Sunday, September 25, 2011

#72 (3-16): The Mark of Gideon


THE PLOT

The Enterprise is orbiting the planet Gideon, where Kirk is assigned to open negotiations for the extremely secretive people of this world to hopefully join the Federation. Kirk has been instructed to beam down alone. He does so... only to find himself back on the Enterprise. An Enterprise whose crew has mysteriously vanished!

It turns out, Kirk isn't on the real Enterprise at all. He's on a duplicate Enterprise, with his only companion being the lovely Odona (Sharon Acker).  Odona claims to have no memory of what happened to her before awakening in this replica. As Kirk tries to figure out this puzzle, Spock is aboard the real Enterprise, pushing for answers from Gideon's maddeningly bureaucratic leader, Hodin (David Hurst). When Hodin flatly refuses to allow Spock to beam down to the planet to search for Kirk, Spock contacts Starfleet Command, demanding authorization to mount a rescue.


CHARACTERS

Capt. Kirk: Spends the bulk of the episode in a state of bewilderment, wandering the corridors of his apparently deserted ship. When he encounters Odona, he is certainly happy of the company and appreciative of her charm and beauty. But he never quite trusts her story, and at several points he presses her for answers. "Captain Ham" doesn't get to come out in force until late in the episode, when he tries to talk Hodin into a better solution. Then things become unintentionally funny, as Kirk talks about having his own "hopes... for Odona." Ultimately, it falls to Spock to save the day, while Kirk is about as useful as a dead battery.

Mr. Spock: Leonard Nimoy's performance as a particularly frustrated Spock is one of this episode's highlights. Spock's frustration at dealing with the contradictory statements of the diplomats on Gideon and the bureaucracy within Starfleet is quite amusing, as he deadpans that the purpose of diplomacy is evidently to make a crisis last as long as possible. His final decision and his very calmly stated parting threat to Hodin are well-portrayed, helping to make this one of the strongest Spock episodes in some time.

Hot Alien Space Babe of the Week: Odona could easily have been another simpering, wide-eyed blonde for Kirk to alternately protect and bully. Fortunately, Sharon Acker is a good actress, and brings more to the part than is necessarily there on the page. She is genuinely lovely, enough so to shine through a rather silly outfit. Though burdened with a labored infodump about her planet's severe overpopulation, Acker manages to convey some of the feeling that would go with belonging to a culture where personal space of any kind is an impossibility.

Villain of the Week: David Hurst is also good as Hodin, a man who at first seems to simply be one of the series' Annoying Bureaucrats of the week but who is gradually revealed to be much more. Hodin is the most interesting kind of villain: He is doing something that he genuinely believes is right. His sympathy for both Kirk and Odona is genuine, but he sees no other solution that would solve his people's problems while at the same time maintaining their values. The script fails to properly challenge him on this - but that's a script failure, and should not take away from Hurst's intelligent performance.


THOUGHTS

The Mark of Gideon is another seriously flawed episode, but at least it's more a "near miss" than an outright misfire. The idea of a planet reduced to misery by overpopulation has potential, which unfortunately is mostly unrealized. Shots of extras shuffling around under green-tinted lights are reminiscent of bad off-off Broadway theatre, and end up provoking unintented comedy out of what should be a dire situation. The writers would have been better off sticking to just having Odona or Hodin talk about their planet's dilemma, as those scenes work considerably better.

For about half an hour, I enjoyed the episode more than not. But once Hodin's plan is revealed, the script insists that a complex situation is actually quite simple. Any viewer should be able to think of better alternatives than the ones Kirk provides to Hodin. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the very fact of an intersteller Federation with spaceships and off-world colonies suggest a potential solution?  Even if Gideon is a world of isolationists, we've seen any number of uninhabited planets during the series' run.

Kirk doesn't make a peep about relocating some of the planet's people, though. Instead, he makes a bizarrely fascistic counteroffer of mass sterilization. For his part, Hodin should try asking some Native American tribes about how much joy is brought to a disease-free society when outside illnesses are introduced - an obvious parallel with which a better script would have either Kirk or Spock confront him. But no, we must have our tragic ending, and damn all plotholes.

Speaking of which... How were Hodin and his people able to create an exact replica of the Enterprise, so exact that it fooled Kirk? Never mind the expense involved, never mind that the technology and resources involved would have been at least as easily applied establishing off-world colonies for some of Gideon's overflowing population. How did Hodin get the specifications to create an identical starship? I suppose there's probably some fanfic or a Pocket Books novel somewhere tying this plothole together with Starfleet's refusal to help Spock to create a huge conspiracy... but I just see it as a big, gaping plothole.

I should repeat that I consider The Mark of Gideon to be more a "near miss" than a turkey. Although the "duplicate Enterprise" angle is blatantly a cost-saving measure, the early scenes of Kirk wandering the empty corridors are effective. Guest performances are strong, and Spock gets one of his better roles this season. It's just a shame the script is such a mess.


Rating: 4/10






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1 comment:

  1. Actually, they couldn't solve their population problem with a colony. An entire planetful of people with uncontrolled reproduction could produce far more people than a starship could carry away. Heinlein has a story about this somewhere, but the numbers are such that ships can't take people off the planet faster than their numbers can be replaced by new births..

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