Whom Gods Destroy

Kirk and Spock are on a medical mission to deliver sanity saving drugs to an institute for the incorrigibly criminally insane. Bad news though; one’s a homicidal, master-strategist shape-shifter. He takes over the asylum, with an eye on taking over the Enterprise. Can Kirk and Spock defeat him? Well… yes. Dude’s insane. But HOW do the defeat him? Find out when we put Whom Gods Destroy in the Mission Log. It’s tough to find a good message about this. On the surface, we see Kirk’s consistently liberal and sympathetic view of the criminal mentally ill, constantly assuring them and the audience that these people are not responsible for their actions and need treatment and not punishment. On the other hand, they’ve been moved to an isolated planet with a forcefield covering the entire planet (that technology could have been useful for the 812 times Earth has been attacked in Star Trek’s vaarious incarnations), and the patients are represented by the sort of over-the-top melodramatic psychiatric cliches one would see in some old comedy (at least, those aren’t just consigned to the background as minions). Little wodner the BBC banned it from broadcast for so long for its depiction of the mentally ill. Certainly most of patients we see on Elba II don’t seem dangerous enough to warrant being placed on a planet light years from their respective homeworlds in the middle of nowhere with a forcefield wrapped around them. Sure, Garth had a shapeshifting ability and an implausible penchant for creating the universe’s most powerful explosive (why would the scriptwriter even want to put that little nugget in, when he could have more realistically said that Garth improvised some chemical found locally into an explosive, something I might expect a Starfleet veteran to do?). But what about the rest of them? Did Marta really warrant more security than just a guard who wouldn’t succumb to her lethal charms? Does the Federation have a universally accepted standard for psychiatric normalcy amongst its citizens, some of whom may have cultural and even biological variances (the Vulcans’ denial of their emotions would be seen as abnormal by others, as would the Andorians’ preponderance for violence, the Tellarites’ argumentative natures, and of course the Terran obsession with 20th Century pop culture and long speeches about humanity)? Would Harry Mudd’s casual attitude towards the law classify him as someone needing the same treatment? Hope this is the last torture episode. Really getting on my nerves. What I admired most about this episode is how perfectly suited every single outfit was for going to Burning Man. I actually found this episode an interesting study in our radically changing view of mental health. The idealistic future they are trying to paint already seems barbaric to modern sensibilities (isolated, kept in cells, that mind wiping device). That’s pretty rare for Star Trek- we have yet to live up to most of its hopeful, future ideals. And that’s not even really a criticism of the show, more a marvel at how far our understanding of mental illness has come. Our modern care needs to catch up with our professionals’ understanding, but our idealistic vision of a facility for the “criminally insane” (of course we wouldn’t actually use that terminology) would look radically different if this episode were made today.