Star Trek The Original Series Rewatch: “The Paradise Syndrome”

I always quite liked this episode, largely because of Gerald Fried’s utterly beautiful, poignant music (which I’m listening to as I write this), my favorite of all his Trek scores — and, alas, his only score for the season and his final Star Trek contribution. And because of the great chemistry between Kirk and Miramanee, and the drama and emotion of the situation. And because Sabrina Scharf was pretty hot. But over the years, I’ve come to realize how problematical it is, with the racial stereotyping and the white-savior cliches and the redface casting and all — among other things.

Here’s the thing with the Preservers: Everyone insists on calling them an “ancient race,” and I’ve seen books assuming they existed billions of years ago or were the same group as the First Humanoids from TNG’s “The Chase,” but that makes no damn sense. Think about it. They transplanted a population of Native Americans because they were in danger of extinction. When did Native North Americans first face that danger? In the 17th century, when Europeans began colonizing North America and their diseases raced through indigenous trade routes, wiping out 90-95% of the continent’s population before the white settlers ever got there (which is what led those settlers to believe they were expanding into land that had never been civilized or heavily populated). So the one known instance we have of Preserver activity is no more than 3-400 years in our past. By definition, that makes the Preservers a modern entity, not an ancient one. They’re more recent than Shakespeare, contemporary with Isaac Newton. So there’s no reason to imagine they’re some long-lost superrace from the depths of prehistory. They’re probably still around today, and probably still around in the 23rd century as well. (I’ve often thought they might be the same as the Vians from “The Empath,” who have the same MO.)

For that matter, why assume they’re even a “race?” Since when was an entire species devoted exclusively to a single activity? If anything, the Preservers are probably more an organization like Greenpeace or the Peace Corps. They could have members from multiple species.

Not to mention that they’re hardly “super.” Their only technologies include starships (implicitly, to transport the Amerinds), asteroid deflectors, and some device that wipes memories when incorrectly used. None of that is beyond the capability of the 24th-century Federation. On top of which, they’re apparently pretty damn incompetent. I mean, they tried to “preserve” an endangered population by knowingly sticking them on a planet that was regularly bombarded by asteroids, and they put only one deflector beam on the planet and put the code in the hands of only one person. That’s a staggeringly terrible plan.

The only reason everyone imagines the Preservers as some all-powerful, godlike, super-ancient race is that there are so few actual facts established about them that people are free to fill the void with whatever they can imagine, and without limits on their imagination, people tend to default to extremes. Any race from the unspecified past must be from the incredibly distant past (even though we can actually date their activity to within a century or two). Any race with any technology beyond the Enterprise‘s must be a superrace indistinguishable from divinity. And so forth.

Of course, the Enterprise‘s asteroid deflection efforts don’t make much sense either. I mean, it’s not that hard to deflect an asteroid from hitting a planet. It takes Earth, for instance, only 7 minutes to traverse its own diameter as it moves along its orbit. If an asteroid were about to hit Earth, you’d only need to speed or slow its arrival by 8 minutes’ worth and it would miss the planet. This is routinely overlooked by TV and movie writers who forget that planets move rather than standing still. Also, the farther away an asteroid is, the smaller the angle you’d have to divert it by in order to make it miss the planet. With two months’ worth of time to work on it, it would’ve been monumentally easy to prevent the asteroid from hitting the planet. All they had to do was have a shuttlecraft push sideways on it for a few weeks.

(Okay, done listening to the music. The “Death of Miramanee” cue is so beautiful and poignant. There’s this fantastic cello sting at the moment Miramanee dies that gives me chills every time — it’s at 2:30 on the cue “The Right Button/Death of Miramanee/End” on the soundtrack album. The newly-performed suite arrangement of the “Paradise Syndrome” score on the Label X album in the ’80s left out that cello sting, which always frustrated me, though the suite was otherwise great to have. I’m so glad the original recordings were finally released on CD.)

@13/Darr: “Come to think of it, Kirk falls in love two times during TOS+movies, and both women die soon after, and his unborn child and his son die as well. It’s almost as if life hates him.”

It’s pretty much par for the course for ’60s/’70s action lead characters. They couldn’t have ongoing relationships, since the stories were always episodic, so anyone they fell seriously in love with would inevitably either die or turn out to be evil.

“They save endangered cultures but keep them in the same state as they found them. That’s how I explained to myself why those people don’t even know how to preserve food and never developed irrigation or other things and why the obelisk has a memory wipe button.”

Again, though, it’s a myth that the Native Americans were ignorant primitives. There was a rich civilization in the Americas for centuries, in many ways comparable with anything in Europe at the time, just with different specializations (e.g. weaker at metallurgy and transportation, much stronger at agriculture and building with organic materials). The idea that Native Americans — the people who domesticated or bred into existence maybe 2/3 of the world’s staple crops today — would need a white guy’s help to understand something as basic as food preservation or irrigation is probably the most ignorant and racially condescending assumption in the entire episode.

Then again, the idea is that the Preservers saved endangered populations. Maybe the ancestors of Miramanee’s people were the stragglers and refugees left after European diseases had ravaged 90-plus percent of the population — people who’d been forced to retreat from their developed communities and trade routes in order to avoid the plagues and go back to living in the wilderness. They might’ve lost a lot of their communities’ knowledge by the time they were found and transplanted. If the Preservers assumed that was their “natural” state, they would’ve been guilty of making the same inept anthropological assumptions as generations of European observers.

@20/Cambias: For all we know, other starships like the Potemkin or the Hood might’ve stumbled across the alien planets settled by transplanted Ainu or Harappans. I always figured there must be other Preserver planets we didn’t see. The conceit of this episode was that the Preservers explained the various Earth-duplicate cultures seen before in the series, but most of the others had explanations (e.g. the space gangsters and space Nazis) or couldn’t be explained as the result of seeding (e.g. the Omegans, who supposedly had Americans and Communist Chinese thousands of years in the past). The only other one that could work as a Preserver world is the Roman planet from “Bread and Circuses,” though their speaking 20th-century American English is hard to explain that way. But the Enterprise is just one ship — it can’t visit every planet. There could be other seeded populations out there.

And what about aliens? Why would the Preservers only protect human populations? As I said, I think the Vians from “The Empath” could be the Preservers. And maybe some of the alien races we’ve seen that are oddly similar to other alien races could be the descendants of Preserver-seeded populations. For instance, the Talarians from TNG: “Suddenly Human” could be a Klingon offshoot.

@23/Darr: Again, I don’t believe the beam was supposed to wipe memories if used correctly. Spock specifically said “You must have activated it out of sequence.” The Blish version rephrases it slightly and calls it an “information beam” instead of a “memory beam.” Like, the machine was meant to beam knowledge into people’s heads — like the Great Teacher in “Spock’s Brain,” maybe — but since Kirk activated the memory-writing beam without programming in any memories to write first, it just beamed a blank signal into his brain and thus left his memory blank.

@26/Jana: The Roman population, no, but maybe their way of life, if the Preservers anticipated the eventual fall of the Western Empire.

And my point is that the primitive level of Miramanee’s people would not have been the baseline for Native Americans in their heyday on Earth. It would have to be a degeneration from that, rather than the preservation of their pristine nature as the episode wanted us to think.

As for Neanderthals, if I’m right, then the Preservers are a group of relatively recent vintage. It’s unlikely that any organization or subculture could persist unchanged in a single activity for hundreds of thousands of years, so I doubt there would’ve been Preservers around that long ago. Even projecting their activities back 2000 years to Ancient Rome is a stretch. Although it’s possible that there have been different “space Greenpeace” groups transplanting cultures at various different times, and historians just lump them all under the Preserver label, presuming more continuity than there was.

@33/MeredithP: Well, to be fair, Starfleet uniform shirts were supposed to use some advanced, futuristic fastening technology. In the first season, they were actually sewn onto the actors; a shoulder seam was left open so the actors could put them on, then invisibly sewn shut. Starting in season 2, they put a hidden zipper in the shoulder seam. So the implicit idea was that the shirt fastened by some means that even 20th-century people would be confused by.

(TNG and DS9 did the same thing, implying some kind of futuristic fastening. The uniform tunics had a zipper in the back, but there were scenes — like in “Ensign Ro” where the title character gives her tunic to a refugee girl — where they were shown to open in front along some invisible seam.)

@50/Jacob H: That doesn’t work as an analogy, because it’s a much more low-energy collision, so the difference in molecular bonding energies between a frozen chicken and a thawed chicken is significant in proportion to the energies involved in the collision. If you were shooting that chicken into the windshield at, say, 500 MPH, then it probably wouldn’t make any difference whether it was frozen or thawed.

You can’t assume things scale up simply between a low-speed collision and a high-speed one. You can see that in regular experience — if your car hits a wall at 1 MPH, it won’t do much damage, but if it hits the wall at just 30 MPH, it could wreck your car. And as we saw in the Mythbusters episode where they used a rocket sled to slam a wall into a car at several hundred MPH, the car literally disintegrated. In the high-speed replay, you could see that it basically just turned to powder on impact. That’s what I was saying about the molecular bonding energies being too low to matter at those energy levels. They were so proportionally tiny that, from a physical standpoint, the car effectively functioned as a cloud of independent particles rather than a solid object. At a low speed, the car just bounces, at a moderate speed it crumples, at a really high speed it just splashes. That’s how different the physics of a high-speed collision are from the physics of a low-speed collision, so you just can’t treat them as equivalent.

And as for comment #51, the only reason the asteroid “explodes” is because the energy of impact causes it and the atmosphere around it to heat, expand, disperse, and change state. Indeed, most of the force of the explosion would be the result of the atmosphere itself being superheated and compressed. If you set off a nuclear bomb in vacuum, it won’t do anywhere near as much damage or create nearly as big a fireball as if it’s in atmosphere. One thing that Trek constantly gets wrong is assuming that explosions in space have shock waves. Of course they don’t, because a shock wave is a property of the medium in which the explosion happens. In the case of an explosion going off in atmosphere, the shock wave is pressure propagating through the air itself because of the sudden, forceful expansion of the atmosphere around the explosion. So superheating the atmosphere is still going to be a problem even if it’s not in a single concentrated explosion. On this scale, it’s just a matter of whether the devastation begins in one place and then spreads outward to encompass a whole hemisphere, or just engulfs the whole hemisphere all at once. I don’t see that difference mattering too much to the people who are roasting alive.

@52/sbursztynski: I don’t see how “Mary Sue” applies in this context. If Miramanee were a Mary Sue, then she’d be better than Kirk at everything, and he’d be in awe of her abilities. And we’ve all been talking about how the episode portrays her and her people as being useless, ignorant, and in awe of Kirk’s superior abilities at everything. That’s pretty much the exact opposite of Mary Sue plotting.

@54/noblehunter: Sure, maybe theoretically there might be scenarios where vaporizing the asteroid wouldn’t devastate the planet, but it’s still an insanely unnecessary waste of energy, because it’s so very, very much simpler just to nudge it a tiny bit off course. If it’s far enough away that it won’t hit the planet for two months, then the angle of deflection necessary to get it to miss the planet is tiny. It would take enormously less energy to deflect it a little bit and let it go harmlessly on its merry way than it would to disintegrate it altogether. Again: A planet is not a stationary target. It’s not like trying to keep a runaway car from hitting a building at the end of a street, it’s like trying to keep a runaway car from hitting a truck as they’re both racing along a dry lake bed in different directions. If you just nudge the car’s steering wheel a tiny bit while it’s still a good distance from the truck, it’ll miss the truck altogether. There’s no need to blow the car up altogether — there’s no need to even contemplate it as an option, because there’s an immensely simpler and smarter solution.

As for tractor beams, they were established as early as the second pilot of TOS, although we didn’t see one in operation until the next episode, “The Corbomite Maneuver.” Tractor beams were referenced quite frequently throughout TOS. In this case, the very first thing Spock tried against the asteroid was a deflector beam, which is just a tractor beam in reverse, pushing instead of pulling. It wasn’t deemed enough of a deflection to do the trick. What’s odd is that Spock abandoned that plan in favor of phasers. He had plenty of time to keep nudging the asteroid with the deflector beam until it was sufficiently altered in course. Perhaps he was in a hurry because he wanted to get back and find Kirk, but it was still a bad idea.

@55/Ellynne: When did Kirk introduce artificial light? I think there was a bit where he carved a gourd into a lantern, but people have had firelight for a very long time.

@59/kkozoriz: Of course it wouldn’t be easy to deflect an asteroid of that size, but the point is that it only has to be nudged a slight bit off course, so slow and steady nudging for two months could probably do it.

As for rotation, you could park an engine at one of its poles and point it straight upward. After all, it doesn’t matter which way you deflect it, so long as you deflect it.

Let’s math it out. If it’s almost as large as Earth’s Moon, let’s say it’s 7 x 10^22 kg. Wikipedia says an average velocity for an Earth impact event is 17 km/s, so let’s go with that for simplicity. If it’s exactly 60 days from impact, it’d be 88 million km away. If “Amerind” is about the size of Earth, say 12,000 km in diameter, then it would subtend less than half an arcminute in the sky, so you’d only need to deflect its vector by half an arcminute.

…But I’m afraid I can’t for the life of me remember the math for how to calculate the amount of force you’d need to do that. Presumably it would be far easier than the greater deflection angle you’d need when the asteroid is closer, but I don’t know the equation. Can someone help me out here?

Anyway, Spock was right that it would get harder to deflect the closer it got to the planet, but he was wrong to assume the only option was to make a single attempt to push it or fracture it. He had two months during which he could’ve applied periodic, repeated deflections that added up over time, which would’ve made far more sense than burning out the ship’s engines trying to do it all in one go.

@60/Jana: Yes, there’s an Old West planet in ENT: “North Star” in season 3. It was an homage to TOS’s parallel-Earth episodes, although the inhabitants were actually human abductees from the Old West.

@63/MikePoteet: My information about the reasons for the cancellation is third-hand at best, and it’s not my place to go into specifics. All I can say is that, from what I understand, it was a side effect of a larger business decision resulting from something else, and wasn’t specifically about the books themselves or their content. It’s just the sort of thing that happens sometimes — projects fall through for external reasons, and you chalk it up to experience and move on to the next project. Luckily, in this case, the falling-through happened after we’d delivered our manuscripts and met our contractual responsibilities, so all four of us got paid for our work.

There was preliminary cover art released, fairly generic shots of the new cast on the new bridge and the like, but only in black and white for the retailers’ catalog. I don’t know if it would’ve been the final art.

The Children of Kings was written (or at least plotted) at an early enough point that the folks at Pocket didn’t quite know what they’d be doing in regard to the new universe or what its exact continuity details would be. So it was written to be sort of betwixt and between, in its own version of the continuity that didn’t quite fit in either Prime or Abramsverse. After all, if there could be two distinct versions of the universe, why not more?

@66/Ellynne: I did not know that about the origins of “spring cleaning.” Neat! (Err, no pun intended.)

@76/kkozoriz: Actually there have been cases where trailers have given away major spoilers that the filmmakers wanted to keep secret. That infamously happened with How to Train Your Dragon 2 — the filmmakers were quite upset when the trailer spoiled the secret of a key character’s identity.

@92: I’ve actually just started a re-watch of the Marx Brothers DVD sets I inherited from my father, but I’d say there are two candidates for their greatest film, Duck Soup from 1933 and A Night at the Opera from 1935. The former was their last film with Paramount and their last as a 4-man team (though Zeppo tended to be overlooked anyway, as the straight man of the team), while the latter was their first MGM film and probably their biggest, lushest production, if sometimes seen as domesticating the Marxes a bit, toning down their anarchy and making them more heroic. Some think Opera is their best film, while others prefer the Paramount era.

Although you might want to start with the one I’m watching today, Animal Crackers from 1930. It’s their second film, better than their debut The Cocoanuts, and pretty archetypal of their work, and it features the song that became Groucho’s theme song for the rest of his career. (It does have some borderline-racist stuff in it, though, with the whole “African explorer” angle.)