3.19 — “Requiem for Methuselah”
Plot: Needing a rare element to use as an antidote for Rigellian space fever, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to a supposedly uninhabited planet in the Omega system. There they meet Flint, his comely ward Rayna, and their floating robot assistant, M4. Flint seems strangely reluctant to help them, at first trying to drive them away, then to stall them in his mansion filled with priceless, curious art pieces from Earth. What is Flint and Rayna’s secret, and will Kirk secure the antidote to the fever in time to save his crew?
Thoughts: Whaaa…? I don’t want to believe that this episode is canon.
This episode rips a lot of plot elements off from the movie Forbidden Planet (1956). Flint is like Morbius, a reclusive scientific genius living alone on a planet with his daughter (here, his ward) who has never seen a man before (just like Prospero and Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which in turn provided the basis for Forbidden Planet). M4, a poor cousin of Nomad from “The Changeling,” stands in for Robby the Robot. Just as in FP, the captain falls in love with the girl, arousing the jealousy of Morbius/Flint. They even have the same scene of M4/Robby attacking the Captain, and the device of the locked door in the laboratory which hides the master’s secret. I have seen (and reviewed) FP recently, and this detracted for me.
There are various things other things I could nitpick. I did appreciate the appearance of a flat panel television monitor(!) and a medicine called ryetalyn, many years before Ritalin would become ubiquitous. Flint is an interesting character.
What this episode deserves to be remembered for most, however, is its portrayals of Kirk and Spock, and what these portrayals add (or detract) from their characters. This must be said: for an alien who constantly complains about humans being barbaric and emotional, Spock sure is an Earth-phile. He plays piano flawlessly, and is familiar enough with Brahms to recognize his manuscript handwriting. In earlier episodes he demonstrates intimate familiarity with Earth history and literature. The next time Spock turns up an eyebrow at human behavior, someone should say “Methinks thou doth protest too much.” Which he would immediately recognize as a paraphrase from Hamlet.
Worst is Kirk. His behavior in this episode is perfectly appalling. He seems to cavalierly forget about the safety of the ship’s crew, and the three crewmembers who have already died, the instant he sees a pretty face. After one kiss, he tries to seduce this pretty face away from the planet–I guess to turn her into a kept woman like Mirror Kirk’s Marlena? For Rayna’s part, she forgets all about wanting to discuss field density and gravity phenomena with Spock very. He’s the one she should have fallen in love with–that would have made for a much better episode.
Kirk has a well known weakness for the ladies, but he’s never behaved like this before. His first love is the Enterprise, and he puts its interests first. At least through the end of second season, Kirk participated in far fewer liaisons than legend would suggest, and when it occurred, it was usually a matter of him ruthlessly exploiting sex appeal to achieve an important objective for the safety of the ship or its crew, as in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” “Miri,” “The Conscience of the King,” “Mirror, Mirror,” and “The Gamesters of Triskelion.” He met old flames in “Shore Leave” and “Court Martial,” and fell in love, but not carelessly, in “The City on the Edge of Forever” and season three’s “The Paradise Syndrome”–but he never behaved like this. Then there was “Dagger of the Mind,” when he was clearly embarrassed to have a former liaison threaten to get in the way of official duties.
Kirk’s behavior in this episode is like a careless parody of a negative riff on his character. Putting this material in an episode gives credence to Kirk’s detractors, which makes me mad. The next time I get into an argument with someone about Kirk’s merits, I’ll have to start by conceding, “I’ll give you ‘Requiem for Methuselah.’” How did this happen? Apparently Roddenberry wasn’t paying attention much at this point, and most of the other key people who had guarded the integrity of the show over its run had already departed.
Finally, there is Spock’s action at the end of the episode, where he reaches into Kirk’s mind while he is asleep to tell him to “forget” his terrible pain over that woman/android that he met for five minutes. This is kind of a cool moment, echoed in Star Trek II by Spock’s instruction to McCoy to “remember.” But I would consider this act an inexcusable violation, which furthermore would surely be harmful to Kirk’s emotional makeup. I don’t see how Kirk would be anything but furious, and probably traumatized, if he ever found out.
At least the episode wasn’t boring.
2 out of 5 fresh Da Vincis.
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