Episode of the Week : The Mark of Gideon
- Thread starter Botany Bay
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The story is lame and implausible but for some reason I always liked this one. I think because as a kid watching this I thought it was pretty cool that the Gideons built an exact replica of the ship (even though even as a kid I thought the possibility of doing that to a degree that Kirk wouldn't notice was absurd). I rated it at a 4
I feel like the Federation had to be in on it in order for the Gideons to have such a perfect Enterprise replica. But I feel like there are personal touches that even the Federation higher-ups wouldn't know about making me think someone among the Enterprise crew had to be in on it.
4. To me, this was the type of episode Bob Justman lamented when he referred to third season episodes as little more than "radio plays." Not much to recommend it, but not much to condemn it either. It's just... there. If you have an hour with nothing important to do, watching this episode is a reasonable way to pass the time.
Maybe the Fed higher ups wan ted Kirk to help with his blood, but couldn't officially say so. How could they condone mass slaughter from intentional illness?
I think the basic ideas are compelling enough on first viewing-- Kirk being on the Enterprise yet not on it, and especially the shock image of the crowd outside. But it's like, once they had those two ideas, they didn't have anything else. So they filled out the rest of the time with . . . stuff. Bureaucratic face-offs, flirting, aimless conversations, her c oming and going memory ... I wouldn't be surprised if the replica Enterprise was an idea they'd had lying around, not knowing where to use it, and they forced it in here, to fill this ep out.
I love the scenes with Kirk and Odona (obviously). Hodin's remarks against birth control remind me of certain right-wing Christian preachers' views. 7.
I've heard this idea floated around for years and it bugs me. It sounds like something a government today might do, but it runs so counter to the way the Federation and Starfleet is generally presented in TOS.
Sharon Acker came off to me as someone Kirk actually might consider marrying... she had a certain gravitas that suggested a possible permanence which other female "guest" characters seemed to lack.
I think I just confused myself there.... perhaps you could translate my thought into a more cogent one.
I think that the possible real big secret of the Gideonites was that they had advanced replicator technology. They had built a basic Constitution class starship and then performed a high rez scan of the Enterprise once it entered orbit. And then replicated all of the minute differences. Plus it's the only way they could feed their people if they occupied all of the lands.
3
I enjoyed this post more than the episode. This is one episode I will skip, there's only about 7, and I rather watch Lazarus falling of a cliff many times before Kirk wandering an empty set of the Enterprise.
I don't even want to discuss the silly themes of the episode, they are too silly to consider.
My biggest complaint is that the teaser in this episode perpetrates the worst cheat I can think of in Star Trek. Kirk is shown beaming down and then materializing, a real time activity as we understand it and in every other episode. But that is not what happened because he materialized, was mugged and drugged and then they put him to recover in the fake transporter room. If it was supposed to be his point of view they should have shot it that way, but since they really never did those we'd know something was up, so they cheated.
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Odona was very sweet, she's one of my favourite Kirk women. And I've always loved Spock's political negotiations with Odona's father, via the viewscreen. Kirk's gentlemanly gesture at the end is also nice to see. So, this episode has some decent aspects to it, but the rest of it leaves much to be desired. I give it a 5
In TOS? That show was on par with ST3:TSfS in establishing every Starfleet officer outside the hero cast as evil/needlessly adversarial, incompetent, or typically both.
That Starfleet or the Federation would have "ideals" is a retcon from the fan years before the movie era. TOS itself really makes deliberate mockery of such, with Kirk hotly defending his right to kill and maim in defense of the supposed moral superiority of the UFP in "Errand of Mercy"...
The thing is, for the first twenty or thirty years of viewing this episode, the concept of perfect replicas was science fiction, one of those things for which a salt shaker next to the TV set is so handy. Today, it would require suspension of disbelief if advanced aliens failed to create a perfect replica - why, any kid could conceivably do so tomorrow, spying the target in minute detail with his flying toy nanobots, then using his toy replicator for replicating the big replicator needed to replicate the bigger replicator that prints out the starship.
Heh, excellent point! Although what we see might still well be what happened - after Kirk's initial beam-down and his getting "processed". He would then be beamed in again by the Gideonites simply to complete the illusion.
(Or did the Gideonites grab his incoming beam and manipulate it in TNG style, to the effect of drugging and sampling Kirk?)
Oh, and 6. The concept is intriguing, the implications even more so. Kirk is uninteresting. But Spock is cool, again because he retains his cool in a situation where action would be to no benefit.
Timo Saloniemi
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