1.8 — “The Magicks of Megas-Tu”
Plot: The Enterprise journeys to the center of the universe, to investigate the circumstances of the original creation of matter. They find a region where the natural laws seem to be suspended, and there encounter Lucien, a goat-footed man with strange magical powers. Before the half hour is up, the crew will be placed on trial, learn more about Lucien, and discover strange facts about the nature and origins of the universe.
Thoughts: The story for this one originally had the Enterprise journeying to the center of the galaxy to meet God–does that remind you of anything? The network objected, so the being was changed to the Devil.
Meeting the Devil–that’s apparently not a problem.
My problem with this one is that it is so anthropocentric. It makes affairs of human beings the central fact of importance to the center of power at the center of the universe. This episode was produced in 1973, before Douglas Adams put Earthlings in their proper place “far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy.” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979).
Still, I love the trippy visuals and the battle of magical wills. It’s Star Trek meets Harry Potter! And Kirk forgives the Devil. That’s pretty sophisticated stuff for a Saturday morning cartoon. The trip to virtual Salem, so that the crew can be put on trial by all-powerful cosmic beings, smacks of TOS 3.6, “Spectre of the Gun,” but this is a classic Star Trek plot, and for my money it’s rarely been done better. The voice work for Lucien, on the other hand, could easily have been improved.
Regarding the scientific basis for the episode, Wikipedia says: “It should be noted that at the time of production, the nature of the center of the Milky Way was not well understood by astronomers. The luminous feature at galactic center known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) was not discovered until February 1974, and it would not be until 2002 before Sgr A* was confirmed to be the location of a supermassive black hole, a feature now known to be at the center of the vast majority of observed galaxies in the universe.”
So there you have it. What did you think?
4 out of 5 foreshadowings of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
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