Sfdebris.net

A real solid TOS episode, one that would have been a disaster in TNG or VOY. Hell, in those shows, someone on the crew would be vociferously arguing that they should all just beam down and let themselves be disintegrated because of the Prime Directive (and the writers would expect us to take that argument seriously). I can imagine Harry Kim saying "it'd do a lot more good than harm." Given the course of his life, maybe it would.

I have to wonder what they would have done, if some unsporting Kirk-like person had hacked into their computer and simulated them destroying each other and destroying all the computers. Would the computers logic-fail to death (I mean, that happened enough in Trek its possible!)? Would they all have commited suicide? Or would that have lead to exactly the same position as Kirk put them in?



[Largely Irrelevant Tangent]A chap at my wargames club used to run homebrew Star Trek games, where we took command of about three ships or so. About the last series of games of that we played were based on this episode, on the premise that they were daft enough to have dug out all their old spaceships and carried on with a "real" war. The Klingons got involved (me bein' one of 'em) and the Federations sort of got involved on the other... It was shaping up to make for a very interesting situation, wherein the Klingon side won battle after battle and were pressing the other guys hard enough the Federation would have had to step in to prevent the Klingons basically getting a new ally and a foothold (and that intervention signalling a full-scale war)... But the chap was far too keen on forcing the course of history to conform to canon, so at the last count (I had had temporaily cease going, to venue changes meaning my RPG group on the same day had to take priority), where the winning side was assualting the losing planet... But the losing planet's defences vastly out-numbered them; essentially doing a Kobayashi Maru on the winners and punishing them for doing to well. 'Twas a shame. (I mean, it's not like we were literally playing a wargame, of anything, for frack's sake...!)

(Same chap also really did not want my personal efforts as a Romulan to start a war with the Federation in the TNG era for similar reasons. (They deserved it, the buggers - one of their captains handed prisoners from my character over to the Klingons! AND then, when we demanded - quite rightly - his trial, they tried faking his death! Duplicitous bastards! (I can't imagine the appolexy said character would have had if he'd ever found about Sisko getting the Romulans into the Dominion war...!)[/Largely Irrelevant Tangent]

Haven't loaded up the review yet, but I see this as one of the more underrated episodes of TOS. It isn't quite as polished as say, City on the Edge of Forever or The Doomsday Machine, but this episode does exactly what I love to see from good sci-fi. It takes an issue (in this case, sanitizing war), boils that issue down to the most basic conceptual level, and then extrapolates on it in an imaginative, science fiction context. This is a quintessential example of that kind of storytelling. Beyond that, the characters are on point. Scotty has a chance to shine, and Kirk gets to make a controversial but effective move.

So the result is an episode that has a lot to chew on. The basic idea of a detached, automated war is more relevant than ever. One component the episode doesn't spend a great deal of time addressing is the issue of propaganda and media desensitizing war. Kirk's decision works out, but does his logic really hold?

This episode always intrigued me. I never particularly believed in the idea that we have wars simply because "humans are savages who are driven to kill". This may be an oversimplification, but I've always seen it as people starting wars for (usually) one of two reasons - because we want something from them, or we find their culture so distasteful that we feel it needs to be destroyed. We know the latter wasn't happening, they explicitly said the whole reason they did this was so their culture could continue to grow while having a "war". As for the former, I suppose it's possible that each side were re-settling fully intact cities and such after the previous population finished vaporizing themselves, but there was nothing in the story to suggest this. It seemed like neither side never really left their home planet.

So what exactly were either side getting out of this war? They've both given up any specific achievement from this conflict. Both sides are basically sacrificing millions of people a year to get the exact same thing they'd get by not sacrificing millions of people a year. At this point, making peace would be so much easier. Why would either side agree to this in the first place? Who said "we should have a war with all the death, but none of the potential benefits"?

As an aside, the female Red Shirt in this episode was quite attractive. Geez, two posts in and I'm already starting a theme.

My biggest question is why the hell the Computer decided that one side would open fire on a neutral third party ship of a nation that could easily glass both planets if they felt like it. I can understand why the people follow it, they've been doing it for hundreds of years after all.

It'd be like if India and Pakistan went to war again, and one of the decided to start firing missiles at US or Russian, or Chinese ships sent to help mediate the situation.


Seems like those computers need a firmware update.

Just dark speculation, but what either side gets from the war is a population sink. Millions die every year that must be replaced. Therefore you can and need a higher birth rate and if you have an unemployable or undesirable population demographic it wouldn't be hard to leave them strategically uncovered...

Or maybe you straight up program the computer to prefer those you want rid of. No muss, no fuss, no opposition.

It is a rather silly premise, but unlike TNG (especially early TNG), TOS managed to get away with silly premises like these because they actually treated them seriously with respect to the human element. Yeah they more or less glance over the question "how did they possibly get into this situation in the first place" but the answer to "why do they keep letting it go on like this" feels REAL, and therefore actually has weight. If Kirk didn't imply that this way of engaging war had made them too comfortable with it, it'd be much harder to take this situation seriously.

For some reason, TNG couldn't manage to do this with their Planet of the Week plots as successfully. Many of them are still good, they just couldn't get away with hinging on a premise as outlandish as this one.

IMO, it's unfortunate that this episode isn't mentioned more often now.

With drone warfare, the US has sanitized war - a la the Kirk speech.

The US has literally been at war continuously since October 2001. But if a Martian who visited your town today, that alien would have no idea. Heck, I'd bet a big chunk of the US population doesn't know that the US military killed someone/somewhere within the past month via a drone or airstrike in the name of the American people.

The Vietnam War was hyper-controversial because there was a good chance an ordinary citizen who be drafted to fight/die for the war. Today with drones and a volunteer army, the average person has a lot smaller vested interest

I dunno, war has always been sanitized to one degree or another. Why do you think people go to great lengths to ignore veterans who come home after? They were the only ones really exposed to it and so are contaminated. This just happens to be an even fuller realization of that.

BlackoutCreature2 wrote: So what exactly were either side getting out of this war? They've both given up any specific achievement from this conflict. Both sides are basically sacrificing millions of people a year to get the exact same thing they'd get by not sacrificing millions of people a year. At this point, making peace would be so much easier. Why would either side agree to this in the first place? Who said "we should have a war with all the death, but none of the potential benefits"?

I think the episode is another TOS cold war analogy. They had a sort of MAD doctrine going on. Neither side wanted escalation and there's no longer any reason to fight, but a distrust ingrained for centuries made certain that neither side made the first move toward peace. No one would want their people's sacrifices to be for nothing, so either side failing to keep up their end of the bargain would be a surefire way to start the real thing. Acceptable losses were perfectly balanced and allowed jingiostic cultures to feel good about themselves.

It might not be entirely plausible, but the idea of computerized, sanitary war that no one has any reason to stop is pretty timely.

Also worth mentioning is Kirk's speech at the end. It really highlights the personal ethos of the character and is one of my prime examples of the different foundational philosophies behind TOS and TNG. TNG's philosophy is summarized when Picard unironically (and "with conviction") quotes the "What a piece of work is man" monologue from Hamlet.