The Doomsday Machine
The Enterprise, responding to a distress call from the USS Constellation happens upon a scene of devastation, whole solar systems destroyed, planets torn apart. In system L370, they find all but two planets destroyed, and the Constellation adrift and powerless. Kirk assumes an attack, and orders the ship on alert, before forming a boarding party consisting of him, McCoy, Scotty and a team of damage control engineers, leaving Spock in command. They find a ship, wrecked, abandoned but salvageable. There is no sign of the crew, although once Scotty realises that the computer systems are still intact, he suggests looking at the ship’s log in Auxiliary Control. They find more than just the log though, ship’s commander Commodore Matt Decker is the sole survivor, and they find him half delirious, slumped over the console. McCoy revives him long enough for him to relate his fantastic story. The Constellation had come across a planet-killer, a gargantuan machine that literally tears apart planets and digests them for fuel. Decker attempted to stop it and paid the ultimate price. His ship wrecked, he beamed down his crew to the system’s third planet so that he could draw the planet-killer’s attention. To his horror, the planet-killer turned its gaze to the third planet instead, destroying it and the Constellation’s crew, leaving Decker alone aboard his wrecked ship. Kirk orders McCoy to take Decker back to the Enterprise, while he sees about getting the Constellation in some semblance of working order. However, the increased subspace interference that is affecting communications has ominous portent, and it isn’t long after McCoy and Decker have beamed out that the planet-killer reappears to finish its meal of planets and starships, cutting off communication completely. Back on the Enterprise, Matt Decker sees a chance to complete the job, and assumes command of the ship, forcing an attack on the alien weapon. This is over the protests of McCoy and Spock. McCoy knows that Decker is unfit for command, but because he hasn’t had the chance to confirm it with a medical diagnosis has no grounds to remove him, while Spock has had a look at the planet-killer and realises that the Enterprise alone is no match for a weapon miles long, armed with a beam of pure anti-proton, capable of dampening the antimatter power of a starship, and with a hull of pure neutronium. Decker on the other hand, motivated by the loss of his ship and crew, also knows that allowing the planet-killer to continue on its course will send it through the most populated portion of the galaxy. Needless to say, the Enterprise’s attack is ineffectual, while the planet-killer’s response is deadly. Soon the Enterprise is caught in a tractor-beam, being pulled to its doom. Kirk and the damage repair team manage to restore sufficient function to the Constellation to see the results of this foolhardy attack, and it’s only by coaxing power from the stricken ship’s impulse engines that he is able to turn the planet-killer’s attention away from the Enterprise. Communications restored, a furious Kirk orders Spock to disregard regulations and remove Decker from command, but with the Enterprise crippled, the Constellation wrecked, the 2000lb gorilla that is the planet-killer still remains. But hope is to be found in the final, suicidal act of Commodore Decker. Now if only the transporter remains operational…
The Doomsday Machine is a cracking episode, one of my favourites of the series that combines a Cold War allegory with a study of obsessive revenge that is worthy of Ahab. That’s despite a couple of conceptual flaws that have me scratching my head when I have more than a few seconds free to consider them. There are, I believe a couple of firsts for this episode, the first mention of subspace as a medium for communication and the first appearance of a starship other than the Enterprise. This is also accompanied with some impressive effects, with the battered and burnt wreck of the Constellation contrasting strongly against the pristine bulk of the Enterprise. We also get to see the Constellation’s auxiliary control, and an engineering room that is subtly different.
The Cold War connection is pretty obvious to begin with, when Spock describes the planet-killer as a weapon of last resort, and reiterates the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction. If it isn’t apparent by this point, Kirk drives it home by directly making the comparison to the H-Bomb. While the anti-war statement is pretty gently made, it isn’t allowed to interfere with the show’s positive stance on scientific progress, with Kirk commenting on the irony of using one century’s doomsday weapon to defeat another’s. William Windom makes for a strong presence as Commodore Decker. His initial appearance as a broken man, shattered by the loss of his crew is chilling. After being propped up by one of McCoy’s potions, he gathers himself enough to relate what has just occurred. Yet he is still a man close to the edge, and when coldly reminded my Kirk that the third planet, the planet to which he evacuated his crew, no longer exists, the breakdown of the man is palpable, as he plaintively cries, “Don’t you think I know that!” Yet when he is taken to the Enterprise, his recovery is almost immediate, as if with a working starship under his feet he is energised with the opportunity to make amends for his fallen crew. He does have a point in once more attacking the planet-killer, as its advance into inhabited space represents a clear threat to the Federation that he has sworn to protect. Yet his fervour for vengeance blinds him as he winds up making the same mistakes yet again, placing the Enterprise in peril and endangering another crew. In the end, Decker is a tragic figure, a man who lost everything when his crew was slaughtered, and has been suffering from an extreme case of survivor’s guilt. Despite his slow motion panicked suicide, I get the feeling that part of him would have been relieved to finally be joining his crew, to expiate that guilt.
In fact, the one weak point in this episode surprisingly is Kirk. It isn’t much of a weak point and really only affects the start of the episode, but for me it is something of a sore point. We are told that Kirk and Decker are friends of long standing (it’s enough for Spock to issue a word or two of condolence at the end), and also Decker is Kirk’s superior officer, yet the shortness with which Kirk initially treats Decker seems out of place given this. It’s almost as if Kirk has seen the end of the script, and he knows instinctively what we are yet to learn, that Decker has cracked. While Decker tries to tell him what happened to his ship, Kirk has no patience for him, hurrying him along, practically cajoling him for the answers, and when it comes to the third planet, it seems to me that Kirk is actually rubbing the fact in, “Yes, you did lose your crew didn’t you”
Then we come to nitpick corner. The planet-killer may be a great plot device, but in practical terms it makes even less sense than a… than a… than a Death Star! Much of the visual drawback of sixties sci-fi was a difficulty in adequately expressing ideas, and this episodes suffered significantly when it came to visual perspective, Decker’s shuttle appearing the same size as the Constellation for one thing. But the problem of perspective also carries forward to visualising the planet-killer in one’s mind. The planet-killer is gargantuan certainly, miles in length, with a maw capable of swallowing starships whole. Yet your typical planet is a few thousand miles in diameter, a gas giant ten maybe twenty times wider. The imagery I get is of one of those birds that sit atop elephants pecking at fleas. It isn’t going to particularly bother the elephant. Also it is a weapon, weapons generally have targets. No society is going to create a doomsday weapon and program it to explore the universe, and eat all that is eatable. It will probably be aimed at a target and told to eat enough to get there, and then settle down for the main course. Surely the amount of energy within a planet would be enough to send the thing a fair fraction of the distance, it just beggars belief that it has to eat every planet on the way for fuel. In fact, I would expect it to be grazing on Oort clouds, are munching the occasional asteroid, rather than dismantling innocent solar systems. Then there is how the thing is defeated. It’s basically a device that breaks apart planets and devours them for fuel. I’d assume that it does this by converting matter to energy. Yet dumping a bit of energy down its maw defeats it. I’ll let pass the idea that 98 Megatons seems a piddling amount of energy for a starship’s Impulse engines, but for a device that is designed to convert matter to energy on a planetary scale to be defeated by the overload of a comparatively microscopic starship is laughable.
But these are insignificant nitpicks in a dramatic episode that ranks among Star Trek’s finest. It’s perfectly paced, suspenseful and with a great central performance from the guest star. Actually I do have one final question. When Kirk asked Scotty to install the remote detonator to the ship’s engines, did he also ask for a ticking sound to accompany the thirty second countdown, just so he could crap his pants, or was Scotty just teasing?
, tho I was planning to getting around to doing that even before the news broke.
