(by Collin R. Skocik)
While investigating reports of life on a molten, uninhabitable planet, the Enterprise comes across Abraham Lincoln floating through space.
Okay, I don’t want to jump the gun and say this is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to this crew, but it’s probably up there. To their credit, they don’t take it in stride—they all think it’s pretty weird. Especially Scotty. Heeding Lincoln’s invitation, Kirk and Spock beam down to a strangely Earth-like part of the planet Excalbia where they meet the Vulcan leader Surak, and an Excalbian called Yarnek pits the four of them against the most evil figures from history—Colonel Green, who led a genocidal war on Earth in the twenty-first century; Zora, who experimented with the body chemistry of primitive tribes on Tiburon; Genghis Khan; and the Klingon leader Kahless the Unforgettable. Yarnek does not understand the human concepts of good and evil and wishes to test them.
Obviously these beings are not really Lincoln, Surak, and the others—despite their insistence that they are. There’s really never any doubt that they are some sort of alien trick. Yarnek has, in fact, extracted them from Kirk and Spock’s minds, and Excalbians have been transformed into them, acting the way Kirk and Spock expect them to act. What’s interesting is what they reveal about the characters. Lincoln is very much the romanticized Lincoln of legend—calm, wise, paternal, gentle. This tells us more about Kirk and why he admires Lincoln than it does about the crass country bumpkin that Lincoln actually was. When Spock first spots Surak, he reacts with the mildest surprise—yet Surak chastises him for his display of emotion. This really shows Spock’s insecurity about his own ability to keep his emotions in check.
Lincoln apologizes for calling Uhura a “negress.” Uhura replies, “Why should I object to that term? You see, in our century, we’ve learned not to fear words.” Kirk adds, “We’ve each learned to be delighted with what we are.” That’s really more progressive than the enforced political correctness we see in more modern shows. In fact, I think it’s one of the most important progressive statements in the series.
Not only do we learn about Surak, who brought Vulcan out of its warlike age and began the movement of devotion to logic and suppression of emotion, but we learn of the Philosophy of Nome, which apparently is the foundation of IDIC. Three episodes from the end of the series, we’re still learning new things about the Star Trek universe!
We don’t really learn much about the genocidal war led by Colonel Green on Earth. It was after the end of the Eugenics Wars, but we learn in Star Trek: The Next Generation that there was another global war at the beginning of the twenty-first century—despite Spock’s statement that the Eugenics Wars were “the last so-called World War.” I understand we meet the real Colonel Green in Star Trek: Enterprise, but I can’t imagine anyone but Phillip Pine in the role. I’ve seen Pine in several episodes of Adventures of Superman, but never does he make a more indelible impression than he does as Colonel Green. Alternately charming and sinister, filled with philosophies of war and strategies “to keep and hold power,” he is a very complex and believable villain despite being a caricature created from Kirk’s mind.
We see very little of Kahless the Unforgettable, but we see that he has the curious ability to imitate voices. Is he just talented at that or do Klingons have the ability to be perfect mimics? This is the last appearance of a Klingon in the original series, and never do the movies or Star Trek: The Next Generation explore this. We meet a clone of Kahless in Star Trek: The Next Generation and learn a lot more about the historical Kahless, who bears little resemblance to the savage villain in this episode. I don’t see that as an inconsistency; we see here what Kirk expects Kahless to be. Again, it reveals more about Kirk than it does about Kahless; Kirk still believes the Klingons to be nothing more than brutal, savage monsters.
When Kirk and Spock defeat their enemies using the deceptive and savage tactics proposed by Lincoln—”We match their evil”—Yarnek notes that “You have failed to demonstrate any of the difference between your philosophies. Your good and your evil use the same methods, achieve the same results.” Kirk concludes that the difference is that Green and the others were fighting for power, while Kirk and Spock were fighting to save the Enterprise. Yarnek replies, “I perceive. You have won their lives.” It looks like an unproductive contact, but Yarnek appears to have learned what he wanted to learn. Kirk asks what gives him the right “to hand out life and death.” Yarnek replies, “The need to know new things.” The Excalbians are really much like humans in their search for knowledge, they just go about it differently.
Yarnek is one of the most intriguing aliens in the series, but I wonder if such a life form is possible. Excalbia is a molten planet. The Excalbians are “living rock with heavy foreclaws.” Conceding that silicon-based life is possible, because we saw it in “The Devil in the Dark,” I was under the impression the temperature had to be very cold for silicon chains to form. The heat of a planet like Excalbia would quickly destroy any silicon chains—or even carbon chains. Life exists in some unexpected places, though. On Earth we have “extremophiles,” life forms that thrive in places that shouldn’t be possible, like black smokers, and hyperthermophiles who live in places that should be too hot to support life, like the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone and various undersea hydrothermal vents. We don’t know everything about life—and we know absolutely nothing about extraterrestrial life. So I grant Star Trek some wiggle room.
In the end, musing on the work of men of peace like Lincoln and Surak, Kirk says, “There’s still so much of their work to be done in the galaxy.” This is an uncharacteristically bleak assessment of the state of the galaxy by Kirk, who usually cites the progress that has been made away from wars and killing and tyranny and how peaceful and wonderful the galaxy is. But Kirk has visited many planets wracked by war. He has seen many dictatorships. He saw his beloved planet Neural torn apart by an unnecessary war brought on by the Klingons. Considering the lack of productive contact with the Excalbians, it’s understandable he might be feeling a little down.
Zora experimented with subject tribes on Tiburon, which was the home planet of Dr. Sevrin in “The Way to Eden.” Zora looks nothing like Sevrin, so either there’s a great difference between the two sexes or they’re not the same species.
Lincoln is played by Lee Bergere, who I’ve seen in various TV movies and sitcoms; he knew a relative of a friend of mine.
(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 