Star Trek:The Book 4A

                                                                                                 Hebraism and Hellenism---
                                                                                                 between these two points
                                                                                                 of influence moves our world.
                                                                                                    --(Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 1869).

Introduction

The theme of dualism, of the human dialectic as a modus vivendi, takes on added notions with Matthew

Arnold's introduction of the concept of Hebraism and Hellenism as polarities, as the major tensional opposites

between which modern man must seek a balanced middle path if he is to achieve fullness of individuali-

zation. Both concepts of life represent different dialectical means to what Arnold insists is one true goal:

"The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as in all great spiritual

disciplines, is no doubt the same: man's perfection or salvation." Hebraism is steeped in man's physical need

for action, is an offshoot of man's dark half--the unconscious, and is coalesced in and through what Kant

(and later, Carlyle) called the die Vernunft, defined by Kant as pure reason, defined by Blake, Coleridge,

and Carlyle as the human imagination--the synthetic, creative force whose power is not logical. This chapter

deals with illogic, with the Judeo-Christian tradiion, with man's unconscious self. Roddenberry's Star Trek

insists on the crucial importance of the inner unknowns of the human psyche. To know ourselves, we must

realize and acknowledge the unknown worlds of imagination, of primordial darkness, of the personal and the

collective unconscious. The pivotal term is Hebraism. The basic quest in literature since the mid-eighteenth

century is for Hebraism over Hellenism--a quest that is carried on by the Puritan tradition and reasserted by

Romanticism with its quest for the human

unconscious and for the supernatural. Arnold notes, with Blake and Carlyle in mind, that modern

humanism's fundamental ground is our preference of doing (Hebraism) to thinking (Hellenism). Energy, the

prime ingredient in Blake's world view, is more favored than intelligence. Hebraism's insistence is based on

duty, self-control and work; the interest is in conduct and obedience based on a sense of man's physical

body and its desires and energies. Hebraism considers cerebral thinking as an important complement to

correct action. Hebraism insists on strictness of conscience. In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold notes

the strong Biblical basis of Hebraism:

          The understanding of Solomon is the "walking in the way of
          the commandments ... The disciples of the Old Testament may
          be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee
          from sin ... of becoming conscious of sin, of awakening to a
          sense of sin.

          In the New Testament the truth which gives us the peace of
          God and makes us free, is the love of Christ constraining us
          to crucify as he did, and with a full purpose of moral regenerating
          the flesh with its affections and lusts ... to 'hold the truth'
          in St. Paul which is just what Socrates' Hellenism
          judged impossible.

Since the Renaissance, Hellenism has been the dominant zeitgeist. Hebraic man is guilty and is sin-ridden

man who was "baptized into death," who suffers in the flesh. The concept of the Biblical, post-Lapsarian man,

reinforced by the Protestant Reformation, stressed man's feeling and acting side, not to his thinking and

reasoning side. The rule is behavior, not beauty. The preoccupation with obedience and action is befitting

an industrial society where working hard leaves little world for leisure of thinking. As the nineteenth century

progressed, man kept looking inwards sometimes out of a paralytic fear of what Carlyle called the "disease

of metaphysics"--the

tendency of “mind to rise above the mind; to envision...or as we say, comprehend the mind"

(“Characteristics," 1831). The concern of men like Blake, Carlyle, and the modern Existentialists

(especially Sartre and Heidegger) is that opinion and action had become discounted, that philosophical

speculation was not finding vent in physical action. The disease of modernism had produced a crippling self-

consciousness that created inquiry, doubt, skepticism, a "march of intellect" that precludes creative action.

The cry was for less logic and mind, and for more action. The industrial revolution fostered science and

metaphysics, fostered change that ironically left man unserved: “Nothing acts from within outwards in

undivided healthy force; everything lies impotent, lamed, its force turned inwards, and painfully 'listens to

itself” (T. Carlyle, "Characteristics,"1831). This created a sensibility among intellectuals that "Man is sent

hither not to question, but to work,” that the end of man “is in Action, not a Thought." Blake, Hegel, Carlyle,

Browning and Tennyson dealt at one time or another with Carlyle's saying that "The sign of health is

unconsciousness," that the healthy understanding is not the logical, but the intuitive, that the end of

understanding is not to prove and find reasons, but to know and believe. Insight and creativity were to be

found in the unconsciousness, and analytics, self-contemplation, were the "symptoms of disease." Science had

created a morbid sensibility (fostered too by the Judeo-Christian tradition) that something is always wrong--a

          The tree of knowledge springs from a root
          of evil, and bears fruits of good and evil.
          Had Adam remained in Paradise,
          there had been no Anatomy and Metaphysics...
          We stand here too conscious of many things:
          with knowledge, the symptom of derangement
          we must even do our best to restore a
          little Order.
              --(T. Carlyle, "Characteristics," 1831).

Thought must be cured by action; action is the only certainty, the only cure for the doubt created by

metaphysics. Self-consciousness is the stamp of the age we call modern. The cure to consciousness was

to balance it with a quest for unconsciousness. The quest was, and still remains, for a tensional balance

between Hellenic reason/consciousness and Hebraic action/unconsciousness. This balance is to be

achieved by the unifying, synthetic power of die Vernunft--the imagination which creates symbols, which

in literature and in Star Trek, unite the unconscious and the conscious factors.

The concern in this chapter is with what Spock would call illogic, that unpredictable emotionalism

that makes a Dr. McCoy so viably human, a man of infinite feeling. Both Kirk and McCoy

are highly intuitive and have an uncanny ability to transcend logic and tap the inner recesses of the heart

of man. Both men are closely tapped into what Jung called man's collective unconscious. The Hebraic sense

of the universal man as he has evolved from millennia of experimental evolution makes a McCoy intensely

human because of his acute sense of human suffering, a trait accented by his role as the ship's chief medical

officer and by his less official role as Kirk's advisor on the topic of the human mind and the collective

unconscious as the core and the source of his seemingly intuitive knowledge of what makes a man tick. No

logic, no dispassioned logic, provides such information because McCoy deals with man's heart, his

viscera; he is gut instinct tempered by acute, experiential knowledge of human nature. His teacher lies in

his knowledge of man's development

since the very dawn of time. This knowledge is innate and is acquired by a disciplined conscience

who knows the human soul, the human heart per force of the fact of being born a human being.

It is a specifical inheritance. Men like McCoy belong to what Hawthorne called the "communion of the race"--a

knowledge of the tree of good and evil, a knowledge too of the Edenic tree of life. It is a matter of finely tuned,

but very human, instinct. The collective unconscious is man's primordial past. Jung defines it as:

          The collective unconscious is an in born disposition to
           produce parallel images, or rather identical psychic
           structures common to all men, which I later called the
           archetypes of the collective unconscious. They corres-
           pond to the concept of the ‘pattern of behavior’ in biology.

In his Symbols of Transformation, Jung insists that the collective unconscious is universal:

          It not only binds individuals together into a nation or
          race, but unites them with the men of the past and with
          their psychology. Thus, by reason of its supra-individual
          universality, the unconscious is the prime object of any
          psychology…..

Therefore, one of the sources of Star Trek's great appeal is its universality because its characters are at once

individuals, but also all mankind “as it was from the beginning" ("Amok Time") as it “comes down from the

beginning” as T'Pau states. In "Amok Time," we see the “Vulcan heart," the "Vulcan soul,” and it is

remarkably human in its primordial darkness and barbarism. Every Star Trek episode taps into this

historical, instinctive flow of human nature. As a result, however unconsciously, the viewer sees his present

self as he views his past human self evolve on the screen. Star Trek's immense popularity lies largely in its

immense portrayal of

the collective unconsciousness as it lives in men today. As it was, so too it is, and so it too shall continue

to be--man. As McCoy quips, "It's the human thing to do." Star Trek has captured the dark, inner recesses

of man's instinctual animality. Those precious moments with Zarabeth ("All Our Yesterdays") show

the past as it continues in the present. The viewer sees himself as he watches the human drama once again unfold,

much like the ancient Greeks who watched Sophocles' dramas unfold again and again, loving the play because

they already knew the plot. The human anticipation of the collective unconscious gives man life

and a sense of his history. Star Trek provides that universal and homogeneous substratum whose homogeneity

extends into a worldwide identity or similarity of myths and fairy tales.

Star Trek depicts the primordial image, and it remains an unknown. The collective unconscious provides

food for Kantian imagination and archetypes which Jung compares to a deeply graven "river-bed in the soul"

in which the waters of life that had spread hitherto with groping and uncertain course over wide but shallow

surfaces suddenly become a "mighty river." Star Trek is replete with such archetypes that hibernate in the

human soul: "all the hidden forces of instinct, to which the ordinary conscious will alone can never gain access"

(Carl Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, 1922). Star Trek weaves masterful tapestries of the human

unknown--the unconscious--by building archetypes and unifying symbols by which the individual's creative

force is linked to the primordial inheritance of psychic energy, a deeply rooted system that enables a McCoy

or a Kirk to tap that

mighty river, giving him a psychic, imaginative grasp of situations that yield individuation and a further

continuation of life. The archetypes of the collective unconscious work hand in hand with

man's Hebraism whereby instinct chooses an appropriate form of action whereby Kirk grasps the momentary

situation, as in “The Deadly Years" where Kirk, having recovered from the aging process,

fakes the corbomite maneuver, knowing instinctively that the Romulans will give way. Hebraism and instinct

present “a practicable formula without which the apprehension of a new state of affairs would be impossible"

(C.G.Jung, Psychological Types). Kirk arrives at this knowledge because he is ironically "of the body" while

still maintaining his individuality--something Landrau would never have accepted. The unconscious coupled

with Kirk's very moral, Hebraic sensibility, enable him to survive, to be enterprising. Human enterprise requires

the symbol be charged with Hebraic dread, awe, and reverence to create an act which is both creative and

unconscious, an act that unifies the unconscious and the conscious. Such an act has an anti-logical or illogical

or pre-logical basis that enables man to master reality. Such illogic gives man an intuitive grasp that transcends

the logic of reason.

Star Trek's symbolism is in keeping with Matthew Arnold's point in Culture and Anarchy that it is between

Hebraism and Hellenism--or in Jungian terms between Unconscious and Conscious-- that the human world

moves. Either concept or state of being, taken in extremis, means disease as Carlyle defines the term, a

human spectrum in Star Trek; it is important because Roddenberry's modern man must be a moral man, first and

always. Carlyle once said that "Socrates is terribly at ease in Zion," that moral man's terrifying conscience is ill

at ease in the world of Grecian intellectual idealities, just as the body is ill at ease in a context of pure essence.

The moral man of action is aware of the difficulties which oppose themselves to man's pursuit or attainment

of perfection sought by the Greeks. What thwarts such efforts is sin--a definite uneasiness that is man's being. The

Judea-Christian confronts the pagan. Unconsciousness is not logical and Hebraism is not the path of reason,

but the path of confrontation of the whole man in the fullness and violence of his passion with the unknowable and

overwhelming All that is the God of the Book of Job. Hebraism stresses Job as a prototype of the modern,

existential man where natural and supernatural meet in the arena of existence, not on that of reason. Being born,

living and dying are rarely logical. Kirk is a modern Job who bends low the mightiest forces because he is faith

in its full primitive state. McCoy's relationship to Kirk is one of trust, not one of belief or dogma. McCoy in

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (ST: TMP) says there are casualties of the worm-hole effect--his "wits!'

This is the Hebraic man of blood, "bones," flesh and blood in his stalk physicality. "Bones" is human life and knowledge

based not on reason alone, but upon body and blood, heart and bowels; man is a creature of passion--the loves, the

failures, the agonies, and the ecstasies--whose very path treads upon doubt and mutability. From St. Augustine through

Kant and Pascal man becomes increasingly aware of his finitude. What Carlyle

calls that feeling of "unkraft," of feebleness, haunts man's every fibre. Hebraic man is religious, especially in the

intensity with which he lives and dies, and reason cannot fathom the religious experience that is life. Carlyle,

echoing St. Augustine, ridicules Plato's question of what is man, emphasizing what I shall do: "Know what thou

canst work at.”

The question shifts from essence to existence, from what a thing is to what a thing is and does. As Sartre insists,

man must confront nothingness. The Enterprise is hurled into non-being constantly; its journey is into immensity.

Pascal notes that man occupies that via media who is the All in relation to nothingness, who is nothingness without

the All. As Blake insists, progress comes if man marries his hell to his heaven, his evil to his good, his yin to his yang.

Nietzsche centers on this darkness within, demanding externalization and its concomitant assimilation of the dark

factor: "Mankind must become better and more evil" is not so different from Blake's late 18th century analysis of

mankind's inherent dialectic between opposites within and without. Hebraism has its counterpart in existentialism's

der angst--the age of anxiety. Star Trek shows man in continual confrontation with the void of NOT-ME in outer

space and in inner space. The theologian, Paul Tillich, shows that fear is at least fear of something; it has an object,

a discernable cause. One knows what he is afraid of. However, anxiety is an uncanny foment whose cause or

object is unknown. It is this nothingness that makes itself present and felt inside oneself. Much of the anxiety is

reduced to fear and, at times, to solution in

Star Trek; but the anxiety or the solution is locked in the realism of illogic of the human unconscious. We

better understand ourselves by confronting the inner space of our primordial fears. Even Spock has an illogical

explanation for eating "animal flesh" in "All Our Yesterdays ," for desiring Zarabeth because he is resorting

to his barbaric ancestors who existed 5,000 years before the Enterprise. Hebraism brings forth characters

replete with resentment and doubt because there is no universal code of ethics. The individual is higher than

any universal. It is post-lapsarian, fallen man as his nakedness facing Blake's barren heath where that fallen man IS

just, where illogic, guts, and sticktuitiveness enable the just man to plant roses amid the thorns in a post-

Edenic nature. Hebraic man-- a Kirk or a McCoy--must fight it out and figure it out with the coyness of the

fox and the strength of the tiger. Uhura, in ST: TMP says, "It's how we all feel, Mr. Spock" as the inscrutable Vulcan

barely notices the bridge crew's existence in his first appearance. That sense of feeling is at the heart of this chapter,

and feeling is not feeling if subjected to the scrutiny of logic. That feeling has millions of years of human evolution

behind it, and it serves to keep man human in a technologized age. Surrounded by computers and microchips, man

has all the greater need to assert feelings to counterbalance the Norman invasion of our galactic glands. Tribbles

are like the lilies of the field, quips Spock, because they neither reap nor sow. They give us nothing--not from a

them" and that's enough. Even Spock is not totally immune from their trilling and purring. Hebraic man is a

creature of the human body. In "Mantrap," Kirk chides McCoy for "thinking" with his "glands." A balance

between illogic and logic, between glands and reason is called for. They must complement each other

in a tensional dialectic between opposites.

     What Star Trek achieves is a transcendence of tensional states by the liberating power of transcendent and

synthesizing symbols that embody man's total, overall human condition. This total man that evolves undergoes a

process of individuation and his personality is best characterized by an early Romantic quality--dynamism, energy,

vitality. What Gene Roddenberry studies is the evil stemming from what Jung calls "dissociation," wherein an

opposition exists between the conscious and the unconscious, between logic and illogic. There can be a

          continuous rhythmic relation between integration
          and dissociation within the individual’s history
          such that either one in ‘arrested’ at a given stage
          ...or one is able to progress, continually incorpo-
          rating the manifestations of the unconscious meaning
          fully into ‘wholeness.’
              --(Marius Philipson, Outline of a Jungian Aesthetics: Northwestern
                 Univ. Press, 1963, p. 37).

Jung points out that the "psyche is not a unity, but a contradiction multiplicity of complexes," making human

"dissociation" not so abnormal. However a dissociation between the individual and the collective unconscious

cannot become permanent, for then we would have what Star Trek studies as an abhorrence--

"the differentiated modern ego...a veneer of civilization over a brute." This

Othello complex with its dissociation (a modern "disease") requires immediate synthesis, a synthetic union

of "savage" man and “uncivilized” man. Man has psychic energy, and, as William Blake notes, energy is from

the body, not from the mind (reason).

Above all, Star Trek deals with symbols. Gene Roddenberry is a master of symbols, including cinematic

projections of the inner states of the human unconscious. The symbol, as pointed out, is a joining device that

unifies the physical and the metaphysical; it is a physical reality that embodies/bodies forth spiritual meaning--

all about man's personality. Man has a need for symbols because man naturally embodies the NOT-ME with

something of the ME in order to recognize and to survive in his earthly environment. In making symbols, man

becomes what Roddenberry calls “the creator" (Gene’s studio nickname) because through symbols he recreates his

universe. Man is the controller. By energizing his physical universe, man becomes nature's dominant and

transcendent being.

The study of man is the study of his dynamic imagination--his most formidable and perhaps his least used faculty

because its capacities go largely unrecognized or unknown. By symbols, the human imagination makes the invisible

visible while showing that everything visible is ultimately invisible in nature. Star Trek makes the suprasensory sensible

by the use of symbols. Art uses the concrete because the things of the earth are of our nature, are part of us to the

last, dust to dust, earth to earth. We understand what we cannot see better if we see its symbol first,

and its symbolic meaning thereafter. Time and eternity meet in the symbol. The use of timeless symbols

and archetypes gives Star Trek its universal appeal. The symbol appeals to man's primordial memory

because it makes him reach inside into his post-Edenic viscera, his millions of years of suffering and

despair, of victories and defeats. Then he can "redate" what he sees on the screen to his own being and to his

primordial past beings as it has evolved into his present human nature. Star Trek is not a success because

it appeals merely to scattered individuals, but because it has something of a spiritual nature to say to man

in his collectivity.

The message is as universal as the response. Star Trek is a consummate study of man as he actually is,

now and forever. The first clear definition of the symbol as it best pertains to Star Trek and to modern art is

defined by Thomas Carlyle:

          Rightly viewed no meanest object is
          insignificant; all objects are as windows
          through which the philosophic eye looks into
          Infinitude itself ....all visible things
          are emblems; what thou seest is not there
          on its own account; strictly taken, is not
          there at all: Matter exists only spiritually,
          and to represent some Idea, and body it forth.
              --(T. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book First, Ch. XI, 1933).

Carlyle calls these emblems "clothes" wherein the "Imagination" must "weave Garments, visible Bodies,

wherein the else invisible creations and inspirations of our Reason are, like Spirit, revealed, and first become

all-powerful….." Gene Roddenberry himself would not object to Carlyle's view of just what we see about

man through a study of symbols. Indeed, an uncanny resemblance exists

between nineteenth century Britain's most brilliant mind and the view of man's inner self in Star Trek:

          'To the eye of vulgar Logic...what is man? An
          omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To
          the eye of Pure Reason [imagination} what
          is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition…
          Deep-hidden is he under that strange Garment [Flesh];
          and Sounds and Colours and Forms.'
             --(T. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, II, X (1833).

Carlyle stresses the paradox of inner and outer man, but stresses the uniform good of the dualities. One is the

man of mystery, “inextricably over-shrouded"; the other is "sky-worth, and worthy of a God." In this sense,

man is the ultimate symbol of himself and of Infinity: "For matter were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the

manifestation of Spirit." It is the so-called collective unconscious of man, that mysteriously intuitive self

that creates energy and wonder. As Carlyle notes, the "progress of Science…is to destroy Wonder, and in

its stead substitute mensuration and numeration" for "thought without Reverence is barren, perhaps poisonous."

It is the intent here to study this wonder with some reverence. The wonder will remain a wonder because

it is ultimately unfathomable. “La mystère vive; toujours mystère! Some see, here and there, man the

symbol and symbol-maker as a task thereby warranted. Star Trek is one vast symbol.

Gene Roddenberry, in his reverence for human life and human growth, requires a self sentience that nudges

the unaware individual into insipient consciousness of what was hitherto unconscious, buried within the self.

                                                                                                                                          IV: A015

                                                                “The Enemy Within”

The first major symbol or archetype is that of man versus the self: the symbol of the enemy within, the

confrontation with one's opposite/complement. Joseph Conrad first called this Jungian l'etranger the

secret sharer, also the title of an exciting and highly accurate story depicting the meeting between a self

and his double, his other self, his secret sharer. Gene Roddenberry has indicated that the episode "The

Enemy Within" is his most memorable episode of the three year series, the one with which he still

found the greatest identification and edification. It is his favorite episode, and it sets the entire pattern for

Roddenberry's analysis of the nature of starship command. Eight specific Star Trek episodes deal directly

with the theme of the secret sharer, and they will be analyzed in this section as a manifestation of man's

confrontation with the unknown unconscious within. The enemy within phenomenon, besides presenting

exciting action, sets a prototype for Gene Roddenberry's anatomy of the human personality

with its light and dark sides, which pervades all Star Trek episodes with unyielding consistency and

aesthetic tenacity. This shadow, as Jung calls it, is one’s own “dark brother,” a "collective shadow"

that manifests itself as a concrete figure in the NOT-ME as one's alter-ego and archetypal symbol that

bodies forth the contents of the self that have been rejected or suppressed or ignored in living one's conscious

self. The greater the zeitgeist of modern civilization demands a life of strict decorum, such as the life of a

starship captain, the greater the forcefulness or need for the unconscious dark side to compensate, to seek

balance, for an overly strict world of ego achtung. The devil is always more active in

a Puritan world. Why, then, is the devil in Milton's Paradise Lost the major and the most kinetic character?

The rigors of discipline forced upon a Kirk by his command and in a Kirk upon himself can leave him “no

beach to walk on," no outlet for pent-up negative creativity. Therefore, the symbol of the secret

sharer is adopted wholesale, sometimes almost literally, from Joseph Conrad's brilliant short story "The

Secret Sharer" (1909)-- some time before Jung's archetypes were extant. Great literature

tends to be ahead of its time, and the secret sharer symbol was a major breakthrough in fiction, especially

in its psychological accuracy and universality. Confrontation with the secret sharer is Roddenberry's way

to force every man to take a harsh and critical review of his own nature. Externalization of l'autre

(the other) is a necessary experience for the integration and the balance between the conscious and the

unconscious factors that, in dialectical synthesis, create the healthy and whole self. Such an acceptance

of the opposites within is necessary for psychic harmony, self-control, control over the NOT-ME,

and, in Kirk's case, true command as captain of the Enterprise. In "The Enemy Within," Kirk's imagination

creates a palpable reality self that he must accept and assimiliate. Kirk, as a new captain, suffers from

an acute case of modernism's self-consciousness, with a resulting need of what Carlyle insisted--

unconsciousness as health. The study centers about the twoness, the duality in the human personality.

The parallels between Conrad's narrator in "The Secret Sharer" and Captain Kirk are frighteningly

similar. Conrad’s Mr. Leggatt has assumed his first command of a seagoing vessel. Of his ship,

he says,

"All its phases were familiar enough to me, every characteristic, all the alterations which were to face me

on the high seas--everything! …except the novel responsibility of command." Like Kirk, Leggatt speaks

of "my strangeness" that "I--a stranger …..with a tangle of unrelated things, invaded by unrelated shore

people, I had hardly seen her yet properly. Now as she [ship] lay cleared for seas……" Both Kirk and

Leggatt are young, strangers to themselves; as Leggatt notes: "I was somewhat of a stranger

to myself." Both men are experiencing what Leggatt calls "the breathless pause at the threshold of a long

passage." Both captains endure the timelessness of a new command. Leggatt's wording incorporates later

Trek themes and nomenclature. Leggatt says:

          ...we seemed to be measuring our futures for a long
          and arduous enterprise, the appointed task of both
          our existences to be carried out, far from all human
          eyes, with only sky and sea for spectators and for
          judges.

Both Leggatt and Kirk, as new captains, must compare the ideals they have set for themselves with the realities

that the job of command imposes:

          I was willing to take the adequacy of the others for
          granted. They had simply to be equal to their [crew’s]
          tasks; but I wondered how far I should turn out
          faithful to that ideal conception of one's own person-
          ality every man sets up for himself secretly.

Kirk's secret sharer ( Kirk 2) is created by a transporter malfunction. Leggatt's secret sharer swims to the

ship, at first appearing like a "headless corpse," but seen proven half-dead with exhaustion. The sharer resembles

Mr. Leggatt and introduces himself::

"My name's Leggatt." Captain Leggatt's secret sharer, unlike Kirk's rather violent one, is "calm and

resolute" where "good voice" and "self-possession...had somehow induced a corresponding state in my-

self.” However, the secret sharer has fled from violence--imprisonment for killing a man. He has a violent

past and Leggatt promptly calls the secret sharer "my double":

          It was, in this night, as though I had been forced
         by my own reflection in the depths of a somber
          and immense moan…. I needed no more. I saw it
          all going on as though I were myself inside that
          other sleeping suit.

Conrad's secret sharer, like Kirk's double, is seen as an intruder, and Leggatt meets his double in his cabin,

oddly enough usually in the bathroom. The double is Kirk and Leggatt's dark side with the ego-consciousness

kept imprisoned within the self. Leggatt's secret sharer has been kept locked up like a murderer. The secret

sharer notes:

          God only knows why they locked me in every night. To
          see some of their faces you'd have thought they were
          afraid I'd go about at night strangling people. Am
          I a murdering brute? Do I look it?

Kirk's double attacks Yeoman Rand, is lascivious and rapacious. Its brutality, although inherent, is self-destructive

          The 'brand of Cain' business, don't you see.
          That's all right. I was ready enough to go
          off wandering on the face of the earth--and
          that was price enough to pay for an Abel
          of that sort.

To the outside world, Leggatt's secret sharer jumped ship and is to be listed as a suicide, but he kept

surviving unconsciously attracted to Leggatt's ship as a haven from society and himself. Officially, Kirk's double,

once its nature is understood by McCoy and Spock, must be kept in the closet, as it were,

and is officially called an imposter and an intruder who is NOT the captain. Such knowledge of the truth

would destroy crew morale because the captain cannot appear anything less than perfect before his crew.

Both Leggatt and Kirk try to hide the "wild beast" from the crew while both captains struggle with the

problem of the other who is both a NOT-ME and a ME. It cannot be destroyed; it must be assimilated

and synthesized to form the integrated Kirk or the integrated Leggatt. The "death" of the "imposter" will be

the beginning of a rebirth of two new captains. For both men, the power of the captaincy lies in the

“wild beast” sharer whose negativity gives the captains the strength to lead others, to rule a ship; they are very

palpable symbols of an autonomous society, both in Conrad's short story and in Star Trek's "The Enemy

Within."

The captain must remain partly a stranger to his crew, but cannot be a complete stranger unto himself or unto

his crew. He is set aside. Captain Leggatt, Conrad's Kirk, explains the sense of l'etranger :

          For the rest, I was almost as much of a stranger on
          board as himself, I said ....I felt that it would
          take very little to make me a suspect person in the
          eyes of the ship's company...and we the two strangers
          in the ship, faced each other in identical attitudes.

Like Kirk, who corners his secret sharer in engineering, both men, in talking with their doubles, are really talking

to an externalization of their personal unconscious. The self speaks to its alter-self. In Freudian terms, the ego

and the id are both rivals and partners to the one self (selbst). Sanity and insanity face both Kirk and Leggatt.

          ….and all the time the dual working of my mind distracted
          me almost to the point of insanity. I was constantly
          watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my
          actions as my own personality, sleeping in that bed, be-
          hind that door which faced me as if at the head of the

table. It was very much like being mad, only it was
worse because one was aware of it.

Both captains have that "scheme for keeping my second self invisible" and "that queer sense of

whispering to myself.” Both can say, "Anybody would have taken him for me." Leggatt's secret

sharer retains a calm, quiet exterior, but has a violent past; whereas, Kirk's secret sharer is unable to

hide his negative violence. Leggatt says of his secret sharer: "A spiritless tenacity was his main

characteristic." However, both men must be tested as new captains, and that test begins in the test with

the double. Conrad’s Leggatt notes:

          If he had only known how afraid I was of putting my
          feelings of identity with the other to the test ...
          something in one that reminded him of the man he was
          seeking--suggested a mysterious similitude to the
          young fellow he had distrusted and disliked from the
          first ... fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suffers
          thus. And I was afraid he would ask me point-blank
          for news of my other self.

Like Kirk and the double in engineering and in sickbay, where Kirk actually caresses his secret sharer

(saving his life by unifying hands to create psychic wholeness), Leggatt too says, "I felt less torn in two when

I was with him." Kirk and his double, Leggatt and his double, are "the only two strangers on board,"

as Conrad notes. Both are experiencing the terrifying aloneness of the captaincy:

          In my [Leggatt's] case they [captain and ship] were
          not unalloyed. I was not wholly alone with my command;
          for there was that stranger in my cabin. Or rather,
          I was not completely and wholly with her. Part of me
          was absent. That mental feeling being in two places
          at once affected me physically as if the mood of secrecy
          had penetrated my very soul.

Both Captains must turn their doubles into singles, a process of psychic reintegration that recreates

the self. The stranger, the other, must become the familiar, the ME. Leggatt's double insists: "Maroon me ;"

and eventually Leggatt's double leaves the ship as captain Leggatt maneuvers the vessel dangerously close

to Koh-ring Island under the guise of seeking the land breeze. His crew is terrified of running aground, while

Leggatt and his double agree mutually that freedom in the Pacific islands far from civilization is preferable to

facing prison or gallows. The civilized world would hang the human unconscious simply because

it is not "civilized.^” Leggatt's secret sharer shares the fears of Kirk's secret sharer. Both aspects of the human

personality fear isolation as much as they do reintegration. There is something both terrifying and wonderful

in the understanding worked out by the opposites within him. This reintegration is the first test of the captaincy:

          Be careful, he murmured, warningly--and I realized
          suddenly that all my future, the only future for
          which I was fit, would perhaps go irretrievably
          to pieces in any mishap to my first command.

In facing "my second self," the new captain in Conrad's story sees his secret sharer "sitting so quietly…

like something against nature, inhuman.”

The rebirth for Leggatt and for Kirk lies in the same need-- synthesis. Leggatt's secret sharer swims

from the ship into the night toward Koh-ring with Leggatt's floppy hat visible in the water, serving as a

reminder that the experience was real. Kirk and his secret sharer are synthesized by molecular scrambling

of

preconceived/prerecorded patterns stored inside the memory banks of the ship's transporter. The two become

one, and Kirk's dark self is hidden safely away, inside, where only the self knows who and why. Joseph Conrad’s

captain’s reaction to his now-lost secret sharer is befitting Star Trek's brilliant enemy within episode:

          I recognized my own floppy hat. It must have fallen
          off his head…and he didn't bother. Now I had what
          I wanted--the saving mark for my eyes. But I hardly
          thought of my other self, now gone from the ship, to
          be hidden forever from all friendly faces, to be a
          fugitive, and a vagabond on the earth...saving the
          ship, by serving me for a mark to help out the
          ignorance of my strangeness.

The secret sharer symbol shows, as Gene Roddenberry says, “there is no enemy.” The enemy is part of me,

a friend in time and function, when integrated with man’s consciousness. "We are two," Gene once said.

Kirk standing reintegrated in the transporter is Leggatt reintegrated. Both captains are now leaders of men,

truly tested. Conrad's early 20th century captain has the same experience and the same feelings

as Star Trek’s 23rd century captain. Leggatt's last remarks show the captain who sits sternly and securely,

whether it be on the quarter deck or in the center chair:

          Nothing! no one in the world should stand now
          between us, throwing a shadow on the way of
          silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect
          communion of a seaman with his first command ....
         my second self had lowered himself into the
          water to take his punishment; a free man, a
          proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.

"The Enemy Within," written by Richard Matheson, is Star Trek’s sixth episode of the first season, and is an

important masterpiece because its theme is the nature of man, and more importantly, the nature of command.

Like Conrad's Leggatt, Roddenberry's Kirk must

let no one in the world stand in the way of command. Nothing must throw a shadow on the “perfect

communion” of a captain with his "first command"--not even an enemy from within. A captain cannot

himself be that shadow. Knowledge of his secret sharer is knowledge of his own dual personality, and

both the light and the dark contraries within the man must, as Blake hopes, breed progression and command

over oneself before command can exist over a society in space--the Enterprise. "The Enemy Within^" is

an intricate study of the conscious and unconscious factors which constitute the total human personality,

and of the divisory ramifications of the dominance or lessening of one factor at the expense of the other that

creates a psychical intolerance that jeopardizes psychological synthesis and, hence, the ability of the new

captain to establish his first command.

As Spock points out, a captain can appear no less than perfect in the eyes of his crew. The criteria imposed upon

the captaincy are almost inhuman, almost super-human; and yet, as McCoy tells Kirk:

          You're no different than anyone else. We all have
          our darker side. We need it. It's half of what
          we are. It's not really ugly; it's human…yes,
          human.

McCoy is the least disturbed and least frightened of the three main Trek bridge figures simply because man's

animal side is treated by the doctor every day. McCoy's psychical balance is a paragon of what the human

attitude toward the human self should be-- see, understand, and live the contraries. McCoy has assimiliatad

his secret sharer, and as such, it shocks him the least. Acceptance of the unconscious, the "negative side,”

is required for full humanization. McCoy tells Kirk, pointing to the other, that "Your strength of command lies

mostly in him." Ironically, man's violent, animal, ancestral, primitive half has the Nietzschean power. The body

holds the energy and the vitality to act upon the judgments of the intellect. But it takes the imagination to link

positive and negative factors within the human psyche. Man is a delicate balance of opposite, yet complementary,

forces. Thousands of years of Platonic thinking combined with Reformation Colonialism and Neo-Platonism

have taught man to consider his body as distinct from his soul, his animality as distinct from his rationality.

To function, a man must have and must coordinate both factors. The same Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote

"Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," had a fondness for women. Perhaps the Marquis de Sade helped restore

a balanced perspective. Post-lapsarian man is "still half savage" ("Arena") and that savagery can be a frightening,

even a terrifying self within the logical self. Such an unconscious without the restraint of understanding can destroy

an Othello who, in turn, destroys his Desdemona and himself.

Kirk faces his Iago within and realizes it is part of himself and he cannot live, no less command, without it.

While the two Kirks are in sickbay, an unusually euphoric Spock, his logic in a tizzy, sees the duality inherent

to the human mind (2 Kirks), the roles of the so-called good and evil. Man's negative side (his unconscious) is

His positive side (his conscious self) is “compassion, love, tenderness." Like Conrad, Jung, and countless

other masters, Gene Roddenberry and Richard Matheson see that the enemy within, the secret sharer,

the negative side, is not the enemy. Roddenberry insists, "There is no enemy" in that this so-called opposite

is really a complement in the Conradian sense of a heretofore unseen friend, a secret sharer, not in

some twisted Freudian sense, as an inner Klingon that destroys. Kirk is a leader, an exceptional man, but

first a man--as McCoy knows too well.

What is common knowledge to McCoy is fascination to the Vulcan and a test for the captain of the

Enterprise. Spock states the theory of what is a commander made of:

          Yes, and what is it that makes one man an exceptional
          leader? We see here indications that it is his
          negative side which makes him strange, that his evil
          side, if you will, properly controlled and disciplined,
          is vital to his strength. Your negative side removed
          from you, the power of command begins to elude you ...
          your power of command continues to weaken, you'll
          soon be unable to function as captain. You must be
          prepared for that.

Spock apologizes for his logical insensitivity as he dissects the "captain's guts," noting it is the "way I am.”

The answer to the dilemma as told by Spock and McCoy, is controlled intelligence which given the episode's

analysis, resembles the Romantic imagination as the power to synthesize opposites.

What Spock sees in his captain is a symbol, a symbol of every human being and a symbol of Spock,

the Vulcan. What Spock sees and understands is made possible by the unity of opposites within Spock--

half-human, half-Vulcan--both halves "submerged, constantly at war with each other":

          Being split into two halves is no theory with me, Doctor……
          I survive because my intelligence wins out over both.
         Your intelligence would enable you to survive as well.

Spock's human half is akin to man's animal half; his Vulcan half is akin to man's rational half. Both
Vulcan and human have within themselves the contraries necessary to destroy or to create. The ego's
control over the beast within (Plato's centaur) must, however, be controlled by a higher power--that
of the synthesizing imagination which transcends the warring opposites.
The statement about man and the power of command would of itself make "The Enemy Within" famous;
however, the screen direction of Leo Penn makes the episode a collage of scenes and symbols that enhance
and further symbolize the theme of the unity, yet violent contrast, between opposites in the human sphere. A
sense of setting and context weave an effective fabric of calm versus violence. The Stardate is 1672.1; the
planet is Alpha 177 and the Enterprise is ironically on a "specimen-gathering mission." Specimens indeed!
One of the functions of the symbol is to make the invisible visible. The cause is the most steadfastly reliable
piece of technology in Star Trek--the transporter. Besides being a good gimmick to duplicate objects and people,
and being the technological cause that makes the psychical schizophrenia of man visible to that man, the
transporter is an identity-based device. Disassembling and reassembling atoms ("scrambling") is a dissociating
and re-associating symbolic process. The transporter has a built-in memory device whereby it can “remember"
what constituted James T. Kirk in his oneness. Thus it is able to turn the two Kirks into the one Kirk at story's
end. Man's mind is not terribly unlike the atom scrambler of the transporter in analyzing

and in synthesizing data and matter and energy. When Kirk, in his log, notes that “a duplicate of me….some

strange alter-ego had been created by the transporter malfunction,” one must remember that the

malfunction is a symbolic bodying-forth of an inner psychical reality. Man is two; the transporter makes this

duality visible and concrete. When Kirk meets this alter-ego, he is meeting a part of himself--the ME meeting

the ME in a concrete setting. Gene Roddenberry has taken full advantage of cinematic art's function

to make inner realities very visible and, hence, more palpably real. Kirk's alter-ego is both fact and symbol,

but now is the first time he actually sees it as himself. In order to command, Kirk must be his own master.

The episode is so constructed so as to juxtapose and to reinforce man's yin-yang opposites. In a fleeting

early scene, Yeoman Rand and Kirk are in Kirk's quarters. Kirk, in a potentially exploitative setting, retains

his "no beach to walk on" posture as he is very business-like and abrupt with the Yeoman, dismissing her with

"That's all, Yeoman," concerning the ship's manifest report. This strain of suppression of Kirk's feelings for

Rand and of his emotional suppressions in general shows in Kirk's physical fatigue as he lies down on his bed.

It is immediately after this scene that Kirk's double demands Bacchanalian indifference from McCoy's bottle

of brandy.

The Dionysian factor of the primordial self now becomes visible as the double enters and hides in Yeoman

Rand's quarters like a prowling predator. This scene of the double rapaciously and lasciviously assaulting Rand

is the exact opposite of the earlier-mentioned scene. The two scenes form a contrapunctal movement. As Spock

then enters Kirk's quarters at McCoy's behest, noting, "Dr. McCoy seemed to think I should check on you."

Kirk notes, “That’s nice^"and Spock, annoyed by McCoy's emotionalism,

notes, "Our good Doctor said you were acting like…a wild man. Demanded brandy," and leaves

embarrassed. The camera switch to the double in Yeoman Rand's quarters enhances the contrast

          Yeoman Rand: Can I help you, Captain?
          Kirk 2: Jim will do here, Janice.
          Yeoman Rand: Oh ...
          Kirk 2: You're too beautiful to ignore. Too much
                      woman. We've both been…pretending too long
                      (Grabs her). Let's stop pretending. Come here,
                      Janice. Don't fight me. Don't fight me, Janice.

The Don Juan scene ensues and Rand scratches the double's face. At this point, the viewer becomes aware of

the key symbol of man 's primitivism--blood. Geological technician Fisher bleeds. The double's face bleeds

and, as the double enters the corridor, his bloody fist singularly protrudes into full view, and the double sucks

the blood off his hand in a vampirish way. From thence, the double is equated with violence and blood

complemented by a wolverine sexuality. The primitive, self divorced from the rational self, works in anatomical,

hyperactive, kinetic consumption, without civilized restraint.

Somehow, Kirk and his double symbolize the Othello of modernism--the veneer of civilization that cracks

under volcanic, inner convulsion and eruption. The double-Rand scene draws a clear distinction between the

beauty of sexuality and the hideousness or sadism of unbridled sexuality. Like the "body" controlled by Landru

in "The Return of the Archons," even Landru, in the computer's concept of a perfect society, is forced to make

men zombies between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., but to make them revelers and rapists between 6:00 p.m.

( the "red hour") and 6:00a.m.,

IV: A029

with darkness symbolic of the primitive self and light symbolic of the civilized self. The problem lies in

the artificial separation of the two halves of man, giving Adam and Eve two faces, two lives, two selves:

          Yeoman Rand: (crying): He the double kissed me
                                  and said that he was the captain ... he mentioned
                                  the feelings we'd been hiding. He started talking
                                  about us.
          Kirk 1: Us?
          Yeoman Rand: You started hurting me. I had to
                                  fight you, scratched your face.
          Kirk 1: Yeoman, look at me. Look at my face.
                      Are there any scratches?….Yeoman, I was in my
                      room. It wasn't me.

The dialogue centers about who the ME is. Kirk does not know that he does not yet know who the ME is.

Rand was far from not wanting what she thought was the captain. It was Kirk's as-still-unacknowledged

inner ME.

In the scenario of blood and violence of the inner, primitive Kirk is further symbolized by Pomeranian

paranoia in the transporter room. The two dogs (split by the transporter) brought in by Scotty symbolize the

two Kirks, with an obvious emphasis that this is an animal. Scotty's explanation of the calm pooch and the rabid,

caged beast (its double) is articulate and precise:

          Scott: That duplicate appeared. Except it's not a
                    duplicate. It's an opposite. Two of the same ani-
                    mal, but different. One gentle--this. One mean
                    and fierce--that. Some kind of savage, ferocious
                    opposite. Captain, we don't dare send Mr. Sulu
                    and the landing party up. If this should happen
                    to a man ...

It already has, and therein lies the play. It exists and it happens to every intelligent man at moments of every

hour of

every lifetime since the creation of life itself. It's the beast within described in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Man is naturally two, and the animal imagery reinforces a perennial principle of sapient life-forms. Vulcans have

Amok time every seven years; human man has it always, but civilization asks, yea requires, that he stifle it until the

freeing hours of darkness when the monsters from the ID prowl, like Blake's lions, roaming about the post-

The motif of Consciousness versus Unconsciousness, the juxtaposition of opposites and sameness, is further

symbolized by the dual settings of the plot in "The Enemy Within." The planet Alpha 117 is a prison for the

landing crew led by Mr. Sulu. The surface temperature of the planet plunges past 120⁰ below zero, colder and

colder and colder. A clear symbol of coldness is juxtaposed with the warmth of primitive blood and

violence aboard the Enterprise. A hot versus cold dialectic evolves: not duplicates, but opposites. The plight of Sulu

          My negative self is under restraint in sickbay.
          My own indecisiveness is growing. My force of will
          steadily weakening. On the planet, conditions
          critical. Surface temperature is 75 degrees below
          zero and still dropping.

As Sulu gives “room service another call,” remaining calm and controlled in a crisis, Kirk 1’s impotency

increases: "You'll have to hold on a little longer. There is no other way.

Survival procedures, Mr. Sulu." The scene of Kirk holding the calm dog in his arms further points out

Kirk holding his calm self, while eroding/dying mentally and physically--like the dog. Kirk's virtue of kindness

is not enough for command. Compassion is a fool's game. Warmth separated from cold is a geological and

climatical symbol of Kirk's dual selves--an extremely effective dramatic technique. McCoy tells Kirk,

"You have the goodness," but Kirk rebuts, "Not Enough. I have a ship to command." In Sulu's last

communication, the landing party's condition is critical; Kirk must act:

       Sulu: Captain Kirk. Sulu here. 117⁰ below. Can't
                last much longer. Can't see clearly ... think
                the cold penetrating communicator. Two men
                unconscious. No time. No ... can't wait.
                No time.

The cold symbolizes the increasing state of physical and mental unconsciousness, a dying symbolic of Kirk's

schizophrenic condition. As Spock insists, Kirk is rapidly losing the power of command like the warm, passive

dog that eventually dies on the transporter platform. To be half a self is to die. Not to recognize one's secret sharer

The crisis on Alpha 177 and the crisis aboard the Enterprise require a unified psyche, one self, and the

subsequent power of command. How to solve the problem? Kill the double? No, because that is suicide.

          Spock: We can't take a chance on killing it. We have
                      no previous experience, no way of knowing what
                      would happen to you.
          Kirk: ….there can't be any chance of him being killed ...
                   he can't be killed.

Kirk, by knowing his unconscious self now made conscious, knows where he is and how he thinks:

          Spock: Apparently this double, no matter how different
                      in temperament has your knowledge....perhaps
                     we can out-guess him ... knowing how the ship
                      is laid out, where would you go to elude a mass
                      search?
          Kirk: The lower levels. The engineering decks.

Again, Kirk, by knowing himself, knows that self’s essence and its personality. Kirk must hold on as a tormented,

kind self until he reassimilates his double. The subsequent search by Kirk and Spock in engineering is also tellingly

symbolic. Why engineering? Engineering is the lower levels, the symbolic sense of man’s lower self. Engineering is a

symbol of Nietzschean power, of the dark levels of the inner self. Engineering is power in the darkness of man's

soul, a Conradian journey into the Heart of Darkness in search of the Kirk 2, a journey into the very source

and heart of the ship--its primordial matter/antimatter energy. The engines symbolize the unconscious energy, the

darkness that lurks within the heart of every human being.

Like Conrad's Marlowian narrator, the journey to the Heart of Darkness is the journey into the depths of the

primitive self, like the journey of Captain Willard in Francis Coppola's movie, Apocalypse Now, which is based

literally on Conrad's story.

The Conscious and the Unconscious must confront one another; two must reunite as one, but with a

difference--the new Kirk (renovatio) will now be conscious of his unconscious and his power of command,

stemming from this negative self (evil), will be known. It is the story of Conrad's Leggatt.

controlled but utilized, to control the NOT-ME. The confrontation of the non-violent Kirk with his alter-ego in

engineering shows the attraction/repulsion syndrome when one sees who and what he really is. It is a Darwinian

culture shock to see that beast within looking right into one's eyes--light to dark, mildness to violence. Kirk 1,

unlike his "double^,”shows no fear, a point McCoy makes, i.e., that human courage may stem from his positive

Self (Kirk 2). The scene in sickbay further symbolizes the confrontation between Kirk 1 and Kirk 2 (the opposites).

Kirk 2 is hyper, under restraints. Kirk 1 is hypo, subdued. Kirk 2 is dying as is Kirk 1: half a man cannot live:

          Kirk 1: What happened?
          McCoy: Apparently, the body function weakened during
                       the duplication process--a fact I failed to consider.
          Kirk 1: He’s not dying?
          McCoy: Yes, he is.
          Kirk 2: Help me.
          Kirk 1: How can he die? How can I survive without him?

The scene involves Kirk l's love for and acceptance of Kirk 2 and is a climactical scene in terms of Kirk's desire to be

unified. What occurs is a marriage of opposites, a "joining" that is completed only in the transporter at episode's end.

The two selves must learn to accept that neither is really James T. Kirk while each claims to be, or thinks he is, the

captain. The fluctuating readings on McCoy's sickbay panel, reminiscent of the doctor's condition in sickbay in

"Dagger of the Mind," brings Kirk's love to the surface, a love of what he detests within himself.

          Kirk 1: Don't be afraid. Here's my hand. Hold on.
                     You don't have to be afraid. I won't let go.
                     Hold on. You won't be afraid if you use your
                     mind. Think: Think: You can do it. That's
                     it.

The panel readings return to normal. The symbol of the hands of Kirk 1 and Kirk 2 joining yields life and the

first step toward synthesis and reintegration of the captain's self. McCoy sees that love gives life: "Jim, he is back."

To Kirk 1, McCoy, in a piece of brilliant irony, offers Kirk 1 brandy. The scene in sickbay is Kirk's anagnorisis,

whereby the reasoning half of man, his intellect, understands the problem and the solution: "I have to take him

Kirk 2 back, inside myself. I can't survive without him. I don't want to take him back. He's like an animal--a

It is at this time that Spock and Scotty regain transporter operation by bypassing leader circuits. Just seconds after

Kirk 1 sees his Kirk 2 as an animal, Spock suggests that "we send the animal through." The dog-like symbol re-asserts

          Kirk 1: Don't hurt him.
          Spock: It's painless and quick. The animal will be
                      unconscious for only a few minutes.

In a juxtaposition of opposites, the two dog-opposites are placed on the transporter platform. "Energize," then "reverse"

mean disintegrate and reintegrate in an attempt to achieve union. The transporter's circuitry reintegrates on a polarity

principle. Opposites yield synthesis. As has been the case before, Gene Roddenberry's view of man requires controlled

of controlling intellect and creative animal energy. The dog dies of shock because only man can reason, thus, only man

          Spock: No autopsy is necessary to know that the
                      animal was terrified, confused. It was
                      split into two halves and suddenly thrust
                      back together again. This shock induced
                      by blind terror. (To Kirk 1) It
                      couldn't understand. You can. You have
                      your intelligence controlling your fear.

Kirk freezes in semi-catatonic indecisiveness. McCoy stalls, exhorting caution; whereas, Spock insists on instant

experimentation. Kirk, clearly losing command and vitality, is now reiterating his opposite's words of "Help me.

Somebody, make the decision." Spock asks, "Are you relinquishing your command, Captain ?" Kirk answers, "No.

No. I’m not.” McCoy states: "Well, then we can't help you, Jim. The decision is yours.” Kirk 1 states: "Mr. Spock,

What calls Kirk's waning intellect to the surface is his fierce determination to be the captain, to retain his identity

while knowing he must put his arms and his command around the dying Kirk 2; also aiding his identity is the freezing

plight of Sulu and the landing party. "The captain is responsible for the lives of his crew," as Commodore Decker

affirms in "The Doomsday Machine," and Kirk's sense of responsibility and love for his crew help him to pull himself out

of himself. The love of crew and of command complement the love/hate relationship with his Kirk 2. Kirk engages in

what the poet Matthew Arnold called "the dialogue of the mind with itself." Kirk 1 and Kirk 2 converse, yet they are

the same Kirk--2 in 1.

IV: A036

Kirk I: Can't wait. Can't let them die.
Kirk 2: What are you going to do?
Kirk I: Go through the transporter. Both of us.
Kirk 2: There's nothing I can do to stop you.
Kirk I: It's what I have to do. It's what I have to do ... what we have to do.

Although Kirk 2 is engaging in trickery, trying to survive as the captain's clone, the change of scene to Kirk 2 as captain

on the bridge brings out the final ludicrousness of power without compassion and reason, while simultaneously

dramatizing the role of the negative self as the key to command. The split Kirk's chaos within causes confusion among

the crew, reaffirming Spock's earlier contention that the crew never know the truth, that a captain can be nothing short

Kirk 2: Grab him! He's the imposter!
McCoy: No.
Kirk 2: McCoy, he's fooled you.
McCoy: He attacked him....
Kirk 1: Mr. Spock, you know who I am. You know
who that is
Farrell: Which one? What do we do?
Spock: We'll let the captain handle this.

In this last scene of critical contest between Kirk 1 and Kirk 2, Spock reasserts the captain's need to cure his own

internal problem in order to be the captain. Kirk 2 is ready to kill to be captain, but his alter-ego, Kirk 1 reasons with

          K2: Yes, I know. You want to kill me don't you?
                 Farrell, James, grab him! He'll destroy
                 the ship. I'm the captain. Don't you understand?
                I'm captaining the ship. My ship! My ship!
                 It's mine! I'll kill you!
          K1: Can half a man live?... then we'll both die.
          K2:  Make me. I want to go back. Please I want to live.
          K1 : You will. Both of us.
          K2: I want to live.

Kirk's very instinct for survival as a man is amply shown in both halves. Both want to live; both want to be the captain;

both need the other in order to achieve such goals. Kirk's two selves have much in common when divided -

"duplicates". There is an eerie sense that what Scotty calls opposites are also somehow duplicates. Such is the nature of

the great leader in Star Trek. Both halves are complimentary opposites that function as one. This is the key to

The transporter, with the two Kirks, reintegrates the captain because of Kirk's ability to see and to assimilate his

opposites. The mind orders and rearranges matter. The key in “The Enemy Within," as in Conrad's "The Secret Sharer,"

is the determination of a mind to hold command.

Kirk's unification is symbolized by his first integrated command: "Get those men aboard fast." Only a true

commander can fire such an order, and his power of command is still based on that secret sharer who is within--known,

understood, assimilated and functional. The half frozen men will live, as well as Kirk. In a sense, a balance of

atmospheric temperature symbolizes physical/psychical balance. Kirk is no longer running hot one minute, cold the

other. Continuity is restored. Conrad's Leggatt, the secret sharer, has jumped ship:

          McCoy: How do you feel, Jim?
          Kirk: How? I've seen a part of myself no one should
                   ever see.

Normality is restored, but Kirk is the greater for his journey into the heart of darkness: "Thank

you, Mr. Spock, from both of us ... the imposter is back where he belongs. Let's forget him." To

Rand, Kirk shows a greater balance at the end than at the beginning. His cold, business-like tone

is now "Thank you, Yeomen." Kirk is indeed the same, yet very changed inside. Like Conrad's

Leggatt, "there is command." For James T. Kirk, he is in command: "This is Helmsman, steady

as she goes." "The Enemy Within" has been a study of man, but above all the study of the nature

Star Trek’s study of man's dark side, of the collective unconscious, continues. Roddenberry's journey into the heart

of Conradian darkness continues in the episode "Plato's Stepchildren." The ideal republic envisioned by Plato becomes

severely tested when Plato's ideals of reason and reflection confront Plato's image of the centaur--the animal body

supposedly ruled by a human head denoting the control of man's rational faculties over the animal senses and instincts.

Plato sought an ideal of controlling mind over matter and the baser instincts. William Blake noted that "Energy is the only

life, and is from the body; and reason is the bound or overall circumference of energy." The unifying symbol where these

two forces coalesce is the chemical, Kiromide, which comes from the soil of Platonius, and its power is acquired

simply by eating the native foods. Kiromide's correlation with the primitive earth is a crucial key to

understanding its effects as used by the Platonians. The theme of "Plato's Stepchildren" begins

and ends with the discussion of Kiromide as a source of power. The episode's theme is the nature,

its use and abuse of power. Although external to the Platonians, Kiromide became an organically based

power that is in the very bloodstream of the Platonians. Blood is a key image in this episode; blood is

the organic vehicle, the carrier of its power that gives the Platonians telekinetic powers. Spock opens

the episode with the theme of power: "Kirornide is a particularly potent and long-lasting source of power."

All the episodes in between are variations on the use and abuse of power as it radiates from the human

unconscious and becomes visible in the form of ominous and deadly telekinetic powers of Parrnen, the

philosopher-King who has made just a few adjustments to Plato's original concept of a republic. Parmen's

flagrant abuse of his telekinetic powers shows the incapacity of a mentality totally built upon logic to cope

with and to control the creatures from the primitive ID as provided by the Kiromide. The result is a misuse

of reason and the concomitant need for a balanced control between Platonic reason and animal energy. In

a rhetorical gesture of dubious sincerity, Parmen, at the episode's conclusion, states the theme of the episode

and the human problem that is the study of this story: "Understood Captain. And you're right. None of us can

be trusted. Uncontrollable power will turn even saints into savages. We can all be counted on to live to our

lowest impulses."

Parmen's misuse of energy, like that of Apollo, shows the frailty of the Grecian ideal of a

rational and reasonable men. Kirk manages to check Parmen only be recreating and acquiring

the power. Controlled power, seen in Kirk and Spock, counterbalances the uncontrollable

power as seen in Parmen who backs down only when beaten by the stronger mind with the

stronger power.

This episode is a study in William Blake's axiom that "mental things are alone real," that what we

cannot see is what should most concern us. "Plato's Stepchildren" is an ironic title because the Platonians

have misused reason; hence, they are not truly Plato's children. They more closely resemble Plato's illegitimate

offspring, like a trip through Plato's "Mirror, Mirror"--Alice through the looking glass. Some Utopia!

The fact that Parmen is dying of a massive infection caused by a simple scratch shows the incompleteness

and the vulnerability of reason without counterbalancing bodily energy:

          Philananoles: You see, we scarcely have to move any more, let
                                alone work.
          Kirk: That's why you have no resistance.
          Philananoles: That's right; a break in the skin or a cut
                                can be fatal.

Akin to the infection consequence of acceleration in “Wink Of An Eye, the result is no "pressing need for the

medical arts" because the thirty-eight Platonians are the product of a "mass ingenious program". Not unlike

Vulcan logic, "over-emotionality and concern with the family have been eliminated." The Platonians were "bred

for contemplation, self-reliance and longevity." The illness of a Parmen is a symbol of the potential effects of a

society totally dependent on reason without the bodily work that fosters immunity to basic physical illness.

Telekinesis has served to atrophy the body

because mind misuses the organic energy to serve only the mind. The fact that there are no Platonian children

fosters a symbol of a sterile society beyond the concerns of love and mutual survival. In essence, they have

become inhuman by misusing reason and by reflecting or suppressing healthful energies.

Parmen's physical illness is symbolic of his greater physical imbalance. Platonia is a soulless and bodiless

society of sterile, isolated minds. Speculative reason--metaphysics, contemplative meditation--never finds vent

in healthful action. Hellenism per se is not health. A schism between mind and body, between conscious and

unconscious power, has resulted in Plato's brutes. This episode endeavors to restore psychosomatic balance to

the viewer's perspective. During his illness, Parmen has no control over the unconscious energy. His suppressed

hostilities surface in dreams and in delirium. As the scene shows objects being cast about by Plato's telekinesis,

the Enterprise also suffers a "storm"--all, as Spock notes, see the psychokinetic manifestations of Parmen's

delirium. While in delirium, Parmen's reason yields its control and the hideous nightmarish alter-Parmen created

destructive turbulence. In an important conversation Philana uses the term "unconscious" to stress the lack of

control that reason has over the dark half of man's psyche:

          Spock: How is the power transmitted?
         Philana: Brain waves.
          Spock: Do these waves cease while you are asleep?
          Philana: No, not if they're embedded in the unconscious.

In an illness from the final script draft (omitted at filming) Philana answers Kirk's question: "How

by noting: "Our sleep is dreamless. Our price of eliminating emotions find no healthful vent

through the catharsis of normal dream sleep." When given the telekinetic power, the Platonians'

emotions run amok, creating a path of destruction in the form of Dionysian amusements. Sadism

becomes a reasonable form of vicarious sexual thrills as Kirk and Uhura, Spock and Chapel are

forced to line a Dionysian fertility play while Philana looks on, her sexual fantasies aroused

because she cannot engage in normal emotional outlets. The "revels" are a testament to

impotency's vicarious thrills in its own incapacities. Dreamless sleep brings nightmares into the

daylight. If one cannot have an emotionally balanced life, x-rated peep shows become the only

Parmen's almost schizophrenic condition is further evidence of the imbalance between

energy and reason in Utopia. He insists on the "amenities" of his guests, but causes Kirk to slap

himself furiously on the face as punishment for accusing Parmen of treating guests "like

common prisoners". In Act II, scene 23, in his atrium, Parmen shows gratitude and

          Gentle spacemen, we are eternally in your debt. Please
          accept these trifles as tokens of our gratitude. They stem
          from the very source of our inspiration.

The shield of Pericles for Kirk, the Kothara for Spock, Hippocrates' cures for McCoy are

symbols of apology between scenes of intemperate violence. While Kirk wants the Enterprise

to be released, Parmen wants to make amends while contemplating murder in his heart of darkness:

           Parmen: My humble apologies. You were badly used. In my
                        own defense allow me to say that my illness was more
                        profoundly disturbing than I myself realized. I am
                        sure, Captain, that you too have been out of sorts,
                        and have been driven to fits of temper and rage.
                        Unlike you, however, what I think and feel, whether
                        for good or ill, is instantly translated into reality.
                        Please find it in your heart to forgive me.

The pressure of the Enterprise crew has brought unconscious elements into Parrnen's consciousness, but

with no cure. What makes Spock 's flamenco dancing and Kirk's neighing like a horse so unforgivable is that

Parmen knows what he is doing, but his conscious reason, in very un-Platonian terms, refuses to control the

negative energy of his heart of darkness. The effort to keep McCoy as court physician is selfish and vindictive.

The unity of the Enterprise figures--Kirk, Spock. McCoy, Uhura, Chapel--contrasts with the Platonians'

command disorder and lack of purposeful work. Even amid pain and negativity, the crew remains a symbol of

In "The Enemy Within,” there is, as Gene Roddenberry says, no enemy. However, in "Plato's Stepchildren"

an enemy exists--l’étranger--and the unconscious is seen, through Parmen, in only its destructive capacity, and

this power is turned outward against the NOT-ME. The sadistic tools, the hot poker and the whip, show a negative

enemy turned outward. A sense of the unconscious one-sidedness must also be seen in the great achievements

given our western civilization from Plato's legitimate children, Aristotle for one, in contributions to medicine, to

Parrnen's role as sadistic stepchild to Plato shows his "adaptiveness" to Plato's republic and the

an enemy within results from the lack of counter-balancing, civilized reason. Any human capacity taken in

extreme is a potentially lethal enemy indeed. The history of Western civilization is strewn, as Mr. Spock

constantly reminds us, with the courage of war after war. What makes the Enterprise landing party different

from Parmen and his Utopians is that those millennia of savagery are remembered and present, but they have

been reasoned out through human experience. As Kirk once said, we can say we will not kill today. In "Arena,"

Kirk is told, "You are still half savage" and so therein lies the truth of the tale.

The behaviors of the "controlled" crew on Platonius are a play within a play. The stranger takes every human

form, but with civilized man, there is, as Ecclesiastes notes, a time and a place for everything, but free will must

choose the time for its revels to begin and to end. The tinge of the Marquis de Sade is present within human

nature. It would be illogical to say man is not occasionally violent. To impose violence under the guise of

Platonic academicians is a supreme irony and a travesty of Plato's teachings. However, man worships both Apollo

and Dionysius, as the philosopher Nietzsche points out; man's Hebraism is somewhat akin to Dionysianism in

stressing the flesh, suffering, energy and fertility. To make Spock laugh and then cry rips away his Vulcan

dignity as a man. This sadism is obscene and immoral. No "laughing spaceman,” Spock's Bacchanalian song does

point to this human half that he suppresses and controls. His intelligence and will provide the power of control.

However, the lyrics of Bacchus do reflect his human half's enemy within that is a

Spock (to the lute): Take care young ladies,
                                           and value your wine.
                                Be watchful of your men
                                            in their velvet prime.
                                Deeply they'll swallow
                                            From their finest kegs,
                                Then swiftly before
                                            Searing bitter dregs ...
                                AH! AH! bitter dregs.
                                With smiling words and tender touch,
                                             man offers little and asks for so much.
                                He loves in the breathless excitement of night
                                             Then leaves with you treasure in cold morning light.
                                AH! AH! ... cold morning light.

Lord Byron, too, speaks of "life's enchanted cup" that "but sparkles near the brim" and once quaffed quickly,

finds "The dregs were wormwood" (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, III, 8&9). While reminiscent of Samuel

Richardson's sentimental warnings to virgins and would-be Pamelas, the lyrics, though uneven, speak to the

theme of tempus fugit, but also speak to the nature of a life experienced without reason to temper the libido.

They speak of the enemy of excess. The fertility of Spock's lyrics contrasts with the sterility of the Platonians

As a play within the play, the body-controlled revels forced upon the Trekkers leave their minds free to

speak of power and of passion. They voice suppressed feelings for an otherwise cruel play. Nurse Chapel's love

for Spock, so clear in "Amok Time" and in other episodes, is clearly voiced. Ironically the crew are freed to

express honest, human emotions:

          Chapel: :Please make them stop.
          Spock: I haven't the power. I'm deeply sorry. We failed
                      you.
          Chapel: For so long I've wanted to be close to you. Now
                       all I want to do is crawl away and die. (kiss)

Without the depths of human choice and passions privacy, wholesome emotions become others' lewd spectacle:

Cupid's arrow kills Vulcans," yelps Erachtus. Uhura and Kirk are also affected by the fickle pair-swapping

effected by telekinesis:

          Uhura: I'm so frightened, captain. I'm so very frightened.
          Kirk: That's the way they want you to feel. It makes them
                   think they're alive.
          Uhura: I know it, but I wish I could stop trembling ... I'm
                      thinking of all the times on the Enterprise when I
                      was scared to death. And I would hear your voice from
                      all parts of the ship, and my fears would faint…
                      but I'm not afraid …I'rn not afraid.

The extensive quotes are important to emphasize the sincerity and the humanity of the couples. However, a divorce

exists between their energy and their reason, between physicality and mentality. Under control of Platonian telekinesis,

their "frankness" is belied by their emotional and rational honesty. The Trekkers are being honest with each other,

and the look on Philana's face, seeing the truth of love in the play, shows the quality so cherished by an author

like Joseph Conrad--human solidarity. Star Trek speaks, in Joseph Conrad’s words:

          ... to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the
          sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense
          of pity and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of
          fellowship with all creation--to the subtle but
          invincible conviction of solidarity that unites together
          the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity
          in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions,
          in hope, in fear, which bring men to each other,
          which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living to the unborn.
                --(Joseph Conrad, "Preface to The Nigger of Narcissus”).

Pain breeds this solidarity as does pleasure, a solidarity that the "Utopia" of Plato's stepchildren has lost

communally and individually. The Trekkers recognize the stranger within themselves; they recognize the stranger

being imposed upon themselves. Both have the same source in the primitive, human collective unconscious.

Without this solidarity, the Platonians

are the living dead, dwellers in T.S. Eliot’s "Death's Twelfth Kingdom.” They have ceased to move to

work, to emotionalize--in essence, to be human in any sense. Kirk shows the theme:

          You're half dead, all of you! You died centuries ago!
          We may disappear tomorrow, but at least we're living
          now and you can't stand that! You're half-crazy because
          you've got nothing inside! Nothing!

The Platonians torture the Trekkers in an effort not merely to prove their superiority, but in an unconscious effort,

to prove to themselves that they exist! The Trekkers show what Marlowe in Conrad's Lord Jim calls "that in born

ability to look temptation straight in the face--a readiness enough...a power of resistance...an unthinking and blessed

stiffness before the outward and inward terrors, before the might of nature, and the seductive corruption of men."

This blessed stiffness is symbolized by Kirk acquiring the power, twice that of Parmen's, of psychokinetic ability.

It is the controlled utilization, the control of reason, over this energy that leaves the crew with more than a balance

of power, but with a distant mental edge over the "corruption of men" ... if indeed the Platonians deserve that

The last aspect of "Plato's Stepchildren" is small, but important--the character of the

dwarf, Alexander. Alexander has the greatest reasons for wanting revenge against Parmen after

millennia of abuse. In the last scene, Alexander fell for Parmen's trust, saying to Kirk, "Let me

do it! Let me finish him." But Kirk gently reasons, "Do you want to be like him?" Alexander

drops the knife at Parmen's feet, saying, "Listen to me, Parmen I could have had the power, but I

want it ... The sight of you and your academicians sicken me! Despite your brains, you're the most

contemptible thing that ever lived on this universe!" Alexander is not the dwarf; Parmen is! Alexander's

dwarfism is an ironic symbol of a giant heart in a small body. Parmen is the freak; Alexander is great and

noble and wholesomely human, a flower among whitened sepulchers. Alexander has the glory without the

power. The misuse of human energy by the Platonians had made Alexander feel small, the "buffoon," the

court jester. As with the Shakespearean fools, "beware the fool for he contains the wisdom in the play.” In the

teaser that opens the episode, the viewer first sees an enormous gigantic shadow he casts. The shadow shows

the compensatory elements that form Alexander's personality. He is an Alexander the Great; his size is ironic,

and both his heart and reason compensate for his small stature. The little man (homunculus) does indeed cast

a large shadow, for his unconscious and conscious factors always seek balance, even after millennia of

          Alexander at your service. I sing! All variety of
           games and I'm a good loser, a very good loser. Please
           try to bear that in mind.

That Platonian's lack of rounded physicality makes Alexander the only balanced personality on Platonius.

The Trekkers add, or resuscitate, an almost dormant factor in Alexander--his sense of ego identity. As he

noted to Kirk and Spock, "I never knew any people like you existed." Alexander's humanity and self-

confidence must be restored after being treated like an object. Alexander is strong, stronger than he thinks,

because he lacks the "power.” Alexander is the only character in the episode who

deliberately shuns the telekinetic power. Alexander's pituitary deficiency proves to be a positive factor in

terms of overall character growth:

          Alexander: I'm the only one that doesn't have the power. I was
                           brought here as the court buffoon ... that's why I'm
                           everybody's slave...and I never do anything right ...
                           They say I'm a throwback, and I am, and so are you.
          Kirk: We're happy without it.
          Alexander: You know, I believe you are.
          Kirk: Where I come from, size, shape, color makes no
                   difference and nobody has the power.

Alexander and the Trekkers are treated by the monsters from Parmen’s ID. Alexander notes, "All the time I

thought it was me...my mind that couldn't even move a petal." The Trekkers prove to Alexander that the

Platonians are no gods. "You showed me size; it's them; it's them ..." Human solidarity redeems Alexander and

stiffens the Trekkers' defense: “That's the first time anybody ever thought of my life before his own."

The "power,” the very theme symbolized by the element, Kiromide, is a manifestation of man's Hebraism.

It is the physical energy (bigotry, lust, libido, ID) conveyed by brain waves, but still organic and primordial in

its power. Power is carried by blood (McCoy compares Parmen’s and Alexander's blood samples) and is symbolized

by blood. The power is the ultimate form of man's own enslavement by his own primitive nature. Power

creates; power destroys. The collective unconscious provides man with both. One mind imposing its negative

self--its stranger, its shadow--its personal and collective unconscious upon the personal and collective unconscious

of another is slavery. No one man should have that power without the complementing and counterbalancing power

of the human faculty most praised by Plato--the gift of enlightened reason.

Plato's cave (in The Republic) is an unreal world, a world of ideas, of reflections, and therefore,

of half-truths. Reason must be tempered by healthful emotions, and man must realize he is "still

half-savage," and there is no Utopia, just an eternal struggle with the enemy within and, in "Plato's Stepchildren,”

it becomes the enemy as part of man's nature mistaken for the whole of man's nature. Blood breeds power,

but power, unfortunately, also breeds blood. Alexander states Roddenberry's ideal:

          You think that's what I want? Become one of them?
          Become my own enemy? Just lie around like a big blot
          of nothing and have things done for me? I want to
          move around myself. If I'm going to laugh or
          Cry, I want to do it myself. You can keep your
          precious power. ..

"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?" asked the wicked witch looking in the mirror.

Beautiful outside, but inside? To the witch's chagrin, Snow White is the fairest--and so evolves the poisonous

apple/ beauty is its own beast. The mirror eventually reveals the heart of darkness that lacks any beauty.

Then, too, there are two mirrors, two perspectives to every individual and so the theme of the enemy within

becomes a study of the darkness within the entire society of man symbolized by the two Enterprises, one

yet two, similar but different. Snow Whites are fair and beautiful, but such characters, in many fairy tales, are

studies in the physical inferiority of good and the superiority of evil. Evil is strong; it is savage, brutal, ferocious--

yet it lacks indecision and fantasy. The mirror of mankind is akin to Alice in the looking glass--a world of

grotesque distortions. Savagery becomes more savage by contrasting it

with its opposite ("without contraries is no progression"), and it is this technique of contraries-of light vs. dark that

is the cinematographic technique by which the phenomenon of the double is studied in "Mirror, Mirror". "And the meek

shall inherit the earth", or is it the dirt? The meek Kirk (Kl) simply had lost the power of command. The inhabitants of the

alien planet, the Halkans, are the insipid Snow Whites of this episode. They are gentle, but dignified. Their refusal to

fight is in sharp contrast to two starships bent on obtaining the Halkans' vast reserves of dilithium crystals. The episode

implies the shortcomings of total pacifism, because the Halkans are peaceful almost to a fault. Their "history of total

peace" is virtually suicidal. Principles are admirable, but they lack that mercurial Satanism that makes a race distinctly

holistic. Pacifism breeds stasis. There is simply no energy, no vitalism to the sweet and gentle robed Halkans. Their

leader, Tharn (the opposite of Thorn?) is a prime symbol in the "Teaser" of this episode because he possesses the

symbol of power, yet embodies none of the energy that the dilithium crystals symbolized and embodies. Power has bred

fear of power, and the Halkans invite destruction from without. They are a vacuum culture, an enigmatic abhorrence in

the laws of nature.

"Mirror, Mirror" is a study in the misuse of power and the limit of reason to channel power for constructive ends. The

contrasting elements are civilization versus barbarism, a mercy/savagery dialectic--a study of tensional opposites in the

nature on man. The dual vision of the mirror becomes evident in the very first moments of the Teaser via the chosen setting

of the story. A normal Enterprise landing party is addressing the

IV: A052

Halkan council using reason in an effort to procure dilithium crystals. The council's spokesman, Tharn, is as the

episode script says, "dignified, gentle, robed." The two parties fail to reach an agreement, but the conversation is

firm and controlled. However, the sky is heavily clouded, with much lightening and thunder. The presence of nature

is disruptive as the majestic storm introduces the violence of the subconscious. Thunder roars as Kirk says, "we have

shown the council historical proof that our missions are peaceful." Tharn answers, "The Council accepts that your

Federation is benevolent, as present--but the future is always in question. Uncertain indeed!" A violent magnetic storm is a

symbol of suppressed violence within man himself-the uncontrollable element, what Joseph Conrad calls lack of restraint

that distinguished the barbarian from the civilized man. The storm will come to symbolize the Enterprise's "double"

which is ostensibly caused by this magnetic storm. The storm roars while Tharn speaks of his race's "history of total

peace," an irony indeed. The storm also symbolizes the focus of the discussion between Kirk and Tharn--the dilithiurn

crystals. As has been noted in "Plato's Stepchildren,” the theme of this mirror episode is the use and misuse of POWER.

Tharn notes, "Our dilithium crystals represent awesome power. Wrongful use of the power, the taking of a simple life, is

reprehensible to the Halkans. A pacifistic culture setting on a planet made of potential power presents a situational irony.

The Halkan obsession with peace is an obsession with suicide. The sweet, gentle Halkans are akin to Kirk 1 in "The

Enemy Within,” full of goodness, devoid of command and strength.

IV: A053

The Halkans' peace, contrasted against the terrible power of the magnetic storm, helps to show the illogic of what

Kirk calls the Halkans' "ethics.” The Halkans have Platonized dualism by simply "disappearing" war as a race. Is

their expressed intent to die as a race any less a misuse of power by denying its potential as an instrument for peace?

Is inviting suicide part of a history of total peace? Contraries are necessary for human growth. Scruples, multiple racial

compunction, remind one of Blake's proverb, "Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by incapacity." Prudence is an

old maid because she takes no risks. Courting the male, incapacity, ensures her status as an empty cistern, not a

fountain. Prudence without action breeds Nothingness. The Halkans are an atrophied culture whose ethics, like

Prudence, hamper growth by avoiding the use of the power within themselves, embodied in the symbol of dilithium

crystals. The Halkans use no power; they literally sit on their untapped energies, thereby stifling growth as a race.

Their "ethics" are in violent contrast to the violent magnetic storm besieging their planet. They establish peaceful ethics

in an atmosphere of uncontrollable violence. The stage is set for the violent collision of opposites in that the Enterprise

double (E2) is a logical bodying forth of the Halkans' awesome power--the crystals-- which they refuse to use, even

for peaceful purposes. Total peace is an historical fallacy, a rationalized dehumanization of suppressed power. Those

crystals' energy is unused, and they take the form of a violent atmosphere about the Halkan planet "a price they must

pay for their fantasy of

total peace. The storm symbolizes the suppressive energies of the Halkin unconscious in their atmosphere. They live

amid violence and refuse to recognize the problem at all. Also, it is the magnetic double (E2). The episode rises the

basic physics of magnetic plus and minus fields. The excessive ethics of peace creates its opposite (or makes it

conscious) to simplify the necessity of a balance between tensional opposites when E I is made aware of the dual

nature of power: power for peace, power for war. Ethics of total peace invites its opposite---ethics of total violence, i.e.,

no ethics. Forever, Tharn there remains a thorn. It is the logic of physics, the logic of history. Halkan peace is a foil for

this episode' s theme--the wrongful use of power.

Power is the key. Therefore, the "peaceful" Enterprise (E1) meets its opposite, its double, E2--the Empire vs. the

Federation. Both are dialectical opposites, like the two Kirks of "The Enemy Within,” of reason vs. energy, of Plato vs.

Nietzsche. Both are two aspects of the attitude towards and the use of power. El meets its enemy within, E2. Blake

notes, that "Love and hate are necessary for human existence," and this episode is a test of that theory of contraries

as necessary for human growth. E1 must face E2, just as Kl had to face K2--only now the problem is not within one

individual; it is an arena for massive social phenomenon. An entire society must face its own double. Sleeping Beauty

must taste the apple of the tree of knowledge, of good and of evil, in order to raise fantasy to the level of a balanced

perspective of opposites. Most fairy tales are rather gruesome if one analyzes them closely. The goal is a

wholistic view of human nature. Fantasy married fact to create the true tale of the just man raging in the wilderness

where lions roam, planting roses amid the thorns. The magnetic storm symbolizes the manifestations of an

imbalanced ethic or history of man. Polarity, too, is a principle of a balance ethos. The episode, “Mirror, Mirror,”

uses the parallel universe theory of “The Alternative Factor, " two universes co-existing on a simple plane, one matter,

the other antimatter. In Mirror, Mirror,” the parallel universes are those coexisting within the mind of man himself.

Man's reason now faces his illogic in a myriad of sublime savagery. The alternative factor is the human unconscious

which is now applied, not just put to two Lazaruses, but to two aspects (opposites/complements) within the collective

(not just personal) unconscious of society's psychological makeup, an awesome power symbolized by the heart of the

Enterprise’s energies—its dilithium crystals. A Federation and an Empire are two opposing means to a similar goal--

to obtain those power sources. Man’s quest for power comes from, and is channeled through, his illogical aspect or ID.

Though the dialectic of El, and E2_,a total picture of power is possible, with all its ramifications for construction and for

destruction. The alternative factor here is the unconscious, and man must learn that power both creates and destroys.

Just as Kl had to accept K2, to embrace it, so also, E1 has to accept K2, to embrace it as a viable part of the total self

of a living viable society. It is K1 and E1 that show understanding and Conradian restraint. Tharn says to Kirk, “You

have the right to force the crystals from us of course." To which Kirk rebutts: “But we won’t. Consider that.”

As the teaser passed its halfway point, the Enterprise emerges from the shimmer in the opposite direction. The four

El figures--Kirk, Scotty, McCoy, and Uhura--now appear aboard E2. Mirror, Mirror on the wall....switched by

a storm in the process of beaming.

They have entered that parallel universe, a twilight zone of which dreams are made. Minor changes in dress heighten

the more fundamental of Alice in the looking glass, a confrontation with the abnormal. These four Trekkers do not,

however, face their four mirrors, their four enemies within. The study is geared towards les autres, the others.

The four Trekkers are in a parallel/opposite universe. What they face are the stranger-selves of the other crew.

The ME meets the NOT-ME, but the E2 is more of a total societal shadow where E2 is E1’s enemy within now

made physically manifest to the four Trekkers.

The doubles of the four Trekkers on E2 have simultaneously been beamed aboard El where they are in another

parallel universe which is opposite to them. In essence, civilization confronts savagery aboard E2 while savagery

confronts civilization aboard E1. The thunder and lightening beam aboard both vessel/worlds in the form of displaced

opposites, each about to confront its stranger, its double world. The Teaser focuses identity, as in “The Enemy

Within" on the transporter as the technological symbol of altered states of identity. The original Latin meaning, to

carry across, is applied to carrying the human personality across the thresholds of its opposite, multifaceted

manifestations. As the Trekkers materialize on the E2 transporter platform, the camera focuses on the unifying symbol of

the entire episode of mirrors--the dagger through the galaxy symbol on the wall. The symbol heralds the dramatic

entrance of each man’s Kurtz, his appears on every major access door and wall on the ship. It is also worn as the

symbol of the Empire on the crew’s uniforms. The symbol confronts the viewer's eyes at every turn in this episode.

The symbol heralds the dramatic entrance of man’s Kurtz, his heart of darkness, the violence in the unconscious

that now

IV: A057

becomes visible and conscious as the four Trekkers glance at the alterations in their uniforms. The word empire

denotes the world of imbalanced Hebraic violence (the word “Gestapo” is in the script), of butchery, of totalitarianism

of rule by and through the dagger. Violence and blood hold together an empire with no Conradian civilized restraint.

Animals rule in human form as barbarism rules the moment as Spock with a beard (actually, a goatee) adds a chilling

Satanism to a world of darkness and appalling brutality. The irony lies in the fact that the empire has no awareness of or

tolerance for its opposite—civilized mores. What is soft must be exterminated as an example.The slightest hint of

vulnerability means death by one's own crew, as Kirk discovers when Chekov attempts assassination.

A Darwinan intolerance for mercy means, as Herbert Spencer noted, only survival of the fittest, and by fittest one only

means brute animal brawn. A crew of technologized Neanderthals rules only by the dagger. The episode is strewn

with scenes of blood and torture--all the manifestations of man’s double as faced by Kirk in “The Enemy Within.”

Living, dying by the sword stresses man’s Hebraic nature with its emphasis on suffering physicality. An empire, not

a civilized federation, rules by the ideals of a latter-day Caesar or a Himmler. Even the empire salute has a Roman

basis to it. The dagger-through-galaxy has many faces--all based on man’s primitive past as it is now manifested to the

Trekkers who must find a way back to their universe (E1), but only after experiencing their doubles, their negative secret

sharers in the world of the empire. The symbol, like the two universes , is a puzzle of opposites, of altered personalities.

The earth forms the cyclic center of the symbol as it is pierced through the north and south poles,

down the middle by the dagger. The earth also surrounds or engulfs the blade of the dagger as though the blade

emanated naturally from the earth’s opposite polarities. The entire episode is based on these systems of reversed

polarities. The empire will be over thrown in two-hundred and forty years (as Spock notes) where the civilized galaxy

will engulf the Satanic dagger of the empire. The "Kurtz" at the heart of darkness will be exorcised by civilized law and

restraint. The galaxy will heal itself from the wounds of primeval blood thirst. But in the episode, the dagger acts as a

thorn piercing a world. The dagger is situated in a descending pattern that contracts with the Federations Galactic symbol

that stresses an ascending motion within the circle of a civilized world. The empire’s dagger is the death of a world, The

dagger is a bawdlerized rendition of the cross of Christianity as ironically symbolized in the handle and the blade of the

sword as it evolves from Roman times through the medieval Christian worlds of western Europe.

The traditional sword was the cross aimed at the enemies of Christendom. King Arthur’s Excalibur epitomized the

ironic, tensional unity of destructive war (ex., the Crusades) and the peace at the heart of Christ’s teachings. Peace and

war meet in the death and resurrection of the Christ. Men must die so that others must live. This becomes necessary in the

pursuit and the maintenance of peace. Here too the dagger, the eventual fall of this empire (much like Rome) in

"approximately two-hundred and forty years,” is to be absorbed by the very body it impales. As Carlyle notes (The

French Revolution) ages of destruction are often followed by ages of construction. War contains the seeds of the Pax

Romana, its own opposite, its own undoing. In this sense, the Federation and the Empire represent conscious

reason and unconscious illogic, two diverse

IV: A059

symbols of human society. The dagger once again acts as the ultimate symbol of human barbarism, man without civilized

restraint .

The worlds of “Mirror, Mirror” are ones of violent contrasts as symbolized by the reversal in direction of the two

Enterprises in the Teaser. The ion storm symbolizes a greater storm that rages within the heart of Hebraic man.

Kirk notes:

          Kirk: Captain’s log, a stardate unknown. During an ion
                   storm, my landing party has beamed back to the
                   Enterprise and found it--and the personnel aboard--
                   changed; the ship is subtly altered physically
                   Behavior and discipline have become brutal--savage!

The key term is change as it relates to power (“The…power jumped for a moment" ), but the power is both technological

and biological. Ultimately, the change is psychological as altered states of mind are observed; the power of the

unconscious effects, the pain of consciousness of one’s double. Power and consciousness are related in a cause/effect

pattern:

          Scotty: Captain…the transporter chief mentioned a surge
                     of power...and we just materialized someone else.
          Kirk: Yes here. Not our universe, not our ship. Something
                     parallel, a parallel universe, coexist with ours on
                     another dimensional plane. Everything duplicated--
                     almost. Another Enterprise. Spock with a beard.
          Scotty: Another Captain Kirk? Another Dr. McCoy?
          McCoy: An exchange.

Human awareness is linked to power, to surge of power that creates consciousness of altered states of mind and altered

states of beings. Mental powers become apparent through the power of nature and technology. Man is sent on a journey

into his heart of darkness, into the inner recesses of his being. Such awareness causes terror and pain--both primary

qualities of the human unconscious. The “agonizer” applied by the Satanic-looking Mr. Spock, to Mr. Kyle, the transporter

chief, for “carelessness with equipment" afflicts a world of pain. Each crew member apparently carries his own

agonizer. Spock demands of Kyle, “Your agonizer,

please,” as though the device aggravated an already inherent sense of suffering which a crew member carried around

with him. The agonizer serves to externalize an internal sense of pain. Man is his own agonizer as the device serves as a

devious device for pain consciousness. Pain is an inherent part of the human condition. The empire thrived on pain,

showing a lack of restrain or of balance. Such a condition is in extreme, and therein lies the disease. The Federation

represents no ideal world of peace without pain: however, within the world of El, a balanced perspective between

pain and pleasure is generally maintained. The tensional dialectic between peace and war serves to create a more

controlled human condition reminiscent of a civilized mores.

The Federation's side of the mirror reflects the necessity of opposites existing side-by-side to create progress by making

man more fully human. One is reminded of the narrator from Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground who finds

enjoyment in his toothache and in the malevolence of his moans because pain gives him a sense of self-awareness and

          The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those
          moments; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would
          not moan. they (moans) expresses the consciousness that
          you have no enemy to punish, but that you do have pain;
          the consciousness that in spite of all possible auto-
          suggestionists you are in complete slavery to your teeth.

His moans do little good, but they do express the aimlessness of pain. Such is the role of the agonizer as a mode of human

expression. A distant lack of purpose is apparent. The Empire's world of pain serves no humanizing end. E2 is a

dissociated society, somewhat like the Halkans in that both are bent upon a suicidal path through extremes of mortality

and pacifism. Each is doomed without the other. El presents a balanced

normalcy amid extreme opposite of E2 savagery and Halkan simpering pacifism.The terrible pain of the agonizer and the

agony booth both emit a Dantesque descent into hell, into a world of the devil full of bearded (Spock), scarred faces

(Sulu) and Perserdones (Marlena). A distinct criticism is apparent of Gestapo, police state mentalities full of Sulu-

security-chiefs, of pawns without redeeming bishops, of dehumanized Neanderthals who epitomize the utter

brutality of total mindlessness. E2 is the double in the mirror of a cosmic collective unconsciousness. In E2 the ethos has

changed. Characters are true to themselves in both worlds, but in the crossover, character traits are reflected (the mirror)

as well as altered. Character's are adapted to their ethos-double. The mirror reflects much of a character's good or positive

character traits. Spock, for example,is a “man of integrity in both worlds.” He symbolizes the presence of conscious

cerebralism in an otherwise Hebraic society. S2 shuns the burden of command and seeks no glory by assassination; S1

also prefers the role of science officer. Both Spocks are mirror, mirror, close reflections whose comparative qualities far

outweigh any contrasting qualities. Most changes are superficial, such as the uniform and the beard (more of a

In this world of mirrors, each double-character contains principles in it of its other double (ex., Uhura, Kyle, Spock).

Spock especially retains a distinct crossover universality in both parallel universes. S1 has that devilish quality in him, but his

intellect meets his animal half in a controlled stand-off, like a truce with intermittent moments of Vulcan over human or

human over Vulcan. S2’s beard belies a logical and loyal officer whose integrity is intact. He remains part of the system

Spock is already aware of what Kirk reminds S2 near the episode's conclusion about the empire being “illogical.” Spock

knows the ebb and flow of history. He has the power to change and the Tantalus field (in K2^'s quarters) would give Spock

the power to change his world. Roddenberry’s portrait of Spock in “Mirror, Mirror,” presents Spock as a potential

revolutionary. One must have both the power and the logic—keys to fuller humanization. By appealing to S2^'s

          Kirk: The illogic of waste, Mr. Spock! Waste of lives-
                   resources, potentials--time! I submit to you that
                   your empire is illogical--because it can’t endure.
                   I submit that you are illogical-- to be a willing
                   part of it…when change is predictable
                   and inevitable--beneficial--doesn't logic demand that
                   you be part of it?
          Spock2: One man cannot summon the future.
          Kirk1: But one man can change the present!

One of this episode’s themes is the illogic of waste, especially of time and human resources. Change is both a good,

inevitable and painful. S2 must alter his logic and his theory of history, and the creative key is always control and balance.

Spock notes that terror must be maintained or the empire is doomed. It is the logic of history. But Kirk's reply is the

episode’s ultimate solution and man’s ultimate solution: “Conquest is easy. Control is not.” Conradian restraint and Blakean

The entire struggle of the Trekkers on E2 is one of adaptation and quest for balance. On an animal level, sharp instincts

for survival save the foursome: however, the logic of applied intellect through technology assures success. Man possesses

two powers or two uses of power: The power to create and the power to destroy. All too frequently, the two coincide in

real lights of history. The foursome of Trekkers always act as individuals (Uhura on the bridge distracting Sulu;

Scotty and McCoy in engineering; Kirk as coordinator, and as an aggregate society, i.e., as one body and one mind

with one motivating soul. Scotty gives the viewer the key to escape from the hell of the heart of uncivilized darkness

when he posits the technological solution to a psychological quandary:

          K2: All right, Spock…whatever your game is, I’ll
                   play it. You want credits? I’ll give hem to you.
                   You’ll be a rich man. A command of your own? I
                   can swing that too.
          S1: Extremely fascinating
          K2: Spock, what is it that will buy you? Power?
          S1: Fascinating!

A dialogue evolves that is between civilization and between the Conscious and the Unconscious, between logic and

illogic within each Trekker and between Trekkers. Civilized man, through millennia of experience history and

evolution, has the knowledge of his past upon which to build his future by changing the present. Primitive man has

only a limited past and a limited present with no future for contemplation. A civilized man can mimic the past without

losing his identity. The Neanderthal (of any era) lacks the knowledge of historical precedent and has no desire to alter

his present. As a result, the foursome of E2 were immediately incarcerated upon beaming aboard E1 because they

          K: What I don’t understand is how you were able to
               identify our counterparts so quickly.
          S: It was far easier for you as civilized men to behave
              like barbarians than it was for them as barbarians
              to behave like civilized men.

A final element of Hebraic man in “Mirror, Mirror^” IS the intimate Kirk1-Marlena relationship that takes place in this

act. The empire, in its lack of conscious control and civilized restraint, provides its captain with an Hebraic luxury as

captain's woman. Marlena, whose erotic talents could take her through the whole fleet, provides Kl with what

Kl does not permit himself as captain of El--that “beach to walk on.” “Civilized” morality would call a Marlena a

harlot, but in the empire’s world, she is a logical offshoot of its ethos. Of course that Kirk2, as buccaneer, would

be entitled to all treasures plundered. A persistent wrong exists because Marlena is a Yeoman Rand, but is permitted

a natural vent to her physical self, as is her captain. Kirk l can enjoy a Marlena, but only in the world

Some voices believe Kirk is too restrained in not permitting himself to be fully human aboard a civilized Enterprise

(E1). Kirk’s almost prudish behaviors vis-a-vis Rand creates an inner purgatory because dedication and duty make

the Enterprise the captain’s only woman—“no beach to walk on”—no love, no erotic love. Aboard E2, Kl has an

erotic female complement. Ironically, K2 had stopped treating Marlena as a woman long ago. He has the woman,

but he does not engage. Kirk1 aboard El has the love but cannot externalize his human eroticism, his barbaric sexuality.

The empire is not all evil, but both captains are loved; both captains do not return that love; both are in love with

dame duty who is their only mistress. Both men are married to an obsession of getting on with their captaincies.

          Marlena: Oiling my traps darling. I^’m afraid I^’m a
                         little out of practice. Maybe that's what
                         happened to us. It’s very hard for a working
                         officer to shine as a woman-- every minute.
                         And you demand perfection.
          Kl: I’ve never seen perfection. But no woman could come
                closer to it.
          Marlena: I remember when you used to talk that way.
          K1: I still do.

Marlena's only alternative to Kirk2’s apparent rejection is rank and her ability to “hunt fresh game” elsewhere.

Marlena is a business woman going about her profession. She supports her boss by using the Tantalus device to rid

the captain of his enemies, but she also harbors genuine affection “behind “her traps. ”The Marlena Moreau later seen

aboard El (a new Yeoman) catches Kirk's eye, but to what extent can he afford to be erotic and still maintain the

stoic respect required of a captain? A captain cannot afford the luxury of being anything but perfect in the eyes of his

crew, and unfortunately, erotic love , in a civilized society, is too often viewed as a weakness, a flaw, a slipping of

“Mirror, Mirror” treats the duality within the human personality; it treats civilization and barbarism on a

social level. What Kirk experiences personally is the enemy within as it becomes a universal social phenomenon,

an entire society seeing its alter-self, its double, in the mirror. Man must recognize that his instincts, (if unbridled}

create chaos and death. But instincts combined with reason in a working dialectic can provide growth in human

society. The episode makes man see the light of his primordial darkness, makes him see the tragedy of creativity

unused or misuse for destructive purposes. Destroying the Halkan race is no final solution to obtaining

dilithium crystals. The man of vision is the hero of this hall of mirrors because he transcends his limitations and works

for the good of the all. Power, a transporter, can bridge universes or can keep them extremely apart. This episode

seeks man’s consciousness of the abuses of the creative instincts lurking in the human unconscious; it also shows the

value and the necessity of using man's instincts in a constructive, creative manner. The episode combines tyranny

                     Kl: In every revolution there’s one man with a vision!
                     S2 A man must also have the power.
                     Kl: Which will it be? Past or future? Tyranny or freedom? It’s up to you.
                    S2: Captain Kirk , I shall consider it...and so.

“We were wanderers on prehistoric earth,” notes Conrad in The Heart of Darkness.

The episode "Balance of Terror" deals with the fear generated within the human unconscious whose

conscious manifestation is terror and war. The episode examines war as a moral imperative, and studies the

displacement of man’s creative energies into destructively applied energies under the aegis of war as a conditioned

morality. The true terror in this episode is symbolized by the Romulans, but the real terror is that which is

within. The Romulans are the double, the enemy within, because in facing the Romulans, the Enterprise faces its true

enemy, the enemy within. Both commanders and both crews experience the terror of imminent extinction, yet each

man must face this terror of non-existence alone. The two commanders--Romulan and Terran--must use all their

primitive instinctual resources in an immense effort to stay alive. It is old naval warfare, one on one. Both are

intruders in each other’s view. Both are secret sharers in the terrifying unknown. It is Mark Leonard's first appearance

on Star Trek, here as the Romulan commander, later as Sarek of Vulcan.

The Romulan commander stresses the love/hate relationship of man within himself as he faces the

dehumanizing effects of endless conflict. “I regret that we meet this way. You (Kirk) and I are of a kind. In a different

reality I could have called you friend.” The logic of conflict is the illogic of an imperative madness of armed

destruction. Strangers meet first and last as enemies, never as friends because of circumstances largely beyond their

control. Each commander does his duty, but neither is clear in conscience as to the reason for what he must do. Kirk

and the Romulan commander are indeed much alike. Both are aliens to the other, yet both know the common

ground of what could have been friendship.

The Romulan has the Centurian as his companion in war and in peace. They possess a deep friendship and a

respect for each other. Kirk and Spock possess this same respect, loyalty and friendship. Both pairs are creatures of

duty, yet both are capable of immense feelings for the other, even though the second in command may just feel he

fully understands his commanding officer; however, he does much more than he will consciously admit. The

Centurian gives his life to save that of his friend and commander. Spock had (in many episodes) also jeopardized his

own life is a selfless sense of self-sacrifice. Duty and instinct form a bond of oneness between both: between

enemies and between commanding officers on each side of the armed conflict. The Romulan is war-weary and seeks

the stars of home. All he brings his glorious Praetor is proof of earth’s weakness and hence, another war.

He seeks solace in the midst of duty to his empire, an empire similar to the martial empire in “Mirror, Mirror.”

          Kirk: I wish I were on a long sea voyage somewhere,
                  Not too much deck tennis...no frantic dancing...and no responsi-
                  bility. Why me? I look around that bridge and I see
                  the crew waiting for me to make the next move--and Bones,
                  what if I’m wrong?

McCoy also acts much like the Romulan Centurian, a voice of conscience, a voice of a warning, a voice of

confidence to a troubled but determined captain:

           McCoy: But live got me...something live never said to a
                        customer, Jim, in this galaxy, there is a mathematical
                        probability of three million earth type planets. And
                        in all the universe, three million million galaxies
                        like this. And in all that, and perhaps more...only
                        one of each of us. Don’t destroy the one named Kirk.

The Centurian warns his commander of Decius, who has friends in power close to the Praetor: “Be wise, good friend…

seek danger where it lies.” The commander strips Decius of his rank for reading a message, an error that eventually

serves as an element in the Romulan defeat by the pursuing Enterprise. Again, the Centurion, like McCoy, offers solace

          Centurian: Take care, commander. He (Decius) has friends
                           and friends of his kind mean power. And power
                            is danger.
     Commander: Danger and I are also companions.
     Centurian: We have seen a hundred campaigns together and still I do not understand you
     Commander: I think you do. The earth Commander
                         will follow ... he must…and when he attacks we will
                         destroy him. Our gift to the homeland--another
                         war.
     Centurian: If we are the strong, is this not the signal for War?
    Commander: Must it always be? How many commanders have we
                          lost in this way?
     Centurian: Our duty is obedience.

The commander will do his duty, but obedience and duty mean “death and more death.” And the commander finds

himself “wishing for destruction before we will return.” The Romulan commander sows the seeds of his own defeat.

Although trained in duty, his other self wants peace. If anything, he is too merciful, ex., in not destroying the Enterprise

when she is apparently disabled in space. Kirk uses the power of a “sorcerer” making the ship “play dead” to

ensure the Romulan ship; in his own gluttony to kill, the Praetor’s insatiable appetite for blood is enormous. War,

Decius reminds his commander of his duty to crush the "enemy”; however, that act of duty creates another duty--
the duty of self-destruction. The Romulan martial philosophy is self-destructive because the peaceful coruscations
of an enlightened commander are no match for the ravenous Praetor and the Decius-types. Indeed, there is much to regret in two “reflections" (doubles) meeting each other in this circumstance. Both captains understand each other perfectly, but duty is blind. Does each man understand why he does what he must do? To be taken prisoner is not the Romulan "way." The illogic of conflict and destruction precludes personal feelings. Duty is a destructive step-dame who treats her children cruelly. One is reminded of the Biblical quotation: "0 Death where is Thy sting? 0 Grave where is thy victory?"
“Balance of Terror" is a study of the conflict between the conscious and the unconscious factors within the power of command. The cat-and-mouse game of pursuer and pursued is terror in that this one episode on the theme of ship-to-ship conflict is a war of nerves, a waiting game whose barbarism is primitive in its terror because there is no true explanation for murder under any aegis or rationalization. It is a dangerous game, a waiting game to see who will make the first mistake. The individual becomes his own worst enemy. Balance within is challenged by imbalance without. Circumstances test the metal of both commanders to see the stuff of which great men are made. It is only by animal cunning that the conflict is resolved (if resolution exists). The Commander must place the Centurion's body in the debris tubes in an effort to feign destruction--a tactic reminiscent of submarine warfare in the Atlantic during World War II. Deceive the enemy; smell him out;

find his weakness; then move in for the kill or be killed. True, in a "different reality" enemies can be friends, but the
reality is larger than anyone man or anyone society. The zeitgeist eclipses the freewill of the individual in the "center
chair." To both vessels, the enemy is always called the "reflection" before that mirror image becomes an “intruder”
that later becomes the "enemy." The true reality begins as a mere shadow of the self. What one sees is a reflection of the self. Man’s primitive suspicion gives this reflection of the self a distinct, antiphonal identity. In essence, the intruder is found as a mirror, mirror of the self, the ME who is and who really creates the enemy status of the reflection. In a literal sense, the enemy exists within first and primarily. The terror lies within the ME, and the NOT-ME is a double of the ME. The fact that the Romulans look like Vulcans is a key symbol of the nature of the conflicting opposites within the ME. The Romulans represent a Vulcan barbarism of the past existing in the present. Spock's knowledge of himself seals the conflict as a struggle of an enemy within.
The use of the mythological story of Icarus symbolizes the themes of the visible and the invisible in human nature. Both vessels pass through the gaseous tail of the comet called Icarus Four, an "ionized mass, a trail of frozen vapor particles.^” The invinsibility screen of the Romulans (later called a cloaking device in "The Enterprise Incident") symbolizes the hidden, unseen nature of the human unconscious. When the Romulan vessel becomes visible, it becomes an evil made conscious to the human mind. As Kirk notes about the Icarus Four comet, an invisible object passing through the tail of the comet will leave a visible trail. The visible and

the invisible work together to create altered states of reality; they serve as doors to the human heart of darkness--

opening and closing. Visibility is related directly to consciousness and to power. When the Romulan ship becomes

visible, the stage notes of the script note that: “Almost at the moment we see it, a thick, long, torpedo-shaped bolt of

brightness is launched from the 'hawk-body' of its underbelly. A blinding streak of speed.... " The torpedo-

bolt that destroyed the earth stations requires all the ship's power to launch, thereby rendering the vessel visible and,

therefore, vulnerable to attack. The Romulan vessel is caught in an energy didactic. The cloaking device or weapons--not

both at the same time. There is not enough power for both factors to work simultaneously. Defensive and offensive

positives yield no balance, and balance is a unifying theme in "Balance of Terror" because imbalance is the true terror.

Energy means mass phasers from the Enterprise, firing in traverse pattern, potshots in hope of getting a lucky strike. Both

sides lack balance and certainty; both are caught off-balance in a conflict without clear cause and without clear

textbook-tactical methodology. Both ships follow intuition, feeling, gut instinct, to penetrate the murky invisibles of human

conflict. Indeed, war seems to be the remotest shot in the dark. The comet, Icarus Four, coalesces these opposites of

visible and invisible, of known and unknown, of consciousness and unconsciousness, within the human sphere and serves

as a symbol of man's predatory proclivities--the quest, the hunt is the thing! The mythological character Icarus failed to

heed the warnings of his father, Daedalus, and with his waxen wings flew too close to the

sun. Thus, his wings melted and Icarus fell into the sea. Aspiring beyond the reasonable limits of his human state

constituted destruction for Icarus. The violation of that literal or symbolic "Neutral Zone" in between life's complex

extremes breaks the balance of that neutrality. As a result, imbalance creates hostility and revenge in the opposite reality.

The Romulan treaty had ensured a sense of balance between the Federation and the Romulan Empire. Indiscriminate

use of power pits the Romulans against their double, their unknown darkness--the world of a democratic Federation.

The result is the fate of the Icarus figure and of the Icarus mentality within man that courts self-destruction. In aspiring

beyond one's place in nature, one courts the vengeance of the powers of darkness. Icarus must pay the penalty of

delinquent risk. Both Icarus and the Romulan Commander fly too close to the sun, to the unknown. Both aspire;

both fall into the heart of darkness and experience, as did Conrad's Mr. Kurtz, “the horror...the horror" of their own lack

of civilized restraint. A treaty of sorts exists within every human soul, within every civilization, and among different

societies with different codes of conduct. Violation of this balance of power, of mores, is a terrible risk.

The Romulan-Earth treaty settled an earlier ancient war. As Spock notes, Terrans and Romulans had never seen the

other. The treaty was handled under subspace radio. The people of Earth believe the Romulans to be "warlike, cruel,

treacherous...and only the Romulans know what they think of Earth." The neutral zone was established as the "buffer"

zone "entry into which by either side...would constitute an act of war.^” The Romulan destruction of the Earth outposts

IV: A073

guarding the neutral zone frequently breaks that treaty and violates that tensional balance between opposites symbolized

by that neutral zone. Each party to the treaty labors under blind racial prejudices based on unseen rumors and innuendo.

The Earth's fear of the Romulans is based on unseen and built-up prejudices and imagined stereotypes. Neither Terran

nor Romulan had even seen his counterpart. The Hebraic view of Romulans as cruel and treacherous is not entirely

true. Although a creature of duty and obedience, the Romulan Commander fulfills his Praetor's orders with great qualms

of conscience. He does not like what he has to do. Such wars tend to be between governments, not between the people

themselves. Both the Commander and his Centurion are capable of warm emotion and love. As people, Terrans and

Romulans differ little except in physical appearance, but for the Stiles’ and the Decius' of the universe, mere ignorance

of the "enemy” is a cause for unbridled hatred. This conflict, as with too many wars, is based on the factor of invisibility.

Ignorance creates hobgoblins of the mind within the unconscious darkness of man's world of inner emotions, of inner

suspicions and fears. Many of mankind's enemies emerge from within the dark realm of man's twilight, primitive kingdom

which sees enemies where they do not exist. The first visible appearance of this "enemy” becomes verification of those

Hebraic, instinctual fears. War is a visible manifestation of mankind's inner horror and gothic imagination. So he

strikes out to soothe the instinct of savagery, and the latent primitivism victimizes others as it victimizes the self as creator

and such tendencies take only "A minute to reverse," but who will create? He who has murdered? The human mind, once

pushed into an extreme of murder or of creativity is slow to recreate the balance that must exist between the two acts.

The Romulans commit themselves to murder, and the Terrans must restore that tensional balance, that neutral zone

between lives, under the aegis of self-preservation and duty. Both Kirk and the Romulan Commander have lost that

neutral zone between creation and destruction and are caught in the self-woven web of inevitable and inexorable

consequences of the horror within the heart of darkness. The hell of war is caused by, and is a manifestation of, man's

lack of balance in perspective. The Romulan invasion makes this heretofore invisible horror visible and conscious by

violating the neutrality of their own treaty. This seemingly martial mentality is a one-sided use (and misuse) of the one

concept that unites Star Trek's enemy within theme: power. The empire concept precludes human individuality and stifles

personal choice and personal creativity.

The strong use of ancient Roman names and settings solidifies the martial theme in man. The neutral zone set up by

treaty draws a line in space between planets with Roman names that figure prominently in the conflict of "The Balance of

Terror." The planets' names are Romulus and Remus, two figures prominent in the forming of the ancient Roman Empire

with which the Romulan Empire is equated and after whom it is named. Earth and Romulus are closely symbolic of

Remus and Romulus. Both are what Star Trek calls doubles. Romulus and Remus were the twin sons of the Vestel Rhea

Silvia via Ilia, daughter of Numitor who had been dispossessed of the throne of Alba by his younger brother Amuluis.

continued in Silvia's twin sons, Romulus and Remus. The twin sons were placed in a trough and cast into the Tiber by

their granduncle. The trough became grounded in the marshes where Rome later was built. According to legend, the

brothers were suckled by a she-wolf, fed by a woodpecker, and later fostered by Acca Larentia, wife of the shepherd

Faustulus. The twins were later to receive recognition by their grandfather whom they restored to his throne. The twins

formulated the city of Rome. In a quarrel with his brother, Remus (like Abel) was slain. Many accounts of this legend

exist, especially those written by Fabius Pietor and Cincius Alimentus. Romulus eventually reigned alone and is believed

to have slain his own brother. Romulus is the founder of the military and political institutions of the ancient Roman

Empire. "Romulus" simply became shortened to "Rome." The naming of the two planets as Romulus and Remus poses a

deliberate play on the Roman legend of the twin sons. The neutral zone separates these two which, as twins, are really

one: twins, brothers, and (psychologically) doubles. The episode poses the necessity of the distinct, separate,

and continued existence of both doubles, of both "reflections." Both are the "shadows" of each other. The elimination of

one double by the other is a form of fratricide; also, the destruction of one double jeopardizes the balance of power. The

crime of the Romulans destroys their double, the Terrans' outposts on the Remus side of the neutral zone. The result is

the eventual destruction of the other double--the Romulan are perpetrators themselves. In "The Enemy Within," the

doubles of Kirk 1 and Kirk 2 are doomed to die without the distinct existence of both doubles as one living person--

James T. Kirk. Kirk and the Romulan Commander are indeed one of a kind, are twins, are

destroys the twin balance of power. War is the killing of one's own selfhood. The martial victor also loses. There is no

true victory unless one grows by absorbing the visible double and makes it part of himself. Conrad’s Marlow must

absorb the Kurtz principle to become more fully human. He must take unto himself the evil double, however repulsive

and horrible that principle may be because it is himself and always was. Once made conscious and visible, the heretofore

invisible evil principle is assimilated and some good may come from that acknowledgement of the enemy within.

The Romulan ship is the “bird of prey," a symbol of man’s own predatory instinct. The Ronulans are now seen, made

visible. The unknown within becomes a known because the Romulans draw it forth in ship-to-ship combat. The

Romulans are a mirror, mirror of the Enterprise's untested ability in primitive ship-to-ship combat, part of Star Trek's

continuing theme of going "Where no man has gone before.” The Romulan self is the dark factor, a civilization’s

heart of darkness. The Romulan is purposefully limited by blood to Spock because the Romulan is a dark extinction of

Spock's primevil "zone of darkness" (“The Imnunity Syndrome") latently present within. Spock is half human with all its

primitive emotions. Spock is also half Vulcan, and even that half is part Romulan. Thus, both Spock's doubles confront

each other in this episode. The Vulcans are probable descendents of Romulan blood. The theme of evolution from

barbarism into civilized restraint focuses an understanding of the present conflict onto an understanding of the primitive

past made visible in the Romulan martial behavior. It is, ironically, the balanced psyche of Spock that ascertains war as a

moral imperative, i.e., that war is the only logical solution in an illogical situation. It is Spock's advice that convinces Kirk

          Spock: And if the Romulans are an offshoot
                      of my Vulcan blood ... and I think this
                      likely, then attack becomes even more
                      imperative....Vulcan, like Earth had
                      its...aggressive, colonizing personal, savage
                      even by earth standards. If the
                      Romulans retain this martial philosophy...
                      then weakness is something we dare not show.

The entire episode hinges on primitive human predatory instinct. The strong prey on the weak and two societies' futures

depend on a basic Darwinian struggle of natural selection, of base instinct versus base instinct. One dare not show

weakness; it is a law of nature. An act of war is rationalized as the less of two evils, and man's rational desire to know

and to grow is often adjunct to, and subservient to, his desire to destroy; destruction of others is a primitive reaction as

an act of self-preservation. One must kill in order to survive. The episode is a study in man's seemingly unreluctant

willingness to go to war, in the inevitability of conflict and destruction. Until man's rational and instinctual factors

are aligned and balanced in and between civilizations, the integrated society must destroy the capacity of non-integrated

societies to destroy reasonable men. If the killer instinct in a peaceful society becomes dormant or forgotten, that society

may easily fall prey to the Romulans and to the Klingons of the universe. Sometimes it is the “bad guys" who keep a

civilization civilized through eternal vigilance against the barbaric unknown. Barbaric instinct is the keystone of every

advanced civilization. Rome fell, as Gibbon and Spengler noted, from within. Rome was conquered not by vandals,

(the barbarians without), but by the enemy within the walls of Rome itself: centuries of decay, complacency, in-fighting

and an army that could no longer fight. The Roman Empire was built upon its army and reigned as long as its army had an

enemy to fight, a goal to achieve, an obstacle to overcome. Even Alexander the Great cried in tears when his armies

reached the sea because there was nothing left to conquer. Blood keeps man from becoming physically and morally

The Federation earth outposts lived behind a world of defensive shields. The Romulans broke those false, defensive

illusions. The Romulans pricked the sedate Federation into consciousness of its own passive posture. One dare not show

weakness: the survival of the fittest (Herbert Spenser). Time and time again the episode uses the term shield in total

surprise and consternation that the shields would not and could not hold. The "terror" of the episode's title lies partly in

the Federation's own abrupt awareness that the "balance" cannot be taken for granted, that imbalance can and does

burst forth. The "terror" also lies in the Romulans' total disbelief in their own vincibility, that their ultimate weapon of

power required visibility to be functional. Both parties to the conflict are terrorized by the distinct imminence of self-

extinction. Both parties are terrorized into an awareness of the limits of power. Power is the dispensing of energy, but

energy in equal amounts for engines and for weaponry is beyond given technologies, beyond science and brute

strength. Equal application of power is impossible simply because there is not enough energy in man and in his machines

make war. Contemporary history shows what happens to a country that spends over half its money on "defense,” i.e.,

on the weaponry of war. People suffer; man himself withers as his energies are spent. The Romulan ship is driven by

simple impulse powered engines. The ships weapon takes all its power. The Enterprise appears to have the edge

because it possesses warp speed; however, it has not the weaponry of the Romulans. The result is a technological

impass and the subsequent need for both parties to resort to instinctual tactics: cat and mouse, predator and prey--with

both parties frequently playing both roles. The society with the superior instinct to live, the better instinct to kill to live,

wins the conflict. The title "Balance of Terror" is ironic and deceptive as a key to the episode's final outcome. Peace, in

history, is frequently seen as a product of a balance of power. Equal abilities to destroy are viewed as deterrents to

offensive warfare. The two warships are balanced indeed. The terror lies in the destruction of man's inner preconceptions

that he cannot be destroyed after breaking the balance for peace. The principle of the balance of power is an incentive to

build bigger and more destructive weaponry. That society's double must then do the same. The very terror of modern

civilization lies in that hideously augmenting balance that opposites claim must be maintained; hence, balance is terror.

How can there be a controlled or limited war while a Romulan society possesses superior ability to destroy? The price of

its advanced weaponry is the simpering need to travel (and to live) on simple impulse power. A warring society

because it cannot possess enough energies to both create and destroy. Vulcan grows into a peaceful society after

millennia of warfare. But no emotions, no illogic, can explode into another era of war. A Vulcan civilization depends on

the maintenance of civilization within the context of a Federation. Also, terror comes from balance once it is broken.

Simple impulse power (impulse is a psycho-technical term) is no match for warp power. Was there a true balance in the

first place, or was a society mesmerized into simply believing that a shield cannot be broken? Power is both the strength

and the Achilles' heel of Romulans and Terrans. Power has "limited range” and range means limited power, and so an

Enterprise must take wild "traverse" phaser shots at an enemy it cannot see--literally a shot in the dark; psychologically, a

shot from within darkness. Indeed, the Romulan Commander possesses a grain of truth when he says, “In a different

reality, I could have called you friend." But he is a creature of duty and his final act is that awful "just one more duty to

The sense of the enemy within in "The Balance of Power" is also visible within the confines of each ship. The Romulan

commander fights within himself, between emotion and duty, between a longing for peace and the necessity for conflict.

He is a very complex, multifaceted human/Romulan. The struggle for power is evident between Decius and his

commander. Decius wants the glory of the kill; the Commander seeks patience and caution. The impulsive Decius

"bucks" his cautious commanding officer. Aboard the Enterprise, the theme of internal power separates the senior

officers into camps. The most virulent enemy within is that of racial prejudice, and the main actors in the

scenario of bigotry are Lt. Stiles and Mr. Spock who engage in a not-so-private little war on the bridge, in the briefing

room, and in the phaser control room. Spock and Stiles are most surprised by the appearance of the Romulan

commander on the ship's viewing screen. Stiles, seeing the Vulcan-Romulan resemblance, blames Spock for the

Enterprise conflict. As Uhura decodes the Romulan message, Stiles voices his hatred.

         Kirk: I didn't quite hear that, Mr. Stiles.
          Stiles: Nothing, Sir.
          Kirk: Repeat it.
          Stiles: I was suggesting Mister Spock can probably translate it for you.
          Kirk: I assume you are complimenting Mister Spock on his ability to decode?
          Stiles: I wish I were sure, Captain.
          Kirk: Here's something you can be certain of, Mister.
                   Leave any bigotry in your quarters; there is
                   no room for it on this bridge. Do I make myself
                   clear?
          Stiles: You do, Sir.

With many generations of Stiles in the military service, Lt. Stiles is an authority on Romulans and their "bird of prey."

Although Stiles seethes with a hostility toward Spock that is felt by all around him, Stiles' philosophy about and

knowledge of the Romulans is seconded by Spock, the object of Stiles' bigotry. Stiles' hatred for Romulans is based on

          Stiles: These are Romulans! Run away from them and you
                    guarantee war. They'll be back, not just one
                    with everything they've got~
                           (Whirling on Spock)
                   You know that Mister Science Officer. You always
                    left out that one point. Why? Why? I’m very
                    interested in why?
          Kirk: Sit down, Mister!
          Spock: I agree. Attack.

The bigotry is finally resolved when Spock rescues Stiles from the phaser control room filled with phaser coolant gas,

          Kirk: And you, Stiles?
          Stiles: I^'m alive, sir, but I wouldn’t be…
                    Mr. Spock ...he pulled me out of the phaser
                    room room...saved my life; he risked his life,
                    and after I….
           Spock: I saved a trained navigator so that he could
                      return to duty. I am capable of no other
                      feelings in such matters.

The second enemy within aboard the Enterprise is a philosophical clash between the pro-martial faction and the anti-

martial faction. The emotional, unswerving voice of pacificism is Dr. McCoy who serves as Kirk's double in terms of

reason and conscience. Spock asserts that attack is "imperative.” McCoy asserts that, "War is never imperative," that

“attack begets attack; it doesn’t stop war. Galactic war.” Do you (Kirk) want that on your conscience?" Kirk's

decision to attack near Icarus Four is seen as a “big gamble.” McCoy keeps Kirk and the viewer ever-conscious of

morals and treaties. “Do we violate the treaty, Captain?" because, as McCoy notes, "Once inside (the neutral zone), they

can claim we did! A set up! They want war; we furnish the provocation." Dr. McCoy's pacifism really springs from his

humanism and benevolence, from his concern as man and physician over the taking of human life. Kirk hopes and quips

that Bones' services will not be required in the aftermath of the conflict. McCoy's devotion to his Captain prods

the sentimental soliloquy of the "three million Earth-type planets," that in the millions of galaxies, "only one of each of us.

Don't destroy the one named Kirk." For the Enterprise's role in the destruction of the Praetor's finest flagship, no injuries,

In the next to last scene of "Balance of Terror,” the critical death of Robert Tomlinson is recorded. The dialogue and

          Kirk: How many men did we lose, Bones?
          McCoy: Only one…Tomlinson.
          Kirk: Can't place the name.
          McCoy: The boy who was going to get married this morning.
                       (Beat, long, pained reaction.
                       Kirk knows who it is and is
                       shocked and pained by the sad news).
          McCoy: His fiancee is at the chapel now.
                       (Kirk's eyes lower to the floor… he draws in a breath ...
                        moves for the door).

Kirk exits into the corridor on his way to the chapel. "Balance of Terror" is a play within a play. Little attention is paid to

the context within which the Terran-Romulan conflict takes place. The opening (teaser) and closing scenes are the same

--the chapel of the Enterprise. The Romulan attack against the Earth outposts guarding the neutral zone interrupted the

wedding ceremony, the marriage to be between Angela Martine and Robert Tomlinson. Marriage is the unifying theme of

the episode; rather, it is the destruction of the marriage as fact and symbol that serves as the final toll of this conflict.

Marriage is the symbol used by the great Romantic poets-- Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge--the symbolize the

function of the human imagination. The human mind interprets opposites to create new synthesis, unity, and harmony. The

death of Robert Tomlinson, as the “only” fatality of the conflict, demonstrates the real destruction, in human terms, of

such a useless war. His death symbolizes the failure of man to create beauty in the aftermath of destruction. Angela

Martine is a widow without benefit of marriage because marriage is the coordination of all man's inner resources, the

conscious and unconscious factors for any coordinated and controlled destiny. True victory requires logic and illogic in

interaction. War demonstrates lack of balance, a lack of natural control over man’s heart of darkness, his animal half.

The marriage of man's opposing elements is the victory of uncontrolled and unrestrained darkness. The unconsummated

marriage ceremony shows the spoils of "victory" where male and female unite their differences and find each other

in man's ultimate ceremony of love. Tomlinson and Martine symbolize love destroyed by hate. War destroys the natural

liturgy of the human procreative spirit, the union of mind and body, of two opposite concepts--male and female--in a

creative act. The Romulan-Terran conflict was a battle of minds, and it was man's evil double that enabled one party to

survive; but the soul of the Enterprise suffered an irreversible loss--its marriage within itself. This marriage to be leaves

two lonely figures in the chapel in this episode's closing scene: Captain Kirk and a tearful Angela, one mourning

inside, crying outside. The death of Tomlinson is somehow symbolic of a dying within. His death also reflects upon

the dual nature of a captain's command. It is the captain's privilege to give and to recreate life; it is also the captain's duty

to destroy life. Kirk's decision to pursue the Romulans takes the life of one of his own most promising young crewmen.

The nature of good and evil is a captain's inner tool of command. He must frequently destroy at great cost to his crew

and to himself. One of the frequently forgotten pleasures of the captaincy is his role as minister of God, as priest over his

flock. He is the good shepherd who commands good and evil, who creates both light and darkness, mercy and justice:

          Kirk: Since the first wooden vessels, all ship's
                  masters have had one happy privilege ...
                  that of joining two people in the bonds of
                  matrimony. And so we gather here today,
                  with you, Angela Martine, and you, Robert
                  Tomlinson, in the sight of your fellows,
                  and in accordance with our laws and our
                  many beliefs, so that you may pledge your ...
          Sulu: Alert, alert. Captain to the bridge.
                  All decks alert.

The outposts have been attacked just as Kirk is about to utter troth/faith. A red alert has cancelled a white wedding.

Blood has destroyed the bridegroom. The ritual of life is eclipsed by the ritual of death. And so life's liturgy runs its full

gamut in this episode about the failure of victory to create life. Life and death are older than the ancient wooden vessels,

as old as the fall of man and the murder of Abel by Cain, his brother. Nothing has changed.

The name of the world-be bride is Angela Martine. She is half-angel, half Mars--the Roman God of War. She is a

unity of the opposites seeking formal joining with Robert Tomlinson. Archangel Michael, right hand of God, carried a

torch and a sword as he drove Adam and Eve out of Eden and drove the fallen angel, Lucifer, from heaven into the fires

of eternal hell. This allegory is repeated in “Balance of Terror." Martine and Tomlinson were, ironically, the crewmen in

charge of the phaser room during the Terran-Romulan conflict. They were efficient causes in the destruction of the

Romulan vessel, yet the angels of death were to be the angels of life; but death destroyed the destroyers almost as if the

phasers were symbols of Martine's and Tomlinson's enemies within. All is not so fair in love and war. Man cannot

simultaneously. As in the Romulan vessel, there is not enough energy for both living and destroying. They had to become

visible to fire their weapon, and it had limited range. So it is with Angela and Robert--for worse, not for better--until

death. A suitable alternate title for this episode could have been "Till death do us part." In the chapel stand two lonely,

isolated people who cannot give full solace one to the other: Kirk and Angela. One has won and lost; the other has

simply lost. The captain has no one; Angela has no one. Both have lost in the balance of terror. Both have encountered

the double, the enemy within. Both are gratefully alive, but both are inexorably changed. The setting for "Balance of

Terror" is the chapel, the house of God in the darkness of endless space and time. The presence of the Godhead is the

alpha and the omega of the balance of terror. Opposites meet in the Chapel Perilous, and the Grail eludes its questors.

Man is left with the sad and terrifying Hebraic sense of suffering and sin. In the episode's last words, Kirk seeks light in

the darkness, a reason for it all: "It never makes any sense. We both have to know that there was a reason."

Angela simply answers with the dubious truth: "I'm all right." Kirk and Angela are alone as Kirk turns his back and begins

to leave the chapel. The final script draft reads: "... Kirk as he is...a man alone...then he moves on down the corridor...the

weight of command heavy on his shoulders, but worn with strength and dignity and understanding.” But there is no

solace for Kirk whose reason and sense of duty give him and Angela little comfort, little reason for the liturgy of death

and the ritual of marriage. Little difference remains between the two any more. Angela remains, almost a wife. There's

got to be a reason, but death is often its own beginning and its own end. Oh Death, where is thy sting? Oh Grave, where

          For the discerning intellect of man,
          When wedded to the goodly universe
          In love and holy passion, shall find these
          A simple product of the common day
          --I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
         Would chat, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
         Of this great consummation ...
              --(Wm. Wordsworth, "Prospectus to The Recluse,” 1814).

In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a story of evil is told by the mariner while standing inside the church while a

wedding service goes on within the sanctuary. The mariner speaks his eternal tale to the Wedding Guest in quest for

reintegration of his soul with nature, God, and man. But the mariner never becomes part of the church, never

becomes married to the opposites and divisions his killing of the albatross has caused. Much penance has he done, and

more he shall do. Kirk and the Wedding Guest in Coleridge's famous poem have much in common, from the ancient

wooden vessel to a starship certain universals remain, including the rituals of sin, suffering, penance, and the quest for

rebirth. Kirk, like the Wedding Guest, begins and ends a tale whose setting is the chapel (in Coleridge's poem, the Kirk;

Kirk means church in Scots dialect). Both stories begin and end in church with a tale of violence as a play within the play.

Of the Wedding Guest, the narrator says:

                         He went like one that hath been stunned,
                        And is of sense forlorn;
                        A sadder and a wiser man
                        He rose the morrow morn.
                           (S.T. Coleridge, "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner"⁾

Carl Jung speaks of a possession of the individual by the so-called "inferior function" which is "practically identical"

with the dark side of the human personality." This darkness "clings" to every individual personality and is "the door into

the unconscious (Carl Jung, Four Archetypes. Bolligen Series, Princeton, 1973). A shadow of ourselves may stand

before us that can be an inner friend or our enemy. Whether this double is an inner friend or foe, according to Jung,

"depends on ourselves." It can be the person we may never want to see or to be. Such is the case of the conflict

between the Klingons and the Trekkers in "Day of the Dove." The alien entity of pure energy is called a “crystal" in the

script's final draft (hereafter called SFD). Its definition is not totally clear, but its apparent effects are the focus of this

episode. The day of the dove is the day of peace. The dove's biblical imagistic qualities appear as early as Genesis and

the story of Noah and the great flood. The symbol of the dove bearing an olive twig back from the fertile land heralds the

end of the flood and the story of a purified new race of God based on the descendents of Noah. The twig symbolizes

purification and fertility. The new land is ready for human and animal habitation. In the New Testament, the dove

becomes the symbol of the Holy Spirit bearing the gift of tongues to the twelve apostles. In Christian mythology, the

Dove becomes the symbol of Christ and the gift of peace. The dove is frequently used as a sacrificial animal following the

law of Moses in the temple, a holocaust offered to God by man. The alien serves these functions

by following traditional biblical patterns. Ironically, the alien brings violence, but is not violent of itself. The alien is an eternal parasite using force that already exists in the universe. Thus, the alien fulfills the role of effecting sacrifice and holocaust. It does reek havoc aboard the Enterprise. On the other hand, the alien entity does offer the gift of the olive branch of peace by inducing the violence inherent in the warring factions. It is the violence without death that brings the warring factions to the table of peace talks and intercultural understanding. Besides appealing to man's reason, the alien also appeals to man's instincts--especially the instincts of self preservation and xenophilia. Too much war becomes as boring as too much peace. In this sense, the alien is the dove of peace. The indisputable fact of the plot is its peaceful, even jovial, ending with Terrans and Klingons laughing at their mutual enemy. Through the alien, peace becomes a reality. This is the one Star Trek episode where the Terrans and the Klingons willingly and decisively bury the hatchet in a scene of united nations, if only for that one sweet moment in time. The picture of Kang, played skillfully by the adept Michael Ansara (perhaps best known for his role as Cochese, another famous warrior) laughing and slapping Kirk on the back is an ideal peace because it is mutually arrived at. The opposites or contraries breed progression. Out of evil comes the dove and its day of peace. War ends quickly when soldiers realize that they are being used or brainwashed by an external force. Man fights wars when, for whatever reason, he thinks his individual or natural or cultural self-preservation is

at stake. Once man realizes (as he has in two world wars in this century) that his instinct for self-preservation is no longer

in jeopardy, the situation of war peters out to its historical conclusions. Jerome Bixby's episode "Day of the Dove" is a

study in why and when men make war and peace. It is a study in motivational reason and motivational instinct.

Mankind’s Hebraic self understands sacrifice, ritualistic slaughter, and war, but the highest instinct, that of self-

Reason tells man that order must be restored in order not to be used, not to be a pawn in an alien's parasitic sadism.

The sadistic impulses and passions, where present, yield to instinct and to reason, and both factions grow and learn from

a very distasteful experience. They have even been denied the traditional spoils, accolades, and dignity of victory or of

defeat because no one dies, because no one can or does win or lose. War ceases to be of mutual interest, of individual

or social benefit to anyone. The alien proves to be a catalyst first for war, but ultimately and finally, for peace. The alien is

thus the symbol of mankind's "inferior function," the darkness that clings to every personality. It is the door to the

unconscious of man. The alien is a double in a cultural sense, an inner foe. In spite of its external appearance, the alien is

a symbol of man's darker side. The alien cannot survive if the violent passions of man were not played upon, induced,

Whereas Kirk's personal energy within was a secret sharer and not really an enemy or the enemy, the alien in "Day of

the Dove" is a symbol of a true enemy within man and between men. The alien is not alien; it is inside man in the form of

dormant passions, a Pandora's box that simply awaits an external stimulus or situation to explode into wholesale hostility

and aggression. It twists man inside out in an act of devastating self-consciousness. Man is not man until he realizes that

his potential to destroy is just as strong as his potential to create, and that both powers stem from the dark vales of the

Collective Unconscious. It is not really a question of what the entity is doing to man, but what man is doing to himself

and to others. Kirk is the first to realize that the hostilities are in extremis and not characteristic of the human behavioral

          Kirk: What's happening to us!? What are we
                    saying to each other?!
           Spock: …fascinating. A result of stress?
          Kirk: We've been under stress before! It's never
                    set us at each other's throat! But...
                    why are we behaving like a group of savages?
                    Look at me! Look at me!!

It is me; it is us; it’s what we are doing to each other, not the alien's doings. This recognition of the enemy as truly an

enemy within is the beginning of the story's resolution. It is the story's anagnorisis--the ultimate recognition of the problem

to be resolved. The hatred must cease, first from within the self where the entity is feeding in mental parasitosis. After

recognition of the entity as external manifestation of the problem, intra-personal and inter-personal problem solving

begins. The enemy is still basically an enemy within.

all hostilities because carnage begins to feed on itself and both Klingons and Terrans are speeding toward the end of the

galaxy, beyond the point of no return, into a possible eternity of endless bloodshed. The dilithium crystals are being

drained, and the ship will no longer be in human control. Beyond a certain point the mind loses perspective on its

aggression and simply seeks revenge. It must be stopped while the situation is within man's own control.

The dilithium crystals symbolize the human energy and passion being wastefully expanded. One of the aspects of Greek

tragedy is the enormous consequence of little beginnings, a point later made by Thomas Hardy in Tess of the

d'Urbervilles. Both Sophocles' Oedipus and Hardy's Tess must reap the full and unforeseen consequences of

their acts of murder, and these consequences tend to grow geometrically, increasing the tragedy of man's human situation

which he has initiated and which he can no longer control. This is the warning to man in Sophocles, in Hardy, and in

Roddenberry's abhorrence of useless violence. It is self-destructive in the long run, destructive of others in the

short run. The key is the controlled use of human energies and passions to create, not just to destroy. In his work, The

Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973: hereafter called

AHD), Erich Fromm notes the importance of human energy as an element that can be destructive:

          The concept of social character is based on the consideration
          that each form of society (or social class) needs to use
          human energy in the specific manner necessary for the function-
          ing of that particular society (AHD, 252-53).

Fromm refers to a specific model of human sadism (that of Lorenz) in stressing the idea of an enemy within that lies in the

          ...inasmuch as character-rooted sadism is a spontaneously
          flowing impulse, seeking for occasions to be expressed and
          creating such occasions where they are not readily at hand
          by 'oppetitive behavior.' The decisive difference is that
          the source of the sadistic passion lies in the character ...
          hence it is common to all men...who share the same character.
                 --(Erich Fromm, AHD, 253).

Star Trek's theme lies in pointing out the idea that war is the ultimate misuse of human energy. It is mindless movement,

an endless wasteland leading only to the valley of the dry bones with no Ezechiel, no Yahweh to breathe resurrection

into the bones and into the bleached earth of expended passion without creative purpose.

A society that destroys itself by wasting energy employs the symbols and settings of a wasteland. Star Trek employs

some traditional symbols and settings in its comment on the martial mentality. Setting, especially as treated in the teaser to

"Day of the Dove," alerts the audience to the overall problem to be analyzed in the episode's four acts. The teaser begins

with the materialization of the Trekkers' landing party on the planet Beta l2-A whose surface is arid and barren.

A distress call had been received from an agricultural colony; however, no evidence exists of any such colony. The arid

setting of the planet raises the theme of nothingness—“results negative...no evidence of a colony..life readings, Dr.

McCoy? Nothing." The term is repeated several times, so that the problem is non-existence. The planet's physical state

will soon become a symbol for the characteristics of both Klingons and Trekkers--nothing. The problem is the existence

nothing, and wars are fought over "nothing" until there is "nothing" left. As Hamlet says, "Nothing comes of nothing."

Peace frequently breeds boredom, and boredom seeks relief in expenditure of human energy. Beta 12-A embodies in its

setting the human problem of the relationship between war and vacuity. A point of plot illogic is notable at this point in

the teaser. The officers of the Enterprise should have known that no colony existed on Beta 12-A in the first

place. Unless the alien was controlling their minds or unless the alien did remove the colony, and "one hundred men,

women, children ..." were destroyed. The matter is subject to discrepancy. What the landing party believes is true is the

truth it believes exists. The higher reality is that which is created in and by the human imagination: "results negative";

"nothing"; "barren"; “unable to"; hundreds "dead.” The theme of technological man's blunted creative forces

          For a multitude of causes, unknown to former
          times, are now acting with a combined
          force to blunt the discriminating powers of
          the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary
          exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost
          savage torpor.
            --(William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1798).

The arrival of the Klingon faction to confront the Terran factor enlivens the savage torpor into powers of the mind that

are indeed blunted, unfit, and savage. Only the creative individual can become more fully human under adversity. With

savage torpor of civilized society comes human imagination turned into a mechanical mechanism of mere fancy that

invents realities, making non-existent states existent, making dormant savagery active and kinetic. The human imagination

force in "Day of the Dove" as it creates terror. Even the quiescent Wordsworth notes that one function of the imagination

is to see "absent things as if they were present." The human mind, through the collective unconscious (a term first used by

Samuel Taylor Coleridge one hundred years before Jung's usage) and the imagination, something can come of nothing, or

nothing can become something, or change form. Hatred is one such something. Terrans do not need a reason to hate

Klingons; Klingons need no reason to hate Terrans( Kang). The imagination can make or unmake. Kang (originally "Kor"

in SFD) reacts violently to the destruction of his ship, blaming it on the Enterprise crew:

          Kang: For three years the Federation and the Klingon Empire
                    have been at peace....What were your [Kirk’s] orders?
                    To start a war? You have succeeded. To test a new
                    weapon? We should be happy to examine it.
          Spock: We took no action against your ship.
          Kang: Were the screams of my crew imaginary?

The concepts of real and unreal are reversed. Each party shares only its view of what happened to the other party.

Cause and effect relationships are blurred by hatred. Kang consistently uses terminology referring to imagination or

invisibility to counteract Kirk's statements of his truth. Kang says there was a Federation colony and “it was destroyed."

Kang asks: "By what? No bodies. No ruins? A colony of the invisible?!” For Kirk's imagination, the invisibility of any

colony is the test of a new Klingon weapon "leaving no traces.^” Paranoia is the consequence, a popular Trek theme.

Both men have grievances, have reasons to hate; both have more to blame other than the other party. Imaginary dead

colonists? Imaginary weapons? Imaginary Klingon and human deaths? All are imaginary excuses. In the absence of rational

and immediate answers, the mind engages in frenzied fancy without reasoned or instinctual control.

Each faction denies the realities of any truths outside the conceptions of that faction. Lives, like swords, cross, but never

run parallel to each other. To each faction, the statements of truths of the other faction are lies disguised as fantasies.

Ironically, each party is correct, but only in its own fancy. The pragmatic Kang, lost in a Sahara (Beta 12-A) of sterility,

with a dead crew and a destroyed ship, wants what Kirk wants--an explanation. The human tendency, unfortunately, is

to stoke the coals of passion and fantasy. Terran and Klingon blame each other because man points to the first and

easiest and visible cause for seemingly inexplicable occurrences. Kang's determination to find a cause is livid and

terrorizing: "I don't propose to spend the rest of my life on this ball of dust arguing your Kirk's fantasies. The Enterprise is

mine!” The fantasies become nightmares when combined with the Hebraic tradition of neurotic fault-finding, an hysterical

need for the scapegoat, the Judas goat syndrome. Kirk, seeking an explanation for a lost colony, is not really seeking an

explanation; he is seeking a Judas goat that continues the Hebraic view of man as a suffering, alienated creature whose

nature is largely libidinal. It is not a question of what, of why, but a question of "Who did it ?" Later, it becomes “Why?"

It is just after the question, "Who?" that the Klingons arrive on the scene. Of course! The Klingons. Who else would do

it? The American archetype of witch hunting is carefully studied in "Day of the Dove" because the Klingons are guilty

before proven innocent, a fact that several lawyers begrudgingly admitted was too true to talk about when questioned.

The first suspect to emerge did it! The Klingons did it! The questioner never asks about the ME, only about the NOT-

ME. The problem is rarely seen as emerging from within; it must be "He did it" or "They did it." The very question of

tion of a conscious refusal to admit of an enemy within, just an enemy without, i.e., I did do it! He did! The presence of the alien entity helps to exaggerate the disease of fault finding; the alien also eventually gives man the excuse to blame someone or something outside the self as the Judas. Jerome Bixby makes it clear in this episode that the “blame" lies within the intricate fibers of man's darker side. It is too easy, too simple, to say: The Klingons did it. Of course! The alien lives on man’s inner fears and hostilities. No fears, no hostilities, mean no "alien" because the alien is no alien; "it" is man himself in a flagrant display of misspent passions, of misapplied human energies. In a bloodlust for "Justice,” in a hurry to find “Whodunit?" the real guilt goes unnoticed or goes free because man lustfully seeks a "Who,” no matter the innocence, no matter the guilt, just as long as someone takes the blame. Any Judas goat will do to carry the sins of an entire culture into the desert. Such a custom is Hebraic, and is depicted many times in the new and old Testaments. “Day of the Dove" is a study in the neurosis of witch hunting and fault-finding outside the ME. The enemy within must cease to be "alien" and be acknowledged as part of the ME. In this tensional integration of Conscious and Unconscious lies the beginning of sanity and humanization. A famous comedian, when asked who did it, always got a laugh when he replied: "The Devil made me do it!” The devil indeed! The Satanic archetype appears frequently in Star Trek. Spock's ears ought not to be overlooked. Much of McCoy's hostility/ambivalence toward Spock runs on the "pointed" or "pointy-eared Vulcan." In “The Omega Glory," Spock's ears make him the very image of the anti-Christ. When something goes amiss, one may hear a friend mutter: "What the devil?” Theologians have argued for millennia

as to whether a devil exists as a distinct entity, ex., the devil in "Genesis" or Satan in Milton's epic Paradise Lost. He

lives, crawls, talks, remains very active and, thus, very evil. William Blake called hell "Ilron" and made it clear that "hell"

was a state of mind experienced in time present, not a place "down there" with fires, pitchforks, and creatures with hairy,

pointed tails. Blake also refutes the devil principle as the evil principle, saying: "But in the Book of Job, Milton's Messiah

is call'd Satan" (MHH). "Love and Hate are necessary for human existence." The devil becomes the Judas goat in

orthodox minds as a rationalized way to explain evil, and to avoid the problem of God permitting/creating evil, or to

avoid the Manichean heresy of two gods: one of evil, one of good. So, "The devil made me do it." This imagery and

psychology are applied to the Klingons by the Terran culture. The Klingons are evil--of course: That exonerates the

Terrans. In an easily underrated pair of lines in Act I of "Day of the Dove," Kirk says to Kang: "Go to the devil." Kang

intelligently retorts: "We have no devil, Kirk, but we understand the habits of yours." The devil is one image from the

collective unconscious of man. It too is one traditional symbol of an enemy who is seen as "alien" but who is really the

negative double, the “inferior function" of man. Thus, the Klingons fit Terran stereotypes of the devil, starting,

unfortunately, with the blackened faces. A Klingon is what the Terran sees him to be. He literally assumes the physical

The enemy within consists of images and symbols of which the devil is one. Other symbols of the enemy within are

These symbols are man looking into the a mirror, mirror. Kang sees Terrans as Terrans see Klingons: "Animals! Your

captain crawls like One…All weapons on him." With Klingons aboard and commuincations with Star Fleet

blanketed, Kirk says, "We've got a diplomat tiger by the tail.” The cat has strong roots in man's inner fears. Its

predatory fleshiness breeds terror. The animal imagery persists at key intervals throughout the episode, ex., in 1-16

(Act I, Scene 16), Kang tells Mara, "When I take this ship, I'll have Kirk's head stuffed and hung on his cabin wall.

Uhura, who is in a panic over the communications' problem says in 1-16: "Channels are open and still no outside

contact! I don't understand! Could the Klingons be doing something?" What appears in SFD and is cut from the film

is "Could the Klingons be doing something--from their zoo?" Most of Uhura's hostility is deleted in the final screening,

but the word zoo makes a point, although it may belabor the obvious and may be a bit out of character. A zoo

mentality exists in both Klingons and Terrans. They have reduced each other to civilized (not really primitive) levels.

Erich Fromm mentions “zoo” as a human condition which is one factor breeding human destructiveness because man

in a civilized society lacks the guarantees for the provisions of "basic necessities.^” Fromm notes: "Man will have to

cease to live under 'zoo' conditions--i.e., his full freedom will have to be restored and all forms of exploitative control

will have to disappear"(AHD, 216). Scotty calls the Klingons “fuzz-faced goons," an old Roman image equating

enemies with hair and dark features (hence "barbarians"). The enemy within equates swords and animals to the key

image of blood--as mentioned in earlier episodes. Mara quips: "Four thousand throats may be cut in one night by a

running man." The Klingons are always bloody “creatures." Kirk uses an apt image in wanting a truce: "We must talk to Kang--bury the hatchet." Spock sees the choice of terms as “appropriate” but notes that, "However, it is notoriously difficult to arrange a truce with the Klingons, once blood has been drawn." The armory holds not phasers but swords. Scotty finds a blood symbol from his Scottish ancestry--a "Claymore," a symbol of Scottish victory, blood/ancestry and national pride. The Claymore, named after a Scottish family, is in Scotty's blood--his heritage. Phasers do not produce blood; they merely incinerate, leaving no bodies. Modern technology has tried to make war "civilized," thus depriving man (or so the myth goes) of the blood on his hands by depersonalizing the destructive powers. It is one thing to push a button; it is something else to run a sword through a man's body. Medieval warfare was bloody, but one usually had a sense of the adversary behind the iron armor. Chekov shows the blood lust and sex lust as he rips Mara's dress while holding a sword-point at her throat. The passion to love and the passion to murder are not terribly different, as Chekov sweats, pupils dilated at Mara: "You don^'t die--yet. You're not human, but you're very beautiful...very beautiful." The blood lust creates madness as Kirk strikes Chekov, seeing only potential rape. It is by ACT III-44 that Spock can safely say of Chekov: “He’s not responsible.” Kirk, however, remains terrified and mystified by striking the young ensign: "What have I done?" Note, it is what I, not it, have done. McCoy adds to the cinematic scenes of sword fights in corridors by stressing the blood element of the human personality: "Sword wounds--into vital organs--massive trauma, shock.....

They're all healing at a fantastic rate!" It is the human Hebraic sense of suffering that nudges human reason into

burying the hatchet with a culture that lives by the sword and dies by the sword. Spock: “…the entity wants us alive."

Kirk: " …and so we can fight…and fight ...and keep fighting coming back for more like some bloody coliseum?

What next?!...the roar of the crowds (III-46)?" Even Mara tries to get her husband, Kang, not to fight, but Klingon

even refuses to believe Klingon; a husband is glad to see his soldier-wife alive, yet he refuses to believe she was not

harmed or sexually molested. Kang's love for his wife fuels his already outraged passions. Love and hate are in full

play as Kirk and Kang feed an enemy that feeds on hatred. But, to paraphrase Byron, this is the madness that makes

men mad. People try to kill while knowing they cannot be killed. As Alfred, Lord Tennyson notes, man had regressed

more in the nineteenth century than he had progressed since the beginning of humankind:

          Chaos, Cosmos: Cosmos, Chaos: Who can tell/
          how all will end?/
          Read the wide annals, you, and take their
          wisdom for your/friend ….
          Do your best to claim the worst,
          to lower the rising race of men;/ Have we
          risen from out the beast, then back
          into the beast again?
            --("Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," 1886).

Blood from blood will reek its own bloody vengeance and man will not even know why. It all seems "stupid," but the

problem is that it is human, all too human. For the martial mentality, it is the "logical thing to do." And therein lies the

horror, the darkness at the heart of man, senselessly destroying instead of sensefully creating. History indicates man

enough human energy to create and to destroy at the same time. The result is an "arrested culture" even though history

Omitted from the final screening, but included in SFD of 8/9/68 of "Day of the Dove" in 1-14 is Kirk's response

to Spock's statement that the Enterprise^'s “log tapes will indicate our innocence in the present situation," but that

"Unfortunately, there is no guarantee they will be believed.” In SFD, Kirk states a theory of war, its causes and

          One party--with violent ideas--
          and the willingness to defend them to
          someone else's death. The essence
         of war, Mister Chekov and of prejudice (I -14).

The quotation is a key omission, but the episode by itself, leaves the viewer to draw the conclusion by himself. Two

elements of war are brought forward and are worthy of analysis: ideology and prejudice. First, war is a study in

ideology, in mind manipulation and propaganda. For war to develop, man must be fully consumed by an idea, an

ideology. Ideology depends on a man's respect for authority or authority symbols to a point of awe or devotion. A

culture is neurotically convinced, like the German people in two world wars, that they are fighting for freedom or for

self-preservation, that the aggression involves a defensive posture of armed resistance. Whether the propaganda

comes from a Goebels’ Ministry of Information or from a Communist Pravda, or from an American military

establishment, the society must link its "social character" and social identity to this ideology. Sometimes, the ideology

appeals to a chauvinism or nationalism, creating a twisted sense of solidarity and cohesiveness.

IV: A103

Franz Kafka, in a story entitled "The Great Wall of China" raises the proposition that a wall keeps the masses busy.

Its apparent function is to keep an invisible enemy out, while its real purpose is to keep the people of China in. The

wall is a symbol of mind manipulation by obedience to authority. In Star Trek, especially in "Day of the Dove,"

ideology creates the potential for hostility by creating an enemy with stereotypes. Hitler once used a propaganda film

equating the Jews, Czecks, and other non-Arians as vermin, as rats. The Terrans' ideology sees Klingons as sub-

human in much the same pattern. McCoy fears that Klingons will kill without reason. He equates Klingons with his

role as healer. Kirk sees Klingons as a violation of reason and as a threat to the Federation. Spock sees the

irrevocable circumstances of Klingon illogic. Scotty fears stolen technology and the loss of the Enterprise's edge over

Klingon technology. The problem fostered by ideology is one of predictable behavior and appearance without any

real knowledge of the anti-culture they have been brainwashed to fear and to destroy on sight, without question.

Ideology creates and stems from a blind obedience to authority and to duty. One kills Klingons because ideology

creates an enemy stereotype to help create a false solidarity among the crew. Ideology turns men into creatures of

blind obedience, into soldiers, into automatons, into “pawns.” Ideology creates mentality without thought, without

personal choice or creativity. For example, Kirk holds Mara hostage in hope that Kang will at least want a truce:

          Kirk: We have Mara, your wife. We talk truce now, or she dies. Reply: She has five
                    seconds to reply
          Kang: She is a victim of war, Captain. She understands
          Kirk: He called my bluff
          Mara: You're not going…
          Kirk: The Federation doesn't kill or mistreat prisoners.
                   You've been listening to propaganda, fables….

          Mara: So this was a trick:
          Scotty: It's the alien that's done this. We're in
                     its power--our people and yours!
         Kirk: We only wanted to stop the fighting to save us all.

Both sides believe in the total brutality and animality of the other. The Klingons truly believe in Federation

"concentration camps." Both believe in propaganda of torture and death camps. The spectre of Hitlerian

extermination camps twists the humanity and the minds of both Terrans and Klingons.

Perhaps the most blatant effect of ideology is the inhuman spectre of man as soldier-pawn. Duty and obedience

adumbrate clear thinking and individual free will. The conflict between the two K's-- Kirk versus Kang--is the most

flagrant example of brilliant leaders leveled by subhuman propaganda. Both are creatures of duty, and that duty, if

retained blindly, means an eternal struggle that will exceed human control and choice. Both men cannot see the forest

for the trees. Only the symbol of the entity, a growing sense of self-awareness, and a growing instinct for enlightened

self-interest can save a snowballing scenario of bloodletting. Kang must be appealed to through his ideology to

disprove his ideology. He must, as a commander, be given a victory without defeat, a cultural and personal dignity

          Kirk: Look! Kang…for the rest of our lives, a thousand
                   lifetimes: Senseless violence. Fighting while an
                   alien has total control over us!

Kirk appeals to Kang's sense of blood while still giving him a sense of dignity and control. Kirk must destroy the

"good soldier" and “pawn” ideologies. The alien permits both leaders an opportunity and an excuse to cease hostilities

by referring to the third power which has its own ideology. In essence, Kirk makes the alien the real king on the

As a result, neither man would be disobeying orders or acting contrary to ideological-cultural-tribal laws. The

          Kirk: All right, all right! (Taunting Kang). In the
                   heart… in the head. I won't stay dead. Next
                   time I'll do the same to you. I'll kill you.
                   And it goes on and on. The old game of war...
                   pawn against pawn…. stopping the bad guys...
                   while something, somewhere, sits back, and laughs,
                   and starts it all over again. Be a pawn: Be a
                   toy! Be a good soldier who never questions.

If man is to fight, it must make sense to that society's soldiers. Kirk appeals to an authority higher than Klingon or

Terran ideology—i.e., universal hatred of an individual being used. What Kirk seeks is an appeal to Kang's humanity

(or Klingmanity) while destroying Kang's blind Klingon ideology. Mara is a critical figure in this struggle to live

because she has seen and has experienced the falsity of Klingon propaganda. There are no tortures, no concentration

camps. Human and Klingon have what C.G. Jung called the medius terminus, the middle ground which the

conflicting opposites have in common. Ironically, the two enemies have a common enemy--the alien that symbolizes

the enemy within both Klingon and Terran that is making both faction act "out of character." Klingons are taught to

kill, but "for their own purposes." They need no further urging to "hate humans." Although Kang's hatred is not totally

destroyed, its violent instrumental aggressiveness has been defused. Spock knows that Kirk's appeal to Kang's

character is just that--to his personality and sense of dignity and duty as a Klingon first, as a soldier

second. The parties are not forced to stop the fighting, and that means the element of free will has been permitted to

surface above the plateau of unconscious ideology. Freedom has a dignity as a function on instinct, for, as Spock

notes calmly: "Those who hate and fight must stop themselves. Otherwise it is not stopped." Mara reinforces Spock's

point of view: "I'm your wife. I'm a Klingon. Would I lie to you? Listen to Kirk! He's telling the truth." Truth

as Grecian agape is a form of love. Mara melds love for her husband to her cultural identity as a Klingon. They are

one. A love triangle emerges with three very substantial ingredients for peace: love, truth, social character. If a

civilized society presented these elements in the first place, no war or instrumental aggression would need ideology.

Erich Fromm makes the point of solidarity between and among all men that Joseph Conrad made the cornerstone of

his great studies of man's "heart of darkness." War ironically provides a solidarity, an ethnic/racial identity when peace

failss:

        If civilized life provides the elements of adventurousness,
          solidarity, equality, and idealism that can be found in
          war, it may be very difficult, we may conclude, to get
          people to fight a war.
                  --(AHD, 215).

Ideology and the boredom of a technologized society help to anesthetize Man’s consciousness, his instincts, and his

reason. When Kang, Kirk, and Mara and all others see that war accomplishes nothing, that it makes them ineffective as

men and women, the swords drop from knowing hands and ring a metallic, beautiful sound of peace aboard the

Enterprise. The peace is chosen freely and willingly by the warriors. The haters choose freely and willingly not

transcending both men rules the day of the dove. The loss of fuel is symbolic of expended and wasted human energy:

          Kirk: This is Captain Kirk. A truce is ordered .. the
                   fighting is over. Lay down your weapons.
          Kang: This is Kang. Cease hostilities. Disarm.

The second element of war, besides ideology, is prejudice. Both elements go hand in hand. Ideology fires

prejudice and prejudice reinforces ideology--all into a self-destructive whirlwind, into nothingness, into non-existence

("The essence of war…and of prejudice"). Prejudice frequently takes the form of ethnic and racial hatred, and thus

lies in the human unconscious waiting for a situation to stimulate it into violence. Prejudice comes from the Latin pre-

judicare, meaning to judge before the fact, to jump to conclusions before all evidence is understood, to act

impulsively based on what Jane Austen called "first impressions." It is to engage in blind thoughtlessness without

knowing the facts about a person or object. Its key ingredient is ignorance of "the other"-- perhaps the double or the

enemy within often imposed into or onto an object or culture that, through ideology and propaganda, becomes the

"enemy" who really is no enemy at all--just a fable, a fantasy, a frustration seeking a Judas goat. Prejudice lends itself

to mind-control, to duty, to the role as pawn, to good soldiering. Its key ingredient is individual thoughtless, indeed

to a lack of individualization itself. Prejudice tends to be a Juggernaut of total mindlessness. It is the wasteland, the

graveyard of human creativity. For Chekov, it is an obsession with an induced notion of “Cossacks! Filthy Klingon

murderers! You killed my brother! Piotr--the Arcamis 4 Research Outpost! A hundred peaceful people massacred--

just like you did here~ My brother! You killed my brother!” Ideology coupled with racial prejudices induces

neurotic fantasies and illusions. Chekov is an only child, and subconsciously may have created a brother whom he

always wanted but never had. Chekov would rather leave the Klingons (as does Scotty) in the transporter, in non-

Doctor McCoy's prejudice is based largely on his inherent emotionality and on his role as ship's surgeon. It is

McCoy who patches the scars, sutures the sword punctures, mops up the gallons of blood in sick bay. Kirk asserts

that there is no proof that the Klingons violated the treaty or destroyed any outpost. McCoy's prejudice is not that

of a scientist: “What proof do we need? We know what a Klingon is!" A Klingon is a sub-human thing, an it, an

object. McCoy has thingized an entire culture into a familiar phraseology, i.e., you know they all look alike. The

episode never pictures McCoy treating Klingons in sickbay, a prejudicial action in its own right. Nor does he

volunteer at any time to serve Klingon wounded. Since they are not human, they do not need human medical

treatment. Yet McCoy treats Lt. Johnson whose blind violence against Klingons hardly qualifies him as very human.

Such ironies in the episode are endless. McCoy sees only Klingon murders in a tirade that is an apogee in the

episode's plot. His bigotry verges on insanity. He embodies all the elements he prejudicially attributes only to

          McCoy: Those filthy butchers: There are rules even in
                      war. You don't keep hacking on a man after he's
                       down....A truce?! Are you serious? I’ve got
                       men in sickbay, some of them dying. Atrocities
                       committed on their persons! And you talk about
                       making peace with these fiends? If our backs
                       were turned, they'd jump us in a minute. And
                       you know what Klingons do to prisoners: Slave
                       labor! Death planets! Experiments! While you're

           McCoy: ...talking, they're planning attacks. This is a fight
                        to the death: We'd better start trying to win it:
          Spock: We're attempting to end it, Doctor…by
                      reason, preferably. There is an alien on board which
                      may have created this situation.
          McCoy: Who cares what started it, Mr. Spock. We're
                       in it! Those murderers: We should wipe out every one
                      of them….How many men must die before you two (Spock
                      and Kirk) begin to act like military men? Instead of
                      fools?   --(II-3D)

The above tirade does not appear in SFD, but was interpolated in the episode's final screening. The quotation speaks

for itself, but its twelfth-hour insertion indicates the producer's insistence on the universality of prejudice, and that

McCoy’s dark, human weaknesses are effective when he is the source. As ship’s Chief Surgeon, his prejudice

denigrates his dignity as a man and his professionalism as a doctor. Coming from McCoy, the ships humanist, the

spasms of raging racial dehumanization are terrifying and insanely effective on the screen.

Gene Roddenberry's distaste for senseless hatred and violence via prejudice also applies to a triad on the bridge:

Scotty, Spock, and Kirk. It is what a man is as manifested in what he says and does that is more murderous than his

bristling weapons of technology. Scotty, Spock, and Kirk (as with Chekov and McCoy earlier) show that

the problem is in man's "zone of darkness" (cf., "The Immunity Syndrome"), his inner heart of darkness that is the

problem, not the Klingons. The myths of the bad guys versus the good guys must be seen in its true light--within man.

man's soul, his guts, his reason--all are at war with the self, and that is the real war in "Day of the Dove" and in the

majority of human prejudices. The secret and the reward, the problem and the solution, lie within the ME. It is literally

halfway through this episode that Kirk realizes the problem is "US." This anagnorisis results from the racial

interchange in III-38. Scotty's Scottish temper rages as the worst in him surfaces to a conscious level. Like

McCoy's eruption, Scotty's prejudice is tantamount to hysterical paranoia, and his prejudice stems from,

          Scotty: Stop! Chekov was right, Captain! We should have left
                     those fuzz-faced goons in the transporter! That's right
                     where they belong…non-existence! Now they can study
                     the Enterprise--add our technology to theirs--change the
                     balance of power! --lurches at Kirk--you've jeopardized
                     the Federation!

As Spock tries to ease Mr. Scott's anger, Scotty's prejudice turns against the Vulcan:

          Scotty: Keep your Vulcan hands off me! Your
                     “feelings” might get hurt. You green-blooded half-
                      breed!

The normally sedate Mr. Spock retorts:

          Spock: May I say that I have not thoroughly enjoyed serving
                     with humans ... I find their illogic and foolish
                      emotions a constant irritant.
          Scotty: Then transfer out! Freak!

Spock comes close to manhandling Scotty with his great strength surging into sudden rage. Kirk "bulls" (SFD) them

both back, shouting: "Gentlemen! Knock it off--To Spock: "Stop it, you half-human…" As of this point, all four

senior officers and one junior officer have screamed discordant notes of distasteful prejudice. Kirk sees his own

anti-Vulcan prejudice and catches himself before completing his remark. The realization surfaces: "What are we

saying?! What are we doing to each other?!” Scotty insists, "This is war!" But Kirk raises the episode’s key

          Kirk: What is happening to us? We've been trained to
                   think in other terms--than war: We're trained to
                   fight its causes if necessary. But why are we behaving
                  like a group of savages. Look at me: Look at me
                   Has a war been staged for us--complete with weapons and
                   ideologies? And patriotic drum-beating? Even Spock…
                   even race hatred.

Spock's answer again shows that war must play upon the enemy within; it must deal with and stimulate a priori

conditions: "Recent events would seem to be directed toward a magnification of the basic hostilities

between humans and Klingons. Apparently it is by design that we fight. We seem to be pawns." Kirk states, "But

what is the game? And whose? And what are the rules?! The game emanates from within and every man must

choose the rules best suited to solve the game. The solution comes from a conscious understanding of the problem

and its source. "Look at ME:" Vengeance fuels vengeance. Soon there will be no control over human energy. Both

Klingons and Terrans are "strengthened by mental radiations of hostilities," not by some thud entity. Violent intentions

          Mara: We have always fought. We must. We are hunters, tracking
                    and taking what we need. There are poor planets in the Klingon
                    systems. We must push outward to survive.
          Kirk: There's another way--mutual trust and help. Violence breeds
        violence.

The source of, and the cure for, prejudice resides in the solidarity of the individual with the social community and

between differing cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. In SFD, Mara and Kirk kiss and speak of harmony between

races as Kirk states that "Individuals are important. You have to start with the individual…we could make history…

right now." The antipathy to being prejudiced, to being pawns, fosters a resolution. Sorrow, expressed sorrow,

whether between senior officers of the Enterprise, or between human beings and Klingons. The most distasteful

prejudice is that shown toward fellow officers, people with whom one must function as a human being:

          McCoy: Spock, if we are pawns--you're looking at one
                        that is extremely sorry.
          Spock: I understand, Doctor. I, too, felt a brief surge
                     of racial bigotry. Most distasteful.

In finding and in defeating the "alien," Terrans become more fully human because all have found the "war" most

distasteful, useless, and undignified. Violence finally breeds its antithesis, peace. Good spirits and joviality help to

destroy the enemy within. "Good spirits" are an "effective weapon"--an interesting choice of terms by Mr. Spock.

Deleted from final screening, appearing in SFD, is a statement espousing mutual trust. The metaphors used are worth

          Spock: Two dogs fight over a bone, Kang--or they can pool
                      their abilities, hunt together and share jointly
          Kirk: We were evenly matched--a standoff. War was the
                    common enemy. Cooperate ... or fight for
                    all eternity. A universal rule ....

On the quotation, the SFD ends the fourth and final act of the episode. The deleted quote was too didactic and

redundant and better deleted, leaving the former enemies laughing jovially at an alien, at a war, at themselves for

Warring factions have exalted themselves above ideology and prejudice. They have become themselves, more

fully free, and more fully human/Klingon. They have made history; they have evolved; they have been reborn and

transformed. A rebirth takes place because the dove has its day--peace: In summary, Gene Roddenberry·s view of

violence, its causes and effects, its ideologies and prejudices, has the company of brilliant writers. Lord

IV: A113

Byron, upon visiting the scenes of the battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo in 1815, bemoaned the nothingness over

which thousands died:

          'tis but a worthless world to win or lose;
          So hath it proved to thee (Napoleon) and all such lot who choose.
                (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, III, 40.)

In the same poem, stanza 42, Byron describes the reason behind a character such as a Napoleon, whose

fundamental rise and fall is internal, much like the Kangs, or Goebels, or Mussolini's of the world:

          But quiet to quick bosoms is a hell,
          And there hath been thy bane; there is a fire
          And motion of the soul which will not dwell
          In its own narrow being, but aspire
          Beyond the fitting medicine of desire.

Erich Fromm says much the same thing about the fire or hell within that leads to vengeance and bloodlust:

          What is unique in man is that he can be
          driven by impulses to kill and to torture,
          and that he feels lust in doing so; he
          is the only animal that can be a killer
          and destroyer of his own species without
          any rational gain, either biological or economic.
                   --(AHD, 218).

Alfred, Lord Tennyson said it all earlier, and with gusto, when he isolated the enemy within phenomenon, seeing man

as problem and solution:

          Have we grown at least beyond the passions
          of the primal clan? / "Kill your enemy,
          for you hate him," still, "your enemy"
                  was a man.

(finis--"Day of the Dove")
xxxxxx

                                                                                                      IV:   A114


“The Conscience of the King”

          Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
          and thus the native hue of resolution
          Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
          and enterprises of great pitch and moment
          with this regard their currents turn awry
          And lose the name of action.
                    --(Hamlet, III, i).

Technically, every deed of man constitutes morality, and morality gives man a conscience of this time spent on earth

as one vast morality play, as millions of scenes of the drama of human existence. Shakespeare's Jacques understates

the matter in saying that all the world is a stage, and man is the principal actor. One of Star Trek's virtues

is that it pricks man's conscience, its sense of right and wrong. The function of great art is to prod man into thinking a

little more about himself and about his relations with his fellow man and with his God. Long before Freud was a

twinkle in his father's eye, Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, wrote about blood, guilt, conscience, darkness, ghosts,

kings and jesters. Shakespeare wrote the book about the human conscious and the human unconscious. No books

says more about modern human nature than the works of William Shakespeare. He makes us conscious that we have

"The Conscience of the King" has as its themes: Justice versus Murder; Humanism versus the Machine--the need

for Shakespeare to reignite the flame of human emotion and human morality in the cold vacuum of space.

"The Conscience of the King" is a play within a play, from within a play, about the reality of the pain of playing. It is a

drama of the human heart, a fantasy, a nightmare of what Conrad's Kurtz called "the horror! the horror!"--lines also

Apocalypse Now. Life is a stage, and every man plays parts in the tapestry called life. Every thinking man contributes

to the fabric of all existence. The Enterprise's mission is to avert famine on the planet, Cygnia Minor. The little swan

planet is dying of hunger. This background first is symbolic of the foreground drama--the theme of moral starvation,

the "hunger that never dies" (cf., “Wolf in the Fold)). All the episode's major characters are, in a sense, dying of the

hunger of the soul. The Shakespearian plays used in "Conscience" include Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar,

Romeo and Juliet, and Anthony and Cleopatra in order of use and importance. In its many senses, Gene

Roddenberry is the Shakespeare of modern cinema. Barry Trivers' original draft shows little working familiarity with

the actual scenes and lines of Shakespeare's tragedies. His title choice belies the draft. Only a close correspondence

between Roddenberry and Trivers produced an insistence on knowing the intricacies of Macbeth and

Hamlet. Gene Coon and Marvin March insisted on Elizabethan authenticity. In a memo of August 29, 1966, March

          I would suggest dropping Arcturean and Venusian decor in favor for
          a more conventional Elizabethan Design. This would mean architect-
          ture, furniture and costumes--the man (Karidian) was totally
          involved with the classical way of life and his main idea for
          a Repertory Group would be to educate the audience--the approach
          is that of a purist. Also, the contrast with our future would
          make that world more believable.

The insistence increased toward believability and authenticity, toward the fact that Shakespeare is timeless and

universal. Roddenberry and Coon had to do their homework to produce a credible script. Both had to do

research in order to create the final script draft of "Conscience." They had to have had a working textual familiarity.

The answers, unfortunately, likely reside with the late Gene Coon, who converted Trivers' story into a masterpiece of credible Elizabethan drama for the 23rd century. Planet "Q" means the planet of questions, and the answers reside in the dramatis personae of "Conscience." The episode is a Shakespeare tragedy, and every noble character has his/her hamartia, or tragic flaw.
Enter: Lenore Karidian:--her first name symbolizes her character and role. The name is mainly Greek in origin (Leonora), and means a predator murderess, lion-like. It ultimately comes from Helen, which means "torch." The Homeric implications of the Helen of Troy are tangential possibilities with the face that launched a thousand ships, the beauty who brings out the beast of Paris and of Agamemnon. When Lenore appears, it is because men die. Beauty is the beast, and ultimately, beauty will kill all the "ghosts" and "beasts." She make a fine Aphrodite, and kills with equal impunity (cf., Hippolytus). Like Geraldine in Coleridge's "Christabel," she is the evil factor who seduces innocence out of an insane sense of fate and duty. Lenore is an actor, but her role is not a role, but a reality. She is Lady Macbeth goading Macbeth--like Karidian, a soldier in a course--to the murder of King Duncan in the play's early acts. She becomes what Macbeth lacks, the "spur/ to prick the sides of my intent, but only/ Vaulting ambition, which o'er itself/ and falls on the other" (Act I, vii). There is no distance between Lady Macbeth's love for her husband and her bloodlust: "From this time/ Such I account they love. Art thou afeard/ To be the same in thine own act and valor/ As thou art in desire? ... /live a coward in thy own esteem….” Her love for blood is equalled only by her hatred

IV: A117

for her sterile femininity and for Duncan. Good and evil, love and hate, intermix and are swallowed by darkness as

Lenore methodically murders the witnesses to Kodos' execution of four thousand people because of “hunger."

Lenore seeks to purge her father's blood guilt by removing the witnesses to the murder of Macbeth/Karidian. As in

Macbeth, it is the cold, rational Lady Macbeth who jumps off the castle's battlements in the quandary of her

insanity. Suicide clashes with her love as "vaulting ambition" takes its tragic toll. But the woman is the initial culprit,

          Out, damned spot! Out, I say! One two
          --Why, then, 'tis time to do't. Hell is murky.
          Fie, my lord, fie~ A soldier, and afeared?
          What need/ we fear who knows it, when no one can call
          our power/to account? Yet who would have thought the
          old man to have had so much blood in him?
                   --(Macbeth, V, i)

Lenore kills her father--the ultimate tragic irony--because both have been morally dead for twenty years. Physical

death is posthumous to the hardening of the human heart. The rivers of the personal and the collective

unconsciousness flow with the episode's major unifying symbol--blood. Blood links the major actors: Leighton, Kirk,

Lenore, Karidian, Riley--all beginning with Governor Kodos' genocidal holocaust on Tarsus IV almost twenty years

ago. As is the case in Shakespearian tragedy, death is the result of a love-distortion. Evil sterns from a unifying virtue.

Bloodlust springs from the fountains of love. Lenore murders seven eyewitnesses because she loves her father. Her

love makes patricide possible and, symbolically, regicide as well. It is a sin of the heart, for the mind is gone,

destroyed from guilt and conscience. Tragedy is always love's swan song, and Lenore is not only a Lady Macbeth,

IV: A118

but also an Ophelia. In Hamlet, Ophelia's love for Hamlet, and the dark Dane's inability to reciprocate, is the major

cause for Hamlet's obsession with revenge against his uncle, King Claudius, for murdering the Dane’s father--this

blinds him to Ophelia's virginal passion. Ophelia dies, a victim of love. Hamlet too dies a victim of love, of bloodlust

ensuing from his love for his father, the murdered king. With flowers in the hair and the vacant mindlessness of her

starry, lost eyes, Lenore is "sweets for the sweet.” Lenore is a merchant in love with her would-be victim, Kirk. Her

love is pure venom. Helen destroyed Troy. Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon. The Trojan War suddenly becomes

meaningless, adumbrated by love's insanity. Lenore is a Siren in a play about twisted and bloody love. Riley asks

          A song….make it a love song, something
          to reassure me that I'm not the only
          living thing left in the universe.

McCoy refers to Lenore as "Juliet," the only such explicit reference to that play. Lenore calls herself "Cleopatra" to

Kirk's "Caesar of the stars," The quest is for eternal love as expressed by Uhura's song which stresses the conscious,

lighter side of love. It is love as health, as the life-giving food of the human heart:

          The skies are green and glowing
          Where my heart is, where my heart is ...
          Somewhere, beyond Antares.
          I'll be back, though it takes forever;
          Forever is just a day ...
          Where my love eternally is waiting….

Uhura's song is love as health, and it is in sharp contrast to the fate of Ophelia as Lenore poisons Riley's milk with

tetralubisol. The two loves of light and darkness occur simultaneously. Uhura's song in present in the background as

the poison is poured into the milk glass--a brilliant dramatization that emphasizes love's contraries. Love turned in

Love turned without the self is healthy and peaceful as the song, a master- ful lyric not unlike Elizabethan ballads. The

song is a sublimation of Lenore's one, healthy, subconscious love. The theme is the heart; its antithesis is the

heart's blood of the dagger. As William Blake notes, Love and Hate are necessary for human existence. Juliet is the

innocent, virginal love in Shakespeare's play; however, Cleopatra is scheming, solipsistic, lascivious and, like Lady

Macbeth, Juliet, and Ophelia, commits suicide for twisted values concerning love. The deaths are from love in

extremis, love without balanced perspective between the male and female partners involved. Love and death are

          'He is dead and gone, lady,
              He is dead and gone,
           At his head a grass-green turf,
              At his heel a stone'
                 --(Hamlet, IV, v) ...
           They bore him barefaced on the bier,
           Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny,
           And in his grave rained many a tear…
           There's rosemary, that's for remembrance ...
          And there is pansies, that's for thought…
           There's fennel for you, and columbines.
           There's rue for you… there's a daisy. I
       &n