frank gorshin star trek episode

• Show Spoilers
• Night Vision
• Sticky Header
• Highlight Links

Follow TV Tropes

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekS3E15LetThatBeYourLastBattlefield

Recap / Star Trek S3 E15 "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"

Edit locked.

Original air date: January 10, 1969

While on route to the planet Arianus on a mission to decontaminate its polluted atmosphere, the Enterprise intercepts a Federation shuttle that had been reported stolen from Starbase 4. After disabling the shuttle, its alien pilot is brought on board: though humanoid, said pilot's skin is half ink black, half chalk white, right down the middle. Spock is extremely intrigued, claiming said coloration goes against all genetic theory and that the pilot might be one of a kind.

The captive pilot wakes up and introduces himself as Lokai (Lou Antonio), from the distant non-Federation planet Cheron. However, when asked as to why he stole the shuttle, he becomes evasive and refuses to explain further. After contacting Starbase 4 and informing them they will return the shuttle as soon as the Arianus mission is complete, the Enterprise is suddenly approached by an invisible alien ship on collision course. However instead of colliding, it disintegrates and its pilot suddenly appears on the bridge. Said pilot is apparently the same species as Lokai, having the exact same skin colors only reversed (so much for "one of a kind"). The alien introduces himself as Bele ( Frank Gorshin ), also from Cheron and Chief Officer of its Commission on Political Traitors. Bele claims Lokai is a fugitive convicted of treason and he has been sent to apprehend him.

The two aliens meet and get into a heated argument, with Lokai claiming Bele's race has enslaved Lokai's and planning on their genocide while Bele claims Lokai's people were "savages" that were "educated" by his own people, and that Lokai has caused his race to engage in violent revolution resulting in the deaths of thousands. Lokai asks Kirk for political asylum while Bele demands that Lokai be handed over to his custody. Kirk refuses to take sides claiming that Lokai is a prisoner of Starfleet (and thus ineligible for asylum) over the shuttle's theft and since Cheron is not a Federation planet Lokai cannot be extradited there. He adds that as soon as the Arianus mission is complete, they will have to make their case at Starbase 4. Bele is displeased at this and uses some mysterious power to take control of the ship, claiming he has been chasing Lokai for " fifty thousand of your terrestrial years " and he won't give up now.

After phasers prove to be useless, Kirk threatens to set off the Self-Destruct Mechanism if he doesn't return command of the ship. Bele thinks Kirk is bluffing to which Kirk responds by ordering the verification of the self destruct sequence by the vocal commands of himself, Spock and Scotty. Only a few seconds away from the end of the countdown does Bele release control. He adds that he will allow the Arianus mission to be completed and requests that he be allowed to bring Lokai to Cheron as soon as it's done. Kirk makes no promises but allows both to walk freely within the ship.

En route to Arianus, Lokai makes his case with the crew, claiming humans have no idea what it's like to be persecuted, and not being impressed when he is informed that persecution did occur in the distant past of human history but mankind has evolved past it. Meanwhile Bele is relayed a message from Starfleet command claiming that Lokai will stand trial on Starbase 4 and that it's likely that he will end up turned over to Bele's custody. Bele doesn't believe it, claiming Lokai will manage to manipulate everyone into releasing him and calling him "an inferior breed". When Spock calls him of the same breed as Bele, Bele points out the difference that Lokai and his "people" are white on the right side while Bele's race is white on the left . Spock's claims that Cheron's people can overcome such differences just like Vulcan once did are interrupted by the Enterprise arriving at Arianus.

The decontamination procedure goes without problems. However, as soon as the course is changed to Starbase 4, Bele hijacks the ship again, this time making sure to burn out the self destruct controls, leaving Kirk and the crew no choice but stand around helplessly while the ship is taken to Cheron. Lokai appears on the bridge outraged at this development and fights Bele, threatening to tear the ship apart though Kirk calms them down. Kirk is given control back once Cheron is in visual range. However, the surface scans pick up a grim sight: completely empty cities filled with unburied bodies, animals and vegetation encroaching on them. Every sapient life form on Cheron is dead, having wiped each other out in a giant race war. The shocked Lokai and Bele promptly turn on each other again, accusing the other's race of being responsible. Kirk pleads with them to stop fighting, claiming that their hatreds are pointless now and that they're welcome to live in the Federation. Kirk's pleas fall on deaf ears and Lokai and Bele take the fight down to the destroyed planet, leaving the crew to ponder on the pointlessness of it all:

Sulu : But the cause they fought about no longer exists. Does it matter now which one was right? Spock : Not to Lokai and Bele. All that matters to them is their hate. Uhura : Do you suppose that's all they ever had, sir? Kirk : No, but that's all they have left. [dejected] Warp factor 4, Mr. Sulu. Starbase...4.

Let These Be Your Last Tropes:

• Ain't Too Proud to Beg : With everyone on Cheron dead and the conflict rendered totally pointless, Kirk all but drops to his knees, pleading with Bele and Lokai to abandon the hate that has destroyed their world. It doesn't work .
• All for Nothing : Bele and Lokai's conflict is proven to be for naught when the Enterprise finally reaches Cheron: everyone on the planet is dead, and with them, any reason to keep fighting. Unable to face this, Bele and Lokai resume their chase on the now dead planet, consumed by the hatred that, as Kirk reflects, is all they have left.
• The audience is given very little information about the overall conflict on Cheron. Most of the details come from two obviously biased individuals whose information could be as much as 50,000 years out of date; that Lokai's people have been on the receiving end of racism and oppression is the only thing both of them agree on, and when the Enterprise finally reaches Cheron, everyone is dead, with no indication of how open warfare started or who did what.
• While Bele claims to have been chasing Lokai for 50,000 years, it's not made clear if they've spent all of that time in space, or if the pursuit started on Cheron before moving out into space. It's only established that they've been gone long enough for their species to be obliterated by war and for nature to start reclaiming Cheron's cities.
• How justified Bele's accusations against Lokai are is never made clear; Bele is obviously biased, provides no evidence to support his argument, and is suspiciously wary of Lokai getting a chance to voice his grievances, but Lokai never explicitly denies Bele's claims, insists that the Enterprise crew kill Bele, and when they first confront one another, Lokai notably promises revenge, not justice.
• Artistic License – Biology : Spock describes evolution as always being a move to a "more advanced" state. In reality, evolution simply tailors a species to better survive in its current environment.
• "Ass" in Ambassador : Bele does a poor job of representing his people with civility.
• Bottle Episode : Another one that only takes place on the Enterprise .
• Chewing the Scenery : Even when he's not shouting , Bele does this when commenting on the idea that humans are descended from apessssss .
• Coconut Superpowers : No budget for a spaceship model? No problem... it's invisible.
• Creepy Monotone : Scotty, when reciting his codes to activate the self destruct sequence.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance : Bele claims that his people are obviously superior because they're white on the left side and black on the right side, while Lokai and his people are obviously inferior because they have the reverse color scheme. He clearly expects Kirk and Spock to agree with him; instead, they both look at him like he's full of crap.
• Determinator : Bele says he has been pursuing Lokai for 50,000 years and not even the destruction of life on their planet stops him.
• Dirty Coward : Implied ; Lokai, despite later proving himself to be at least nearly as powerful as Bele, repeatedly insists that the Enterprise crew kill him rather than trying to do so himself (despite the fact that Bele has proven able to shield himself from their weapons), and he doesn't contradict Spock's remark that, while Lokai himself is alive, the same can't be said for many of his followers.
• Doomed Homeworld : Cheron.
• Downer Ending : A whole race gets wiped out, to the last man , and for once there's not a single thing the Enterprise crew can do about it. They are forced to let the last two survivors chase each other down to the planet to continue the senseless conflict for its own sake.
• Early-Installment Weirdness : Spock claims the differences in Vulcan society were resolved peaceably. Future installments and spin-offs would clearly demonstrate the Romulan exodus in the Time of Awakening were anything but.
• After being dismissive towards the crew of the Enterprise , Lokai is quick to insist on asylum when Bele comes around, entreats the crew for sympathy, and expects them to kill Bele when he demands it, angrily dismissing them when they refuse.
• Bele, despite providing no proof of his claims, expects the Enterprise crew to surrender Lokai to his custody and to prioritize his desire to bring Lokai to Cheron over their mission to save an entire planet.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave : Spock's flat delivery leaves no ambiguity in his finding that Bele and Lokai's people have been entirely wiped out: Bele : My people... all dead? Spock : Yes, Commissioner. All of them. Lokai : No one alive? Spock : None at all, sir.
• Everything Sensor : The ship's sensor can detect anything on Cheron down to corpses lying in the street. Makes you wonder why they need an away team most of the other times they visit a planet for research...
• Fantastic Racism : Not only do Bele's and Lokai's people have this for each other, but they also seem to have a low opinion of mono-colors like our heroes.
• Fantastic Slur : As they struggle, Bele and Lokai snarl that the other is a "half-white" and a "half-black" respectively.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse : Discussed between Bele and Lokai. Lokai defends his rebellion on the past oppression of his people. Bele explains that through that he killed innocent people including children just because of the pattern on their face. The Enterprise crew, refusing to take sides in the conflict, consider the entire issue ludicrous , and are ultimately just as disgusted by Lokai as they are by Bele.
• Grudging "Thank You" : Lokai takes a break from yelling at Kirk to thank him for the rescue — and goes right back to arguing.
• Half-Breed Discrimination : Somewhat literally.
• Ham-to-Ham Combat : Every time Lokai and Bele share the screen. Kirk makes it a verbal Mêlée à Trois .
• He Who Fights Monsters : Given that a mutual genocide was the end result of their conflict, this would mean Lokai's people eventually began slaughtering Bele's people indiscriminately thus forfeiting the moral high ground they once had. What started as a struggle for freedom became an excuse to kill based on guilt-by-association reasoning.
• Bele describes Lokai and his people as savages who cannot change. As soon as there is the vaguest question of getting what he wants, he jumps right to force and refuses to even entertain the idea that he and Lokai are functionally of the same race, or of abandoning the chase when there is longer any reason to keep going.
• Despite having suffered racism himself, Lokai has no problem with treating other people with disdain because of how they look, making sure to point out the Enterprise crew's mono-colored skin tone when he isn't trying to play for sympathy. He also considers Bele impossible to reason with, but rejects reason himself, insisting that the crew kill Bele and angrily condemning them when they refuse to, as well as refusing to listen to Kirk's pleas of abandoning his hatred for Bele and his ilk.
• Implacable Man : A 50,000-year lifespan and the ability to take control of a starship through willpower put Bele in this category.
• Inspector Javert : Bele's pursuit of Lokai is obsessive enough to make him an example of this trope, but we don't know how justified his accusations against him were.
• Invisibility Cloak : Bele's ship is sheathed in materials that make it invisible, although it still shows up on sensors.
• Bele's claim that Lokai goes looking for sympathy wherever he goes is supported by the fact that Lokai is shown doing exactly that with a gathering of Enterprise crewmen. His point about Lokai being unable to change, while based in bigotry and equally applicable to him is also proven true; when Kirk entreats the two enemies to give up their hate, Lokai rejects him as an "idealistic dreamer" and leaves.
• Lokai's attempts to garner sympathy with the crew are implied to be more about maintaining his own freedom than serving real justice, but he correctly points out that, having grown up on a world where bigotry among their own race has been consigned to history books, they lack the context to fully understand what he and his people have been through. He's also proven right about Bele being unreasonable; as soon as there's any chance that he might not be able to drag Lokai back to Cheron in chains, Bele jumps straight to the use of force, and Bele proves just as unwilling to abandon his hatred as Lokai himself .
• Jitter Cam : Every time a red alert sounds in this episode, the camera repeatedly zooms in and out at the flashing light. This was a Shout-Out to the Batman TV series, as Frank Gorshin (the Riddler) plays Bele.
• Kirk Summation : At the end of the episode, the good captain attempts to sermonize Bele and Lokai about the futility of their battle; pointing out that their entire planet, Cheron, as well as all of the entire rest of their people, have been completely and utterly devastated during their absence as a result of the bickering between the various groups... surely the two Cherons can find a common ground in the wake of this catastrophic event.
• Last of His Kind : Bele and Lokai discover at the end of the episode that they are the last two remaining members of their species, or (from their point of view) each is the last remaining member of his race.
• When they first meet face-to-face at sickbay, Lokai sits there smoldering at Bele until he smugly mentions how he sees how "quiescent" he is; at this, he starts up from the bed and Kirk restrains him...
• ...and at the other end of their back and forth, Bele, increasingly nettled, gets himself into it at "You're coming back with me to pay for your CRIMES!!! " and goes for him.
• Motive Decay : Discussed ; at the end of the episode, where Cheron is revealed as a dead planet, Uhura and Sulu wonder why Bele and Lokai are bothering to keep fighting, as the reason for their conflict is gone. Kirk and Spock solemnly reflect that it no longer matters; all they have left is their hate.
• "Not So Different" Remark : Kirk and Spock remark that, as far as they can tell, Bele and Lokai are clearly of the same race; not grasping what Spock means by seeing no significant difference between them, Bele remarks on the only obvious physical difference (which side of their body is black).
• Obstructive Bureaucrat : For once, Kirk gets to play this, insisting that both aliens go through the Federation first, and firmly staying out of foreign politics.
• Playing the Victim Card : Lokai shows a habit of doing this even before Bele gets involved; when Kirk takes him to task for stealing a shuttlecraft from Starbase 4, Lokai is angered at even being accused for a crime that he clearly committed and puts Kirk's accusations down to Fantastic Racism ( that Lokai himself shows , accusing all monotoned lifeforms of being racist towards him). Once Bele is aboard, Lokai is quick to ask for asylum and try to drum up sympathy from the crew.
• After Bele hijacks control of the Enterprise , Kirk makes it clear that he'll sooner destroy the ship than allow it to be taken over, initiating the Self-Destruct Mechanism ; as Kirk says, Bele's ability to control the Enterprise is moot if Kirk can simply blow it up. Subverted later on, as Bele proves that he can simply disable the ship's auto-destruct before Kirk can initiate it.
• Played straight with the episode's conclusion; while Bele and Lokai are both very powerful, with their final clash endangering the Enterprise before they beam down to Cheron, their conflict no longer has any purpose beyond mere hate, as their homeworld is dead along with anything they were ever fighting for.
• Profiling : Bele is guilty of this while pointing out he is black on the right side and stating, "All of his people are white on the RIGHT side" about Lokai.
• Really 700 Years Old : The aliens from Cheron have been chasing each other around the galaxy for 50,000 years.
• The second time Bele commandeers the Enterprise to get to his distant home planet, the trip is way too short; by the time our heroes have finished discussing the fact that the ship has been commandeered, they're there. Bele needn't have taken the trouble to disable the self-destruct mechanism; there wouldn't have been time to enter the activation codes anyway.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism : The Enterprise has one which requires three ship's officers to recite activation codes to the computer .
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness : Spock reports: "Cheron lies between 403 mark 7 and mark 9". So 403 mark 8, then? Maybe 403 mark 7.01?
• Shut Up, Kirk! : Both of the aliens ignore Kirk's appeal, choosing to beam down to their dead planet and finish each other instead.
• Silly Reason for War : How pretty much everyone on the Enterprise views a war being fought because one side is white on the left side and black on the right, while the other side has it the other way.
• Slave Race : Lokai's "people" are said to have been this. Notably, Bele doesn't bother to deny it, simply claiming that slavery had been abolished thousands of years prior (which, given the claim that Bele has been chasing Lokai for 50,000 years, might make it a fairly recent occurrence by their standards).
• Stealth Insult : After Kirk and Spock suggest that the people of Cheron must once have been mono-colored, Bele brings up the theory that some humanoids are descended from apes . Not missing a beat, Spock replies that the actual theory is that they evolved into more advanced lifeforms.
• Stealth Pun : Cheron is in the southernmost part of the galaxy, in other words, the Deep South .
• The close-up of Chekov's hand operating the decontamination of Ariannus is a recycled shot of Kirk's hand from " The Doomsday Machine ". (It was also used as Spock's hand in both " Obsession " and " The Immunity Syndrome ".)
• A shot of crewmembers buzzing around in a corridor during red alert is recycled from " The Trouble with Tribbles ".
• The footage of Lokai's shuttlecraft in space, then landing in the shuttlebay is lifted from " The Galileo Seven ", creating an error. While they state that the shuttle was stolen from Starbase 4, the designation "USS Enterprise NCC-1707/7" can be clearly seen on its side. This was corrected in the remastered version.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens : Bele flies an invisible spaceship, can commandeer the Enterprise without physically interfacing with the ship, and (along with Lokai) has a lifespan in the tens of thousands of years, if not more.
• When Bele will not release control of the Enterprise , Kirk activates the ship's self-destruct sequence and tells him that while Bele may control the Enterprise , the final order is Kirk's.
• Bele and Lokai then try to do this with each other.
• Title Drop : Not word-for-word, but at one point during Bele and Lokai's struggle on the bridge, Kirk does reference the Enterprise being "your last battlefield". Ironically, and tragically, it seems this will be true of their planet which was already devastated by their races' last battle.
• Tractor Beam : Used to bring Lokai's stolen shuttle aboard the Enterprise .
• Travelling at the Speed of Plot : The final chase scene depicting Lokai and Bele running through the corridors of the Enterprise is mixed with stock footage of burning cities filmed after WWII aerial bombing raids, as each visualizes the destruction of their shared home planet. Fred Freiberger stated, "We ran a little short on that show which is why it ended with a chase that went on forever. I thought it was a hell of a creative solution".
• Two of Your Earth Minutes : When Bele makes the claim that he's been chasing Lokai for 50,000 years, he specifies that he's speaking of "your Terrestrial years".
• Villain Has a Point : While he is clearly using it as a cop out to his own failings as an individual, Bele is right that it's unrealistic to expect utopia in a day, especially with so much bad blood still going on.
• White Man's Burden : Bele tries to invoke this.
• You Are What You Hate : Bele does not respond favourably to Spock's theory that his "people" and Lokai's "people" evolved from a common ancestor.

Video Example(s):

Enterprise self-destruct.

Kirk, Spock, and Scotty order the U.S.S. Enterprise to self-destruct.

Example of: Self-Destruct Mechanism

• Star Trek S3 E14 "Whom Gods Destroy"
• Recap/Star Trek: The Original Series
• Star Trek S3 E16 "The Mark of Gideon"

Important Links

• Action Adventure
• Commercials
• Crime & Punishment
• Professional Wrestling
• Speculative Fiction
• Sports Story
• Animation (Western)
• Music And Sound Effects
• Print Media
• Sequential Art
• Tabletop Games
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Characterization
• Characters As Device
• Narrative Devices
• British Telly
• The Contributors
• Creator Speak
• Derivative Works
• Laws And Formulas
• Show Business
• Split Personality
• Truth And Lies
• Truth In Television
• Fate And Prophecy
• Edit Reasons
• Isolated Pages
• Images List
• Recent Videos
• Crowner Activity
• Un-typed Pages
• Recent Page Type Changes
• Trope Entry
• Character Sheet
• Playing With
• Creating New Redirects
• Cross Wicking
• Tips for Editing
• Text Formatting Rules
• Handling Spoilers
• Administrivia
• Trope Repair Shop
• Image Pickin'

Advertisement:

How well does it match the trope?

Example of:

Media sources:

11,241--> Report

• What’s The Viewscreen?
• Donation Success!
• Star Trek: The Animated Series Re-Watch Index
• Star Trek Movies I-VI Re-Watch Index
• Related Posts Index
• The Re-Watches
• Ten Forward
• Star Trek: The Next Generation Re-Watch Index
• Privacy Policy
• Star Trek Re-Watch Index
• Laugh Treks

Star Trek Re-Watch: “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”

Season 3, Episode 15 Production episode: 3×15 Original air date: January 10, 1969 Star date: 5730.2

Mission summary

Enterprise is on an important humanitarian mission to decontaminate Ariannus, which has succumbed to bacterial invasion that will kill billions of people without their timely intervention. But a funny thing happens on the way to the planet: they encounter a damaged Starfleet shuttlecraft which was jacked from Starbase 4. The lone pilot is injured and unable to respond to their hails, so they bring the shuttle onboard. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock meet it at the hangar deck with a security team and a man in blackface stumbles into the corridor. But wait! He collapses and rolls over to dramatically reveal that the left side of his face is white!

Dr. McCoy, Spock, and Kirk are baffled by their guest’s strange appearance. They’ve never heard of an alien race with this kind of pigmentation, and conclude he must be a mutant, “one of a kind.” Kirk states that, “judging by looking at him, we know at the very least he is the result of a very dramatic conflict.” ( Wink, wink. ) The doctor’s merely guessing at treating his unknown biology, but his ministrations do the trick and the patient soon wakes up. They’ve never heard of him, but he’s heard of Enterprise . The man identifies himself as Lokai from Cheron, a planet in an uncharted area of space. All Kirk knows is that Lokai stole a shuttle.

LOKAI: You’re being very loose with your accusations and drawing conclusions without any facts. KIRK: Well, I do know you made off with a ship that didn’t belong to you. LOKAI: I do not make off with things. My need gave me the right to use the ship. Mark the word, sir, the use of it. KIRK: You can try those technical evasions on Starfleet Command. That’s where you’ll be facing your charges.

Lokai insists that he was going to return the shuttle when he was done with it, and tosses in, “You monotone humans are all alike.” Clearly he knows how to win friends and influence people. McCoy tries to smooth things over by complimenting him as “the most incredible physical specimen of all time,” but he probably says that to all the half-black, half-white aliens he encounters.

Kirk is summoned back to the Bridge when an alien ship is detected on a collision course with Enterprise . At least, that’s what their sensors say, even though the viewscreen shows absolutely nothing but empty space. Sometimes Chekov imagines things. Nonetheless, they all peer at the screen worriedly as the invisible ship gets closer, they think. They brace for impact just in case, but the other ship just seems to disintegrate, leaving its passenger standing on the Bridge. Holy Half-Moon cookie, Batman! It’s another duotone alien! Kirk blames Spock for this development–he promised this sort of mutation was one of a kind. What kind of science officer is he, anyway?

The man’s name is Bele, also from Cheron. Kirk and Spock are more curious about his method transport. Apparently the warranty just ran out, and you know how things fall apart right as soon as the warranty expires. He further claims that it was “sheathed in special materials that rendered it invisible.” Uh-huh. This plausible explanation, so convincingly delivered, satisfies Spock’s curiosity, so it’s on to real business. As the chief officer of the Commission on Political Traitors, Bele wants to collect Lokai for trial on their planet. Kirk says he’ll have to take a number because Starfleet already has dibs, but agrees to show him to their prisoner in Sickbay. As soon as Bele and Lokai meet, they get into a heated political debate, rehashing an old argument between them.

BELE: And you see how this killer repays you, as he repays all his benefactors. LOKAI: Benefactors? He’s a liar. He raided our homes, tore us from our families, herded us together like cattle and then sold us as slaves! BELE: They were savages, Captain. We took them into our hearts, our homes. We educated them. LOKAI: Yes, just education enough to serve the master race. BELE: You were the product of our love! And you repaid us with murder. LOKAI: Why should a slave show mercy to the enslaver? BELE: Slaves? That was changed thousands of years ago. You were freed. LOKAI: Freed? Were we free to be men? Free to be husbands and fathers? Free to live our lives in equality and dignity? BELE: Yes, you were free, if you knew how to use your freedom. You were free enough to slaughter and to burn all the things that had been built! LOKAI: I tried to break the chains of a hundred million people. My only crime is that I failed. To that I do plead guilty.

Kirk breaks up their verbal onslaught and refuses to grant Lokai political asylum or return him to Cheron in Bele’s custody. Not only does he have to hold Lokai accountable for stealing that shuttle, but they’re kind of under a deadline. Bele isn’t happy and says as much, but he allows a security guard to show him to his temporary quarters. A moment later, Chekov calls with an important update.

CHEKOV: Captain, we’re off course. KIRK: Well, get back on course.

You just can’t get good help these days! It turns out that Chekov has an actual emergency–the ship has changed its heading spontaneously and they’ve lost control of the helm. Not good. They try all the troubleshooting tricks listed in the help manual, but nothing works. Even the cameras have gone all wonky, zooming in and out on the flashing Red Alert lights. It seems Enterprise is going to Cheron whether they like it or not. Cheron? Wait a minute, didn’t–

Bele appears on the Bridge again, via the turbolift this time, to state the obvious:

We’re on the way to Cheron. Captain, this ship is now under my direction. For 50,000 of your terrestrial years, I have been pursuing Lokai through the galaxy. I have not travelled this far, this long, only to give him up. This ship goes where my will drives it.

This guy is very dedicated to his job. Lokai joins the party and begs the crew to help him by killing Bele. “You’re two of a kind,” Kirk argues. He’s had enough of this. He orders security to arrest their visitors, but they have personal energy fields that prevent anyone from touching them and even blocks phaser fire. Cheron it is, then. Hope the weather’s nice this time of year.

But Kirk has one other alternative. If he can’t have his ship, no one can. He threatens to blow it up but Bele thinks he’s only bluffing. Obviously he doesn’t know Kirk. The captain orders the computer to initiate a self-destruct sequence, Spock and Engineer Scott authorize the order with the correct command codes, and the thirty-second countdown begins. Kirk warns Bele that nothing can stop it “from five to zero.” It’s a game of chicken to see who will break first. Bele tries to use his will to stop the computer while the Bridge crew look around nervously, but he ultimately agrees to release his hold with only six seconds remaining. Phew! Kirk cancels the destruct sequence in the nick of time.

Bele doesn’t immediately comply, requesting the captain take them to Cheron after they fulfill their mission on Ariannus, but Kirk refuses to negotiate. Seemingly defeated, Bele returns helm control and they’re back on course. Now that the crisis is over, Kirk feeds them the company line (peace…individual rights…yadda yadda yadda) and gives them both free run of the ship. Huh? Spock then summarizes: “Fascinating. Two irrevocably hostile humanoids.” Thank you , Spock.

Since Kirk is letting them hang out wherever they want, Lokai preaches to the choir in the crew lounge. Spock eavesdrops outside the lounge while Lokai  pushes his propaganda, as Bele warned he would.

LOKAI: There is no persecution on your planet. How can you understand my fear, my apprehension, my degradation, my suffering? CHEKOV: There was persecution on Earth once. I remember reading about it in my history class. SULU: Yes, but it happened way back in the twentieth century. There’s no such primitive thinking today.

( Nudge, nudge. )

Meanwhile, Bele is sharing drinks with Kirk and Spock when a communique from Starfleet Command informs him that his request for Lokai’s extradition has been denied. The frustrated Commissioner finally reveals the source of their conflict.

BELE: It is obvious to the most simpleminded that Lokai is of an inferior breed. SPOCK: The obvious visual evidence, Commissioner, is that he is of the same breed as yourself. BELE: Are you blind, Commander Spock? Well, look at me. Look at me! KIRK: You’re black on one side and white on the other. BELE: I am black on the right side. KIRK: I fail to see the significant difference. BELE: Lokai is white on the right side. All of his people are white on the right side.

OH… Oh boy. What ? He fails to convince Kirk and Spock that this makes any sense, but Kirk suggests maybe they can, you know, talk about their problems. Bele refuses to believe that Lokai can ever change, even when Spock relates the uplifting story of how the Vulcans embraced logic and got back their groove, though he doesn’t mention the whole Romulan thing. That would only weaken the point he’s making, which is that they should all just get along.

They’re about to have an interesting discussion about evolution, when the ship finally arrives at Ariannus. From the Bridge, Scotty coordinates the fumigation of the entire planet’s atmosphere, which is completed within minutes. Then they set course for Starbase 4.

Or do they? Some of the computer’s memory circuits are toast. Bele takes credit for burning out helm control and the self-destruct, demonstrating his newfound ability by literally hand waving. Lokai returns to the Bridge, ranting about justice, and he and Bele struggle with their hands around each other’s throats and their energy fields blazing. Kirk tries once more to get them to chill. “Bele, you keep this up, and you’ll never get to Cheron with your prisoner,” he says. “This will be your final battlefield.” Inexplicably, he gets through to them this time, and Kirk seems more willing to negotiate for control of his ship when blowing it up isn’t an option.

Bele releases the helm, and must repair its damaged circuits with his mind too, since Sulu confirms it’s working again. “Captain, it’s beautiful ,” he says. Okay, Sulu, calm yourself. As it happens, they’re also at Cheron already.

Their long-range scanners reveal that all intelligent life is gone, with “vast numbers of unburied corpses in all cities.” Now Bele and Lokai start fighting over who killed everyone.

KIRK: Stop it! What’s the matter with you two? Didn’t you hear Spock? Your planet is dead! There’s nobody alive on Cheron because of hate. The cause you fought about no longer exists. Give yourselves time to breathe. Give up your hate. You’re welcome to live with us. Listen to me. You both must end up dead if you don’t stop hating.

But they love hating! Lokai runs off the Bridge, closely followed by Bele. Kirk is unconcerned–after all, where can they go? Well, Spock tells him, narrating their action-packed chase throughout the ship in excruciating detail.

Bele is chasing Lokai on deck three. Bele is passing recreation room three, approaching the crewmen’s lounge. Lokai is running past the crewmen’s lounge. Lokai has just arrived on deck five. Passing recreation room three.

These guys are really out of shape, panting their way through the corridors like 50,000-year-old men, all while imagining Cheron’s fiery doom. Lokai eventually finds the transporter room and beams himself down to Cheron, followed shortly by Bele. But what does it all mean?

UHURA: It doesn’t make any sense. SPOCK: To expect sense from two mentalities of such extreme viewpoints is not logical. SULU: But their planet’s dead. Does it matter now which one’s right? SPOCK: Not to Lokai and Bele. All that matters to them is their hate. UHURA: Do you suppose that’s all they ever had, sir? KIRK: No, but that’s all they have left.

NUDGE NUDGE, WINK WINK. Sigh .

So, that’s a downer. This is one of the most sobering and depressing endings of the series, and the rest of it isn’t exactly cheerful either. This is also one of the preachiest and least subtle scripts, kind of ever. It couldn’t be more obvious that they were trying to expose the folly of racism based on the color of someone’s skin, but unfortunately their approach is to simply turn Bele and Lokai into mouthpieces for every stereotypical defense of prejudice and subjugation. But what are we to make of the fact that despite all Lokai has suffered, he is just as quick to judge and mistrust “monotones” as a group instead of individuals?

And yet the ridiculous conflict between the differently-duotoned men is meant to be absurd, pointing out how insignificant skin color is by greatly exaggerating the issue. Though their tirades feel more like bad, didactic exposition instead of dialogue you’d actually want to hear, there are some effective moments. Whenever Bele and Lokai look at each other, usually while arguing, they present the same skin color to the screen–on opposite side of their faces–to highlight the fact that really, they’re the same. Lokai and Bele are both masterful orators, but where Lokai relies on his words to save him, Bele resorts to violence and force. They even wear the same outfits, gray jumpsuits that meet black and white in the middle. The style is reminiscent of actor Frank Gorshin’s much more colorful Riddler costume on Batman , right down to the gloves.

The director also composes some interesting shots: the extreme close-ups on eyes and mouths during the self-destruct sequence are unusual but striking, and my favorite composition of the episode is of Lokai’s shadow on the wall of the crew lounge–a faceless voice spewing divisive propaganda. (Also note the tri-dimensional chess set with its black and white pieces in the same scene.) There’s also a slow pan over the Bridge crew after Bele disables the computer, highlighting the racial diversity of Spock, Kirk, Uhura, and Chekov.

One of the biggest flaws in this episode is the focus on its strong message to the exclusion of all else, barely making even a token attempt at explaining things like Bele’s advanced ship or strange mental control over the ship’s helm (a power Lokai doesn’t seem to share, so maybe he is inferior). It doesn’t make any sense that he could redirect the ship but not halt the computer self-destruct, and if he knew he could short-circuit things with his mind, why didn’t he try that sooner? The makeup and effects are also rather half-hearted–the shiny grease paint used to blacken one side of their faces doesn’t look remotely like real skin, the recycled effects shot of the shuttlecraft from Starbase 4 is clearly the Galileo that we know and love, and the invisible ship was probably prompted more by budget than the demands of the story.

As eyerolling as the episode’s heavy moralizing may seem, we should still keep in mind that it was filmed in 1968 and broadcast in 1969, during the civil rights movement. At the time, there was too much at stake to risk people not getting the message, and the issues weren’t so obvious to a lot of people. With the hindsight of the twenty-first century, it seems a lighter touch would have been more persuasive, but this wasn’t meant to entertain, it was meant to instruct. However hamhanded, it was a noble attempt to change people, or at least open minds to different possibilities. Contrast this with the equally overdone Star Trek: Deep Space Nine two-parter, “Past Tense,” which tackles both homelessness and race relations even more ineptly twenty-six years later.

Aside from the transparent theme and weak script, the show also had terrible pacing, with several scenes stretched out much longer than necessary: the encounter with Bele’s ship, the self-destruct sequence, the chase through the corridors. Of these, I still enjoyed the self-destruct sequence, which was recreated word for word in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock , all except the counterorder, of course. Did anyone else find Kirk’s great faith in the computer ironic, considering how little he usually trusts them? I was also annoyed with their simplistic grasp of genetics and evolution, particularly their automatic assumption that Lokai and Bele are mutants, and the idea that at one time the people of Cheron were monotones too. Where did they get that idea?

What is with Starfleet’s policy on only extraditing to other planets in the Federation? It’s also bizarre that Cheron turns out to be so close to Arrianus, when it’s supposedly in uncharted space–maybe they weren’t going to get there until Tuesday. Speaking of Cheron, Bele believes their information that the planet is dead without seeing any evidence. It might have been funny–well, not funny , but a good ploy perhaps–to pretend it was dead to prove their point, then tell him the truth later. Then again, given their extreme reactions, possibly nothing would have worked.

I also have one really important question that has been bugging me for a few episodes. Why does Scotty always run to the Bridge whenever there’s a problem? Shouldn’t the Chief Engineer actually stay in Engineering, where he can do something?

Eugene’s Rating: Warp 2 (on a scale of 1-6)

Torie Atkinson: Sometimes I couldn’t resist rolling my eyes at this one: the blatant references to the 20th century, allusions to a “dramatic conflict” and “primitive thinking,” and plenty of whacks from the allegory bat. But in the end I didn’t really mind because “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” is a parable. The message is clear: hate is destructive. Tolerance helps you build empires, like the Federation, and hatred and oppression destroys them, like on Cheron.

I was impressed by the nuances (I won’t say subtleties…) of how racism was expressed here. Lokai’s first experience with the crew is one many people of color are familiar with even today: immediate suspicion. When he awakes in sickbay Kirk is hostile to him for no apparent reason. Kirk doesn’t even give Lokai a chance to relax or explain before accusing him of theft, purely on assumption and, more importantly, on appearances. As Lokai says, “You monotone humans are all alike. First you condemn and then attack.” All we know is that Lokai was in the shuttlecraft, dying, and yet Kirk assumes that he stole it. I don’t know that we’ve seen him be so confrontational and harsh before. To make matters worse, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy all assume–based on no evidence–that he’s one of a kind. They distance themselves and marginalize him as mutation and as an other.

Given that, though, there’s just not that much else to say here–it really just works on one level. Each thematic choice and every parallel is spelled out already. Everything in the episode is in service to that moral story, and as such we get a pretty flimsy plot. If Cheron is in some distant part of the galaxy that’s totally unexplored, how did it take 50,000 years to get so far away and yet only an hour or so to get home? Why doesn’t Kirk just listen to their grievances and do a preliminary hearing on the ship, “The Menagerie” style? I was also irritated that the characters speak in hyperbolic talking points, making them all kind of unsympathetic. It’s impossible to know, based on their two accounts, what the real situation on Cheron was.

But the most implausible scenario of it all was the ending: that they mutually destroyed one another. I just don’t believe it. No one’s left? Not a single person? First of all, it sets up a false moral equivalency between the slavers and the oppressed, that they were both “just as bad” as each other, and that the hatred was mutual. To the extent than it’s trying to make any kind of meaningful point about slavery and/or the civil rights movement, that false equivalency is exactly the kind of rhetoric used to keep American blacks disempowered. There wasn’t moral parity–there was, in fact, an objective standard of equality and fairness that was not being met, and even the race riots were responses to that and not merely attempts to express violent hatred. To boil those legitimate grievances down to some kind of petty and inexplicable hatred, well, I think that diminishes both the scale of the injustice that was practiced and the significance of the real movement that sought to correct it.  I was disappointed that the episode fed that kind of rhetoric.

I feel like this episode was done much better as the movie The Brother From Another Planet .

Final notes: Kirk’s self-destruct sequence is the stupidest combination I’ve ever heard in my life. 1-1-1-1? Then 0-0-0-0? And finally, 1-2-3? The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!

And was it just me, or do you think those last filler bits of running through the hallway while Europe is bombed around them seem a little Valjean/Javert to you? I should set that clip to some Les Mis …

Torie’s Rating: Warp 4

Best Line: LOKAI: I’m grateful for your rescue. KIRK: Don’t mention it. We’re pleased to have caught you.

Syndication Edits: Kirk orders magnification on the viewscreen to try to spot Bele’s ship and Chekov says they still can’t see it; Kirk stands to look at the blank viewscreen some more; lots of reaction shots of people not seeing anything and some background noise about emergency conditions; after a commercial, some reactions before Bele gives his name; more reactions and Kirk, Spock, and Bele taking the turbolift to Sickbay; Kirk’s comment that Lokai and Bele’s problem is settled “At least for the present”; McCoy checks on Lokai as Kirk leaves; the second half of Scott’s attempts to restore control by switching to Auxiliary; Kirk’s lines “Computer, destruct sequence. Are you ready to copy? Prepare to verify destruct sequence code one.”; a precious four seconds from the countdown, 25-21; exterior of Enterprise arriving at Ariannus; two segments of Enterprise fumigating the planet.

Trivia: According to producer Fred Freiberger, Gene Coon (aka Lee Cronin) originally envisioned Bele and Lokai as a devil chasing an angel. Coincidentally, this episode ended Coon’s involvement with Star Trek. Freiberger named “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” as one of the episodes he was proudest of working on.

Director Jud Taylor came up with the idea of bicolored aliens with opposite color schemes–bisected horizontally at the waist–only a week before filming began in October 1968.

This is the last use of the Enterprise hangar deck footage on the series.

This is one of only a few episodes to feature zoomed in “beauty shots” of the Enterprise model, in this case, a close-up of the underside of the saucer section just before cutting to Sickbay.

The self-destruct sequence is repeated verbatim in Star Trek III , with Scotty providing the second command instead of Spock and Chekov supplying the third. In the film, the computer gives them a sixty-second countdown instead of thirty.

The stock footage Lokai and Bele imagine while running is of cities burning after aerial bombings in World War II. Freiberger excuses that interminable chase sequence as a “creative solution” to pad the episode’s runtime. Sigh.

The first story outline in March 1968 was titled “A Portrait in Black and White.”

Other notes: The wacky zoom effect on the Red Alert was likely acknowledgment of Frank Gorshin’s (Bele) famous turn as the Riddler on Batman from 1966-67.

Gorshin, who was a famous impressionist, hams it up as James Cagney in the third season blooper reel, and also hilariously collides with actor Lou Antonio (Lokai) while they run in the corridor. Gorshin received an Emmy nomination for his portrayal as Commissioner Bele.

Mego peddled a Cheron action figure in the 1970s with a half-black and half-white costume and no hair.

Previous episode: Season 3, Episode #14 – “ Whom Gods Destroy .”

Next episode: Season 3, Episode #16 – “ The Mark of Gideon .” US residents can watch it for free at the CBS website .

About Eugene Myers & Torie Atkinson

35 comments.

Oh wow, I absolutely LOVE the alternate title for this episode. Beautiful.

Nobody can chew scenery like Frank Gorshin. Frankly, this episode is worth it just for him going over the top.

I think of this one as another remake, since it is essentially “The Alternative Factor” with a sledgehammer dose of meaning . This is substantially better though.

One thing that really jumped out at me in Eugene’s review is that Lokai is largely an Archie Bunker view of a civil rights activist. The way he uses his plight as justification for anything, including stealing, his own racial attitudes, it’s all right out of the privileged white guy’s handbook for describing a minority who wants to be equal. Malcolm X this guy is not. (Also note his name evokes Loki, the destructive trickster. I’m not so sure about Bele.)

I always thought the vertical bicoloration was kind of stupid, but I never noticed before that when they face each other screaming we see the same color on both of them. That’s actually pretty subtle and well-done. Kudos to whoever came up with that.

I’m going to split the difference between you two and give it a 3.

I’m with Eugene on this one and say it’s a 2, and that I feel is being kind. I dislike being hit between the eyes with a clue-by-4 as a means of delivering a message. I think your should craft entertain fiction that subtly weaves in your message, but this episode is just a train wreck. We have magic aliens with invisible ships and all sorts of powers. Very unsubtle jabs at the audience telling them how they should think. (Did anyone else notice that Charon was located in the SOUTHERN end of the galaxy. Because as every knows all racism come from the South.) Our principle characters are passive reactive to the events of the story. Except for the self destructive thingy what difference did it make that it was Kirk who found them at all? The story does not resolve by action of the principle character it just ends. The script and episode are full of things that simply cannot be believed. The planetary fumigation had me laughing out loud and waiting for a Michael Bay screen credit. Where was Spock when he overheard Loki ranting at the crew? It seemed like he was standing by a door that was ajar and given the Enterprise doors I do think someone would have noticed that. No, this is a bad episode and it gets no donut.

There simply is not and never will be another Frank Gorshin. Damn. As noted, he’s worth the price of admission, all by himself.

I remember watching this as a kid and thinking, ‘How come the insides of their mouths aren’t coloured half-and-half?’ and ‘What happens if they take off their gloves?’ and ‘How come they’re black and white , not pink and brown?’

And, just how extensive is that bilateralism, anyway? It would be interesting to seem them naked… Ah, my mind; one-track, really.

If they stood next to each other, they could out go for Halloween as an Oreo cookie…

But, seriously, folks…

Yes, unbelievably heavy-handed preaching, even for third-season Star Trek . But I agree with Torie that it’s a parable, and really shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The dialogue is stilted (but Gorshin’s delivery is … god, just awesomely good, regardless), the effects are crap (invisible shuttle my arse, and what’s with the WWII firestorm footage?), and the makeup is only passable.

But it’s a fun episode — if for no reason other than getting to hear a bit of good left-wing revolutionary talk, Frank Gorshin (!!!), and the self-destruct sequence, which I still think is really cool (though, yes, why Bele lets them get away with it is beyond me).

And, Torie, the destruct code can’t be too complicated; after all, Kirk will be giving it in a highly stressful situation, and he has to be able to remember it, and say it. It has a few words thrown in at random locations, so it’s pretty hard to guess.

I suppose, realistically, they would have something more akin to the firing release system on a nuclear submarine or an ICBM silo, with physical (or maybe biometric) keys, inserted at the same time but physically separated so as to prevent one person from being able to destroy the ship on his own.

Hey, and if Charon is in an uncharted part of the Galaxy, how come Kirk’s heard of it? And how do they know they’re headed for it? What exactly do they mean by ‘uncharted’ — I’m not sure that word means what they think it means.

Still. Better than ‘The Empath’!

Possibly the closest we’ll ever come to another Frank Gorshin is John Byner, and he was basically a contemporary. Since then every impressionist is somewhat less good then his predecessor and we are now into levels of what Jo Walton recently called “homeopathically good”.

On the destruct code, IIRC, voice recognition is part of it, so there is a biometric key. And since the second and third in command have to confirm the order with their own codes. I think the system is secure enough.

On the bilateralism question, I just suddenly thought about their hair. Why is that uniform on both sides? Also, if they were originally envisioned as being horizontally divided, how did they expect to show that on television?

“I once heard that on some of your planets, people believe they are descended from …apes.” The great Frank Gorshin delivers the most provocative line in the episode with Riddler aplomb.

This is probably THE iconic Star Trek episode–it could play without sound for five seconds on a TV anywhere in the world and anyone could instantly identify it and its theme. But it is still a mind-numbing drag; and it hasn’t aged well.

This episode wastes more time than any in memory, and that’s saying a LOT in Season 3. From the time wasted on the (budgetless) “invisible spaceship” canard, to the (iconic, but leads nowhere) self-destruct sequence, to the amazing amount of time spent trying to grok the left-right asymmetry of this race (Spock should have tumbled to the left/right asymmetry instantly), to plodding jogging scenes through the deserted decks, to the inadvertently symbolic and apropos scenes of the Enterprise turning aimlessly in space, this episode goes nowhere important and takes its sluggish time doing it. In sports you’d blow a whistle, “delay of game.”

Speaking of the self-destruct sequence, like the chess gambit of the previous episode this might have been a handy option in earlier episodes when more was seemingly at stake. Which raises the corollary question of whether, in this instance, the special purpose commandeering of the Enterprise for a forced extradition and repatriation of an acknowledged criminal by a law enforcement officer whose authority Kirk seems to readily accept really rises to the level of something worth destroying a capital ship over.

How many times has the ship been commandeered at this point? The risk vs investment seems out of balance here.

The episode presents its racial commentary with a cudgel, absolutely unsubtle bludgeoning. Compare to the “Cloud Minders” or “A Private Little War” or, heck, just about a quarter of TOS’ episodes that touch on racial/social inequality and apartheid tropes in one way or another, all the way back to “Balance of Terror.” Once you’re past this episode’s blatant tropes, it has very little to say or reveal.

Was it even provocative on its air date, when you’d had shows like “I Spy” and “the Mod Squad” doing racial tropes, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “To Sir, With Love” and the entire blaxploitation wave just around the corner? Having two painfully white guys play the parts of the exploited and exploited, anarchy and order, was less than innovative and inspired for Star Trek. What might this episode have been like with two black actors painted half white? That might’ve at least been interesting for its period.

Overall, a boring and tendentious morality play that, for all its hubris is pure black-&-white. Yet it endures in memory because it is visual and it seems to be going somewhere and doing something.

Still… Frank Gorshin rocks.

DemetriosX@5: Also, if they were originally envisioned as being horizontally divided, how did they expect to show that on television?

Short sleeves and knee-breeches?

And, yeah, I remember wondering about the hair, too — especially Frank’s which was brown, and didn’t really blend well with the white/black makeup.

Regarding self-destruct mechanisms, I always thought the one from The Andromeda Strain was the most interesting, in that it was automatically triggered, and required human intervention to stop it.

@4 NomadUK You are confusing uncharted with unknown. Uncharted suggests that they had a basic idea that there were systems there but they hadn’t gotten around to surveying the area. As discussed with other episodes, some information from an uncharted area could have come to the Federation through stories and histories from nearby charted systems.

Now onto the episode in general.

On the self destruct system. I may be wrong, but I had assumed that their voiceprint had to match with their given authorization code. Still. It seems one could get past security with creative use of edited recordings. Maybe Kirk should have used a phrase he wouldn’t use in conversation. How about “Frak the Federation!”? :)

I’m glad the dates of production and first airing were given because this episode is dependent on its time. We had Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits then but most people still looked as science fiction as the pulps or comics. That being the case, science fiction TV shows and movies were expected to be over the top. Look at Lost In Space and the other Irwin Allen shows. As I’ll illustrate next, I think this is an episode in which Star Trek managed to successfully push the standards for science fiction at the time.

The staging of the scene in the rec room is wonderful. You have the “white” men listening to the words spoken by the ‘black’ shadow. And two of the men are sitting where they interrupt the shadow. In my opinion having someone with darker skin in the scene would have ruined the subtle play on the outrageous setup for this episode. Sulu was there so you have a suggestion of the diversity of the crew while making that subtle play on the Black and White issue. But what else do we see here? A foreshadowing of the episode’s conclusion. Lokai is present as a shadow and that’s what he and Bele were revealed to be at the end – shadows or ghosts from a dead world. They were still living but there was no way that they could – or would – get together and try to restart the race.

The ending of the episode seems over the top when you think only about race issues but you should also consider the other big issue of the time. The war and the threat of nuclear war. And, many people felt that the race and war issues were related.

Another episode that is cheesy by today’s standards but I have a fondness for it because I saw it when its time was its strength.

Ludon@8 makes a good point about needing to see the ending in the framework of its time, though I draw a slightly different conclusion. There was an undercurrent of rhetoric and belief that a “race war” was impending. Dixiecrats and Birchers used it as bogeyman to frighten people to their way of thinking. On the other side, the Nation of Islam had been urging direct and violent action for several years (and his eventual rejection of that philosophy may be what got Malcolm X killed). The riots in Watts and elsewhere were seen by some as the opening skirmishes. George Alec Effinger even wrote a story as late as 1971, All the Last Wars at Once, that used a race war as its starting point. The imagery shown at the end of the episode was not considered to be at all far-fetched or impossible.

Ludon@8: Uncharted v. unknown: Well, maybe so, but, wow, what an encyclopaedic memory old Kirk has for individual planets in solar systems in obscure, uncharted reaches of the Galaxy. Isn’t that what the computer — or Spock — is for?

I had assumed that their voiceprint had to match with their given authorization code.

Oh, I’m sure it does. But what happens if the larynx is damaged? Presumably there’s an alternative mechanism. And could one or two officers force the other(s) to give their codes at phaser-point? Or through some other threat? How fail-safe is this system?

And, of course, Kirk had the option of blowing up the ship once before, in ‘By Any Other Name’. It was a kludge, but the effect would have been the same. Still, the self-destruct system would have been difficult to engage under those conditions, since it was unlikely the Kelvans would have allowed the ship’s senior officers time to recite their codes. Keys or some other mechanism might have been more subtle and allowed for easier activation if the ship were seized.

And, yes, blowing up a Federation starship, together with her rather expensive crew (well, except for the redshirts, of course) for grand theft auto seems a bit extreme.

I really like this episode. It seems a bit hamfisted in retrospect, but it blew my five-year old mind at the time. This should be the prime example of the [Warning: TV Tropes] adage that some anvils need to be dropped .

The cinematography was outstanding here. I think they got a bit wacky with the sirens, but that was pretty much S.O.P. at that point. Well, maybe slightly edgy O.P.

Gorshin can chew scenery with the best but I still think Will Windom got the biggest bites in this series. (I will quote him to this day. Few people get it, alas.)

I did appreciate that the self-destruct was unavoidable after a certain point. They nipped the “0:01” trope in the bud.

Oh yeah, forgot to grade it. I give it a Warp 3. Parts of the story are problematic, of course, but it gets massive points for making the whole black/white thing so literal that it’s initially unrecognizeable.

@ 2 DemetriosX

It’s not just Archie Bunker. There’s also a bit of hippie-punching going on, with the “You’ve combed the galaxy and come up with nothing but mono-coloured trash, do-gooders and bleeding hearts. You’re dead, you half-white!” It stings a little.

@ 3 bobsandiego

I’m not disagreeing about the… coherence problems, but if you look at it through the lens of a parable, it makes a little more sense and is much more forgivable. Parables exist outside of reality–they’re meant to be instructive, not necessarily plausible, and I was okay with that.

@ 4 NomadUK

I can always count on you to ask questions no one should ask.

Now you’ve got me curious…

I have to disagree with you, there. “Spock’s Brain” has way more time-wasting dreck than this one does. It was sluggish at times but never boring.

The instant commandeering of the Enterprise is beginning to grate on me. So Lokai, desperate for his life, hurts no one and takes a shuttlecraft to escape–but Bele commandeers the ship, TWICE, and Kirk says oh well, you’re both free to move about the ship.

@ 8 Ludon and @ 9 DemetriosX

The whole “if we don’t play nice we’re going to have race wars!” thing is the same poisonous rhetoric of the false equivalency.

@ 11 ChurchHatesTucker

I agree–there’s something to be said for tackling a problem literally.

What to say . . .

Well, first off, Torie, don’t go setting that sequence to Les Mis. You’d be doing the musical a terrible disservice.

I didn’t so much mind the terrible heavy-handedness of the plot so much as I minded its refusal to take sides. I’m with Torie on this — for instance, I don’t see how Lokai’s speech to the off-duty crew was anything but an important education.

I mean, folks, Lokai’s people grew up in slavery . They remained oppressed for thousands and thousands of years (apparently a very long-lived people, with no doubt a correspondingly conservative (in the sociological/linguistic sense) social bent). Bele (or, as it’s actually pronounced, “Beal”) makes no effort to deny this. All he does is trot out the usual arguments of the plantation holder, that it’s the right-side-black man’s burden to raise up and properly train his benighted right-side-white stepchildren.

In this context, everything Lokai says is absolutely true. His people have been oppressed. The Earth-men don’t understand this any more, because it’s been generations since that oppression was here. You really cannot blame him for fighting back without explicitly endorsing a moral and practical equivalency between the violence of oppression and the resistance of the oppressed.

That’s why the final message — “Oh they all destroyed each other oh noes let’s stop the hate, okay!” — is so galling. “Everybody just stop fighting” is a wonderful rhetorical strategy to deploy when you’re the guy on top, your people control the wealth and the power, and the official rules of the game endorse at least some portion of your advantage over the other guy. It’s the sociological equivalent of asking the ref to stop the game when your team’s in the lead. So long as it’s viewed as a zero-sum game — which it obviously is; neither side seems to deny it — equality isn’t even in it; it’s just a question of who’ll get to be on top.

In that context, I’m not sure Lokai should view it as a loss that his people are all dead; at least they took their oppressors with them.

@14. DeepThought

raises a notable point about this episode. Kirk instantly recognizes the authority of the high commissioner and it is with Bele that his identity and (apparent) sympathies lie. Even past the point, as Torie notes, where Bele far more than Lokai has shown himself to be a threat to ship operations. The Federation is likewise deferential to the high commissioner plantation owner. Yet what credentials has he offered, what warrants does he hold as a police officer?

Kirk is unsympathetic to Lokai, who has only the power of rhetoric (clumsy as it is) and seems to have none of the “special powers” of Bele. Lokai inviting the junior officers to revolt as XO Spock eavesdrops reinforces the idea that Lokai is a threat to hierarchical authority.

In the end, after Lokai has fled the bridge, Kirk issues a special impassioned plea to Bele as if tacitly understanding that only the Overlord, not the Revolutionary, has the power to reason (we’ll see more of this in The Way To Eden BTW). Bele evidently has the “white man’s burden.”

The entire episode is presented to the audience as network broadcasters of the era presented the erupting racial strife of the South to their moderate white audience–a bizarre curio. Who can fathom its depths? BOTH sides must be at fault! **Shrug**

@14 Deep Thought “Everybody just stop fighting” is a wonderful rhetorical strategy to deploy when you’re the guy on top, your people control the wealth and the power, and the official rules of the game endorse at least some portion of your advantage over the other guy.

Only if you think you have more to gain by stopping the fighting than continuing it. Of course, the same is true for the other side. Which is sort of the point of the episode. Neither one had a real reason to keep it up.

@ 14 Deepthought “I didn’t so much mind the terrible heavy-handedness of the plot so much as I minded its refusal to take sides.” You know I was so mind numbed with boredom this flew right past me and thank you for pointing it out. You are dead on target. Of course by the nature of the Star Trek Philosophy (i.e. Prime Directive) we aren’t supposed to take sides. All cultures are equally valued and equally right. I prefer strong stands — but without preaching — in my themes.

bobsandiego@17: I’m not sure I agree that the Prime Directive necessarily implies that all cultures are equally valued and equally right. What it says is that we don’t have the right to meddle in their development, which says nothing about whether we sympathise with the culture, whilst saying a lot about our own — namely, that we don’t know enough to tell others how to run their civilisations.

The Federation certainly takes sides, and values some cultures more than others, else why would there be arguments regarding admission of new members, as in ‘Journey to Babel’?

And Kirk — well, Kirk and the Prime Directive have an uneasy relationship. Yet at the end of this episode (in which, I agree, he tends to give undue — and unusual — deference to Bele at Lokai’s expense, but perhaps he’s simply being a Federation diplomat more than a Starfleet soldier), his position is reasonable: there’s nothing left to fight for, so give it up.

It’s really not so different a viewpoint than the one he’s expressed before, in ‘Patterns of Force’ and ‘A Taste of Armageddon’: war is a messy business, and it’s better to jaw-jaw than war-war.

Wow, I sit out for one day and come back to find all these comments. It’s like you were all waiting for this episode to come around. Some late responses:

@1 Torie At first I didn’t like the alternate title, but when I just read it again and thought more about your take on this one being a parable, “A Portrait in Black and White” would have made it clearer that this was all intentional instead of mediocre storytelling. It’s the sort of title we might have seen on The Twilight Zone , which was much better suited to this kind of moralizing.

I disagree though that because it’s telling a different kind of story that makes it more forgivable. It still has to be good Star Trek .

@4 NomadUK If they stood next to each other, they could out go for Halloween as an Oreo cookie…

You have a strange mind, sir.

@8 Ludon I like your analysis of the crew lounge staging. If only the episode could have had that much depth throughout.

@8 Ludon, @9 DemetriosX The big problem with pushing the race issue so much in this episode is that I think it blinded me to the question of war and mutual annihilation, which absolutely was a fear of the time. I didn’t really consider how the two were linked, but it may have been more effective for me if they had tried not to be so specific in their comparison. And yet, some have mentioned that as a strength of this episode. Regardless of its weaknesses, it was a daring move to attack it so directly. Surely by now they knew they were cancelled, and figured they could get away with whatever they wanted.

@11 ChurchHatesTucker They nipped the “0:01″ trope in the bud.

Assuming that Kirk is telling the truth about the five second limitation. Maybe that was the last trick he had up his sleeve.

@14 DeepThought, @15 Lemnoc Great observations re: taking sides and Kirk’s obvious deference to Bele. I was stunned when I saw them sharing drinks together, while Lokai is forced to “sneak around” and curry favor with the crew. Despite the beautiful staging, the fact that Spock was eavesdropping on his speech implies there’s something sinister about it, that he’s doing something wrong. I think casting Lokai’s shadow on the wall was also meant to make the whole proceeding seem more ominous.

@ 18 NomadUK Certainly during the run of TOS the Prime Directive was principally argued as about development, but once Roddenberry got out from under a newtwork and was making his show in syndication (i.e. TNG) he made it clear that it was about an affirmation of the philosophy of Relativism. He also referred ot in interviews and such. Now I do not think it directly applied to this episode as this episode is not that well thought out, but it is tool that was used to say this is why we cannot take side in the continuum of stories.

Eugene @19:

all these comments

It’s not that surprising. For the first time in ages we have a) an episode that’s actually snark worthy and b) an episode that’s actually about something.

it may have been more effective for me if they had tried not to be so specific in their comparison

The thing is they were so intrinsically linked at the time, it was almost impossible not to deal with them together. It’s really easy to look back and see the civil rights movement as being largely sit-ins and rousing speeches punctuated by the occasional water cannon and police dog. Somehow the murders, the church burnings, the riots, and all the other violence seem to get pushed to the side and hand-waved as not really connected or isolated incidents. It was a much tenser time than people realize.

@ 14 DeepThought Good point. Women had to ask men for suffrage. The oppressed don’t earn rights and privileges; the ruling class grants them.

@ 15 Lemnoc I hadn’t thought about that but by god you’re right. Kirk invites him for DRINKS while Lokai’s around trying to earn sympathy from the underdogs of the crew. Yikes.

@ 17 bobsandiego Lemnoc changed my mind. Kirk very much DOES take sides, if only marginally. He seems very much on Bele’s team in a way that doesn’t sit right with me.

@ 18 NomadUK I would think Kirk’s history of stomping into some “backwards” planet and setting them straight is proof enough that the prime directive has certain cultural preferences.

@ 19 Eugene Plot and production-wise it’s middling Star Trek, but thematically it felt very Trek to me.

@ 21 DemetriosX Oh yeah, no argument here. It doesn’t help that I’m reading Nixonland right now, which is sometimes enough to make you want to hide under the sheets.

The more I think about this episode, the more I agree with Torie that it should be taken as a parable. The stated duration of the chase, the quickness of the trip from Ariannus to Cheron, and even the attitudes of the regulars don’t make sense when examined in detail but they do work as stage props for this morality play.

It didn’t hit me until today while listening to NPR that the American holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. falls within the week of discussion for this episode.

Additionally, If any of the followers of this site who are too young to have seen the series first run want another example of how race tensions had a grip of all aspects of society at that time, I’d suggest looking up Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ Black Power Salute in the 1968 Summer Olympics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salute This event was still a topic of conversation when this episode aired.

@ 22 Torie “Kirk very much DOES take sides, if only marginally. He seems very much on Bele’s team in a way that doesn’t sit right with me.” I find this phrasing intriguing. He Very much marginally takes Bele’s side. Personally I do not think he takes Bele’s side. If Kirk had he would have then lectured Lokai on the error of his ways. No, I think Kirk deference such as it is to Bele is purely his function as the Federation diplomat on scene and Bele however loathsome is the representative of a new government contacting the Federation. Everything Kirk does is what any diplomat would have done.

I couldn’t agree more about Frank Gorshin. I had the opportunity to see him on Broadway in 2003 in Say Goodnight, Gracie , his one-man show as George Burns. One of the most memorable and astonishing performances I’ve ever seen — it was almost impossible to believe, at times, that it was NOT really George Burns on stage. The audience brought the house down at the end.

Three years later, he was dead. Sigh. What a talent.

I find it telling that Lokai is just as prejudiced towards “monotones” as Bele is towards Lokai. A subtle bit in a mostly anvilicious episode that is, yes, quintessential Star Trek.

Lokai’s remark reminds me of something I noted in high school (in Alabama)- I was suprised to note that one of my friends, who was (as Richard Pryor put it) “ Africa dark”, was prejudged by the majority of lighter skinned African-Americans. It is presented here as a more subtle and less broad indictment of both sides- neither is immune to being wrong.

oh, another thing that bugged me while watching the episode. During some bridge scene in shots photographed from the front of the bridge it was clear that it was Sulu and Chekov at the Helm and Navigation stations, but on the reverse angle it was Sulu and some random guy.

@BobSandiego #17 “All cultures are equally valued and equally right” See, I don’t get this as what the Prime Directive’s about, even in Next Gen (and I’m a NG kid really). It’s not that any particular individual in the Fed is required to value anything at all — they frequently find other cultures abhorrent and are happy to offer to interfere if the circumstances warrant it. It’s just that it’s a big universe and nobody’s got the right to go telling everyone else how to live. That’s part and parcel of respecting the laws of whatever planet you’re visiting — the difference between a tolerable space empire and an EEEVIL one is, well, state’s-rights federalism.

@Eugene #19 Re: Spock Sneaking I think it’s also possible to read that scene as Spock eavesdropping on a necessary learning process. Lokai isn’t encouraging anybody to rebel — he doesn’t even suggest that the crew should question the lawfully constituted authority of the senior officers, for instance. He’s more conducting what we’d call a teach-in, spreading uncomfortable truths to the privileged Starfleet types who would otherwise be entirely sheltered from them. For Spock to get involved would disrupt an educational process that he, with his encyclopedic knowledge of Earth history, has to know is well-founded and productive. I don’t think this makes Lokai untrustworthy at all; sure, his only power is to win hearts and minds with words, and that is the power of the Serpent, but it’s also the power of the apostles. (If I may arbitrarily lapse into religious metaphor.)

As long as I’ve got the conch, let me gesture imprecisely at another idea. I think Kirk’s sympathy for Bele is telling for what the Federation is. Kirk sees in Bele a kindred spirit, or at least “our kind of people,” the kind of guy the Federation-types can get along with. Many here seem content to explain that as Kirk just “following diplomatic protocol,” etc., but that doesn’t evade the point: Bele’s people embrace a set of norms that elevate one race above others, prejudge the accused based on social status, and assume a large portion of the population deserves to be kept subservient, and Kirk recognizes him as a kindred officer? There’s an implicit endorsement there. Even if it is just following diplomatic protocol, embracing and thereby legitimizing the spokesperson of an oppressive system is not a neutral act. There are consequences to sitting down to tea with the representative of an Apartheid government, and it’s telling when one feels comfortable doing so.

Obviously I’m going further than is warranted by the episode, but I think it’s interesting in the way that it exposes the assumptions we make as an audience, as well as those made by the writers.

@27 bobsandiego

It seems like there’s a lot of that sloppy editing going on this season, including some shots in episodes that show a different woman at the communications station. (Interesting that they never cast a male in that role, that I can remember.) Obviously budget cuts, but irritating nonetheless.

That was a weird timing coincidence, wasn’t it?

Thank you for the article link. I knew of that story but I didn’t realize the extent to which their lives were destroyed by that simple act. Wow.

@ 24 bobsandiego

I think DeepThought addresses this better than I could.

The cultural preference for light skin over dark in black communities is very real , and not just in the United States .

I think Lokai’s statements against the “monotones,” though, cheapened the episode. It made their disagreements and hatred seem petty when the issues are much more serious.

We’re on the way to Cheron. Captain, this ship is now under my direction. For 50,000 of your terrestrial years, I have been pursuing Lokai through the galaxy. I have not travelled this far, this long, only to give him up. This ship goes where my will drives it. It’s amazing how long THEY CAN LIVE 50,000 of your terrestrial years LOKAI: Benefactors? He’s a liar. He raided our homes, tore us from our families, herded us together like so they actually had families then woman children baby what makes of the family

LOKAI: Freed? Were we free to be men? Free to be husbands and fathers? Free to live our lives in equality and dignity? These guys are really out of shape, panting their way through the corridors like 50,000-year-old men,OR MORE all while imagining Cheron’s fiery doom. Lokai eventually finds the transporter room and beams himself down to Cheron, followed shortly by Bele. But what does it all mean? turns out to be so close to Arrianus, when it’s supposedly in uncharted space–maybe they weren’t going to get there until Tuesday. Speaking of Cheron, Bele believes their information that the planet is dead without seeing any evidence or is it really a dead planet or is it something else

This ship is going to Sharon! The greatest episode of Star Trek ever made.

the idiots who do not like Star Trek novels miss the point of the entire Series this is one of the greatest movies ever made ever ever ever

Trackbacks / Pings

• Tweets that mention Star Trek Re-Watch: “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” -- Topsy.com
• Spare Time Theater » A Portrait in Black and White

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  Notify me when new comments are added.

Recent Comments

• Nanda on Star Trek Re-Watch: “And The Children Shall Lead”
• GMC on Star Trek Re-Watch: “Miri”
• Joey on Star Trek Re-Watch: “The City on the Edge of Forever”
• bcjammerx on Star Trek: The Next Generation Re-Watch: “Datalore”
• Richard Simpkins on Re-Watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Recent Discussions in Ten Forward

• Re: A data journalism approach to solving "best ST" debates? by: Kevin July 3, 2017, 19:02
• ST Rewatch: The EMotion Picture (long) by: Guest October 18, 2015, 15:13
• Re: Chaos on the Bridge by: Kevin September 3, 2015, 13:13
• Re: Leonard Nimoy by: Kevin February 28, 2015, 15:13
• "Shaka, When the Walls Fell" by: ecmyers June 19, 2014, 08:20

Recent Posts

Laugh treks: “spock’s brain”.

Making "Spock's Brain" re-watchable.

Laugh Treks are humorous audio recordings you can sync with your Star Trek episodes to enhance your viewing experience.

Favorite Posts

Uhura takes the first steps to becoming a crazy tribble lady.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who on the ship is meanest of all?

If you hit Forever, you went too far.

Wrath, like a seed, needs time to grow... in a Petri dish, best kept cold.

This week on Masterpiece Theater... Shakespeare’s Hamlet! In space.

• June 2014  (1)
• May 2014  (1)
• January 2014  (2)
• November 2013  (1)
• October 2013  (1)
• August 2013  (5)
• July 2013  (2)
• June 2013  (4)
• April 2013  (3)
• March 2013  (4)
• February 2013  (4)
• January 2013  (4)
• December 2012  (2)
• November 2012  (4)
• October 2012  (3)
• September 2012  (4)
• August 2012  (4)
• July 2012  (3)
• June 2012  (5)
• May 2012  (4)
• April 2012  (4)
• March 2012  (5)
• February 2012  (4)
• January 2012  (4)
• December 2011  (5)
• November 2011  (5)
• October 2011  (6)
• September 2011  (1)
• August 2011  (7)
• July 2011  (8)
• June 2011  (8)
• May 2011  (5)
• April 2011  (6)
• March 2011  (4)
• February 2011  (5)
• January 2011  (6)
• December 2010  (5)
• November 2010  (6)
• October 2010  (6)
• August 2010  (1)
• July 2010  (3)
• June 2010  (3)
• May 2010  (6)
• April 2010  (8)
• March 2010  (4)
• February 2010  (3)
• October 2009  (2)
• September 2009  (6)
• August 2009  (1)
• July 2009  (5)
• June 2009  (8)
• May 2009  (8)
• April 2009  (9)

About Arras WordPress Theme

The Viewscreen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Frank Gorshin

• View history

He is best remembered for his portrayal of the Riddler in the 1960s Batman television series (1966-68), for which he received his first Emmy nomination (the only one for the series). Other Star Trek alumni he worked with on the series are Roy Jenson , Sherry Jackson , Theo Marcuse , Yvonne Craig , Joan Collins , Gil Perkins , and director Robert Butler . Gorshin also played the Riddler in the 1966 Batman movie produced to capitalize on the TV show's success. The film also featured Lee Meriwether , Gil Perkins, Dick Crockett , and George Sawaya . The character of the Riddler was subsequently voiced by Michael Bell on the 1970s series Challenge of the Super Friends and by John Glover in the 1990s' Batman: The Animated Series .

After serving in the Army during the Korean War, Gorshin had a role in the 1957 film The True Story of Jesse James , starring Jeffrey Hunter and featuring Frank Overton and Clegg Hoyt . In 1959, he made an uncredited appearance in the western Warlock , as did Paul Comi . Original Series regular DeForest Kelley and " The Trouble with Tribbles " guest actor Whit Bissell had larger, credited roles in this film. Gorshin's first substantial role was Bells Are Ringing (1960, with Original Series guest actor Roy Jenson ).

Early in his career, Gorshin performed his impressionist/comedy act many times on The Ed Sullivan Show . He, Charlie Brill , and Georgia Brown were among Sullivan's guests on the legendary 9 February 1964 show which featured the American debut of The Beatles . In 1965, Gorshin had a supporting role in the popular Disney film That Darn Cat! , which also featured Christopher Held and Liam Sullivan .

Gorshin also had a role in the 1978 mini-series Greatest Heroes of the Bible . Other Star Trek alumni featured on this series include Ted Cassidy , Jeff Corey , Nehemiah Persoff , John Schuck , and Dean Stockwell . Gorshin's other television work up to this point had included guest appearances on The Defenders (with the aforementioned Frank Overton), The Untouchables (in an episode with Stefan Gierasch , Gilbert Green , and Jason Wingreen ), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (with Nancy Kovack ), The High Chaparral (starring Henry Darrow ), The Interns (with Stephen Brooks , Skip Homeier , and Sandra Smith ), Ironside (with Joan Pringle , Kenneth Tobey , and Jason Wingreen), and Charlie's Angels (with Meg Wyllie ).

In 1979, Gorshin appeared in a two-part episode of the cult science fiction series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century , on which Tim O'Connor was a regular cast member. He had roles in several films and made-for-TV movies during the 1980s, in addition to guest-starring in a 1988 episode of Murder, She Wrote with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine regular René Auberjonois and Star Trek: The Next Generation guest actor Matt McCoy .

In 1993, Gorshin appeared in the film Amore! , which also starred Original Series actor James Doohan . That same year, he was seen in the film The Meteor Man , featuring Tommy "Tiny" Lister, Jr. , Wallace Shawn , and Deborah Lacey . In 1995, he made an appearance in the acclaimed science fiction thriller, Twelve Monkeys , co-starring Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country actor Christopher Plummer . Gorshin and Plummer had previously worked together in 1987's The Gnomes' Great Adventure .

In later years, Gorshin portrayed classic cartoon characters like Foghorn Leghorn, Daffy Duck, and Yosemite Sam in various animated shorts. This talent for mimicry would lead to his masterful portrayal of legendary comedian George Burns in his one-man play Say Goodnight, Gracie . He also played the role of Burns in his final film, 2005's Angels with Angles , with Amy Wieczorek as Burns' wife and partner, Gracie Allen. Another of Gorshin's last films was the 2002 comedy Manna from Heaven , which co-starred Louise Fletcher and Seymour Cassel .

In 2003, Gorshin reunited with most of the surviving Batman cast members, including TV Catwoman Julie Newmar and movie Catwoman Lee Meriwether , in the TV special Return to the Batcave: The Misadventures of Adam and Burt . Brett Rickaby portrayed a young Gorshin in flashbacks to his Batman days. Also appearing were Jason Marsden , Julia Rose , James W. Jansen , Ray Buktenica , Steve Vinovich , Joel Swetow , Christopher Darga , Ivar Brogger , and Todd Merrill .

Soon thereafter, he voiced a completely different DC Comics villain, Dr. Hugo Strange, for the next Batman series, simply called The Batman .

Gorshin died in Burbank, California, on 17 May 2005 following bouts with lung cancer, emphysema, and pneumonia. He was 72 years old.

Other Trek connections [ ]

Additional projects in which Gorshin appeared with other Star Trek performers include:

• Torpedo Run (1958, with Don Keefer )
• Studs Lonigan (1960, with Stanley Adams )
• Where the Boys Are (1960, with Jon Lormer )
• Sail a Crooked Ship (1961, with Guy Raymond )
• The George Raft Story (1961, with Seamon Glass and Roy Jenson )
• The Great Imposter (1961, with Willard Sage )
• Sky Heist (1975 TV movie, with Arch Whiting , Al Wyatt , Ed McCready , Stan Barrett , Bill Catching , James Daris , Steve Marlo , and Joseph Campanella )
• Record City (1978, with Wendy Schaal , Ed Begley, Jr. , and Alan Oppenheimer )
• Legends of the Superheroes (1979 TV movie, with William Schallert and Mickey Morton ) as the Riddler
• Death Car on the Freeway (1979 TV movie, with Roger Aaron Brown )
• Goliath Awaits (1981 TV movie, with Duncan Regehr )
• The Edge of Night (TV series, 1981-82, with James Horan )
• A Masterpiece of Murder (1986, with Clive Revill , Jason Wingreen , and Louise Sorel )
• Hollywood Vice Squad (1986, with Emilia Crow and Ronny Cox )
• Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers (1989, with Brooke Bundy , Keone Young , and Victor Tayback )
• Sweet Justice (1992, with Marjean Holden , Chuck Hicks , Scott Leva , Jeff Pruitt , Michael Canavan , and Marty Rackham )
• Body Double (1992, with Marty Rackham)
• Midnight (1989, with Robert Miano and Tommy "Tiny" Lister, Jr. )
• Buford's Got a Gun (1995 short subject, with Dan Gauthier )
• Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997, with Alice Krige )
• After the Game (1997, with Mike Genovese , Sam Anderson , and Richard Lineback )
• The Phantom Eye (1999 TV mini-series, with Michael John Anderson )
• Luck of the Draw (2000, with Patrick Kilpatrick , Chris Doyle , Andy Milder , and Erik Cord )
• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode "Grave Danger" (2005, with Wallace Langham , Conor O'Farrell , and Andrew Prine )

External links [ ]

• Frank Gorshin at the Internet Movie Database
• Frank Gorshin at Wikipedia
• Frank Gorshin at TriviaTribute.com – pictures and trivia

• More to Explore
• Series & Movies

Published Apr 4, 2017

Celebrating Frank Gorshin, Bele on TOS

The late, great Frank Gorshin left behind too many memorable performances to count, but a pair of characters remain front and center in the minds of television viewers everywhere: The Riddler on Batman and Commissioner Bele in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode " Let That Be Your Last Battlefield ." The actor/comedian/impressionist/Vegas veteran was born on April 5, 1933, and would have turned 84 today. Sadly, he passed away in 2005. Today, we celebrate Gorshin's birthday with some facts and anecdotes you may not have known:

Pittsburgh, Baby

Gorshin was born on April 5, 1933, in Pittsburgh, PA, and was raised there as well. He landed his first professional job at age 17... after winning a talent contest.

A Really Great Show

Guests on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 included Gorshin, as well as two child actors (from Broadway's Oliver! ), the comedy tandem of Mitzi McCall and Charlie Brill, plus a young British band called The Beatles. Brill's name will surely resonate with Trek fans. He played Arne Darvin - a Klingon posing as a very cranky human - in the TOS episode " The Trouble with Tribbles ," and he reprised the role 29 years later in the Deep Space Nine hour " Trials and Tribble-ations ."

A Significant Episode

Gorshin spoke to RealityCheckTV.com in a 1999 interview recorded at an autograph show. Looking back on "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, " he commented, "That was a significant episode, in as much as it made a social comment at that time. We're talking 1966. It was a racial thing. I played a character who was black on the right side and white on the left side, and my adversary was the opposite. He was black on the left side and white on the right side."

Holy Overlap, Batman

Given the facts that TOS and Batman ran around the same time and that both shows relied heavily on guest stars, it's no surprise that Gorshin and several other talents overlapped on the two shows. According to Memory Alpha , "Other Trek alumni he worked with on ( Batman ) are Roy Jenson, Sherry Jackson, Theo Marcuse, Yvonne Craig, Joan Collins, Gil Perkins, and director Robert Butler. Gorshin also played The Riddler in the 1966 Batman film produced to capitalize on the TV show's success. The film also featured Lee Meriwether, Gil Perkins, Dick Crockett, and George Sawaya. The character of The Riddler was subsequently voiced by Michael Bell on the 1970s series Challenge of the Super Friends and by John Glover in the 1990's Batman animated series." Both Bell and Glover guest starred on later Trek series.

Say Goodnight, Gracie

Gorshin went out in style. In late 2002, he starred as George Burns in the Broadway production of Say Goodnight, Gracie . According to the New York Times , "During its run, Mr. Gorshin learned he had lung cancer, a condition he kept secret, all the while performing eight times a week." And for his very last screen appearance, the Times reported in its obituary, he fittingly played himself in an episode of CSI that aired just days after his passing.

Join us in remembering Frank Gorshin on what would have been his 84th birthday.

Get Updates By Email

An archive of Star Trek News

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

You may have missed.

Several S&S Trek Books On Sale For $1 This Month

• Star Trek: Lower Decks

Another Classic Trek Actor On Lower Decks This Week

Classic Trek Games Now On GOG

• Star Trek: Prodigy

Star Trek: Prodigy Opening Credits Released

Star Trek: The Original Series

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

Cast & crew.

Frank Gorshin

Lou Antonio

Majel Barrett

Nurse Christine Chapel/Computer

Information

© 2009 CBS Corp.

Accessibility

Copyright © 2024 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

Internet Service Terms Apple TV & Privacy Cookie Policy Support

Screen Rant

Riddle me this: who did frank gorshin play in star trek: tos.

Actor and comedian Frank Gorshin played the villainous Riddler alongside Adam West's Batman, but he also appeared in an iconic episode of Star Trek.

• Batman and Star Trek shared many actors, showcasing the crossover appeal of 1960s television.
• Frank Gorshin's performance as Bele in a Star Trek episode brought depth to the social commentary.
• Gorshin's versatile acting career spanned various iconic TV shows and films of the era.

Actor and comedian Frank Gorshin may be most recognizable for playing the Riddler in the 1960s Batman series, but he also guest starred in an iconic episode of Star Trek: The Original Series . Batman and Star Trek: The Original Series both began in 1966 and likely appealed to many of the same fans. With its campy and comedic tone, the Batman series of the 1960s depicted a very different version of the character than most modern adaptations of his stories . Nevertheless, Adam West's version of Batman became iconic in his own right, as he fought crime alongside his trusty sidekick Robin (Burt Ward).

Batman and Star Trek: The Original Series both tackled moral and ethical issues, though Star Trek generally took a more complex and nuanced approach to its social commentary. In TOS season 3, episode 15, "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the USS Enterprise encounter two survivors of a planet that has been destroyed by war. The two men, Bele (Frank Gorshin) and Lokai (Lou Antonio), have been pursuing one another for thousands of years and refuse to put aside their centuries of hatred. "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" may be a bit heavy-handed, but it's a good message made more impactful thanks to Gorshin's solid performance.

Every Star Trek TOS Actor Who Appeared In Batman 1966

Frank gorshin’s star trek: the original series character bele explained, bele wasted his life pursuing his enemy out of prejudice and hatred..

Frank Gorshin’s character Bele has a complexion that is stark black on the right side and white on the left, while Lokai has the same coloring on opposite sides. Although the USS Enterprise crew members fail to see why this distinction matters, it means a great deal to Bele and Lokai. When the Enterprise makes it to Bele's home planet of Cheron, Bele and Lokai discover that both of their peoples have destroyed one another in a civil war . Despite this, Bele and Lokai still refuse to put aside their differences, and they beam down to Cheron, destined to spend the rest of their lives fueled only by their hatred for one another.

In addition to his roles in Batman and Star Trek , Frank Gorshin appeared in many popular shows of the 1960s and 70s, including The Munsters , Hawaii Five-0, S.W.A.T. , and Charlie's Angels . Gorshin also appeared in 67 episodes of the crime drama soap opera The Edge of Night , as well as an episode of Murder, She Wrote in the 1980s. Gorshin portrayed Blake Barton in the Dean Martin and Judy Holliday film Bells Are Ringing , Iggy in Disney's That Darn Cat, and Dr. Fletcher in the Bruce Willis-led 12 Monkeys film . He has also voiced many characters in various animated shows, including Professor Hugo Strange in Cartoon Network's The Batman .

12 Monkeys has even more connections to Star Trek. The 1995 film spawned a 12 Monkeys television series created by Terry Matalas, who served as showrunner for Star Trek: Picard seasons 2 and 3.

Star Trek: The Original Series Had Other Batman 1966 Actors

Catwoman and batgirl were in star trek.

Because they were airing at the same time, many actors appeared in both Star Trek: The Original Series and Batman . Julie Newmar portrayed Catwoman in 13 episodes of Batman and appeared as Eleen, a pregnant woman whose leader husband has just died in TOS season 2, episode 11, "Friday's Child." Yvonne Craig, who appeared in TOS season 3, episode 14, "Whom Gods Destroy" as the Orion Marta, also played Batgirl in 26 episodes of Batman . Sherry Jackson appeared alongside Frank Gorshin's Riddler as Pauline in 2 episodes of Batman and played an android woman named Andrea in TOS season 1, episode 7, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

Harry Mudd himself, Roger C. Carmel, played the villain Colonel Gumm in the first story of Batman's second season. Malachi Throne appeared as Commodore José Mendez in TOS two-parter, "The Menagerie," and played False Face in a season 1 Batman story. Grace Lee Whitney, who played Yeoman Janice Rand throughout much of TOS's first season, appeared in a Batman story as King Tut's bride, Neila . Golden Age starlet Joan Collins portrayed the doomed Edith Keeler in one of Star Trek's best episodes , "The City on the Edge of Forever," and she appeared in a season 3 Batman story as the Siren. Many more actors appeared in one-off roles in both Star Trek: The Original Series and Batman , and both shows remain beloved staples of their respective genres today.

Star Trek: The Original Series is available to stream on Paramount+. Batman is not currently available for streaming.

• Movies & TV
• Featured Categories

Image Unavailable

• Sorry, this item is not available in
• Image not available
• To view this video download Flash Player

Star Trek - The Original Series, Episode 70: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield VHS

• VHS Tape from $9.99

Editorial Reviews

Product description.

1 VHS TAPE & CONTAINER

There's blunt and then there's really blunt. "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" is certainly the latter, a thick fable about the absurdity of intolerance, a story so obvious it becomes energized by its own, sheer audacity. Frank Gorshin, a 1960s television icon for his recurring role as the Riddler on Batman , plays Bele, an extraterrestrial cop pursuing a fugitive named Lokai (Lou Antonio). The latter is chalk-white on the right side of his body, and ebony-black on the left, an arrangement despised as inferior by Bele and his race, whose own color scheme simply reverses the two. While Captain Kirk (William Shatner) decides what to do about Lokai's request for asylum, the old race hatred between both sides looks increasingly ridiculous. Interestingly, the episode originated as an idea from producer Gene L. Coon, who envisioned an endless chase between a devil and an angel. Eventually it was decided that the sheer stupidity of prejudice would be underscored more clearly in the final arrangement and, indeed, several decades after the fact, the show does have a surrealist punch to it. Incidentally, the Enterprise self-destruct sequence seen here was reprised in the feature film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock . --Tom Keogh

From the Back Cover

TREK TRIVIA Actor/impressionist Frank Gorshin (Bele) gained popularity as the Riddler from the Batman TV series, but he made one of his first appearances in the 1957 sci-fi film Invasion of The Saucer Men. This episode's self-destruct sequence was later reprised by director Leonard Nimoy for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.

Product details

• Package Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.32 x 4.19 x 1.12 inches; 6.13 ounces
• Release date ‏ : ‎ April 15, 1994
• Date First Available ‏ : ‎ February 9, 2007
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Star Trek Original Series
• Studio ‏ : ‎ Paramount
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 630098866X

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Star Trek : "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"/"The Mark Of Gideon"

I've talked about how much I love  Trek 's commitment to Big Ideas, but you'll get no argument from me that sometimes, that commitment has a downside.  Trek  can be inspirational in its vision of a brighter, more open-minded future, but when it decides to put its Special Message Hat on, it can be preachy, tedious, and hilariously unsubtle. (Hence the classic AV Club Inventory, Space Racism Is Bad ) Both episodes this week have points to make, and both put the  Enterprise  and its crew in the position of moral superiority, but "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" is the clear winner in the stridency sweepstakes. There's cool alien make-up, Frank "The Riddler" Gorshin, and a really good ending. All the rest is speeches; a seemingly endless series of on-the-nose rants that leave you exhausted just listening to them.

Related Content

The  Enterprise  is on its way to save some lives (and seriously, are they even pretending to have a mission anymore? The ship is basically just Starfleet's go-to for whatever damn thing happens to come up. Of the five years Kirk and crew are supposed to be exploring, I'm betting they spend maybe four of those delivering space newspapers) when it encounters a damaged shuttlecraft floating in space. Kirk has the single inhabitant beamed aboard, a wounded alien with a startling skin color: one half of him is black, the other half is white. McCoy heals him up, Spock discusses the unlikeliness of bi-chromal skin, and when the alien finally wakes, he turns to be an a arrogant twerp. He says he's from Cheron (aka, "the southern most part of the galaxy," hint hint), his "need" made it perfectly fine to steal a ship, and anyone who questions him is just a big ole meanie.

None of this really explains anything, and the situation doesn't come any clearer until a second alien arrives on the  Enterprise , destroying his (invisible) ship while beaming himself onto the bridge. Bele (Frank Gorshin) is also from Cheron, and he's been chasing Lokai, the first alien, for 50,000 years (?!?), to bring him to task for some horrible crime which, unless I zoned out during all the speechifying, never gets explained. It takes a little while, but eventually the metaphor becomes clear: Bele and Lokai hate each other because their black/white coloring is mirror opposites, which is hating someone because of the color of their skin, which is racism. Bele represents the Establishment, aka The Man, and Lokai is the insurgent, willing to commit any act of violence in order to earn the freedom he doesn't even really understand anymore.

There's nothing inherently wrong with using metaphorical science fiction to get your point across, but the metaphors have to be more than just a quick coating of paint. Bele and Lokai never have personalities, despite all the over-acting, and for the most part, Kirk and the rest hang out on the sidelines, trying to dispense wisdom that never gets heard. It was interesting hearing how Starfleet and the Federation deal with alien races outside their organization: Kirk is respectful, but given Lokai's crime (the shuttlecraft theft), refuses to just hand him over to Bele without due processing at a Starfleet base. We've seen the system's bureaucracy at work before, but while it's mostly used as a delaying device here—if Kirk just gave the distinctly unpleasant Lokai to Bele at the start, we wouldn't have much of an episode—it's neat to contrast the oddness of meeting a new race with the menial requirements of diplomacy and government. Whatever the source of the Cherons' enmity, there's still paperwork that needs to be filled out.

No delaying tactic would be perfect without a counter, though, so Bele ends up taking over the ship and trying to force his way back to his home planet. There's a great sequence when Kirk, after exhausting all other options, tells Bele he'd rather blow up the  Enterprise  then let it continue to operate out of his control. Bele thinks this is a bluff, so Kirk initiates the self-destruct. (Is this the first time we've heard the self-destruct code? They used roughly the same system in  Search For Spock , and I've always dug how straightforward it is.) Bele, realizing that Kirk is just crazy enough to kill 430 people on a matter of principle, backs down. I can't decide if Kirk's behavior here was reckless, or hardcore, or both. But whatever it says about his morality, it makes for a tense, exciting scene.

Although it would've been more effective if the director hadn't insisted on a series of pointlessly tight close-ups. "Battlefield" is full of over-the-top visual touches—I especially liked (ie, snickered at) the way the camera would shake every time someone called a Red Alert. You know it's serious when the camera-man has a seizure! Then there's the ridiculous climax: after a lot of negotiation and power-plays, Bele finally gets the  Enterprise  back to Cheron, only to find every last sapient life-form on the planet dead. (I'm not sure I'd trust the sensors on the ship to make that kind of absolute judgment, but I'll let it pass.) The cities are in ruins, and there are unburied corpses everywhere, because, see, that's the racism end-game: everybody dies. (Honestly, that's the  everything  end-game.) In response to learning that all they've ever known has been destroyed, Bele and Lokai chase each other around the ship for a while, before beaming themselves down to the planet, presumably to continue their chase until they die of exhaustion, or whatever diseases you get from running around a world full of rotting dead people.

Conceptually, that's not bad. Neither Bele or Lokai are likable enough for me to pity them much, but the idea of them stranding themselves in the graveyard of their civilization is striking enough that you can overlook the symbolic heavy-handedness of it. Too bad this ending is undercut by the hilariously goofy shoots of Bele and Lokai prancing through the corridors of the  Enterprise  like idiots, with footage of burning buildings super-imposed over the screen to remind us of their grief. It's terribly silly, and that, really, is why "Battlefield" doesn't work: not for that one scene, but for the episode's unwinking insistence on its righteousness. The alien make-up is a cool visual, there are some good moments, but the message here is so overpowering that it's hard to remember anything else.

So at least "The Mark Of Gideon" lets the mystery last a bit longer, anyway. This time, instead of fighting off a deadly bacterial invasion, the  Enterprise  is running peace talks with the notoriously stand-offish Gideon, and for once it isn't a matter of the  Enterprise  being Starfleet's dogsbody. The Gideons specifically requested Kirk, and asked that he beam down to the planet for negotiations. Which is totally not suspicious at all, and it's just a tremendous shock when Kirk, after beaming, finds himself in a seemingly empty  Enterprise , still orbiting Gideon.

"Gideon" is typical of the third season, in that it has a strong set-up and a weak resolution, but even the set-up has flaws. We get an awful lot of Kirk wandering around his abandoned ship, doing a voice-over about how confusing everything is, and how he's lost time and doesn't know what happened. This starts off cool, because hey, who doesn't like a good mystery, but quickly takes a turn for the boring. It doesn't help that the one person Kirk does meet, a woman named Odona, is spacey and dull. Oh, and almost instantly in love with the captain. We eventually learn that Odona is the daughter of Hidon, Gideon's main ambassador, and this whole thing was a set-up so Odona could get infected with a disease Kirk had years ago. And if that doesn't sound ridiculous, well, keep listening.

Thankfully, not all of "Gideon" focuses on Kirk being smooth and spreading the sickness. In what initially looks to be a place-holder subplot (a series of scenes that use characters outside the main action to make us feel like there's a larger world, and to make sure the episode lasts the full fifty minutes) turns out to be the ep's strongest element, the increasingly hostile negotiations between Spock and the stonewalling Gideons about Kirk's location. Spock's obvious frustration at getting the runaround both from the planet below and from Starfleet high command is hilarious and well-written. The ep would've been better served, I think, if it had focused on Spock from the start. The Mystery of the Empty  Enterprise  is a decent hook, but it fails to pay-off. Spock's struggles, while more mundane, have a stronger foundation in character, and giving us the episode from his perspective, without even showing Kirk until maybe halfway through, would've worked well.

So why are the Gideons so interested in James T.? Well, they're all terribly healthy. Terribly, awfully, miserably healthy. Gideon has become over-populated, and they needed an outside disease to decimate the population and make for some more elbow room. I'm not sure how well this concept holds up under actual consideration. Gideon exists in an era of space travel, so why not negotiate with Starfleet for some star-ships? Kirk suggests sterilization and birth control, Hidon explains that the Gideons consider life "sacred." So why is their chosen response to the problem essentially a passive mass murder? We're supposed to be upset that Hidon wants Kirk to stay on Gideon permanently, as a carrier of the disease, but I just can't get my head around all the stupid here. Even worse, the end of the episode has Hidon actually going ahead with his plan, albeit in a different way than he'd initially intended.

See, Kirk and Odona have fallen in love, or lust, or some indeterminate emotional connection that will dictate Kirk's actions right up until the end credits, after which he'll never mention her again. Hidon's original plan was to use Odona as a test case, to show his people that he was as willing to sacrifice for the good of the planet as anybody else; after Odona died, they'd start spreading Kirk's blood around the planet. (How the hell would that work? If the whole point of this is to allow them to kill without actively deciding who lives and who dies, what's the use in maintaining a single vector for the spread of the disease?) But now that Odona has got a taste of Kirk kissing, she's regretting her life choices; and of course Kirk can't simply let some really hot chick die on his watch. While Kirk argues with Hodin, Spock, in his usual unstoppable fashion, follows in his captain's footsteps, searches the fake  Enterprise  (which is just a model of the real ship—is there a reason for this? If all you needed Kirk for was his blood, you could just strap him down someplace. Diseases aren't like cows, they don't taste better if they've been walking around), takes out a pair of the most inept guards ever, and enters the room with Hodin and Kirk. This gives Kirk the power to get Odona back to the real  Enterprise , where McCoy can cure her.

One of my favorite things about this current season is the way Kirk and Spock's relationship continues to make sense, even in the most ridiculous eps. Like in "Blink Of An Eye," here we have Spock following in Jim's footsteps, and when he arrives at the same destination, Kirk shows no surprise whatsoever. It's not so much taking Spock for granted as it is a well-earned display of complete trust. So even when the writing is clunky, or the plots full of holes, there's at least that to come back to, a strong, believable friendship between two very different characters.

Once Odnoa is healed, she decides to go back to her people in Kirk's place, and, in effect, be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of her own people. It's an unsettling resolution that's played without any ambiguity whatsoever. As some of you mentioned in the comments last week, "Gideon" has our heroes tacitly assisting in a government sponsored holocaust, without any real regret or moral confusion. Kirk's biggest issue at the end is having to leave Odona behind. That's another problem when you try and bring in big ideas—you need to follow through on the consequences. "Gideon"  tries to create a situation in which semi-genocide is the best, noblest response, but it doesn't justify itself enough to work dramatically.

"Let That Be Your Last Battlefield": C+

"The Mark of Gideon": C+

Stray Observations:

• "Battlefield"'s attempts to make oppressor and oppressed equally morally culpable rang false to me. That's another problem about making such an overt metaphor: because of its connection to real-life situations, it's difficult to judge the story on its own terms.
• "You monotone humans are all alike. First you condemn, then you attack!" Oh man, that's so us.
• Spock: "We must acknowledge once and for all that the purpose of diplomacy is to prolong a crisis."
• Up next week, it's "That Which Survives" and "The Lights of Zetar."

Star Trek (TV Series)

Let that be your last battlefield (1969).

• User Reviews

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

• User Ratings
• External Reviews
• Metacritic Reviews
• Full Cast and Crew
• Release Dates
• Official Sites
• Company Credits
• Filming & Production
• Technical Specs
• Plot Summary
• Plot Keywords
• Parents Guide

Did You Know?

• Crazy Credits
• Alternate Versions
• Connections
• Soundtracks

Photo & Video

• Photo Gallery
• Trailers and Videos

Related Items

• External Sites

Related lists from IMDb users

Recently Viewed

• Buy the Book…
• Reviews Hub

the m0vie blog

Following Us

• Adding Our RSS Feed to Your Gmail
• Following our Feed in Internet Explorer
• Millennium (Reviews)
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Reviews)
• Star Trek: Enterprise (Reviews)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (Reviews)
• Star Trek: The Original Series (Reviews)
• Star Trek: Voyager (Reviews)
• The X-Files (Reviews)
• X-Files Fandom Poll Form

Check out the Archives

Awards & Nominations

Star Trek – Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (Review)

This July and August, we’re celebrating the release of Star Trek Beyond by taking a look back at the third season of the original Star Trek . Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the latest update.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is iconic Star Trek .

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is a reminder that the iconic Star Trek is not necessarily good Star Trek .

Half and half.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield has become a cultural shorthand for the show.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is a testament to the weird influence that the dysfunctional third season has on the cultural memory of Star Trek .

Two sides of the same coin.

This blog cannot accurately capture the cultural shorthand for Star Trek , being written by a life-long fan of the franchise who writes thousands of words about entire shows that have been all but forgotten by the mainstream. The perspective is skewed. What Star Trek means to fandom is different to what it means to the public at large. It can be difficult to get a sense of scale or distance. Indeed, it is tempting to read the controversy over Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness as a conflict over the popular and fan memory of the franchise.

Still, trying to imagine the cultural memory of Star Trek is a fun exercise of itself. What images pop into the average viewer’s mind when they hear the words  Star Trek ? It seems to be a collection of images, grabbed almost randomly. Leonard Nimoy as Mister Spock. The music as Kirk and Spock fight to the death in  Amok Time . Kirk manufacturing a “rudimentary lathe” and fighting a man in a rubber lizard costume in Arena . Andorians from Journey to Babel . Orion Slave Girls from The Cage and Whom The Gods Destroy .

J’accuse, Monsieur Bele!

Some of those images stretch beyond the original Star Trek show. Kirk yelling “KHAAAAAN!!!” in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , veins throbbing in rage. The franchise’s fixation on Moby Dick , perhaps an acknowledgement of its own yearning to be a formative American text. Perhaps that cultural memory stretches to the rough outline of Star Trek: The Next Generation . Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the cliffhanger to The Best of Both Worlds, Part I would seem to represent the far edge of it.

Indeed, the cultural memory of Star Trek is fickle and as prone to distortion as the fan memory. As every fan knows, the line “beam me up, Scotty!” was never spoken on the show, but becomes a go-to line for anybody referencing the franchise. William Shatner’s performance in Star Trek is certainly memorable, but the cultural consciousness seems to conflate Shatner’s work on the show with his even-more-over-the-top works of performance art like The Transformed Man or his unique interpretation of Rocket Man .

“I… eh… haven’t yet listened to the album, Captain.”

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is definitely a part of it. The episode is frequently and casually dropped into discussions of the franchise’s legacy. “Remember the futility of the mutual hatred between the half-white-half-black race and the half-black-half-white one?” asked Sneh Rupra in a piece about Star Trek Beyond published in July 2016. Steven D. Greydanus singled it out on the death of Leonard Nimoy in March 2015 . Mark E. Anderson cited it as an allegory for modern race relations in December 2014 .

Even viewers who have never watched a full episode of Star Trek in their lives can point to the episode as a prime example of “what Star Trek does.” It is an incredible simple (and incredibly potent) commentary on the modern world, filtered through a high-concept science-fiction lens. There is an almost fairy tale quality to the allegory here. It is the kind of example that can be used in primary discussion of racism, or that parents might present to a curious and impressionable young child. The beauty of the idea lies in its simplicity.

The Bele of the ball.

Even William Shatner still cites the episode as a prime example of the franchise’s social commentary and willingness to engage with social issues :

The best Star Treks had an underlying philosophy… It was a brilliant show. [In the episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield], actor Frank Gorshin was half black and half white. Half black on one side of his face, and half white on the other side of his face. And he hated this other guy, who was half black on the other side — the opposite side. And so the idea of racism, the stupidity of racism, was dramatized. And I thought that was a really clever science fiction idea.

Nearly half a century later, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield still exists as a fixture in the culture memory.

Destructive impulses.

Even individual scenes have had a lasting cultural impact. Not only do a large proportion of viewers recall the basic premise of the episode, they also recall the twist, when Bele reveals the key distinction that exists between himself and Lokai. “I am black on the right side,” Bele helpfully explains. “Lokai is white on the right side. All of his people are white on the right side.” It is a delightfully obtuse justification for millennia of oppression, one that remains almost as well-remembered as the episode itself. (It helps that the twist flows from the premise.)

Even within the franchise, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield has a considerable impact. Manny Coto would establish his credentials as a dyed-in-the-wool Star Trek fan by scripting a clumsy and heavy-handed adaptation of the episode for the War on Terror era with Chosen Realm during the third season of Star Trek: Enterprise . The self-destruct sequence from Let That Be Your Last Battlefield would be used as a clear frame of reference for the self-destruct sequence in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock .

Riddle me this.

From the perspective of even the most casual Star Trek fan, there is something perplexing about all this. It is strange to think that Lokai and Bele are among the franchise’s most iconic creations; certainly their design is more recognisable to the general public than that of the Ferengi or the Cardassians. Only two Cheron characters ever appeared in Star Trek , and only in one of more than six hundred episodes. That is a phenomenal impact for characters that are so straightforward in their design.

It is all the more ironic for the fact that the distinctive design came about rather late in the development process. Much like Wink of an Eye , this episode was developed from a story provided by Gene L. Coon under the alias of Lee Cronin. As with Wink of an Eye , the original plot for Let That Be Your Last Battlefield drew upon a more primal iconography than that which drove science-fiction. If Spock’s Brain had been an homage to b-movies and Wink of an Eye was a story about the fair folk, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield would draw upon religious iconography.

“We’re detecting a metaphor, sir. It’s off the charts.”

Marc Cushman summarises the original pitch for the episode that would become  Let That Be Your Last Battlefield in These Are the Voyages :

Coon’s Down From Heaven dealt with racial intolerance in a way never before seen. Satrana, a creature rescued by the Enterprise, does indeed resemble a stereotypical devil, complete with red skin, pointed ears, arched eyebrows, two horns growing out of its head, and a forked tail. As Satrana is brought aboard, he collapses on to the deck. Scott takes a look and exclaims, “Lord save us, Captain, it’s the devil himself!”

It would certainly have been a distinctive visual, standing out in a season which would later feature Abraham Lincoln as a guest star in The Savage Curtain .

The devil’s in the details.

As with Wink of an Eye , Coon was unable to complete the assignment himself due to outstanding commitments to It Takes a Thief . As it turned out, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield would be the last Star Trek credit afforded to Gene L. Coon. He would pass away in 1973, suffering from lung and throat cancer likely connected to his smoking habits. As such, Coon would not live to see the renaissance and rebirth of the Star Trek franchise. While Dorothy Fontana and David Gerrold would work on the later shows, Coon’s involvement ended here.

Gene L. Coon would become known as “the forgotten Gene” , his involvement and influence in the franchise largely overlooked while Gene Roddenberry built up his own legend during the wilderness years. Recent reappraisals of the Star Trek franchise have been kinder to Gene L. Coon , acknowledging his huge influence upon the franchise in its formative years. However, there is something bitterly ironic in the fact that Coon’s final contribution to Star Trek should be a truly iconic episode hidden behind a fake name.

Don’t you know he’s Lokai?

Coon’s concept would remain part of the episode, although the design of the characters would change. As producer Fred Frieberger explained to Starlog :

Gene Coon had a script that called for a devil with a tail to chase an angel with a halo …and I felt that we didn’t want to do something so “on the head.” I asked Coon if we could change it, and he said to go ahead. I wanted to keep the concept of good chasing evil, so I got Ollie Crawford, and came up with this idea of half black and half white, and I think it worked out as a pretty good  show. The program came in a little short and we had a chase that went on forever in the Enterprise to fill the hour.

Inside Star Trek credits director Jud Taylor with the “half-white, half-black” visual, although Taylor suggested that they should be bisected at the waist.

“Shield yourself!”

Because Gene L. Coon could not complete the script assignment, Frieberger drafted in Oliver Crawford. Crawford already had one  Star Trek credit to his name,  The Galileo Seven from the first season. Although the production of Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was fraught, with a number of significant changes being made at the last minute, Crawford would prove a reliable writer for assignments like these. Freiberger assigned him to work on  The Cloud Minders later in the season.

It should be noted that both  Let That Be Your Last Battlefield and  The Cloud Minders are prime examples of  Star Trek as allegory. In fact, both episodes could almost be considered  “Star Trek fairy tales” , the sort of iconic metaphorical stories that explore key social themes through their use of a science-fiction framework. In  Let That Be Your Last Battlefield , the science-fiction framework provided a vehicle to explore issues of race. In The Cloud Minders , the show would touch on class and power.

The eternal struggle.

Crawford was a very socially-conscious writer. As he explained to Starlog , he had been blacklisted during the witch hunts of the fifties:

“Two hundred writers were blacklisted  from 1953 to 1957,” Crawford explains. “Of them, only 10 percent were able to recover their careers, and I was always grateful to be among them. People have often said, ‘How could the blacklist happen?’, but it’s amazing what can happen: what form intolerance can take, as well as intimidation. I like to think that any situation you’re involved with during the course of your life equips you to become a better person and, in my case, a better writer.”

With that in mind, it seems only reasonable that Crawford should be so socially conscious.

The colour of hate.

The analogy at the heart of the story is very simple and straightforward. Just because people look different from one another does not justify prejudice or hatred. It is a very effective metaphor for issues related to race, particularly in the context of the sixties when race exploded into a national issue after decades of bubbling away in the background. As with a lot of the third season, the simplicity of the metaphor is at once part of the charm and a source of great frustration.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield argue that “colour” doesn’t really matter. It is a very idealistic argument, and a very pure distillation of the concept of equality. However, the simplicity of the premise lends the episode an elegance that explains why it has lingered in the popular consciousness so long. It also feels somewhat reductive. Skin colour should never be used to justify prejudice and hatred, but issues relating to race and ethnicity cannot simply be ignored. That is why saying “all lives matter” is not an appropriate response to “black lives matter.”

It’s not a black-and-white matter…

In some ways, this approach to racism is akin to the popular belief that the modern world is a “colourblind” or “post-racial” society. This is a view that tends to stem from a position of privilege, assuming that the process of stopping active overt racism resolves every lingering issue. As Zach Stafford argues :

This ideology is very popular – like a racial utopic version of the Golden Rule – but it’s actually quite racist. “Colourblindness” doesn’t acknowledge the very real ways in which racism has existed and continues to exist, both in individuals and systemically. By professing not to see race, you’re just ignoring racism, not solving it. Still, the idea of “colorblindness” is incredibly popular, especially with young people who believe racism is a problem for the older generation and will soon die out. According to a 2014 study done in partnership with MTV and David Binder Research, almost three-fourths of millennials believe that we should not see the color of someone’s skin, as though it’s a choice. Nearly 70% believe they have achieved this and are now actually colorblind; and the same percentage shockingly believe that we make society better by not seeing race or ethnicity.

It is a laudable and utopian ideal, but it does ignore that systemic prejudice and years of oppression cannot be undone simply by ceasing to actively inflict harm upon the oppressed group .

Monomaniacal…

There are moments when Let That Be Your Last Battlefield feels quite reactionary, as angry at Lokai as it is towards Bele. It almost suggests an equivalence between the two. Lokai is presented as incredibly self-righteous and untrustworthy; the Enterprise first encounters him flying a stolen shuttlecraft, and he responds by shrugging off the charge of grand theft shuttle. “I do not make off with things,” he warns Kirk. “My need gave me the right to use the ship. Mark the word, sir: the use of it.” He argues with Kirk before thanking him, ungrateful for the rescue.

In contrast, Bele is treated as an honoured guest during his time on board the ship, even after his attempt to hijack it. Whereas Lokai eats with the crewmen on the lower decks, Kirk and Spock share a dinner with Bele in the private mess. In some ways, the sequence feels unsettlingly close to the icky racial politics of Alliances on Star Trek: Voyager , where Janeway seems far more comfortable dealing with former slavers than freed slaves. Bele might technically be a visiting dignitary, but those privileges should probably be scaled down after trying to commandeer the ship.

Eye opening.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield comes dangerously close to suggesting a false equivalence between Lokai and Bele. “What’s the matter with you two?” Kirk asks at the climax. “You both must end up dead if you don’t stop hating.” It is as though both Lokai and Bele are equally responsible for the status quo , and that there is an appropriate solution to be found at some point between the two extremes. Bele must learn to be a little less racist and less fascist, and Lokai must learn to… stop being so tightly wound.

While Star Trek gets a lot of credit for being progressive, there is also a very conservative element at the heart of the show. This is perhaps most obvious in the way that the series approaches counterculture, in episodes like This Side of Paradise or And the Children Shall Lead or The Way to Eden . For all that Star Trek is a utopian show, it is deeply uncomfortable with contemporary anti-establishment viewing points, dismissive of concerns raised by the younger generation about the direction society has taken.

Engines of progress.

There is also a much deeper fear rooted in the three seasons of the original show. Star Trek is incredibly nervous about the breakdown of established social order, as memorably expressed in the wave of insanity and violence spreading across the universe in Operation — Annihilate! The threat posed by Gorgan in And the Children Shall Lead is threat of wide-scale social collapse spreading across the cosmos. At times, Star Trek could think in quite apocalyptic terms, very much reflecting the tone and mood of the elder generation during the sixties.

To be fair, this is not a surprise. Many of the veterans working on Star Trek were part of that older generation. They had served during the Second World War; Gene L. Coon was in the Marine Corps, Gene Roddenberry and Fred Freiberger were in the Air Force. As a result, the show seemed more likely to see the sixties through that lens, as a generation who had fought tyranny in order to build a safer world, watching the sixties descend into social strife and protest marches and chaos, to see criticism of the establishment as a threat to social order.

His world is gone.

After all, there was a palpable sense of apocalyptic despair running through 1968. Lyndon B. Johnson had effectively abdicated by declining to run for another term in office at the end of March, throwing the politic sphere into chaos . Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April . Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in June . The Doomsday clock had been moved back to twelve minutes to midnight in 1963, but found itself brought forward to seven minutes to midnight in 1968 . The very world seemed to be burning.

Following the death of Martin Luther King, there were riots in Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas, Washington and Wilmington . The following month, there were riots in Louisville . Chicago endured a second set of riots in August, when it hosted the Democratic National Convention . These scenes of urban unrest were not confined to the United States. Paris was caught in the midst of a failed student revolution in May . To American audiences, it seemed like the world was on fire and cities were burning to ground; like those inserts at the climax of Let That Be Your Last Battlefield .

Boy, that “Stardate Armageddon” is going to cause issues when sorting chronologically.

The third season as a whole seems more preoccupied with apocalyptic imagery. Spectre of the Gun opened by presenting Kirk with a literal ghost town in which he was cast as a dead man. Both  The Paradise Syndrome and  For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky focus on asteroids hurdling towards inhabited planets.  And the Children Shall Lead found a space ghost turning children against their parents.  Is There in Truth No Beauty? cast the Enterprise out of the galaxy.  Day of the Dove set the Enterprise hurdling out of the galaxy on  “stardate armageddon.”

In some sense, these apocalyptic anxieties reflected the show’s uncertainty about it’s own fate. After all, this is a show that had been resurrected at the last minute, only to have its budget slashed and witness the mass departure of key creative staff. However, it also spoke to the general mood around the show, the apocalyptic dread lurking in the collective consciousness as the sixties faded into the seventies.  Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is the second consecutive episode to end in extinction; the third of four consecutive episodes to feature extinction as a key plot point.

Getting crewed in.

In that context, it makes sense that Lokai’s radicalism is presented as a threat that social order and as particularly dangerous on those grounds. There is a sense that Let That Be Your Last Battlefield would rather that Lokai gracefully endure the prejudice and suffer heaped upon him by Bele than force the matter, treating Lokai’s anger (rather than the source of Lokai’s anger) as the problem that needs to be addressed. The insistence that both sides are to equally culpable seems somewhat disingenuous.

To be fair to Let That Be Your Last Battlefield , the episode at least acknowledges these concerns, even if it never quite engages with them. When Bele insists that everything is better now because slavery was abolished on Cheron thousands of years ago, Lokai responds by pointing to more lingering prejudices. “Freed? Were we free to be men? Free to be husbands and fathers? Free to live our lives in equality and dignity?” Lokai avoids going into detail, but the implication is clear; Cheron had not confronted the legacy of past injustices.

Eternal war.

Indeed, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is very clearly rooted in the particulars of sixties culture and strife. “Do you know what it would be like to be dragged out of your hovel into a war on another planet?” Lokai asks the crew at one point. “A battle that will serve your oppressor and bring death to you and your brothers?” It is very clearly coloured by the racial disparities of the Vietnam War :

Wallace Terry, the Vietnam correspondent for Time magazine between 1967 and 1969, taped black soldiers airing their anger in the summer of 1969. Throughout the recording, their rage is tangible. Speaking about his team-mates, one black soldier declares, “What they been through in the bush, plus what they have to go through back in the world [America], they can’t face it. They’re ready to just get down and start another civil war.” Another adds, “Why should I fight for prejudice?” When Terry inquires, “Tell me what you think the white man should be called?” a chorus of “devil… beast” erupts from the group. Although President Johnson predicted that the Vietnam war would create a political nightmare, he neglected to foresee the racial one. The ongoing domestic conflicts between black and white Americans were reflected and exacerbated over in Vietnam, principally because the very apex of this increasingly unpopular war, between 1968 and 1969, coincided explosively with the rise of the Black Power era in America. In these years, there was a surge of inter-racial violence within the US forces in Vietnam. Discrimination thrived and, as in America, a racial polarisation arose out of this tension. Black soldiers embraced their culture as well as the emerging Black Power politics and its external symbols.

The Vietnam War was inevitably tied up into the racial strife of the late sixties, contributing to that sense of apocalyptic dread at home and abroad. Prominent African Americans critiqued the conflict, calling out the United States government for insisting that African American citizens contribute to the war while ignoring their basic human rights, refusing to acknowledge exploitation and abuse past and present.

Afflicted by racism.

Muhammad Ali is perhaps the most memorable example, refusing the draft on political grounds :

“My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America,” he said at the time. “And shoot them for what? They never called me n!gger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”

In 1967, Ali was convicted of refusing the draft. He was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $100,000 . That conviction would be overturned in 1971 .

Guess who’s coming to dinner.

From the context of 2016, it is hard to properly comprehend how all of these factors associated with the sixties were intertwined with one another. However, none of this happened in a vacuum. The Vietnam War could not be divorced from counterculture, which could not be divorced from the civil rights movement. Some of those connections were literal and material, whereas some of the areas of overlap were less tangible reflecting broader anxieties and common root causes.

The Vietnam War was a transformative experience for the American psyche, both creating new wounds and deepening existing divides. There was very pointedly a class divide in terms of those called to service, with members of wealthy and influential families (or even those in college) granted deferments . Existing tensions over issues of race came to a head when African Americans were called to serve disproportionately and were killed in action in numbers proportionately much higher than whites .

Purple haze.

The way in which the socio-political realities of the Vietnam War cut to the heart of American identity. Martin Luther King acknowledged these connections in a speech made in New York in April 1967:

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such. Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

It could legitimately be argued that the distance of history obscures these overlaps and contours, these points of intersection. Martin Luther King’s place as a non-violent civil rights campaigner is enshrined in history; his anti-war and socialist beliefs tend to be obscured, ignoring the connection that exists .

Ringing a Bele.

To a certain extent, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield deserves some credit for acknowledging these complexities and connections that exist between racial discrimination and wider social concerns. Unfortunately, the episode does nothing with those powerful observations, refusing to acknowledge that Lokai probably has more of a point than Bele. Worse than that, it seems to paint Lokai as unreasonable for giving voice to them. While Bele is given time with Kirk and Spock, Lokai gives voice to that metaphorical criticism of Vietnam in an ominous sequence.

Like Spock, the audience eavesdrops on Lokai’s arguments; the ship’s science officer happens to catches the discussion while passing by an open door, which is a rather strange sight on the show. Spock does not walk into the room. Instead, he waits outside the door and listens to the discussion. The camera angle is low, and the door is only slightly ajar. The whole sequence suggests that Lokai is up to something, attempting to sew dissent among the crew of the Enterprise and ultimately validating Bele’s insistence that Lokai is seditious.

Spock is all ears.

To be fair, this stubborn refusal to explore the legitimacy of Lokai’s accusations is reflective of a larger facet of the episode. This assurance that both Bele and Lokai are equally culpable is a reminder of how shallow the metaphor at the heart of Let That Be Your Last Battlefield actually is. As clumsy as it might be, it is powerful. And there is something quite endearing about the earnestness of the moral, the argument that people really should learn to get along; even if that moral seems disingenuous to those who live with the legacy of centuries of systemic abuse.

Still, that is not the biggest issue with Let That Be Your Last Battlefield . The biggest issue with Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is that it is not very good. It is not very good at all. In fact, it is quite terrible as an hour of dramatic television. To be fair, this is something of a recurring problem with the more iconic and memorable episodes of the third season.  Plato’s Stepchildren is something of a television legend, but it is also a terrible piece of scripted drama. Even  Day of the Dove is somewhat clumsier and less elegant than the collective memory would suggest.

Both sides of the story.

There is a cheapness to the third season of Star Trek as a whole, but it is particularly noticeable in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield . Indeed, the casting of iconic Batman! guest star Frank Gorshin in the role of Bele probably took a substantive amount out of the episode’s budget. Indeed, it seems likely that the episode’s willingness to entertain Bele and afford him a higher profile than Lokai is likely down to the need to justify that expense. Of course Frank Gorshin gets an extended dinner-table conversation with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.

To be fair, it is possible for the Star Trek production team to do excellent work on a tiny budget. Both Spectre of the Gun and The Empath are great examples of the production team doing more with less. However, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield lacks that rich imagination of creativity. More than that, the budget restrictions are particularly transparent. There are several scenes in which the show seems to draw attention to its shortcomings in rather unnecessary ways.

“I just missed Lee Meriwether? When is Yvonne Craig showing up?”

As Fred Freiberger acknowledged, the episode came short and padding was desperately needed. As a result, there is an extended sequence of the two aliens running around standing sets, overlaid with stock footage of war and destruction, while Spock commentates. “Captain, I have located them on ship’s sensors. Bele is chasing Lokai on deck three. Bele is passing recreation room three, approaching the crewmen’s lounge. Lokai is running past the crewmen’s lounge. Lokai has just arrived on deck five. Passing recreation room three.”

However, these constraints are also obvious earlier in the episode, during the sequence in while Bele boards the Enterprise. The sequence is very clearly written as a tense space battle, with Bele outmanoeuvring the Enterprise as it tries to evade him. However, there was clearly not enough money left in the budget to produce the necessary special effects. Other episodes would acknowledge the limitation and move on, extending some dialogue-drive scenes or add a physical altercation. However, like Lokai, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield refuses to let go.

Darkening the mood.

The result is a space action sequence in which one of the ships is invisible . The characters draw attention to this. “What is it?” Kirk asks. “Could it be a Romulan ship using their cloaking device?” When Bele arrives, Spock muses, “A most unique craft. Pity it couldn’t be salvaged for our study.” Bele acknowledges as much, using the sort of cheap handwave that five-year-olds would employ while playing make believe. “Yes. It was sheathed in special materials that rendered it invisible.”

There is a little zero-budget b-movie charm to all of this. It is hokey, but hokey in a way that is strangely endearing. The big issue is in how director Jud Taylor chooses to compensate for these limitations. Taylor is not a subtle director. His Dutch Angles on Wink of an Eye were a delightfully camp way of conveying Kirk’s transition to the domain of the Scalosians, but they were not understated in the slightest. Similarly, Taylor’s suggestion to paint Bele and Lokai half-white and half-black was ingenious, but it was not nuanced. Taylor’s bluntness could be a strength.

Somebody has to stand up to him.

However, Taylor’s direction is just too heavy-handed. In an attempt to add drama to these shipbound sequences, Taylor opts for a dynamic approach. When the ship goes to red alert, Taylor emphasises the shift by having the camera zoom in and out and in and out from the red flashing lights repeatedly, as if worried the audience might not grasp that the red light at the centre of the frame means that the ship is at red alert. Taylor’s Dutch Angles in Wink of an Eye were overstated, but charming. These touches run the risk of inducing motion sickness.

The script for the episode is similarly clunky, leaning heavily on repetition to pad out the hour. Characters repeat information to one another. Arriving at Cheron to discover a dead world, Bele observes, “My people, all dead?” Kirk answers, “Yes, Commissioner, all of them.” Lokai does not seem to grasp this, and inquires, “No one alive?” Spock responds, “None at all, sir.” Similarly, there are a lot of scenes that never really go anywhere. The rather ominous sequence of Spock eavesdropping on Lokai never pays off. Kirk’s interactions with Bele never convince him to offer Lokai amnesty.

Charon’s gone.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield might be iconic and hugely influential piece of Star Trek , but it is not necessarily a good one. Then again, that appears to be a recurring theme this season.

Share this:

Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: cheron , fred frieberger , Gene L. Coon , iconic , jud taylor , let that be your last battlefield , oliver crawford , star trek , star trek: the original series |

16 Responses

>the ship’s science officer happens to catches the discussion while passing by an open door, which is a rather strange sight on the show.

There was something in Stark Trek Memories (quoting Justman?) which I loved: “Spock notices a door is ajar. When is a door not a door? When it’s a jar! Doors on the Enterprise are never ajar – they are either open or closed.”

You’ve noted previously how utopian Trek was gradually becoming at this point and I could see the bluntness of Bele’s racism as something which works in that light – for his racism to be wholly alien to a post-racial Federation. Certainly if this were season 1 Next Gen, Picard and Riker would have taken half a minute to tut-tut “the same self-destructive impulses which nearly wiped out our ancient 20th century ancestors!”

(but given the racist shade in many of McCoy’s remarks to Spock, that one set of people could hate another based on appearance/genes shouldn’t be that hard for Kirk’s crew to grasp)

Those 15 seconds where Bele explains the racism of his society are pretty good and sharp. Pity this episode is otherwise so padded.

I only recently realized the Gene L. Coon of Star Trek is the same Gene L. Coon of Combat! who wrote that series’ two-parter “Hills Are for Heroes,” probably the best story in the entire series and which had a definite anti-war sentiment. Now that I know more about Coon (largely thanks to you), I can see similarities in his season 1 anti-war Trek episodes.

I was actually thinking of that Justman quote while watching the episode. It’s a very strange storytelling choice.

There is a lot of clever stuff in here. Whenever Lokai makes a sound philosophical argument that abolishing slavery doesn’t mean a society is equal, for example. But there’s a weird refusal to commit to that idea in favour of a more “even-handed” and simplistic metaphor about how hatred destroys society. (And yes, the early TNG version of this episode that you suggest is easy to imagine. And it induces shudders.)

Well, this episode might be dated now, but my Dad saw it when it first aired, and he said it was quite shocking. Apparently, his parents were utterly befuddled by the concept that white people could have anything to do with racial problems beyond slavery, which had happened so many years ago it surely was no longer relevant.

(Swap out “mom and dad” for “alt-right news blog”)

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the Turks’ inability to face up to the Kurdish massacre. Intelligent, rational people go aggro if it is mentioned.

Or how about closer to home: the British Conservative party is using the Scottish National Party as a cudgel to batter Labour to death.

Is it the way with all subjugated cultures? We’ll let you join, but don’t get any funny ideas about raising your heads?

Well, to be fair, there’s also issues like slavery and the genocide of Native Americans in the United States.

If Ireland had been an imperial power, we’d probably have our fair share to own up to.

That’s a fair point, and it’s easy enough to lose sight of, I think.

And I do like that aspect of the episode, but there’s also this irritating desire to pull back from what was (at the time) a bold proposition. It seems disingenuous to say, “You have a point about systemic inequality, but please stop complaining about it because you’re contributing to the destruction of society.”

“Satrana, a creature rescued by the Enterprise, does indeed resemble a stereotypical devil, complete with red skin, pointed ears, arched eyebrows, two horns growing out of its head, and a forked tail.” Oddly enough, I seen racism against my character from Star Wars The Old Republic. I played as an honorable Sith Warrior, with red skin and yellow eyes, and yet a Youtuber on one of my videos dismissed all Sith as evil for having red skin, as if having that skin color made them the automatic bad guys. But then again, I liked the dichotomy of having red skin and yellow eyes, and having none of the preconceptions effect my character’s personality.

“Taylor’s suggestion to paint Bele and Lokai half-white and half-black was ingenious, but it was not nuanced.” While I agree that the episode severally missteps by siding with oppression and its favor to the privileged, there’s something about the screenshots you posted. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but the still pictures of the half-black half-white character seem to speak a million words. Maybe that’s why this episode was so iconic, just the image of the episode and the concept of the idea was enough to carry the message, that watching the episode was unnecessary.

“Taylor’s Dutch Angels in Wink of an Eye were overstated, but charming. These touches run the risk of inducing motion sickness.” Hey, the Dutch aren’t that nauseating. And I don’t remember any Dutch Angels from God spreading Calvinism and tulips in that episode!

Yep, I’d certainly agree with the point about the iconic quality of the episode. I’d go further and say that applies to the third season as a whole. The kiss in Plato’s Stepchildren. The Klingon cruiser. Kang as the iconic Klingon. Kahless the Unforgettable. The Tholians. There are so many great images here to which the franchise returns time and time again, even when those images are rooted in stories that are not great. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is just the exemplar of that trend. A bunch of striking images that can’t quite be sequenced into a good episode of television.

And fair point about the angels! Correcting!

A couple of things jump out at me about your analysis, which is, as usual, quite prescient.

First, the cultural reach of this rather mediocre episode. In the late 70s/early 80s, this was one of the few third season episodes featured on RCA’s “SelectaVision” CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc) anthology of the Star Trek series. It was regarded as important enough to occupy one side of a videodisc, itself in a collection of about 4 or 5 discs meant to be representative of the Star Trek series as a whole. Furthermore, when the MECO Company made dolls of the Star Trek phenomenon–this was about 1976, ’77, not long before the first film–as foils to the main characters they created a limited run of iconic villains from the series, and one of the figures they included was a half black/half white alien from this episode. I don’t recall if it was specifically identified as Bele or Lokai, but it didn’t matter. The visual was the whole point.

Second, as you were talking about the apocalyptic themes of season three, plus racism and the cultural shocks of 1968-69, I couldn’t help thinking of another depiction of these same themes from a decade later: Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” Set in Vietnam, but based on a source text from the classic age of imperialism–and dealing explicitly with genocide based upon racism–it’s an interesting counterpoint, deep and courageous, to this episode’s rather shallow and timid engagement with themes of racism, apocalypse and the Vietnam War. You’re certainly correct to assert that racial issues in America in the late 1960s, and especially after 1968, couldn’t be separated from Vietnam, which itself was linked with a Cold War context (and hence carried the potential, however nascent, of a world-destroying apocalypse). Vietnam was a racial war. The simplistic race war portrayed in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” dodges most of the nuance issues of race, violence and imperialism, but I don’t think they were lost on the audience. If I recall correctly this episode aired in the late fall of 1968 which was pretty much the low point of the various disasters that occurred in the ’60s. Interestingly, “Apocalypse Now,” though filmed in 1976-78, takes place at this exact same time. It might be a stretch to assert them as companion pieces, but there are commonalities.

I absolutely *love* your analyses of these episodes and the cultural and historical literacy you bring to them. I can’t wait to read more.

Thanks again Sean.

I’d forgotten that Apocalypse Now tracks exactly to this period in time, but you’re right. There definitely was something hanging in the air, to the point that Coppola could point to it even ten years later as an apocalyptic period.

I never knew that about the home media releases of the episode, or the dolls. All I know is modern pop culture references and those that friends and family slip casually into conversation. They couldn’t identify Kang as a Klingon because he lacks forehead ridges, for example, but they’d recognise Bele and Lokai. Which is really strange, as a fan.

They will never do a cheron woman only Paramount and CBS the only one they own of is the cheron man like lokia and bele ain’t that the truth I guess the fans get the other one

You seem to really want a Cheron woman.

Good day. I just came upon this website. Since we will be in the sane online business, There is a offer available. Hit me back, please. Best, Jenny

Thank you, Jimmy.

this episode is one of the most significant statements about racism in the history of television (i would argue it is comparable to MLKing’s I have a Dream speech): the supreme idiocy of racism, “i’m black on the right side, he’s white on right side”, the ignorance and primitiveness of it (and the obvious enlightenment of our heroes and their time with their bafflement at such perverse, backward, subhuman thinking; episodes such as this one are why Star Trek Lives! and will never be forgotten; lessons such as this (from the mind and heart of gene coon) are ST’s gifts to humanity; this episode is courageous, moral, thoughtful, significant; i saw it 50 yrs and it has never left my consciousness; all involved in presenting this have done an honorable act, and like Schindler’s List, this episode is “a good thing”.

I mean, it’s also an episode about how those opposing racism are just as bad as the racists, and we need to calm down and meet somewhere in the middle on the whole “racism is bad” thing. I’d argue that episodes like Errand of Mercy and even Day of the Dove make their points much more coherently by refusing to be as facile, and by acknowledging that our “heroes” can be just as flawed as the enemies they create, a more radical notion than anything in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield .

Leave a comment Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Recent Posts

• 373. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (#225)
• 371. Poor Things (#246)
• 370. Dune: Part Two (#12)
• 369. Memento (#57)
• 368. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (#154)

Recently tweeted…

• "I Simply Am Not There": The Existential Horror of Eighties Excess in "American Psycho"...
• X-Men: Operation Zero Tolerance (Review/Retrospective)
• Star Trek: Voyager (Reviews)
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Reviews)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Measure of a Man: Extended Cut (Review)

Available at…

Blogs Well Worth Your Time

• 1001 Must See Films
• Andrew at the Movies
• Anomalous Material
• Cut the Crap Movie Reviews
• Encore Entertainment
• Fandango Groovers
• FlixChatter
• Four of Them
• It Rains… You get Wet…
• Jameson Cult Film Blog
• Jar Watches Films
• Let's Go To The Movies
• M. Carter at the Movies
• Marshall and the Movies
• Movie News First
• Musings from a Man Lost in La Mancha
• Never Mind Pop Film
• Paragraph Film Reviews
• Roger Ebert's Journal
• Ross v. Ross
• Scannain.com
• Screenwriter (Donald Clarke, Irish Times)
• Strange Culture
• The Film Cynics
• The Pompous Film Snob
• The Projection Booth
• Things That Don't Suck
• Too Busy Thinking About My Comics
• Undy a Hundy

Film Nerd Resources

• CinemaBlend (News)
• Internet Movie Database
• Rope of Silicon
• The Guardian Film Blog
• James Berardinelli
• Roger Ebert

Email Subscription

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Sign me up!

Blog at WordPress.com. WP Designer.

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

Midnite Reviews

Detailed analysis of classic sci-fi movies and tv shows, star trek episode 70: let that be your last battlefield.

Technical Specs

Director: Jud Taylor

Writer: Oliver Crawford

Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Frank Gorshin, Lou Antonio, James Doohan, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, and Majel Barrett

Composer: Fred Steiner

Air Date: 1/10/1969

Stardate: 5730.2

Production #: 60043-70

While few would likely admit as much, even the most vile of human prejudices are often somewhat grounded in reality; however, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” acknowledges no such grey area while fleshing out its central thesis and may therefore fail to resonate with those who wish for a more penetrating commentary on the disputes and social injustices that motivated the Civil Rights movement.

Concluding Comments

Overall Quality: 6/10

If you enjoyed this post, please click the follow button or enter your email address in the subscription box to stay tuned for more updates.

Please note: Comments that are malicious, offensive, or excessively profane will be removed. Off-topic messages belong in the About section.

2 thoughts on “ Star Trek Episode 70: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield ”

This one has always been one of my least favorite episodes of the series, in a season filled with least favorite episodes. This one is another good example of why Season Three of STAR TREK is easily the lowest of the series. This is not surprising at all. It is very common among television shows..to get worse and worse as they go along, the further away they get into the series. Wasn’t there also a different producer this final season, as well as a blue font lettering, instead of the traditional yellow? Anyway, this is probably a bottom five for me..

Fred Freiberger’s replacement of Gene Roddenberry may very well have played a role in the diminished quality of many season three episodes. The series budget was also reduced by this point, which likely impacted the show’s creative direction (or lack thereof).

Comments are closed.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Challengers Link to Challengers
• Abigail Link to Abigail
• Arcadian Link to Arcadian

New TV Tonight

• Dead Boy Detectives: Season 1
• The Jinx: Season 2
• The Big Door Prize: Season 2
• Knuckles: Season 1
• Them: Season 2
• Velma: Season 2
• Secrets of the Octopus: Season 1
• Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story: Season 1
• We're Here: Season 4

Most Popular TV on RT

• Baby Reindeer: Season 1
• Fallout: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• Under the Bridge: Season 1
• The Sympathizer: Season 1
• Ripley: Season 1
• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• X-Men '97: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Baby Reindeer Link to Baby Reindeer
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

DC Animated Movies In Order: How to Watch 54 Original and Universe Films

The Best TV Seasons Certified Fresh at 100%

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

Poll: Most Anticipated Movies of May 2024

Poll: Most Anticipated TV and Streaming Shows of May 2024

• Trending on RT
• Challengers
• Play Movie Trivia

Star Trek – Season 3, Episode 15

Let that be your last battlefield, where to watch, star trek — season 3, episode 15.

Watch Star Trek — Season 3, Episode 15 with a subscription on Paramount+, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

More Like This

Cast & crew.

William Shatner

Capt. James T. Kirk

Leonard Nimoy

DeForest Kelley

Dr. Leonard McCoy

James Doohan

Engineer Montgomery Scott

Nichelle Nichols

George Takei

Episode Info

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Frank Gorshin

Frank Gorshin, who has died of lung cancer aged 71, was an impressionist, singer, comedian and actor. All of these talents were put to good use in his most famous role, the Riddler in the camp Batman TV series of the 1960s.

Clad in a green suit, green tights and bowler hat, all covered in question marks, Gorshin's cackling, frenzied portrayal of one of Batman's craftiest supervillains, whose catchphrase was "Riddle me this, Batman", not only set the tone for the hugely popular series, but inspired future nemeses of the "caped crusader". The rubber-faced Gorshin certainly influenced Jim Carrey's interpretation of the Riddler in Batman Forever (1995).

Like Carrey, Gorshin's big break came as an impersonator. "I do not do hundreds of impressions," Gorshin explained. "My entire repertoire of impressions numbers less than 50. I never set out to do an impression of a person. However, when something a star does suddenly sparks my imagination, I find myself doing an impression of him, first for my own amusement, later for audiences." Gorshin not only captured the voices of the personalities, but took on the facial and bodily characteristics of his subjects, without makeup. James Cagney, who thought Gorshin did the best impression of him, remarked, "One of us is doing it right."

Gorshin recalled: "My parents were both from Yugoslavia and didn't know any of the people I impersonated, so they couldn't understand why I was winning prizes. My mother did start going to movies and she'd often say, 'I saw someone who acts just like you.'"

Gorshin, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was the son of a railway worker and a seamstress. While in high school, he worked as an usher at a local cinema, and started doing impressions of film stars. Aged 17, he won a talent contest, his prize being a one-week engagement at the Carousel nightclub in Pittsburgh that launched his career. In 1956, after serving two years in the entertainment unit of the US Army in Korea, Gorshin landed a Hollywood agent and parts playing soldiers in a couple of second world war dramas. Now 22, his hair slicked back, he embarked on several B teen movies, Hot Rod Girl (1956), Dragstrip Girl (1957) and Invasion Of The Saucer Men (1957), in which Gorshin keeps a dead alien in his fridge.

Driving to Los Angeles from Pittsburgh for a part in Run Silent, Run Deep (1957), a submarine movie starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster (two of the stars he impersonated regularly), Gorshin fell asleep at the wheel and suffered a fractured skull. He lost the role but had recovered sufficiently in time to appear in Vincente Minnelli's Bells Are Ringing (1960), in which he did a brilliant send-up of a mumbling Brandoesque Method actor helped by an answering-service operator (Judy Holliday's last role).

Gorshin was one of the first impersonators to be top billed in the prime night spots in Las Vegas, and was on The Ed Sullivan Show the night the Beatles made their American TV debut in 1964. Before the broadcast, he looked out of the window of his hotel on 42nd and Broadway and saw hundreds of girls lined up. He turned around and asked, "Hey, how did they all know I was here?"

The offer to play the Riddler in the first Batman episode came soon after. "When I was first approached to play the Riddler, I thought it was a joke. Then, I discovered the show had a good script and agreed to do the role - I developed the Riddler's fiendish laugh at Hollywood parties. I listened to myself laugh and discovered that the funniest jokes brought out the high-pitched giggle I use on the show. With further study I came to realise that it wasn't so much how I laughed as what I laughed at that created a sense of menace."

Gorshin appeared as the Riddler in the 1966 spin-off film and remained in the series until 1969, the year he made a guest appearance in another cult show, Star Trek. In the episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, he was Emmy-nominated for playing a man from the planet Cheron, prejudiced against an alien who is black on the left side and white on the other, whereas his people have the opposite pigmentation.

In 1970 Gorshin made his Broadway debut, as the star of Jimmy, a musical based on the life of New York's Mayor James J Walker, and also starred in touring companies with Promises, Promises, Death Trap, On The 20th Century and Guys And Dolls.

In 1995, he played a doctor in Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. His last stage appearance was on Broadway as George Burns in the one-man show Say Goodnight, Gracie (2002). His valedictory performance was in the final episode of the CBS series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, broadcast on US television two days after his death.

Gorshin is survived by his wife since 1961, and a son.

· Frank Gorshin, impersonator and actor, born April 5 1934; died May 17 2005

Most viewed

Star Trek: Discovery Just Brought A Legendary Original Series Episode Back Into The Mix

Let's fly ... away from spoilers . Read no further if you haven't watched the latest episode of "Star Trek: Discovery."

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the strangest of them all? In "Star Trek," that title goes to one of the zaniest concepts ever introduced into the canon: The Mirror Universe. The idea of our alternate selves living completely different lives somewhere out there is no longer the sole domain of perhaps the nerdiest franchise in all of sci-fi (although shows like "For All Mankind," "Foundation," and "3 Body Problem" are creating some stiff competition), the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or the best episode of "Community" ever made . Fans might be surprised to find out that many in the scientific community believe the theory is worth discussion these days . But "Trek" put its own unmistakable fingerprints on the multiverse by emphasizing one in particular that stands at odds with the usual Prime Universe -- one that poses a fundamentally moral dilemma between the paragons of Starfleet we know and love, and the absolute worst versions of themselves.

It doesn't come as a huge surprise that "Star Trek: Discovery" would use its final season to travel full circle and return to the Mirror Universe that played such a significant role back in season 1 (even if, ironically, there might be a parallel universe out there where we were able to see  former showrunner Bryan Fuller's more complex and nuanced take on it ). But what's sure to shock and delight longtime fans in episode 5, aptly titled "Mirrors," is a deep-cut reference to arguably one of the most influential hours of "Trek" ever made, and the one that introduced the Mirror Universe in the first place.

Read more: Every Star Trek Show And Movie In Chronological Order

A Different Kind Of Black Mirror

There might not be any sinister goatees or chest-baring V-necks in sight throughout this episode of "Discovery," but the lasting effects of "The Original Series" episode "Mirror, Mirror" are plain to see. Upon entering the wormhole that took scavengers Moll (Eve Harlow) and L'ak (Elias Toufexis) into multidimensional space, Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Book (David Ajala) discover the wrecked remains of their ship ... alongside the still-functioning husk of a familiar-looking Starfleet vessel, emblazoned with the name, "ISS Enterprise." For those who haven't brushed up on their 1967 "Trek" lore (and, quite frankly, shame on you if that's the case), Burnham helpfully points out that this isn't exactly the same starship captained by the fabled James T. Kirk thousands of years ago. It's one that has somehow found its way from the depths of the Mirror Universe (the exact specifics are oddly brushed aside) and remained stranded ever since.

But then "Discovery" goes a step further and hearkens back to "Mirror, Mirror" more thematically. While exploring the derelict ship, Burnham and Book stumble upon information about the previous occupants of the ISS Enterprise and specifically that of a certain Kelpian who rose from a slave to a leader in his own right. That, of course, refers to none other than the Mirror version of Saru (Doug Jones) seen in season 3, whom Emperor Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) saved from certain death and pointed towards his proper path. Where the ending of "Mirror, Mirror" suggests that Mirror Spock is still "a man of integrity" despite the ruthlessness of the Empire he serves, "Discovery" reconfirms that even the comically rampant evil of the Mirror Universe is no match for the stubborn idealism of "Trek."

New episodes of "Star Trek: Discovery" stream on Paramount+ every Thursday.

Read the original article on SlashFilm

Den of Geek

Star Trek Just Addressed One of Deep Space Nine’s Biggest Unanswered Questions

The Star Trek: Discovery episode "Mirrors" includes a HUGE reveal about the Breen, an odd alien species from Deep Space Nine.

• Share on Facebook (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Twitter (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Linkedin (opens in a new tab)
• Share on email (opens in a new tab)

This Star Trek: Discovery article contains spoilers.

“I wonder what the Breen look like under those helmets?” asks Ezri Dax in the Deep Space Nine season seven episode “‘Till Death Do Us Part.” That’s a strange question, given that Ezri and Worf had been captured by the Breen and interrogated for some time. But despite their close and uncomfortable contact with the hostile alien species, neither hostage learned much about them.

“They say no one has ever seen one and lived to speak of it,” Worf answers.

Ezri continues in her usual lighthearted manner. “Maybe they’re all furry. It’s supposed to be very cold on Breen.”

Ad – content continues below

“One thing is certain.”

“They’re horrible cooks?”

“They are dangerous,” responds Worf, with even greater gravity than the Klingon usually assumes. “They do not tolerate incursions into their space. During the Second Empire, Chancellor Mow’ga sent a fleet of Klingon ships to conquer their homeworld, and they were never heard from again.”

Until today, that bit of dialogue encapsulated everything that Trekkies knew about the Breen. First mentioned in The Next Generation, the Breen appeared most prominently in the final season of Deep Space Nine , in which the Breen presented a threat that undid whatever gains the Federation had made in the Dominion War.

When the Dominion first entered the Alpha Quadrant through a wormhole from the Gamma Quadrant, they threatened to immediately overwhelm the Federation. As a result, the Federation had to align with longtime antagonists the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Star Empire. That confederation was more than a match for the Dominion/Cardassian alliance, but then the Dominion upped its hand by enlisting the terrifying Breen. It would take a miracle for the Alpha Quadrant forces to win. Fortunately, the Federation had a miracle on its side in the form of the Prophets (and the morally flexible Section 31 ) and won the war.

The Breen rarely appeared after Deep Space Nine concluded, and it’s easy to see why. They felt like they came from another universe, even moreso than the alien oddities that often appeared on Star Trek . With their monocular helmets and gravelly, indistinguishable voices, they felt like something out of Star Wars — specifically, they felt like riffs on Princess Leia’s bounty hunter disguise at the start of Return of the Jedi . Although they get a couple of nods in Voyager and, of course, Lower Decks , the Breen were largely relegated to a handful of non-canon novels.

That is, until the Star Trek: Discovery season five episode “ Mirrors .” In that episode, we finally learn that L’ak, a courier who has been chasing past Discovery in a search for Progenitor tech with his partner Moll, is a Breen who doesn’t wear helmet that hides his face, showing us for the first time what the species actually looks like under the armor. That’s a surprise because L’ak appeared to be just a regular green-skinned alien, a little lizard-esque in appearance, almost like a Reptilian Xindi from Enterprise .

Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!

In fact, “Mirrors” does a lot more than just show us the face of the Breen. We also learn more about their culture, getting a sense of why they refuse to use a Universal Translator in conversation with other races and of their political system. In a move that recalls another Star Wars property, The Mandalorian , the Breen consider their helmets their true faces, and in fact have a transparent look when they remove that helmet.

But as L’ak makes clear, the Breen have the capacity to change, something hinted by the warmth and softness performer Elias Toufexis brings to his imposing character. Not only has L’ak made his skin non-translucent, but he’s adopted Federation Standard (aka English) and moved beyond his hierarchical culture.

Those changes are a good thing, because the Breen have always created problems for Star Trek canon. As many fans have noted, although Worf insisted that no one had seen the Breen under their costumes, Kira and others stole Breen uniforms to move behind enemy lines at one point on the series. They must have gotten a glimpse of the Breen then, right?

For Ronald D. Moore , one of the key creatives during the ’90s Star Trek era, that’s not necessarily the case. “There’s nothing in those helmets. I don’t think there’s a guy in there, which is something we never got around to saying,” Moore said in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion . “Or maybe there’s a little slug, some tiny little creature in there. I never wanted them to be humanoid in any way.”

“Mirrors” goes against Moore’s wishes then, but that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Discovery started its life by radically altering the Klingons. Looks like it will be ending its life by radically altering the Breen. But this time, it’s for the better.

Star Trek: Discovery is streaming now on Paramount+.

Joe George | @jageorgeii

Joe George’s writing has appeared at Slate, Polygon, Tor.com, and elsewhere!