{"id":4458,"date":"2014-05-08T06:04:51","date_gmt":"2014-05-08T06:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/319-Requiem-for-Methuselah"},"modified":"2014-05-08T06:04:51","modified_gmt":"2014-05-08T06:04:51","slug":"319-requiem-for-methuselah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relivethemajesty.com\/index.php\/2014\/05\/08\/319-requiem-for-methuselah\/","title":{"rendered":"3.19 — \u201cRequiem for Methuselah\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n

3.19 — \u201cRequiem for Methuselah\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Plot:<\/strong> 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\u2019s secret, and will Kirk secure the antidote to the fever in time to save his crew?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thoughts:<\/strong> Whaaa\u2026? I don\u2019t want to believe that this episode is canon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This episode rips a lot of plot elements off from the movie Forbidden Planet<\/em> (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\u2019s The Tempest<\/em>, which in turn provided the basis for Forbidden Planet<\/em>). M4, a poor cousin of Nomad from \u201cThe Changeling,\u201d stands in for Robby the Robot. Just as in FP<\/em>, 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<\/em> recently, and this detracted for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.\u00a0Flint is an interesting character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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 \u201cMethinks thou doth protest too much.\u201d Which he would immediately recognize as a paraphrase from Hamlet<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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\u2019s the one she should have fallen in love with–that would have made for a much better episode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kirk has a well known weakness for the ladies, but he\u2019s never behaved like this before. His first love is the Enterprise<\/em>, 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 \u201cWhat Are Little Girls Made Of?\u201d \u201cMiri,\u201d \u201cThe Conscience of the King,\u201d \u201cMirror, Mirror,\u201d and \u201cThe Gamesters of Triskelion.\u201d He met old flames in \u201cShore Leave\u201d and \u201cCourt Martial,\u201d and fell in love, but not carelessly, in \u201cThe City on the Edge of Forever\u201d and season three\u2019s \u201cThe Paradise Syndrome\u201d–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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kirk\u2019s 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?\u00a0Apparently 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Finally, there is Spock\u2019s action at the end of the episode, where he reaches into Kirk\u2019s mind while he is asleep to tell him to \u201cforget\u201d 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<\/em> by Spock\u2019s instruction to McCoy to \u201cremember.\u201d But I would consider this act an inexcusable violation, which furthermore would surely be harmful to Kirk\u2019s emotional makeup. I don’t see how Kirk would be anything but furious, and probably traumatized, if he ever found out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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At least the episode wasn’t boring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2 out of 5 fresh Da Vincis.<\/p>\n\n\n

http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Requiem_for_Methuselah<\/a>