The Mark of Gideon

Good story. Good dialogue. This rating is relative to the entire series. For the most part, the dialogue stays together and the plot holds together reasonably well. It's kind of fun. It's not a monster plot which makes it a more interesting story. It's a bit fun to watch some of the population. I'm not sure we can call it misogyny this time since both characters act like 13-year-old's. I they do have a little of a common plot problem where characters don't say obvious information to other characters. It was fun and easy to watch.

Season 3, episode 16. The Enterprise arrives at the planet Gideon to begin diplomatic relations and to have them join the Federation. Kirk beams down and finds himself on what appears to be an empty Enterprise. In the sky, is Spock in charge of the real Enterprise. Kirk finds no one on the fake Enterprise but does find the young girl Odona who does not know how she got there. Spock, in the real Enterprise, must now deal with representatives of Gideon that say that Kirk never arrived. Spock also realizes later that the coordinates given to him are wrong. Back on the false Enterprise, Odona tells Kirk that her planet is very much overpopulated and Kirk believes she's from Gideon but she insists she is not. Then Odona falls ill - her illness is exactly what the Gideon leaders want. Kirk takes her to sickbay where he meets Ambassador Hodin, Odona's father. Odona has a virus, Vegan choriomeningitis, and it is help control the overpopulation problem and that Kirk is part of a secret experiment. Spock must try to find Kirk from the real Enterprise, while Kirk must find a way to get back to the real Enterprise. They also must get to bottom of what is going on at Gideon.

Nothing unusual about Kirk (and crew) ending up in an odd place, disappearing or missing. Nor is it unusual for Kirk (and crew) to be used as a pawn is someone else's game. BUT the way it is put together and played out in this episode is done quite well. In spite of the lower rating, I like it.

8/10

This episode has so many holes. Kirk beams down to the surface of a planet, or so he thinks. He finds himself on what appears to be the Enterprise. But there is no crew. After a thorough investigation of the ship he is suddenly face to face with a young woman. She claims she does not know why she is there. Meanwhile, on he real Enterprise, Spock and the gang are trying to negotiate the ability to beam down and look for the Captain. Unfortunately, the officials on the planet refuse to allow this. Kirk, who despite being in grave danger, can't control his hormones and has contact with the young woman. After their tryst Kirk sees faces on the viewing screen. A group of people wearing some kind of hoodie. It turns out that this is a planet where people no longer die (unless they grew extremely old) and they have only to wander the planet, no room, like they were stuck in Time Square on New Year's Eve. The hope is that Kirk will infect the young woman and she will in turn bring disease to the population, decreasing it through mass death. It's unfortunate that there is no satisfactory resolution. I guess it is a lesson in population control.

The Enterprise arrives at the planet Gideon to begin some kind of interstellar relations. Gideon is rumored to be a paradise but no one in the Federation knows the details. The planet's leaders insist that Kirk beam down by himself, which he does. However, he seems to end up back on an empty Enterprise, wondering where his crew has disappeared to. Unfortunately, this intriguing mystery has a most mundane explanation; it has nothing to do with Kirk entering another dimension or being out of sync, as I hoped when I first saw this as a kid. Most of the episode concerns Spock and the bridge crew dealing with bureaucracy from both Gideon and Starfleet. Even they look bored - how can they expect the audience to get excited? Kirk, meanwhile, spends most of the episode wandering on the other, empty Enterprise, along with a young female who shows up unexpectedly. Expectedly, it's an even more dull sequence of scenes. Every few scenes, a collection of sober, droopy faces pop up on this Enterprise's view-screens; this was meant to be startling or ominous. It doesn't really make sense, is all.

There also isn't much sense to this elaborate scheme concocted by Gideon's policy-makers. They wanted Kirk down on their planet for a certain reason; there was no need for all the grand subterfuge. Once Kirk beamed down, they could have sat him down in any room for an hour or so with another inhabitant to get their plan to succeed. So, it's all a contrivance as far as the plot. Likewise, Spock and the crew are too slow on the uptake in figuring out the bogus coordinates: '..079' vs. '..709' - Spock didn't notice the discrepancy immediately? This is a Vulcan! Hello? Like with many later Trek episodes (in the 3rd season), the show aimed for heavy-handed relevance to tackle social issues and rising problems of the sixties: racism, war, pollution, inequality and, in this case, overpopulation. Once Gideon's problem is revealed, it is an admittedly interesting dilemma, taken to a logical extreme (later, "Soylent Green" in '73 would tackle the issue in a similar manner). But, it's a real slog to get there. This episode also has a shot (two, actually) of the empty bridge, previously seen (attention trivia Trekkers) in "This Side of Paradise." However, that was the real bridge in the older episode, savvy?

The council on Gideon, a non-federation planet, agrees to a delegation of one: Captain Kirk. But when Kirk beams down to the co-ordinates supplied, he finds himself not in the Gideon council chamber but back on the Enterprise, and very alone. His entire crew has disappeared!. After searching the ship from top to bottom, Kirk eventually encounters a beautiful young woman named Odana (Sharon Acker) who hasn't the foggiest how she got there. What in the blue blazes is going on?

Sadly, the answer to this question isn't very satisfactory.

It turns out that Kirk has been beamed down to an exact replica of his starship on Gideon, designed to confuse the captain while Odana, actually the daughter of Gideon Ambassador Hodin, tries to seduce him (not difficult - this is old horndog Kirk we're talkin' about!). It transpires that the Gideons are after the meningitis virus in Kirk's bloodstream, which they intend to use as a means of population control on their overcrowded planet. The duplication of the Enterprise seems like a pointless endeavour since Kirk could just have easily been beamed down to a secure room with armed guards, thus saving the Gideon's a lot of time, trouble and materials (where they got such detailed plans of the Enterprise is another matter).

Also, seeing as the overcrowding problem stemmed from the Gideons' sanctity of life, it seems like an awfully strange move to now introduce a nasty virus into the population in order to whittle down the numbers. It makes the carousel in Logan's Run seem like a humane answer by comparison.

4/10. It disnae make any sense, Captain.