Was Gary Mitchell a Force User?

[Spock's Barber]

I guess I won't be telling any more jokes to god.

 

[Phaser Two]

I just had a wild fan theory pop into my head while I was waking up this morning: In "Where No Man Has Gone Before," Star Trek's second pilot, Captain Kirk's best friend Gary Mitchell suddenly finds himself with starling new abilities after the Enterprise attempts to cross the Galactic Barrier. He's able to move objects with the force of his mind, sense thoughts and feelings in others, project his voice into others' minds, and even, at the end of the episode, shoot lightning bolts out of his fingertips. These are all abilities that we see the Jedi displaying at various points in the Star Wars movies.

They say in the episode that Mitchell's encounter with the barrier boosted his latent telepathic and telekinetic abilities up to superhuman levels, but what if something else was going on? What if Gary Mitchell was simply a potential Force user? What if the Galactic Barrier at the edge of the galaxy was what separated the Star Trek Universe from the Star Wars Universe, and going through it activated the latent midi-chlorians in his system? Was he just instantly corrupted to the Dark Side because he received his Force abilities so fast?

The ramifications of this theory are interesting... Could everything have been okay with Gary Mitchell if he'd just received some training from Yoda or Ben Kenobi? How would Gary have done with a lightsaber? And does this mean that Dr. Dehner was really Gary's long-lost sister?

Ha! As a fan of both universes - but always Star Trek first - I love this. Well done.

 

[Push The Button]

Different time, different galaxy.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Ha! As a fan of both universes - but always Star Trek first - I love this. Well done.

Thanks!

 

[Albertese]

I say no, because Jedi cannot manifest objects like Mitchell does with the headstone and grave and earlier with the garden and the apples that Dehner eats. And, unlike Jedi, there's no evidence that Mitchel gained any precognitive powers. Clairvoyance, yes, but he couldn't see the future (thankfully for Kirk).

As for George Lucas getting Jedi ideas from this particular episode, I don't buy it. Telepathy, telekinesis, and clairvoyance were all staple sci-fi powers going back at least to pulp sci-fi magazines and dime novels from George's childhood. There's nothing really original in the list of Jedi powers, Lucas just managed to package the ideas in a way that hadn't quite been done before. (After all, the Jedi aren't quite the Bene Gesseritt). But the use of these powers in "WNMHGB" is hardly original either.

--Alex