Joseph Nebus
06-07-2008, 03:38 AM
Once again I apologize for being so late. It's been too busy
a week and I barely had the chance to watch and think about the episode.
The Mark of Gideon
The Plot:
Kirk suddenly finds himself on what appears to be the
Enterprise, alone except for a beautiful alien (Sharon Acker). (Tivo)
Yet again I'm having trouble thinking of a larger context and
deeper thoughts about the plot. I suppose the trouble is this feels
like the tenth time this season that Kirk's ended up on a spooky
alternate-reality Enterprise and had to piece together how to get back
to normal, although actually I think it only happened twice before this
season. (The Tholian Web -- where we don't see much of Kirk wandering
the empty Defiant in interphase with the Enterprise -- and Wink Of An
Eye -- where it's the same old Enterprise, just at an incompatible time
speed. And of course Mirror, Mirror, but that was last season.)
Whether the story works or not I think depends on whether you're
spooked by Kirk's predicament. The story gives Spock a plot to try out,
and it's superficially plausible, but it just doesn't come across as
making Spock look any too smart and his henchlings on the bridge don't
do much better. All right, he can't throw his sensors into the search
for Kirk due to legal obligations and maybe technological blockades. He
still looks like the guy who goes to Encyclopedia Brown with the
transporter coordinates problem. The thread in which Spock can't make
any progress in the diplomatic side still doesn't make him look very
competent, but since the Gideon folks are trying to sabotage that his
inability in that regard is sensible.
If you are in the mood to get spooked then the episode has some
wonderful scares, like seeing Kirk alone or near-alone intercut with the
Enterprise clearly perfectly normal, or the heartbeats of Gideonites
bursting through the ship, or the scenes of Gideon peepers staring
indifferently at the empty space. If they scare you, then the episode
works despite it all.
Gideon is of course a planet of the Population Bomb world, where
there are so many people there's not room to get out of bed, or even for
a bed, which leaves unanswered the question of how they got quite to
that point. Or how they feed themselves to that point. The old _Worlds
Of The Federation_ book postulated that Gideon had a population of, I
think, one trillion, but that's way too low. Assuming Gideon has about
the land area of the Earth, then a population of one trillion is
something like 2,000 people per square kilometer, or about that of
Vatican City -- and a third that of Singapore or Hong Kong. You need to
get something like a quadrillion people for the sort of crowding we see,
assuming what's around the fake Enterprise is representative.
The people of Gideon have trouble making themselves
biochemically plausible. I don't mind the talk about rapid
regeneration; that's questionable, but I can't really say that organs
which regenerate much faster than human bodies do is absurd. But His
Excellency Jerkface says the atmosphere of the planet has always been
germ-free, and I call no way. Not with any sort of functioning
ecosystem.
Isaac Asimov tried to get away with this in his Spacer novels,
giving the Spacer worlds long lives due to there being no germs on the
native worlds that could eat humans -- I'll allow that -- and
sterilizing the humans who settled so they carried nothing dangerous,
and that's just nonsense. Even if you managed that feat once, something
-- such as the bacteria in human intestines essential for digestion --
would soon evolve into germs.
In the edited-for-syndication version I got the impression that
Gideon had been colonized sometime in the fairly distant past, which
would be consistent with the first-season sense of the show taking place
in some potentially quite distant future and many of the worlds being
offshoots of lost Earth colonies. Reading over the closed captioning
transcript of the full episode I get the sense that the Gideon folks
were meant to have just always been there.
I'd mentioned in Operation: Annihilate that Blish said that one
time he found the ending of an episode didn't make sense in print and so
he changed it substantially from the scripts and outlines he had to work
with. Operation: Annihilate is an obvious candidate for that since it
finishes in a very different direction in the Blish adaptation than the
aired episode, but in the earliest novelizations he had to work from
very much non-final drafts and so all sorts of curious variances are to
be expected.
While I'd forgotten it at the time this is another episode that
might be the one: see, part of the reason that Odona couldn't be cured
of the plot-useful disease was that the voluntary death of a young
person -- daughter of Excellency Jerkface -- supposed to have important
symbolic value for the society. I grant that it would. With Spock's
intervention she's cured and can serve as source for the disease, but
her symbolic value is destroyed.
In the novelization, Blish (actually, at that point, his wife
and mother-in-law) addresses this, and they spend time working out a
public relations campaign to encourage people to kill themselves for the
sake of their loved ones. The symbolism is taken from the silver stars
and gold stars in windows used to drum up support in the United States
for the people killed in World War I and II. That may not be the height
of public relations work in the 23rd century, but on the other hand the
stars do have their power and sometimes the best symbolic displays are
the simplest ones.
(It is not actually relevant, but I find it interesting to note,
that one of Blish's jobs was essentially publicity man for a tobacco
company, just as the medical community started noticing that smoking was
maybe not the greatest benefit to mankind since cooking the meat before
eating came into fashion. If you'd wondered why in a few of his stories
characters grumble about the 'weak' link between smoking and cancer, it
may be simple science fiction author contrariness or it may be that this
is what he was doing for his day job.)
Thoughts While Watching:
- Gideon keeps refusing surveillance and visitors from the
Federation. Why does the Federation want this planet?
- Oh, it's a virtual paradise. All right, then.
- Apparently there's ways to disguise an enormous planetary
population even from visual scanning. I guess they don't go in for a
lot of night lighting.
- 875 020 079. Transporter coordinates are shorter than I would
have thought necessary.
- Do you suppose the 079 is pure coincidence or someone noticing
there were going to be only 79 episodes in the series so why not use it?
78 (omitting 'The Cage' in the count) was put forth as an in-joke
number before 47 took charge -- 1701-D was 78 years past Kirk's time;
Data was the Starfleet Class of 78; Spock's jet-boots took Kirk and
McCoy up to deck 78. But it's probably coincidence; I don't think they
were quite fanboyish enough back then to include something like that on
purpose.
- The Gideon transporter room lights up when it receives Kirk.
- ``Why did you leave your post before confirming transport?''
Other than that nobody's bothered to confirm transport since about the
sixth episode of the first season.
- We get some rare empty scenes of the bridge, sickbay, and
engineering. I wonder how many were taken from 'The Ultimate Computer'
for convenience.
- There's a transparent panel over the rightmost of Uhura's
Christmas tree lights.
- Kirk is so alone he's not even making his ship's logs,
probably because comparing logs would show those were missing too.
- Kirk's lost a couple minutes of time ... when? There've been
only minutes gone by.
- Who put the camera behind the fence?
- Why *does* the Federation want this planet of jerkfaces,
anyway?
- Spock refers to the end of the wars among the stellar powers.
- Spock has a low opinion of diplomacy. Someone's
overcompensating for his father.
- Dr Bashir is sitting at the Science station again, although
the only picture sort-of showing him is the lousy:
http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/3x16/The_Mark_of_Gideon_044.JPG
- Since the tranpsorter has a range of something like 30,000
kilometers it seems like they should be able to establish Kirk isn't on
the Enterprise, or in space, and therefore show he must be on Gideon if
he's anywhere.
- Man, even when Kirk's in his own dimension he finds women.
- So how much of her not-knowing-anything by Odona is subterfuge
and how much is her being amnesiac or stupid?
- Hah hah hah! Those silly bureaucrats trying to pass
responsibility in endless circles!
- The remastered New Stardates are still in effect on the fake
bridge.
- Weak tension hook going to commercial? Then draw the musical
sting *waaaaaaaayyyyy* out!
- ``You may now forget about Gideon!'' Go way! Go way!
- It's a bit amusing to see Spock run circles around in the
department of choosing words precisely.
- Every other episode they remember to mute the viewscreen; this
time, they forget it and make the Enterprise crew look like idiots.
- The Gideon chairman has a reasonable point, though, about the
wisdom of repeating a procedure already known to lose a person.
- They're beaming up Doctor Phil?
- 878 020 709. How did this not get instantly noticed by, like,
everyone? At least by Spock? It is, apparently, quite close to 079
though.
- Beaming out from on the viewscreen is a cool camera angle.
- Spock is losing his temper mighty easily considering this.
- They have food for 430 people for five years. For two people,
if it didn't spoil, that would last over a thousand years, which should
be long enough.
- I can understand Odona's feeling for Kirk, more or less. What
does Kirk see in an either amnesiac or uninformed woman of uncertain
origin when his whole crew is missing?
- Aaaah! The Brain Guys from MST3K are watching!
- So Gideon is a planet of pepping Toms, which I guess is
unavoidable.
- Kirk has so little memory of that wound on his arm that he
didn't even remember to have it every other scene.
- Kirk claims to know every sound the ship might make. That's
got to be bravado.
- Hey, our first manual control override!
- So why weren't the star views over the windows all the time?
I mean, the windows had to be projectors of some kind, so why were they
ever transparent? I suppose it's that the scheme is, however clever,
not perfect and it can't be.
- Still, why weren't the Gideons running the whole simulation
watching Kirk and Odona to make sure they wouldn't have things like
those viewports be surprises?
- Kirk wonders if it might be some power creating this illusion,
I bet as a way of testing humanity or of learning what is this thing
called 'love' or 'good and evil' or whatnot.
- It's Milling About Days outside the Council Chamber.
- Kirk's being guarded by Jack Hench's line of discount guards
for budget supervillains.
- Hey, they remembered to use the tilted arrowhead for the
Admiral's conference room.
- Spock *still* hasn't figured out the transporter coordinate
swap?
- Vegan choriomeningitis -- another bit of odd backstory.
- So how did Kirk's old diseases get brought up to his prime
minister?
- ``You're mad!'' ``No -- we are desperate!'' That's what
happens when people start talking in trailer commercials.
- So what *was* Spock waiting for to compare these coordinates
and act on them?
- McCoy shows off his quiet determination insisting on coming
with Spock.
- ``Isn't that just about what Captain Kirk said before he took
off?'' You know, that strikes me as an interesting moment to reflect
on. You don't see much of the Original Series cast talking about the
earlier parts of the story that way.
- There's one of those fancy DVD stands in the corridors as
Spock walks around scanning.
- The glass table is great, and the shot up through it clever.
- So Gideon is a germ-free world. This is *really* dumb
biology.
- Oh, dear, they live in the Population Bomb world.
- ``They can find no rest, no peace, no joy.'' If they weren't
able to find the zippers they could avoid that problem.
- They either underplayed the discovery that Odona was
Chairman's daughter or else it was cut from the WOR/New York City
airing.
- The creepy border-of-the-galaxy music from 'Where No Man Has
Gone Before' music makes its reappearance.
- Aah! Dr Phil keeps his communicator in his underwear!
- There's a curious shot of the empty faux-bridge before showing
Kirk at Odona's bedside.
- Kirk doesn't try distracting the Gideonites from their
attempted mass murder; he just tries redirecting their focus to not need
him for it.
- Spock's taken a long while to get to Kirk's quarters. He also
hasn't bothered, at least in the syndication cuts, to call the ship,
although I think he had said so before.
- Star Fleet's analysis was correct? What analysis was that?
- All right, so it *was* just Odona deceiving Kirk all along.
- Odona turns out to have the sort of determination-to-duty that
Kirk has; and if that had been established before it would have been a
common element making Kirk's feelings for her sensible.
a week and I barely had the chance to watch and think about the episode.
The Mark of Gideon
The Plot:
Kirk suddenly finds himself on what appears to be the
Enterprise, alone except for a beautiful alien (Sharon Acker). (Tivo)
Yet again I'm having trouble thinking of a larger context and
deeper thoughts about the plot. I suppose the trouble is this feels
like the tenth time this season that Kirk's ended up on a spooky
alternate-reality Enterprise and had to piece together how to get back
to normal, although actually I think it only happened twice before this
season. (The Tholian Web -- where we don't see much of Kirk wandering
the empty Defiant in interphase with the Enterprise -- and Wink Of An
Eye -- where it's the same old Enterprise, just at an incompatible time
speed. And of course Mirror, Mirror, but that was last season.)
Whether the story works or not I think depends on whether you're
spooked by Kirk's predicament. The story gives Spock a plot to try out,
and it's superficially plausible, but it just doesn't come across as
making Spock look any too smart and his henchlings on the bridge don't
do much better. All right, he can't throw his sensors into the search
for Kirk due to legal obligations and maybe technological blockades. He
still looks like the guy who goes to Encyclopedia Brown with the
transporter coordinates problem. The thread in which Spock can't make
any progress in the diplomatic side still doesn't make him look very
competent, but since the Gideon folks are trying to sabotage that his
inability in that regard is sensible.
If you are in the mood to get spooked then the episode has some
wonderful scares, like seeing Kirk alone or near-alone intercut with the
Enterprise clearly perfectly normal, or the heartbeats of Gideonites
bursting through the ship, or the scenes of Gideon peepers staring
indifferently at the empty space. If they scare you, then the episode
works despite it all.
Gideon is of course a planet of the Population Bomb world, where
there are so many people there's not room to get out of bed, or even for
a bed, which leaves unanswered the question of how they got quite to
that point. Or how they feed themselves to that point. The old _Worlds
Of The Federation_ book postulated that Gideon had a population of, I
think, one trillion, but that's way too low. Assuming Gideon has about
the land area of the Earth, then a population of one trillion is
something like 2,000 people per square kilometer, or about that of
Vatican City -- and a third that of Singapore or Hong Kong. You need to
get something like a quadrillion people for the sort of crowding we see,
assuming what's around the fake Enterprise is representative.
The people of Gideon have trouble making themselves
biochemically plausible. I don't mind the talk about rapid
regeneration; that's questionable, but I can't really say that organs
which regenerate much faster than human bodies do is absurd. But His
Excellency Jerkface says the atmosphere of the planet has always been
germ-free, and I call no way. Not with any sort of functioning
ecosystem.
Isaac Asimov tried to get away with this in his Spacer novels,
giving the Spacer worlds long lives due to there being no germs on the
native worlds that could eat humans -- I'll allow that -- and
sterilizing the humans who settled so they carried nothing dangerous,
and that's just nonsense. Even if you managed that feat once, something
-- such as the bacteria in human intestines essential for digestion --
would soon evolve into germs.
In the edited-for-syndication version I got the impression that
Gideon had been colonized sometime in the fairly distant past, which
would be consistent with the first-season sense of the show taking place
in some potentially quite distant future and many of the worlds being
offshoots of lost Earth colonies. Reading over the closed captioning
transcript of the full episode I get the sense that the Gideon folks
were meant to have just always been there.
I'd mentioned in Operation: Annihilate that Blish said that one
time he found the ending of an episode didn't make sense in print and so
he changed it substantially from the scripts and outlines he had to work
with. Operation: Annihilate is an obvious candidate for that since it
finishes in a very different direction in the Blish adaptation than the
aired episode, but in the earliest novelizations he had to work from
very much non-final drafts and so all sorts of curious variances are to
be expected.
While I'd forgotten it at the time this is another episode that
might be the one: see, part of the reason that Odona couldn't be cured
of the plot-useful disease was that the voluntary death of a young
person -- daughter of Excellency Jerkface -- supposed to have important
symbolic value for the society. I grant that it would. With Spock's
intervention she's cured and can serve as source for the disease, but
her symbolic value is destroyed.
In the novelization, Blish (actually, at that point, his wife
and mother-in-law) addresses this, and they spend time working out a
public relations campaign to encourage people to kill themselves for the
sake of their loved ones. The symbolism is taken from the silver stars
and gold stars in windows used to drum up support in the United States
for the people killed in World War I and II. That may not be the height
of public relations work in the 23rd century, but on the other hand the
stars do have their power and sometimes the best symbolic displays are
the simplest ones.
(It is not actually relevant, but I find it interesting to note,
that one of Blish's jobs was essentially publicity man for a tobacco
company, just as the medical community started noticing that smoking was
maybe not the greatest benefit to mankind since cooking the meat before
eating came into fashion. If you'd wondered why in a few of his stories
characters grumble about the 'weak' link between smoking and cancer, it
may be simple science fiction author contrariness or it may be that this
is what he was doing for his day job.)
Thoughts While Watching:
- Gideon keeps refusing surveillance and visitors from the
Federation. Why does the Federation want this planet?
- Oh, it's a virtual paradise. All right, then.
- Apparently there's ways to disguise an enormous planetary
population even from visual scanning. I guess they don't go in for a
lot of night lighting.
- 875 020 079. Transporter coordinates are shorter than I would
have thought necessary.
- Do you suppose the 079 is pure coincidence or someone noticing
there were going to be only 79 episodes in the series so why not use it?
78 (omitting 'The Cage' in the count) was put forth as an in-joke
number before 47 took charge -- 1701-D was 78 years past Kirk's time;
Data was the Starfleet Class of 78; Spock's jet-boots took Kirk and
McCoy up to deck 78. But it's probably coincidence; I don't think they
were quite fanboyish enough back then to include something like that on
purpose.
- The Gideon transporter room lights up when it receives Kirk.
- ``Why did you leave your post before confirming transport?''
Other than that nobody's bothered to confirm transport since about the
sixth episode of the first season.
- We get some rare empty scenes of the bridge, sickbay, and
engineering. I wonder how many were taken from 'The Ultimate Computer'
for convenience.
- There's a transparent panel over the rightmost of Uhura's
Christmas tree lights.
- Kirk is so alone he's not even making his ship's logs,
probably because comparing logs would show those were missing too.
- Kirk's lost a couple minutes of time ... when? There've been
only minutes gone by.
- Who put the camera behind the fence?
- Why *does* the Federation want this planet of jerkfaces,
anyway?
- Spock refers to the end of the wars among the stellar powers.
- Spock has a low opinion of diplomacy. Someone's
overcompensating for his father.
- Dr Bashir is sitting at the Science station again, although
the only picture sort-of showing him is the lousy:
http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/3x16/The_Mark_of_Gideon_044.JPG
- Since the tranpsorter has a range of something like 30,000
kilometers it seems like they should be able to establish Kirk isn't on
the Enterprise, or in space, and therefore show he must be on Gideon if
he's anywhere.
- Man, even when Kirk's in his own dimension he finds women.
- So how much of her not-knowing-anything by Odona is subterfuge
and how much is her being amnesiac or stupid?
- Hah hah hah! Those silly bureaucrats trying to pass
responsibility in endless circles!
- The remastered New Stardates are still in effect on the fake
bridge.
- Weak tension hook going to commercial? Then draw the musical
sting *waaaaaaaayyyyy* out!
- ``You may now forget about Gideon!'' Go way! Go way!
- It's a bit amusing to see Spock run circles around in the
department of choosing words precisely.
- Every other episode they remember to mute the viewscreen; this
time, they forget it and make the Enterprise crew look like idiots.
- The Gideon chairman has a reasonable point, though, about the
wisdom of repeating a procedure already known to lose a person.
- They're beaming up Doctor Phil?
- 878 020 709. How did this not get instantly noticed by, like,
everyone? At least by Spock? It is, apparently, quite close to 079
though.
- Beaming out from on the viewscreen is a cool camera angle.
- Spock is losing his temper mighty easily considering this.
- They have food for 430 people for five years. For two people,
if it didn't spoil, that would last over a thousand years, which should
be long enough.
- I can understand Odona's feeling for Kirk, more or less. What
does Kirk see in an either amnesiac or uninformed woman of uncertain
origin when his whole crew is missing?
- Aaaah! The Brain Guys from MST3K are watching!
- So Gideon is a planet of pepping Toms, which I guess is
unavoidable.
- Kirk has so little memory of that wound on his arm that he
didn't even remember to have it every other scene.
- Kirk claims to know every sound the ship might make. That's
got to be bravado.
- Hey, our first manual control override!
- So why weren't the star views over the windows all the time?
I mean, the windows had to be projectors of some kind, so why were they
ever transparent? I suppose it's that the scheme is, however clever,
not perfect and it can't be.
- Still, why weren't the Gideons running the whole simulation
watching Kirk and Odona to make sure they wouldn't have things like
those viewports be surprises?
- Kirk wonders if it might be some power creating this illusion,
I bet as a way of testing humanity or of learning what is this thing
called 'love' or 'good and evil' or whatnot.
- It's Milling About Days outside the Council Chamber.
- Kirk's being guarded by Jack Hench's line of discount guards
for budget supervillains.
- Hey, they remembered to use the tilted arrowhead for the
Admiral's conference room.
- Spock *still* hasn't figured out the transporter coordinate
swap?
- Vegan choriomeningitis -- another bit of odd backstory.
- So how did Kirk's old diseases get brought up to his prime
minister?
- ``You're mad!'' ``No -- we are desperate!'' That's what
happens when people start talking in trailer commercials.
- So what *was* Spock waiting for to compare these coordinates
and act on them?
- McCoy shows off his quiet determination insisting on coming
with Spock.
- ``Isn't that just about what Captain Kirk said before he took
off?'' You know, that strikes me as an interesting moment to reflect
on. You don't see much of the Original Series cast talking about the
earlier parts of the story that way.
- There's one of those fancy DVD stands in the corridors as
Spock walks around scanning.
- The glass table is great, and the shot up through it clever.
- So Gideon is a germ-free world. This is *really* dumb
biology.
- Oh, dear, they live in the Population Bomb world.
- ``They can find no rest, no peace, no joy.'' If they weren't
able to find the zippers they could avoid that problem.
- They either underplayed the discovery that Odona was
Chairman's daughter or else it was cut from the WOR/New York City
airing.
- The creepy border-of-the-galaxy music from 'Where No Man Has
Gone Before' music makes its reappearance.
- Aah! Dr Phil keeps his communicator in his underwear!
- There's a curious shot of the empty faux-bridge before showing
Kirk at Odona's bedside.
- Kirk doesn't try distracting the Gideonites from their
attempted mass murder; he just tries redirecting their focus to not need
him for it.
- Spock's taken a long while to get to Kirk's quarters. He also
hasn't bothered, at least in the syndication cuts, to call the ship,
although I think he had said so before.
- Star Fleet's analysis was correct? What analysis was that?
- All right, so it *was* just Odona deceiving Kirk all along.
- Odona turns out to have the sort of determination-to-duty that
Kirk has; and if that had been established before it would have been a
common element making Kirk's feelings for her sensible.