Joseph Nebus
06-16-2008, 11:22 PM
(Divided into two segments because I came up with far more to
say about this episode than there actually is anything to say about it.)
The Way To Eden
The Plot:
Rebellious young people, led by an insane scientist (Skip
Homeier), demand to be transported to a world called Eden. (Tivo)
Television viewers were blessed in 1966 when the FCC ruled that,
apparently, every TV show had to make a Hippie Episode. The results of
this far-sighted ruling were a set of episodes bringing a delightful
piece of kitsch into pretty much everything, from episodes which were
instantly hilariously dated to episodes which were instantly
outrageously hilariously outdated, and it gave us such wonderful persons
as The Groovy Guru, Adam West slipping through a psychedelic dance, or
every third Dragnet 67 episode. And this blessing was extended to Star
Trek, as well.
Plenty of elements of `The Way to Eden' bring joy to every
viewer ever, with the music coming up for particular ridicule.
Actually, I like the music, which I find catchy and pleasant. Of
course, my Internet radio channel of choice, when the old-time radio
stations are inaccessible, is the Technicolor Web of Sound, so I'm
pre-adapted to it. I note that James Blish bothered to include a
footnote in the novelization of this episode to praise the music's
composition, and Blish was a music expert of reasonable snottiness in
his tastes (he disapproved of The Beatles, for example, which you may
recall as the subject of a mandated Pop Hates The Beatles episode of
every TV show that was on from 1963 to 1965). Possibly he felt it
politic to compliment his steady employers, but everyone seemed to be
satisfied with the Trek book production at the time and I doubt anyone
would feel slighted if he hadn't said a thing about the music either.
Rather famously early drafts of the episode featured Dr McCoy's
daughter Joanna, who might as well be canonical when you consider the
nerd riot which would ensue if JJ Abrams's _Star Trek XI_ were to
declare McCoy childless. The move to an old flame of Chekov's does mean
that the ensign gets a bit more backstory without costing McCoy much in
personality, though, and it's hard to figure how the plot bit of taking
over the ship would be accomplished if we didn't have Emergency Control
and Chekov's willingness to explain it to the audience. I suppose it
would have all been done by Sevrin's audio thingy of wincing.
Part of the episode that I rarely see it credited for, though,
is that this is pretty much the entire look we get of the Federation's
popular culture. We never saw 23rd century Earth past establishing that
it has cities, of course, and Roddenberry was careful that as little as
possible be said about the social structure and the things normal
citizens think about. Even slang was eliminated, besides a few fitful
efforts like ``credits to navy beans'' or the surprisingly confusing
``nobody here but us chickens'', the better to keep the dialogue from
being too pinned down to the 1960s. (A rare exception was the
``dunsel'', introduced because it was an emotional point being
deliberately made.)
That was successful in keeping the look of the 23rd century
Federation from being too closely tied to a 1966 view of The Future, but
it has meant that you could paint the Federation as liberal democracy,
technocratic utopia, or totalitarian hegemony without contradict much
that's on-screen. It also started to become a nuisance as 24th century
Trek racked up the number of hours we spent in this society without
learning all that much which was important about it. Several writers
complained about how Trek writing requires a mode of dialogue different
and a bit artificial compared to other shows.
That's often attributed to the legendary ``everybody basically
gets along'' doctrine, but I think the real problem is Trek people don't
have a popular culture around them to refer things to, or slang to use,
or any of these touches which keep them from seeming too staged. (They
have a high culture, mostly Shakespeare in the Original Series and
_Moby-Dick_ in the later ones.) Pop-culture references can be badly
overdone, but they are a tool for establishing scenarios and for
underlining emotional resonances, and depriving the characters of that
was a handicap the Sequel Shows worked under.
(In _Enterprise_ they did try addressing that by bringing in ...
ah ... water polo and Paramount-owned movies. This was fumbled, but
that doesn't mean it was a foredoomed effort; just that the producers
for the first two and a half years had no idea how to do it with taste
and were making references to movies like the Boris Karloff
_Frankenstein_ without ever watching it. In the fourth season better
writers started filling in these details -- another World War III epic
sweeping the Oscars and such - and then it finally started making
sense.)
In `The Way To Eden', though, we finally see people from the
Federation, and we get some idea of how they live from how youth in the
confident feeling they can fix the universe would want it changed.
Those details aren't particularly unique -- they feel oppressed by petty
bureaucrats with narrow minds, but then who has never felt that?; they
long for a simple and burden-free life, which again is hardly unknown to
anyone living since hunting and gathering became trendy -- apart from a
few bits which Spock provides. It's not explained how Spock knows this
movement so well, past Spock admitting that he understands the feeling
of being an outsider in society, but that's enough. It's a subtle
explanation but it's also quite satisfying, and it's to their credit
they don't over-explain that.
Spock does mention the space hippies being upset about ``the
planned communities; the programming; the sterilized, artfully balanced
atmospheres''. This can be taken to read the Original Series Federation
as totalitarian overlords, but ... I just don't see Kirk and Spock and
McCoy as acting like people living in the fear of disapproving
overlords. I think the talk is more inclined to fit in with the
semi-baked concepts of society being improved by more optimum education,
greater computerization removing the inefficiencies of the marketplace,
and so on -- all of which can be employed to make people freer to do
what they really want, but which does require organization and
bureaucracy and at least implicitly social control.
I don't doubt, for example, that with convenient control over
the weather atmospheres would soon become optimized for economic and
safety reasons, in much the same way the insides of houses are heated,
cooled, and made more or less humid for the same causes; and just as
that's pleasant but sometimes you want out, so would people find a
balanced-weather Earth pleasant enough and still sometimes want out.
Nevertheless, it is interesting that the best look we get of
what life is like for the average Federation person, it's people who
really hate that culture. I do note that the major complaint is the
space hippies stealing (and along the way destroying) a ship, which is
going to be objectionable to any government, and that despite that Spock
is willing to pledge to search for a suitable 'Eden' and to argue for a
colonization project. Spock's subsequent actual search indicates to me
that this isn't an empty promise made for temporary gain: he is happy to
use what influence he could bear to help these people achieve their
goals.
There are some curious bits of deck-stacking in the plot. For
one, Kirk, who's been able to size up and understand pretty much any
society with a couple of glimpses -- and who may, arguably have been
trained for exactly that ability -- has that fine empathy and
understanding fail him entirely at least to the start here. That seems
atypical for him, but this may have just been the first flush of
annoyance, since Kirk seems to warm up to them and to treat their cute
little rebellious phase as something young folks will do.
A bigger one is the declaration that Doctor Sevrin is insane.
It's a bit manipulative that he should have a fatal disease created by
the modern society (in some way), but it's also reasonable that there
should be diseases traceable to high-technology civilization and that a
person afflicted with one would resent it and want to throw the whole of
civilization away. It may not be smart, but it is human, regardless of
what his ears look like. And he does have to be a genius of some kind
or there's really not much way he can plausibly get control of the
Enterprise. (We'll grant stealing a shuttle because *everybody* can
steal shuttles. I bet Captain Archer could steal shuttles, and he once
needed it explained to him that it would take longer to rendezvous with
a Vulcan ship now that they weren't moving toward it anymore.)
By declaring Sevrin mad, though, it means the audience can
dismiss his motives: they're by definition not rational. And his
followers stop being adults -- young, but still adults -- who've decided
society's gone wrong and it needs fixing, and it turns them into hapless
dupes of a sociopath. The best Trek episodes allow for empathy with the
antagonist (and thus avoid having ``villains''); declaring Sevrin mad
undercuts that, weakening all the space hippies. If they want to
convince me that Sevrin is actually mad, they need to show something
more than that he's got a grievance against society, at least when the
grievance is that society's given him an incurable, untreatable illness
limiting his freedom to move for the rest of his life.
It's hard also in reviewing `The Way To Eden' not to notice how
the basic gimmick resembles that for the overly maligned _Star Trek V:
The Final Frontier_. I notice that Sybok grows from being a villain to
an antagonist and picks up some fair sympathy as his motives are fleshed
out and his dream of finding Shakaree is shown to maybe have some
substance. This I think reinforces my point that `The Way to Eden'
would have been stronger if it had avoided the madness bit.
The Enterprise makes its fourth known voyage into the Romulan
Neutral Zone, and the third that we've seen into Romulan space. (It's
unclear whether Tau Ceti might be Romulan space.) But this being the
third season and there having already been three guest stars with
speaking parts they don't have anywhere near the budget for Romulans to
show up. Considering how scared everyone was in the first season of
setting foot into Romulan space, the relatively casual attitude which
this is given shows that Federation-Romulan relations have obviously
gotten a lot more calm even despite the Enterprise invading twice
already in the previous year and a half.
(I could put together a theory that by the time of the movies
the Federation and the Romulans are on mighty good terms and I think I'd
get away with it. It was longstanding Trek fan folklore that the
Klingons and Romulans were allied in this era, but the entire evidence
of this consists of the Romulans 'now using Klingon vessels' in `The
Enterprise Incident', and the Klingons gaining cloaking devices by the
time of _The Search For Spock_, neither of which actually requires they
have shared one civil word.)
That the Romulans don't have any noticeable response in the
several hours it takes to get in, let the space hippies escape, and get
out again retroactively makes Commodore Lunkhead from `The Deadly Years'
less of a gigantic idiot, however, if there's experience that short
detours through Romulan space are reasonably likely to get away with it.
It means he took a big gamble and it failed, and he should have known
that since he's not named in the opening credits he can't count on his
big gambles succeeding, but it looks marginally less stupid than it did
at the time.
In, I think, a Peter David-penned issue of the DC Comics _Star
Trek_ run from the 1980s, it was insisted that the Adam of this episode
was really the Herbert who inspired the derogatory name. This is what
happens when you let other people read your fan fiction. I hold to the
theory that The Galaxy Has More Than Five People In It, so such grand
unifications as this drive me crazy.
say about this episode than there actually is anything to say about it.)
The Way To Eden
The Plot:
Rebellious young people, led by an insane scientist (Skip
Homeier), demand to be transported to a world called Eden. (Tivo)
Television viewers were blessed in 1966 when the FCC ruled that,
apparently, every TV show had to make a Hippie Episode. The results of
this far-sighted ruling were a set of episodes bringing a delightful
piece of kitsch into pretty much everything, from episodes which were
instantly hilariously dated to episodes which were instantly
outrageously hilariously outdated, and it gave us such wonderful persons
as The Groovy Guru, Adam West slipping through a psychedelic dance, or
every third Dragnet 67 episode. And this blessing was extended to Star
Trek, as well.
Plenty of elements of `The Way to Eden' bring joy to every
viewer ever, with the music coming up for particular ridicule.
Actually, I like the music, which I find catchy and pleasant. Of
course, my Internet radio channel of choice, when the old-time radio
stations are inaccessible, is the Technicolor Web of Sound, so I'm
pre-adapted to it. I note that James Blish bothered to include a
footnote in the novelization of this episode to praise the music's
composition, and Blish was a music expert of reasonable snottiness in
his tastes (he disapproved of The Beatles, for example, which you may
recall as the subject of a mandated Pop Hates The Beatles episode of
every TV show that was on from 1963 to 1965). Possibly he felt it
politic to compliment his steady employers, but everyone seemed to be
satisfied with the Trek book production at the time and I doubt anyone
would feel slighted if he hadn't said a thing about the music either.
Rather famously early drafts of the episode featured Dr McCoy's
daughter Joanna, who might as well be canonical when you consider the
nerd riot which would ensue if JJ Abrams's _Star Trek XI_ were to
declare McCoy childless. The move to an old flame of Chekov's does mean
that the ensign gets a bit more backstory without costing McCoy much in
personality, though, and it's hard to figure how the plot bit of taking
over the ship would be accomplished if we didn't have Emergency Control
and Chekov's willingness to explain it to the audience. I suppose it
would have all been done by Sevrin's audio thingy of wincing.
Part of the episode that I rarely see it credited for, though,
is that this is pretty much the entire look we get of the Federation's
popular culture. We never saw 23rd century Earth past establishing that
it has cities, of course, and Roddenberry was careful that as little as
possible be said about the social structure and the things normal
citizens think about. Even slang was eliminated, besides a few fitful
efforts like ``credits to navy beans'' or the surprisingly confusing
``nobody here but us chickens'', the better to keep the dialogue from
being too pinned down to the 1960s. (A rare exception was the
``dunsel'', introduced because it was an emotional point being
deliberately made.)
That was successful in keeping the look of the 23rd century
Federation from being too closely tied to a 1966 view of The Future, but
it has meant that you could paint the Federation as liberal democracy,
technocratic utopia, or totalitarian hegemony without contradict much
that's on-screen. It also started to become a nuisance as 24th century
Trek racked up the number of hours we spent in this society without
learning all that much which was important about it. Several writers
complained about how Trek writing requires a mode of dialogue different
and a bit artificial compared to other shows.
That's often attributed to the legendary ``everybody basically
gets along'' doctrine, but I think the real problem is Trek people don't
have a popular culture around them to refer things to, or slang to use,
or any of these touches which keep them from seeming too staged. (They
have a high culture, mostly Shakespeare in the Original Series and
_Moby-Dick_ in the later ones.) Pop-culture references can be badly
overdone, but they are a tool for establishing scenarios and for
underlining emotional resonances, and depriving the characters of that
was a handicap the Sequel Shows worked under.
(In _Enterprise_ they did try addressing that by bringing in ...
ah ... water polo and Paramount-owned movies. This was fumbled, but
that doesn't mean it was a foredoomed effort; just that the producers
for the first two and a half years had no idea how to do it with taste
and were making references to movies like the Boris Karloff
_Frankenstein_ without ever watching it. In the fourth season better
writers started filling in these details -- another World War III epic
sweeping the Oscars and such - and then it finally started making
sense.)
In `The Way To Eden', though, we finally see people from the
Federation, and we get some idea of how they live from how youth in the
confident feeling they can fix the universe would want it changed.
Those details aren't particularly unique -- they feel oppressed by petty
bureaucrats with narrow minds, but then who has never felt that?; they
long for a simple and burden-free life, which again is hardly unknown to
anyone living since hunting and gathering became trendy -- apart from a
few bits which Spock provides. It's not explained how Spock knows this
movement so well, past Spock admitting that he understands the feeling
of being an outsider in society, but that's enough. It's a subtle
explanation but it's also quite satisfying, and it's to their credit
they don't over-explain that.
Spock does mention the space hippies being upset about ``the
planned communities; the programming; the sterilized, artfully balanced
atmospheres''. This can be taken to read the Original Series Federation
as totalitarian overlords, but ... I just don't see Kirk and Spock and
McCoy as acting like people living in the fear of disapproving
overlords. I think the talk is more inclined to fit in with the
semi-baked concepts of society being improved by more optimum education,
greater computerization removing the inefficiencies of the marketplace,
and so on -- all of which can be employed to make people freer to do
what they really want, but which does require organization and
bureaucracy and at least implicitly social control.
I don't doubt, for example, that with convenient control over
the weather atmospheres would soon become optimized for economic and
safety reasons, in much the same way the insides of houses are heated,
cooled, and made more or less humid for the same causes; and just as
that's pleasant but sometimes you want out, so would people find a
balanced-weather Earth pleasant enough and still sometimes want out.
Nevertheless, it is interesting that the best look we get of
what life is like for the average Federation person, it's people who
really hate that culture. I do note that the major complaint is the
space hippies stealing (and along the way destroying) a ship, which is
going to be objectionable to any government, and that despite that Spock
is willing to pledge to search for a suitable 'Eden' and to argue for a
colonization project. Spock's subsequent actual search indicates to me
that this isn't an empty promise made for temporary gain: he is happy to
use what influence he could bear to help these people achieve their
goals.
There are some curious bits of deck-stacking in the plot. For
one, Kirk, who's been able to size up and understand pretty much any
society with a couple of glimpses -- and who may, arguably have been
trained for exactly that ability -- has that fine empathy and
understanding fail him entirely at least to the start here. That seems
atypical for him, but this may have just been the first flush of
annoyance, since Kirk seems to warm up to them and to treat their cute
little rebellious phase as something young folks will do.
A bigger one is the declaration that Doctor Sevrin is insane.
It's a bit manipulative that he should have a fatal disease created by
the modern society (in some way), but it's also reasonable that there
should be diseases traceable to high-technology civilization and that a
person afflicted with one would resent it and want to throw the whole of
civilization away. It may not be smart, but it is human, regardless of
what his ears look like. And he does have to be a genius of some kind
or there's really not much way he can plausibly get control of the
Enterprise. (We'll grant stealing a shuttle because *everybody* can
steal shuttles. I bet Captain Archer could steal shuttles, and he once
needed it explained to him that it would take longer to rendezvous with
a Vulcan ship now that they weren't moving toward it anymore.)
By declaring Sevrin mad, though, it means the audience can
dismiss his motives: they're by definition not rational. And his
followers stop being adults -- young, but still adults -- who've decided
society's gone wrong and it needs fixing, and it turns them into hapless
dupes of a sociopath. The best Trek episodes allow for empathy with the
antagonist (and thus avoid having ``villains''); declaring Sevrin mad
undercuts that, weakening all the space hippies. If they want to
convince me that Sevrin is actually mad, they need to show something
more than that he's got a grievance against society, at least when the
grievance is that society's given him an incurable, untreatable illness
limiting his freedom to move for the rest of his life.
It's hard also in reviewing `The Way To Eden' not to notice how
the basic gimmick resembles that for the overly maligned _Star Trek V:
The Final Frontier_. I notice that Sybok grows from being a villain to
an antagonist and picks up some fair sympathy as his motives are fleshed
out and his dream of finding Shakaree is shown to maybe have some
substance. This I think reinforces my point that `The Way to Eden'
would have been stronger if it had avoided the madness bit.
The Enterprise makes its fourth known voyage into the Romulan
Neutral Zone, and the third that we've seen into Romulan space. (It's
unclear whether Tau Ceti might be Romulan space.) But this being the
third season and there having already been three guest stars with
speaking parts they don't have anywhere near the budget for Romulans to
show up. Considering how scared everyone was in the first season of
setting foot into Romulan space, the relatively casual attitude which
this is given shows that Federation-Romulan relations have obviously
gotten a lot more calm even despite the Enterprise invading twice
already in the previous year and a half.
(I could put together a theory that by the time of the movies
the Federation and the Romulans are on mighty good terms and I think I'd
get away with it. It was longstanding Trek fan folklore that the
Klingons and Romulans were allied in this era, but the entire evidence
of this consists of the Romulans 'now using Klingon vessels' in `The
Enterprise Incident', and the Klingons gaining cloaking devices by the
time of _The Search For Spock_, neither of which actually requires they
have shared one civil word.)
That the Romulans don't have any noticeable response in the
several hours it takes to get in, let the space hippies escape, and get
out again retroactively makes Commodore Lunkhead from `The Deadly Years'
less of a gigantic idiot, however, if there's experience that short
detours through Romulan space are reasonably likely to get away with it.
It means he took a big gamble and it failed, and he should have known
that since he's not named in the opening credits he can't count on his
big gambles succeeding, but it looks marginally less stupid than it did
at the time.
In, I think, a Peter David-penned issue of the DC Comics _Star
Trek_ run from the 1980s, it was insisted that the Adam of this episode
was really the Herbert who inspired the derogatory name. This is what
happens when you let other people read your fan fiction. I hold to the
theory that The Galaxy Has More Than Five People In It, so such grand
unifications as this drive me crazy.