Should Omicron Ceti III be declared off-limits?

[Sisko_is_my_captain]

It seems to me like Omicron Ceti III, with it's joy-and-contentment spores would actually be quite a draw. Experiencing a shitty life full of depression? Just go there and smell the flowers. Garak basically did the same thing, in a manner of speaking, with his Wire.

So should Starfleet blacklist the planet? What if people understand the pros and cons and still want to go there? Surely it can be handled in a safe way. I don't recall there being any real negatives to spore exposure, besides a general lack of Starfleet motivation.

 

[publiusr]

That’s where I would have dropped of Khan.
And the space hippies and Vaal’s followers, perhaps...

 

[Commishsleer]

Wouldn't the planet be good for people missing a kidney, a lung, a limb???
Doesn't it grow missing stuff in your body back?

Starfleet could set up a hospital there. Send people missing legs or an eye or whatever there and expose them to the plants and a couple of weeks later ta da they're whole again.

 

[Qonundrum]

The Federation's foremost penal colony and pleasure planet... come one, come all, step right up - Khan won't hurt you! (Unless he throws a big enough tantrum and the spores within wither and die...)

Great point about smelling the flowers...

The story could have added a bit more as to why it's such a bad thing. "The spores eventually kill the host" is probably the most they'd allow in 1966*. Even saying "Like what alcohol does to a liver after a while" as a simile could have been too graphic should the audience then imagine a bunch of spores rotting a person from inside out** , and this is taking "Charlie X"'s machinations into account. But metamorphosis into plantlife is a bit harder to sell than ordinary body horror...


* despite Doctor Who showing on air a plant species infecting an organic life form with spores and said spores turn hapless victim into another plant, with said human becoming murderously psychotic during the transformation... Of course, if the costume looks risible then nobody's going to buy into the horror of it and no plant is ever bipedal. Maybe tons of tentacles or glides along like how a snail does but it's not going to walk over for a pub to get some fermented barley.

** No worries. Then came 1979 and a little movie called "Alien" where bodies being used as food sources by alien critters truly became popular, even if Doctor Who did something similar again in 1975... only with green bubble wrap that nobody in 1975 would recognize but everyone by 1978 would. Which is why the underlying concept carried the weight more than the bubblewrap needed to...

 

[johnnybear]

I think that Kirk nailed Starfleet's opinion of the spores many times in the series with his man was never meant to stagnate and would have to push and climb for everything in life! But for most people who are fed up with war, greed, street violence and depression the place would offer an alternative to that! That's if the said negative things still existed on twenty third century earth and it wasn't the paradise we're all told it was?
JB

 

[Timo]

I gather this would hinge on what happened to Sandoval's people after Kirk dragged them away from the place in chains.

Did they live full and happy lives, now with extra appendices and whatnot? Did they die horribly within a couple of years or perhaps months, as the damage from Berthold rays finally triumphed over the healing effects of the spores? It's quite the pity that for the next year or so, no adventure presents the heroes with a character who would otherwise suffer or die, but might benefit from a trip to Omicron Ceti III (Pike having been dealt with already and all); it's only with "For the World is Hollow" that the premise again emerges, and that's 2k stardates and probably two years after "This Side". Plenty of time for the true horrors of getting Omicroned to be revealed to Federation science.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Pike having been dealt with already and all

Christopher Pike is truly the man fate crapped on. First he got the delta rays, and then he was stashed away on Talos IV just weeks before the healing spores of Omecron Ceti III were discovered.

 

[Vger23]

Declare OC3 off limits...but allow any old group of idiots to land on the Ba’ku World in the Briar Patch.




Because those dudes suck.