In the twelfth episode of the third season of\u00c2\u00a0Star Trek<\/i>, Kirk, Spock, and Bones are subjected to brutal rounds of torture at the hands of a couple aliens. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to watch\u00c2\u00a0Star Trek<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Trigger Warning: For torture<\/b><\/p>\n
Well, this was a weird one, though I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s necessarily a bad thing. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lot here that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s purposely bizarre, and I appreciate that the show was willing to do something so drastically different from what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen. And lord, it seemed so much like a ton of past episodes. How many times have these people gone down to make contact with missing crewmembers, only to discover the horrible truth of what happened to them? While you still have that aspect of the story here, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Empath\u00e2\u20ac\u009d quickly veers off in a relentlessly uncomfortable and almost existential direction.<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a visual thing, too, since the opening credits unfold on blackness, and nearly every scene plays out on a minimalistic set that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s shrouded in darkness. I actually thought it was brilliant, an almost post-modern taken on what the show normally did. The black backdrops are unnerving, as are the costume designs for the Vians. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re designed with such a traditional and plain look (borrowing heavily from common tropes for aliens within science fiction) that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re immediately recognizable as antagonists. And then we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got the Empath, Gem (IT SHOULD BE SPELLED \u00e2\u20ac\u0153JEM\u00e2\u20ac\u009d JUST SO I CAN JUST IMAGINE THE HOLOGRAMS SHOWING UP TO SING WITH HER), whose costuming is in visual juxtaposition with the aliens. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s very easy, then, to accept the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153obvious\u00e2\u20ac\u009d roles of these two forces. The Vians were callous, sadistic torturers, and they were exploiting Gem for\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 well, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a mystery, a frustrating one that only gets more difficult to watch as the Vians become more and more heinous in their torture.<\/p>\n
It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s through this that Gem reveals that she is an empath, one who does not \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and can not \u00e2\u20ac\u201c speak. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a character I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve\u00c2\u00a0ever<\/i> seen on television, especially since the writers never once make her magically able to speak. Hell, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rare for\u00c2\u00a0Star Trek<\/i>, which often brushes over the statistical improbability that every species can speak English. And while I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think this makes Gem a perfect character or an ideal representation, it does make her remarkably compelling. Kathryn Hays does not get an easy role here, and she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s able to convey Gem\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s complicated journey entirely through facial expressions.<\/p>\n
That journey\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a weird one. I admit I may have misunderstood some of this because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got a fever and a cold and my brain hurt trying to figure out the final ten minutes of this episode. But my understanding is that the entirety of the torture seen in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Empath\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was a test for Gem\u00c2\u00a0only<\/i>. The Vians \u00e2\u20ac\u201c of which there were only two, apparently? \u00e2\u20ac\u201c wanted to know which race in their system that they should save from the impending super nova. This is one of those episodes that has a fascinating premise, but all the details are largely perplexing. The framework by which they test Gem is to see whether she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll put another person before her self, which\u00c2\u00a0might<\/i> make sense if the race Gem belonged to had ever proven to be a selfish species. But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a ludicrous idea because the Vians are utterly oblivious to the fact that by kidnapping Gem, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s probably not in the best mental space to want to put another life ahead of her own.<\/p>\n
And yet? She heals Kirk and McCoy to great cost to herself. What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so absurd is that THIS ISN\u00e2\u20ac\u2122T GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE VIANS. No, they believe that she is still selfish because\u00c2\u00a0she<\/i>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s still alive<\/i>. Like??? What? Why is this the standard by which you judge an entire race? AREN\u00e2\u20ac\u2122T THERE OTHER FACTORS THAT ARE IMPORTANT TOO??? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m thankful that Kirk and Spock point out how absurd this is because\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 seriously??? You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re talking about saving an entire race, and this is the way in which you judge them. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s heinous!<\/p>\n
That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not to say that the ending of this episode justifies all of this. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s great that the Vians now value Gem and her amazing selflessness. But what about all the other races? Did Kirk and Spock accidentally doom them all to annihilation? Not that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s their fault, mind you, but is no one going to address that? Probably not. THIS EPISODE IS SO WEIRD.<\/p>\n
The video for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Empath\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can be downloaded here for $0.99<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n – Mark Does Stuff is now on Facebook<\/a>! Feel free to Like the page, which I’m running myself, for updates and SILLINESS. In the twelfth episode of the third season of\u00c2\u00a0Star Trek, Kirk, Spock, and Bones are subjected to brutal rounds of torture at the hands of a couple aliens. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to watch\u00c2\u00a0Star Trek.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[614,616],"tags":[615],"class_list":["post-4321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-star-trek","category-the-original-series","tag-mark-watches-star-trek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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