3x06 Spectre of the Gun

[8.0/10] We’ve played this game before. (I’m beginning to sound like a broken record talking about how Star Trek is beginning to sound like a broken record.) It’s hard not to think of “Arena” in this one, with the crew being transported against their will into a hostile situation, improvising weapons using the local materials, and being rewarded by their uber-powerful instigators when they show restraint instead of viciousness. This is pretty standard stuff for Trek at this point.

And yet, “Spectre of the Gun” gets by on atmosphere, performance, and the cleverness of its conclusion. I’ll admit, there’s something that still strikes me as cheesy every time our spacemen from the future end up visiting some familiar earthlike civilization (“this week it’s gangsters, then Nazis, then Romans, hooray!”) but there’s an eeriness to transporting Kirk and company to Tombstone, Arizona.

A big part of that comes from the production design. There’s a part of me that assumes the half-pieced together set is a result of budgetary concerns than any real choice to create an eerie, half-formed sense to the surroundings, but either way it works. The episode offers the fig leaf that the Melkotians, despite their psychic abilities, don’t have a great grasp on Earth’s history and that this is the best they can come up with. The result is a boom town that doesn’t feel all there, in a nicely unnerving way.

That lends to a foreboding atmosphere that permeates the episode. Random storefronts flanked by a red sky, shop facades that lead nowhere, clocks floating in the sky without the right flora or fauna help establish the dream-like confines in which our heroes find themselves. Something immediately feels wrong about this place, and it’s a great example of the show using its visual tools to build to the plot’s conclusion.

To the same end, the episode has some really nice shots in it, like the symmetrical framing of Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Scotty tending to Chekov while boxed in by the silhouettes of the Earps. And it’s a neat trick to show the crew’s mind over matter bona fides by shooting them from the back and watching the wooden fence become riddled with bullet holes while they remain unscathed. There’s some cleverness in this script, but despite it’s rehashes, it’s the aesthetics of this one that really rule the day.

Still, the episode also works because of the guest performers and the tone. What’s separates this episode from the prior visits to other civilizations out of time is that “Spectre” mostly plays the Western angle straight. While the gangster planet was explicitly comedic, the Roman planet was over the top, and the Nazi planet was cartoonish and weird, “Spectre” treats things as though the crew of the Enterprise have stumbled their way into a Sergio Leone film.

At times that gets a little corny. The Earps and Doc Holiday announcing themselves rings a bit too much with “here’s a name you might remember” syndrome. But what I like is that the guest actors who play the black hats in this one carry themselves with purpose and, more to the point, menace. There’s an understatedness to them most of the time, something that makes them feel like genuine bad guys from a Western movies, which creates a contrast when they’re juxtaposed with our colorful space-farers. “Spectre” creates antagonists (and allies for that matter) who feel like a real part of their world, not just adjuncts to that of Kirk and company, that makes their bits of intimidation land and create a genuine sense of impending, unavoidable doom.

It’s the way our heroes manage to avoid that doom that really bumps “Spectre” up a notch. What’s great about the episode is that it shows Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, and Chekov using their familiar tricks to try to avoid getting into a shootout at the OK corral, and finding that nothing works. As much as “Spectre” returns to a certain amount of formula, it also has the wherewithal to play out that formula and show Kirk being stymied and ineffectual nonetheless.

Kirk tries diplomacy, and is warned that he’ll be shot on sight if he tries it again. They try running away, but find that leaving Tombstone is impossible, thanks to a Malkotian forcefield. They try improvising a tranquilizer, the sort of MacGyver-esque solution to these problems the show often employs, but it ends up having no effect. They even try just staying put, in the hopes of avoiding the confrontation altogether, but get whisked to the site of the gunfight regardless.

There’s a futile fatalism to this one, a sense in which Kirk can’t just fight or trick his way out of it. There’s no third option, no clever workaround, just a looming confrontation and a literal ticking clock that promises danger and death.

That’s when Spock comes up with a Matrix-esque solution, realizing that the trick to surviving this little pocket world is to understand that it doesn’t truly exist. His clue is that the laws of science don’t work, and thus decides that if they simply focus themselves on the fact that this Tombstone is a fantasy, a construction, they will not be subject to its dangers. It’s a clever way out of the problem. Sure, the necessity of a mind meld feels a little forced, but helps build tension leading up to those final moments.

There’s issues at the margins of this one. The color in the episode is a mixed bag, with Chekov’s dalliance with a local coming off alternatively cute and weird, Scotty’s appreciation for bourbon being entertaining but stereotypical, and the rest of the Western cast going a bit over the top. In addition, “Spectre” drags in places and, as usual, Shatner has a tendency to overact his moral dilemma in not killing these imaginary cowboys that oppose him.

Still, “Spectre” works because even if some of the beats are familiar, and the destination is something of a repeat, to the solution to the problem isn’t, and the atmosphere and mood of the episode is superb. This late in the show’s run, it’s nice that it can still surprise the audience with a tense, unnerving, even nightmarish scenario for our heroes that runs on different logic and a different aesthetic, that allows the show to feel like something different this week.

Spectre of the Gun: A title suitable for every Bond movie ever made ....

It's an objectively bad story. Plus, we had this scenario before. The crew is once again abducted and are forced to fight to save their life. We had that Roman (sort of) arena before - now it's a 1880s frontier town populated by dangerous gunslingers. Doc Holiday and co. It's as silly as it sounds. At least it makes sense that there's a historic US town replicated in the depth of space, since it's all an illusion to begin with.

I love a good Western though. Is it a good Western then? Certainly not! It looks as cheap (and too clean) as most US Westerns from that era do and it's overall very silly. Stage design is .... let's not talk about this. Inexplicably I like this episode though. It's like the one TNG episode in that Las Vegas casino from the Eagles song. That was silly too but to my own disbelief that was very entertaining too. This episode also seems to work better when you approach it as a comedy. That was proably not how writers envisioned this. They probably wanted to focus on the final twist and how a morale decision can be the right decision. I pretty much enjoyed Chekov dealing with that woman. I liked the good Doctor plunder Doc Holiday's dentist's office. I liked to watch Scottie in his natural habitat: a saloon serving a good whiskey. I usually hate it when the Captain resorts to his trusted fists and wrestling skills, but I somehow like him in the final scene: it's as entertaining as Bud Spencer landing some random jabs.

I know it's wrong to rank this 6/10 but let's call it my guilty pleasure.