Welcome to the Terrordome
I have this feeling that “Balance of Terror” is viewed by those sorts of people who rank episodes of televisions shows as more or less legendary, in part for its supposed philosophical depths but probably as well because it features the first Star Trek appearance of Mark Lenard, who would be recast in a future episode as Spock’s father, where he remained. I guess it’s like getting to see Eddie van Halen before he and his brother swapped instruments. Personally, I’m not deeply impressed. It feels to me like it’s mostly unloading exposition for later episodes. Not that it doesn’t have stakes of its own but they strike me as being pretty much contrived for the sake of staging The Enemy Below in space, which incidentally is an apple with Roddenberry-shaped bites on both sides, since The Wrath of Khan also contains a healthy dollop of World War II submarine movie.
This episode also marks the introduction of ur-antagonists the Romulans, a race of humanoids strikingly similar in appearance to Spock, suggesting perhaps that the makeup department had extra ears and needed an excuse to use them. This resemblance prompts a fairly weak anti-racist theme, driven by a single-minded red shirt navigator who appears here solely to undermine Spock at every available opportunity. It’s weak insofar as it’s written about as subtly as a dick illustrated in Sharpie on a bathroom wall, though it drives its point with brio, pounding it directly on the nose with the intensity of a thousand suns. We’ll call it a wash.
The curtain rises on Kirk officiating a wedding between two crew members who are sadly decked out in the cheapest looking uniforms this side of Burger King. The wedding is thankfully truncated1 by a distress signal from a Federation base near a plot device mysteriously referred to as The Neutral Zone. This zoney thing, see, is a border between Federation territory and that of the aforementioned Romulans. This buffer area was the outcome of a war some hundred years past, which you would assume would burn in Federation hearts much the way the First World War burns in ours, e.g. like a wet match.2 But perhaps this border is a bit more of a simmering dish—38th parallel style. The Romulans, like the North Koreans, are insular, silent to the outside world, engaging neither in trade nor diplomacy. The only contact between the two cultures comes in the form of mutual observations taken at various outposts along both sides of the border. And so it goes, generation to generation, until one day out of the sheer blue a Romulan captain zips across and starts blowing up Federation garrisons, masking his identity with a device that renders his ship invisible.
The episode plays out as a lengthy encounter between the Enterprise and the Romulan ship. Initially at a disadvantage our protagonists figure out how to neutralize the invisibility and before long the Romulans are crippled and facing certain destruction… or capture? I’m not entirely clear what the Enterprise is trying to do here. Prevent the destruction of bases, sure, but there’s also a whole discussion about intercepting the Romulans before they are able to retreat back across the Neutral Zone, on the grounds that not doing so would be interpreted as weakness and would encourage more attacks.
Counterpoint: any nation that keeps entirely to itself for a hundred years is, pretty much by definition, not warlike. Present circumstances excepted of course, but why did they do this in the first place? It doesn’t really make any sense. Is it a probing attack? Why did it take them a hundred years to start probing? Is it an overzealous underling taking matters into his own hands to force a long-desired war, as junior Japanese officers did in Manchuria in 1931?
Fuck if I know.
All of that is left pretty much to the imagination, or future episodes and murmurations of forgettable novelizations perhaps. Our attention is drawn instead to the long hunt and the resourcefulness of the Romulan captain, vis-a-vis that of Kirk and his crew. In a last ditch grasp at victory he employs a ruse commonly used by submariners during World War II, firing a clump of debris from a torpedo tube to convince attackers that they had scored a victory (c.f. The Enemy Below). In a bid to take advantage of Kirk’s due diligence, the Romulans also pack in a little surprise in the form of an atom bomb.3 The Enterprise is damaged but Spock turns in one of Star Trek’s magical repair jobs—this is a frequently used plot device that simply requires the viewer to accept that Spock, or Scotty or Bones or whoever, is like really good at his job. That’s more or less what the whole show is about anyway, so I guess it works. Along the way Spock takes a moment to rescue the racist navigator, who has spent the entire episode inappropriately jamming in his grumbled aspersions concerning pointy eared freaks of all stripes, thus providing viewers their moral Ovaltine for the week.
The Enterprise blasts the Romulan ship to a pulp, chunks of foam raining down from the ceiling of the dinky little closet that serves as the Romulan bridge (and indeed is all we ever see of the interior of the ship), before stopping to offer a hand because, as we have been reminded in every scene since the Romulan captain first trod upon the diminutive stage, these two captains are mutually respectful of the others abilities. They are so deeply enamored of one another, it often seems, they should just go get a room, but in the end Kirk winds up with a broken heart, for once. The Romulan, devoted to the last to his horseshit code of ethics, opts to go down with the ship.
And that’s it.
Now, there really are a lot of—as Paul Krugman used to say—Very Serious People who think this is pretty close to the pinnacle of the original series because of its treatment of war and race, or maybe its various historical parallels (not least of which is the title itself, which would surely conjure the Cold War in the minds of any contemporary viewer). This is all nonsense. It doesn’t treat any of these topics; it just mentions them in passing. Racism is bad. War is bad. Bud Lite is not beer. Thin stuff, folks.
Is it a good episode? As an homage to that hoary old tale of a duel between a dogged and clever German submarine captain and a dogged and clever American destroyer captain, each gazing respectfully in the other’s eye4 as they struggle to knife one another in the guts, there's enough of a peg from which to hang an episode; it was enough to hang a film from after all, though... is The Enemy Below good? Well it’s entertaining, if for no other reason than that it’s fun to watch Robert Mitchum do pretty much anything short of taking a dump.
So it’s good in the same sense that Die Hard is good, except that this kind of action is exactly the sort of thing that makes Star Trek look dated and silly. It’s not enough that control panels on both ships are these vast expanses of plywood with like four or five buttons and lights scattered across them like flotsam drifting in the sea, but the Romulan ship looks it was staged in a stairwell with five awkwardly-costumed guys crowded around a podium looted from a defunct gameshow.
It’s hard not to second-guess everything in this episode. Hard for me anyway. The plot is a lot like that tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Spindly and misshapen, but at the end of the stardate, it’s a functional armature for baubles. It’s goofy but entertaining, and I suppose there are worse ways to spend a mundane Tuesday evening.
The groom dies at the end but it’s such a weightless tragedy I can’t afford it anything more impactful than this bargain-basement footnote.
In fairness, nobody is more concerned about the potential resurgence of the Ottoman Empire than me.
Is there any phrase that so captures the gee-whiz sciency ethos of the early nuclear era more perfectly than “atom bomb?” This all went away when I was a youth, in favor of the rather gloomier “mutal assured destruction,” e.g. the balance of terror. This episode sits right on the neutral zone between those two worlds.
Metaphorically of course; they never actually see one other.