Let That Be Your Last Battlefield by: Oliver Crawford from a story by: Lee Cronin and directed by: Jud Taylor

 

“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” is written by: Oliver Crawford, from a story by: Lee Cronin, a pseudonym for Gene L. Coon, and is directed by: Jud Taylor.  It was filmed under production code 70, was the 15^th episode of Star Trek Season 3, the 70^th episode of Star Trek, and was broadcast on January 10, 1969.

 

Star Trek has always been touted as an incredibly progressive show pushing for equality and breaking ground in terms of casting and messaging.  This is the 70^th review for the show that has honestly shown that the record of this was largely hit or miss: the casting was largely diverse but the roles for the female characters especially are limited, same with racial minorities while LGBT representation is entirely down to coding (though this is largely down to it being a show from the 1960s).  Much of this is down to the scope of the writers working on Star Trek through this era, much like television at the time the perspective is a white and male one, though Star Trek did advocate for female scriptwriters such as D.C. Fontana and several gay and bisexual writers were also featured (including ones breaking into scriptwriting) including Theodore Sturgeon and David Gerrold.  “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” is Star Trek’s most explicit episode thus far to be a treatise on the topic of racism in the United States through the lens of racism among two members of an alien species.  It is important when looking at this episode to remain aware of the fact that it the script is coming from Oliver Crawford from an outline by Gene L. Coon, both white men living in the 1960s while this review is coming from the perspective of a white man living in 2024.  This inherently leads to an incredibly limited scope in terms of what the nature of racism and white supremacy.  “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” is not interested in examining the systemic nature of bigotry in America.  While it has been a politically active show and this is a very politically charged episode, its racial analysis is limited to the surface level of explicit, public facing bigoted opinions and people who could be seen starting fires in bedsheets.  While not to discount the fact that this sort of bigotry and acts of bigoted violence still exists especially in the public zeitgeist, at the time of this episode’s production it had only been four years since the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, three since the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  It genuinely seemed like progress was being made.

 

There is dialogue in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” that reflects that, specifically calling out the slow march of progress.  The aliens feature bisected pigmentation, the discrimination coming from which side is the ink black side and which is chalk white.  Lokai, played by Lou Antonio, has been on the run for 50,000 years for inciting essentially a slave revolt while being hunted by Commissioner Bele, played by Frank Gorshin.  Crawford’s script is explicit in lampooning the basis of racism: it is bigotry based on arbitrary appearance that makes no meaningful difference in terms of what a person is.  It however slightly drops the ball by placing the Enterprise crew in a situation where they are not interfering in the conflict of this pair.  Now the motivation for Kirk and company is initially noble, they are already on a mission to help decontaminate a planet and Bele taking over the ship to bring Lokai to some sense of “justice” for starting a revolt thus endangering the population of a planet.  This portion of the episode plays out like a thriller and is perhaps the best of what the episode has to offer, Jud Taylor’s direction is especially effective when Kirk puts the Enterprise into a self-destruct sequence.  It’s incredibly tense and largely allows the Federation to be dreamt up as post-racial, keeping the absurdity of bigotry at the center of the episode quite well, though being heavy handed.  The second half of the episode falters slightly in the conclusion: the Enterprise is forced to Cheron to find it destroyed and Bele and Lokai are set on the planet to fight with our heroes unable to stop them.

 

Now the problem with this is largely because Crawford, most likely from Coon’s original outline, in highlighting the ridiculous nature of bigotry is also subtly placing some of the blame for society’s lack of change on the oppressed.  It’s not an explicit aspect of the text, largely coming across as two well-meaning white writers not quite understanding the complexities of systemic racism and what actually is needed to dismantle those systems, but Lokai as a character is placed on the same moral level in the conclusion as Bele.  Lokai’s violence against Bele is largely defensive, attempts to get humans on his side and outright attacking and being on edge because he has been pursued by someone who does not even acknowledge his rights as a person.  Lou Antonio’s performance is perhaps too overshadowed as Lokai by the immense presence of Frank Gorshin (who don’t get me wrong is utterly fantastic in the episode), but Antonio largely makes the character utterly sympathetic and acting out of terror while Gorshin’s Bele is acting out of hate.  Outside of this the episode is brilliant, and the striking imagery of the burning planet at the climax is particularly effective, but that accidental message is ever so slightly holding back the episode.

 

Overall, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” is an episode with an incredibly evocative title and is perhaps the most bold attempt at political commentary in Star Trek.  It is hampered by the white lens of the episode, but the ideas of showing the absurdity of bigotry in a dramatic setting is something quite bold.  It’s a ray of light in what has been such a rocky season, even if as an episode in its premise there already are these problematic aspects that were problematic in 1969 and are problematic now.  8/10.

Star Wars: Dark Force Rising by: Timothy Zahn

 

Let’s talk about the original Star Wars trilogy and its format.  Star Wars is one of the easiest examples of the three act structures: the first film is complete rising action while having its own three act structure within itself, Return of the Jedi is the big extended climax lifting the characters from the darkest point into success, and The Empire Strikes Back is the big second act with the major twist reveals and ending with the characters at their lowest point.  When Timothy Zahn was commissioned for his Star Wars trilogy, Heir to the Empire felt structurally similar to Star Wars, which isn’t a bad thing.  While there was an ending clearly with a sequel in mind there was also the sense that there could have at one point been an off-ramp while the immediate sequel, Dark Force Rising, follows the structure of The Empire Strikes Back almost to the letter including the final twist leading to a particularly harrowing final moment for the characters to reflect on where the New Republic could possibly be going.  Heir to the Empire as a novel was quite concerned with the nitty gritty of the politics of the New Republic while Luke Skywalker’s journey was a general uncertainty over reestablishing the Jedi Order.  Dark Force Rising sees Zahn put his focus inward on the characters as the general Republic is now aware of the greater extent Grand Admiral Thrawn poses to the galaxy and Luke has become more of an independent figure in proceedings.

 

Luke’s story arc in particular is one of two halves: for much of the first half he is paired with Lando Calrissian in basically a smuggler’s plot trying to find evidence as to who in the New Republic is a traitor.  This particular pairing of characters really shows Zahn’s mastery of who these characters are because the original trilogy rarely had Luke and Lando interact, and the brief interactions they did share were in group sequences in both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.  Zahn writes Luke with this respect for Lando’s attitude towards life and the universe that is separate from his relationship with Han Solo, who in essence is from the same character archetype as Lando.  It takes talent since a lesser writer would just attempt to graft the Han/Lando relationship onto Lando and Luke, something that Zahn does replicate when Lando and Han share scenes and a subplot after Luke goes on his larger plot for the bulk of the novel.  The rest of Luke’s plot is in large part reuniting with Mara Jade who has been struggling with her preconceived notions of the Empire and being generally used by others.  What becomes especially interesting is that Dark Force Rising as a title is double meaning, it is in one aspect a reference to Thrawn’s forces rising, but there is also a legendary fleet of 200 Dreadnaught class cruisers called the Dark Force.  The fleet itself is one of those McGuffins that leads to the last lines of the novel being incredibly foreboding for what is to come, ending after a climax but a climax that also ends without total resolution.

 

The other major plotline of the novel involves an extension of Leia’s plotline from Heir to the Empire.  Zahn is clearly interested in exploring Leia’s political nature, continuing the idea that she could represent a Lady Vader and successor to her father.  Luke is the one always afraid of falling to the Dark Side of the Force, and with good reason he is sent to an insane Jedi in this novel, but Leia’s plotline has her actively working for a group that the Empire had both repressed and kept under a form of codependency in the Noghri.  The Noghri were a part of Heir to the Empire, but here Zahn explores their culture particularly well as Leia uses much of the charm and cunning to convince them of the righteousness of the New Republic.  While it’s a plotline that takes over, it does have a slight problem in recapping the events of Heir to the Empire, but outside of that it also ends up being one of the most compelling plotlines of the trilogy thus far.  It’s also interesting that Dark Force Rising actually doesn’t have Thrawn appear as often as he did in Heir to the Empire, something that isn’t a problem, Zahn’s novel is compelling without his presence since when off-page there is also a sense of menace when he does appear.

 

Overall, Dark Force Rising is definitely the middle leg of a trilogy for better and for worse, the ending being mostly satisfactory but also ending on a wham line.  Zahn has developed his prose and sense of the world (Chewbacca’s dialogue isn’t just written out in bracketed English for example), and the character pairings are a particular delight.  This, however, in places feels like a book that could improve or be made worse by the quality of the conclusion to the trilogy which for me ends up slightly holding it back from being stronger than the first.  8/10.

Whom Gods Destroy by: Lee Erwin, from a story by: Lee Erwin and Jerry Sohl, and directed by: Herb Wallerstein

 

“Whom Gods Destroy” is written by: Lee Erwin, from a story by: Lee Erwin and Jerry Sohl, and is directed by: Herb Wallerstein.  It was filmed under production code 71, was the 14^th episode of Star Trek Season 3, the 69^th episode of Star Trek, and was broadcast on January 3, 1969.

 

Maybe it’s just because Season 3 of Star Trek having had such a recent run of bad episodes, maybe it’s just the over the top campy quality of “Whom Gods Destroy”, or maybe I’m just insane, but there is a lot of enjoyment to be had with this episode.  There really shouldn’t be: the episode is a grab bag of already established Star Trek tropes, far more than the series’ general tendencies to reuse ideas of godlike aliens and planets that are carbon copies of Earth as an excuse to break out historical costumes.  The plot has largely the same setup of “Dagger of the Mind” with the general commentary on mental illness, the isolated location being reminiscent of the setting of “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, the shapeshifting aspect of “The Man Trap”, and having sequences of two Kirks where one is incredibly over the top allowing William Shatner to go full William Shatner a la “The Enemy Within”.  Some of the set pieces are actually reused and redressed from “Dagger of the Mind” while the costumes of the institution’s patients outside of our major villain are sourced from “The Menagerie” and “Journey to Babel”.  That’s six individual episodes that “Whom Gods Destroy is aping material from.  Despite the mixing of several tropes and ideas from previous episodes of Star Trek, something that while limiting wouldn’t necessarily make a failure of an episode, “Whom Gods Destroy” has the biggest issue of sustaining its second and third act.  The premise is that the insane Captain Garth, played by Steve Ihnat, has taken over the only Federation facility for the criminally insane, has learned how to shapeshift and rewrite his own biology, and wants to conquer the galaxy using the Enterprise as Kirk and Spock are delivering a medicine that will assist in rehabilitation of brain tissue.  The trouble comes with the fact that Kirk, Spock, and Scotty have anticipated potential trouble by establishing a code phrase before Kirk or Spock could be beamed up, so Garth has to use his cunning and madness to discover it.

 

The discovering the code phrase is sadly not enough to really sustain the full hour-long plot, and feels on some level the script attempting to hold back from going full camp insanity with the patients running loose on the Enterprise.  Ihnat’s performance knows exactly what sort of material he is having and there are points where it’s clear in between takes when Shatner has to play the shapeshifted Garth as Kirk there is this eternal battle to one-up each other in who can be the most expressive.  The sets, despite being colorful and Herb Wallerstein’s dynamic direction, feel like they are limiting the actors and these performances need to be unleashed fully on the Enterprise sets and to Scotty and McCoy (who is sadly all too small of a role this week).  Despite not sustaining the fifty minutes, this can’t help but be an episode that I have at least some fun with and that’s probably due to the rather odd tone.  This is an episode that doesn’t feel like any tone Star Trek has taken before, instead taking more cues from the 1966 Batman series: the patients feel like Silver Age escapees from the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Herb Wallerstein loves some creative angles (though not many Dutch angles), and Batgirl herself, Yvonne Craig, has a pretty scene chewing guest role in this episode.

 

Overall, while “Whom Gods Destroy” isn’t a particularly good episode, it feels in many ways like a glimmering light of entertainment in the third season of Star Trek.  It’s largely a piece that makes no sense logically and has things happen because without them happening, the plot wouldn’t allow Kirk and Spock to succeed, but the camp elements just make it a lot of actual fun to watch which has been missing this season especially.  It’s like taking all of the Star Trek tropes and putting them into a blender and then setting that on fire for utter insanity for a bad time but a pretty fun time.  5/10.

Profits of Doom! by: Mike Collins with pencils by: John Ridgway, inks by: Tim Perkins, and letters by: Annie Halfacree

 

Profits of Doom! is written by Mike Collins with pencils by John Ridgway, inks by Tim Perkins, and lettering by Annie Halfacree.  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issues 120-122 (December 1986-February 1987) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: The World Shapers by Panini Books.

 

The last Doctor Who Magazine review I wrote, eightish months ago, introduced legendary comic writer Grant Morrison to the strip for the first of their three stories.  Profits of Doom! is the first contribution of Mike Collins to the strip, this time in capacity of writer.  Collins has most recently contributed to the strip as artist in 2019 and has several runs as primary artist.  Profits of Doom! feels like an important milestone for the strip, mainly because after this point there are only two more Sixth Doctor stories which would take the strip through the autumn of 1987 when Sylvester McCoy would premiere in the role of the Doctor and become the primary Doctor of the strip well into the 1990s.  Profits of Doom! feels far more in line with where Andrew Cartmel would begin taking the show and the Virgin New Adventures line of novels would continue, setting three issues of the strip in the cold, harsh, emptiness of space in a society where capitalism has run rampant.  Now it is especially weird seeing the Sixth Doctor, Peri, and Frobisher really interacting with this particular setting since the televised show has just gone through an era far less concerned with this overt type of storytelling.

 

Profits of Doom! is a story where the villains are capitalist slugs who prioritize profits over all else, invading a spaceship where a woman is awoken from suspended animation only for maintenance.  Collins keeps the number of characters down, Kara being our primary guest character for the story and a single woman being sent to Arcadia for unknown purposes.  Collins directly links the capitalism of the Profiteers of Ephete (the slugs are from a planet that’s a tax haven) equally with colonialism of expansion.  Kara’s ship is the Mayflower which is a clear symbol of colonialism, the big twist being that there is an immortal villain who wishes to convert the planet Arcadia into a capitalist hellscape complete with slaves.  That immortal villain is called Seth and is sadly where the story drops the ball, he’s an uninteresting immortal and built up as if this is a foe the Doctor has faced before under many aliases.  The problem comes in the fact that he’s essentially just a man on a screen who really only serves to be a big bad because the comic strip kind of needed some central villain to defeat.  It’s a shame because the interactions between the Doctor, Peri, and Frobisher, especially in the first part of the story are excellent, perhaps the best the characters have been characterized and John Ridgway’s pencils work really well with Tim Perkins on inks.

 

Overall, Profits of Doom! was honestly a big surprise since many of the issues with the Doctor Who Magazine strip are overcome here as the characters are well characterized and the plot is simple enough to fill the short page count while providing some fairly biting commentary on the state of the world in late 1986.  It’s just a shame about that weak villain.  8/10.

Elaan of Troyius written and directed by: John Meredyth Lucas

 

“Elaan of Troyius” is written and directed by: John Meredyth Lucas.  It was filmed under production code 57, was the 13^th episode of Star Trek Season 3, the 68^th episode of Star Trek, and was broadcast on December 20, 1968.

 

This episode of Star Trek at least in terms of the title is riffing on the mythological figure of Helen of Troy, and that should be the first clue that this is going to be an episode stuck completely in the trappings of the 1960s.  John Meredyth Lucas had written for the show before this point with “The Changeling” and “Patterns of Force” as well as directing “The Ultimate Computer” and “The Enterprise Incident” so he clearly understands how Star Trek works.  “Elaan of Troyius” sees Lucas responsible for both the script and direction, and there is a world where this is a winning combination.  Lucas as a director is actually quite dynamic and his script is confined to Enterprise sets as many episodes this season are, but because of his style visually the episode looks interesting.  Lucas knows how to pace an episode of Star Trek so it doesn’t drag like other episodes this season in particular have struggled with pacing.  The makeup of the aliens in the episode is also something that has some retro camp appeal in execution, outside of the title character being potentially in brownface in makeup that feels like a stylized Ancient Egyptian Pharoah costume which feels quite insensitive.  This is also an episode where William Shatner is clearly having a ball with the material, getting to be largely more prideful in his role of Captain Kirk which is a lot of fun to watch, even when Kirk gets brainwashed by the beautiful Elaan due to magic tears which are used to seduce him.

 

This is where the big troubles of “Elaan of Troyius” really show their head.  As mentioned above the title is a clear reference to Helen of Troy, the character of Elaan being forced into a marriage she doesn’t want paralleling the abduction of Helen by Paris in myth.  There is an academic history to paint Helen as at fault for the Trojan War which looking at the mythological sources is an incorrect reading, she was kidnapped after all and forced into a relationship while already being married and in The Odyssey it is shown that Helen is still happily married to Menelaus.  It’s clear that Lucas wishes to have the audience make the parallel between Helen of Troy and Elaan being sent as bride in a political marriage between Elas and Troyius who are on the brink of war.  Lucas is attempting to characterize Elaan as being dissatisfied with the situation and being treated in an insulting way within the largely warrior like culture of her people, but the characterization also is drawing on another character, that of Katherina from William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.  Indeed, much of “Elaan of Troyius” draws its plot and conflict as equally from Shakespeare’s play as the 1960s perception of the Epic Cycle.  The Taming of the Shrew is a highly problematic play, the central comedy is quite literally how a woman is tamed by a suitor while her sister is allowed a more traditional Shakespearean romance.

 

The play would have been in the public consciousness at the time of this episode’s production: Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate and its film adaptation were over a decade old at this point allowing some reinterpretation of the play while the episode was roughly a year after Franco Zeffirelli’s straight film adaptation of the Shakespeare play starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.  France Nuyen’s portrayal of Elaan in this episode while being inspired by a Pharoah is also clearly modeled partially after Elizabeth Taylor’s portrayal of Katharina and her 1963 portrayal of Cleopatra.  Much of Elaan’s character arc is becoming tamed in the same was as Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew, however she is heightened to be immediately a royal brat that characters come into conflict with.  Lucas is clearly attempting to engage with the text of The Taming of the Shrew by giving his shrew some sense of actual power, but he also is directing this episode through a particularly male lens.  We are not through Elaan’s point of view, we are in Kirk and Ambassador Petri’s, played by Jay Robinson.  Elaan is treated as a femme fatale by the halfway point of the episode, something we are seeing now as a sexual partner for Kirk and the tension comes from Kirk’s violation.  There is a Klingon B-plot in this episode that feels largely there for action that doesn’t actually work, it’s almost an afterthought to add some conflict and worldbuilding.

 

Overall, “Elaan of Troyius” is clearly an attempt to reevaluate William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew through a Star Trek lens and that’s probably why it doesn’t work.  Star Trek often drops the ball when it comes to portraying women and this is an episode whose text explicitly portrays the ideal woman as soft and demure following the gender dynamics of Shakespeare’s play and eventually casting Kirk in the role of Petruchio (Kirk slaps Elaan at one point in retaliation in the episode).  John Meredyth Lucas as a writer easily could have done more work to make this premise work, but it’s stuck in the trappings of its time and those attitudes stopping it from being a good episode.  3/10.

The Empath by: Joyce Muskat and directed by: John Erman

 

“The Empath” is written by: Joyce Muskat and is directed by: John Erman.  It was filmed under production code 63, was the 12^th episode of Star Trek Season 3, the 67^th episode of Star Trek, and was broadcast on December 6, 1968.

 

Sometimes there are just stories that baffle their audience.  “The Empath” is one of those stories.  Another of the episodes of Star Trek from a fan submission, Joyce Muskat would only sell this single episode to television, and sadly you can see why.  The premise of this episode is essentially a Star Trek by numbers: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to a planet that is on the verge of going nova, there is a pair of powerful telepathic aliens that capture our heroes, there is a very pretty lady present who is sadly mute, and the next hour is our characters attempting to escape.  What strikes me the most about “The Empath” is how much of the premise is recycled from “The Menagerie”, specifically the flashback sequences in particular.  This is not helped by the similarities of the Vians, the episode’s aliens, having a visual design and performances from Alan Bergmann and Willard Sage far too similar to the performance of the Talosans.  Their plan is revealed to be different: while they do keep samples in glass tubes though in taxidermy here, the woman they are keeping is undergoing a test to see if the Vians have the moral right to save her people.

 

The woman is named by McCoy as Gem, something adopted by the other characters, and is responsible for the title of the episode.  Gem, played by Kathryn Hays, is a mute empath, able to take the injuries and pain of others upon herself.  Gem is a bit of a problem character for the episode, Hays’ performance is expressive in its muteness, however, Muskat’s script has this issue of not really allowing Gem as a character to have her own agency.  This is a character who can only be characterized through her actions, and much of those actions are performed as weak.  Hays does a good job of expressing the emotion of the situation, but the script undercuts this by then having excess dialogue from the other characters explaining them, thus making any agency the character have lose some of its weight.

 

The episode is also directed by John Erman, his only directorial effort for Star Trek, and the way that it looks is interesting.  Since it’s largely set at the core of a planet, Erman directs this in stark, empty, black sets, with some scenery giving much of the episode a stage-like aspect.  Surprisingly, this would be an incredibly effective piece of direction and set design, if the script was intentional in building on heightened emotions and literal giving of one’s pain and suffering to others in a great sacrifice.  The strength of the script is not there, the central figure is not characterized nearly strongly enough to allow these interesting ideas and genuine attempts to add something to the episode from the production team to become interesting.  This is also simply a script that feels padded in what it is attempting to accomplish.  There are scenes set on the Enterprise that interrupt the action at one point that would usually be the basis of a B-plot, but instead they honestly serve little purpose outside of informing the audience of the danger that was already established at the top of the episode.  Add to that Erman’s particular style of making some of the scenes take longer in attempts to wring the emotion out of the cast, and the episode greatly suffers from some genuinely awful pacing.  There is a moment where Kirk is going to give himself up to the Vians and the camera lingers between them, silently to allow William Shatner to go ham, but the going ham lasts thirty seconds while not really giving Shatner the direction of where his emotion is supposed to go.  The emotion from Shatner peaks early and for once I cannot believe that it was Shatner overacting or not caring, it’s clear that there isn’t the proper direction to communicate in silence anything beneath the surface of emotions.

 

Overall, “The Empath” is a mess.  This is an episode where the more I think about it, the more it feels disjointed and unable to explore the ideas it sets out to in an interesting way or in a way to really bring forward a central thesis.  The bright spots, largely when our three main characters are able to interact and the interesting choices designed to heighten emotions, have the trouble of being done better elsewhere or are just attempts to bring out ideas the script is clearly lacking in design.  It’s clearly a low point and makes it the third week in a row of just a poor episode with once again so much wasted potential which seems to be the tragedy of Season 3 of Star Trek.  3/10.