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.