Star Trek: "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"/"The Mark Of Gideon"

I've talked about how much I love Trek's commitment to Big Ideas, but you'll get no argument from me that sometimes, that commitment has a downside. Trek can be inspirational in its vision of a brighter, more open-minded future, but when it decides to put its Special Message Hat on, it can be preachy, tedious, and hilariously unsubtle. (Hence the classic AV Club Inventory, Space Racism Is Bad) Both episodes this week have points to make, and both put the Enterprise and its crew in the position of moral superiority, but "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" is the clear winner in the stridency sweepstakes. There's cool alien make-up, Frank "The Riddler" Gorshin, and a really good ending. All the rest is speeches; a seemingly endless series of on-the-nose rants that leave you exhausted just listening to them.

The Enterprise is on its way to save some lives (and seriously, are they even pretending to have a mission anymore? The ship is basically just Starfleet's go-to for whatever damn thing happens to come up. Of the five years Kirk and crew are supposed to be exploring, I'm betting they spend maybe four of those delivering space newspapers) when it encounters a damaged shuttlecraft floating in space. Kirk has the single inhabitant beamed aboard, a wounded alien with a startling skin color: one half of him is black, the other half is white. McCoy heals him up, Spock discusses the unlikeliness of bi-chromal skin, and when the alien finally wakes, he turns to be an a arrogant twerp. He says he's from Cheron (aka, "the southern most part of the galaxy," hint hint), his "need" made it perfectly fine to steal a ship, and anyone who questions him is just a big ole meanie.

None of this really explains anything, and the situation doesn't come any clearer until a second alien arrives on the Enterprise, destroying his (invisible) ship while beaming himself onto the bridge. Bele (Frank Gorshin) is also from Cheron, and he's been chasing Lokai, the first alien, for 50,000 years (?!?), to bring him to task for some horrible crime which, unless I zoned out during all the speechifying, never gets explained. It takes a little while, but eventually the metaphor becomes clear: Bele and Lokai hate each other because their black/white coloring is mirror opposites, which is hating someone because of the color of their skin, which is racism. Bele represents the Establishment, aka The Man, and Lokai is the insurgent, willing to commit any act of violence in order to earn the freedom he doesn't even really understand anymore.

There's nothing inherently wrong with using metaphorical science fiction to get your point across, but the metaphors have to be more than just a quick coating of paint. Bele and Lokai never have personalities, despite all the over-acting, and for the most part, Kirk and the rest hang out on the sidelines, trying to dispense wisdom that never gets heard. It was interesting hearing how Starfleet and the Federation deal with alien races outside their organization: Kirk is respectful, but given Lokai's crime (the shuttlecraft theft), refuses to just hand him over to Bele without due processing at a Starfleet base. We've seen the system's bureaucracy at work before, but while it's mostly used as a delaying device here—if Kirk just gave the distinctly unpleasant Lokai to Bele at the start, we wouldn't have much of an episode—it's neat to contrast the oddness of meeting a new race with the menial requirements of diplomacy and government. Whatever the source of the Cherons' enmity, there's still paperwork that needs to be filled out.

No delaying tactic would be perfect without a counter, though, so Bele ends up taking over the ship and trying to force his way back to his home planet. There's a great sequence when Kirk, after exhausting all other options, tells Bele he'd rather blow up the Enterprise then let it continue to operate out of his control. Bele thinks this is a bluff, so Kirk initiates the self-destruct. (Is this the first time we've heard the self-destruct code? They used roughly the same system in Search For Spock, and I've always dug how straightforward it is.) Bele, realizing that Kirk is just crazy enough to kill 430 people on a matter of principle, backs down. I can't decide if Kirk's behavior here was reckless, or hardcore, or both. But whatever it says about his morality, it makes for a tense, exciting scene.

Although it would've been more effective if the director hadn't insisted on a series of pointlessly tight close-ups. "Battlefield" is full of over-the-top visual touches—I especially liked (ie, snickered at) the way the camera would shake every time someone called a Red Alert. You know it's serious when the camera-man has a seizure! Then there's the ridiculous climax: after a lot of negotiation and power-plays, Bele finally gets the Enterprise back to Cheron, only to find every last sapient life-form on the planet dead. (I'm not sure I'd trust the sensors on the ship to make that kind of absolute judgment, but I'll let it pass.) The cities are in ruins, and there are unburied corpses everywhere, because, see, that's the racism end-game: everybody dies. (Honestly, that's the everything end-game.) In response to learning that all they've ever known has been destroyed, Bele and Lokai chase each other around the ship for a while, before beaming themselves down to the planet, presumably to continue their chase until they die of exhaustion, or whatever diseases you get from running around a world full of rotting dead people.

Conceptually, that's not bad. Neither Bele or Lokai are likable enough for me to pity them much, but the idea of them stranding themselves in the graveyard of their civilization is striking enough that you can overlook the symbolic heavy-handedness of it. Too bad this ending is undercut by the hilariously goofy shoots of Bele and Lokai prancing through the corridors of the Enterprise like idiots, with footage of burning buildings super-imposed over the screen to remind us of their grief. It's terribly silly, and that, really, is why "Battlefield" doesn't work: not for that one scene, but for the episode's unwinking insistence on its righteousness. The alien make-up is a cool visual, there are some good moments, but the message here is so overpowering that it's hard to remember anything else.

So at least "The Mark Of Gideon" lets the mystery last a bit longer, anyway. This time, instead of fighting off a deadly bacterial invasion, the Enterprise is running peace talks with the notoriously stand-offish Gideon, and for once it isn't a matter of the Enterprise being Starfleet's dogsbody. The Gideons specifically requested Kirk, and asked that he beam down to the planet for negotiations. Which is totally not suspicious at all, and it's just a tremendous shock when Kirk, after beaming, finds himself in a seemingly empty Enterprise, still orbiting Gideon.