AKA Yes, It’s A Macbeth Reference
Content Warning: this episode contains brainwashing, torture (use of a device that causes physical and mental pain), and sexual assault (a woman being kissed against her protests).
Our episode begins in the transporter room, where a whole bunch of cargo is about to be beamed down. A close up one of the containers reveals that it’s being shipped to the Tantalus Penal Colony, and contains ‘infra-sensory drugs,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. Also, I’m not sure if the intent here was specifically “it’s a big container of drugs, so let’s make it look like a giant pill bottle, because that makes sense” but that…sure is what they did.
The crewmen attempt to beam the cargo down, but despite repeatedly saying, “Energize!” it doesn’t go anywhere. Kirk walks in and observes this with a somewhat amused look on his face, and when the transporter operator says he doesn’t understand what the deal is, Kirk points out that they’re beaming down to a penal colony—which has a security force field. That seems like a pretty big thing to forget about! I know I’m the last person that should be telling other people to pay more attention to what they’re doing, but dude: you should really pay more attention to what you’re doing.
Kirk calls down to request an opening in the field so they can get to beaming, which is granted. This time the transporter works—thank God, I mean, you never know with that thing—and the giant pill bottles get sent on their way. The colony is sending one thing back up, some kind of shipment of research material bound for Stockholm. Good to see Stockholm still exists in the future! You keep on trucking, Stockholm.
The penal colony beams up their box, and Kirk turns to go, with a passing shot at the transporter operator about how he might want to make sure he knows what he’s doing next time. The operator leaves as well (actually he just kind of isn’t there between one shot and the next, but let’s assume he left), leaving the other guy to turn and look at a map on the wall while very seriously tapping at a PADD.
Unfortunately, the transporter pad is like a toddler: you just can’t take your eyes off it for five seconds without some kind of trouble brewing. This time the culprit isn’t an evil clone, but that big box still sitting on the pad, which slowly opens up to reveal that it doesn’t contain research materials at all, but instead, a wild-haired and wild-eyed man wearing a breath mask. Well, either that or he is the research materials. I mean, they weren’t real specific about the nature of said materials.
Ever so carefully, the stowaway climbs out of his box and sneaks up on Red Jumpsuit, before delivering a stealth takedown in the form of the ever-handy Star Trek Neck Chop. He then attempts to flee the room, but draws up short and quickly hides back inside as people pass by in the hallway, and the scene closes on his frantic-looking face.
After the opening, we’re up on the bridge, where Kirk is chatting with McCoy about the penal colony and its head (warden? Manager? King?) Dr. Adams. Kirk is disappointed that he didn’t get to actually meet Dr. Adams; he’s intrigued by the man’s methods, and claims that since they started being used, penal colonies are more like resort colonies. McCoy is…less enthused, saying that “a cage is a cage.”
This stirring debate about the ethics of prison management is interrupted by a message from Tantalus, saying that they can’t locate one of their prisoners, who’s a potentially violent case. As the message goes on, saying that the prisoner may have been hidden in the box that got beamed up, we see Mr. Stowaway stealing the red jumpsuit from the crewman he knocked out and then skittering down the hallway. I really gotta say, I’m super not impressed by the security of this prison if it’s possible to escape it by hiding in a box. How did he get in the box? Did they not check it before they sent it off? This is a short step away from just getting in a cardboard box and having yourself mailed somewhere else.
Well, however he got up here, he’s here now, so Uhura sends out a security alert warning of a possible intruder. Mere moments later, Mr. Stowaway is flagged down in the corridor by a suspicious goldshirt. Mr. Stowaway is clearly not a practiced infiltrator, because he hasn’t learned that if you don’t want to get caught trespassing, it’s far more effective to stroll around confidently like you own the place than it is to run furtively from corner to corner and bolt like a scared deer when someone calls out to you. Naturally, the goldshirt pegs him as the intruder immediately and calls it in.
The redshirts are dispatched to the location posthaste, and, since they’re redshirts, one of them goes in the wrong direction while the other gets a stealth takedown chokehold from Mr. Stowaway before he skedaddles. As the chase progresses, Kirk makes a call to Tantalus, and gets answered by Dr. Adams himself, because when you’re in charge of an entire prison colony you got nothing better to do than sit by the phone. Dr. Adams informs the Enterprise that the escaped prisoner is both very clever and very violent, so they’d better watch out.
In the brief ensuing lull in the action, McCoy, who’s been silent throughout all this, paces over to Spock’s station. He looks like he’s about to say something, but Spock goes first with this withering comment: “Interesting. Your Earth people glorify organized violence for forty centuries, but you imprison those who employ it privately.”
McCoy responds to this with about the expression you’d expect from someone who abruptly got dropped into a conversation on the morality of prison and individual violence versus organized societal violence, before saying that oh, so the Vulcans found an answer to that question, did they? Spock says that they eliminated emotion, and without emotion there’s no need for violence. Now, that’s a whole ethical debate that I have neither the time nor the inclination to get into here, but I’d like to point out that despite ‘eliminating all emotion’ (suuuuuuure), Spock does commit violence. He carries a phaser that he has no compunctions about using if necessary, he works on a starship equipped with extensive weapon systems, and he’s fully willing to physically throw hands when he needs to. Is that violence for a good cause? Sure (usually). But it’s still violence. Spock’s argument sounds nice and high-minded, but it doesn’t seem to be holding up real well in practice.
Before that conversation can go any farther, and thank God, frankly, Mr. Stowaway arrives on the bridge, neck chops the redshirt on sentry, and demands to know which one of these people is Captain Kirk. Kirk identifies himself, and Mr. Stowaway—haltingly, and seemingly in pain—says that his name is Van Gelder, and he wants asylum. Kirk points out that it’s a bit rich to demand asylum at gunpoint—or phaserpoint, whatever—but Van Gelder doesn’t back down. He wants Kirk’s word that he won’t be sent back to Tantalus before he puts that phaser down. The drama of this tense stand-off scene is, in my opinion, a bit undercut by the expressions of the goldshirts at the helm, who look less like they’re in-between their captain and the escaped convict holding a phaser on him, and more like they’re witnessing a really awkward family argument.
Kirk won’t promise anything (I guess Kirk is unwilling to lie even to talk down a panicking prisoner holding him at phaserpoint), and Van Gelder insists he’s not going back and he’ll shoot out the control panel and disable the ship if Kirk won’t give him asylum. He hasn’t watched the show, so he doesn’t know that a blown-out control panel is pretty small potatoes compared to the kind of damage the Enterprise regularly trucks right on through. Scotty could probably fix that over his lunch break. While Van Gelder talks, though, Spock is sneaking up on him; Van Gelder notices this at the last moment and swings around, but he’s unable to fend off both Kirk and Spock and winds up getting nerve pinched to the floor. Kirk orders him to be hauled off to sick bay, and for the ship to do a u-turn back to Tantalus.
In sick bay, Bones has Van Gelder on a table, and tells Kirk that the man doesn’t have “schizophrenia, tissue damage, or any condition I’m acquainted with, Jim.” Schizophrenia or tissue damage, huh, that’s, uh, that’s quite the range you checked out there. Apparently he’s got something, though, beyond just being a dude who wanted to escape from prison—which we frown upon as a society, but it’s not a mental illness.
McCoy says it took three times the usual amount of sedative to get Van Gelder to chill out a bit, and that he’s been talking quite a lot, but not very coherently. As…people often do when they’ve had a heck of a lot of sleepy drugs. Yet, McCoy also says that Van Gelder’s ramblings had “the ring of truth” and that he’d like to study the man some more. Kirk just kinda rolls his eyes fondly and says Van Gelder’s not their problem.
Van Gelder objects to that one, sitting upright and snarling at Kirk about how he’s just gonna wash his hands of the whole business, drop him off and let someone else worry about him, huh? Kirk doesn’t look real impressed by this, but he drifts back towards the bed and asks Van Gelder what did he say his name was, again. The man manages to stutter out that his name is Simon Van Gelder, but not without a lot of difficulty; he acts as if the words cause him a lot of pain to get out. With the same halting speech he says that he was the director of Tantalus, graduated from– he was assistant to– Doctor—he can’t get it out. He says he knew, but “they’ve erased it…edited it…subverted me.” But he won’t forget, he screams, and he won’t let them take him back there, at which point he’s gotten so loud and worked up that McCoy gives him another hypospray.
Later, Kirk strolls onto the bridge and finds Spock leaning over his console in fascination. Spock says he’s reading an identification tape on Dr. Simon Van Gelder. Yes, Doctor Van Gelder, and he was never committed to Tantalus—he was assigned there to work with Dr. Adams, six months ago. Huh. That’s mighty suspicious.
Kirk calls down to Tantalus to ask what the hey, and Dr. Adams smoothly explains that Dr. Van Gelder was working on an “experimental beam we’d hoped might rehabilitate incorrigibles.” That’s, um…quite a beam. Apparently, Van Gelder didn’t think it was fair of him to subject anyone else to something he hadn’t tried on himself first, which is…not really how science or medicine works! But I guess he did that thing, or at least that’s the implication. Kirk buys it, but McCoy, who came onto the bridge about halfway through the call, doesn’t, and says as much to Kirk. Since McCoy is not only an actual doctor himself but has experience with testing things on yourself first, he might be onto something here.
Kirk puts the call on hold and orders McCoy to explain, but he can’t—he just knows that he doesn’t believe Dr. Adams. Kirk’s not buying this, and asks if McCoy is aware that Dr. Adams has done more to revolutionize the prison system in twenty years than all of humanity did in forty centuries. That…seems like hyperbole, but okay. He goes on to say that he’s been to these colonies since Dr. Adams improved them and they’re not cages anymore but “clean, decent hospitals for sick minds.”
This is kind of the tricky part of the episode. Tantalus, and by extension other similar colonies vaguely mentioned in the episode, is explicitly identified as a penal colony. That is, a prison. A place where you put criminals. Yet, the terms in which it is talked about—and therefore, a lot of the tropes that the episode employs towards it—are much more reminiscent of the way people might talk about a psychiatric hospital, which comes to a head when Kirk literally describes the place as a hospital for sick minds.
On the surface, yes, it is quite progressive to identify people who commit crimes as being people who need to be helped rather than punished. And believe me I am all for rehabilitating people rather than just throwing them behind bars to rot. But the view that seems to be espoused in this episode, that committing crime is a form of mental illness that can be cured, leaves a real bad taste in my mouth.
It doesn’t work like that! I mean…obviously. There’s not a dysfunction of the brain that causes people to go out and commit crimes. People wind up in jail for a huge amount of reasons (up to and including ‘minding their own business when the cops decided to pick on them’ but that’s another subject) and if you want to actually help them you have to address those specific reasons for each person. You can’t just turn an Upstanding Citizen Beam on them and make them magically better.
Wittingly or no, by painting crime as something that comes out of a kind of mental illness, this episode falls into the sadly common trope of portraying mentally ill people as scary and violent—it just does so by slapping a thin veneer of ‘criminal’ on top of the stock tropes instead of outright specifying any real mental illness. The people in these penal colonies are ‘sick’, they’re ‘abnormal’, they’re distinctly othered and held at arm’s length by people like Kirk, who seems sympathetic to them even as his compassion towards Van Gelder is strongly tinged with condescension. It’s also not real helpful for literal criminals either, who in real life range all the way from ‘violent murderers’ to ‘people who smoked a joint a couple times’. You can’t just lump all those people together, that’s not going to fix anything. Not to mention that portraying all criminals as Just Sick People neatly excuses you from having to put any thought at all into what things might be wrong with society that would cause people to commit criminal acts, or if our classification of what is criminal and what is not is always completely and objectively true. The only hint of any viewpoint to the contrary that we get in the whole episode is Spock’s brief ‘lol humans’ comment.
Now, to be fair, the episode does subvert some of those tropes later on. In fact you could take some of the things that happen in this episode as still being a salient commentary on the abuses of the prison system today (and it’s quite depressing to hear that things apparently won’t get any better for a couple centuries at least). But I think it’s still worth pointing out. Because…well, we’ll get to that in bit.
On a lighter note, if you want your penal colony to be so progressive and wonderful, why in God’s good name would you name it Tantalus? Tantalus was the guy in Greek mythology who pissed off the gods and was sentenced to an eternity of suffering where he would be forever hungry and thirsty but food and drink would be always just out of his reach. Yes, it’s a great reference, very thematic, but that means that in-universe someone decided that they were going to name their penal colony after someone synonymous with eternal torture in the afterlife. Way to go guys. Great job, there. What other wondrous, compassionate facilities has Dr. Adams worked for? The Sisyphus Colony? The Lucifer Colony? The Loki Colony?
Well, at any rate, point is, McCoy may not trust Dr. Adams, but Kirk still thinks he’s a man you can believe, helping everyone in need, and that no one can succeed like Dr. Adams. Before McCoy can get full swing into a counterargument, Spock interrupts and points out that they’ve got Dr. Adams on the line so maybe they should get back to seeing about that whole prisoner return thing.
When Kirk asks about Van Gelder, Dr. Adams asks if they’re passing by any superior hospital facilities, because he’d like Van Gelder to have the best possible treatment, you see. Smooth move. But McCoy’s not buying it. He points out that there are no superior facilities (no hospitals superior to the medical care available at a penal colony? that’s…somewhat worrying), and Dr. Adams knows that. Also (though McCoy doesn’t mention this), Dr. Adams knew the Enterprise was stopping by; if he’s so concerned about Van Gelder having the best possible treatment, why didn’t he actually arrange for him to be picked up and taken to one, instead of waiting until Van Gelder escaped and then going, “oh, if you’re not busy, could you take my friend to a psychiatric hospital? kthx.” Something’s not adding up here, and McCoy knows it. So he tells Kirk that if he, McCoy, has suspicions, he’s required to enter them into his log—which means Kirk is required to follow up on them in his log. Kirk is obviously peeved about this, but I guess he can’t do anything about it. Even Spock gives him the ‘He’s Got You There’ Eyebrow.
So Kirk tells Dr. Adams that, so sorry, but regulations require they perform an investigation into all this. Of course, of course, Dr. Adams says, by all means, come on down and check it out, just don’t bring too many people down with you! Kirk assures him that he’s visited rehab colonies before. You know, I’m really starting to wonder why Kirk has toured so many prisons.
Kirk tells McCoy to find him someone from Medical who has psychiatric and penology experience. Which is…quite a tall order. Why would there be someone hanging around the Enterprise with penology experience? I mean it’s not impossible, but it’s not really the kind of thing you would expect to come up a whole lot on a starship. Given there are only four hundred people on the entire ship, you’d think they’d have some other fields of study to prioritize, and let the people well versed in prisons work in…y’know…prisons. Just a thought.
After the break, Kirk is giving his captain’s log into a recorder. It’s always kind of weird to see him do this, considering that he’s basically narrating dramatic exposition while everyone around him just kind of ignores him. McCoy calls in from Sickbay to say Van Gelder is still violently agitated (Van Gelder is dutifully thrashing around in the background to demonstrate this) and he’d like to keep him aboard until the investigation is over. Spock agrees with him, and when Spock and McCoy actually agree on something you know it’s time to sit up and listen. McCoy also says that he does have someone who matches Kirk’s criteria, because of course he does; here on the Enterprise we’ve got an expert for every occasion. This one is named Dr. Noel, and they’re waiting in the transporter room now, so Kirk and Spock head on down.
Dr. Noel turns out to be a woman, with nothing particularly shocking about her aside from the usual TOS combo of skimpy clothes and soft focus that all women get, but the background music swells and Kirk looks stunned. Spock looks incredibly arch. Seriously, never let anyone, including Spock, tell you Spock doesn’t emote; the man can deliver a metric ton worth of sass with the bare minimum amount of facial movement.
Apparently—as Dr. Noel feels the need to bring up right now, before a mission, because professionalism, what’s that—she and Kirk met at the science lab Christmas party. Oh, the Christmas party! And she’s named Helen Noel! Ha ha ha, ah ha. Ha. Ah ha. Yes. Exactly what happened at the Christmas party is not specified, but apparently something did, and Kirk is feeling mighty awkward about this, not to mention Dr. Noel going “remember me? Huh? Huh? Remember me? Remember that time we hooked up at the Christmas party? Huh?” So he takes the time to deliver a veiled threat to McCoy by way of Spock before he and Dr. Noel get going.
The two of them beam down to the colony, which seems to be mostly inside a cliff with a little bit sticking up from the top. It looks not bad, actually, as far as Star Trek planets go. A bit rocky, sure, but there’s some plant life, and the sky is a lovely blue with some impressive rings overhead.
Kirk and Dr. Noel don’t get to see the vista, though, because they beam down inside. There’s no one around to greet them, so they just wander into a random room, which turns out to be an elevator. The two of them are understandably very startled to find themselves dropping down very quickly, and grab onto each other instinctively, making an already awkward situation even more awkward. Seriously people, label your elevators, this ain’t the Haunted Mansion.
After going down quite a ways, the doors open to reveal Dr. Adams waiting for them. And there is definitely nothing ominous about Dr. Adams. Absolutely not. Nothing about this man says ‘evil’ in any way. I don’t know where you could possibly get that idea.
Dr. Adams warmly welcomes them to ‘Devil’s Island’, definitely the sort of nickname you would give a kind, compassionate rehabilitation center with the best intentions towards its inmates. Kirk introduces Dr. Noel, who says please, call me Helen, so we don’t get all these doctors confused around here. Suit yourself, but if I achieved a doctorate, you can bet I’d make everyone call me Doctor. I’d make my family call me Doctor. I’d make people in the group chat call me Doctor. Some dude says he’s also a doctor? Good for him, but I’m not making way for him.
Kirk offers to check his phaser, but Dr. Adams says that won’t be necessary as long as he keeps it out of sight. Sure, those boring old prison regulations might not let you walk around with a lethal weapon at your hip, but we’re all friends here! What could go wrong? Now let’s drink a toast! Hooray!
Kirk calls up to the ship to check in, though he can’t get through until Dr. Adams turns the security screen off. After a quick chat with Spock confirming everything’s fine, the office door opens and a woman in a typical TOS nonsense dress comes in. Dr. Adams introduces her as Lethe and says she came to Tantalus for rehabilitation but stayed on as a therapist. Okay, one, that’s kinda weird; of course people should have the chance to go live normal lives again after serving their time and getting better but I don’t think most people would go “ah yes I just loved being incarcerated so much I’m going to stick around in the same penal colony I was imprisoned in even when I don’t have to anymore” and two, Lethe? LETHE? NOBODY IS NAMED LETHE! Lethe was one of the rivers in the Greek underworld, which caused anyone who drank from it to forget everything, and also the name of the Greek spirit of oblivion and forgetfulness for whom the river was named. So yes, great reference, very smart, job well done, but I think you mighta overplayed your hand there a little bit. Who else is gonna come through that door? “Ah yes, these are my other assistants, Dr. Ann Nesia and Dr. Todd Wedestroyyourbrainhere.”
Oh, and Lethe also has a flat, dead stare and talks in a monotone, so that’s not suspicious at all. She tells Kirk that she enjoys her work very much and that she was another person before coming to Tantalus, but that person no longer exists, so it doesn’t matter what she got up to before she came there. Dr. Adams jumps in to say that part of their ‘cure’ involves burying the past, because why should people have to live with horrible memories of that time they did rotten things? This…unorthodox approach is casually accepted by Dr. I Swear I’m A Real Psychologist Noel, who says that “a shifting of memory patterns is basic to psychotherapy.” Oh yeah, first time I went to therapy, first thing they said was “forget everything about your past life.”
But Kirk doesn’t seem to find anything odd about this situation just yet, so Dr. Adams goes back to giving an incredibly overwrought toast and then the three of them take a tour through the facility, which has a lot of people in weird pajamas strolling around the corridors. This being TOS, it’s impossible to tell if their bizarre outfits mean they’re prisoners or staff. Or, y’know, both, apparently we multitask at this facility. Anyway, Kirk catches sight of a strange room being manned by a guy who, judging by his expression, is either stoned or fell asleep standing up with his eyes open. Kirk wants to know what this is about, but Dr. Adams brushes it off, saying it’s an experiment that went wrong and he doesn’t really want to bring up his personal failures. When Kirk insists, Dr. Noel says there’s no point in looking at it if it failed and therefore has no scientific relevance. Which is a weird thing for a scientist to say, since you can learn just as much from your failures as your successes in science. On the other hand, lacking in situational awareness though she may be, Dr. Noel has a point when she says that Kirk brought her down there to ask her advice so he might as well listen to it. Kirk says the great thing about being a captain is that you can ask for advice without having to take it, or even letting the person finish talking. Dr. Adams smugly chimes in that Dr. Noel is “fighting over [her] weight.” Cool, so we can add casual sexism to his list of many fine qualities.
Back on the ship, McCoy and Spock are hanging out with Van Gelder, who’s ranting about how he’s not a criminal and doesn’t need the ‘neural neutralizer’. At Spock’s prompting, Van Gelder talks about a room with a light, but he can’t describe what happens there without just breaking down into sobbing and screams of pain, forcing McCoy to tranq him again. Jeez, this guy has been given so many sedatives I’m surprised he’s not in a coma by now.
It turns out the neural neutralizer is what’s in the room Kirk, Dr. Adams and Dr. Noel are looking at at that very moment. Dr. Adams says it’s only experimental and they don’t expect to get much use out of it, even though there’s a guy in the room at that moment, sitting in a chair and looking up at a spinning light on the ceiling.
Dr. Adams claims the machine “neutralizes brainwaves” which he says very casually as if that isn’t a terrifying phrase, and that it makes people calmer, though the effects are only temporary. When Kirk asks the very reasonable question of why, if they don’t think the machine works, there’s a dude sitting in it right now, Dr. Adams says that they just hope it might do something. Maybe it can take the edge off the more violent cases. That’s definitely best practice right there: “Well, this experiment was ruled a failure, but what the hey!” Dr. Noel approves, saying that “tranquilizers are all very fine, but to continuously pump chemicals into peoples’ blood–” Yes, as we know, in psychotherapy there are only two options: constantly load someone up on heavy-duty tranquilizers, or make them stare at a spinny light that you don’t really think will work. No middle ground.
The two doctors move on, but Kirk stays behind to ask how the chamber works. The stoned technician explains it to him: two switches and a dial, very simple. The rest of the controls are just there to look pretty.
Dr. Adams comes back to chastise Kirk for wanting to investigate things during his investigation, and Dr. Noel assures him that beam neutralization has been experimented with on Earth, so even though she’s not familiar with this equipment she can assure him that “Dr. Adams has not created a chamber of horrors here.” Much like how I know that chemotherapy has been experimented with on Earth so even though I’m not familiar with the equipment I could definitely tell you whether a chemotherapy setup was legit and absolutely not just giving people radiation poisoning for lulz. Kirk wants to know where Van Gelder had his accident, and Dr. Adams admits it was in the neutralizing chamber: he tested it alone on himself at full volume, or so Dr. Adams claims. So either Van Gelder was the world’s worst scientist (possible) and/or Dr. Adams is lying his teeth off (also quite possible).
Kirk follows Dr. Adams out, but the scene lingers in the neutralization chamber, where the technician turns the intensity dial up and tells the man in the chair that he will forget everything he heard and remembering any of it will cause him terrible pain. The spinny light glows brighter and spins faster, while the man’s face contorts in fear and agony. Hm. Well, that seems safe.
Sometime later, Spock and McCoy are holding a conference call with Kirk while he hangs out in Dr. Adams’s study. Spock brings up the neural neutralizer that Van Gelder mentioned and Kirk says phssst, it’s fine, Dr. Adams told me all about it. Spock and McCoy shoot each other a very skeptical look at that point, but since Dr. Adams is listening in they clearly don’t want to say a lot more. Picking up on this, Dr. Adams oh-so-graciously excuses himself, allowing Spock to report that Van Gelder is warning that Kirk is in danger. Dr. Noel insists that this is foolish; Van Gelder has brain damage, so naturally he’s having delusions. Naturally! Actually Van Gelder has been very consistent with everything he’s said, but y’know, probably don’t need to worry about that. Or at least Kirk and Dr. Noel think so. Spock and McCoy don’t seem too sure.
Kirk says they’re gonna spend the night planetside. No one questions this, even though it’s not like it’s too much effort to drive home. You could beam back up to the ship in like, five minutes. But sure, this is such a lovely resort location I’m sure Kirk just wants to spend some time there, soak in the local atmosphere. Anyway, Van Gelder is so agitated by this news that he starts screaming NO! NO! and McCoy gets ready to hypo him again, but then Van Gelder calms down a little and begs McCoy not to do it. He says he’ll try to calm down and not fight, but they have to warn Kirk that Dr. Adams will “destroy…destroy…right…death.” That’s what he said. I have no idea what that means, but it’s dramatic enough for a cut to break.
After the break, Spock gives an acting captain’s log stating that he’s going to try an ancient Vulcan technique to look into Van Gelder’s mind. That’s right, it’s MIND MELD TIME! This is not just the first time the mind meld comes up in the show, Spock says it’s the first time he’s ever even tried it on a human. Apparently, the original script had them using hypnosis instead, but it was decided that they didn’t want to inaccurately portray hypnosis as a legit medical technique (though I mean, why start accurately depicting medicine now), and also didn’t want to to accidentally hypnotize viewers. At least, that’s what Memory Alpha says. On the one hand it’s pretty wild to imagine someone in the writer’s room going, “Guys. Guys, what if we do this so well it works in real life??” but on the other hand this is the same show that had producers worried that Spock looked too much like Satan, so y’know, who knows what went on over there. At any rate it seems that the Vulcan mind meld, like a surprising amount of other Vulcan traits, was made up at the last minute to substitute for something else that wouldn’t work as well, but of course wound up becoming a major part of the show and extended canon.
Spock is clearly uncomfortable and hesitant about using this, which is understandable since it’s a very private thing for Vulcans and also poking around in someone’s head isn’t the kind of thing any sensible person does lightly. McCoy is being…less than entirely sensitive about it. But it’s clear that he’s super worried about Kirk, currently happily la-dee-dahing around a penal colony run by an evil scientist, and if there’s any chance that this mind meld thing can get important information out of Van Gelder, he wants Spock to hurry up and try it.
First, Spock warns Van Gelder that what he’s about to do is dangerous, which he needs Van Gelder to understand before he agrees to it. Always ask for consent before you invade someone’s mind. Van Gelder is so desperate to communicate with someone that he urges Spock to get on with it, never mind the danger. Then, Spock tells McCoy (and the audience at home, nervously watching on their notoriously brain-melting 1966 television sets) that the mind meld is not hypnosis, and will only affect the person he’s actively touching. With no more room to stall, he puts his hands on Van Gelder’s face and starts putting Van Gelder under. This involves a lot of murmuring while McCoy looks on in some concern.
Back down at the luxury hotel prison, Kirk drops in on Dr. Noel to get her impression of the prisoners at this here colony. He thinks they seem happy enough, but a bit…blank. Dr. Noel scoffs at the idea of questioning the methods of Tristan Adams, and says that if Kirk has any questions he should just bring them up with the doctor himself. Because after all, if you’re suspicious of someone, the best thing to do is to raise those suspicions to them personally so they can tell you that you have no reason to be suspicious, psshaw.
Fortunately Kirk has cottoned on to how this whole ‘lying’ thing works, and points out that if Dr. Adams has been lying, he’s gonna keep on lying, so Kirk wants to go check out this machine himself. Dr. Adams is skeptical, but she follows him anyway.
Meanwhile, Spock has gotten Van Gelder to talk about the neural neutralizer. Van Gelder says that Dr. Adams can use it to reshape minds and put whatever thoughts he wants in there, which he did to Van Gelder. Van Gelder’s description of how the machine emptied his mind of all thoughts until he was willing to accept anything Dr. Adams put in there is…less than pleasant. Alright, that’s it. I’m taking Dr. Adams’s doctorate away. Once you start torturing people for kicks you lose the right to call yourself a doctor; that’s a new rule I just made up and I think it’s a good one.
In the neutralizer room, Kirk is preparing to test the machine on himself. Great idea there, Kirk. Well done. Top notch. Look, I get you’re suspicious and you don’t want to directly confront Adams, but there’s got to be a better way of figuring out what’s going on here than sitting under the Machine We Don’t Know What It Does, which you suspect may have given a dude serious brain damage, and see what happens. He plans to try it on the lowest setting, but even if that goes well for him, well, that doesn’t really prove anything. Put it this way: if your question is, “Is Adams using this machine to harm prisoners?” then “this machine doesn’t hurt people on the lowest setting” doesn’t actually answer that question. It doesn’t prove that the machine couldn’t be harmful if used wrongly, which is what you suspect is going on here anyway.
But Kirk’s going to go on and sit in the scary chair anyway. Alright, Kirk. You do you.
So he sits down and Dr. Noel turns the thing on the lowest setting for about five seconds. Afterwards, Kirk tells her to go ahead and turn it on any time, showing that he has no memory of what he was just doing. Which is a lot more ominous in this context than when it happens to me, repeatedly, throughout the day.
Since that test was inconclusive, Kirk tells Dr. Noel to do it again but this time try giving him a harmless suggestion. So she turns the machine on and tells him that he’s hungry. When the light goes off, Kirk immediately says he wants to go get something to eat. Hmmm. Kirk is starting to find it suspicious that Adams claimed this thing didn’t work too well when clearly it does, but he’s still not fully convinced, so he tells Dr. Noel to try it one more time, this time going with an ‘unusual’ suggestion.
Soooo Dr. Noel turns the thing on again and starts talking about that infamous Christmas party. She says all that happened was that they danced and talked, but then conjures up a fantasy for Kirk in which they instead went back to Dr. Noel’s room and made out. In other words she not only tells him that they had a physically intimate encounter that never actually happened, she puts that suggestion into his brain in a way that he actually remembers it and can’t dispute it. That’s an incredibly shitty thing to do to a person. Why would you think that was okay?? What kind of doctor are you?? You know what—no. I’m revoking your doctorate too. Go back to medical school until you learn not to violate people by brainwashing them into believing your own romantic daydreams.
This whole horrifying dream sequence is interrupted, though, when the technician from before comes in and drags Noel away. She has to watch as Adams steps up to the mic, turns the machine on higher, and begins to tell Kirk that he’s madly in love with Noel, that he desperately longs for her and would do anything for her, and is in pain the longer she’s away from him. There’s really no practical reason why this would benefit Adams in any way (as opposed to telling Kirk to go back to the ship and cover up the whole operation for him); he’s just a terrible, terrible person. Then he tells Kirk to drop his phaser and communicator on the floor. Kirk drops the phaser with some struggle but he resists on the communicator, desperately trying to use it to call the Enterprise, so Adams turns the machine up even more until Kirk is writhing out of the chair and screaming in pain.
After the break, Kirk wakes up back in his own quarters, with Noel attending to him. At least, she’s wiping a cloth over his forehead; I guess there’s not a whole lot more you can do to help someone recover from a session in the Brain Melty Chair. Kirk immediately starts talking about how much he loves Noel. Now, Noel may have been willing to fuck around with Kirk’s brain to fulfill her own fantasies and I’m not gonna forgive her for that, but I’ll give her this at least: she at least knows this situation is not okay and is not willing to take advantage of Kirk being in this state. She tells him this was all a lie Adams put in his mind and begs him to remember what happened. He says he remembers, but he’s still giving her creepy eyes and advances across the room at her. For a moment it looks like things are gonna get all Enemy Within again, but (thank God) it turns out he’s actually interested in the air conditioning duct on the wall. Like all ventilation shafts in media it’s inexplicably big enough for a person to crawl through and Kirk thinks it might connect to the colony’s power supply; if Noel can crawl through there she might could shut off the power and thus the protective forcefield. That seems like a giant design flaw for a prison to have, but then again so does the brainwashing room so whatever. Of course, the minor flaw in this plan is that Noel has no training whatsoever in disconnecting power sources and could easily kill herself if she screws up, but they don’t have much choice so she gamely heads on in. Hopefully there’s no headcrabs in there.
They do this just in time, too, because as soon as Kirk closes the vent back up two guards show up to escort him away. They don’t notice Noel being missing, but then they look pretty brainwashed themselves. Meanwhile Noel heads through the vent, and I must say I don’t envy her crawling around on her knees in a miniskirt and pantyhose. Ow.
Back in the Aurora Chair room, Adams is telling Kirk that he completely trusts and believes in Adams. Then he starts gloating about how he tortured Van Gelder and what fun it is to have such interesting specimens like him and Kirk. Thankfully this little monologue is interrupted by Lethe coming in to tell Adams that they finally noticed Noel is gone. Adams demands that Kirk tell him where she went, but Kirk passes his Will save, so he just yells “I…DON’T…KNOW!” and then contorts himself onto the floor.
Noel has found herself in the power room, or at least a room with a lot of mechanical boxes and WARNING signs, remarkably unguarded or unmanned by anybody. There’s not even a proper lock on the door that she swings open to reveal some thing with a lever and an off setting. Well-labeled. Good job.
Up on the ship, Spock is trying to get in contact with Kirk, but they can’t get through the Tantalus forcefield. Meanwhile Noel hasn’t had any luck with the power supply, and has to run and hide while a few Tantalus security men run in to sweep the place. They do a real bad job of it though, so she’s passed over and runs back to fiddle with the thing some more. There’s a big ol’ switch up at top that says MASTER and HIGH VOLTAGE, which seems promising, so she pulls down on that. She manages to shut it off just before one of the security guards comes to double-check his work. He pulls her away, but the power outage shuts down the neural neutralizer as Adams and his assistant are trying to get Kirk back into the chair. This gives Kirk the opportunity to take out the two of them with a combo Neck Chop and backhand to the face.
In the power room, the guard manages to push Noel down and turn the power back on, but as he advances on the fallen Noel she gives him a good strong kick—right into the generator. There’s a real impressive light show, lots of sparks and sizzling and popping, and when it’s all over the power’s out for good and the security guy is seriously charred.
The transporter operator notices that the forcefield is now gone and Spock quickly heads down, telling McCoy to follow him with some security guards. Noel heads back into the vent a few seconds before Spock shows up. He briefly checks out the toasted guy, then locates the forcefield box…thing…and gives it a few whacks to knock it out for good. Then he turns the power back on—and Adams, waking up on the floor of the neutralizer room, suddenly finds himself being subjected to the device, which was left on at full power. Uh oh.
Noel makes it back into Kirk’s quarters at the same time Kirk does, and he helps her out of the vent and immediately starts kissing her, though she tries to pull away, saying this isn’t right. Spock walks in at just that moment, and quickly assumes his standard “Really, Jim? Again?” expression upon walking in on Kirk during a makeout session after being seriously worried for him, though the comedy of the moment is rather undercut by the fact that the Kirk has been brainwashed into doing this and the woman he’s kissing is protesting and trying to get away from him.
Upon being reminded of Adams, though, Kirk breaks away and runs for the treatment room with the other two in tow, encountering McCoy along the way, mingling with a bunch of Enterprise security guards and Tantalus security guards having a security-guard-off. They all run into the treatment room and Kirk shuts the device off, but it’s too late: Adams is dead. Well, too late from a certain point of view.
Noel says the device wasn’t on high enough to kill him, though I have really no faith left that she knows what she’s talking about here. I mean, he’s dead, so, obviously it was on high enough to kill him. Kirk thinks Adams died because he was alone, without even a person torturing him for company. The machine “emptied him.”
Some unspecified amount of time later, Kirk walks onto the bridge in a bit of a daze. Uhura says there’s been a message from Van Gelder: the neutralizer was dismantled and destroyed. Uh, that’s great, but what is Van Gelder doing down there? Yeah, we know now that he was telling the truth and not deluded, but he still had brain damage. You guys couldn’t take him to a hospital or anything? Just dumped him back down at Tantalus again? Honestly, people.
McCoy quietly ruminates that it’s hard to believe a man could die of loneliness. Kirk responds, “not when you’ve sat in that room.” Poetic, but I’m still going with my theory that Adams died of the, you know, brain damage. From the brain damaging device. That he was left under, alone and unregulated, at a high intensity. Considering the thing was experimental and no one knew that much about how it operated it’s a bit daft to declare that a certain setting wasn’t high enough to kill him. Some people just die easier than others.
Kirk gives the order to head out, and the episode ends, with a lot of hanging questions. Like, did they find any way to reverse Kirk’s brainwashing or is he just going to spend the rest of his life madly and painfully in love with Noel? What’s going to happen to Tantalus now—I mean an entire penal colony isn’t an easy thing to re-secure after the director turns out to be corrupt and then dies and you don’t know how many of the staff were corrupt as well, and how damaged the inmates now are. Then there’s the fact that the world now has to cope with the fact that Adams, a well-known hero who completely reformed the entire penal system, has turned out to be a massively corrupt evil scientist who was melting people’s brains for laughs. Unfortunately it’s not unrealistic that someone well-regarded and admired in their field can turn out to have been a terrible person all along, but it’s a hard thing to deal with. You have to start looking at everything they did, everything they were involved with—were any of his reforms as good as they seemed? How flawed is this system, really, the one everyone was so convinced was the answer? What do you do with the prisoners who have been affected by this horrible treatment? Who knows? Episode’s over now.
You remember how I said earlier that we’d get to talking about how this episode deals with its themes? The thing is that while Kirk finds out he was wrong about Adams, his other assumptions about penal colonies and criminals aren’t really challenged at all. There’s not a single word given to considering what Adams’s true nature means for the prison system that he was so heavily entwined with, and whether it now needs to be reconsidered. He’s treated as just this one guy who turned out to be evil, a villain that needed to be taken down, and now that we’ve dealt with him we can carry on.
And Adams is almost comically evil. He’s got no depth. He’s just a guy who enjoys torturing people with his spinny light. I think the episode would have been more interesting if he had been portrayed as a sort of well-intentioned extremist, claiming he was doing all this to make people better. That alone would have called into question the way this society is treating its prisoners, and thrown an uncomfortable—and therefore interesting—light on the attitude towards them that even the main protagonist engages in. Kirk might have had to seriously examine his own beliefs. But instead Adams is just some guy who’s evil for no reason, an evil so disconnected from any apparent motivation that no one has to have any uncomfortable thoughts about where it came from.
Our crew death count for this episode is zero once again, though we have two NPC deaths with Adams and the unnamed Tantalus guard. Next time we’re gonna play some poker in The Corbomite Maneuver.
Undeath of the Author 