Star Trek – The Mark of Gideon

★★★★ January 17, 1969 Season 3 Episode 16

If you want to see where we are…and you missed a few…HERE is a list of the episodes in my index located at the top of my blog. 

This show was written by Gene Roddenberry, George F. Slavin, and Stanley Adams

This is a dark episode. 

Enterprise visiting the planet Gideon to negotiate its possible membership of the Federation. Everything they say makes their world like a paradise but they are isolationists and won’t even allow their planet to be scanned. Their one concession is to allow Kirk to beam down. When he does something apparently goes wrong… he rematerializes in the transporter room of the Enterprise strangely the ship appears to be abandoned and Kirk is suffering from an injury he doesn’t remember receiving.

He calls for Spock, McCoy, and the rest of the crew and no one is there. How could a Starship evacuate that fast? You are as confused as Kirk is when you are watching. It starts becoming apparent that this is a facsimile of the Enterprise as we repeatedly cut back to the bridge of the real Enterprise where the crew are concerned about what happened to the captain. 

He searches and eventually meets one other person; a beautiful young woman who identifies herself as Odona. She claims to have no idea how she got on board; saying that she comes from a world that is so crowded that it is impossible to ever be alone. Alone together they start to grow close while strange things start to happen; we see crowds of people looking through the view-screen and it becomes apparent that the ship might not be moving.

It turns out they are on Gideon and that far from being a paradise it is an incredibly overpopulated planet where people live longer and longer but a cultural objection to contraception means babies are born at the same rate as before they want Kirk for a more radical solution… to introduce a disease.

While this is going on…on the real Enterprise Spock is getting really close to being frustrated. Starfleet has denied him to go and look for the Captain. Gideon’s ruler Hodin…is a true politician! He twists Spock’s words and his own for that matter to make sure no one beams down. Hurst won’t let Spock come down and investigate. In the end, Spock cuts some red tape, but even Vulcans can lose their patience and what he did was eminently logical.

SPOILERS

It’s a good episode but not great. There are many plot holes in this one. If you don’t have the room…why build a replica Enterprise? You could have just beamed Kirk down and got the same result. Their society believes in life but Hodin is willing to sacrifice his own daughter so she can catch a disease and spread it so the population will go down. 

Some episodes are hard to explain…and this is one of them. 

From IMDB:

The episode was written by Stanley Adams, who had earlier guest-starred as Cyrano Jones in The Trouble with Tribbles (1967). Adams has become concerned over the issue of overpopulation, and during production of Tribbles, mentioned to Gene Roddenberry that he thought it would be an interesting social topic for the series to address. However, Adams said that he was disappointed by the episode’s final results.

McCoy makes a sarcastic remark regarding Spock having a career as a diplomat. Spock would later go on to have a career in diplomacy, negotiating with the Klingons in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) and working as an ambassador during the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987).

The coordinates given to Kirk to transport down to the council chamber were 875 020 079. The coordinates the council member gave Scotty, to beam him up from, were 875 020 709. This is not a “goof” but a (admittedly silly) plot device of the episode.

Remarkably, this episode did not run afoul of NBC censors, despite Kirk broaching such sensitive matters as sexual sterilization and birth control.

When Kirk tries to address anyone on the ship, one of the shots, showing an empty corridor, is recycled from Is There in Truth No Beauty? (1968). Also, another shot shows an empty Sickbay – with the Red Alert indicator light flashing, an obvious pickup shot.

This is the only episode showing an exterior viewing port. The only other time a window looking outside the ship is seen is on the observation deck in The Conscience of the King (1966). Of course, in this case, the port seen is not on the real Enterprise. The exterior viewing port from this episode is the same design as the one used to witness Marta’s execution in Whom Gods Destroy (1969).

Gene Dynarski, who plays Krodak, the man who is beamed up to the Enterprise, appeared as one of the miners in the season one episode Mudd’s Women as Ben.

A sample of the reciting of the 875 020 079 coordinates was repeated multiple times at the end of the song ‘Mathematics of Chaos’ from Killing Joke’s 1994 album ‘Pandemonium’.

This is the second of two TOS episodes that show an empty Constitution-class bridge, the other installment being the first season outing This Side of Paradise (1967).

In This Side of Paradise (1967), Kirk stated in his log that the crew had committed mutiny and had effectively stranded him in orbit because he was unable to pilot the Enterprise by himself. Here, while he’s on the bridge with Odonna, he changes out one microtape for another at the engineering station. When Odona asks Kirk what he’d done, Kirk says he took the Enterprise out of warp and activated the sublight (impulse) engines. This suggests that Kirk can indeed pilot the Enterprise by himself with the assistance of the ship’s computer and pre-programmed microtapes, creating a plot hole for This Side of Paradise.

Sharon Acker (Odona) had earlier showed up on TV in The Night of the Sedgewick Curse (1968), in which she played Lavina Sedgewick. But in this case, she had the opposite problem, as the Sedgewick family had a history of Lubbock’s Distemper, a disease in which the sufferers age rapidly.

This takes place in 2268.

David Hurst would later play Justin Collins in three installments of the original Dark Shadows (1966) in 1971. One of eight actors to appear both in Star Trek and Dark Shadows, he is the only one who appeared in Trek before he appeared in Shadows.

Summary

While beaming down to the planet Gideon, Captain Kirk finds himself still in the transporter room. He can find no one on the ship, now apparently abandoned by the entire crew. He does find one other occupant on the Enterprise, a beautiful young woman, Odona, who does not know how she got there. Back on the real Enterprise, Spock tries to deal with Gideon’s representatives who claim that Kirk never arrived and claim no knowledge of his whereabouts. Soon, Odona falls deathly ill, which is exactly what the leaders of Gideon were hoping for. Spock soon realizes that there is a problem with the beam-down coordinates they were provided.

CAST

William Shatner … Captain James Tiberius ‘Jim’ Kirk
Leonard Nimoy … Mister Spock
DeForest Kelley … Dr. McCoy
Sharon Acker … Odona
David Hurst … Hodin
ames Doohan … Scott
George Takei … Sulu
Nichelle Nichols … Uhura
Walter Koenig … Chekov
Gene Dynarski … Krodak
Richard Derr … Admiral Fitzgerald
Bill Blackburn … Gideon Inhabitant (uncredited)
Frank da Vinci … Lt. Brent (uncredited)
Jay D. Jones … Gideon Guard (uncredited)