(by Collin R. Skocik)
Once before, Scotty fell in love. He was head-over-heels for Lt. Carolyn Palamas—but oblivious to the fact that she was completely uninterested in him. Even when she ran off with Apollo, Scotty remained utterly devoted to her, risking his life for her numerous times and incurring Apollo’s wrath. Now he’s in love again, this time with Lt. Mira Romaine, a woman who finally returns his feelings. And Scotty doesn’t love halfway. He wears his heart on his sleeve. When Mira falls prey to the mysterious “Lights of Zetar,” the collective consciousness of the last hundred of the extinct planet Zetar, he dotes over her with a single-mindedness that’s both touching and annoying.
Kirk’s log entry at the beginning of the episode is beautiful: “When a man of Scotty’s years falls in love, the loneliness of his life is suddenly revealed to him. His whole heart once throbbed only to the ship’s engines. He could talk only to the ship. Now he can see nothing but the woman.” That pretty much sums up Scotty’s behavior in this episode. Mira is everything to him. For the first time in the series, his personal feelings interfere with his on-the-job performance. Kirk ought to be able to identify that, since he went through the same thing with Elaan, and he holds his patience in check for the most part—though when he finds that Scotty is in sickbay looking after Mira, he does snap, “Is the doctor there, or will I find him in engineering?”
We’re getting pretty late in the series now and there’s a melancholy sense that it’s all coming to an end. Scotty may really settle down with Mira. (Some fans have speculated that they did get married, although she’s never mentioned again.) The three-year series has gone by awfully fast, but at the same time it’s been a deeply fulfilling odyssey. It’s a shame it’s starting to wind down, but we’re seeing in these late episodes that these characters who we’ve followed through the most incredible experiences of their lives have a shot at happiness in their post-Enterprise life. Certainly no one could have anticipated that in ten years they’ll be back on the Enterprise resuming their adventures! Spock and McCoy continue their companionable relationship, and Spock—who in the previous episode demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of human quirks—has no difficulty in understanding Scotty’s love for Mira.
In this episode we visit Memory Alpha, a galactic library complex which contains all the knowledge and history and art and literature from every Federation member. It’s a treasure house, a futuristic Library of Alexandria. And tragically, it meets the same fate. This is precisely the kind of nightmare that keeps me attached to paper books. Technological advancement is great and I’m all for it, but our digital media storage is simply too fragile a thing to invest our knowledge and history and literature to. It makes a great supplement, but I don’t like the way it’s taking over completely. Many books are now only available as e-books. We always used to back up our important files by printing them, not by merely storing them on a backup disc. And a lot of us don’t even bother with that. It would be so easy to wipe it all out. Nuclear war, an EMP effect, or a major solar storm could erase the collective knowledge of our civilization. And even if not, file formats become obsolete, files corrupt, new means of data storage constantly come along, and of course everything costs money—it’s very comforting to me that my personal library is untouchable by any computer viruses or crashes or companies changing the rules. My beautiful copy of Moby-Dick will always be on the shelf ready to be read at any time. Yes, paper books can be destroyed by fire and flood, and they do age—but they’re much more permanent and reliable than computer files. Find me a computer file that’s still readable after a mere ten years. My Arthur C. Clarke collection will still be readable—if fragile—a hundred years from now.
Curiously, Kirk thinks nothing of killing the Lights of Zetar to keep them from “possessing” Mira. His moral stance is quite understandable. “You’re entitled to your own life,” he says, “not another’s.” In “Spock’s Brain,” he laid it on the line, saying “No one may kill a man, not for any reason. It cannot be condoned.” Yes, it’s a bit hypocritical coming from a man who has called himself a soldier and who has killed, but nevertheless his ethical position is pretty consistent; he has killed, but either in self-defense or to save lives. Yet when he destroys the Lights, he is rendering a civilization extinct. Odd that there’s no discussion of the ethical problem there; does Mira’s life count more than the lives of the last hundred of Zetar? If so, why? Because it was her body first? I can buy that argument, but it’s a discussion they don’t have.
Strange for a series about space travel, but this is the only time in the original series that we see someone weightless. The Enterprise has a perfect artificial gravity field that always works, even when life support goes out. That’s understandable, since it’s hard to simulate weightlessness realistically, but it does often stand out to me that the vessels in Star Trek behave more like ships at sea than spacecraft. Not that that’s entirely unrealistic; prolonged weightlessness has numerous detrimental effects, and a five-year mission will certainly require some sort of artificial gravity. It might be simpler and more realistic if the inside of the saucer section were to rotate—but then that would only provide full gravity at the rim. Who knows what advancements we’ll make in the next three hundred years? In the twenty-third century, perhaps we really will have some sort of controlled gravity field. So many things that Star Trek predicted have already come true. In fact, in order for warp drive to be possible, gravity control may need to be achieved first.
The quest of the Lights of Zetar to preserve themselves is similar to Sargon’s people, but they’re more selfish. The desire to survive is innate and understandable, but there’s no complexity to their desire. Sargon at least promised humanity great technological miracles; the Lights just want to “live out our lives.” Sargon and Thalassa only wished to borrow Kirk and Dr. Mulhall’s bodies long enough to build androids, but the Lights want to take Mira’s body permanently, and they have already killed numerous people in their search for the right host. Kirk can hardly be blamed for so callously destroying them. But really, more than anything else, this is Scotty’s love story. Even though Mira is never mentioned again, there is a ring of permanence to Scotty’s relationship with her, especially at the end when he says “Now we have all the time in the world.”
(Collin R. Skocik is a fan of the Star Trek franchise and has written synopses of all 79 episodes of Star Trek’s original series and the first six Star Trek films.)
Principled Thoughts 