Tag: Whom Gods Destroy

★★★1/2 January 3, 1969 Season 3 Episode 14

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, Lee Erwin, and Jerry Sohl

As Kirk and Spock are about to embark on an away visit to a prison planet to deliver medical supplies, they suspect something isn’t quite right. The medical supply is medicine to help the criminally insane.  Kirk arranges a code signal with Scotty before he beams him and Leonard Nimoy back on board.

That proved to be a wise precaution because when the two beam down the prison and it’s a prison for the criminally insane. The warden/governor of the planet Keye Luke has been overthrown and Steve Ihnat has taken over. This former starship commander is mad and also has developed shape-shifting abilities. The inmates have taken over.

I’ve read where some think Steve Ihnat went overboard playing the mad criminal Garth…well yea he did but that is what the role called for. He has ambitions just as mad people do, to take over the immediate universe with the Enterprise at his disposal and his ability now to become Captain Kirk. But there’s that signal code that Kirk arranged with Scotty. Can’t do much until he’s on the Enterprise.

Yvonne Craig plays Marta an Orion Slave Girl and is great in the part. The ending gets eventful. Garth turns into a clone of Captain Kirk and he fights the real Captain Kirk. Spock comes in and doesn’t know which one to stun. He uses his logic and listens…does he stun the wrong one?

If Yvonne Craig seems familiar…she played Batgirl on the Batman TV show. 

From IMDB:

The plot of inmates taking over the asylum and impersonating the warden closely resembles Dagger of the Mind (1966), right down to the “agony chair” prop which is reused from that episode. In his memoir ‘I Am Not Spock’, Leonard Nimoy shares a memo that he wrote to the producers to complain about the similarities.

Garth’s costume is that of Galactic High Commissioner Ferris from The Galileo Seven (1967).

The episode’s title is often misattributed to the Greek playwright Euripides. However, the phrase “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad” is spoken by Prometheus in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Masque of Pandora” (1875). Another version (“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad”) is quoted as a “heathen proverb” in ‘Daniel, a Model for Young Men’ (1854) by William Anderson Scott (1813-1885). Yet another variation on the phrase was given by historian Charles A. Beard, who, when asked to write a short volume summarizing the lessons of history, said that he could do it in four sentences. One of them was, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.”

The asylum planet’s name is based upon an historical place. Elba II is named after the Mediterranean island off of the coast of Italy where the French Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte was briefly exiled to in 1814. Napoleon succeeded in escaping from there in 1815 and was restored to power in France, but was later defeated at Waterloo. He then spent the remaining six years of his life on the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena. “Captain Garth” in this story was characterized as another Napoleon.

The remote control for the facility’s force fields is a repainted and redecorated phaser prop.

Garth’s torture chair is a reuse of the chair in the neural neutralizer room from Dagger of the Mind (1966), with the addition of earpieces mounted on either side.

Although Garth is a former Starfleet captain whose exploits were studied by Kirk at Starfleet Acadamy (and thus is at least a decade older than Kirk), the actor who played Garth – Steve Ihnat – is 3 years younger than William Shatner (Kirk).

Kirk refers to Spock as his “brother” and Spock agrees with this figurative interpretation of their relationship. Kirk would refer to Spock as his “brother” again in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989).

In the United Kingdom, the BBC skipped this episode in all runs of the series through to the early 1990s, due to its content.

Steve Ihnat worked with Gene Roddenberry and DeForest Kelley in his failed pilot Police Story (1967), which led to his casting as Garth.

While the Andorian inmate is wearing an almost boa-like red costume, one of the Human inmates is wearing the traditional Andorian costume seen in the second season (and which can be seen again on an Andorian corpse in The Lights of Zetar (1969)).

Garth mentions several figures from Earth’s history who failed in their attempts to conquer the planet, among them Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, and the fictional name of Lee Kuan. This marks the second time the fictional name of Lee Kuan was mentioned in the original series, as Spock cited his name among Ramses II, Gaio Giulio Cesare, Alexander the Great, Napoléon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler in Patterns of Force (1968), where Spock stated that Earth’s history is “full of men seeking absolute power.”

Contrary to popular belief, the Tellarites in TOS always had three fingers, even in this episode. The fingers are sleeker in appearance than they were in Season Two. The Lights of Zetar (1969) would be the only time we see a Tellarite with five fingers in TOS.

The character of Garth led to an historic legal battle between CBS/Paramount and the fan filmmaking community: a battle about pitting digital rights and its owners, and the community which has fostered their growth in the first place. The Star Trek fan filmmaking community has always been very strong and vibrant one, even prior to the Internet. However, it’s been through such sites as YouTube, that the fan-made films have found a much wider audience. After receiving over $1million in Kickstarter funds, the makers of a proposed fan-made film based upon Garth’s battle at Axanar, were told by CBS/Paramount in no uncertain terms that doing so would be in violation of copyrighted material. This incident – and the uproar since – has roiled the community.

The suits worn by Garth’s men on the planet surface are the same environmental suits as worn by the Enterprise crew in The Tholian Web (1968).

Garth mentions Krotus in the list of leaders who preceded him but failed. Although never shown in any Star Trek (as of 2020), Krotus was an Andorian historical figure, a noted despot who harbored goals of great conquest, but ultimately failed. History would remember him as the Ka’Thelan Conqueror of Andoria, who swept across the planet, forcing the Andorians into a new cultural and technological era. His entire world bowed to him, but his empire ultimately crumbled and he was murdered by his own daughter.

This episode mentions a Starfleet battle strategy called “The Cochran Deceleration.” Although it was never seen used in the series, apparently it is so well known and used by all starship captains that it’s considered a classic battle maneuver.

This was the last live action appearance of the Orions in the “Star Trek” franchise until Borderland (2004) 35 years later.

This is the second consecutive episode to guest star an actor from the Batman (1966) TV series, namely, Yvonne Craig, and the third in a row to feature an actor connected to Batman, as Lee Meriwether (Losira in That Which Survives (1969)) played the Catwoman in the Batman: The Movie (1966) feature film. Previously, Frank Gorshin who played the Riddler played Commissioner Bele in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (1969).

This was released in Jan. 1969 and Garth twice says, “Marta, my dear” in an apparent nod to The Beatles’ “White Album,” which was released Nov. 1968, and included the song “Martha, My Dear”, which was written by Paul McCartney as an ode to his Old English sheepdog Martha. In fact, this is merely a coincidence as the episode was filmed in October 1968, prior to the release of the “White Album”.

Spock’s sentence “Captain Kirk, I presume?” is an allusion to the famous but apocryphal question asked by explorer Henry Morton Stanley to David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on November 10, 1871: “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” The question was later used as the basis for the title of Doctor Bashir, I Presume (1997).

Summary

The Enterprise travels to the planet Elba II, home of the last asylum for the criminally insane, to deliver a serum that should cure all of its remaining inmates. Kirk and Spock beam down to the planet’s surface where all seems in order, but they soon find the inmates now run the asylum, led by Garth (at one time a starship Captain, whose exploits were required reading at the Academy). Garth, who’s learned how to shape-shift, can take on the appearance of anyone, including Kirk or Spock. In the process of learning this ability, he lost his sanity. Garth plans to pose as the Captain, beam up to the Enterprise and take over the ship, but Kirk has a roadblock set up to overcome.

CAST

William Shatner … Captain James Tiberius ‘Jim’ Kirk
Leonard Nimoy … Mister Spock
DeForest Kelley … Dr. McCoy
Steve Ihnat … Garth
Yvonne Craig … Marta
James Doohan … Scott
George Takei … Sulu
Nichelle Nichols … Uhura
Dick Geary … Andorian (as Richard Geary)
Gary Downey … Tellarite
Keye Luke … Cory
Bill Blackburn … Lieutenant Hadley (uncredited)
Frank da Vinci … Lt. Brent (uncredited)
Lars Hensen … Elba II Inmate (uncredited)
Roger Holloway … Lt. Lemli (uncredited)
Jeannie Malone … Yeoman (uncredited)