"Star Trek: The Original Series" episode review: "Patterns of Force"
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Pros: Interesting, if slightly flawed concept. Good script. Nice acting.
Cons: Tends to perpetuate the myth of Nazi efficiency. Otherwise, none.
Patterns of Force: Parallel Worlds, TV Production Politics and Star Trek Explained
Considering the socio-cultural and financial success of Paramount’s Star Trek franchise – a multi-media colossus rivaled perhaps only by J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and George Lucas’ Star Wars empires – over the past 46 years, it’s hard to remember the reality that Gene Roddenberry’s Original Series was not given too much support from NBC, the network on which it originally aired.
Of course, to those fans who saw Star Trek during its broadcast network run (1966-1969) and those who latched on to Trekker status in the decade that followed its cancellation and eventual rebirth in syndication, the show’s struggles to survive on the air is part of the Star Trek legend.
Star Trek was, after all, the first show in history to be saved from the programmers’ axe by a fan-organized letter-writing campaign, and it was the first “failed” show to launch not just 11 feature films but four TV spin-offs (five, if you count Filmation’s Star Trek: The Animated Series, which Paramount clearly does not).
Even if most TV viewers are not aware of the Byzantine machinations that go on in the TV industry – especially in the relationship between networks and series creators/showrunners – it sometimes is very easy to tell which shows or genres are heartily supported by their parent studios and/or host networks.
If, for instance, you see a nighttime soap (such as Dallas) or police procedural drama – the CSI triumvirate, say – you know that the network executives support them because they are heavily promoted and adequately budgeted.
Even in the 21st Century, with broadcast networks relying more on cheaper-to-produce reality shows and talent competitions and ceding the TV-movie and miniseries business to the big cable networks, network execs invest heavily in shows which promise good ratings and a steady flow of advertising revenue.
Because no one at NBC had a crystal ball to help foresee Star Trek’s future or had done demographic studies to show the network that the show did have an audience among the 18-35 young adult crowd, NBC’s budget allowances to Gene Roddenberry and his line producers were almost penurious.
It’s quite likely that Star Trek’s production crew would have liked to give viewers a better-looking Starship Enterprise and more exotic alien worlds and races, but the lack of funding forced Roddenberry (and later, Fred Freiberger) to use whatever resources the show could tap into within its limited means.
One creative trick Roddenberry resorted to was the “Parallel Worlds” concept. The producer came up with the rationale that posits since there are billions of stars in our galaxy, even if only a small percentage have planetary systems, then there must be millions of Earth-like planets capable of sustaining human like life.
Roddenberry argued further that given a set of certain circumstances – say, like interference on a human-dominated civilization by Earth explorers or sheer coincidence – some of the planets visited by starships such as Enterprise would have developed societies and cultures which mirrored our own.
As intriguing as Roddenberry’s stated Parallel World’s concept may be to the die-hard fan, there is a simple reason why episodes such as Bread and Circuses – which depicted a Roman Empire which had survived well into the 20th Century and had cars, TV and machine guns – and Patterns of Force were produced: Star Trek could use existing sets, costumes and props owned by Paramount, even if those had been created for Westerns, sword-and-sandal epics or World War II movies.
Patterns of Force
No Stardate Given, but c. Earth Calendar Year 2268
Original Air Date: February 18, 1968
Written by John Meredyth Lucas
Directed by Vincent McEveety
On an unspecified stardate during the fourth year of the Starship Enterprise’s five-year mission of exploration under the command of Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner), she is en route to the planet Ekos. Her assignment: to look into the apparent disappearance of John Gill (David Brian), a respected cultural observer and one of Capt. Kirk’s instructors at Starfleet Academy. Gill is a proponent of the thesis that history is best understood in terms of cause-and-effect rather than as a dry collection of dates and events.
Located in the M43 Alpha Star System, Ekos and its sibling world, Zeon, are M-class (Earth-like) planets which support human (or very human-like) inhabitants with technology very similar to late 20thCentury Terran standard.
Shockingly, the Enterprise finds herself targeted by what appears to be an old-fashioned ICBM armed with a thermonuclear warhead, a primitive weapon by the standards of the 23rd Century but far too advanced for the previously reported tech levels existing on Ekos upon Gill’s arrival some time before.
Although the starship fends off the attack easily, nevertheless Kirk and First Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy) are alarmed by this unexpected turn of events; such a technological leap forward by the Ekosians indicates that Gill has, for unknown reasons, violated the Federation’s Prime Directive and deliberately interfered in the planet’s socio-cultural development. Determined to find out why, the two Enterprise officers beam down in search of Gill.
"Unbelievable... do you recognize those uniforms?"
"Mid twentieth century Earth. The nation state called Nazi Germany."
- Kirk and Spock
To their horror, Kirk and Spock find that Ekos is a near-perfect carbon copy of Germany during the period of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich (1933-1945), albeit a version with technology levels slightly higher than those of 1960s Earth. (Imagine, for instance, a Nazi Germany with nukes and spacecraft capable of interplanetary travel and you have Ekos.)
Because it’s highly unlikely that a “parallel world” scenario could have replicated one of the most odious regimes in Earth history, it’s obvious to Kirk and Spock that this Ekosian Reich, which uses the same uniforms, insignia, salutes, terminology and even racial policies as Nazi Germany, is proof that Gill has carried out an ill-conceived cultural experiment – and it has gone disastrously wrong.
Worse still, Kirk’s former history professor has not only introduced Hitler’s Fuhrerprinzip (leadership principle) to Ekos, but he has become the Fuhrer of Ekos – another serious violation of the Prime Directive.
Determined to find out why Gill has done this, Kirk and Spock steal some Nazi uniforms and begin looking for this “rogue academician” who has seriously disrupted the Ekosians’ normal cultural evolution.
"Lieutenant? Better see a doctor, you don't look well... your color!"
"Yes, I shall tend to it, Major."
"Lieutenant! Your helmet... remove it!"
"We have urgent business with the Fuhrer!"
"Lieutenant! Remove your helmet!!"
- Kirk and Spock discovered by an SS-Major
But before too long, Kirk and Spock are captured, interrogated and tortured, then taken before Chairman Eneg (Patrick Horgan). Spock’s disguise is removed during this process, revealing his Vulcan features to the racially-prejudiced Nazis.
Still suffering from their ill-treatment by the Ekosian SS, Capt. Kirk and
Spock are locked in a dungeon along with a Zeon resistance fighter named Isak (Richard Evans), who tells them how the Ekosians morphed into the present Nazi system not long after Gill arrived on the planet.
"How would you classify this one?"
"Very difficult. Note the sinister eyes and the malformed ears. Definitely an inferior race."
- Daras and Melakon, on Spock
Incarcerated on a world patterned after one of history’s most ruthless regimes, Kirk and Spock must somehow find a way to escape, return to the Enterprise and eventually find Fuhrer John Gill before Ekos and Deputy Fuhrer Melakon (Skip Homeier) launch a space fleet on an invasion of the planet Zeon to implement a 23rd Century Final Solution against its inhabitants. The question is: will they?
My Take: Though Gene Roddenberry and the production staff often took great pains to come up with answers to such questions as Why do aliens in Star Trek always speak English and Why do certain humanoid-dominated planets look remarkably like Earth of the 1960s, the reasons were, and still are, extremely simple. For instance, the aliens – which tended to look like humans but garbed with exotic costumes designed by William Ware Theiss – had to be portrayed by English-speaking actors since Central Casting couldn’t hire actual ETs.
Star Trek also could not very well send camera crews out into deep space to find actual Class-M planets and shoot on location, a fact that is still true in the 2010s as it was back in 1968. Creating those strange new worlds on studio sets and a few locations not far from Los Angeles was possible, but to really make uniquely alien locations was expensive.
Given the skimpy funding which Desilu/Paramount and NBC doled out, the only way that Roddenberry and his crew could depict worlds beyond Earth was to use whatever resources they had available and write stories about “parallel worlds.”
Patterns of Force is a perfect example of how Star Trek compensated for its low production budgets through creative storytelling and get away with it somewhat successfully.
The episode was penned by second season producer John Meredyth Lucas, who got his start in Hollywood when director Michael Curtiz, his stepfather, got him his first job. Because he was heavily involved in the production end of the show, Lucas might have gotten the idea to blend Nazi-era stock footage and Paramount Pictures’ large collection of World War II movie uniforms along with a plausible Star Trek scenario of cultural engineering gone wrong.
Though I think it’s not one of the best “parallel worlds” episodes (A Piece of the Action is much better), Patterns of Force works reasonably well once the viewer suspends disbelief and accepts the premise of an idealistic academician who mistakenly duplicates Nazi Germany’s “efficient” society without leaving out its ruthless and evil philosophies.
What I think Lucas was aiming for in Patterns of Force was to illustrate George Santayana’s famous maxim “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.” For the most part, the episode reflects this theme very clearly; at one point, Gill himself says, "Even historians fail to learn from history. They repeat the same mistakes."
Of course, World War II buffs who have read books written by Ian Kershaw, Max Hastings and other contemporary military historians will probably have a field day picking Lucas’ story apart. After all, if Gill is such an eminent historian and cultural expert in the 23rd Century, wouldn’t he know that the Third Reich was not as efficient as popular myth portrays it?
The image of Hitler’s well-oiled and ruthlessly efficient “People’s Society” was a creation of Nazi propaganda between 1933 and 1945, and even Allied counter-propaganda campaigns somehow helped keep this myth alive in some fashion for several decades after the end of World War II.
However, the real Third Reich was never an efficient monolith where industry, government, the military, the secret police and the Nazi Party coordinated their efforts to further Germany’s national goals. On the contrary, Nazi Germany was a collection of fiefdoms controlled by a plethora of competing Nazi chieftains, ruled somewhat erratically by a megalomaniac Fuhrer with delusions of invincibility.
Obviously, Lucas was not writing a treatise on Nazi Germany nor was he aiming for total historical accuracy; Star Trek was, and still is, a TV action-adventure series with a science fiction backdrop which allowed writers to sneak in social commentary about issues such as war, peace, the role of technology in modern society, sex, gender roles and racial equality.
However, Lucas apparently bought into the then-prevalent mythology of Nazi hyper-efficiency, which was still widely-believed by most Americans in the 1960s.
Patterns of Force features some nice acting by both the regular cast and the guest actors. The series’ trio of leading actors – Shatner, Nimoy and DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy) — turn in really watchable performances, while Homeier, Horgan, Evans and Valora Norland as Daras acquit themselves well in their roles as either Nazi Ekosians or their Zeon counterparts.
This episode has been given a few digital makeovers as part of CBS-Paramount’s 40th anniversary remastered DVD project of 2006, which means that some of the special effects shots from the 1960s edition have been altered or replaced altogether.
Patterns of Force actually only required a handful of visual changes. The most obvious are shots of the Starship Enterprise in spaceflight and firing phasers at the Ekosian nuclear missile, and Ekos itself now looks more like a realistic Earth-like world as seen from space.
Considering the socio-cultural and financial success of Paramount’s Star Trek franchise – a multi-media colossus rivaled perhaps only by J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and George Lucas’ Star Wars empires – over the past 46 years, it’s hard to remember the reality that Gene Roddenberry’s Original Series was not given too much support from NBC, the network on which it originally aired.
Of course, to those fans who saw Star Trek during its broadcast network run (1966-1969) and those who latched on to Trekker status in the decade that followed its cancellation and eventual rebirth in syndication, the show’s struggles to survive on the air is part of the Star Trek legend.
Star Trek was, after all, the first show in history to be saved from the programmers’ axe by a fan-organized letter-writing campaign, and it was the first “failed” show to launch not just 11 feature films but four TV spin-offs (five, if you count Filmation’s Star Trek: The Animated Series, which Paramount clearly does not).
Even if most TV viewers are not aware of the Byzantine machinations that go on in the TV industry – especially in the relationship between networks and series creators/showrunners – it sometimes is very easy to tell which shows or genres are heartily supported by their parent studios and/or host networks.
If, for instance, you see a nighttime soap (such as Dallas) or police procedural drama – the CSI triumvirate, say – you know that the network executives support them because they are heavily promoted and adequately budgeted.
Even in the 21st Century, with broadcast networks relying more on cheaper-to-produce reality shows and talent competitions and ceding the TV-movie and miniseries business to the big cable networks, network execs invest heavily in shows which promise good ratings and a steady flow of advertising revenue.
Because no one at NBC had a crystal ball to help foresee Star Trek’s future or had done demographic studies to show the network that the show did have an audience among the 18-35 young adult crowd, NBC’s budget allowances to Gene Roddenberry and his line producers were almost penurious.
It’s quite likely that Star Trek’s production crew would have liked to give viewers a better-looking Starship Enterprise and more exotic alien worlds and races, but the lack of funding forced Roddenberry (and later, Fred Freiberger) to use whatever resources the show could tap into within its limited means.
One creative trick Roddenberry resorted to was the “Parallel Worlds” concept. The producer came up with the rationale that posits since there are billions of stars in our galaxy, even if only a small percentage have planetary systems, then there must be millions of Earth-like planets capable of sustaining human like life.
Roddenberry argued further that given a set of certain circumstances – say, like interference on a human-dominated civilization by Earth explorers or sheer coincidence – some of the planets visited by starships such as Enterprise would have developed societies and cultures which mirrored our own.
As intriguing as Roddenberry’s stated Parallel World’s concept may be to the die-hard fan, there is a simple reason why episodes such as Bread and Circuses – which depicted a Roman Empire which had survived well into the 20th Century and had cars, TV and machine guns – and Patterns of Force were produced: Star Trek could use existing sets, costumes and props owned by Paramount, even if those had been created for Westerns, sword-and-sandal epics or World War II movies.
Patterns of Force
No Stardate Given, but c. Earth Calendar Year 2268
Original Air Date: February 18, 1968
Written by John Meredyth Lucas
Directed by Vincent McEveety
On an unspecified stardate during the fourth year of the Starship Enterprise’s five-year mission of exploration under the command of Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner), she is en route to the planet Ekos. Her assignment: to look into the apparent disappearance of John Gill (David Brian), a respected cultural observer and one of Capt. Kirk’s instructors at Starfleet Academy. Gill is a proponent of the thesis that history is best understood in terms of cause-and-effect rather than as a dry collection of dates and events.
Located in the M43 Alpha Star System, Ekos and its sibling world, Zeon, are M-class (Earth-like) planets which support human (or very human-like) inhabitants with technology very similar to late 20thCentury Terran standard.
Shockingly, the Enterprise finds herself targeted by what appears to be an old-fashioned ICBM armed with a thermonuclear warhead, a primitive weapon by the standards of the 23rd Century but far too advanced for the previously reported tech levels existing on Ekos upon Gill’s arrival some time before.
Although the starship fends off the attack easily, nevertheless Kirk and First Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy) are alarmed by this unexpected turn of events; such a technological leap forward by the Ekosians indicates that Gill has, for unknown reasons, violated the Federation’s Prime Directive and deliberately interfered in the planet’s socio-cultural development. Determined to find out why, the two Enterprise officers beam down in search of Gill.
"Unbelievable... do you recognize those uniforms?"
"Mid twentieth century Earth. The nation state called Nazi Germany."
- Kirk and Spock
To their horror, Kirk and Spock find that Ekos is a near-perfect carbon copy of Germany during the period of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich (1933-1945), albeit a version with technology levels slightly higher than those of 1960s Earth. (Imagine, for instance, a Nazi Germany with nukes and spacecraft capable of interplanetary travel and you have Ekos.)
Because it’s highly unlikely that a “parallel world” scenario could have replicated one of the most odious regimes in Earth history, it’s obvious to Kirk and Spock that this Ekosian Reich, which uses the same uniforms, insignia, salutes, terminology and even racial policies as Nazi Germany, is proof that Gill has carried out an ill-conceived cultural experiment – and it has gone disastrously wrong.
Worse still, Kirk’s former history professor has not only introduced Hitler’s Fuhrerprinzip (leadership principle) to Ekos, but he has become the Fuhrer of Ekos – another serious violation of the Prime Directive.
Determined to find out why Gill has done this, Kirk and Spock steal some Nazi uniforms and begin looking for this “rogue academician” who has seriously disrupted the Ekosians’ normal cultural evolution.
"Lieutenant? Better see a doctor, you don't look well... your color!"
"Yes, I shall tend to it, Major."
"Lieutenant! Your helmet... remove it!"
"We have urgent business with the Fuhrer!"
"Lieutenant! Remove your helmet!!"
- Kirk and Spock discovered by an SS-Major
But before too long, Kirk and Spock are captured, interrogated and tortured, then taken before Chairman Eneg (Patrick Horgan). Spock’s disguise is removed during this process, revealing his Vulcan features to the racially-prejudiced Nazis.
Still suffering from their ill-treatment by the Ekosian SS, Capt. Kirk and
Spock are locked in a dungeon along with a Zeon resistance fighter named Isak (Richard Evans), who tells them how the Ekosians morphed into the present Nazi system not long after Gill arrived on the planet.
"How would you classify this one?"
"Very difficult. Note the sinister eyes and the malformed ears. Definitely an inferior race."
- Daras and Melakon, on Spock
Incarcerated on a world patterned after one of history’s most ruthless regimes, Kirk and Spock must somehow find a way to escape, return to the Enterprise and eventually find Fuhrer John Gill before Ekos and Deputy Fuhrer Melakon (Skip Homeier) launch a space fleet on an invasion of the planet Zeon to implement a 23rd Century Final Solution against its inhabitants. The question is: will they?
My Take: Though Gene Roddenberry and the production staff often took great pains to come up with answers to such questions as Why do aliens in Star Trek always speak English and Why do certain humanoid-dominated planets look remarkably like Earth of the 1960s, the reasons were, and still are, extremely simple. For instance, the aliens – which tended to look like humans but garbed with exotic costumes designed by William Ware Theiss – had to be portrayed by English-speaking actors since Central Casting couldn’t hire actual ETs.
Star Trek also could not very well send camera crews out into deep space to find actual Class-M planets and shoot on location, a fact that is still true in the 2010s as it was back in 1968. Creating those strange new worlds on studio sets and a few locations not far from Los Angeles was possible, but to really make uniquely alien locations was expensive.
Given the skimpy funding which Desilu/Paramount and NBC doled out, the only way that Roddenberry and his crew could depict worlds beyond Earth was to use whatever resources they had available and write stories about “parallel worlds.”
Patterns of Force is a perfect example of how Star Trek compensated for its low production budgets through creative storytelling and get away with it somewhat successfully.
The episode was penned by second season producer John Meredyth Lucas, who got his start in Hollywood when director Michael Curtiz, his stepfather, got him his first job. Because he was heavily involved in the production end of the show, Lucas might have gotten the idea to blend Nazi-era stock footage and Paramount Pictures’ large collection of World War II movie uniforms along with a plausible Star Trek scenario of cultural engineering gone wrong.
Though I think it’s not one of the best “parallel worlds” episodes (A Piece of the Action is much better), Patterns of Force works reasonably well once the viewer suspends disbelief and accepts the premise of an idealistic academician who mistakenly duplicates Nazi Germany’s “efficient” society without leaving out its ruthless and evil philosophies.
What I think Lucas was aiming for in Patterns of Force was to illustrate George Santayana’s famous maxim “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.” For the most part, the episode reflects this theme very clearly; at one point, Gill himself says, "Even historians fail to learn from history. They repeat the same mistakes."
Of course, World War II buffs who have read books written by Ian Kershaw, Max Hastings and other contemporary military historians will probably have a field day picking Lucas’ story apart. After all, if Gill is such an eminent historian and cultural expert in the 23rd Century, wouldn’t he know that the Third Reich was not as efficient as popular myth portrays it?
The image of Hitler’s well-oiled and ruthlessly efficient “People’s Society” was a creation of Nazi propaganda between 1933 and 1945, and even Allied counter-propaganda campaigns somehow helped keep this myth alive in some fashion for several decades after the end of World War II.
However, the real Third Reich was never an efficient monolith where industry, government, the military, the secret police and the Nazi Party coordinated their efforts to further Germany’s national goals. On the contrary, Nazi Germany was a collection of fiefdoms controlled by a plethora of competing Nazi chieftains, ruled somewhat erratically by a megalomaniac Fuhrer with delusions of invincibility.
Obviously, Lucas was not writing a treatise on Nazi Germany nor was he aiming for total historical accuracy; Star Trek was, and still is, a TV action-adventure series with a science fiction backdrop which allowed writers to sneak in social commentary about issues such as war, peace, the role of technology in modern society, sex, gender roles and racial equality.
However, Lucas apparently bought into the then-prevalent mythology of Nazi hyper-efficiency, which was still widely-believed by most Americans in the 1960s.
Patterns of Force features some nice acting by both the regular cast and the guest actors. The series’ trio of leading actors – Shatner, Nimoy and DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy) — turn in really watchable performances, while Homeier, Horgan, Evans and Valora Norland as Daras acquit themselves well in their roles as either Nazi Ekosians or their Zeon counterparts.
This episode has been given a few digital makeovers as part of CBS-Paramount’s 40th anniversary remastered DVD project of 2006, which means that some of the special effects shots from the 1960s edition have been altered or replaced altogether.
Patterns of Force actually only required a handful of visual changes. The most obvious are shots of the Starship Enterprise in spaceflight and firing phasers at the Ekosian nuclear missile, and Ekos itself now looks more like a realistic Earth-like world as seen from space.
Adolf Hitler
Gene Roddenberry
Nazi Germany
parallel words
Star Trek
Star Trek: The Original Series
Third Reich
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