Star Trek -- Season 1 Episode 7 (What Are Little Girls Made Of?)

It’s a bog universe.  There seems to be a lot of planets that were once inhabited.  Exo-III is one such planet and it’s being studied by Dr. Roger Corby.  Or, at least it was.  He hasn’t been heard from in a while and landing parties have been at a loss to locate him.  He’s also engaged to be married to Nurse Chapel, who signed on to the Enterprise in hopes of finding him.  When the Enterprise approaches Exo-II at the start of the episode, Korby does respond.

Korby insists that Kirk beams down alone.  When Chapel identifies herself, Korby allows her to beam down, as well.  Kirk and Chapel do beam down, but with two security officers.  (This begins the trend of security officers who won’t see the end of the episode.)  Kirby has made an incredible discovery.  He can duplicate a person and transfer their memories and consciousness into the newly formed android.  This would allow everyone to become immortal.

Kirk doesn’t seem to like the plan and tries to stop Korby, who duplicates Kirk and sends the android back to the ship.  Korby reveals his plan to infiltrate some colony, preferably one of Kirk’s next few stops, and test out the procedure there.  He can do it incognito and see how it goes.  Fortunately, Kirk is able to thwart Korby.

This is one of those episodes that raises questions rather than attempting to answer them directly.  My first question would be why Chapel signed on to the Enterprise thinking that she’d be the one to find Korby.  At best, it would give her an inside track if someone did find here.  There’s on reason to believe she’d be on the ship to locate him, assuming he’d be located at all.

The big question, though, is what it means to be human.  Assuming the transfer were successful, is it still the same person?  How much does the duplicate Kirk resemble the actual Kirk?  Korby also mentions that undesirable traits, like fear and jealousy, could be edited out, meaning that the androids would be less like an actual human.  (It’s not mentioned if the offer of immortality would be extended to other races.)

There’s also the problem of humans not being able to reproduce again.  The androids aren’t immune to everything.  (Phaser fire seems to be a notable weakness.)  There might come a point, even with the androids, where humans would no longer exist.  Consider that a civilization died off, despite having this technology.

It’s hard to think of Korby as being a villain, but he is.  He seems to genuinely want to help humanity.  It would remove the threat of disease.  It’s more his desire to do it outside of official channels that makes him the antagonist.  He could submit his findings to Starfleet Medical or some other agency for further study.  Instead, he wants to do experiments covertly.

I would call this one of the better episodes, despite the familiar elements.  We have someone studying a long-dead planet.  Kirk is duplicated.  The use of androids is new, but would be no stranger to the franchise.  It uses familiar elements to tell a new story.  It does leave you wondering about certain things.

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Star Trek -- Season 1 Episode 3 (Where No Man Has Gone Before)

The first season of Star Trek can be a little confusing.  There was a pilot episode that was made, but not used by the network.  It didn’t air until the 1980s, but was incorporated into a two--art episode.  A second pilot was made, but NBC decided to air two other episodes before it.  The episode that first aired was actually the sixth produced.  So, here we are, the third episode to air and it’s actually the second pilot episode.

Captain James T. Kirk (or James R. Kirk, if you prefer) is in command of the Enterprise.  They’ve found a flight recorder for a long-lost ship, the SS Valiant.  Parts are missing, but there are references to a magnetic storm and ESP.  Kirk attempts to take the ship across the galactic barrier to find out what happened, but much of the equipment is knocked out, as are Lt. Cmdr. Gary Mitchell and Dr. Elizabeth Dehner.

Dehner seems no worse for the wear, but Mitchell now has glowing silver eyes.   What’s alarming is that he’s beginning to develop powers like telekinesis and mind reading.  Spock points out that the most logical thing to do is to kill Mitchell while they still can.  Kirk decides to abandon Mitchell on a planet called Delta Vega.   Delta Vega has an automated mining facility for an ore they need, so they’ll have to stop there anyway.

Unfortunately, Dehner begins to change, too.  Kirk realizes that he has to kill Mitchell; it’s too dangerous to leave both of them on the planet where they might have children with superpowers.  (This leads to a fight scene where Mitchell creates a tombstone for one James R. Kirk, hence my earlier comment.)  Both Mitchell and Dehner die, removing any threat of god-like humans ruling the galaxy.

From what I understand, the order in which the episodes aired had to do with NBC preferring episodes with action.  Thus, episodes with good fight scenes got aired first.  The fact that we got two episodes with extremely powerful humans was probably secondary.  (For the sake of simplicity, I’ll be reviewing episodes based on the order in which they aired, as that seems to be the order both Netflix and IMDb have them in.)

The whole aspect of ESP seemed a little odd to me.  Both Dehner and Mitchell have high ratings, but that admittedly doesn’t count for much.  It doesn’t seem that humans have much ESP power compared to other races.  Vulcans would be revealed to be touch telepaths.  The Next Generation would introduce Betazoids and other telepathic species.  Despite all the hype, unaltered humans don’t seem to be capable of that much.

I’d ask why Spock wasn’t affected, but many of the details were still being worked out.  Spock says that one of his ancestors was human.  That ancestor was later revealed to be his mother.  He’s also shown having some emotion, which we’d later learn Vulcan society forbids.

I’ve also wondered where Star Trek got the idea for the galactic barrier.  It was also featured in at least one subsequent episode, so someone thought that there must be something at the Milky Way’s edge that would strongly affect ships.  I don’t know if there’s any actual science to support this or if it was just a nice plot device.  I’m kind of leaning towards the second one.  I’m not sure why such a thing should exist other than to add an element of danger.

I can forgive a lot of the details, as this was the second pilot.  Spock seems less emotional, although does show signs here.  He even admits to feeling for Mitchell.  I’m not sure why Kirk’s middle initial was changed, though.  It may have just been a mistake or maybe there’s some interesting story.

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