3.16 — “The Mark of Gideon”

3.16 — “The Mark of Gideon”

Plot: The Enterprise makes contact with Gideon, reportedly an advanced, paradise society which has so far resisted joining the Federation or allowing sensor scans of its planet. The Gideons consent to have Kirk beam down, alone. After entering the transporter, he finds himself still aboard the Enterprise, but with no people in it. No people, at least, until he meets a young girl named Odona. Meanwhile, on a parallel Enterprise, the crew try to solve the mystery of their missing captain.

Thoughts: Disappointed! I was falling asleep when I watched this episode, so I went back and watched the second half again. I’m sad to report that being awake only makes a marginal difference in the quality of the experience. Baaad writing.

Here are some things I liked: Ambassador Hodin’s colorful hexagon shirt. I want a reproduction of this to wear at science fiction conventions! The teaser, showing Kirk on the empty ship, which offered new viewing angles on the transporter room and the bridge (some of which may have been recycled from first season’s “This Side of Paradise”), and seemed spooky and promising before it became evident that all promises were empty. Nice things might be said about the spooky reveal of the faces on the viewscreen, if the viewer wasn’t busy gagging over the completely irrational, undermotivated scene when Kirk first kisses Odona.

The episode can’t seem to decide whether Odona is a dupe, or is in on the whole plot from the beginning. She plays most of her scenes as if she has been mind-wiped or is suffering from short-term memory loss. I, for one, do not find lack of purpose or absence of mental acuity attractive. The character is supposed to be beautiful–hey, the master plan is that the captain of the starship will fall in love at first sight and forget about his crew and his duties!–but she just looks unhealthy and undernourished to me.

It feels like making excuses for the episode to say that I do like that the series had the ambition to tackle overpopulation as an issue, to reference access to contraception as a thing of social value, and to take on belief systems that would prohibit voluntary limitations on reproduction. The notion of pestilence as a good thing is also a pretty far out idea. The problem with this episode is not lack of interesting concepts, but lack of story and execution.

This feels like shooting fish in a barrel, but let me try to get this straight. The government wants Kirk to help them introduce a virus which kills within 24 hours into the general population? So that it can engage in biologic warfare against its own citizenry? Nightmare. Kirk focuses on the importance of saving Odona, who has consented to this procedure, but seems unconcerned about the masses, who may, after all, be less personally attractive. (Shatner, by the way, is a pro. He has to know these scenes are awful, but soldiers on in a way that almost makes them work.) Why can’t the government cook something like this up themselves? Does famine not come into play as a population constraint? Or war, if Odona wasn’t lying when she said that the people would kill for the chance to be alone.

How did the people of Gideon get access to detailed schematics of the Enterprise? A commenter on IMDB pointed out that the Klingons and Romulans would love to have a copy. Remember, the ship is huge. Did they also make a working turbolift? Must have, because Kirk and Spock both travel to the bridge. But how does building a fake Enterprise even advance the people of Gideon’s goal of stealing the virus from Kirk’s blood? Couldn’t they have just strapped him to a gurney, attached some lines to him, and kept him under sedation? Or for Pete’s sake, just take the one blood sample and send him on his way, none the wiser. Too many problems.

What we have is a perfect illustration of the ills of third season. The producers couldn’t afford to go on location, or to build more than limited new sets, so the action is stuck on the Enterprise. They also couldn’t afford action, so it’s just talk, talk, talk–telling not showing, with a lot of filler incidents that go nowhere (all that time to beam a citizen of Gideon on board, just to send him back). And a lot less time and attention was evidently being paid to getting scripts in shootable condition. By this time, Robert Justman, D.C. Fontana, and Gene Coon had all left the series.

As I’ve said before (2.5, “The Apple”), I’d rather have an ambitious script that falls flat on its face (e.g., 1.27, “The Alternative Factor,” or perhaps 3.1, “Spock’s Brain”), than a lazy script that fails for lack of trying. This one has a little of both–some ambitious concepts, orphaned by a lack of effort to place them in a workable context.

1 out of 5 insubordinate Vulcans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark_of_Gideon