TOS Review: “Where No Man Has Gone Before” (season 1, episode 3, original air date 9/22/66)
Note: The TOS reviews continue. Spoilers within. Watch the episode here:
http://www.cbs.com/classics/star_trek/video/video.php?cid=619493214&pid=mRUET46ME1jNuxRSk38L6r3YUL02OAsy&play=true
Less than half an hour into this show, I was already grinning and proclaiming to the walls of my apartment, “I like this episode! It’s exciting!” It is, too. It was made before either of the first two episodes, and is in fact the second pilot for the series**; as such, it has a pre-canonical, slightly anarchic, breaking-the-rules-we-haven’t-made-yet feel that was delightfully reminiscent (or anticipatory, whatever) of the reboot movie.
Actually, this episode contains a couple of major links to the reboot movie, starting with the character of crew member Gary Mitchell. Mitchell is supposedly a helmsman and a character in his own right, but anyone can see he’s really Dr. Bones McCoy, wandering around the Enterprise in search of his true identity. (There is an actual ship's doctor aboard, a dude named Piper, but he's not fooling anyone. He's not even the correct canonical doctor whom Bones will replace; that, as anyone who's seen the reboot movie 5 times will know, would be Dr. Puri, who is tragically killed in the line of duty.)
I mean, just look at the guy, for starters: his physical resemblance to Bones 2.0, Karl Urban, is kind of arresting, is it not? (Just ignore the weird psycho eyes for the moment.)
Not only that, but Kirk and Mitchell have the same longstanding friendship, dating back to Starfleet Academy days, that is part of Kirk and Bones’ backstory for the new movie. (My childhood TOS memories are so vague that I have no idea if that backstory is TOS canon as well. Dilettante? Who, me?). There is a conversation between the two of them fifteen minutes in that reveals more about Kirk’s past than anything we’ve seen in the series thus far, and is so interesting (not to mention kind of hilarious) that I’m going to transcribe it here in full.
[Kirk has come to visit Mitchell in sickbay after the latter has been knocked out by some kind of strange electrical charge during a chaotic attempt by the Enterprise to enter an uncharted galaxy (surrounded, it would appear, by an electric cattle fence) where, ahem, no man has gone before. Well, actually men have, but they all died, so they mean shit-all to the producers of this show.]
Mitchell: You look worried.
Kirk: I’ve been worried about you ever since that night on Deneb 4! [Mentally insert your favorite Kirk/Bones slash fantasy here]
Mitchell (laughing): Yeah, she was Nova, that one. [Whoops, guess it was a threesome!] Not nearly as many aftereffects this time. Except for the eyes. [This refers to the weird, psycho, white-lit eyes that Mitchell has been sporting since the galaxy-crossing accident; see pic above.] They kind of stare back at me when I’m shaving.
Kirk: Do you…feel any different?
Mitchell: In a way, I feel better than I've ever felt before in my life. It actually seems to have done me some good.
Kirk: How?
Mitchell: Well, I’m getting a chance to read some of that long-haired stuff of yours. [Handing Kirk a cassette] Hey, man, I remember you back at the Academy. A stack of books with legs. The first thing I ever heard from the upperclassmen was, “Watch out for Lieutenant Kirk! In his class, you either sink…or think!”
Kirk (laughing): I wasn’t that bad, was I?
Mitchell: If I hadn’t aimed that little blonde lab technician at you…
Kirk: You what? You planned that?!
Mitchell: Well, you wanted me to think. I outlined our whole campaign for her.
Kirk: I almost married her!
Mitchell: Better be good to me. I’m getting even better ideas here.
OK, what?! “A stack of books with legs?” “In his class"? A class where "you either think or sink”? Isn’t this Spock 2.0 you’re talking about here, Mitchell? Oh, wait… “little blonde lab technician”…guess not. All right, now we’re back on familiar Kirk ground, except for that “almost married her” thing. A beginner’s tactical error, I guess. Anyway, this idea of Kirk as simultaneous campus intellectual and ladies man is kind of bending my brain and making it hurt a little. I need Kirk to represent the impulsive, intuitive, sensation-seeking,"body" side of the the mind-body continuum! I need a neatly dualistic world, I need black vs. white! Next you'll be telling me that Spock has romantic and/or sexual desires...oh, wait.
And while we're on this Kirk-the-Intellectual tip, I would just like to note that the cassette that Mitchell gives Kirk during the above chat turns out to contain an electronic copy of Spinoza's Ethics, which they then proceed to work into the conversation. Yes, you heard me right: Characters on Star Trek discussed the work of a philosopher who, while not obscure, has nowhere near the name recognition value of, say, Plato or Aristotle, for no apparent reason other than the fact that they could. (Did you know Spinoza's first name was Baruch - or, possibly, Benedict? I didn't, until twenty seconds ago. Thanks, Wikipedia!)
Mitchell is not a Spinoza fan; he calls him "rather simple" and "childlike." Having never read Spinoza, I can't comment on that assessment, but I'm pretty sure it was supposed to mean something to viewers of 1966. I gather that Spinoza was in particular vogue in academic and perhaps countercultural circles at the time, and I believe Mitchell's description of him as "long-haired" is supposed to signal that, a full two centuries later, that association still sticks. Does this mean that the young Kirk, in addition to acting as Starfleet Academy's resident philosopher, might have been, ideologically speaking, some kind of...hippie? Oh, my brain is hurting again.
There is plenty more interesting weirdness in this episode. The producers have not yet gotten their shit together about who's who and who's doing what among the crew; people have the wrong jobs, the wrong attire, and the wrong personalities. Mitchell is acting like Bones while performing Sulu's duties; Sulu is here, but he's an astrophysicist, Jim, not a helmsman; Uhura and Rand aren't here at all. Chekov, in case you weren't aware, was a season two idea, so he's even less here than the others.
Scotty is, though, despite not having existed in "The Man Trap" and "Charlie X," and thankfully he and Kirk are both acting like themselves, because the Spock of this episode is a touch off. His shirt is the wrong color, bringing out the green of his Vulcan complexion; his haircut has not yet found that perfect balance of geek and chic; he is either not aware that his human blood comes from as near a geneaological source as his mother, or doesn't want to say so; and, most disorienting of all, he is given to YELLING unnecessarily. Indoor voice on the bridge, Spock, please!
In the absence of Uhura and Rand, the main female presence in this episode is provided by one Elizabeth Dehner, a visiting psychologist researching crew behavior in stressful conditions. You know already from the combination of this description and her gender that she will at least be perceived as, and may even be, a buttinski and a pain in the ass. She is, at any rate, a rarefied creature: at one point there is a close-up of her medical record, which shows that she is 21 years old with a PhD. She apparently wrote her thesis every night between high school cheerleading practice and I Love Lucy.
Her voice is oddly familiar: perfectly clipped yet somehow distorted, like a New England blueblood who is slightly sloshed. She sounds, in fact, so much like the woman from the Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing commercials of my childhood (and my adolescence, and my adulthood - Jesus, are they still running those things even now?!) that I had to Wiki it, and bingo!: she is indeed the same Sally Kellerman whose voice launched a thousand voiceovers and has been heard by anyone who's watched TV in the last 30 years.***
Scotty and the fake doctor eye Dehner's unisex outfit suspiciously, while Sulu, totally over it, surveys the bridge and realizes that everybody's jersey is the same fucking color.
Upon Dr. Dehner's first appearance, my jaw dropped: she was wearing pants. At first I thought this was a privilege granted to her because of her status as a medical professional, but no: all the women in this episode are wearing pants. I now understand what NBC really meant when they complained that the early shows were too cerebral: "THIS SHOW NEEDS MORE ASS!" The powers-that-be spoke, the producers responded ("Get me the shortest microminis in the history of filmed media! And while you're at it, make them FIRE-ENGINE RED!"), and the rest is TV and fashion history.
Do you want a plot synopsis for this episode? Please see under: "Charlie X," because it's pretty much the same deal - Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner develop beyond-human powers, including telepathic ability, after a traumatic experience (electric shock in this case). At first they continue to act more or less normally, but soon enough their worldviews alter with the development of their new powers, they start abusing those powers, they become threats to the Enterprise, and their deaths are required before normalcy can resume.
The twist is that, in Mitchell's case, it's happening to a friend and intimate rather than a stranger like Charlie Evans or Dehner. Mitchell's Bones-like charms make his expendableness more regrettable than usual, but die he must, and die he does. There's some stuff about ESP thrown in as scientific window dressing, and an X-Men-like defense by Dehner of people with special powers as benevolent, even superior to regular schmucks, but it's not of much consequence. This was the first episode with an interesting enough teleplay to make me wonder a) who'd written it and b) whether we could look forward to other episodes by them (Samuel Peeples and no, BTW), but somewhere in the second half things got more predictable and my interest fell off substantially.
What else should I mention about this episode? - Oh, of course, how could I forget? Once Mitchell has gotten out of hand and seems unreclaimable, Kirk is faced with the choice of either killing him or abandoning him somewhere. He at first chooses the latter, and where do you suppose they take Mitchell to maroon him? None other than Delta Vega, the marooning destination of choice for discriminating captains in all possible universes! Catastrophic climate change has apparently affected other planets besides Earth in the last 40 years, because the frozen, Hoth-like Delta Vega of the new movie is, here, a temperate place that will accept the Edenic flora and fauna that Mitchell telepathically generates to landscape the headquarters where he and Dehner will draw up their plans for upgrading/controlling the human race. It's also a much nicer planet to die on, as Mitchell soon does - in a grave marked "James R. Kirk," a notation I can see causing several different types of confusion to later starship missions. I'm sensing possible fodder for future movies here, in fact. Ortzman, are you on this?
Drunkenness potential from playing the TOS drinking game: Almost nil, due to the very few Trek conventions that are in place here. However, Spock's complaints of illogic and emotional decision-making in others (I counted three) will save you from complete, painful sobriety.
* This was not actually the number one song in the country on 9/22/66. (Believe it or not!) The actual number one song was the same as last week - the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” - but it’s not terribly exciting to keep reporting the same information several times in a row (when we get to season three, I will not be typing “Hey Jude” into this space for nine weeks straight), and as classic and great as the Supremes are, I thought I’d range a bit farther afield for this week’s tune, which comes from the Fugs’ 1966 debut album.
**The first pilot, "The Cage," was rejected by NBC for being too cerebral; it presumably contains discussions not only of Spinoza but of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Gertrude Stein and Tom Stoppard. Shatner isn't even in it, and it wasn't shown on TV until the '80s. Nevertheless, it's on one of the first-season DVDs somewhere, and I'll review it whenever I get there.
***She also, almost as famously, played Hot Lips Houlihan in Robert Altman's original movie version of M*A*S*H*, which although I've seen it I had completely forgotten about. This may indicate that the movie is due for a re-watch. That is all.
http://www.cbs.com/classics/star_trek/video/video.php?cid=619493214&pid=mRUET46ME1jNuxRSk38L6r3YUL02OAsy&play=true
Less than half an hour into this show, I was already grinning and proclaiming to the walls of my apartment, “I like this episode! It’s exciting!” It is, too. It was made before either of the first two episodes, and is in fact the second pilot for the series**; as such, it has a pre-canonical, slightly anarchic, breaking-the-rules-we-haven’t-made-yet feel that was delightfully reminiscent (or anticipatory, whatever) of the reboot movie.
Actually, this episode contains a couple of major links to the reboot movie, starting with the character of crew member Gary Mitchell. Mitchell is supposedly a helmsman and a character in his own right, but anyone can see he’s really Dr. Bones McCoy, wandering around the Enterprise in search of his true identity. (There is an actual ship's doctor aboard, a dude named Piper, but he's not fooling anyone. He's not even the correct canonical doctor whom Bones will replace; that, as anyone who's seen the reboot movie 5 times will know, would be Dr. Puri, who is tragically killed in the line of duty.)
I mean, just look at the guy, for starters: his physical resemblance to Bones 2.0, Karl Urban, is kind of arresting, is it not? (Just ignore the weird psycho eyes for the moment.)
Not only that, but Kirk and Mitchell have the same longstanding friendship, dating back to Starfleet Academy days, that is part of Kirk and Bones’ backstory for the new movie. (My childhood TOS memories are so vague that I have no idea if that backstory is TOS canon as well. Dilettante? Who, me?). There is a conversation between the two of them fifteen minutes in that reveals more about Kirk’s past than anything we’ve seen in the series thus far, and is so interesting (not to mention kind of hilarious) that I’m going to transcribe it here in full.
[Kirk has come to visit Mitchell in sickbay after the latter has been knocked out by some kind of strange electrical charge during a chaotic attempt by the Enterprise to enter an uncharted galaxy (surrounded, it would appear, by an electric cattle fence) where, ahem, no man has gone before. Well, actually men have, but they all died, so they mean shit-all to the producers of this show.]
Mitchell: You look worried.
Kirk: I’ve been worried about you ever since that night on Deneb 4! [Mentally insert your favorite Kirk/Bones slash fantasy here]
Mitchell (laughing): Yeah, she was Nova, that one. [Whoops, guess it was a threesome!] Not nearly as many aftereffects this time. Except for the eyes. [This refers to the weird, psycho, white-lit eyes that Mitchell has been sporting since the galaxy-crossing accident; see pic above.] They kind of stare back at me when I’m shaving.
Kirk: Do you…feel any different?
Mitchell: In a way, I feel better than I've ever felt before in my life. It actually seems to have done me some good.
Kirk: How?
Mitchell: Well, I’m getting a chance to read some of that long-haired stuff of yours. [Handing Kirk a cassette] Hey, man, I remember you back at the Academy. A stack of books with legs. The first thing I ever heard from the upperclassmen was, “Watch out for Lieutenant Kirk! In his class, you either sink…or think!”
Kirk (laughing): I wasn’t that bad, was I?
Mitchell: If I hadn’t aimed that little blonde lab technician at you…
Kirk: You what? You planned that?!
Mitchell: Well, you wanted me to think. I outlined our whole campaign for her.
Kirk: I almost married her!
Mitchell: Better be good to me. I’m getting even better ideas here.
OK, what?! “A stack of books with legs?” “In his class"? A class where "you either think or sink”? Isn’t this Spock 2.0 you’re talking about here, Mitchell? Oh, wait… “little blonde lab technician”…guess not. All right, now we’re back on familiar Kirk ground, except for that “almost married her” thing. A beginner’s tactical error, I guess. Anyway, this idea of Kirk as simultaneous campus intellectual and ladies man is kind of bending my brain and making it hurt a little. I need Kirk to represent the impulsive, intuitive, sensation-seeking,"body" side of the the mind-body continuum! I need a neatly dualistic world, I need black vs. white! Next you'll be telling me that Spock has romantic and/or sexual desires...oh, wait.
And while we're on this Kirk-the-Intellectual tip, I would just like to note that the cassette that Mitchell gives Kirk during the above chat turns out to contain an electronic copy of Spinoza's Ethics, which they then proceed to work into the conversation. Yes, you heard me right: Characters on Star Trek discussed the work of a philosopher who, while not obscure, has nowhere near the name recognition value of, say, Plato or Aristotle, for no apparent reason other than the fact that they could. (Did you know Spinoza's first name was Baruch - or, possibly, Benedict? I didn't, until twenty seconds ago. Thanks, Wikipedia!)
Mitchell is not a Spinoza fan; he calls him "rather simple" and "childlike." Having never read Spinoza, I can't comment on that assessment, but I'm pretty sure it was supposed to mean something to viewers of 1966. I gather that Spinoza was in particular vogue in academic and perhaps countercultural circles at the time, and I believe Mitchell's description of him as "long-haired" is supposed to signal that, a full two centuries later, that association still sticks. Does this mean that the young Kirk, in addition to acting as Starfleet Academy's resident philosopher, might have been, ideologically speaking, some kind of...hippie? Oh, my brain is hurting again.
There is plenty more interesting weirdness in this episode. The producers have not yet gotten their shit together about who's who and who's doing what among the crew; people have the wrong jobs, the wrong attire, and the wrong personalities. Mitchell is acting like Bones while performing Sulu's duties; Sulu is here, but he's an astrophysicist, Jim, not a helmsman; Uhura and Rand aren't here at all. Chekov, in case you weren't aware, was a season two idea, so he's even less here than the others.
Scotty is, though, despite not having existed in "The Man Trap" and "Charlie X," and thankfully he and Kirk are both acting like themselves, because the Spock of this episode is a touch off. His shirt is the wrong color, bringing out the green of his Vulcan complexion; his haircut has not yet found that perfect balance of geek and chic; he is either not aware that his human blood comes from as near a geneaological source as his mother, or doesn't want to say so; and, most disorienting of all, he is given to YELLING unnecessarily. Indoor voice on the bridge, Spock, please!
In the absence of Uhura and Rand, the main female presence in this episode is provided by one Elizabeth Dehner, a visiting psychologist researching crew behavior in stressful conditions. You know already from the combination of this description and her gender that she will at least be perceived as, and may even be, a buttinski and a pain in the ass. She is, at any rate, a rarefied creature: at one point there is a close-up of her medical record, which shows that she is 21 years old with a PhD. She apparently wrote her thesis every night between high school cheerleading practice and I Love Lucy.
Her voice is oddly familiar: perfectly clipped yet somehow distorted, like a New England blueblood who is slightly sloshed. She sounds, in fact, so much like the woman from the Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing commercials of my childhood (and my adolescence, and my adulthood - Jesus, are they still running those things even now?!) that I had to Wiki it, and bingo!: she is indeed the same Sally Kellerman whose voice launched a thousand voiceovers and has been heard by anyone who's watched TV in the last 30 years.***
Scotty and the fake doctor eye Dehner's unisex outfit suspiciously, while Sulu, totally over it, surveys the bridge and realizes that everybody's jersey is the same fucking color.
Upon Dr. Dehner's first appearance, my jaw dropped: she was wearing pants. At first I thought this was a privilege granted to her because of her status as a medical professional, but no: all the women in this episode are wearing pants. I now understand what NBC really meant when they complained that the early shows were too cerebral: "THIS SHOW NEEDS MORE ASS!" The powers-that-be spoke, the producers responded ("Get me the shortest microminis in the history of filmed media! And while you're at it, make them FIRE-ENGINE RED!"), and the rest is TV and fashion history.
Do you want a plot synopsis for this episode? Please see under: "Charlie X," because it's pretty much the same deal - Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner develop beyond-human powers, including telepathic ability, after a traumatic experience (electric shock in this case). At first they continue to act more or less normally, but soon enough their worldviews alter with the development of their new powers, they start abusing those powers, they become threats to the Enterprise, and their deaths are required before normalcy can resume.
The twist is that, in Mitchell's case, it's happening to a friend and intimate rather than a stranger like Charlie Evans or Dehner. Mitchell's Bones-like charms make his expendableness more regrettable than usual, but die he must, and die he does. There's some stuff about ESP thrown in as scientific window dressing, and an X-Men-like defense by Dehner of people with special powers as benevolent, even superior to regular schmucks, but it's not of much consequence. This was the first episode with an interesting enough teleplay to make me wonder a) who'd written it and b) whether we could look forward to other episodes by them (Samuel Peeples and no, BTW), but somewhere in the second half things got more predictable and my interest fell off substantially.
What else should I mention about this episode? - Oh, of course, how could I forget? Once Mitchell has gotten out of hand and seems unreclaimable, Kirk is faced with the choice of either killing him or abandoning him somewhere. He at first chooses the latter, and where do you suppose they take Mitchell to maroon him? None other than Delta Vega, the marooning destination of choice for discriminating captains in all possible universes! Catastrophic climate change has apparently affected other planets besides Earth in the last 40 years, because the frozen, Hoth-like Delta Vega of the new movie is, here, a temperate place that will accept the Edenic flora and fauna that Mitchell telepathically generates to landscape the headquarters where he and Dehner will draw up their plans for upgrading/controlling the human race. It's also a much nicer planet to die on, as Mitchell soon does - in a grave marked "James R. Kirk," a notation I can see causing several different types of confusion to later starship missions. I'm sensing possible fodder for future movies here, in fact. Ortzman, are you on this?
Drunkenness potential from playing the TOS drinking game: Almost nil, due to the very few Trek conventions that are in place here. However, Spock's complaints of illogic and emotional decision-making in others (I counted three) will save you from complete, painful sobriety.
* This was not actually the number one song in the country on 9/22/66. (Believe it or not!) The actual number one song was the same as last week - the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” - but it’s not terribly exciting to keep reporting the same information several times in a row (when we get to season three, I will not be typing “Hey Jude” into this space for nine weeks straight), and as classic and great as the Supremes are, I thought I’d range a bit farther afield for this week’s tune, which comes from the Fugs’ 1966 debut album.
**The first pilot, "The Cage," was rejected by NBC for being too cerebral; it presumably contains discussions not only of Spinoza but of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Gertrude Stein and Tom Stoppard. Shatner isn't even in it, and it wasn't shown on TV until the '80s. Nevertheless, it's on one of the first-season DVDs somewhere, and I'll review it whenever I get there.
***She also, almost as famously, played Hot Lips Houlihan in Robert Altman's original movie version of M*A*S*H*, which although I've seen it I had completely forgotten about. This may indicate that the movie is due for a re-watch. That is all.