Name: The Prometheus Design
Authors: Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath
Publication Date: 3/15/1982
Publisher: Pocket Books (Star Trek #5)
Page Number: 190
Historian’s Note:
The story occurs shortly after the events of The Motion Picture
Cast of Characters: Rear Admiral/ Acting Captain James T. Kirk Commander
Spock Dr. Leonard H. McCoy
AKA “Bones” Commander
Montgomery Scott AKA “Scotty”
Lieutenant Commander Hikaru
Sulu Lieutenant Commander Nyota
Uhura Lieutenant Pavel Chekov Lieutenant
Dobius Lieutenant Shirn O'tay Dr. Christine Chapel Yeoman Second Class Trian Admiral
Savaj Belen Trath
Starships and/or Starbases: USS Enterprise NCC-1701,
small unnamed scout ship
Planets: Helva
My Spoiler filled summary and review: Kirk is leading the landing party on a mission to the planet Helva. Helva is a primitive pre-warp society with a people who all have what humans would view as “devil’s horns.” That is a perfect place for hell to break loose. For Kirk and most of the landing party start having hallucinations and memory loss. They are all beamed up and go to sickbay for observation. Then sealed orders come in to rendezvous with a scout ship to pick up a certain someone. This person is a very important Vulcan, and his name was Savaj and he was Starfleet admiral who still retained his commission for special circumstances such as this.
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| The Enterprise |
Admiral Savaj gets right down to
business and announces that due to his memory loss and hallucinations Captain
Kirk is to be immediately relieved of command.
Savaj then states that Spock will be placed in command. However, Kirk is allowed to remain on duty as
first officer, despite the memory loss and hallucinations. In addition, the Vulcan Admiral openly states
he doesn’t know why Kirk was ever allowed to command Spock who is his clear
mental superior. Savaj seeks to prove
this by beating Kirk at chess and suggesting Spock had been going easy on him,
all while in front of the crew.
Savaj and Spock decide to go down on an away mission themselves. Spock also seems to have changed personalities claiming he is on “Vulcan Command Mode” and he insists that he must be deferred to all the time without question. When pointed out that was not how they do things Spock seems not to care. Before he and the Admiral leave, Spock gives strict orders to Kirk, who is left in charge despite the memory loss thing, that if they don’t return, they are to retreat and request an all-Vulcan ship to take over the operation.
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| Spock starts to act weird under Vulcan peer presure |
Kirk being Kirk he is not going to
let Spock die. Instead, when the Vulcans
lose contact, and are captured Kirk launches a rescue mission and saves them. Spock is as angry as a Vulcan can get and
relieves Kirk confining him to quarters.
Despite this we learned something important: that there are other
entities at work. An advanced alien
species was kidnapping the locals and doing experiments on them. Like humans use to claim strange green men
did back in the 1950s. They suggest this
means there might have been something to that. Kirk and his landing party in
the rescue attempt even took some of these aliens hostage.
Later there is an attempt on Spock’s life and Kirk is the main suspect. Giving Kirk’s memory problems it is reasoned he was not a premeditated killer. A security officer is posted with him at all times, however that security officer views Kirk as his natural captain so it doesn’t really restrain him much. Kirk uses his freedom of movement to interrogate one of the prisoners and gains information that the two Vulcans both find useful.
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| Spock is having a difficult command |
A four-person landing party of
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Savaj is formed and they head down to the planet’s
service. They get captured by the invaders, who are known as the
Designers. One of the Designers’
scientists is a woman named Belen. She
is beautiful and she seems to have an attraction to Captain Kirk that McCoy
wants the Captain to exploit. Kirk does
actively flirt with her. 
Kirk with lady alien
Trath the male Designer is not as
impressed as Belen. Through the two of
them the landing party learns that they are trying to solve the problem of
Hell’s Kitchen or Prometheus Design. This we are told is not a reality TV show
but rather a theory that states that intelligent lifeforms would rather live
violent more exciting lives than quiet safe ones. Trath offers to leave the Milky Way galaxy
alone in exchange for Kirk surrendering himself as a specimen. Spock refuses to allow this but Savaj
overrules him. Although to the Admiral’s
credit he does offer himself up first.
The Designers end up taking the
entire landing party for their experiments and Kirk interrupts one of them
between the two Vulcans. The Designers
have learned enough and decided to let everyone go. We learn they are behind everything including
arranging Savaj to come to the Enterprise to relive Captain Kirk of
duty. All odd behavior from everyone is
explained by said aliens and Spock turns command of the Enterprise to
Kirk. Savaj lets Kirk know he has his respect even though he spent almost the
entire book disrespecting him.
Additional thoughts: This was an odd story basically its “what if Kirk and Spock switch jobs.” I have this impression that the authors had this idea for a while and I assume when they first conceived of it, the setting would have been on the Enterprise’s classic five-year mission not the post-Motion Picture five-year mission. The reason I think this is Kirk is a Starfleet rear admiral who is acting as a captain. The book acknowledges this, which is a detail I wish books that focuses on the second five-year mission would focus on more. Such as, how does Kirk’s flag commission affect his dealings with other starship captains and Starbase commodores? However, this book doesn’t do that instead after acknowledging it, the books proceed to ignore it. In particular, if Kirk were to be relieved of his command wouldn’t his flag commission automatically just reactivate since his second captain’s commission was just a temporary thing made to give him control of the Enterprise in order to deal with V’ger. Instead, Savaj refers to Kirk as “commander” even though there was no stated rank demotion. Now the only thing that might make me think the authors always intended this to be right after The Motion Picture, is maybe they felt Kirk was a jerk to Will Decker and thought he deserved some of the same treatment. Of course, that would only make sense if Savaj took command. The bigger issue I have is if Kirk’s mental problems were the reason he couldn’t be trusted with continued command, by what logic can he be the first officer? As first officer he is one breath away from being in charge and for part of the story he is. When Kirk goes against Spock’s orders, I don’t know how they can logically hold him to account because according to them he is mentally compromised anyway.
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| Maybe the authors felt like Kirk deserved some karma. |
One of the strengths these authors
have is the way they can incorporate past episodes and book adventures into
their story, particularly how they affect each characters’ thought process
going into certain things. For example,
the episode “Obsession” is mentioned frequently as a moment that divided Kirk
and Spock. In addition, Kirk makes
reference to Omne who was the main antagonist in the authors’ pervious books The
Price of the Phoenix and The Fate of the Phoenix. So, I found it surprising that there was no
reference to “The Gallio Seven,” an episode where Spock in command of a
shuttlecraft crew and finds it extremely difficult to lead a crew of humans due
to their vast differences in emotional state and approaches. As Spock has difficulty enforcing his Vulcan
Command Mode, it seems that someone should bring that up.
I'm amazed this didn't come up more.
A small objection I had in this book was the chess game. When Savaj beat him and suggested Spock was going easy on him. Kirk's monologue suggests Spock defeat multiple times when they first started playing. This is false. These authors have a encyclopedia-like knowledge of classic Star Trek, this is just wrong. When Kirk and Spock play chess Kirk wins. Spock is a genius but he is not a natural military technician that Kirk is. When ever they are shown playing Spock is frustrated by Kirk's "illogical" moves. In"Court Marital" when it looked like Kirk was going to lose his command he joked with Spock that maybe he might be able to beat his next captain in chess.
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| This is something that Kirk wins! |
This book reminds me a little bit
of the short story In the Maze. In
that story the Enterprise encounters a species so advanced that it
doesn’t recognize their intelligence and uses them as laboratory guinea
pigs. The difference is once the alien
scientist realizes he is dealing with sentient beings becomes extremely
remorseful and overcome with guilt.
Where these aliens know how smart humans are but in their view it’s not
smart enough. The best line in this
story is when is arguing with Belen about what they are doing Belen counters
that humans do the same thing. Kirk
defends humankind with the line, “yes, but we don’t do so on intelligent
animals.” To which Belen replies,
“Neither do we.”
The ending of the story seems
rushed and is very unsatisfying. The
Designers feel they learned all they need to and just give up and let everyone
go. It was almost the authors were
getting bored the story and wanted to be done.
Well, I can relate to that because I was bored with the story too.
Should it be canon: I would say no. There are too many weird things going on in
this book. In addition to the whole Kirk/Spock
thing, there is also the idea that 1/3 of Starfleet is all-Vulcan and is
governed by different rules. I don’t think Starfleet should be a segregated
society.
Cover Art: The
cover art is nice. It has Kirk and Spock in their TMP duds in the front. In
background are the native Helvan in front of a mountain range.
Final Grade: Final Grade 2 of 5
