1x14 Balance of Terror

Most of the time, my status as having seen most of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager, etc., but having seen little of the original series works well for me going back and watching the first Star Trek show. It means I know enough about the concept of the show – the wagon train to the stars, alien-of-the-week premise – and details of the franchise’s universe to where I don’t have to get up to speed on the whole kit-and-kaboodle, but that there’s still blank spaces to fill in. It means that I already know who Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the crew are, but that I don’t know their individual stories. It means the show is a mix of the familiar and the new in a way that works to its benefit much of the time.

But “Balance of Terror” is one of those episodes where knowing the details of the Star Trek world works against an individual installment of the series. With the build of Earth and the Romulans having worked out a treaty, but never actually seen one another, the reveal of what they look like, the fact that they resemble Spock, and the details of their ship and society, it’s all meant to be something of a mystery and a grand unveiling. But if you already know the Romulans, who have been antagonists in early episodes of TNG up through the 2009 reboot film, there’s not much intrigue here.

Sure, there’s some novelty to seeing (what I can only imagine) is their early conception and appearance, which, with some variations here and there, is surprisingly consistent with their later counterparts, especially relative to a species like the Klingons. But for the most part, there’s nothing particularly thrilling about seeing the Romulans in action for a longtime Trek fan, and that hurts an episode like “Balance of Terror.”

But for whatever it’s worth, the episode epitomizes what I thought of as TOS’s M.O. before actually sitting down to watch it. Its premise is a not very subtle cold war allegory; it has an Important Lesson™ about prejudice, and it features Kirk as the risk-taking commander in battle. Throw in a few green women and a transporter malfunction, and you basically have my prior conception of what the show was on a week-to-week basis.

And frankly, that’s why this one bored me. There was something mildly interesting about Kirk and the Romulan Commander playing a game of chess among the stars, with each trying to guess the other’s move, attempting some new maneuver, and gradually developing a respect for this unknown enemy who could go toe-to-toe with their plots and plans. But for the most part, there was a lot of the Worthy Adversary™, "We're not so different, you and I" type of stuff that, whatever its status in 1967, has become a notable cliché in 2017.

That's the sort of problem that's inevitably going to befall a series made sixty years ago. During the Cold War, I'm sure there was a potency to the idea that the hated enemies, the ones whom we'd set up a treaty with a generation ago and had little contact with since, were distinct in their practices and threatening at times, but also smart, caring, and very much like us. In the modern day, however, that point has been hit so many times that it doesn't have much power unless you come at it differently.

What does have power, and what briefly elevates this one a bit from the back-and-forth strategic doldrums, is that the episode goes into what too many blockbuster films these days are missing – the calm before the storm. While there’s merit in trying to take an all killer no filler approach to movies and episodes with action, taking a beat here and there to show the characters reacting to their surroundings helps give color to the (in this case repeating stock footage) of explosions. Moments like Captain Kirk and Yeoman Rand huddling close when an energy blast, the same kind that destroyed an outpost, is headed toward them, makes that moment feel more real and more important than the blast alone ever could. (As an aside, I learned recently that the actress who plays Rand left the show and/or was fired after she was sexually assaulted by an executive at the network, which adds a tinge of sadness every time she appears.) Details like both ships being offline and having to bide their time, giving us an opportunity to see Kirk and the Romulan Commander mulling over their options before the next big conflict arises, add character to the phaser blasts and energy weapons.

The episode also tries to show the human costs of these conflicts with the only casualty being the man who was getting married that day. While I appreciate the idea, the ceremony being interrupted by the attack and the young bride declaring something along the lines of “you won’t get away from me that easily” telegraphed pretty hard that one or both of them wasn’t going to make it down the aisle. Still, there’s a modicum of power in Kirk’s comforting her and walking down the hallway with his 10,000 yard stare, presumably contemplating what’s been lost in this conflict.

And however cheesy the execution is, I at least like the idea of the not-so-subtle xenophobia subplot at play. It’s not hard to connect the crewman’s prejudice against Spock to Roddenberry & Co. making a statement about the way people of Eastern European descent were treated in the United States during the Cold War. The fact that Spock, despite his ill-treatment at the hands of the crewman, saves the day and his compatriot is a nice, if predictable touch. Again, it’s hard not to be inured to such things when that same message has been hammered home in a myriad of different works in the decades since Star Trek, and the episode lays it on pretty thick, but it’s something worth appreciating at a time when the country wasn’t far removed from McCarthyism.

But that’s really the best you can say for “Balance of Terror.” Iconic lines like “In a different reality, I could have called you friend," don’t land with the same force in 2017 as they did fifty years earlier. You can try to appreciate these things for what they would have meant at the time, but appropriately enough, they’re still at a remove from us, hard to fully understand and appreciate in the same way someone watching live would have. For episodes like this one, so tied to the culture as it stood when “Balance of Terror” aired, modern viewers are as far from the context of the episode as the humans and Romulans in the episode, able to bridge some gaps, but still very much at a distance.