When I think of stories of first commands, my admittedly off-balance mind reaches immediately for those of Jack Aubrey of Patrick O’Brien’s so-called Master and Commander series of novels and Horatio Hornblower, protagonist of the shorter but no less enthralling eponymous series. Both are rising stars in the British navy at its apex, during the Age of Sail, both making soufflé out of Napoleon’s forces on the watery battlefields of the world, both skilled and intelligent, and lest the ceaseless welter of success should grow boring, each with his own weaknesses and shortcomings. Master and Commander—the novel as well as the series—begins with the young Jack receiving promotion to the rank of master and commander1 along with his first command, the sloop Sophie. Hornblower, if you organize his books chronologically, takes somewhat longer to reach the coveted spot on the starboard side of the quarterdeck, but one thing is indisputable: both captains make the most of their first opportunities. It makes for rollicking stories, but times there’s something almost a bit unbelievable about their success—they seem at times almost superhuman.
It’s a truism to say that nobody is perfect, and both Jack and Horatio show their imperfections over time, of which there is much in the 37 titles that comprise their respective canons. Perhaps in 1968 it wasn’t immediately apparent to Gene Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy that they were embarking on a 45-year collaboration,2 and that they would need to cram in as much as possible as quickly as possible. The result is “The Galileo 7:” a cornucopia of ideas all thrown together like a mystery casserole, a murky goo from which occasionally emerge gray geometric solids vaguely meatlike, limp tubes of greenbean, a lone olive escaped from another dish. There are potentially interesting ideas, but the episode never really decides what it wants to be about, and it ends with a frenzy of hand-waving followed by a CHiPs mid-laugh freeze-frame sort of moment. In case that doesn’t tempt you to put aside a hunk of your hard-earned free time and cue this episode up on the old electronic story box, it’s also fantastically stupid-looking.
The tale begins with the Enterprise, bearing a cargo of medical supplies, en route to some absurdly named planet full of colonists presumably engaged in forcibly stealing the place from the natives, when they stumble across what looks like a puff of green cigarette smoke drifting through space. Here we learn that Kirk has a standing order to explore any puffs of green cigarette smoke they should come across.3 So, ignoring the insufferable guy in the cheap uniform hanging around the bridge—the official responsible for both overseeing the supply delivery as well as setting a time limit on the episode—griping nonstop about the desperate colonists, Kirk sends the seven titular crew members out in the titular shuttlecraft, the Galileo, to explore the cigarette smoke. The away team this time consists of Spock, McCoy, Scotty, another pointless sexy yeoman, two redshirts, and a certain Lieutenant Boma—a role apparently created to feature Black actor Don Marshall, but one whose sole quality is a sustained one-note criticism of Spock. There’s no real explanation why there are seven people on a craft laid out so that only two people can do any real work—the rest being essentially passengers sitting awkwardly in office chairs in the back of what looks suspiciously like a small breakout room at a conference center.
Of course the shuttle immediately loses contact with the Enterprise before also losing the ability to drift aimlessly in space, upon which event they make an emergency landing on a nearby planet. Good luck, that there just happened to be a planet nearby. Bad luck that it’s apparently full of mysterious furry giants bent on their destruction.
For a moment there’s some discussion of how they don’t have enough fuel left to get off the planet’s surface without ditching a few members of the crew, and one gets the sense that this episode is going to be an hourlong exploration of the trolley problem. There’s talk of drawing straw, but Spock knocks this down by stating the obvious: that as commander of the mission it’s his responsibility to determine who goes and who stays, a revelation which sends Boma and the redshirts into an extended sulk. Then one of them goes and gets himself skewered with a huge, slow-moving spear thrown with the force of a whiffle ball by one of the Wookies that call the planet home. Spock makes some questionable decisions in the interest of experimenting with the mood of their attackers, about whom he becomes suddenly and rather inexplicably compassionate, and in due time the second redshirt fulfills his destiny.
There’s a lot of conflict between the all-too-human (and highly unprofessional) humans, who seem incapable of any behavior beyond self-righteously burying their colleagues, and the Vulcan Spock, who quite reasonably points out that doing so could lead to a whole septet of funerals. Scotty makes some sort of stupid mistake and blows all their fuel, but then cleverly suggests they recharge the shuttle using their phasers. As this would leave them defenseless, this of course starts another round of bickering, led by Boma, who really ought to have been court-martialed for insubordination.
Long story short they eventually get off the ground, but by this time the Enterprise has run out of time and is off to deliver the meds. In a last ditch effort to attract assistance, Spock blows their remaining fuel into space and ignites it (it’s not clear at all to me how phasers contain ignitable fuel but whatever), hoping to produce a flare visible to whoever might be looking. Of course Boma gives him grief about how in so doing he’s thrown away any chance of returning to the planet, even though they are all pretty much in agreement that that would be a death sentence anyway.
The Enterprise, looking back fixedly for its erstwhile away party even as it speeds away, spots the flare and beams up the five remaining crew just an instant before it burns up in the planet’s atmosphere. Back on the Enterprise Kirk ribs Spock jocularly about the supposedly human desperation that led him to his final gamble. Spock isn’t buying it, and honestly neither am I. Is there some “logical” reason why one should not try every option to avoid catastrophe? Everyone has a good laugh at the bemused science officer, glossing over the weakness of the critique, but presumably the casual viewer will be so caught up laughing along with the bridge crew while Spock lifts an eyebrow quizzically as to never question the essential flim-flammery of this denouement.
I, of course, am no casual viewer. No indeed, gentle reader, I pretty much have a stick up my ass and am honor-bound to pick every nit I can find in this hoary old mess.
There’s a moment on the shuttle, while Scotty is doing “engineering stuff” (James Doohan spends pretty much the whole episode lying on the floor of the shuttle fiddling around with what looks like PVC plumbing), when Spock, perplexed, recounts the supposedly logical train of actions he’s followed, trying to make out how they led to the deaths of two highly expendable crew members. McCoy makes some hay out of this being Spock’s first command, which as I have said almost seems like the point of the episode. It’s not even remotely true—Spock was left in charge of the Enterprise just one episode prior—but it’s also unclear what exactly is being implied. Is Spock a failure because he tried to solve their problems using reason? Was this a learning opportunity for Spock? Will anyone trust him ever again?
Who knows? It’s all a big muddle. Points for introducing the shuttlecraft, even if they are clumsy space Winnebagos, but all in all I find this episode to be a missed opportunity. Seven people trapped in an ill-equipped RV is probably as close as the original series ever came to the sort of small interpersonal drama of something like 12 Angry Men, but lacking anything like a point it wound up instead being 6 Men of Varying Degrees of Petulance and 1 Yeoman Who Does Absolutely Nothing but Sit in a Chair. Sometimes, I think, the pursuit of science fiction often got in the way of storytelling on Star Trek. This is just such an example of this, and without doubt more time spent thinking through the seven characters and their conflicting motivations would have been a better investment than furry giant costumes and plaster-of-Paris rock outcroppings and ten-foot spears that look like Nerf toys. On occasion, the extreme penury of the show would lead to such superior investments,4 but just as often, they did not.
This oddly named rank lies between lieutenant and captain—post-captain, technically—and was granted to those who commanded ships too large for the one and too small for the other. Like sloops for instance.
If you want to get nitpicky it was more like 23 years because Roddenberry died in 1991, but Spock went on until Nimoy went and died, leaving the role to be grotesquely shat upon by J.J. Abrams.
Star Trek’s capacity for inventing new backstory just to suit the imperatives of the week’s plot is truly supernatural.
C.f. “The Squire of Gothos,” coming next time.