'Star Trek' Episode Review: 'Specter of the Gun'

Pros: Gene Coon has some good ideas.  McEveety's direction.

Cons: Gene Coon has some bad ideas. Low budget look and feel.

Spectre of the Gun
Stardate 4385.3 (Earth Calendar Date: 2268)
Episode Production Number: 056
Episode Number (aired): 61
Original Air Date: October 25, 1968
Written by Gene L. Coon (as Lee Cronin)
Directed by Vincent McEveety
 
On Stardate 4385.3, the starship USS Enterprise, commanded by Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) enters a star system inhabited by the isolated Melkotians. Its mission: to establish first contact with this cloistered civilization on behalf of the United Federation of Planets.

For Kirk and the 430-strong crew of the Enterprise, this assignment is one of the reasons why they’re on a five-year mission to “explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.” To the xenophobic Melkotians, however, the Federation’s intrusion into their space is most unwelcome.

 
Melkotian Buoy: [voice] Aliens. You have encroached on the space of the Melkot. You will turn back immediately. This is the only warning you will receive. 
Spock: Vulcan, Captain. 
Capt. Kirk: English. 
Chekov: It was Russian, sir. Every word. 
Uhura: No, Captain, it was Swahili. 
Capt. Kirk: Interesting. Telepathy. 
Spock: Unquestionably. Most impressive. 

The Melkotians try to dissuade the Enterprise from encroaching into their closed off system by blocking the starship’s path with a space buoy. The buoy is endowed with certain abilities, including addressing each of Kirk’s bridge crew in his or her native tongue. The captain hears the Melkotians’ “Go away…you are not welcome here,” demand in English; Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) hears it in Swahili. It also maneuvers so that whenever the Enterprise attempts to bypass it, the buoy matches the starship’s moves and prevents her from entering orbit around the Melkotians’ home world.

Kirk is as resolute in making first contact with the Melkotians as the Melkotians are in resisting his diplomatic overtures.  He ignores the aliens’ demands to be left alone and orders the destruction of the buoy. Bam. A blast of the ship’s phasers blows the buoy away and the Enterprise crosses into Melkotian space.

Kirk, First Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Chief Medical Officer Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott (James Doohan), and Ensign Pavel Chekov beam down to the planet surface – only to find that their tricorders and communicators are inoperative. Even more alarming: the five officers’ phasers have been transformed into six-shooter revolvers such as those used in the Old West on 19thCentury  Earth.

The Melkotians, having made clear that they consider Kirk and his crew to be an unwelcome infestation that must be eradicated, have decided to punish the trespassers by plunking them in a bizarre recreation of 1881-era Tombstone, Arizona.

It’s essentially a drawn-out execution – the Enterprise Five are cast as the ill-fated Clanton gang, the losers of the gunfight at the OK Corral. The Melkotians – who have taken the setting and characters of this drama from Kirk’s mind – have set it up so that the Tombstone inhabitants see Kirk, Spock and the rest as the five Clanton gang members who faced off against Wyatt Earp (Ron Soble), Virgil Earp (Charles Maxwell), Morgan Earp ((Rex Holman), and gun-toting dentist Doc Holliday (Sam Gillman). 

Although the Starfleet officers are trained in combat, the Earps and Holliday are ruthless and efficient gunfighters. And as imagined by a Kirk who probably romanticizes the Old West era too much, they are always spoiling for a fight.  Now the question is: will the ever-resourceful captain find a way out of this execution-by-any-other-name, or will history repeat itself with another deadly victory for the Earps?

My Take: Though Star Trek’s “two Genes” (creator Gene Roddenberry and writer-producer Gene L. Coon) left the series before the start of Season Three, Coon still contributed several scripts – using the pen name “Lee Cronin –   to be produced by show-runner Fred Freiberger. The first of these was a teleplay originally titled The Last Gunfight; during the editing process it was renamed Spectre of the Gun. 
 
(Contrary to Star Trek mythology, Coon did not adopt the “Lee Cronin” pen name because he didn’t want to be associated with this or any of the scripts he wrote for the show during Season Three. Considering that Coon, the guy behind the Kirk-Spock dynamic and major Trek concepts as the Prime Directive, had also turned in Spock’s Brain and Wink of an Eye, it is understandable that fans might think this was the case. The truth is that Coon was no longer under contract with Paramount, which produced Star Trek. He was working for Universal and couldn’t, for contractual reasons, use his real name in his capacity as a Star Trek guest writer.)

Spectre of the Gun was written at a time when Star Trek’s existence was in doubt. NBC, which never understood Roddenberry’s vision and didn’t know quite what to do with the show, wanted to cancel the show at the end of the second season.

When Roddenberry got word about NBC’s intentions, he quietly funded an organized effort by Bjo and her husband John to start a fan mail campaign intended to get NBC to change its corporate mind. After the network received over a million letters (but only admitted it had received 116,000), NBC announced Star Trek’s renewal for a third season. (In a behind-the-scenes featurette in the Star Trek: The Original Series Season Three DVD/Blu ray set, Bjo Trimble says the announcement was made as a voiceover during a rebroadcast of a Season Two episode; the NBC announcer, according to Trimble, closed the voice over by saying, “Please don’t send any more letters to the network!”)

Still, NBC didn’t know what it had in Star Trek; the programmers scheduled it to air on Friday nights at 10 (Eastern) to place Laugh-In in the time slot Gene Roddenberry had hoped to get – Monday night at 8.  Friday night at 10 was, and still is, called the Death Slot because that’s when most of the networks’ coveted viewers – males 18-34 – are either not at home or asleep. Even today, in a society that is beginning to turn away from rigidly-scheduled broadcast and cable TV and embracing non-traditional streaming and mobile media, putting a series in the Death Slot practically guarantees its cancellation.

When it was being written as The Last Gunfight, NBC had not yet told Roddenberry that the show was going to be placed in the Death Slot. Instead, the focus of Coon (as Cronin) was on expanding Walter Koenig’s Ensign Chekov character so the show could attract young fans by creating a Star Trek counterpart to The Monkees’ Davy Jones.  This was a concept that the network was eager to embrace, so the challenge for Coon was to come up with stories in which Chekov had a substantial amount of screen time.

In Spectre of the Gun, Chekov’s Melkotian-created Tombstone role is that of  Clanton gang member “Billy Clairborne.” Supposedly the youngest participant of the infamous gunfight, Chekov/Clairborne gets to play both action and romance scenes. He exchanges gunfire with the Earps and gets loving hugs, massages and kisses from the beautiful Sylvia (Bonnie Beecher). 

Coon also gives Walter Koenig a chance to show Chekov’s humorous side:

 
Capt. Kirk: [as Sylvia kisses Chekov passionately] Um, Mr. Chekov? 
Chekov: [slowly disengaging] What can I do, Keptin? You know we're always supposed to maintain good relations with the natives.

However, although Spectre of the Gun is not as dismal as Coon/Cronin’s Spock’s Brain, it is an episode that reflects Star Trek’s qualitative slide as a result of Fred Freiberger’s “new vision” for the show.

Star Trek’s budgets had never been lavish even when it was owned by the more supportive Desilu Studios, the Lucille Ball-owned company which produced the series for NBC.  Roddenberry and his creative team found inventive ways to compensate for this – using the concept of “parallel Earths” allowed the show to reuse existing props and costumes to tell cool sci-fi stories set in worlds which echoed 1920s Chicago or 1930s era Nazi Germany.

But NBC and Paramount slashed the budgets so drastically that Freiberger had to make episodes which were either set entirely aboard the Enterprise or "planets" created on sets that look, well, stagy.

Spectre of the Gun was initially written as an on-location episode which required full-scale outdoors sets suitable for Westerns. Freiberger, who had to make do with the per-episode budget handed down by the suits, said it was too expensive.  Instead, only partial facades and weird, barebones sets were used to recreate Kirk’s imaginary version of 1881 Tombstone.

Obviously, the weird visuals of the episode work against it. But it’s Coon/Cronin’s somewhat uneven teleplay that makes Spectre of the Gun a difficult story to like.

First, it once again pits Capt. Kirk and his crew against aliens who possess powers to distort reality and manipulate time and space. It’s an intriguing concept if handled correctly (the Organians in Errand of Mercy and the Talosians seen in The Cage and The Menagerie are good examples of super-powerful aliens), but to see Kirk constantly outwit this type of alien gets to be a tired cliché. In this episode, that tired cliché is overused and wears out even the most loyal of Trek fans.  (It’s not even a logically-driven cliché, either. For instance, if the Melkotians are so powerful and can get into “ordinary” human minds and successfully mess with them, why not simply plant into Kirk’s mind the idea that the Melkotian system doesn’t exist? Why is there just one Melkotian buoy deployed?)

Second, although Coon came up with the notion of the Prime Directive – which forbids Starfleet personnel from interfering with other cultures’ development, he tells a story in which the Federation seeks first contact with a race that clearly wants to be left alone. It doesn’t matter if the Federation is a well-meaning alliance of diverse worlds which promotes intergalactic peace and peaceful scientific cooperation.

Here, the Federation is acting like the U.S. did in the 1850s, casting Kirk as the 23rd Century equivalent of Commodore Perry, the American naval officer who “opened” an isolated and xenophobic  Japan to the West.  Kirk’s insistence on plowing the Enterprise into Melkotian space and the ensuing destruction of the aliens’ buoy reflect the negative aspects of American gunboat diplomacy in science fiction terms. The effect is, of course, unflattering to those of us who see Star Trek as a guide to what humanity can do if it harnesses its abilities in a positive fashion.  

That’s not to say that Spectre of the Gun is all Star Dreck.  Coon injects some of the show’s trademark humor into the story, and director Vincent McEveety gets good performances from the series’ regular cast and the various guest stars.