                                    destroyed.  You have that long to surrender your hostages.

Computerization in “A Taste of Armageddon” is part of a large human scenario wherein pain is anaesthetized.  There’s a pill
for every pain, a suave for every muscle ache.  Eminiar’s computers made war a clean, antiseptic, therefore acceptable and l
ogical, the logic of killer bees, using

                                          V  A072  

restructured evolution as an excuse for no enlightenment:  Anan’s introverted thinking seeks excuses in a primal post.  He blames
a five-hundred year lapse in truth on the hereditary instinct for violence:  “There can be no peace.  Don’t you see…We’ve
admitted it to ourselves.  We’re a killer species.  It’s instinctive.”  Kirk’s point of view reflects the literary viewpoint of Gene
Coon.  One, war means blood.  Two, war and instinct can be controlled:

                          Kirk:  Death.  Destruction.  Disease.  Horror… that’s what war is all

                                    about.  That’s what makes it a thing to be avoided.  You’ve

                                    made it neat and painless, so neat and painless you had no

                                    reason to stop it…I’m going to end it for you…One way or

                                    another!

With the war games computers destroyed, Kirk fulfills Gene Coon’s wish (same memo:  “Why not let him [Kirk] be the big
hero?  By threatening to bring down total war in all its horror upon them…a seemingly inhuman thing to do.”)  And so Kirk
reams Anan 7:

                        Kirk:  I’ve given you back the horrors of war.  The Vendekans will now

                                  assume you have abandoned your agreement, and are preparing

          for a real war, with real weapons…the nest attack they launch will

          do a lot more than count up numbers in a computer.  They’ll destroy

          your cities, devastate your planet.  You will want to retaliate of course.

          If I were you, I’d start making bombs.

From the point of view of Hellenism’s truth and beauty, Kirk reinstates Matthew Arnold’s instinct for order and sense for order
in lieu of the instinct for violence.  It is just not logical:

                        Kirk:  …the instinct can be fought.  We’re human beings with the blood

                                   a million savage years on our hands.  But we can stop it.  We can

                                   admit that we’re killers…but we’re not going to kill today.  That’s

                                   all it takes!  Knowing that we’re not going to kill today!

Terror creates peace because the only alternative to peace with Vendikar is utter destruction.  Kirk has scared the hell out of
Eminiar VII, has given them a taste of Armageddon:

You must therefore each descend in turn and

                        live with your fellows in the care and get used

                               V  A073  

to seeing in the dark; once you get used to it

you will see a thousand times better than they

do and will distinguish the various shadows and

know what they are shadows of, because you have

seen the truth about things admirable and just and good

(Plato, The  Republic 7:324).

    XXXX
(Finis: “A Taste of Armageddon")
                XXXX

 

                                                                                                                                                          V  A074  

                                                                  "That Which Survives”   

                                                   

“All changed, changed utterly:

 A terrible beauty is born”

  --(William Butler Yeats “Easter” 1916).

            In a memo of March 2, 1968 to D.C. Fontana, Gene Roddenberry asks a question regarding the strange events of this
haunting episode:  “Is there anything, any alien race, any civilization, so perfect and wonderful that anything and everything at any
 time intruding upon it should be destroyed?”  Perhaps it is the intrusion by Trekkers that breaks the silent harmony of a race of 
wondrous beings.  And the very defense of the planet may be an injustice to the race that no longer needs protection from its
computer, for that machine acting in self-defense without external reason’s guidance is too efficient.  Set on “automatic,” the
machine survives for a purpose no longer reasonable or healthful.  Its programming of defense may have been effective but
non-lethal to another race, but its defensive postures create a dual arena of crises, both of which terminate human life.  The
machine survives, but serves nothing and no one.  It is a machine crying in the desert, and its logic spells lethal.  It is, as Spock
noted of the squire of Gothos, logic without purpose or discipline.  It lacks human guidance.  The lone English farmer who
accidentally unearths and sets off a World War II German bomb faces the forgotten anachronism whose purpose remains, but
whose raison d’être has expired in time.  Mr. Sulu sets the stage for a mystery story:  “We have only questions—no answers.” 

            The deadly Agatha Christie type of plot should be called “Beauty and the Clock.”  There is an unusually strong two-tiered
plot structure, two parallel stories that jump one to the other and back, presenting the two areas affected by the computer:, 
the Enterprise and the landing party. 

                                       V  A075  

Hell breaks loose for Spock and Scotty in the form of a runaway ship about to explode, and for Kirk, McCoy Sulu and D’Amato
on the planet’s surface.  Both plot levels are linked by a common crisis—physical survival and double jeopardy.  The camera
switches between the two, and incredible suspense is maintained until the final scene.  It is a thriller, well written and well
conceived.  It also has another level of story interest—language (linguistics).  Losira is the Siren who calls Odysseus and his
crew.  If they listen, “I am for you” becomes painful death.

            The logic is the world of Nomad’s non-sequitur.  The theme of impossibility to logic and science permeates the two
plots.  For example, non-sequitur is a planet that is only a “few thousand years old.”  Ergo, it is “impossible for vegetation to
evolve in so short a period.”  Yet it does.  Non-sequitur.  “An atmosphere could not evolve in so short a…time.”  Yet it has: 
non- sequitur.  In essence the planet is “a seemingly impossible phenomenon.”  The facts, as Spock explains, “do not fit any
known categories of planets.”  This outpost of Losira’s people is an ontological impossibility.  It is illogical, impossible; yet it
exists.  It has the distinction of being “a planet even Spock can’t explain.”  There is the force that creates the separation (dualism)
of ship from planet—one of “almost measurable power.”  Yet it has no cause; its effects are unclear.  And then, “like a door
opening,” it is not there anymore. It is a tremor, but not necessarily one. It is here, yet it is “not there anymore,” says D’Amato. 
The Enterprise is “gone,” yet it cannot be.  It is not gone, it is simply not here anymore.  How does one explain it?  “We have
only questions—no answers.”

                                       
                                                                         Binary Plot

                                                                          
Planet                                                                    Act I                                      Ship

Crises:  survival—food and water                                                          “The stars…they’re wrong”=

 “a positional change” of 990.7 light years

                                       V  A076  

  Planet                                                      Act I                                        Ship 

Explosion theory:  Logic=Spock’s

penchant for mathematical precision, ex, “It is illogical to assume that the force of an explosion…could have

launched us a distance of 890.7

light years.

Logic:  Scott:  it should have “vaporized” us.  Correct, it did not destroy.  Non-sequitur

                                                 …Cellular destruction…

Crisis:   Losira:  “I am for you, Lt.                                              Dr. Boya:  “each cell

            D’Amato.  death                                                           of the body…individually blasted

from inside.”  [Transporter Technician]

            Grass, but no water—poison…

            Impossible.  Science:  in magnetic

            sweep from zero…off the dial,

            Then a reverse of polarity.  Then,

            Nothing:  impossible (checked).

            Surge=death is appearance

            of Losira

                                                                    Act II

Crisis:  No soil:  impossible.                                                      Ship “feels wrong.” (Scotty).

            rocks to rocks=memorial.

            There aren’t any good ways

            to die.  Need defense                                                    Need definition of “wrong.”

    …Defensive posture…

                                                            “I am for you, Mr. Watkins”=

                                                            death:  “strange woman”

            Planet alloy=diturnium

            osmium:  “It wouldn’t have

            evolved naturally.  Same for                                          no natural explanation for

            plants.  Defies science                                                   Watkins’ death

            NIGHT:  1^st watch

Spock:  “The power of this intruder to disrupt every

                                         V  A077  

cell in a body combined with the already al-

most inconceivable power to hurl the Enterprise

such a distance speaks of a very high culture

and a great danger”:  “Impossible” theme

Watch:  Sulu on alert                                                                 Security alert:  female

Losira:  “I want to touch you” “ I am                                                     intruder

             For Lt. Sulu:  3 vs./defense                                                      Cancel red alert, but maintain

             --increased defensive measures                                                increased security…

             --running out of time                                                                fifteen minutes to live:  the

             Sulu’s shoulder touched:                                                          emergency bypass control

             cellular disruption                                                                     on the matter-antimatter

Sulu:  “…how can such people                                                  integrator fused.  Engines

            be?  With such evil.  And                                                          run wild:  Time [clock]

            She is…she is so beautiful”                                                       countdown begins 14.87

minutes.

                                                                                                            Scott:  “This thing is going

to blow up and there’s nothing in the universe can stop it.”

                                                              Act III

                                      Beauty and the “Cuckoo clock”

“She’s [Losira] not through yet”--                                             the “cuckoo clock” sabotage  

                                                                                                            verified…Impossible:  fused,

                                                                                                            yet  only ship’s phasers could

                                                                                                            have fused circuit:   non-

sequitur

Logic:  Spock:  “ a force that could hurl us 990.7 light years away and at distance still be able to sabotage our main
source of energy will not be waiting around to be taken into custody.”

Solution:  Quest begins:  Does she need our                                           Crawlway in energy stream:

Thoughts?  Tricorder overload:  explosion.                                            Logic:  seal fuel flow with 

                                                                                                            magnetic probe:  Scott. 

                                                                                                            Twelve minutes, 27 seconds.

Quest for entrance, source of power:  “strange                                      Spock:  runs computer 

Magnetic sweep,”  like a door opening.                                                 analysis:  ship’s condition:

Losira:  “for you James T. Kirk.”                                                           Real vs. ideal.  Warp 11.6

                                                                                                            …11.9.  Eight minutes, 41

                                                                                                            seconds “I don’t need a

                                                                                                            bloomin’ cuckoo clock”                                                                                  (Scott).                                                                        

                                      V  A078  

Planet                                                                                                               Ship                

…Magnetic condition…

Act IV

…Defensive to offensive procedures: problem solving…

Losira:  “No life reading at all.”  She is

only a projection, yet palpable:  impossible!

No life reading, but clearly present.  Identity:

“I am Losira, commander of …station.”

Logic-Antilogic

You are killing (cf., M-5) us (Kirk).

Power level high, “right off the scale                                                      Power level increasing:

Cave:  food and water?> “Brain” =                                                    beyond control

computer as cause.                                                                               Ship’s computer Cause=

                                                                                                            Transporter:  ship reas-

                                                                                                            sembled .009% “out of

                                                                                                            phase.” 

Clock:  seventeen seconds.

                                                                                                            Scott:  reverse probe polarity

Computer:  polarity scrambler to seal incision…auto defense…computer put Enterprise through molecular transporter, reassembled with Losira (in computer room, severe polarity underground):

“I must touch you …you are my                                                            five seconds; Scott:  probe 

match…                                                                                               ‘stuck’

I will live as one even to the                                                                   Probe works:  warp 15.9 and

structure of your cells, the                                                                     dropping.  SAVED!

arrangement of chromosomes.”

“This is how you kill” (Kirk)

--Computer duplicates replicas

--Spock arrives:  Rescue:  computer

destroyed just as replicas met number

of victims

                                                            ORDER

                                                            TRUTH

                                                           BEAUTY (with a loss?)

                                        V  A079  

Any theme derived from this disturbingly haunting mystery story must consider one of Star Trek’s traits that appears in its best
episodes—the muti-layered ,or parallel, or parallel-cross plot networks.  What goes one aboard the Enterprise always has the
same basic crisis on the planet.  The presence of Losira, giver of beauty and death (a kind of Proserpine) unifies both plots by her
projected “presence” aboard both arenas.  The causes of the hostile and life threatening situations are the same—one computer
left by a now dead race of intelligent and beautiful builders—Archons of sorts.  Spock, still impressed by 990.7 light years
(Dickens would have loved this story!) notes, “What a remarkable culture this is.”  “Was, Mr. Spock.”

            Spock works logically aboard the Enterprise to beat the clock.  His penchant for mathematical accuracy and for scientific
English is a source of brilliant humor (comic relief) amid a double plot of incessant tension.  He is much like the computer as he
clicks his hand calculator.  Today, he guides Scotty’s nightmare job in the service crawlway.  He is a constructive computer, but
rarely has Spock engaged in verbal play and linguistic puns and irony.  He insists on scientific accuracy to a humoured fault.  He takes
Scotty’s metaphoric language literally, thus creating verbal play and puns.  His total “cool” under fire is in stark contrast, say, to
“The Galileo Seven” where his logic explodes in his ears at every turn.  Here, his efficiency as commander and as science officer is
never nauseating, nor does it ever protest too much.  He is the brain; Scotty is the body.  The episode is a rare, long role for Scotty,
and a rare Spock vs. Scott, one on one verbal humor.  An ordered work ethic attains truth through balance and plot solution through
logic augmented by an almost human game of double entendre. 

                                       V  A080  

Spock’s Royal Academy “plain prose please” vies with Scotty’s colorful metaphoric English to create a polarity of
language proper to the two differing dispositions, and proper to the dualistic plot where opposites create tension and solution. 
The clock meets Tam O’Shanter, creating dual concepts of time as well as a sense of the machine meets the metaphor.  Spock
is like the head; Scotty is like the body.  The goal is the same, but the tongues are chamber music.  The logic of non-sequitur is
paralleled in language.  Language helps make the impossible possible.  It is a factor of communications that permits a conclusion. 
For example, Spock bumps his head, but that is not logically phrased:

            Uhura:  What happened?

            Spock:  The occipital area of my head seems to have impacted with the

                         arm of the chair.

Spock insists on being precise, even through Uhura wants to know what happened to the ship.  Another tool used by Spock is
bathos, deliberate understatement:

                        Lt. Rada:  …but what bothers me is the stars, Mr. Spock.

                            Spock:  The stars?

                        Lt. Rada:  Yes, sir.  They’re wrong.

                            Spock:  Wrong?

                        Lt. Rada:  Yes, Mr. Spock.  Look…

                             Spock:  Hmmm…a positional change.

Scotty’s emotionally charged English is imprecise from a scientific point of view.  Scotty’s

blood pressure rises:

                          Scott:  What you’re saying is that the planet didn’t blow up?  Then the

                                     Captain and the others—they’re still alive?

                        Spock:  Please, Mr, Scott, restrain your leaps of illogic.  I have said

                                     nothing.  I am merely speculating. 

When Aristotle meets Hegel, literalness creates humor:

                                                V  A081                   

Spock:  Then, Mr. Scott…can you give me warp eight?

                        Scott:  Aye, sir, and maybe a wee but more.  I’ll sit on the warp

 engines myself and muse them.

Spock:  That position, Mr. Scott, would be not only unavailing but also

             undignified.

The verb “to feel” is one of the most widely abused and overused verbs in the English language.  One may respond in many ways
to the question, “How do you feel?”  Spock plays on its imprecision:

                         Scott:  Mr. Spock, the ship feels wrong.

Spock:  Feels, Mr. Scott?

                         Scott:  I know it doesn’t make sense.  Instrumentation reads correct,

                                    but the feel is wrong—something I can’t quite put into words.

                        Spock:  That is obvious, Mr. Scott.  I suggest you avoid emotionalism

 and simply keep your instruments ‘correct.’

Scotty’s well known thistle-headed emotionalism as the ship’s resident Scotsman is legion, but Trek rarely gives him the good
 lines.  The writers were generous in this episode.  Colorful (metaphoric) language helps to offset scientific fundamentalism of speech. 
For example, Watkins’ tact:

                        Watkins:  …this is the matter-antimatter integrator control.  That’s the

                                         cut off switch.

                         Losira:  Not correct.  That’s the emergency overload bypass.  It

              engages almost instantaneously since it takes the anti-matter

              longer to explode once the magnetic flow fails.

In some ways, the language of science is artificial in its theoretical nature.  Facts require

precision, but correctness has its place:

                   Dr. M’Benga:  The pattern of cellular disruption was the same, Mr. Spock. 

                                           But  as to a cause, your guess is as good as mine.

                   Spock:  My guess, Doctor, would be valueless.  I suggest we refrain
    
                                from guessing and find some facts.

                                         V  A082  

Spock expects scientific language from another scientist, Dr. M’Benga.  Spock’s irritation is part of his insistence on receiving
accurate data.  The ship is in danger.  Also, Spock is rankled by rampant speculations and pointless questions, given the logic
of Watkins’ death:

                        Uhura:  Mr. Spock, what are the chances of the Captain and the

                                   others being alive?

Spock:  Lt., we are not engaged in gambling.  We are proceeding

                                     in the only logical way to return to the place they were

                                     last seen and factually ascertain whether or not they are

                                     still live.

The metaphor of the ants is classical:

Scott:  I’ve sealed off the aft end of the service crawlway and I’ve

           positioned explosive separator charges…I’m so close to the

           flow now that it feels like ants crawling all over my body.

                       Spock:  Mr. Scott, I suggest you refrain from any further subjective

                                   descriptions.  You now have ten minutes and nineteen seconds…

                        Scott:  It looks like an aurora borealis in there…

                       Spock:  You have eight minutes, 41 seconds.

                        Scott:  I know what time it is.  I don’t need a bloomin’ cuckoo clock.

Language becomes an extension of how man calculates and communicates time.  Spock ia a literal (the straight man); Scotty
is the joker.  There is a definite Vaudeville atmosphere between Spock and Scotty (George and Gracie, Dick and Tom)
that creates humor through the isolation of logic, as funny, without a concrete equivalent for communications.  The image
of the “door” opening and closing gives a metaphoric expression to a more abstract statement of a magnetic power surge. 
It is most effective because the door portents the dual qualities of Janus, the Roman God with two faces.  Herein, language
aids in creating suspense while providing color to the black and white world of the computer, the culprit that underlies the two
tensional plots of the play.  Language is the dialogue between beauty and the clock, between Losira as Siren and as

                                         V  A083  

mechanism.  All of this reality, and yet Losira is a projection provided by a computer.  The computer seems at odds with
the Kolandans, not a true representative of their beauty.  Kirk answers Spock’s note that the “door” was left open…and “…
this is (was) a magnificent culture.”  Spock surmises that the defenses were run by computer because “its moves were immensely
logical.”

            In looking at Losira’s image on the screen, one sees all that is left of a civilization.  They and their civilization were too
perfect at keeping other cultures away.  They buried themselves under their own security systems.  Kirk notes, “…the computer
was too perfect.  It projected so much of Losira’s personality into the replica that it felt regret—guilt at killing.”  The significance
of the play’s title lies in the projection vs. the reality it projects:

                        Kirk:  She must have been a remarkable woman.

                        McCoy:  And beautiful.

                        Spock:  Beauty is transitory, Doctor.  However, she was evidently highly

                                     intelligent.

                        Kirk:  …I don’t agree with you, Mr. Spock.  Beauty survives.

That which survives is the image of beauty.  Beauty survives, in spite of its touch.  The act of love involves touching and oneness,
kill.  The computer saw beauty as Siren to lure the futuristic mariners and descendents of Odysseus and his crew.  With the story
written by Dorothy Fontana and the teleplay by John Meredyth Lucus, “That Which Survives” is a great mystery story with a
very high quality dialogue.  Gene Roddenberry was attracted to this story and states his view of a likely theme:

                        …a wondrous thing left behind by a wondrous race…protecting

some encampment and ending up by doing a terrible act to a lovely

thing…perhaps the theme is that we can protect  ourselves too well

and too efficiently and in doing so in  the narrow perspective of our

 

                                       V  A084  

time destroying more wondrous things than we were trying to save

--(Gene Roddenberry inter-office memo March 12, 1968).

More succinctly, the former Miss America retains her beauty, and “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” (Keats “Endymion”).

    XXXX
(finis:  “That which Survives”)
                XXXX

                        (end Chapter V: A--Man and/or/vs. the Computer)

                                                                                                                                                                V  B085  

"Guys and Dolls”: Chapter V: B--The Android Syndrome:      
                                          

 “What Are Little Girls Made of?”
                                                           

“What are little boys made of?

Snips and snails, and puppy dogs’ tails;

That’s what little boys are made of.

“What are little girls made of?

Sugar and Spice, and everything nice;

That’s what little girls are made of.”

                                                                                                                         --Anonymous

            The childhood verse above is the voice of innocence.  Spock would say the verses are illogical, if not irrational and
irrelevant.  But the verse does point out the human need to express distinctions between so-called opposites in metaphoric terms. 
Robert Block’s play and title explore the fallacy of human sexual (gender) definition by purely logical terms alone.  It is the mechanistic
view of mankind that concerns writer and viewer.  Logically, how does one define human personhood?  It does not lie in literal,
demonstrative definitions.  The verse and Block’s play warn against simplistic evaluations of people based solely on one’s
chromosomal make up.  Does one’s essential nature become definitive by assessing one’s accidental (physical) qualities or attributes? 
Is one what one’s glands make one out to appear?  For Block, appearance is only a minute part of human reality.  Hence, the title
points out the irony of names and quantities in achieving one’s whoness and whatness.  But the conventional mind sees boys as
prankish, and girls as sweeties.  This play is a timeless story of guys and dolls, of the relationship between mechanistic “people”
and born people.  Are “real” people any better or different from androids, mechanical “people?”  The play is also a love story,
not unlike “Romeo and Juliet,” where tragedy is inherent to the star-crossed lovers.  To make the play interesting, the major
dramatis personae are two guys and two dolls surrounded by “them,” whoever or whatever they are and do.  Sexuality is behavior;
sexuality is attitude; sexuality is logic and emotion with a focused goal

                                         V  B086  

and a motivating idea/emotion.  Who/what are they?  The boys are no longer little; the girls are no longer little.  None is innocent
any more.  It is mixture of memory and reality and time:

                        And all that Memory loves the most

                           Was once our only hope to be,

                        Hath melted into Memory.

                        Alas! it is delusion all;

                           The future cheats us from afar,

                        Nor can we be what we recall,

                           Nor dare we think on what we are

                        --(Lord Byron “They Say That Hope is Happiness” 1816).

            The question of the inevitable existence of androids among human beings simply scares people, especially as the
physically and mentally distinguishing quantitative sense characteristics become less noticeable—to the point where one
cannot discern the difference, shy of using a tricorder.  Roger Korby’s (RUK without a “H”) name is linguistically ironic. 
Kor in Hebrew means a round vessel, a measure of capacity.  Also as the “Pasteur of archaeological medicine,”  Korby is
a translator of the Rosetta Stone of medicine, related to Koran, Arabic for reading.  It is the sacred book.  Spelled differently,
cor is Latin for heart—and the issue is all three, possibly more.  He is measurer, translator of holy words, but does he have a
human heart?  Is he Roger Korby?  The question goes beyond man and the computer.  This is the man within the man who
must prove he is still what Joseph Conrad called “one of us.”  If he is “one of [them],” he is an android to be treated as scrap
metal.  Roger Korby is a brilliant scientist (a fact often ignored as the play unfolds), the best.  He is a man who studies;
anthropology is man itself.  He is an academician  also, who has instilled humanism into his standards at the Academy.

                                       V  B087  

Missing for five years, even after failed search parties, Korby has almost been given for loss, but Christine, his fiancée,
 has waited some five years because she knows Korby is a survivor:  “Roger is a very determined man. He’d find a way to live.” 
This early comment must be coincidental when Korby chooses to be found in the underground caverns.  The story must be
considered in light of his scientific genius.  What is “a way to live?”  For Kirby, it means surviving, using what the environment
provides.  In the last act, when Korby rips the “flesh” off his hand, Christine is repelled and aghast.  For one doll, a guy  is not
a guy if he is not all flesh and bone, i.e., imperfect and human.  When Korby cries raising his ripped hand, “Does this make so
much difference?…this can be repaired…I’m the same as I was before, Christine, perhaps even better.”  Christine rejects and
spurns him:  “Are you Roger?”  Ignored in his desperate plea for human acceptance of his mechanical, accidental self:

            Korby:  It’s still me, Christine.  Roger.  I’m in here.  You can’t imagine

                          how it was.  I was frozen, dying, my legs were gone.  I had

  only my brain between life and death.

Korby achieves Christine’s prediction of “…he’d find a way to live.”  He did, but the “way” is not “living” to one guy (Kirk)
and one doll (Christine).  His way is a way in, not a way out.  His way is, however, not acceptable to a Hebraic, moralistic world. 
The Newtonian solution was his only one, yet he pays the ultimate price for “real” peoples’ points of view.  He is seen as a
Frankenstein.  This is wrong and simplistic.  Man became man through millions of years of evolution, of adaptation in form. 
Korby’s Exo III is a cold one (300 degrees below zero), a world with a dying sun.  Korby has no light, an ingredient all men
are made for.  It is cold; the caverns become his only defense against cold and death.  Brownie and Andrea are symbols of

                                    V  B088  

Korby’s brilliance, but also the loss of his human empathy and of his respect for other life forms.  A change in environment
creates a psychical change as well.  But survival in itself is not wrong.  This is a man who sought and who seeks human
companionship and warmth.  Do human beings provide that solidarity?  Or do the androids?  An ironic inversion is to take
place.  Korby’s personship is also linked to his revelations, from the Orion ruins, about immunology.  Over a five year period
 has had to build an immunity to human civilization, to “real” people because, in a mechanistic world, “the inferior ones” are the
“evil” disease bearers.  Korby has his truth, a truth—not the truth--but he has order as long as his world (anti-human immune
system) is not invaded by outworldness.

            Based on his past, his reputation, Korby’s present status makes “no sense” to Kirk and Christine.  In his present world,
from a mechanistic point of view, all is imperfect order, and Korby is a scientist whose quest is for a perfect world:

                        Korby:  This is not a vain display, Captian.  I’m a scientist; you obviously

                                      know of my reputation.  Trust me.

                           Kirk:  Yes, I know your reputation.  The whole galaxy knows who you

  are and what you stand for.  That is why all this makes no sense.

Korby’s reputation has become separated from his personship because he is assumed to be dead.  His reputation contributes
to the illogic of Korby as past conception.  Illogic, to Kirk and Christine, means no sense.  In the third act, this “no sense” issue
 becomes critical when the present does not fit the imposed stereotype of a man who no longer exists as that man.  Christine
notes:  “…it doesn’t make sense.  He’s done nothing wrong.  He is Roger Korby…whatever he seems to be doing…he’s as
sane as you or I.” These may not be the best credentials for testing Korby’s sanity.  People are quick to label as ‘nutso’ anyone
who is unconventional, creative, or

                   V  B089  

survivalistic.  Kirk is not immune to tin gods, and Christine is not immune to an android fiancé.   And there is no resurrection from
|the caverns for a Korby, according to a Kirk:

                        Spock:  Where is Dr. Korby?

                        Kirk:  He was never here.

The Kirk guy—man or machine?

            Ultimately, traditional morality refuses to accept a mechanism with a human soul.  It is seen as disgusting and abhorrent. 
It is also a bit blasphemous.  Korby must be viewed by his past standards, because the Hebraic moralists do not like machines. 
Korby’s current, inhuman condition, surrounded by Ruk, Andrea, and Brownie, must be viewed according to Korby’s own
philosophy of the human spirit.  One’s humanity is defined by two qualities:  choice and freedom of movement:

                        Brown:  Dr. Korby has discovered that as their sun dimmed, the

   inhabitants of this planet moved underground, from an open

   environment to this dark world.  When you were a student of

   his, Christine, you must have often heard Dr. Korby remark how

   freedom of movement and choice produced  the human spirit. 

   The culture of Exo III proved his theory.

Korby’s physical movement from light to dark meant that loss of choice means a diminution of the human spirit.  Confinement to
dark caverns meant dehumanization, even according to Korby’s own theory.  His academic interest moved from the social
sciences to pure mathematics.  Ergo, he moves into a mechanical world to be followed by mechanical “thinking.”  Korby is
doomed by his own theory of human development.  When Korby kills Ruk, the proof is in the man’s words and deeds. 
In a take-out from the RFD (July 27,1966), Kirk remarks:  “You didn’t

                                           V  B090  

have to destroy him.”  Korby’s remark (retained) is, “I had no choice.”  No choice means loss of the human spirit.  Choice
makes a difference between the noids and the droids. 

Korby has lost his sense of right and wrong.  His morals take on the terms “all right” and “no harm.”  He has become
a utilitarian, a pleasure is good; pain is bad, philosopher.  This quest for all rightness is euphemistic and lacks depth of character
judgment.  It is the nursery rhyme world.  Christine, in first meeting Korby, says, “Yes, Roger.  Everything is all right now.” 
It is not. When Korby introduces Andrea, it is Christine who needs reassurance from Korby:  “Everything’s all right now.” 
No, it is not.  Later, Spock (on ship) turns the problem into a question of “Is everything all right?” As Ruk (Ted Cassidy) holds
Kirk in a wrestler’s lock.  Ruk mimics Christine, and in her voice, chups, “Yes, Roger.  Everything is all right now.”  Ruk has
no problem in seeing the reality behind the romantic fantasy.  By the third act, all right is often interlaced with no harm. As Kirk
is strapped into the android circle, Korby reassures Christine about Kirk’s condition:  “He’s not being harmed.  I promise.” 
After the wheel quits spinning and the Kirk android is made, Christine asks Kirk, “Are you all right?”  The Kirk android beams
up to the ship and shows his dual “mental pattern.” This time, it is the Kirk android talking to a startled Mr. Spock:

                        Kirk:  Mind your own business, Mister Spock!  I’m sick of your half-breed

                                  interference!  Do you hear?!  You look upset, Mr. Spock.  Is everything

                                  all right up here?

Spock answers:  “No problems here, Sir.”  At some point, every main character, except Andrea, asks or is asked the same
question.  Guys and dolls are insecure.  The repetition is deliberate and reminds the viewer that the perfect, logical ethic of the
android is the illogical, imperfect ethic of the human being.

                                         V  B091     

The conflict is one between logic and emotion; it is also between android thinking and human judgement.  Kirk and
Christine represent civilization (very Judeo-Christian).  They are like original Crusaders out to dispatch the heathen Saracens. 
By the middle of the second act, Kirk has already buried Korby:  “You’ve convinced me, doctor—you’ve convinced me that
you’re dangerous.”  As less objective party, Christine takes more convincing.  Kirk’s hatred of machinery gives Korby’s words
and world no fair hearing whatsoever.  Prejudice is immediate.  Kirk and Christine represent civilization, and it is civilization that
dehumanizes just as well as Ruk.  Part of Korby’s problem is one familiar to readers of Joseph Conrad’s classics, such as “The
Lagoon” and Lord Jim.  The native in “The Lagoon” takes one of his tribe’s chief’s holy virgins and parades away from the tribe. 
But later, after the girl dies, the native chooses to return to the tribe and face its justice rather than face isolation and ostracism. 
Lord Jim’s world in Patusan is destroyed forever by Brown’s (civilization’s) appearance.  He has to face his own kind, and the
dead civilization of Exo III “moved from light to darkness," they replaced freedom with a mechanistic culture.  “When Christine
and Kirk arrive, Korby must deal with his own kind, with his own past.  No one sees that Korby no longer exists.  It cannot,
because survival required making adaptations from freedom the enslavement of a mechanistic culture.  Like Garth, Korby will
“revolutionize the Universe” with his androids.  Survival meant loss of freedom.  Civilization sees Korby as Evil; Ruk sees Kirk
as the inferior one, the evil.  Ruk remembers that the androids killed the ancient civilization of Exo III when the populace, in panic,
began to shut off the androids.  Like Dr. Daystrom, they made their machines too well.  To be mechanistic is to be of the Body. 
Civilization has its own body, and androids have no souls.  For the Crusaders, the machines have no respect for the sanctity of life. 
 They see change in Korby.  He sees more

                                          V  B092  

in himself.  But no one asks Korby if he sees changes in real people.  He does, but he can no longer argue with them in human terms. 
Prolonged absence from his root civilization has brought dehumanization, loss of oneness and solidarity with reasoning, civilized society:

                        Christine:  …What’s happened to you?  When I sat in your class…you

     Wouldn’t even dream of harming an insect or an animal…

      life was sacred to you then.

 Korby:  I haven’t changed.

Kirk posits the same basic argument in the fourth act when, as civilization, he cannot accept abrupt, uncharacteristic change in Korby’s
personality:

                        K:  You were a man with respect for all things alive.  How can I ever

                               explain the change in you, Doctor?  If I were to tell Earth that

                               I was in your hands and tell them what has become…

Kirk is just as concerned with his reputation as he is with Korby’s plight.  There is a lot of enlightened self-interest among these
characters.  Kirk, like the civilization he represents, has Korby dead before the trial.  Twisted logic sees the sanctity of life as the
sanctity of mechanisms:

                        She [Andrea] killed the android [Kirk], Korby…just as you killed Ruk

                        …is this your perfect world?  Your flawless beings?  Killing off one

                        another?!  Aren’t you doing exactly what you hate most in humans? 

                        Killing with no more concern than when you turn off a light?

            The major argument from civilization’s representatives is that programming, not sanctity, is what Korby is offering.  It is
reminiscent of Dr. Daystrom’s argument that men need not die in space; it is the same argument presented by Nomad, to destroy
that which is imperfect—all science’s objectives are to create a “perfect society”:

                        Korby:  No one need ever die again!  No disease, no deformities; even

                                     fear can be programmed away, replaced with joy!  I’m offering

                                     you a practical heaven, a new paradise…

                                       V  B093  

Logic loses the android game largely because of tradition, but also because Korby cannot control the androids.  They run amok! 
Korby’s science crosses that invisible line between machine and soul.  The main moral issue arises shortly after Christine says,
“He’s done nothing wrong.”  Wrong is not a logical term.  When logic tampers with morality, civilization goes after the tin-god. 
Society is endangered by the mechanical offspring of a “bad reasoner.”  Civilization will not accept “soul” transferal into the
android form.  This would dehumanize man because perfection is Hellenic reasoning, but Hebraism is practical, physical, and
moral.  To be perfect (Korby’s goal) precludes inherent humanity.  Machines and souls do not mix:

                        Korby:  By continuing the process I could have transferred you, your

                                     very consciousness, into that android…your ‘soul,’ if you wish

                                     …yes, humans converted to  androids can be programmed, but

                                     we could do away with jealousy, greed, hate…

                           Kirk:  It can be improved by eliminating tenderness, sentiment and love. 

                                     They’re the other side of the same coin, doctor.

The infiltration of androids with an uninformed society is subversion.  Here, Kirk and Christine

 draw the line:

                        And the gates of the chapel were shut,

                        And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;

                        So I turned to the Garden of Love,

                        That so many sweet flowers bore,

                        And I saw it filled with graves,

                        And tomb-stones where flowers should be;

                        And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

                        And binding with briars my joys and desires

(Wm. Blake, “The Garden of Love” 1794).

            The dolls of “What Are Little Girls Made of?” are Andrea and Christine.  This relationship was considered by NBC,
Robert Block, and Gene Roddenberry to be the most kinetic character growth area, “the emotional struggle which is going on
inside of her, the

                                                                                                                                                                   V  B094 

 struggle of a ‘synthetic’ woman to acquire the ‘soul’ of a human”  (Stanley Robertson, Film Programming Manager, NBC
[March 31, 1966]).  Gene Roddenberry in a letter to Robert Block (March 31, 1966), sees that “it might be awfully hard…
to go back to a flesh and blood wife with all her female imperfections and monthly crises when you’ve been living for years with
a perfect android wife.”  There is no doubt of Andrea’s programming.  An ironic inversion occurs.  Christine (name:  “Christ like”)
and Andrea (Gk:  Woman) are Christian (jealous, prudish, intolerant) and pagan (loving, selfless, human, warm).  The “real”
human female is a cold fish; the android is a loving wife.  Christian civilization produces prudes; science produces women. 
Never does Andrea become selfish or mean or nasty.  She is a charming hostess, well mannered:  “I’m Andrea.  You must be
Christine…I’ve always thought how beautiful your name is.”  To which the Miss Freezer looks down her nose and snickers,
“I don’t remember Doctor Korby mentioning an ‘Andrea!’”  Andrea politely says, “But you are exactly as Roger described you. 
No wonder he missed you so.”  Andrea is also Dear Abby:  “How can you love Roger without trusting him?”  Christine is merciless,
a pope in nylons:

                        Christine:  Yes, let’s start with Andrea.

                         Andrea:  I’m like Dr. Brown…an android.  Didn’t you know?

                         Korby:  Remarkable, isn’t she?  Notice the lifelike pigmentation,

     the variation in skin tones.  The flesh has warmth.  There’s

     even a pulse, physical sensation…

Christine:  How convenient.

Korby:  …It does only what I program…

Christine:  …that given a mechanical Dr.Brown, then a mechanical

                  ‘geisha’ would be no more difficult?

 Korby:  Do you think I could love a machine?

Christine:  Did you?

                                    V  B095  

As with Rayna in “Requiem for Methuselah,” Andrea soon feels and chooses.  Woody Allen had his “orgasmitron.”  Isn’t love
a mechanical activity between two machines?  Gene Roddenberry holds that man too is a machine—a terribly complex one—
but a machine nevertheless.  For Korby, Andrea is incapable “of intercourse, and love can’t exist at all when it’s predictable. 
There must be imperfection—moments to be lied to, worshipped, hated—anger, fear.”  The last quote is a take-out, but it does
help to explain android making as a science, but a means for survival for Korby.  Five years without human companionship.  Love
requires imperfection.  Andrea is too perfect for subliminal love.  Ergo, Christine is loveable because she is imperfect.  Two dolls,
but only one belongs in paradise!  Again, Korby built his androids too well.  Late in Act IV, Andrea attempts to kiss the Kirk
android, (“It is illogical”) and zaps it for the refusal.  She is “not programmed for alarms.”  It is Korby’s and Andrea’s mutual
Romeo and Juliet suicide by phaser.  Their death is an act of love:

                        Andrea:  To love you…protect you…to kiss you.

                         Korby:  No…you cannot love…you are not human.

                        Andrea:  Love you…kiss   (zap)

She loves him, but she is not human.  Christine is human, but no longer loves him.  Christine is the doll; Andrea is the woman. 
Korby is the guy; Kirk is the machine.

            The fallacy of the play is the human invasion’s gambit to prove to Korby that he is  not human.  They destroy what humanity
was left in him, a great deal more than civilization will tolerate.  He yells, “I am Roger Korby!”  to deaf ears and lime hearts.
John Stewart Mill describes the fate of non-conventional thinking and behavior:

                        The despotism of custom is everywhere

                                        V  B096  

the standing hindrance to human

advancement…the general tendency

of things throughout the world is to render

mediocrity the ascendant power

among mankind…individuals are

lost in the crowd

--(J. S. Mill, On Liberty).

            Both Daystrom and Korby were Utopians, on a quest for perfection.   But Kirk draws the line on the applications of
human reason.  Of Korby’s mangled hand (“Does this make so much a difference?”), Christine sees completeness of
anatomical wholeness as humanity.  For Korby, the hand is not even a handicap.  Korby is not behaving illogically, but this
does not mean that he is not being true.  He has a mechanical attitude.  Christine, like Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, is in love
with a reflection.  She cannot accept his change; here, human reactions are illogical.  The story is told from Christine’s and
Kirk’s points of view.  What about Korby’s internal hell?  Not a simple Baron Von Frankenstein, Korby still cannot control
his machines; ergo, he has a problem because he cannot control himself.  The ice symbolizes Korby’s loss of sensitivity. 
He is a man in darkness where reason loses perspective and its learned past.  A system of reason and ethics is necessary
to more than survive.  Korby has a low self-esteem; he does not trust himself; his approval is almost apologetic, obsessive. 
Subjectively, Kirk and Chapel (two churches) are jealous of Korby’s immortality.  Korby did incorporate the essence of a
human being into a machine.  The definition of man needs redefinition—man does not know yet and his definitions are based
on something tangible.  Representations are lies, and Korby is representing.  He is a mimic that made reason his sole god, with
a loss of energy, loss of imagination.  He does not defend his creativity using reason; duplication is nothing new—this is
mistaken by Korby for creativity.  He is a “bad reasoner.”
 

                                      V  B097  

            Roger Korby’s caverns are like “The Cave” in Plato’s The Republic where reality is a  shadow on the wall of the cave. 
Illusion is the truth, a distortion.  The statement on human nature here is to see the shadow; see it as reality; it is safe and secure. 
 Reflection is reality.  Plato did not trust the world outside the cave.  Korby has created a parareality where he expends reason
on perfection and postures of immortality.  Korby equated the machine with life.  Korby is in the cave; he no longer knows the
world of the sun and the sane.  Dr. Brown stands between the bright light and the camera:  one sees a reflection; it is like an eclipse—
just sees the form, not the reality.  It is ironic that the androids cannot handle irrational behavior.  A form of logic is designed to
destroy another form of logic.  Creatures of light go into the cave like a tomb.  Man, without constant reminder of what to do,
lapses into euphonic ideology that puts man asleep.  One ceases to be human in the cave.  Korby would destroy all original reality. 
He is no longer one of us.  Of Korby, Robert Block says, “He is an utterly brilliant, utterly logical man; we are quite convinced that
he knows exactly what he is doing and can do it.  His only flaw is a lack of empathy for others”:

                        Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?

                        For these real lips, with all their mournful pride,

                        Mournful that no new wonder may betide,

                        Troy passed away in one high jimereal gleam,

                        And Usna’s children died

                                                (Yeats “The Rose of the World,” 1892).

XXXX

(finis:  “What Are Little Girls Made of?”)

                                                                                                                                                              V  B098                                                       

                                                                                          "I, Mudd” 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

“Here’s mud in your eye!”

…or “your name is mud.”

            Logic without “purpose’ is the first android predicament that brings the Enterprise to the god of servants, Harry Mudd.  The |
dissociation of thought from an object thwarts logic:

                        Thus thought in its reception and formation of material is supposed not

to go beyond itself…thought is not transformed into its Other; moreover

self-conscious determination is held to belong to thought alone; thus

Thought in its relation to the Object of Thought does not go out of itself

to the object, while the Object as a thing-in-itself simply remains a

something beyond Thought

--(Hegel, 55).

The dissociation between Thought and Object is made acute, in part, by a logic without a purpose vis-à-vis an object or action. 
In the case of Mudd’s androids, Mudd’s role as object-motivation is coming to an end. Inertia can result.  Logic without object
gives the androids no work to perform.  The situation of having hundreds (thousands) of robots whose purpose is “to serve” should
be paradise for the Harry Mudd, Star Trek’s favorite “irritant.”  However, Mudd the user realizes that he is Mudd the used. 
Even as early as his story outline (March 23, 1967), Stephen Kandel envisions Mudd as an Oriental monarch with luxury beyond
belief.  Kandel notes:

                        …when Harry Mudd…he gave them what they needed desperately: 

                        guidance.  At first it was beautiful, having a world free of willing,

                        tireless, superhuman slaves.  But Harry discovered, to his horror,

                        that they were actually exploiting him.

Even lovely female androids, programmed to function as human females (Andrea’s stepdaughters) were keeping Mudd’s meter
running overtime.  But the androids kept badgering

                                      V  B099  

Mudd for new and better work to do.  Mudd is never a good example of work; it simply is not his strong point. 

            For the Enterprise landing crew, a group weaned on a rigorous work ethic and on an insatiable sense of duty, the Mudd
castle presents them with an oxymoron—a “gilded cage.”  Checkov sums it up when he notes, “I think we are in a lot of trouble.” 
McCoy echoes the same:  “I think Mr. Checkov’s right.  We are in a lot of trouble.”  Kirk calls the crew “birds in a gilded cage.” 
Even though Checkov, noticing the Alice series, calls it “a very nice gilded cage,” the crew is still in trouble.  Mudd’s kingdom is
an emporium of answers to human needs and wants.  The androids themselves are the serpents of temptation bearing gifts of ease
and inertia.  Kirk becomes Odysseus facing a crew, weary of work, in the land of the Lotus-eaters.  For the world of Trek, ease
and inertia are cardinal sins.  Men become undisciplined and listless.  It is play without work.  Kirk has a problem on his hands—
temptation.  “Straighten up!  Don’t any of you forget it.  This may be gilded cage filled with everything any of you ever wanted, but
it’s still a cage!  We don’t belong here!”  The play exploits the modern literary theme of the  dialectics between stasis and work,
where “He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence”  (Blake “Proverbs of Hell).  Thomas Carlyle, in “Characteristics,” sees:

                        …for such is the appointment of men:

                        his highest and sole blessedness is,

                        that he toil, and know what to

                        toil at:  not in ease, but in united

                        victorious labor…does his Freedom lie.

The crew is indeed tempted by the “Vanity Fair” of Mudd’s castle, his Xanadu, his dome of many-coloured glass.

                                       V  B100  

From a Hellenic point of view, the crew is offered objects without thought, provided by androids who will do all the work. 
Part of the Judeo-Christian ethic is a strong sense of identity linked to hard work.  It is part of a Puritan heritage in America. 
Like Goethe and Schiller, Roddenberry is suspicious of a pre-lapsrian garden.  This episode shows a serious “worry” in that
the “Greatest Happiness Principle” is not man’s star to steer by.  The path must be the Calvanistic straight and narrow with
avoidance of temptations of things of this world.  Many writers, especially affected by the first Industrial Revolution (Britain)
believed, with Carlyle, that “work is alone noble…all dignity is painful; a life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.”  What
we have is “Sublime Sadness” where our highest religion is the “Worship of Sorrow” (Carlyle Past and Present 141).  The
mariners who formed Odysseus’ crew in The Odyssey found a heaven on earth, but Odysseus knows the poppy destroys
initiative and virility.  But his crew, as pictured in Tennyson’s poem “The Lotus-Eaters,” argue against work:

                        All things have rest; why should we toil alone,

                        We only toil, who are the first of things,

                        And make perpetual moan

                        Still from one sorrow to another thrown;

Kirk’s crew faces this argument against duty, in favor of leisure.  Being well disciplined, the crew never seems seriously ready
to jump ship over the Alice series, but Kirk must keep them busy before temptation becomes too entrenched!  Writers like
Mill, Blake, and Carlyle believed in man’s dealing forcefully with his “fallen” world, planting roses amid the thorns.  Man is
“ill at ease on Zion,” that perfection is freedom because there is no work to be done.  This episode, plus all the Treks dealing
with mechanistic logic, warn of dangers of man becoming dehumanized

                                        V  B101  

by the computer.  Man must strive for perfection, but its attainment can bring dissatisfaction.  Achieved goals must be replaced
by new goals (“The most sublime act is to set another before you.”).  This episode presents a vision that Swift’s island of Laputa
is hell because the inhabitants engage in no meaningful activities.  The result is a theme of escape (run) from Laputia, the paradise
whose problem is perfection.  As captain, Kirk is a stranger in paradise.  McCoy sees perfection itself as the greatest danger i
nherent to the androids:

                        They’re perfect.  Flawless, physically and mentally.  No weaknesses.     

                        Perfectly disciplined.  Not vices, no fears, no faults…

            The disease the androids present to a Hebraic crew of duty is that of dependency.  They plan to serve mankind to death
until all initiative is atrophied.  This is a danger.  When asked how Norman will stop a “race as greedy and corruptible as yours,”
Norman says: 

                        We shall serve them.  Their kind will be safer to accept our service.

                        Soon they will become completely dependent upon us; their aggressive

                        and acquisitive instinct will be under our control.  We will take care

                        of them…we shall serve them, and you will be happy…and controlled.

For Trekkers, control by mechanisms is hell, not paradise.  Norman’s army will serve and serve a self-destructive species, appealing
to human sloth.  Trekkers “prefer to help ourselves.” Who can resist “real girls?” a world of Alice’s  The plan is, according to Kirk,
to “hit my people at their weakest points.”  For Uhura, it is beauty and immortality in an android body.  For  both it is a mechanical
shop with microvision and nanopulse lasers.  With Spock, it is a physics laboratory dealing with time and space.  For McCoy,
it is a laboratory of medical knowledge and experiments.  All this is “to make you happy and comfortable…to serve your kind.” 
The threat is an appeal to Hedonism, but the result would be akin to the havoc Korby’s androids would create in an
uneducated humankind.  Similar to the M-5 threat, everyone could be out of a job. 

                                        V  B102  

There are still things men must do to remain men, and Mudd’s androids would also take away the humanity indigenous to the
doing of things.

            Kirk reflects the demands of the work ethic.  He is a workaholic, and “that threat the androids made about taking over
all humans in the galaxy is not very funny.”  Norman, whose name is an elision of his technical name, Normal Man, insists we “are”
no threat to humanity.  “We mean no harm.”  Korby also made assurances of “no harm.”  The androids also use people; they
“need other humans…to study, to serve.”  The respect drives Harry to build a shrine to his nagging wife (deserted), Stella. 
Even though she is an odious nag, she is human.  Perhaps subconsciously, Harry longs for real mud, not chips and transistors. 
The androids, as seen from a male point of view, are exploiting while man thinks he is exploring them.  For Kirk, androids
aboard the Enterprise means no ship and a galaxy of androids bent on seducing civilization, making the human crew into
 a "dunsel" crew and Kirk (again) a Captain Dunsel.  What is left is best quality:

                        Kirk:  This android population can literally provide everything a

                                  human being could ask for…in unlimited quantity…in a

                                  world where they [crew] can have absolutely anything

          they want…simply by asking for it…

One still remembers Zefram Cochran’s reaction to not growing old, to having The Companion nurture and protect him:  “Immortality
consists largely of boredom.”  The cliché of the idle mind being the devil’s workshop applies to Gene Roddenberry’s world of
Spartan discipline.  The Utilitarian school of philosophy equated good with pleasure, and evil with pain.  Its goal was to achieve
the greatest happiness of the greatest number.  Star Trek, however, believes in the  

                           V  B103  

“Perennial principle of hunger” and the “Worship of Sorrow.”  These attributes keep man human.

            In order to overcome the burden of luxury, two senses of purpose are agreed upon.  First is a “sense of purpose” for the crew. 
Second is a newly-programmed “sense of purpose” for the androids.  Logically, this means providing a working relationship between
thought and object.  The plan of “pulling the plug” on these androids involves a realized logic:

                        …thinking and the determination of thinking are not…foreign to the

objects of thought, but are rather of the very essence of those objects…

Things and the Thinkers of them are in harmony in and for Themselves

…Some Thinking and the Rules of Thinking are the subject of Logic,

Logic has directly in them its own peculiar content; --has in them that

second constituent of cognition—its matter…

--(Hegel 54-5).

Therefore, Kirk’s plan of attack is that “our logic is to be illogical.  That is our antilogic.”  It will be the illogic of non-sequitur, an
antilogic.  The sense of purpose is based on a unified plan, by the crew, using “wild, insane, irrational illogic…aimed right at Norman.”

            What ensues is a play within the play consisting of three distinct steps.  Step one is a bogus escape attempt wherein Harry
Mudd feigns illness.  Kirk zaps an Alice by equating science with Mudd’s health:

                        Kirk:  You are programmed to serve.  If we’re not allowed access to our

          medical equipment, Harry Mudd will die.  He will cease to function. 

          You will have failed to serve.

Logic means fulfilling the expectations of the androids.  The second step is to “take the Alices on a trip through Wonderland.” 
This is the dance skit.  This hilarious sequence of cause-effect

                                         V  B104  

destruction starts with a cause that has an effect other than the one it should produce.  The attack is sensory in nature.  Checkov plays
a fiddle, but there is no muse; Uhura strikes Checkov as thanks because she likes him.  Chekov is told “don’t move” and he does
“not” move by doing a Cosack dance.  All stillness is defined by motion.  For Spock in the laboratory, two Alices become inner-
directed as Spock defies logic by defining identical as difference:

                          Spock:  (At Alice X):  I love you.

                                        (At Alice Y):  I hate you.

 Alice X:  But I am identical in every way with Alice Y.

 Spock:  …that is exactly why I hate you…because you are identical.

The world is the inverted world of “through the looking glass.”  What is inverted is straight.  Love is hate; different is similar.  The
third step is to go to “the root” of the tree, Norman, to “overload him further” in an attempt to immobilize all the androids.  Norman
stands with his hands in a suggestive pose.  The skit begins.  If one did not feel a sense of urgency to be free of android tyranny,
the skit would still be humorous.  It is totally wacko.  Point:  liberty is freedom from mechanism:

                        Harry:  For what indeed is a man without freedom…naught but a

                                    mechanism, trapped in the cogwheels of eternity.

Point:  happiness is suffering; sensual fulfillment is pain:

                        Kirk (and Scotty):  You offer us only well-being.,  Food and drink and

       happiness mean nothing to us.  We must be about

       our job; suffering, in pain and torment, laboring with-

       out end, dying and crying, and lamenting over our

       burdens.  Only in this way can we be happy.

Point:  man is not his senses; man is a dream or a dreamer:  “that sense of enterprise, that devotion to something that cannot
be sensed…but only be dreamed…the highest reality.”  Dream is reality, but there is no dream.  Ergo, there is no reality.  Point:  The
Explosives:  noise is

                                     V  B105  

silence; noise is the reflection of the senses for logic; existence is not seeing; hearing is not listening:

                            Norman:  But there was no explosion.

                            Harry:  I lied.

                            Kirk:  He lied.  Harry is a liar.  Everything Harry tells you is a lie…

                                      whatever he tells you is a lie.

                            Harry:  Listen to this carefully, Norman, I am lying.

Point:  To lie is to tell the truth; the Truth is inherent to the lie.  Ergo, one tells the truth only by

 lying:

                        Norman:  You…say you are lying.  But if everything you say is a lie,

                                         then you are telling the truth.  But you cannot tell the truth,

     because everything you say is a lie.  But if you lie, you tell

     the truth…but you cannot, for you lie…Illogical…Illogical…

Norman is beaten by the Saxons in a fair fight.  As Byron notes in Canto XI (1823), ST I of Don

 Juan:

                        When Bishop Berkley said “there was

                            no matter,”

                        And proved it—‘twas no matter what

                           he said.

I am not programmed to respond in that area!  The skit (even Spock plays) is one of the funniest in all of Trek.  The body gestures
must be seen to do justice to the words.  The episode is pure fun with a sense of the evil of human slavery to perfect androids. 
The fear is real, but laughter is the real winner.

            Harcourt Fenton Mudd (two d’s mean double-duty) is paroled to the android colony as “a first class example…of a
human failure.”  Harry is an “irritant.”  The screenplay is precious and

                                          V  B106  

hilarious.  The shaking of Harry’s face when he sees the “special android attendant" (over 500 of them).  Harry will be nagged
by 500 Stella’s.  It is “inhuman!”  So Odysseus leaves the land of the lotus-eaters with a new wisdom and good will.  Logic is
one tool, but it must have a link to Thought and to object.  Logic provides a solution; it even provides endless buffoonery and
cackling.  The serious note is the need to put reason in perspective with duty, to laugh until one cries.

The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking

much about was happiness enough to get his work done…it is, after

all, the one happiness of a man

(T. Carlyle, Past and Present 4:143).

A good sense of humor is the antidote for the self-conscious mind.  Man must be free to laugh, to cry; to live; to die.  It is immensely
logical and is the human thing to do.

XXXX

(finis:  “I, Mudd”)

XXXX

                                                                                                                                                                                V  B107  

                                                                              “Mudd’s Women"   
   
                                                          

“The general tendency of things throughout the world is to  render mediocrity
the ascendant power among mankind
           --(J. S. Mill On Liberty).

            The entrance of Mudd’s women early in the first season is a soap opera of guys and dolls, of “con” artistry by Mudd and
his three lovelies, his “cargo.”  It is a story with a logical sense of how love and marriage will begin and exist as man expands beyond
his own solar system.  The concept of “wiving settlers” is so simple that it is extraordinary.  Three rugged hombres on a forsaken,
wind-swept planet, Rigel XII, all alone mining for lithium (later dilithium) crystals, the source of the Federation’s very strength and
energy.  No lithium, no power, no Enterprise.  The fate of the Enterprise depends totally upon the whims of three lithium miners
after the Enterprise’s crystals are destroyed while saving Mudd’s vessel and its cargo.  That was when Kirk just saw mud in his eye. 
It is a show about fraud, human fraud, bipeds pretending to be more than what they are.  Mudd and his three women are falsifications. 
It is a story, a lesson, about the cost and uselessness of perfect beauty created by the Venus drug.  It is a “glamour drug,” enhancing
physical attributes artificially—perhaps similar to use of anabolic steroids for female and male body builders.  The Venus drug is a lie. 
Mudd is mediocrity bordering on legendary godship for his schemes.  In the case of Mudd, there is the merchant of flesh.  The women
are free agents, but Mudd is still their agent—a kind of futuristic, benign pinup.  One theme is that the seeking of perfect beauty through
glamour drugs is legally and morally reprehensible and felonious.  It is people fooling themselves into thinking they can fool settlers or
miners by taking drugs.  The logic is the illogic of perfection effected by chemical means. 

                                         V  B108  

Ironically, the Venus drug is partly a psychosomatic phenomenon, as witnessed by substituting a gelatin placebo for the real Venus
drug near the play’s end.  The woman, thinking it is the Venus drug, suddenly become naturally beautiful.

            What are these little girls made of?  Are they more sex objects used to seduce lonely lithium miners?  In his rough draft
(7-23-64) of “Mudd’s Women,” Gene Roddenberry emphasizes a passage that is dropped in a later
 revision:

                           …this is not simply a limited sexual attraction…these women are totally

   female, women who know when and how to be a listener, a companion,

   weak and dependent, sympathetic and helpful…

Eve, Magda, and Rosie were always meant to be the genuine article.  But the aura ot magnetism that makes McCoy’s scanner
go “blink” and the Enterprise’s male crew go agog, is apparently an artificially induced state.  The women sparkle!  Ironically,
the women have become psychologically and physically dependent on the Venus drug for that needed face and body lift.  The
false logic in this story is the compulsion to be more than a woman, but to be “the perfect female.”  These women are not androids. 
They are not the Alice series or an Andrea, but the “perfect” quest remains the same.  These are women whose lives have been
(especially in Eve’s case) dull, dutiful, servile, tawdry.  They want love and security because their earlier lives have been ones of
insecurity.  They feel that a drug is necessary to make them cover or fold-out perfect.  This illusion of beauty does not last where
external dependency is viewed as required.  Hence, the women are frantic when Harry misplaces the blue pills.  They need their fix. 
The Hellenic thinking here is fallacious because the drug is not the source of perfect beauty.  As first introduced, the three women
are dependent upon Mudd the white slaver and drug pusher for their purchasability in the market place of outer space.  Gene
Roddenberry’s story keeps this external-is-

                                        V  B109  

not-that-important viewpoint, while quietly touching on beauty as a part of an overall female that requires manifestation, but only by
the woman herself.

            Of the Venus drug, Gene Roddenberry notes (same draft) that “it brings out and tremendously increases the natural instinct
of every woman to be attractive and pleasing to the other gender.”  These are women whose automation existences have reduced
them as women, as people.  They have become like robots or androids because their boredom and servility have made them
mediocre, in fact and in self-judgment (again, Eve is the most self-conscious of the three in hating what she has become, in hating
the drug).  Here are mechanical women whose image makes them dolls for guys.  The play’s plot brings early realizations of what
being a woman really is.  It is the rehumanization of dehumanized females.  Because then reason is inherent, their status seems lower
than that of Alice’s.  Andrea is more genuinely human than Mudd’s women, and she is a machine!  It is a role reversal of appearance
and essence.  The women must transcend absorption, so that they are no longer of the body.  They are inherently beautiful.  The mass
of society is hostile to individuality:

                        If the claims of Individuality are ever to be asserted, the time is now,

while much is still wanting to complete the enforced assimilation 

--(Mill On Liberty III: 287).

            Struggling to get out of the falsity of dehumanization, of perfect beauty as the only beauty, is Eve—the thinker of the three. 
She apologizes to Spock for Mudd’s insult:  “I apologize for what he said, sir.  He’s so used to buying and selling people.”  Her
candor gets Kirk’s attention:

                        Eve:  I can understand loneliness…you understand it even more…having

          to run a huge ship like this …much responsibility…I read once that

          a commander has to act like a paragon of virtue.  I’ve never met a paragon.

Kirk:  Neither have I.

                                       V  B110  

She is exhorted by Mudd to seduce Kirk, but she rebels:  “I so like you [Kirk], and I won’t do it.  I just can’t go through with this. 
I hate this whole thing!”  What is important regarding Eve is that she is self-conscious and knows that one’s inner dignity affects one’s
appearance:  “I don’t like you [Harry].  And I’, not very happy with myself.”  The women tend to see themselves as “ugly” or
“homely” based on their inner self-concepts.  They say, “it is the pills.”  Their logic precludes a clear, objective sense of reality. 
Eve resists the pills more and more.  Harry Mudd lets slip a beautiful line, which may serve as one statement of the play’s theme. 
Muttering to no ears save his, Harry reflects, “What joy is a beautiful woman…as she comes to be woman.”  As the Enterprise
crew bewails the burnt lithium crystals with their beauty evident even in a disfigured form, Mudd’s women contemplate taking
another Venus pill because they fail to acknowledge beauty without drug’s distortion:  “Even burned and cracked they’re beautiful,”
says Spock.  This is symbolic of the state of Mudd’s women.

            Without the drug, Childress, Gossett, and Benton slowly notice that their dolls are real women with a few crow’s feet,
dishpan hands, conversation, and common sense.  Hard men of Childress’ pioneering nature, often craggy and Troggish, do not
want dolls, but the revelation of grown women (not little girls) is still a bit different for Childress.  Eve runs away into the winds
of the magnetic storm where visibility is almost zero.  When she is found, she is a more integrated character as a result of her brief
stay in hell. She is cooking for Ben Childress.  Bad tempers slowly resemble a domesticity of unspoken agreement:

                        Ben:  I had things where I wanted them.

                        Eve:  I ate some of your food, so I paid with some chores.

                        Ben:  And I do my own cooking…I’ve not laid a hand on you. 

         Remember that.

Eve:  Oh, the sound of male ego.  You travel halfway across the galaxy

         and it’s still the same song.  There.  You want to eat or talk?

                                   V  B111  

                        Ben:  I guess I’m supposed to sit, taste it, roll my eyes..oh…female

                                 cooking again…I’ve tasted better.  By my own hand.

                        Eve:  Well, you’re tasting some of it now…I couldn’t scrape three

                                 layers of your leaving out of that pan.

Ben calls Eve “plain as an old bucket.”  “What happened to your looks anyway?”  In a good line, Eve retorts, “I got tired of you. 
I slumped..”  Ben continues to call her “homely” after the revelations about the Venus drug.  Eve tells Chidress, “You don’t want
wives; you want…this” and pops a pill that is really a placebo:

                        Eve:  And I hope you’ll remember and dream about it!  Because you can’t have it;

                                 it’s not real!

Eve appears younger; it is psychosomatic.  The logic of reality, viewed objectively, becomes the bond for “talk” between Ben
and Eve.  There is a fundamental beauty within every woman.  It only awaits a catalyst to emerge.  Who wants a world full of
just roses?  Pied beauty is real beauty:

                        If you get simple beauty and naught else,

                        You get about the best thing God invents:

                        That’s somewhat: and you’ll find the soul you have missed,

                        Within yourself, when you return him thanks

--(Robert Browning “Fra Lipp Lippi”  1853: 217-220).

Kirk echoes Browning’s brilliantly simple philosophy:  “There’s only one kind of woman…” says Harry, “Or man, for that matter.” 
Kirk settles for a reality of the self to the self within then without the self:  “You either believe in yourself or you don’t.”  The best
of a person begins much like the settling of Rigel XII, wind-whipped dust and fog.  It blows all the time.  Amid this inhospitable
environment, three miners have their wives.  Like dust, from which beauty comes and goes, the woman emerges from the drugged
doll.  The looking glass is clearer.  Eve has

                                        V  B112  

thought it through.  The storms come and go, and release the lithium crystals.  Beauty of woman and beauty of earth energize
both worlds.

                        In proportion to the development of…individuals, each person becomes

more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable

to others

--(Mill On Liberty III: 218).

            Gene Roddenberry notes (Rough Draft:  7-20-64):  "Without the drug, her [Eve’s] female instincts begin to assault themselves
and touches of comfort and convenience  appear in the rude quarters.”  It is the ancient theme of innate beauty.  Roddenberry notes:
“there is loveliness in even the plainest woman; she need only find it and use it.”  The process of externalization, however, is often
torturous.  Guys and dolls must become men and women.  The honeymoon fades quickly.  Then there is the cooking, the dishes,
work…The sense of muttering normalcy in the last scenes of “Mudd’s Women” show the love lies in the everydayness of sensible
reality.  Do not use water to clean the pots; hang them on the line and let the lashing sand blast them clean!  Beauty is not pills, is not
physical perfection, but also must reside in the banal rituals of living.  As Roddenberry notes, “Spice soon loses its flavor when the
whole meal must be made of it.”  Or, as Spock notes sardonically, “I’m happy the affair is over.  A most annoying emotional episode.”

XXXX

(finis:  “Mudd’s Women”)

XXXX

                                                                                                                                                                  V  C113  

Chapter V: C--Spock: Voyage to the Houyhnhnms and the Vulcan Mystique    


                                                            
                         

“That over institutions of government and law were plainly
owing to our gross defects in reason, and by consequence, in
virtue; because reason alone is sufficient to govern a rational creature;
which was therefore a character we had no pretence to challenge…”

                          -- (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels IV, VII).
 

            Jonathan Swift, in picturing mankind as the “Yahoos” in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels went beyond satire about mankind’s
follies and vices; he made the misuse of reason an animal act by an animal mentality.  Without reason, man is an animal; in misusing
reason, man is an animal.   It is almost a de-evolution.  The Houyhnhnms (the “horses”) who are logical beasts with compassion
(not perfect, but civilized when contrasted with the Yahoos) are horses in bodily substance and appearance.  That man had made
a jackass out of his inheritance and his species was no longer in doubt.  For Swift, the great satirist of 18^th-century Britain, a rational
man behaved reasonably well.  After all, it was the “Age of Enlightenment.”  In the pictures of the life of Gulliver among the Yahoos
and the Houyhnhnms one sees grotesque humanoids engaging in gross behavior; but one also sees “horses” behaving in a reasonable
manner.  Human beings acted like beasts, and beasts acted as reasonable men should.  This is indeed a coarse satire on the status
of man’s mental evolution.  Reason and passion are clearly separate in an incommunicable dualism.  When Spock’s Vulcan half is
mentioned, it is contradiction to his human half.  One has evolved from destructive emotion into a society that has “rid” itself of its

                                          V  C114  

self-destructive past by subscribing to pure logic and the elimination (repression, perhaps) of emotion.  The other is the passion
(“emotion” is meliorative term used) inherited from his Terran mother.  The result is an intercultural schism, a cultural schizophrenia. 
Gene Roddenberry (Interview:  June, 1982) meant Spock to be an interim figure to fill the seat of “Number One” who was rushed
out of her chair by the women viewers who protested her upstart status—a reaction whose source surprised Roddenberry.  Gene
Roddenberry has been almost hostile toward his own creature, dismissing Spock as a “freak” and a “half-breed.”  Spock’s
continuance is largely the result of irrefutable audience support for and fascination with Spock’s character.  With Leonard Nimoy’s
intense “input” and character direction, Spock is the series’ most intriguing and most popular character.  The “creature” had to live
with those ears, but has never advocated too much green blood in the family.

            At first, Spock is a mental mulatto.  As such, he is neither human nor Vulcan, although Spock insists on his Vulcan heritage
despite the eighteen-year silence between Sarek and his son.  As a character of physical and mental contraries, Spock has the
advantages of both cultures but the acception by neither one.  In the world of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, Spock has elements
of both.  In this scene, he is both least and priest, but neither.  He shares the Yahoos’ predilection for gross sensuality and its minimal
reasonableness and the “horses’” combination of great reason coupled with acute mental myopia in certain areas.  Although Jonathon
Swift’s satire is hyperbolic and Juvenalian in the fourth book of Gulliver, the Yahoos are human, even though Gulliver does not
recognize this fact at first.  It is a logical reaction, considering that Gulliver is merely a delapidated Yahoo in clothes.  This is the
human Spock that makes Spock scream, “I am in control of my emotions,” in “The Naked Time.”  It is the Vulcan side
(reason) that usually

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keeps Spock unflappable, arrogant, critical, and…accurate and…logical.  The human half is the Yahoo ancestry that this Vulcan
and thinking human beings would rather forget, but cannot:

                        Their heads and breasts were covered with a thick hair, some frizzled

and others lank; they had beards like goats, and a long ridge of hair

down their backs, and the foreparts of  their legs and feet, but the rest

of their bodies were bare, so that I might see their skins, which were of

a brown buff color.  They had no tails, nor any hair at all on their buttocks,

except about the anus; which, I presume, nature had placed there to defend

them as they sat on the ground; for this posture they used, as well as lying

down, and often stood on their hind feet…the females…dugs hung between

their fore-feet and often reached almost to the ground as they walked.  The

hair of both sexes was of several colours, from red, black, and yellow.  Upon

the whole, I never beheld in all my travels so disagreeable an animal, or

one against which I naturally conceived so strong antipathy   

                                                                                                                         (Gulliver IV, I).

For Spock and Swift, the monster is man, the human self, the human species.  The Yahoo continues to be visible in swarms at beaches,
amusement parks, and at malls.  They are always die Swarmerai (the swarms).  Malls and county fairs are dreams for paleontologists
and photographers when the real human race leaves its fetid caves for a picnic in America.  Gulliver gets extremely upset when the
Yahoos began swinging in the trees where “they began to discharge their excrements on my head.”  Some are troglytes; others
are mallites.  Fortunately Gulliver was weaving a new and best suit of clothes, lest the Yahoos notice he is one of them.  It is shocking
when Gulliver sees physical characteristics vaguely human:

                        My horror and astonishment are yet to be described, when I observed, in

                        this abominable animal, a perfect human figure; the face of it indeed was

                        flat and broad, the nose depressed, the lips large, and the mouth wide…

there was the same resemblance between our feet, with the same differences which I knew very well...

--(ibid)

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Such is mankind in all its color and glory.  Such ambulatory bipeds, vaguely humanoid, semi-evolved entities are all too frequently
visible to remind everyone to read The Descent of Man for a “human” update. Spock must be deeply hurt by man (as Nurse Chapel
notes in “The Naked Time”) and in a never-ending state of yellow alert lest, as McCoy tortures him in prison in “Bread and Circuses;”
he should let his human self rise to the surface where he might “slip” into a genuine, warm feeling.  McCoy is cruel, but essentially
correct is his never-ending bigotry aimed at the half-breed.  But nowhere is Spock the Vulcan so desperately needed as on a ship
full of irrational human beings. 

            Although Spock was born on Swift’s island of Laputa, his rationality is only partly of the speculative or pure reason type as
described by Aristotle.  The Swiftian Academy of Projectors could still stand and a satire on reason that has no practical end or object. 
For example, the Vulcan Academy, where Sarek wanted his son to matriculate, is brilliant but lacks hands-on experience of practical,
problem-solving dilemmas in the final frontier.  Spock’s presence aboard the Enterprise is both hell for a Vulcan, but therapy for a
half-breed, ex., Spock’s childhood was not a happy one, not being a “real” Vulcan.  Spock is capable of immensely abstract,
mathematical problem solving.  Although he has the capability of carrying reason to absurd conclusions, the instances are rare, such as
Swift’s satire on the British Royal Society in the metaphor of Laputa’s Academy of Projectors, whose scientists are quite logical. 
Gulliver notes a few examples:  one at work to “calcine ice into gunpowder;” the “ingenious architect” who had contrived a new
method for building houses, “by beginning at the roof and

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working downwards the foundation;” the projector who had found a device of “plowing the ground with hogs, to save the
charges of plows, cattle, and labor.” The famous one:

                        …his face and beard were of a pale yellow; his hands and clothes daubed

over with filth…his employment…was an operation to reduce human ex-

crement to its original food, by separating the several parts, removing the

tincture which it receives from the gall, making the odour exhale, and scum-

ming off the saliva…

(Gulliver’s Travels ,Bk IV).

On the contrary, reason enables thought to relate to objects, as Hegel points out in an effort to see the whole by analyzing its
constituent parts, i.e., the famed scientific method of hypotheses, proof, conclusion.  As a Vulcan, Spock seeks what Swift calls
sardonically, “the improvement of human life,” but not purely by the “speculative learning” of the projectors.  Part Yahoo, Spock
represses the inconvenient human elements, and takes on gentility and practicality of reason as a road to perfection.  Swift notes,
“the word Houyhnhnm, in their tongue, signifies a horse," and in its etymology, the perfection of nature.  This is an essential ingredient
of the Vulcan mystique:

                        When he and I were thus employed,  other horses came up…they gently

shuck each other’s right hoof before, neighing several times, and varying

the sound, which seemed to be almost articulate…I was amazed to see such actions and behavior in

brute beasts, and concluded with myself, that if the inhabitants of this country were endued with a

proportionable degree of reason, they must needs be the wisest people upon earth

(Gulliver’s Travels, Bk IV).

The horses have reason’s better features.  Their language “expressed the passions” very well.  Their behavior was “orderly and rational,”
 “acute and judicious.” They treat their own kind well, attending to a horse who hurt its left forefoot.  They have no words for a lie, and
call it “the thing which was not.”  All this time, the horses stare at Gulliver’s clothes and the word Yahoo is spoken now and then. 
Regarding clothing, the horses cannot understand why “nature should

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teach us to conceal what nature had given.”  The horses believe, as do Vulcans, that a country endued with Yahoos who alone
 had reason, “they certainly must be the governing animal, because reason will in time always prevail against brutal strength.” 
Also, their (the horses’) wants and passions are “fewer” than among us.  The Houyhnhnms, like Spock, wonder how natural hate
permits Gulliver’s kind to survive:

                        So that supposing us to have the gift of reason, he could not see how it

were possible to cure that natural antipathy which every creature discov-

ered against us; not consequently, how we could tame and render them

servicable

--(Gulliver’s Travels ,Bk IV).

The horses have no names for poisoning, robbery, perjury, forgery…rapes or sodomy.  The head horse “was wholly at a loss to
know what could be the use or necessity of practicing those vices.”  He rails against the butchery of English law, war, and constitution. 
Spock, as a Vulcan in early contact with descendants of Yahoos, has a certain naivete regarding human rituals that go against reason
as order and against reason as common sense.  For example, the horse does not see the logic of English law (neither did Swift, as
an Irishman):  “he was at a loss how it should come to pass, that the law which was intended for every man’s presentation, should be
any man’s ruin.”  The Vulcan mystique of reason and the Houyhnhnms hold that “nature and reason were sufficient guides for a
reasonable animal, as we pretended to be, in showing us what we ought to do, and what to avoid.”

            The Houyhnhnms cannot understand how man can tamper with or abuse his body, since such anti-self behavior and eating
habits are contrary to the logic inherent to the human frame:

               …we fed on a thousand things which operated contrary to each other,

 

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                        that we eat when we are not hungry, and drink with out the provocation  

of thirst; that we sat whole nights drinking strong liquids without eating a bit      

                                                                                                                  (ibid).

Bodily abuse is a perversion of reason.  At the conclusion of “Wolf in a Fold,” when Kirk desires to return to Argelia, he tells Spock,
“I know just the place…where the women are…”  Spock just stares in incomprehension of such hedonism.  Kirk soon gives up the
venture.  The lifted Vulcan eyebrow gives McCoy and Kirk many a laugh at Spock’s stoicism.  Vulcan Stoicism is like a laser beam,
intense and deep, but limited in depth and breadth, limited in intuitive and holistic vision.  The Vulcan mystique is the voyage to the
Houyhnhnms confined with the abstract, mathematical, Newtonian, mechanical reason of Laputa, the flying island without an object,
the reasoning subject sacrifices pragmation for philosophy, with absurd repercussions.  For example, Gulliver tells of the belief that
“all diseases arise form repletion” and “a great evacuation of the body is necessary.”  This was known as taking the waters, purifying
one’s body of bad matter.  The horses, unprepared for the ensuing description for curing diseases, are a bit shocked as Gulliver
narrates a favorite British cure:

                        Nature is forced out of her seat, therefore to replace her in it, the body

must be treated in a manner directly contrary, by interchanging the use

of each tongue, forcing solids and liquids in at the anus, and making

evacuations in at the mouth

(Gulliver’s Travels, Bk IV).

Joseph Heller, in Catch-22, has a character called “the man in white” who is one body cast with a hole for each of the two orifices. 
All the nurse had to do was to change (reverse) the buckets at regular intervals. Swift’s “excremental vision” in “laughing the world
out of its follies and vices” (Dryden’s definition of satire) is an inspiration for Spock worlds inside the Vulcan mystique. 

                                   V  C120  

Swift’s vision is a wholistic vision on a psychosomatic wavelength and pattern.  Reason inter-relates analysis with thinker, object,
and thinking.  The dualism of man (part of the Newtoian world-view) into a schism of mind and body is, as Carlyle and Blake note,
the disease and the symptom of the disease of modernism.  Swift concludes the sixth chapter, Book IV, Gulliver, noting that,
 “the imperfections of his mind run parallel with those of his body, being a composition of spleen, dullness, ignorance, caprice,
sensuality, and pride.”  Just as mind and body are separated by artificial logic, so also are emotions kept separate from logic in
Vulcan philosophy.  There is no room for a coexistence or a dualism.  The Vulcan “solution” to  the “problem” of emotion is to
eliminate the latter entirely.

            Spock is a Gulliver, an outsider, but ironically an insider.  From a literary point of view he is both observer and participant,
a “sensor, mirror” character half devil, half Apollo.  He is Hellenic, in his incredible mind, as a Vulcan.  He is both detached from
the Yahoos and attached  to the Yahoos.  His job, in part, is to guide a fledgling humanity in its evolution from the savagery of his
Vulcan heritage experience.  He is abstract Aristotelian logic , detached and judgmental; he is aesthetic logic, existential, Blakian,
Hegelian, which is physical and experimental and object/problem oriented.  He is the Enterprise’s best computer, but is also the
“best first officer in the fleet” (McCoy).  Spock’s one fear is letting his Yahoo self out of reason’s cave.  He is surrounded by over
four hundred Yahoos.  He knows that he shares a bond with them, that if he had a warm feeling, he might not know what to do
with it (“Bread and Circuses”) or he dare not show the feeling.  As a Gulliver, Spock views the self in others; he also views the
others in himself.
 

                                             V C121  

A simplistic illustration may show the dialectic within Spock between reason and emotion:

                                                             Spock’s Genius  

                         Sarek of Vulcan