Episode Title: Court Martial
Air Date: 2/2/1967
Written by Don M.
Mankiewicz and Steven W. Carabatsos
Directed by Marc
Daniels
Cast: William
Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk
Leonard Nimoy as Lieutenant Commander Spock DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard H.
McCoy AKA “Bones” Richard
Webb as Lieutenant Commander Ben Finney Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura Bill Blackburn as Lieutenant
Hadley Frank Da Vinci as Lieutenant
Brent Hagan Beggs as unnamed Helmsman Nancy
Wong as Ensign who was Personnel Officer
Tom Curtis as Crewman
Corrigan Winston DeLugo as Timothy Elisha Cook Jr. as Samuel T. Cogley,
Esq. Joan Marshall as Lieutenant Areel
Shaw Percy Rodriguez as
Commodore Stone Bart Conrad as
Captain Krasnovsky William
Meader as Captain Lindstrom
Reginald Lal Singh as Captain Nensi Chandra Alice Rawlings as Jamie Finney Majel Barrett as Enterprise Computer
Ships and Space
Stations: USS Enterprise NCC-1701, Starbase 11, unnamed Constitution Class
Starship, several unnamed shuttle craft
Planets: unnamed planet that hosts Starbase 11
My Spoiler filled
summary and review: The episode begins with Captain Kirk at Starbase 11
reporting to Commodore Stone about the death of one of his crew members. The lost crew member is Lieutenant Commander
Benjamin Finney. The Enterprise had encountered ion storm. While in the storm Cmdr. Finney was in a pod
that had to be ejected by Captain Kirk himself.
The whole story itself is rather weird why these pods are necessary is
never really quite explained nor is it ever understood why before going into a
dangerous ion storm someone would have to board one of these pods to begin
with.
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| Kirk meeting with his superior officer |
It’s at this point that Mr. Spock
shows up. He beams down with the
official computer records and presents them to the Commodore. Stone looks at them then asks Kirk if there’s
anything about his story he wants to change, Kirk says no, and then Stone tells
Kirk he’s either mad or willfully ignorant for Finney’s pod was ejected before
the red alert siren.
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| Something is not adding it up |
With the computer now against him
Captain Kirk has to tell his story on the record officially for Commodore
Stone. Kirk tells a story of him and Ben
Finney that Finney had been an instructor at Starfleet Academy when he was just
a cadet, in a way is their relationship was the reverse of him and Gary
Mitchell. They formed a tight friendship
and Mr. Finney even went so far to name his young daughter in honor of James
Kirk. During a period of time where
they’re both serving on the Republic,
the then Ensign Kirk relieved a Lt. Finney of duty and noticed an open
circuit. That circuit should’ve been
noticed and corrected by Lt. Finney but Kirk corrected it himself and logged
what he did. This caused Finney to get
in trouble and drop him to the bottom of the promotion list. The two men eventually got past what had
happened to recover their friendship but since then Kirk rose all the way to
become one of the greatest Starfleet captains and Finney was still waiting for
his first command. Kirk repeats the story about how they were heading
into the ion storm so the plot demands that a member of the crew has to be put
in danger and the list said it was Finney’s turn. Kirk warns him when the yellow alert came
on he warned Finney that he had to get out of their or he would be dead. Kirk then activates the red alert and few
moments later jettisoned the pod.
However since the computer is
against Kirk and the computer is never wrong Commodore Stone tries to talk Kirk
into accepting a desk job, he feels that Kirk was probably stressed and panicked
and doesn’t think he should be sent a Federation Penal Colony because of it
since we know how bad they can be. Kirk
refuses and demands a court martial.
After Captain Kirk gives his
deposition to Commodore Stone, Jamie enters the room. His namesake is infuriated she looks at him
and calls him a murderer, Jamie’s reaction breaks his heart he tries to give
his sympathy and explain but she has no intention of listening to the Captain. And she is not the only one who is upset, when
Kirk visits the bar on Starbase 11 he is confronted by number of officers some
of whom he went to the Academy with all of them upset over the death of Lt.
Cmdr. Finney. It’s understandable
considering at this point the computer records all say that he did it, Captain
Kirk elects to leave the bar rather than confront men over the accusation that they have
already made up their minds.
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| Kirk's namesake and Finney's daughter |
As Kirk leaves McCoy runs into a
beautiful woman and attempts to flirt letting her know that she had just past
the famous Captain James T Kirk. She
said she is quite familiar with Kirk and McCoy asks if she’s a friend or foe to
which she replies friend. McCoy wonders
how Captain Kirk and have so many beautiful women amongst his circle of
friends. She introduces herself as Lt. Areel
Shaw and she asked Dr. McCoy if you’d be kind enough to arrange for Kirk to
meet her. McCoy agrees to let Kirk know
that she is here.
Captain Kirk meets with Lt. Shaw
and they get caught up on old times. It is very clear that the two of them at
one point had a real romantic relationship and they still generally cared about
one another. She gives him advice on how
the prosecuting attorney’s most likely to proceed and what he needs to defend
himself. She has even gone out of her
way to contact an attorney on his behalf a civilian named Samuel T. Cogley,
Esq. Kirk is pleased to see that she
still cares and is taking an active interest in this case not to mention
believing him as well. In a moment where
Captain Kirk forgot there is such a thing called judicial ethics he asks Lt.
Shaw why she can’t be his lawyer. Then
Lt. Shaw shows Kirk and the audience that there are no legal ethics in the 23rd
century and that she’s already involved in the case as the prosecuting
attorney. That’s right in the United
Federation of Planets is perfectly acceptable for one’s former significant
other to be their prosecuting attorney and no one thinks the wiser. Dr. McCoy’s earlier suggestion about possibly hooking up with Yeoman Rand no longer seems odd at all.
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| When you meet your old girlfriend and she tries to send you to jail |
Captain Kirk enters the quarters
that he’s been assigned to on Starbase 11 and finds Samuel T. Cogley Esq. has
already moved in. Yes he’s moved in, in the
23rd century when you need an attorney your attorney comes to live
with you. He also brings with him stacks
upon stacks of books, mostly law books, to help him in his case for Captain
Kirk. Kirk wonders why he does doesn’t
use a computer like normal people, Cogley
responds by explaining to the Captain that the law is in the books and you if
you want understand the law must you read in the books. That doesn’t make any sense to me but I
suppose a crazy lawyer has some advantages when it comes to courtroom strategy.
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| Kirk's new lawyer and roommate |
The court-martial begins Kirk is
asked if there’s any person involved in the court-martial the he feels
prejudiced against him to which he says no.
Lt. Shaw calls the USS Enterprise’s
personnel officer to explain the history that we already heard of why Finney
didn’t like Kirk. Then she has Dr. McCoy
testify with his knowledge of space psychology and asks him if Kirk knew that
Finney hated him then he might also hate Finney. That seems like some awfully bizarre logic
and Dr. McCoy says so at the time. Shaw has Spock testify to what happened on the
bridge to which Spock then declares that Captain Kirk is innocent in the
computer is in error because Captain Kirk cannot do what it is that he is accused
of doing. It seems to me at this point
things are going Kirk’s way: the motive Shaw assigns Kirk is highly in doubt
and the two of three witnesses were fans and friends of Captain Kirk who
testified that the evidence against him was faulty and against the nature of his
character.
Cogley never cross-examined any of
the witnesses that strikes me as fine as I think things were going his way
anyway and then he does something really bizarre: he has Captain Kirk take the
stand. Now most lawyers try to keep
their clients from testifying in their own cases however as we already
demonstrated: Cogley is somewhat crazy.
Captain Kirk’s long list of rewards is read out for the record and Kirk
confidently testifies to what happened on the bridge. Then Lt. Shaw delivers a devastating piece of
evidence she has a videotape of Captain Kirk ejecting the pod on yellow alert. It looks like Kirk is toast.
 |
| Ex-girlfriend with her game face |
As Captain Kirk’s fate is still
being decided Jamie now feeling guilty asks Captain Kirk to take a plea deal
and just accept the ground assignment.
The Captain is happy that Jamie no longer hates him but he’s going to
take his chances. Then Spock calls to let Captain Kirk know that he went over
the computer one last time hoping to find an error and he couldn’t, Kirk thanks
him for his efforts and lets him know he may be able to beat his next Captain
at chess. This makes Mr. Spock think and
he goes to play chess with the computer.
Dr. McCoy finds him and is surprised that he’s playing a game when the
Captain’s career is on the line. I personally
don’t see why so surprising people do lots of things in distress to distract
themselves particularly when there’s nothing they can do about with is
happening, however Mr. Spock had a plan and he is able to use the computer’s
chess program to proven an error.
Spock and McCoy show up in the
courtroom just as Cogley rests his case.
They explain they have new evidence and Cogley turns the tribunal and tells
that to the Commodore. Commodore Stone
shows some general interest in what this evidence might be, then Cogley goes on
to a long rant which is completely pointless.
Now I’m sure the two writers probably thought that the speech by Cogley
about rights was the greatest part of the episode and were so happy and proud to put it there. However it doesn’t make any sense for Cogley to go on his rant when the
Commodore has already asked about the evidence instead of pointing out that Cogley had
rested his case, which when you want to get technical about meant that their
time to present evidence was now over.
Nevertheless we get to hear his rant about rights and about how unfair
it was that Captain Kirk was not allowed to confront the computer.
The court-martial moves to the Enterprise where Mr. Spock explains to
the tribunal that he programed the computer with an equal amount of skill as his
own. Therefore if he played it and he
made no error the best he could hope for be a stalemate after a stalemate. Yet when he played the computer he beat it five
straight times, more times than would be logical to suggest he had just gotten
better. Someone had sabotaged the
computer and is only three people on the Enterprise
who had the authority to do that: Kirk, Spock, and Finney.
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| Spock outsmarting the computer |
The court-martial then moved to the
bridge of the Enterprise and nearly
the entire crew is transported to the Starbase with exceptional of the
court-martial tribunal, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, Lt. Uhura, unnamed helmsman, and Lt. Shaw. Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock take over the use of
technology of the Enterprise to track
the heartbeats of all who remain on the ship they find there is one extra
heartbeat hiding in engineering room.
This is bad because from there Finney has managed to sabotage the ship
making it difficult to turn back on and prevent it's orbit from decaying.
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| Tribunal on the bridge, imagine being Lt Uhura normally there is only one captain! |
Captain Kirk leaves the bridge and
heads to engineering to confront Finney.
When Kirk arrives Finney gets the drop on him with a phaser. Finney confesses to everything how he framed
Captain Kirk for his death in revenge for him stalling his career. Kirk tells Finney that they need to restore
the ships power and stabilize the orbit for if they don’t they will all die
and Kirk lets Finney know that his lawyer Cogley brought Jamie aboard ship.
Finney begins the panic in this gives Kirk an opening. Kirk attacks Finney with his amazing set of
fighting skills that are unmatched anywhere the side of the galaxy. Finney shows that he can fight too but his
skills are nowhere near as amazing as the graceful and vicious attacks that
Captain Kirk can impose on opponent. Kirk defeats Finney and then goes to undo this
to sabotage the Finney did to the ship saving it in the nick of time.
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| Finney looking good for a dead guy! |
The episode ends with Kirk now
fully exonerated saying goodbye to his former girlfriend and former prosecutor,
Lt. Shaw, he gives her a parting kiss. It’s
a good thing we established that there are no legal ethics the Federation or
conflicts of interest for that matter because she leaves telling him that
Samuel D Cogley is now representing Lt. Cmdr. Ben Finney in his court-martial.
Additional thoughts:
When I went to watch this episode again for the review I was determined from
memory that I was going to spend a good deal of time discussing what is portrayed
about Starfleet’s unrealistic and rigid standards for story purposes. We often
hear about that Starfleet Academy is so difficult that only the best of the
best can possibly get through it, yet we encounter incompetent officers from
the Academy all the time. In this story
Ben Finney makes a terrible mistake early in his career and because it is
logged on his record it makes it near impossible for him to get his own
command, at least according to Finney. I
remembered how silly I thought that was when I first watched the episode when I
was a teenager. In real life Chester W
Nimitz, when he was an ensign, was in charge of small ship that was run
aground. As a consequence he received a
letter of reprimand entered into his record.
This is did not stop him from becoming one of our great leaders of World
War II and one of the few naval officers to rise to the rank of fleet
admiral. It would seem to me is
organization that would still hold
onto a mistake made by officer decades after the event despite other
achievements in his career would tell me something very negative about that
organization. However as I re-watched this episode a new question emerged in my
brain: was Finney’s career as negatively impacted as he thought?
Let’s view this from Finney’s
perspective for second. He first meets
Captain Kirk when Kirk is only a cadet and he is a lieutenant serving as an
instructor. Later when serving together
on the Republic the incident happens
and ever since then Finney received only a single promotion to the rank of
lieutenant commander while Kirk rose all way to captain it is now Finney’s
boss. It is easy to see why this might
rub somebody the wrong way. But is
Finney making a huge error by comparing his career to Captain Kirk’s? One of the things we know about Kirk is that
he’s an exceptional officer, he’s considered to be the very best, and his rise
the position of Starfleet captain is unparalleled for its speed. Any officer comparing their careers to
Captain Kirk is going to view their own career probably negatively. Picture a
normal eighth-grader meeting a five-year-old child genius and then being
shocked when that same child genius graduates high school before him.
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| McCoy, a lieutenant commander just like Finney |
Now lets compare Finney’s career to other officers
around the same age. Finney is in his
late 30s possible early 40s. So he is
about the same age as Mr. Spock, Mr. Scott, and Dr. McCoy. Finney holds the rank of lieutenant
commander, the exact same rank as the three other characters mentioned. Also where is he in the command structure of
the ship? I mentioned in my review of
“Where No Man has Gone Before” that while the traditional Star Trek command structure for the Enterprise is Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock as first officer, Mr. Scott
as second officer, and Mr. Sulu as third officer. However up to this point in the series we
have yet to see command of the Enterprise
fall below Mr. Spock. So I’m not sure if
that is command structure is set up yet.
As I said about Gary Mitchell I thought it was a very high probability
that he in “Where No Man” may have been the second officer. It would make narrative sense command of the Enterprise to have started
Kirk/Spock/Mitchell/Scott, after losing Mitchell, Kirk still early on in his
command wanted, to have someone familiar in his command structure and he was
still getting to know Mr. Spock and Mr. Scott.
So he asks for Ben Finney to transfer over, a gold shirted lieutenant
commander, to serve as the ship’s second officer as well as records
officer. Then after the events in this episode Mr. Scott is bumped up to second officer and invites Mr. Sulu to be the third
officer.
 |
| Mr. Spock, also a lieutenant commander like Finney |
So Ben Finney was a lieutenant
commander and the second officer of starship, it doesn’t look like his career
is suffering that much. In addition, he
also wears the rank insignia of a full commander not a lieutenant commander. Now this could just be a wardrobe design
error or maybe, like our dear Mr. Spock, Finney is frocking because a promotion
is already scheduled. This guy looks
like he’s headed for full commander and most likely a first officer job somewhere. It doesn’t look like his career is doing so badly
after all. That is until he ruins it himself by focusing on the success of
Captain Kirk.
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| That look on your face when you wreak your career and Kirk still lives! |
One of the great unanswered
questions of this episode is: was Jamie involved and how much did she know and
when did she know it? In one moment
she’s angry at Captain Kirk blaming him and later she’s playing for mercy for
him. I just felt in every scene that she
was in on it but this is never answered. Finney’s goal was not for Kirk to be
convicted but for him to take a plea deal and accept the ground assignment. This would complete his revenge for Kirk would
now have a reduced Starfleet career just like he was forced to endure (at least
in his mind). I think there’s a third
Jamie scene the needed to be shown.
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| Kirk and his lawyer |
So about Captain Kirk’s chair, in
the altered recording we get a good look at what the top Captain Kirk’s chair
looks like. Now I always assumed that
the buttons on the captain’s chair just represented communication. This allows him to talk to engineering or
talk to the science department. I didn’t
realize he could just do red alert/yellow alert from his chair. If this is the case why does he always order
someone else to do it? Wouldn’t be faster for him to the push the button himself
rather than tell someone else to push a button?
Also he can jettison the pod from his chair? Shouldn’t that be an order he gives to
another station? It seems to me this is
a one-off deal for this rather poorly written episode.
On a positive note, I would like to note the social forward thinking that often make Star Trek great. Star Trek’s rather casual commitment to
diversity is part of what makes a show legendary. We know through Nichelle Nichols, that Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a fan of the series for that reason. Now Star
Trek was aired out of order, however when you watch the series in
production order—as I choose to for both myself and this blog—this is the first
episode where we encounter a Starfleet officer who’s higher than Captain
Kirk. We met a Federation official in
the previous episode but he himself was not part of Starfleet. Since the show takes place on a starship the
captain is typically speaking the highest ranking official we ever see on an
episode to episode basis. In this
episode however we get Commodore Stone, the first Starfleet official we see
Kirk reporting to. Not only does he
outrank our Captain, but he himself has held that position. He lectures Kirk on the pressures of being a
starship captain, as something they have both experienced. Commodore Stone is
an African-American, shown as a high ranking Starfleet officer in the episode
that aired a little under three years after the Civil Rights Act was
passed. In addition to the Commodore,
when Kirk is court-martialed there are three more captains who join the tribunal
one and they are quite a diverse panel.
Although I should point out they are all men.
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| Kirk's Tribunal |
FINAL GRADE 3 of 5
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