THE SMARTEST STUPID PERSON IN THE UNIVERSE

 

Episode Title:  Patterns of Force

Air Date: 2/16/1968

Written by John Meredyth Lucas

Directed by Vincent McEveety

Cast: William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk    Leonard Nimoy as Commander Spock             DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard H. McCoy AKA “Bones”              James Doohan  as Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott AKA “Scotty”        Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura                 Bill Blackburn as Lieutenant Hadley           Walter Koenig as Ensign Pavel Chekov                Richard Evans as Isak             Eddie Paskey as Trooper                   Frank Da Vinci as Soldier at Party              Roger Holloway as Soldier at Party                       Valora Noland as Daras               Jeannie Malone as Blonde in Audience          Skip Homeier as Melakon                       David Brian as John Gill                 Patrick Horgan as Eneg            William Wintersole as Abrom             Gilbert Green as S.S. Major               Lev Mailer as S.S. Lieutenant             Ed McCready as S.S. Trooper          Peter Canon as Gestapo Lieutenant         Paul Baxley as First Trooper         Chuck Courtney as Davod        Bart La Rue as Newscaster         Benjie Bancroft as.          Soldier at Party       Sean Morgan               as Second Trooper        Joe Paz as S A Brigadier     Basil Poledouris as Trooper       Robert Strong as Soldier at Party

Ships: USS Enterprise NCC-1701

Planets:  Ekos and Zeon

My Spoiler filled summary and review: The Enterprise is on a mission to the planet Ekos looking for a lost Federation official named John Gill.  Ekos is in a system with another planet named Zeon.  Both planets have humanoid populations but Zeon is the more technologically and culturally advanced of the two having achieved both space flight and planetary unified government.  Ekos however has been fractured into small warring states for a number of years.  John Gill was sent there as an observer.  Gill himself is a professional and accomplished historian.  He was Captain Kirk’s history professor at Starfleet Academy.  Spock didn’t take his class but had read his publications and was impressed with his analysis. Spock especially liked Gill’s interpretation of history through causes and motivations rather than dates and events.   

Travel the universe and still run into Nazis!

Suddenly the Enterprise is attacked with an interplanetary missile with an armed nuclear warhead launched from Ekos.  They manage to destroy with ease but that raises another concern as Ekos were centuries away from such technology at last report.  Kirk decides to that he and Spock will have to investigate directly.  Kirk doesn’t want the Enterprise to stick around in orbit too long.  So he has Scotty drop them off and then come pick them up at a set time.  To insure and immediate extraction Kirk has Dr. McCoy place emergency transponders under their skin. 

Not so good at playing Nazi

Kirk and Spock beam down wearing civilian clothing that their records say match the local population.  When they get there they find a young man being chased by a squad of SS Nazis.  Wearing uniforms that seem to have come straight out of the 1930s or 40s, the squad beats up the poor man and drags him away.  Kirk wanted to interfere but their code of non-interference.  Thinking about this Kirk asks Spock about what are the odds that another culture could have developed an ideology identical to the Nazi party of Earth.  Spock says it’s impossible and I have lot more to say about that in the additional comments section because I don’t want to rant here.

Let's play the game who can get whipped the longest and not cry!

Kirk and Spock then come across a public broadcast.  In the broadcast they learn that the Nazis have managed to dominate the entire planet, which actually makes them much more successful than the Earth Nazis. Their target however in place of Jews and other minorities is the people of the planet Zeon.  They are trying to find every Zeonian living on Ekos and eliminate them before launching and interplanetary attack.  Kirk and Spock also learn of a new hero of the fatherland, a woman by the name of Daras.  Kirk reacts with some amusement when the broadcaster refers to the Enterprise as invader who was “ultimately destroyed.”  Lastly, they learn that John Gill is the Führer.  That last part is the most shocking of them all.  Kirk thought Gill was one of the gentlest people he had ever known. 

They decide they need to confront Gill, the two beat up some Nazis and steal their uniforms.  After leaving the two Nazis beaten and naked, Kirk and Spock head to Nazi headquarters. However they are caught immediately when Spock is forced to remove his helmet and expose his ears.  Next we see Kirk and Spock taking a whipping in the Nazi prison.  After the two Starfleet officers are put in a cell.  They find the Zeonian from earlier who the Nazis had captured.  His name is Isak and from him they learn that his people had sending over groups to Ekos to help them become more civilized and develop their planet.   While they received some support from the locals this also triggered the rise of the Nazi Party.  Kirk and Spock dig out their tracers and use the crystals inside to build a make-shift laser.  They beat up and steal the uniform of another Nazi and use the stolen uniform and some pick pocketing skills to get access to their lab where they are holding their communicators.  They find the communicators in pieces but take them anyway. 

Isak takes them to the Underground a place where the Resistance hides from the Nazis.  They are introduced to Abrom, their leader, and he is skeptical but trusts Isak’s recommendation.  Isak also learns that his wife has been killed brutally by the SS.  Later, it looks like they are discovered but it turns out Daras, the woman from the newsreel is actually a resistance spy.  She had been rewarded for exposing her father as a traitor to the party.  It was his idea so she could get into a trusted position.  Kirk revels to the Resistance that he and Spock are from another world, in fact a Federation of Planets, and the Führer is one of their people gone rogue. 

As a hero of the Fatherland, Daras is invited to party headquarters for the announcement of the Final Solution to the Zeonian problem.  As they sneak into the party they are able to get a glace of Gill, who was behind a secure bunker and he looked out of it.  The speech he was giving on camera seemed to be dubbed over.  Now once again in communication with the Enterprise, Kirk has Lt. Uhura send down Dr. McCoy dressed as a Nazi military physician.  After almost nearly getting caught, and especially odd that they didn’t considering they met the Chairman while they were imprisoned, Kirk gets his team into the same room with Jon Gill. When he is revived Kirk is able to confront him about what he had down.  Gill explained that the world was tearing itself apart and he felt that National Socialism was the answer so long as the racist and genocidal elements were removed.  He claimed the Nazi was the most efficient state Earth ever knew.  Spock clarifies his arguments for Kirk.  However it seems Gill was very wrong and that this type of government naturally generates hatred.    Deputy Führer Melakon is now the real power.  He seized control, drugged Gill to use a figurehead, and is waging the war on the people of Zeon. 

Escape with homemade lasers

As he recovers Gill gets on the radio again, to tell them that they have all been betrayed, ends the war, and recalls their space fleet.  A gun fight then ensues and the Führer and Deputy Führer are both killed.  It turns out the Chairman of the Party was also a Resistance spy with the two major leaders dead, he and Daras feel that they can lead their planet and Zeon back to peace.  Kirk and Spock are both hopeful that the two planets will one day join the Federation together.

I can play Nazi and pick pocket

Additional thoughts: Back when I was eleven in 1992 my cousin Tim who was about fifteen explained the concept of a “really smart dumb person” to me.  The example Tim gave was kid he went to school with who generally got good grades and was regarded by his teachers as rather smart.  “But,” he said, “if he were given a basketball that had the autographs of every member of the Dream Team on it, he would go out and try to play basketball with it.”

In response to the horror in my eleven year old mind of someone carelessly abusing such a precious object I asked him what he would do.  Tim answered “Simple, I would have him pass me the ball and then I would run away with it.  He is so dumb he wouldn’t understand what had just happened.  He would just figure that without his basketball he couldn’t play basketball anymore so he would just go home and do his homework.” 

Later I would learn the phrase “people smarts” or “street smarts.” It appears John Gill was deprived of those traits.  He might have been good as a historian but like my cousin’s classmate he was a really smart dumb person.  I mean who goes to a planet whose native inhabitants are ravaged by war and thinks “You know what this chaotic planet needs? Nazism, and lots of it!”   Even if you thought that there could be a begin sort of fascism that may create order from chaos, why didn’t you make up your own symbols, salutes, and all the rest?   He could do something like the Wave Experiment for example.  No, he decides what he must do is plagiarize the entire Third Reich.  You get the impression that Gill must have been thinking about this for quite some time. 

Not really a Nazi

The funny thing is fascism once had its defenders and admires even in the United States.  Joseph Kennedy is a famous example.  However this was before its true nature became exposed to the entire world.  Gill has knowledge looking back at the Nazis that is centuries old to say he should have known better is the understatement of the millennium.

 There are also some holes in the narrative.  Primarily how long was Gill there for?  In the beginning they state that Kirk had studied under him at the Academy and that he has been out of contact for months.  Now granted how long he was out of contact is not necessarily an indication of how long he was there, however given everyone actions it seems like he had been there for only a short time.  Until we actually get to Ekos.  Daras states that she grew up admiring him this would indicate that he had been there her whole life, and no one in the Federation was aware of his activities. 

A meeting of real Nazis and fake Nazis

Gill had to be there long enough to come to the conclusion the planet was helpless on its own, form a Nazi party, take over one of the states, conqueror the rest of the planet, then get overthrown and drugged by the Deputy Führer.  I think he would have to have been there for at least a decade and a half.  He must have left right after teaching Kirk’s class.

Asleep at the wheel

There are also problems with in the metaphors.  In this the people from the planet Zeon are more advanced and had been coming to Ekos to try and help them catch up.  The Ekosians see them as interfering outsiders, and despite their benevolence that is not entirely wrong even with the Nazi reaction definitely being wrong.   In real life the Jewish community had been living amongst the gentiles of Europe for almost two thousand years.  Some victims of the Holocaust had been war heroes for Germany in World War I, despite the Nazi demand to drive them out the truth was they were a part of these European communities not apart from them. 

You feel as if the average human "people smarts" IQ went up five points!

I am glad in this episode we got to see the effects of contamination like in A Piece of the Action, as opposed to the tired troupe of Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development.  Although I was sort of taken back when Kirk asks Spock what the chances of a parallel world forming a Nazi party with the same symbols and set of beliefs as Earth’s Nazis, Spock’s response was to tell the Captain it was all but impossible.  At which point Kirk should have responded with, “Are you sure, Mr. Spock?  Didn’t we come across a 20^th century type Roman Empire just a few months ago?  What about that planet last year with the immortal kids that looked like Earth from the 1960s?  Impossible? We run into this stuff all the time?”  It would have been better if Spock just quoted a number.

FINAL GRADE 3 of 5