“Whom Gods Destroy”
Written by Lee Erwin and Jerry Sohl
Directed by Herb Wallerstein
Season 3, Episode 16
Production episode 60043-71
Original air date: January 3, 1969
Stardate: 5718.3
Captain’s log. The Enterprise is bringing a new medicine to the insane asylum on Elba II, a planet with a poisonous atmosphere. The medicine is supposed to eliminate mental illness for all time—the last fifteen remaining mentally ill people in the entire Federation are interred on Elba.
Kirk and Spock beam down to deliver the medicine to Dr. Donald Cory, the colony governor, who is skeptical about the efficacy of the new medicine. (The beam-down procedure requires that the force field protecting the asylum be temporary lowered.) Cory brings the landing party to see Elba’s newest inmate, Garth of Izar, a former fleet captain in Starfleet, whose exploits were required reading at the Academy. Kirk considers him one of his heroes, and he’s disappointed that he’s gone all cluck cluck, gibber gibber, my old man’s a mushroom, etc..
En route to Garth’s cell, they pass an Orion woman named Marta who insists that Cory isn’t really Cory. It turns out she was telling the truth, as a rather haggard Cory is in Garth’s cell, and Cory changes shape to reveal himself to actually be Garth.
Garth lets Marta and two other inmates—an Andorian and a Tellarite—out of their cells and stuns Spock. The Andorian and Tellarite take the unconscious Spock away while Kirk is put in the cell with Cory. Garth is obviously completely binky-bonkers, and intends to rule the universe. He has destroyed the medicine Kirk and Spock brought, and plans to take over the Enterprise, having changed his shape to that of Kirk, and take revenge on his crew who mutinied—and also take over the universe, can’t forget that…
Cory explains to Kirk that Garth was badly injured on Antos, and the Antosians taught him the skill of cellular metamorphosis. Intended to heal him, it also enables him to change his shape (and, apparently, his clothes) to anything he wants. He started his campaign to take over Elba by assuming Cory’s form and fooling the guard into letting “the governor” out.
Disguised as Kirk, Garth contacts the Enterprise and orders Scotty to beam him aboard. Scotty, following Kirk’s own security orders, says, “Queen to queen’s level three.” Garth, unaware of the security procedure, bitches out Scotty, then quickly backtracks, saying he was just testing him, ha ha. Once he ends the transmission, Garth throws a massive temper tantrum, changing back into his natural form.
On the Enterprise, Scotty and McCoy know something’s wrong, but Uhura can’t reestablish communication, and Sulu confirms that the force field is up and won’t allow them to transport. Punching through with phasers could kill everyone down there.
Garth approaches Kirk, reiterating the invitation to dinner he made as Cory at the top of the episode. Dinner comes with a show, including the Andorian and Tellarite playing wheelbarrow, and Marta reciting her own poetry (actually Shakespeare’s) and then dancing.
After Marta’s dance, we learn that Garth ordered his crew to destroy Antos, a planet of peaceful people, after they refused to join him in his conquest—as did his crew. He intends to renew his plans of conquest, this time with the dozen-plus inmates as his much more loyal crew. Garth is also revolted that Kirk’s visit to Axanar, long after Garth’s victory there, was a peace mission. He also condemns Kirk and Spock’s friendship, as Spock should be Kirk’s subordinate, nothing more.
Spock tries to explain logically to Garth why his plans for conquest are foolish, and Garth wants to hear none of it. He has Spock taken away, and then makes it clear that he wants to know the response to the security phrase. Kirk won’t tell him—and he won’t tell Marta, even after she slinks at him—and so Garth wheels out THE COMFY CHAIR!
Okay, it’s not a comfy chair, it’s a redress of the rehab chair from “Dagger of the Mind,” except Garth has modified it so that now it causes pain. He demonstrates it on Cory. When Kirk refuses to provide the countersign, Garth puts Kirk in the chair, but he’s still not forthcoming.
He falls unconscious, and Marta offers instead to try to cajole the information out of him with her feminine wiles. However, she insists that she lied to Garth to get him to stop torturing Kirk, because she loves him so much. And then, just to remind us that she’s batshit, she tries to stab him with a dagger. Kirk stops her and then Spock shows up—as promised by Marta, who said she arranged it with a guard who finds her desirable—and neck pinches her. The pair head toward the control room. Spock stuns the Tellarite and Kirk takes his phaser.
They get to the control room and Kirk contacts the ship and orders a security detail beamed down to take control of the asylum. Spock urges Kirk to return to the ship, as his safety is vital, and offers to take command of the security team. When Scotty gives the callsign, Kirk realizes something’s up and orders Spock to give the countersign.
Except, of course, it isn’t Spock, it’s Garth in disguise, and Kirk’s phaser is inactive. The whole thing, starting from when Marta tried to seduce and stab him, was a ruse to get the countersign.
Kirk tries to appeal to the captain Garth used to be rather than the self-proclaimed lord he is now, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. So Kirk tries to deactivate the force field while Garth is ranting and raving, but Garth stuns him before he can manage it.
Kirk regains consciousness in time for Garth’s coronation. Everyone kneels before Garth, and Marta hands him a crown, which he places on his own head, as no one else is worthy to crown him. He designates Marta his consort and Kirk his heir apparent.
The Andorian and the Tellarite bring Kirk to the control room. Kirk tries to appeal to the pair’s better nature, but they’re no more receptive than Garth was. Then Garth himself shows up, displaying his latest invention, an explosive that could lay waste to the entire planet in sufficient quantity. One crystal of it is in the necklace he put around Marta’s neck when he made her consort. Garth then has Marta taken out of the dome, where she slowly chokes to death—at least until Garth detonates the necklace, and then she’s blown up, instead.
The Enterprise detects the explosion. Now with a sense of urgency, Scotty has Sulu move the ship into orbit over the force field’s weakest point on the far side of the planet. However, ship’s phasers have no effect on the field.
Since Kirk remains unmoved even by Marta’s death, Garth has Spock brought to the control room. However, Spock is smarter than the average bear—he fakes being unconscious and then double neck pinches the Andorian and the Tellarite and takes their weapon.
However, Garth is alerted to Spock’s treachery, and so he disguises himself as Kirk so Spock is confronted with two Kirks. Rather than just stun them both, which would solve everyone’s problem, Spock proposes to wait Garth out, since he would need energy to maintain Kirk’s form (a hypothesis with no basis in reality, since there’s no indication that such energy is required; in fact, since the cellular metamorphosis had its basis in healing Garth from injuries, it’s something that he shouldn’t have to concentrate to maintain, since it would be useless as a healing tool if you had to fixate on it all the time). Garth then attacks Spock, and the two Kirks attack each other for several seconds. When one Kirk urges Spock to shoot the one he’s downed, the second one urges Spock to shoot both of them to ensure the safety of the Enterprise.
That’s all Spock needs to know, and he shoots the first one. Spock calls the ship, gives the countersign, and a medical team and a security detail beam down. McCoy administers the medicine to the surviving inmates, including Garth, who seems to have no memory of what happened on Elba.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Somehow the people of Antos can teach someone how to be a shapeshifter, which is impressive, to say the least.
Fascinating. Not a banner episode for Spock: he tries to use logic on someone who has been declared criminally insane and seems surprised that it doesn’t work, is smart enough to take out the Andorian and Tellarite in one shot, but isn’t bright enough to do so with Kirk and Garth even though he has a weapon that allows him to do so from a distance, and then he gets himself hit on the head while failing to do that.
I’m a doctor not an escalator. McCoy’s sole function is to annoy Scotty with blindingly obvious statements on the bridge. Oh, and distribute the medicine at the end. Woo hoo.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu finds the one weak spot in the force field, but is unable to punch a hole through it with phasers.
Hailing frequencies open. Uhura gets to run the science station in Spock’s absence, since Chekov isn’t in this episode, and she determines that there are still life form readings on the planet even after the big-ass explosion that killed poor Marta.
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty quickly figures out that it isn’t really Kirk who calls the ship, but is utterly powerless to do anything about it.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Marta hits all over Kirk from jump, possibly in an attempt to make Garth jealous, but probably mostly because she’s nuts.
Channel open. “Queen to king’s level one.”
A phrase Garth spends the entire episode trying and failing to learn.
Welcome aboard. First Catwoman, then the Riddler, now Batgirl! Yvonne Craig plays our second Orion woman, and our first real one (the one Susan Oliver played in “The Cage” and “The Menagerie” being an illusion and all) in Marta. Craig, who played Batgirl during the third season of the Batman TV series the year before, was apparently one of the people considered for the role of Vina that eventually went to Oliver.
Steve Ihnat—who worked with both Gene Roddenberry and DeForest Kelley on a failed pilot called Police Story—plays Garth, who is supposed to be much older than Kirk, but Ihnat is actually three years younger than William Shatner, which is why they silvered his hair.
Stuntmen Richard Geary and Gary Downey play the Andorian and the Tellarite, respectively. Recurring regulars James Doohan, George Takei, and Nichelle Nichols are present and accounted for.
But to my mind, the really big guest here is the late great Keye Luke, who plays Cory. No one ever went wrong casting Luke in anything…
Trivial matters: The title for this episode derives from a Greek proverb: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
While Ihnat plays Garth is his original form, Luke, Shatner, and Nimoy also play a disguised Garth at various points in the episode.
Leonard Nimoy wrote a detailed memo to show-runner Fred Freiberger and executive in charge of television for Paramount Douglas S. Cramer complaining about several aspects of the episode, including how out of character everyone is, as well as the many similarities to “Dagger of the Mind.”
In the original script, Spock determined which Kirk was real via a series of questions rather than letting them punch it out. That scene was left intact in James Blish’s adaptation in Star Trek 5, but was changed by director Herb Wallerstein, who wanted more action.
Elba II is named after the island to which Napoleon I was exiled after he was forced to abdicate the throne of France.
Earth makes first contact with Axanar in the Enterprise episode “Fight or Flight.”
There has been considerable speculation in the tie-in fiction and games as to what the Battle of Axanar was and against whom it was fought. The FASA role-playing game had it as a climactic battle in a four-year-long war against the Klingons (which the controversial fan film Axanar has used as the basis for its plot), and several tie-in works have done likewise, including Federation: The First 150 Years by David A. Goodman. Michael Jan Friedman dramatized the aftermath of the battle involving the U.S.S. Republic, on which a young James Kirk served, in the My Brother’s Keeper trilogy, thus establishing how Kirk got the Palm Leaf of Axanar, as established back in “Court Martial.” None of these stories really follow up on Kirk’s line about how the aftermath of Axanar allowed him and Spock to be brothers, implying that the battle was critical to the forming of the Federation, or at least in Vulcan being part of it.
A reference is made to a classic battle strategy called the Cochrane deceleration, presumably named after Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of warp drive, whom our heroes met in “Metamorphosis.” Kirk used that in a battle against the Romulans at Tau Ceti, a battle that has amazingly gone unchronicled. The strategy itself was explained in the FASA Four Years War RPG module, which also included the Battle of Axanar.
This story is followed up on in the novel Garth of Izar by Pamela Sargent & George Zebrowski, and in a contradictory story in DC’s monthly comic book, in a storyline collected in the trade paperback Who Killed Captain Kirk? written by Peter David. The Sargent/Zebrowski novel also has another version of the Battle of Axanar.
Alternate timeline versions of Garth are seen in A Less Perfect Union by William Leisner and Mirror Universe: The Sorrows of Empire by David Mack.
Marta claims to have written Sonnet XVIII by William Shakespeare, and later claims to have written Last Poems XIX by A.E. Housman.
Garth references Lee Kuan, a post-20th-century tyrant first mentioned in “Patterns of Force.”
Your humble rewatcher showed life on Izar, an independent human colony, in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers novella Security (which was collected in the Wounds trade paperback), mostly from the POV of Christine Vale, a prose-original character who has appeared in multiple S.C.E. and Next Generation tales as the security chief of the Enterprise between Insurrection and Nemesis, and in the Titan novels (and other stories featuring the U.S.S. Titan) where she serves as Will Riker’s first officer.
To boldly go. “Queen to queen’s level three.” As an acting exercise for Steve Ihnat and Yvonne Craig, this is a fun little hour to watch. I like that Ihnat doesn’t overplay Garth’s insanity—it’s a very intelligent, mostly very controlled madness. In fact, the only exception is the temper tantrum he throws when he learns of the security callsign, and I’m willing to put most of that on William Shatner’s usual theatricality. His costuming is particularly ingenious, from the cape that is constantly falling off, to the medal that flies off his chest as he’s throwing the temper tantrum, to the rather pathetic crown, to the thing I never actually noticed until this rewatch: his boots are mismatched! One is silver, one is gold.
And Craig is an absolute delight, slinking her way around the asylum: amusing, sexy, mercurial. I love her claiming old poetry as her own, I love her dancing, and I love the fact that she’s barefoot throughout (I don’t know why, it’s just a nice little touch).
Too bad they’re not performing in a better episode. It’s always dangerous to call back to another episode and do it badly, and it’s not like I thought “Dagger of the Mind” was any great shakes in the first place. But this feels like a retread of that, with a little “I, Mudd” mixed in, only the crazy people really are crazy. And as good as Ihnat is, he’s no Roger C. Carmel.
On top of that, the story just doesn’t work. For starters, the entire plot hinges on a security procedure that we’ve never seen before and will never see again. It might not have bothered me so much, except this is an episode that’s aware of the show’s history in general—mentioning fighting the Romulans, the use of Axanar, which was established back in “Court Martial“—and to just pull this callsign out of their asses, particularly when they’ve been in far more high-security situations than this without such a callsign, just feels like lazy writing.
Also everything’s in terms of total extremes: The last ever insane asylum! A medicine that will totally cure mental illness! The most powerful explosive ever created! (And sure, Garth may be exaggerating, but it’s Cory who first declares it that.)
And finally, the biggest turd in the water closet of this episode: how the heck do you teach someone how to be a shapechanger? It’s like teaching someone how to have a big nose or teaching someone to have a food allergy.
Good guest stars, wasted on a dopey plot. Still fun to watch, though, so I’m being generous with the rating.
Warp factor rating: 6
Next week: “The Mark of Gideon”
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be appearing at Intervention 7 this weekend, alongside Trek actor Rene Auberjonois, and Trek writers David Gerrold and John Peel, as well as actors Robert Axelrod, Gigi Edgley, Todd Haberkorn, Alex Kingston, Juliet Landau, Jon St. John, and Dwight Schultz; musicians Thomas Dolby and Ego Likeness; director Rachel Talalay; and tons more, including cartoonists, filmmakers, bloggers, bellydancers, etc. Keith will have a table where he’ll be signing and selling books, and will also be doing lots of programming, including an Author Spotlight Sunday at 9am where he’ll be reading from one of his upcoming works of fiction. Check out his full schedule here.
This could’ve been so much better if it had been more subtle — if Garth had been a more nuanced character, if we’d learned more of why Kirk admired him, if the portrayal of mental illness hadn’t been so cartoonishly broad, and if the random shapeshifter angle hadn’t been tossed in. As it is, Yvonne Craig is pretty much the one worthwhile thing here.
In addition to ridiculous implausibilities like the chemical explosive that’s somehow “the most powerful ever” in a society that has antimatter weapons and considers nuclear warheads antiquated, there’s the question of why you need to put a force field around an entire planet just to safeguard a single small facility. Why not just put the force field around the building? Not to mention that no other Trek episode or film has asserted that the Federation was capable of erecting an impenetrable field large enough to surround an entire planet. It would’ve made things like TMP, TVH, “The Changing Face of Evil,” and the 2009 movie play out rather differently.
With regard to callbacks to earlier episodes, this is the second mention of Antos IV; it was mentioned in “Who Mourns for Adonais?” as the home of the giant dryworm.
Keye Luke was going to play Noonien Soong in TNG: “Brothers,” but he had to withdraw due to illness (I think he died soon afterward). Which led to them casting Brent Spiner as Soong, which not only gave us a Chinese-named character played by a white actor, but created the paradox of how Data’s creator could’ve been unknown pre-“Datalore” if he looked exactly like Soong all along.
The appearance, in the third season of TOS, of a number of actors who had played major roles in the 1960s BATMAN leads me to a fun mental exercise: reimagining those confusing plot-defying, fisticuffs-heavy we’ve seen of late as BATMAN episodes (with the Caped Crusader and Robin visiting odd planets in their Bat-Rocket in lieu of Kirk and Spock, while Alfred waits above doing all the bridge crew business). I think that it. just. might. work.
Don’t be silly, Keith – Garth is obviously Andersen’s Emperor, and he’s shapeshifting the appearance of clothes. ;)
I rather like this episode, but I’m a sucker for any sci-fi plot involving mental illness. I wouldn’t say it’s Shatner’s theatricality that prompts the excessive temper tantrum – Garth is just that binky-bonkers.
The call/counter signs are probably my favorite thing here, because regardless of whether mental illness should/will be eradicated, the people in this facility are dangerously ill, and I totally approve of setting up a mechanism to prevent exactly what Garth tries to pull off.
“Taught” might at least be hand-waved on the theory of mistranslation. The Antosians may describe the passing on of any ability/skill that isn’t biologically inherent as being “taught” even when the ability was based on biological modifications.
Of course, Cory seemed unaware of Garth’s ability (or else the guards were dumb enough to be fooled by a known shapechanger) and only got his info from Garth after he’d broken out, and who knows what the crazy guy said?
Let me just add a big complaint about a universal cure for mental illness that works on everyone, regardless of species or cause of madness–including developing shapechanger skills your brain isn’t wired to handle.
That was one bit of realism. Aliens made a desperate effort to save a life using things that worked fine on their people and caused complete insanity in a mind that couldn’t handle the modifications they made.
Keith / Christopher, just out of curiosity and because it is mentioned in this episode, what did you think of Prelude to Axanar and were you looking forward to the full blown movie?
Congratulations, you are the first person in the fifty years of STAR TREK who has compared Spock to Yogi Bear. Well done! I don’t know why it took so long when the comparison is so apt.
@3/MeredithP: It takes a very skilled shapeshifter to shapeshift the appearance of a cape that keeps falling off!
About the episode: I agree that Garth and Marta are fun to watch – I never payed much attention to Cory – and I appreciate it that the writers didn’t rehash any of the more questionable aspects of Orion women from The Cage, like slavery or “animal women”. My favourite line is Marta’s claim to have written Shakespeare’s sonnet again.
But on the whole, I find the episode too silly and cartoonish. It also suffers from the recurring third season problem that there isn’t enough story there. The talk at the dinner table leads nowhere. Marta’s dance goes on for too long. All the events are rather arbitrary. And I’m not a big fan of lighthearted torture scenes. Bottom line, I prefer Dagger of the Mind.
BTW, the episode reuses a lot of plot elements from earlier stories. There’s the setting and the torture chair, of course, but there’s also:
Shapeshifting – The Man Trap. Duplicate Kirk – What Are Little Girls Made Of?. Also The Enemy Within and Mirror, Mirror (sort of). Starship captain gone bad – The Omega Glory. “Required reading at the academy” – again, What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Party on, Garth!
You are being generous. The silliness, the cartoony portrayal of mental patients. This is a 4. At best a 5.
This is also one of many TOS episodes which had me checking the clock to see how much time was left before the end. Not enough story to hold together, although at least they tried to get creative with the plot, even though there are still more than enough plot holes. This fumbles what could have been a very intriguing story, especially given the care the writers took to reference past events in Trek history.
The guest actors bring some life to their roles, and are mostly watchable, but not enough for me to be invested in the episode.
The trivia section on the other hand had me surprised. I had no idea Wallerstein changed the dual Kirk scene to increase the action quota. Is a TV director-for-hire even allowed to do that? I recall Joe Menosky saying in an interview that directors were required to stick to the script. I doubt TNG/DS9 directors like Les Landau and Allan Kroeker could even change a line of dialogue, let alone the action.
If anything, this paints Freiberger as a very poor showrunner. I’m all for creative out-of-the-box solutions, but this is still television. You have to maintain a standard. He should’ve been in control of the directors in order to maintain such a consistency. You don’t have time to experiment. If anything, Wallerstein shows a poor understanding of the material when he changes a potentially clever plot solution for mindless action and questionable character logic.
You see the difference. Rick Berman wouldn’t even let the actors direct until they read scripts, attended classes, plus casting and editing sessions.
@1: I’d argue that even if the Federation is capable of enveloping entire worlds inside force-fields, doing so goes against every principle they stand for. When the Enterprise faced V’Ger, Kirk refused Decker’s advice to raise shields in order to not come across as aggressive. Riker offered the same advice when first encountered the Borg.
As I mentioned some weeks back, this is one of the last episodes to have any original music. Most of the score was recycled stock cues, of course, but Marta’s dance music was composed by Alexander Courage (making this his second Orion-dance cue) and recorded during the session for “Plato’s Stepchildren,” the last episode with a full original score. The cue bears the unfortunate title of “Arab Hootch Dance (Hootchie Kootchie).” This is from an old American slang expression for belly dances, more generally spelled “hoochie-coochie.” (Here’s an interesting, slightly NSFW article about the history and etymology of the term.)
Speaking of recycling, the Elba control room features the return of the crescent-shaped console that was first seen as the Landru conversion console in “The Return of the Archons” and was also used as Norman’s control console in “I, Mudd” and the cloaking device base unit in “The Enterprise Incident.” Also, Garth’s fur coat looks like it may be the same one worn by Karidian in “The Conscience of the King.” There’s also a human inmate wearing Thelev’s vest from “Journey to Babel” and a couple of inmates wearing Eminian headgear from “A Taste of Armageddon.” One thing that isn’t reused is the prosthetic eye pieces from the “Journey to Babel” Tellarite makeup; the Tellarite inmate here has human eyes.
@9/Eduardo: I don’t think a director could unilaterally change the script that much, but he could certainly ask the producers for permission to change it and get their go-ahead if he was convicing enough.
As for shields, I don’t think your comparison works, since both Enterprises did have shields and used them when they were attacked; the cases you cite are just specific instances where they didn’t think it was appropriate to have them raised. Obviously a planet with a shield defense wouldn’t have it up all the time (and really, how can a planet ever “appear aggressive?”), but if there’s a Breen fleet or a giant alien superprobe or a Romulan mining ship from the future launching an attack on your planet, then being able to raise a shield around the entire world would be a pretty handy thing to do.
“First Catwoman, then the Riddler, then Batgirl!”
I never realized that TOS had a trilogy. It’s not a WoK/SfS/VH kind of trilogy, much closer to an Azati Prime/Damages/The Forgotten (not that they’re in any other way comparable), but it’s still neat.
I know you’ve said your ratings are the least important blahblahblah. Still, how much daylight is there between Wink of an Eye’s 2 and this 6? All three of these episodes are campy and stupid, not meant to be taken seriously (well, “Battlefield” was probably pretty relevant at the time…). To me, they kinda fit together. Then again, they could as easily fit with most of Season Three.
Anyway, I still approve of it. It’s a fun episode to re-visit once a year or so.
It’s interesting how Marta’s skin looks so much less vividly green in the shots where she’s alongside someone else than in the shots where she’s alone or separate from the others. I guess that when the lighting and color timing are optimized for Caucasian skin tones, they shift Marta’s green hues more toward red and make them less saturated and more grayish, but when she’s under her own separate key light or alone in the shot, they can adjust things to emphasize the green. Indeed, in the screencap of her dance, you can see that the tablecloth behind her looks like it’s being illuminated by a green light.
There are also a couple of shots where you can see the makeup fading a bit along the edge of her dress, like in that shot where she’s draped over Garth’s shoulder near the top of the recap. Looks like either the makeup was rubbed off by the fabric or they didn’t make her up thoroughly enough to begin with.
Eh. This wasn’t a horrible episode like “And the Children Shall Lead” but it’s not one I look forward to watching either… and I’m one of those odd people who actually prefers Season 3 overall to the first two. It’s kinda cartoonish, as has been mentioned above… without the entertainment value of a “Way To Eden” (i.e. it’s slow and boring). Garth (LORD Garth! Lol) is not the Salt Vampire offering individualized illusions of appearance, he’s a true shape shifter… so it seems silly that he can shift his clothes as well. The idea of protecting the entire planer with a force field is not only wasteful, but beyond the known level of Federation technology even in the TNG era. I just don’t see how this episode warrants a 6, where the far more enjoyable (and sexy!) “Wink Of An Eye” only warrants a 2.
@10/Christopher: I’ve always thought that the Tellarite looks somehow wrong, but I never realised that it’s because he has human eyes. How could I not notice that? Thanks for pointing it out!
@13/Kevin Parker: I’m with you. I like Wink of an Eye much better than this one. In Wink of an Eye, both Kirk and Spock are smart and resourceful and do good teamwork under difficult circumstances. Here, not so much.
@11/Muthsarah
He also gave “Patterns of Force” a 4, right after saying – basically – that it is a pile of s*it (on which I agree with him completely, by the way).
In short: I love this rewatch and Keith’s commentary, but the numerical ratings often make no sense what-so-ever. Trying to find any rhyme or reason in them will just get you “binky bonkers” (love that term, too).
I suppose Garth learning shapeshifting parallels Charlie Evans learning his powers from the Thasians. It still doesn’t make any sense, but there is a history. Maybe the Anaxarians use nanobots or something.
When Freiburger did “And the Children Shall Lead”, he declared that he was going to do “Miri” right. Ever since I learned that, I wondered if several of the third season episodes reflected an intention to redo old episodes and improve on them. This one and “Dagger of the Mind”, possibly “The Empath” and “The Cage”, and I think a case can be made that “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield” is an attempt to redo “The Alternative Factor”. If that last one is the case, then he actually managed to improve one!
@16/DemetriosX: Except the Thasian in “Charlie X” says that they “gave” Charlie his power, not that they “taught” it to him. Presumably they telekinetically altered him the same way he telekinetically altered other people and objects. The Antosians’ ability is something they can use only on themselves (or their clothes, apparently), so it shouldn’t be something they can pass on in the same way.
Besides the fact that Spock could have just stunned both Kirk and Garth (before Kirk urged him to do so), Spock was on the right track when he gave the Queen to Queen’s Level 3 sign. When one of the “Kirks” claimed that he wouldn’t answer because it was what the other one wanted to know, Spock could have asked one of them to write the counter-sign. Of course that would have been slow drama and there would have to be writing stuff nearby,
This scene always makes me think of Leonard Nimoy writing in I Am Not Spock in which he shared with the readers his memo to Fred Freiberger (referenced above) in which he described Spock as a “smart-ass”, and described this puzzle as something Spock, with all of his smart-ass knowledge and techniques, couldn’t figure out.
See, this is why I hate the warp factor rating system, and keep emphasizing that it’s the least important part of any rewatch entry. Everyone focuses on that way more than is necessary or required or desired (by me, anyhow).
Mind you, I’m totally guilty of the same thing as a reader. I’ll read a review of something on, say, The A.V. Club, and look at the letter-grade rating and think the reviewer is nuts for only giving a B when it’s clearly an A- at least or giving an A to a C at best or whatever — but then I’ll read the review and see that I agree with the bulk of what the reviewer is saying. *sigh*
Hell, I’ll look back and some of my TNG reviews from five years ago (digression: sweet Christmas, I’ve been doing these rewatches for five years!!!!) and wonder what I was smoking when I came up with that warp factor rating, but also standing by everything I said in the review above it. *another sigh*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@19/krad: I’ve noticed the same thing in all the fuss over the response to movies like Batman v Superman. There was so much made of the fact that the critics’ ratings on aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes were really low percentages and the audience’s ratings were much higher. But I actually read a bunch of the individual reviews, and the professional critics and amateur reviewers generally agreed that it was an often-entertaining movie with some massive conceptual and structural flaws, and generally agreed about what specific aspects worked and what didn’t. They just weighed the good and bad parts differently in giving their numerical ratings, with the critics giving more weight to the flaws in construction (since it is a critic’s job to analyze such things) and the audience giving more weight to raw entertainment value. So the huge difference in ranking was largely illusory.
That’s the problem with trying to reduce a review to a single letter or number. You’re weighing a bunch of different factors and you have to pretend they can be reduced to a single data point, and how you choose to weigh them or average them out to get that single result is pretty arbitrary.
This is one of my favorite 3rd season eps.I love the guest stars in this episode! The casting was perfect! As a dyed in the wool liberal, I have to give props for the casting of Keye Luke purely for his talent, as the roll was completely racially and ethnically neutral, much like Daystrum in “The Ultimate Computer”. Curiously, when I first saw these episodes 40+ years ago, it never occurred to me that this was unusual in any way.
“Remove this animal,” Says Senior Garth! This is one of my all time favorites of any show. Well done and quite funny.
I’ve always loved this episode, particularly in Blish’s version, which was the first version I had contact with, as with most TOS episodes. And I like that the planet where an important military commander (and emperor, a “would be” one in this case) has been exiled to is called Elba, as krad pointed out.
I absolutely adore Yvonne Craig as Marta, but it’s funny how even in small pictures here where she’s seen from afar (like crowning scene) you can see how the make-up on her feet hasn’t been touched up, and her normal skin tone is visible.
Also, of course Garth wears mismatched boots, because HE’S CARAAAAZY!!! And one of his rings is super fly. I mean, a fly.
@2 – bhaughwout: Poor Alfred, the lone servant in that mansion, and the lone crewman in that ship.
@19 – krad: It’s not that people are disagreeing with your ratings because they think the episode is better or worse than what you say. Some people are saying that your ratings are not consistent with what you write above them. Declaring something is complete shit and giving it a 4, instead of a 1 or a 2, for example. Not me, though, I don’t really care about the ratings.
First, props for the Blackadder reference! I used to have that as one of my system sound files on my PC in the mid-90s…
Second:
“BTW, the episode reuses a lot of plot elements from earlier stories. There’s the setting and the torture chair, of course, but there’s also:
Shapeshifting – The Man Trap. Duplicate Kirk – What Are Little Girls Made Of?. Also The Enemy Within and Mirror, Mirror (sort of). Starship captain gone bad – The Omega Glory. “Required reading at the academy” – again, What Are Little Girls Made Of?“
I read this rewatch right after having watched A Taste of Armageddon. So I noticed another similarity, one which almost made me think for a moment that I was reading the rewatch of the episode I had just watched. When not-Kirk calls the Enterprise, Scotty isn’t fooled and figures out that it’s a trick. Same thing in both episodes. Here he’s suspicious because of the call-sign, and in Armageddon he’s suspicious just based on the content and gets the computer to analyze the voice print. In both cases, someone is mimicking Kirk and calls the Enterprise in an attempt to trick them and gain some sort of control, and in both cases, Scotty isn’t duped for a second and smartly keeps control of his ship.
@1&10 CLB: I haven’t done adequate research on the writers’ intentions re Soong’s identity/backstory, but the casting of Spiner didn’t bother me, at least at the time. I interpreted it that Soong made Data and Lore “in his image,” adding a somewhat touching layer.
Thank you for continually adding the fascinating music trivia! On the list of projects I’d love to work on but will never have the time is a book about the music of Trek.
As to this episode, I remember it mainly for “I am LORD Garth!”
@25/Don S.: The problem is that “Datalore” established that nobody knew who created Data. Although “Datalore” contradicted itself somewhat on that point by establishing that Noonien Soong was infamous for trying to make “Asimov’s dream of a positronic brain” come true while other roboticists dismissed it as fantasy — meaning that it shouldn’t have been hard for people to guess that a working positronic android might be Soong’s work. But when it was retconned that Data actually had Soong’s face, that made “Datalore”‘s premise that Data’s builder was previously unknown even more problematical.
There’s already a book on Trek music: The Music of Star Trek by Jeff Bond, published in 1999.
Honestly, they retconned the notion that nobody knew who created Data pretty quickly. Maddox said in “The Measure of a Man” that he started following up on Soong’s work after Data entered the Academy, which was years before TNG.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This one is definitely a personal favorite of mine, likely the last time I will cite any episode of this rewatch as a personal favorite. Wait, let me check…yep this is the last one. It’s a favorite for one reason: the late, great Yvonne Craig. Yvonne Craig is so delightfully sexy and seductive even in Marta being totally batshit crazy. A joy to watch. Story? What story? This one’s just so damn fun to watch, you give up looking for any kind of coherent story and just go along for the ride
Did I mention Yvonne Craig is very sexy here? I knew she was in this episode, but to me she’ll always be Batgirl.
And Garth’s mania is thankfully not so completely over the top and is still entertaining, except where he kills poor Marta. Otherwise an hour of totally binky-bonkers fun.
OK, I’m curious, and my library system doesn’t have Blish’s Star Trek 5, and I’m not going to buy it just for this– How does Spock determine the real Kirk through questions in the original script? Is there anything clever about it? How sorry should we be that we missed that?
And Ellynne @@.-@, I agree that the universal cure for mental illness is more ludicrous even than the chemical explosive that’s the Most Powerful Explosive Ever.
@29/Saavik: Blish’s adaptation came from 1972, late enough that he could’ve seen the final episode, so it’s nearly identical to the aired version. The only difference in that scene aside from a few rephrasings is that both “Kirk”s say “Shoot us both” and the real Kirk says “Shoot to kill. It’s the only way to ensure the safety of the Enterprise.” (At least, I think it’s the real Kirk. It was in the episode, but the book is unclear.) Which is something I’m glad the episode did differently, since it seems kind of bloodthirsty for the real Kirk.
@30/Christopher: In contrast, according to the captions in a TOS sticker album I used to own, Spock stuns Garth when Garth attempts a lethal blow because he knows the real Kirk would never do such a thing.
@29/Saavik: I think the most ludicrous idea is that mental illness has effectively been cured already. “Fifteen incurably insane out of billions” is practically nothing. Perhaps all fifteen have the same particularly tough neurochemical condition, or whatever, and it can be caused by different things. In this case, curing that condition means eliminating mental illness.
Concerning the most powerful explosive ever, does anyone claim that except Cory and Garth? I imagine that Garth found an explosive and believes it to be the most powerful ever because he’s a madman with illusions of grandeur. And Cory believes Garth because he’s intimidated and he doesn’t know much about technology.
@31 JanaJansen–yes, absolutely, when I spoke of the ludicrousness of the idea of the universal cure for mental illness, I was lumping together the ludicrous idea that all mental illness throughout all the sentient species of the Federation has already been cured/prevented with the exception of these recalcitrant few and the ludicrous idea that there could be a single cure that would work on these remaining insane people of different races.
@32/Saavik: The idea of a single cure for different species didn’t bother me so much because most sentient species are implausibly similar in Star Trek anyway – they all look the same, and they can all interbreed, as shown by the existence of Spock and, later, Deanna Troi, K’Ehleyr and others. But yeah, it’s actually quite silly.
@33/Jana: It’s not just that it’s different species, it’s that mental illness is more than one thing. A cure for all mental illnesses is like a cure for all physical diseases — it’s illogical that the same treatment would fix problems arising from many different causes.
Then again, Trek has shown us several different physical panaceas over the decades, like the spores in “This Side of Paradise” and the “Fountain of Youth” radiation in Insurrection. So I guess the idea of a mental-health panacea isn’t any more implausible.
@34/Christopher: I know! But with only fifteen mental patients left, I rationalised that perhaps they all had the same illness. See comment #31.
Hi, Keith… has anyone else reported difficulties reading and posting comments from their smartphones? I have a Samsung Galaxy S6, and a couple days ago I discovered that I suddenly couldn’t see the comments anymore on either this, or any other re-watch thread. Any advice on what to do?
Kevin: I have no idea. That’s not really my department, but I’m sure that someone from Tor.com will come along to answer, though it may not be until their offices reopen on Monday.
FWIW, I haven’t had any problems on my HTC M9……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I was unable to access (not just post) comments for a week, from last Friday until yesterday, on any device, any browser.
@@@@@#37– OK, I’ll just hang loose then, post from my computer, and wait for Tor.com to resolve the difficulty.
I also wanted to say I discovered these re-watches earlier this summer, really enjoy them, and look forward to new ones each week. I see “The Mark Of Gideon” is up next. Sweet– the first of two (in my opinion) historically underrated episodes which really creeped me out when i was a kid, the second being “TLOZ”. They used to run back-to-back in syndication on WPIX Channel 11 when I first watched Trek growing up in New Jersey.
@37 and 38: Just a note to say that we are working on the commenting issue (it seems to be mainly a cache issue), but if you have a chance to email webmaster@tor.com with further details (which platform and browser(s) you’re using, along with anything else that might be relevant), it would be a big help. Thanks!
@36 Kevin, the same problem happened to me. And inexplicably went away for no obvious reason. I think it might have started when I tried to go into a rewatch on my phone. Since then I have avoided the attempt.
@41 — Yes, it was most annoying. I have a routine where I read the re-watches and comments from my phone, while smoking my tobacco pipe upstairs in my newly-remodeled attic/den. Suddenly not having any access from my phone a bit of a bummer. Oh, well it’ll be resolved soon, i hope.
Very little I can add that hasn’t been said. As krad said, the idea that we wouldn’t have seen the sign/countersign gambit before is absurd, and lazy writing. I also didn’t buy the shapeshifting. More lazy writing, IMO.
As Christopher L. Bennett said, some nuance would have helped. Maybe a flashback of Kirk and ‘good’ Garth, or some hints in the script of the good Garth still in there somewhere, much like Lee Meriwether’s hologram in That Which Survives.
And as Jana Jansen said, the episode itself is derivative of others and light on story. The extended Yvonne Craig dance scene is total filler, even though she does it well.
Not a dreadful episode, but nothing to write home about either. I like the small touches, like the mismatched boots, that add some flavor to the episode.
The “security callsign” was another security protocol, like the subdermal implants in “Patterns of Force,” that seems so eminently practical that you wonder why it isn’t used more often; showing up only when plot requires it. I do like the explanation provided by MeredithP @@@@@ 3 for its use here, at least. They were going down to a planet known to house dangerously mentally ill patients. The additional security was a wise precaution in this case. I will admit though, that until he repeated it, clearly expecting an appropriate response, I thought Scotty was just being whimsical with the “Queen to Queen’s Level 3” being some reference to the beam up.
I half expected Spock to use some kind of trick question. Along the lines of “We never fought the Romulans at Beta II” to know which Kirk was real. I did like the “King Solomon” solution as well, but I would have preferred a more clever solution from Spock.
CLB @@@@@ 10 – THE EYES! I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that seemed off on the Tellarite. In fact, for most of the episode, I wasn’t even sure it was supposed to be a Tellarite, it just looked so wrong. (Partly justifying that confusion on my part, as well, is that I was watching on a phone, so the view was pretty small to begin with)
The late Steve Ihnat – who strongly resembled the late Andy Williams – did an excellent job in playing Garth Of Izar. This episode also led to a well written sequel novel in 2002, and was instrumental in the development of an episode that I had written for Star Trek-New Voyages/Phase II concerning Section 31 obtaining the explosive device that Garth created.
Sadly, this episode and Garth will forever be associated with the A;ec Peters/Axanar lawsuit that led to CBS/Paramount justifyingly ending the fan films. A lawsuit that was caused by Peters’ illegal and immoral actions in the matter.
@45/Christopher Dalton: I found the novel rather boring.
A hypospray may reverse the physiological condition that created Garth’s insanity but he’s going to need some serious counseling to come to terms with the things he did while insane.
“His costuming is particularly ingenious, from the cape that is constantly falling off, to the medal that flies off his chest as he’s throwing the temper tantrum”
I don’t think it’s a medal – I think it’s the large ring that can be seen on his right index finger most of the time, though not in that scene.
Shapeshifting abilities clearly include memory-editing powers to make people forget that it’s possible, because they are taken by surprise EVERY TIME, and express shock at the possibility.
It struck me while watching the first season of STAR TREK: DISCOVERY that Commander Saru’s list of Great Comparisons against whom to compare himself raises some interesting questions about Garth of Izar’s precise status in the DISCO era – given the description given of him in ‘Whom Gods Destroy’ one might have expected to see his name on the ‘Choose Your Pain’ shortlist of All-Time Greats.
While out-of-universe this was probably an omission born of the fact that Garth is a relatively obscure one-episode character, from an in-universe perspective it’s quite possible that Captain Garth only achieved his Greatest fame during Burnham’s War (although it is quite possible that he was already a personal hero to Cadet Kirk even before the conflict); it is interesting to wonder if the Battle of Axanar occurred during the nine month absence of USS Discovery, since in these circumstances that victory may have played a key role in holding the Federation together while Our Heroes were being kept busy in the Mirror Universe (Given that Kirk mentions the role Axanar played in allowing him & Spock to work together as brothers, it is far from impossible that the Battle played a key role in preventing the Federation from splintering under the blows of the Great Houses – quite possibly by allowing Starfleet a rallying point that kept them a ‘Fleet in Being’).
While he would be far from the only Hero of this particular conflict (and his victory wasn’t enough to spare the Federation death by a thousand cuts), Captain Garth’s victory may well have allowed the Federation to keep the faith long enough for Discovery to make its ‘Hail Mary’ play (I’m actually surprised the DISCOVERY tie-in novels don’t seem to have used the character to show how the Federation fared in NCC-1031’s absence).
This version of events is purely speculative, but it would add to the pathos that ought to attach itself to Garth of Izar – an officer who achieved status as one of the all time Greats just in time to suffer the horrific injuries (and associated Trauma) that almost certainly bought his career to an end.
@50/ED: Kirk said that Garth’s adventures were “still” required reading at the Academy, implying that they already were when he was a cadet.The Axanar Peace Mission was also when Kirk was “a new-fledged cadet,” so it must also have been pre-DSC (since Kirk would’ve been a lieutenant on the Farragut at the time of DSC season 1). So Garth’s fame should have already been achieved, and the absence of his name from Saru’s list was an unfortunate production oversight.
@51/ChristopherLBennett: Am I the only one who finds it slightly hilarious that James T. Kirk was only a year ahead of Ensign Tilly at the Academy? I would love, Love, LOVE to imagine that the ‘Bookstack with Legs’ was something of a bogeyman for the young Sylvia, just because he was so d— intense about things (I can’t decide if it would be more amusing were James T. to be more “Oh God, it’s Tilly, nod and smile until you can get a word in edgeways” or if he should go down in History as one of those rare students who had their nose so deep in the textbooks as to be barely aware of her existence).
Ahem, please pardon that digression; anyway, going by the 2250-2254 academy career of Cadet Kirk, this does suggest that Garth was already in the ascendant prior to ‘Burnham’s War’ (a somewhat unkind name, I know, but given her role in starting AND finishing it not necessarily inaccurate) – in all honesty I’d still be willing to finesse the canon to suggest that while he was already famous enough to be required reading, he had not yet acquired ‘All Time Great’ fame (as opposed to ‘Fifteen Minutes’ fame) prior to 2256.
This is, admittedly, splitting hairs to cover a pardonable omission – after all, Captain Garth not only does not appear in DISCOVERY (or at least has not done so YET), he isn’t even the man who gave us the Constitution-class! (-;
Actually, all this just makes me curious about how we could fit Captain Garth and the Battle of Axanar into post-DISCO canon (I wonder if, in hindsight, the Battle is seen as a warm-up for the Federation-Klingon War? A humiliation that made T’Kuvma outright desperate for an Anti-Federation Crusade to reunify the Empire); in all honesty, while we could definitely debate his precise level of fame c.2256, it still seems reasonable to suspect that he would have been one of the pillars of Starfleet’s war effort 2256-2257 (and a useful PoV of the ‘Black Months’ between the disappearance & reappearance of NCC-1031).
By the way, thank you for taking the time to reply to my post! (-:
Naming a prison for the criminally insane “Elba II” does not make much sense. After all, Napoleon’s enemies exiled Napoleon to the island of Elba after his defeat in the War of 1812. A few years later, Napoleon escaped and immediately began warring against his enemies. Napoleon had his “Waterloo”, and the British exiled him to St. Helena, a remote island in the south Atlantic. Where he spent the rest of his life. St. Helena II would have been a far more appropriate name for the prison planet. Also, Napoleon was not criminally insane by 19th, 20th or 21st Century standards. Now, Lord Garth is a different story altogether.
Paladin: Elba II was the name of the planet, which just means it’s the second planet in the Elba system. Of course, out of the box, the name was chosen for the very symbolism you describe…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@53/Paladin: If anything, I’d say Elba is a better analogy than St. Helena for exactly that reason. The Federation is supposed to have an enlightened approach to penology, which means that the hoped-for outcome is rehabilitation and release, not permanent imprisonment until death. So it’s more fitting to name it after a reversible exile than a permanent one.
@55/CLB: Yes, I forgot the planet naming convention. Another point: if my memory serves me right, the British and their allies made Napoleon sovereign over Elba during his exile there. So, I guess there is some parallel between Garth on Elba II and Napoleon on Elba. But, there are clear differences. Garth made himself the sovereign (temporary) of Elba II and was deposed before he could escape exile and make war again. Whereas, Napoleon was made sovereign and escaped exile to make war again.
Also, it occurs to me that “Elba II” might not mean “the second planet of the Elba system” in this case, but might mean the second Elba, with Napoleon’s exile site being the first.
I guess opinions differ. This was probably one of the funniest episodes of TOS. Steve Ihnat was overly brilliant and over the top as Garth. The insanity of it all showed just how funny it was. Having a conniption fit when he was presented with the chess question. Almost choking Marta when she is reciting Shakespeare. This episode was meant to show insanity. It succeeded through great performance.
I forgot to write anything after seeing “Whom Gods Destroy” so I’m getting to it late.
Ableist as hell, but since media to this day is still bad about ableism it’s hard for me to fault it much. It’s pretty fun otherwise, probably the most fun I’ve had with TOS in some time.
@26 – A little research reveals that Jeff Bond’s The Music of Star Trek book was published in 1999 (!) and is very, very long out of print. It would be wonderful to have an updated edition.
@60/clayinca: I literally said in comment 26 that the book was published in 1999, so I’m not sure what additional research was required. But yes, an update would be nice.
“Marta hits all over Kirk from jump, possibly in an attempt to make Garth jealous, but probably mostly because she’s nuts.”
Nuts? Ouch. You realise the character is institutionalised for mental illness, yes? An actual patient—one who is going dangerously untreated throughout the episode? And who eventually dies at the hand of a violent fellow patient? If you ever have any loved ones requiring full time residential care, I hope you will be a little more generous, and sympathetic.
I commented about “And The Children Shall Lead” that it was the least-interesting episode of Star Trek ever made. This one is a close second. Instead of being “evil,” as was the case with Gorgan, the villains here are “mad.” Okay.
However, unlike the aforementioned episode, this one doesn’t even pretend to take itself seriously, so it’s far more watchable. The banter between Garth and Marta was the highlight of the episode.