[6.8/10] Star Trek has always been political, but there’s a strange trend in the show’s third season where the message of a given outing seems to be a little more worn on the sleeve, and it becomes harder to evaluate the story an episode is telling independently of the point it’s trying to make.
Case-in-point, “The Mark of Gideon” works reasonably well as pure text. It does the divide and conquer routine the show has taken to now and again, with Kirk shanghai’d by mysterious forces on a duplicate of the Enterprise (bet that saved some money on sets) after intending to beam down to meet with Gideons, while Spock leads an effort to negoitate with the Gideon leadership and try to figure out what happened to their disappeared captain.
But it also seems very directed toward issues of overpopulation and the pro-life perspective. When it’s revealed that the trickery with the transporter is the work of the Gideons, who wanted to extract a rare disease from Kirk in order to allow Gideons to euthanize themselves to end the planet’s overpopulation, the show goes into a long bit of digression and exposition. The Gideon leader talks about how volunatry sterilization or contraception are out of the question for the Gideons because they believe that every life is sacred, from the tinest fetus to the oldest elderly person. So they insist that Kirk stay with them, so that they can continue to use his blood to help people euthanize themselves and ease the overpopulation problems.
Now, on a thematic level, this all works well enough as a kind of out there thought experiment, presumably meant to show that being rawly pro-life would result in massive overpopulation problems. This is where your humble reviewer having not been born until a couple of decades after Star Trek creates problems. It’s hard for me to say how much an audience watching “Gideon” five years before Roe v. Wade was decided would react or understand this premise, or how they would take this point.
In 2017, where abortion and contraception and issues of bodily autonomy vs. the sacredness of life have been major political issues for nearly fifty years, it feels like a pretty direct statement from Star Trek arguing that these are the pitfalls and probable results of a strong pro-life perspective. Maybe I’m just reading the Gideon’s imploring Kirk to stay and donate his blood to this cause in the shadow of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous violinist thought experiment. But while it’s not particularly nuanced or complex, the thrust of “Gideon” seems loud and clear to a modern viewer like yours truly.
The problem (regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the point) is that it doesn’t make much sense in terms of the plot or the show as a whole. It seems odd that the Gideons think life is so sacred and yet are actively implementing a plan for (admittedly voluntary) euthanasia. The fact that the Gideons have a planetary shield that prevents our heroes from scanning for Kirk fits with their closed community lifestyle, but feels pretty convenient to the plot. And most strangely, not once do the Gideons ask or does Kirk suggest that the Federation could help the Gideons colonize, and ease their overpopulation problem that way, which seems like the obvious solution which the Captain and Starfleet have offered to other foreign cultures several times before.
That makes it seem like the plot is serving the message of “Gideon,” rather than the two complementing one another, which makes for a bumpier ride in even taking the episode’s point at face value. It doesn’t help that “Gideon” founds much of the emotional stakes in the episode on the idea that Kirk and Odana (the daughter of the Gideon leader) have quickly fallen in love after being trapped on the duplicate Enterprise constructed so that Kirk would infect Odana (who was, at least nominally, a willing participant in the scheme).
The Gideons were apparently banking on the idea that Kirk would love Odana so much so instantly that he’d agree to stay on their planet forever. Frankly, it’s not a bad idea, given that Kirk seems to fall in love at the drop of the hat. But the other side of the coin is that, whether it’s just Kirk love interest fatigue, the romance between the captain and Odana never really clicks. It’s immediately clear that she’s up to something when the pair first meet (which Kirk himself seems to recognize) and their connection never feels terribly solid despite that. So when Odana begs Kirk to stay on her behalf or there are these tender moments between them that are supposed to give Kirk real pause when deciding what to do, the best I could muster was a “huh?”
Still, the episode has its merits. Before the episode digs deep into the messaging portion of the installment, there’s a nice bit of divided storytelling. Kirk finding himself on an odd, empty doppelganger of his beloved ship has a nicely disquieting, Twilight Zone quality to it as a premise. He and Odana attempting to evaluate their situation and figure out what they should do has intrigue. On the other side, it’s always nice to see Spock in command. His dealings with the bureaucratically stonewalling Gideons show a certain fun cleverness and even wiliness in Spock’s diplomacy, and he even gets a compliment from Dr. McCoy for his willingness to buck Starfleet’s commands to go search for the captain.
There’s also some interesting visual and directorial choices. Jud Taylor, who added some interesting cinematographic flourishes in last week’s episode, returns here with some more aesthetic acuity. The images of the bluegreen-hooded faces staring at our heroes through portholes and shuffling around in circles to symbolize the overpopulation problem is nicely freaky. Again, it’s a little cartoonish, but it adds a certain chill. It serves as a memorable image that not only creates a sense of the Gideons’ Enterprise mock up having a haunted house quality, but also works better as an illustration of the overpopulation problems than a mere abstract discussion would.
That’s the problem with “Gideon” though -- too often it feels like an abstract discussion. There’s an interesting story told about one commander stranded in an alien mousetrap, and another trying the diplomatic and slightly more rough-and-tumble approaches to find him, and an interesting thought experiment raising issues of the sanctity of life and autonomy, but the two don’t fit together very neatly. Whether or not the viewer agrees with the message a television show is sending, that message should dovetail with the plot that unspools in an episode, both because it helps the story being told feel worthwhile independent of its rhetorical thrust, and because it makes the point itself more potent. “Gideon” is still solid and generally entertaining, but it never really figures out how to link up the thematic and story-based parts of the episode into one unified whole.
It seems that the Federation may be as bad as the Jedi Council at times.
I'm surprised at how many aspects of this show are recycled (both plot lines and the Enterprise set in this case). I know it's an old show and budgets were different back then but I didn't know just how low the standards were even for a now "classic" piece of media. So much of this show feels like it existed way before its vision could even partially be realized.
How often can one man be captured or abducted in space?
Again, it's another experiment on him. The other "lab rat" is one of the hottest space babes in this show (Sharon Acker). Of course Kirk does the right thing: try to get her laid. He's a natural. Creepy faces watch him kiss her. That's a very scary idea - if you're not a webcam girl. Turns out the aliens manufactured an exact replica of the Enterprise (how exactly? Did they scan the ship months in advance?) Don't really understand why that replica was necessary in the first place but it saves the money for a new stage. They need Kirk - well let's say it as crude as it is- to harvest his sperm or imperfect DNA or his viruses or something. Don't really understand the idea here. Trakt was down for one week in December 2022 and after it was up again, I already forgot the details when I wrote this review. Through one window you can see the reason why: the planet is overpopulated. People constantly bump into each other. In funny costumes. Their lifespan has increased so that the mortality rate went down. That's perhaps the philosophical core of this story: what happens in a society and to its world when a civilization is too successful and consumes all resources? May euthanasia be an option? Or birth control? But this third season ain't the Club of Rome, so that's not really fervently discussed. Only memorable thing Kirk is able to recommend: take contraceptive pills. Basically. If I get this right. Sometimes the late sixties felt modern. Not sure if this topic reminiscent to the pro life vs. abortion rights discussion still has a place in today's TV. Spock - after some entertaining diplomatic struggles [you're not helping Scotty!)] - does what he always does: beams down, analyzes the situation, doesn't get distracted by girls, saves the Captain.
Mediocre episode.
Another episode that could have been great, but instead more fluff degrades the story.
Interesting message unfortunately executed exceedingly clumsily in a plot where the Gideon's actions don't really make sense. Could have been told much better, and they basically gave it a happy-go-lucky non-ending that made it confusing as to what was actually happening. It didn't help that this was obviously a budget-saving episode. This show is capable of much better, even when it's still awkward and badly written. Still, props for actually taking on such a primevally taboo subject. I honestly don't think any modern Trek, post-TOS would have the spine to look the problem in the face for what it is, despite the fact that we've been facing the crux of the problem for half a century.
Review by FinFanBlockedParentSpoilers2022-06-29T15:03:41Z
A civilization, which planet is bursting at the seams from overpopulation, has abducted Kirk to harvest a rare disease from him. So that they can introduce it to their own population in order to solve their population problem.
OK, that's a good start. But really nothing else makes sense. Where did they get the plans for the Enterprise from ? And for that matter, why even build it in the first place ? They could beam Kirk down to the council chamber, take him prisoner and lock him up. They seem contempt to hold him there for the rest of his life - even if that wouldn't have been nessessary as we learn later. And in another variation of "Kirk and the Women" it's all centered around a beautiful young girl longing for Kirk to fall in love with her. Why ? She thought she was going to die anyway.
The fact that she was willing to sacrifice herself, or the father his daughter, shows their desperation. That's one of the strong points. And the diplomatic dialogue between Spock and Hodin was, unwillingy (?) funny.
But at the end the romance seems to be more important then finding another solution to Gideon's problem.