Episode Title: A Taste of Armageddon
Air Date: 2/23/1967
Written by Robert Hamner and Gene L. Coon
Directed by Joseph Pevney
Cast: William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk Leonard Nimoy as Lieutenant Commander Spock DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard H. McCoy AKA “Bones” James Doohan as Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott AKA “Scotty” David L. Ross as Lieutenant Galloway Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura Sean Kenney as Lieutenant DePaul Eddie Paskey as Eminiar Guard Bill Blackburn as Lieutenant Haley and Eminiar Technician Miko Mayama as Yeoman First Class Tamula Jeannie Malone as unnamed Yeoman Frank Da Vinci as Eminiar Guard Gene Lyons as Ambassador Robert Fox Sean Morgan as Lieutenant O'Neil Ron Veto as Eminiar Guard David Opatoshu as Anan 7 Barbara Babcock as Mea 3 Robert Sampson as Sar 6 John Burnside as Eminiar Guard Dick Cherney as Council Member Monty O'Grady as Council Member Al Roberts as Council Member Majel Barrett as Enterprise Computer
Ships: USS Enterprise NCC-1701
Planets: Eminiar VII, Vendikar
My Spoiler filled summary and review: The USS Enterprise is on a diplomatic mission to the planets of Eminiar VII and Vendikar. These worlds have not been visited by Starfleet in over fifty years, at last report the two worlds were at war. Lt. Uhura finally receives a signal from Eminiar, but unfortunately it is one telling their ship to go away. Eminiar are using a code that they learned from the Valiant, the pervious Federation starship that arrived over a century ago. The applied code #710 states: that under no circumstances are any Starfleet vessel to approach. However, today on the Enterprise the crew is joined by Ambassador Robert Fox, who has the power to counterman Starfleet’s highest general orders whenever he thinks it’s necessary. Fox, against objections from ship’s leadership, orders Captain Kirk to head to Eminiar anyway. Apparently this planet exists on a vital location for the Federation.
Captain Kirk with great reluctance obeys his orders, but since he is still in charge of the ship itself the Captain insists that he lead an away team down the planet to confirm that it is safe. The away team of Kirk, Spock, a Yeoman, and two security officers transport down and they are met by a delegation led by a very attractive woman named Mea 3. I want to point out now that she doesn’t fall in love or make out with Captain Kirk. There is a brief question to why the Enterprise ignored their request to be left alone but this quickly brushed aside and the Eminiar delegation is warm and welcoming. Captain Kirk and his crew are even taken to meet the High Council of Eminiar. Here Captain Kirk meets with the planet’s leader, Anan 7.
Anan 7 explains that he is disappointed the Enterprise has shown up because his planet is at war. This statement takes Kirk and Spock by surprise as the planet from orbit shows absolutely no evidence of any sort of war. They openly tell Anan this but he still insists they are. An alarm goes off and their planet is now under attack. Now the Enterprise away team gets really confused as Anan and the Council go over a map on their computer screen showing an attack. The council members began moaning over the destruction and vowing to retaliate. Despite the city they are in as one of the attacked places they can hear no explosions and tricorder readings show none on the entire planet. The entire war is simply a simulation.
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| Planet's war leaves Away Team very confused! |
We then get the explanation and it is a horrifying one. Considering the horrors and destruction of traditional war the planets of Eminiar VII and Vendikar came up with a deal during their conflict. They would only fight simulated battles on a computer; therefore neither planet would lose and part of its vital infrastructure. The catch was anyone who was reported as a casualty in the simulated battle must report to a disintegration chamber to be killed within twenty-four hours. This is how they fight their war and the reported causalities are about seven million annually. The war has now been fought like this for 500 years. Their entire culture is now based around it.
Spock points out to the Captain that there is certain logic to it. Anan is grateful for the approval to which Mr. Spock responds with one of Star Trek’s great lines pointing out that by saying he understood he is not giving approval.
It is at this point that things go from bad to worse. Anan explains that since the Enterprise was in orbit around Eminiar during the attack making it a legitimate target and Eminiar computers have recorded the starship as having been destroyed. Although they are not required to destroy the ship as that is the point of the simulation, they required to have the crew come down so they can all be put to death. The away team is not required to die as they aren’t part of the causalities but they are disarmed, detained, and communicators confiscated. They need to be hostages to insure compliance.
Anan and the Council try to trick the Enterprise crew by using a computer generated copy of the voice of Captain Kirk to lure the crew to their deaths. Mr. Scott, who as second officer is in command of the Enterprise, isn’t fooled for a second and raises the ship’s shields. Eminiar attacks but the Enterprise’s shields hold and the ship can keep its distance. Ambassador Fox is infuriated he wanted to go the planet as soon as “Kirk” called up, but Scotty held firm. Scotty vs. the Federation Ambassador continues as the small subplot to the episode.
It had already been revealed that Vulcans have tactile telepathic capabilities, but Spock is now going to take it to another level. He reaches out with his telepathy through a wall and pulls what seems like a Jedi mind trick twelve years before Obi-Wan Kenobi. The away team escapes now free the have the unfortunate experience of seeing one of the disintegration chambers in action. Mea, the woman who greeted them when they first arrived, is heading toward the disintegration chamber. When the away team last saw her was right after they were imprisoned where she had also informed them that she was one of casualties. In that conversation she told Kirk that her life was a dear to her as his was to him, but she had to do her duty or else disaster would befall her planet. Now here she was to fulfill that duty. The away team kidnaps her and they blow up the disintegration chamber with a disruptor they stole from the guards.
Ambassador Fox secretly communicates with Anan who convinces him that firing upon the Enterprise was just a technical error and they didn’t mean anything by it and they just really wanted the crew to come down. Fox, ever the optimist actually believes these packs of lies and as Eminiar powers down its weapons allowing the Enterprise to lower its shields, he transports down with his assistant to be promptly arrested and informed that he and his man are to be killed.
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| Spock with some of the greatest red shirts of all time. Lose the shirts and dress in enemy uniform is a good way to stay alive. |
Kirk and his away team take the prisoner with them back to their cell because they think no one will bother to look for them there. Kirk the has the Yeoman guard the Mea, and Spock will go with the two security officers now, dressed as Eminiar guards having stolen their uniforms, to attack more disintegration chambers. While this is going on Kirk is going to go and get their communicators and phasers back.
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| I really did want to see Mea test her luck with the Yeoman |
Kirk confronts Anan to force him to give back the communicators and phasers. Anan starts off remarkable cooperative but it turns out to be a ruse as Kirk is jumped by two Eminiar security officers. Kirk using his skill at fighting, which is unparalleled throughout the galaxy, nearly holds them off but since they have a weapon he is effectively recaptured.
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| Matching wits with Anan 7 |
While Kirk was getting recaptured Spock and the two security officers destroy another disintegration chamber and free the Ambassador. Fox agrees to follow Spock’s lead as they go off to find and rescue the Captain.
Anan tries one last time to get Kirk to order his own crew down to which Kirk does the opposite and instead shouts “General Order 24.” Kirk then tells Anan that the order he just gave to Scotty means the engineer will now lead the Enterprise in attack on Eminiar destroying its weapons and leveling its cites. Kirk boosts that when they do war they do the real thing. This causes the panic among the Eminar and this allows Captain Kirk to drop all pretense of weakness and attacks the guards with his full fighting skill unrestrained. Having never battled for real and only in simulation they were unprepared for the savagery of Kirk’s physical attack and were utterly defeated. Spock arrives to see that all is well.
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| Mr. Spock rescues the Ambassador |
Kirk and Spock then destroy the battle simulators. Anan then claims that he has condemned them to death. Kirk declares that he has done the opposite. The problem Kirk tells his former captors is that they made war easy. War is supposed to be horrible that is why we try to avoid it. By turning it into a simple inconvenience to society they have allowed the death toll to clime at an inconceivable rate resulting in millions or perhaps billions of death more than necessary. Kirk concedes we all have a drive to kill but also power to put that drive aside. Ambassador Fox finally redeems himself by offering his skills as a negotiator. Kirk says that those on Vendikar are mostly likely just as terrified as they are. Since they have a way to directly communicate with their high council they should use it to put an end to this destructive nightmare.
In the end Fox stays behind to help the two planets sort this out. As the Enterprise leaves Kirk confides to Spock that he felt the duel terror that each planet felt in potentially losing their way of life and having real warfare come down would convince them both to come to the negotiation table.
Additional thoughts: In the previous episode, “The Return of the Archons,” Kirk and Spock discuss the Prime Directive briefly and Kirk quickly dismisses it. He does so under a technicality that a society with all actions being governed by a computer was not “developing” so the Prime Directive did not apply. In later episodes Captain Kirk will use another technicality of prior interference that needs correcting.
Neither of those is the case here and I would go so far to say that this is the only time Kirk directly violates Prime Directive. You can try to make excuses and blame Fox for creating the situation or invoke the right of self-defense when Anan and the rest of Eminar tried to kill the crew of the Enterprise. Those excuses however can only be used to justify Kirk doing just enough to rescue the Ambassador and get back to the Enterprise and have an escape. Kirk goes much farther than that he is altering the course of two neighboring worlds with a shared history. He demands they change at gunpoint or he will destroy their civilization himself. Captain Kirk has decided that there is something about this developing society that he does not like and has decided to change it, so much for the Prime Directive.
It should be noted that when this episode was written World War II had only been over for a couple of decades. So it was living memory of cities of Europe and Asia that were left in ruin with hardly stone on top of stone. Not only had the human cost been enormous but the structural costs were debilitating and interfering with long-term recovery. So the idea of being able to fight war without knocking buildings over just killing people started to become more popular. The military even developed a type of weapon to do just that called the Neutron Bomb, although it was never used. Kirk points out in this episode that such an idea is conceivably worse than traditional war. Since traditional war saps resources it demands to be ended, war that preserves resources is like added fuel to fire it allows the burning to continue with a long term greater human cost.
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| Dresden |
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| Tokyo |
Another critique of 20th century society that this episode explores is the state of modem American warfare that was still relatively young when this episode aired and has unfortunately continued on for the last fifty years. From the US Civil War to the end of World War II the United States method of waging war was conducted under the theory of Total War. When the entire society was committed to the conflict that was complete with a draft, resource rationing, and war bond sales. All in an effort to ensure victory for the United States with the complete and unconditional surrender of the enemy. Then in the aftermath of World War II the Iron Curtin fell and the Cold War was on. A war without direct battles but two powers locked in conflict with nuclear missiles always aimed at one other with the promise of mutual assured destruction. Proxy wars would be fought in Korea and Vietnam, and with President Johnson not wanting to interfere with his social programs promised that the United States could produce “butter and guns” and wage a military conflict without civilian sacrifice.
In the decades since this episode aired it has only gotten worse. There is no draft and the country can engage in multiple military conflicts without effecting the civilian population in any which way. Modern war in the second half of the 20th century would become the exclusive burden on military families. As we began the 21st century those families would be tossed around in our federal budget like any other causal expense. In 2006 many soldiers were forced to buy their own equipment and their families had to send them armor because it wasn’t in our war budget to provide it for them. Also during the second Iraq war in the late 2000s military caskets would be returned home under cover of darkness and out of sight so not to disturb the civilian population. I want to point out I am writing this as a lifelong civilian.
Back to the episode however, it is a tad disappointing that the limits of an hour long program prevented us from getting a full look at Eminiar society that would have been fascinating to examine. They have reduced war deaths in their society to a simple sacrifice that must continue in order to preserve their culture. This reminds me of how we as a society tend to view car accidents. We see cars correctly as necessary part of our transportation infrastructure that allows a twenty to twenty-first century economy. The price however is accidents are fairly frequent and deaths are even common. I was in a car accident myself when I was sideswiped last December. It was the second one in my life where both cars were moving. Everyone I know has lost at least one relative. I have lost an uncle in 2003 and a cousin in 2016.
Yet we try to prevent car accidents and we work to make cars safer. This war went on for 500 years and they just keep plugging. I imagine Eminiar literature probably focuses a lot on this continuing sacrifice. Providing heroes that the condemned can identify with, characters who want to live but realize they must report or the world as they know and love will soon be destroyed. “What type of person would put their own life and self-interest against the survival of the planet?” Their cinema must have horror movies that star sympathetic people who don’t want to die who end up bringing down the hellfire. “The Man Who Didn’t Report” is a film that terrifies audiences everywhere.
Captain Kirk is never disciplined for his actions in this episode despite the clear Prime Directive violation. In one of the novels, and I forget which one, they were talking about this case it was explained that officials for the United Federation of Planets were so horrified at the millions who walked willing to their death in disintegration chambers for five straight centuries they simply turned the other way.
FINAL GRADE 5 of 5
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