Kirk Your Enthusiasm (4)

By: Stephanie Burt
August 2, 2012

Fourth in a series of posts, each one analyzing a single Captain Kirk scene from the Star Trek canon.

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“No kill I” | “Devil in the Dark” | Star Trek: The Original Series | Season 1, Episode 25 | March 1967

The first Star Trek depicted an empire whose representatives sounded and acted American and tried hard to act benign, with Captain James Tiberius Kirk as its symbolic, charismatic agent in charge. Episodes about aliens and other “natives” were almost always reformist; they portrayed the conversion of old-fashioned outlooks, where “natives” are disregarded or enslaved, into better ones where aliens got respect.

That transformation is one subject of “Devil in the Dark,” in which the unseen monster killing off Janus VI’s miners turns out to be the silicon-based horta, defending her mineral eggs; she not only deserves protection, but invites it, carving “No Kill I” in acid on stone. By the end, miners and horta have moved from a mutually destructive plot — we kill it, or it kills us — to a modus vivendi.

KIRK: Well, Spock, I’m going to have to ask you to get in touch with the Horta again. Tell her our proposition. She and her children can do all the tunneling they want. Our people will remove the minerals, and each side will leave the other alone.

That’s an extraction industry that hurts nobody, at least until minerals run out (we are told they are superabundant); it rests not only on explicit contract, but on the leverage each side keeps — if the human miners damage the eggs, the Horta can just start to kill them again.

It’s a shift from absent-mindedly genocidal extractive institutions to mutual respect and hands-off cooperation: and it’s a shift that historically, in real life, has proven very, very hard to make, both because “natives” rarely have such leverage, and because hatred, let loose, becomes hard to tamp down (cf. Frantz Fanon).

KIRK: The Horta is intelligent, peaceful, mild. She had no objection to sharing this planet with you, till you broke into her nursery and started destroying her eggs. Then she fought back in the only way she knew how, as any mother would fight when her children are in danger.

But what about the miners: agents of empire, armed victims, outpost people? Aren’t they angry too? They are, and it’s Kirk — who admits to that anger — who knows how to deal with them. It’s Kirk, who first realizes that he need not shoot the Horta, who stops the miners:

KIRK: Don’t fire! First man that fires is dead.

VANDERBERG: That thing has killed fifty of my men.

KIRK: You’ve killed thousands of her children.

Captain Kirk has to be as big and loud and dramatic as possible, sharing the miners’ tense energy but not their impulsiveness, in order to get the miners to hear what Spock says, to bring them to the point of accepting a mutually beneficial deal. How many real public figures, in the colonies or in the metropole, have been able to speak to the army, to the commanders of extractive institutions, to the leaders of outpost peoples, and get them to change, even at the point of a gun?

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What do you think?

Adam McGovern says:

August 2, 2012 at 9:20 am

Acknowledging pain while getting people to see that it’s shared by their adversaries, would that be so hard? Of course it would also involve getting people to see that their adversaries are also people. And identification is currency with leaders more shortsighted than Kirk was modeled to be (ones who stay on top through the acclimation of the mob, not advance their society with the consent of the whole public). Everything I know, Star Trek tried to teach me, and this, Stephen, is a damn good listen.
Esoth says:

August 2, 2012 at 3:09 pm

I was always curious as to what precisely, other than survival, was the benefit to the Hortas, in their rapprochement with the minors? This was 1967 and the Snail Darter would not become widely known for a few years yet, but no consideration seems to have been given for having the miners find their pergium somewhere else so that the Hortas habitat might be preserved. I suppose so sturdy a silicon-based life might be impervious to industrial wastes, but the creature’s intelligence suggested there was such a thing as quality of life for a Horta, beyond survival.

“The Devil in the Dark” was first season TOS, but they were already confident and/or daring and ambitious enough to move toward other genres, as the episode has it’s who-dunnit aspects. I always liked the gruff casting of veteran actor Ken Lynch, who was at-home in an industrial setting as he was out-of-place in a trippy space opera. It is a nice touch that doing the right thing has a financial kicker for the miners, as they are spared the expense of having to do all that tunneling themselves.

And the resolution of the obscured moral dilemma in “The Devil in the Dark” became one of my favorite Trekian tropes. Who better than Kirk to turn a personal epiphany into an impassioned plea and denouement of this week’s planetary peril? But before he could rise to the occasion, Kirk had to first cover the moral terrain on his own and on foot. There is this dynamic within him of being at the outset the predictable determined and decisive commander of events and men, which is then quieted by the surprising development of the Horta’s sentience. And then a pensive Kirk swells, not with what the actor’s ungenerous critics might see as self-aggrandizement, but with the merit and substance of the ideas and principles as they are revealed to him. In this way the preachiness of TOS is softened because Kirk is sharing his self-discovery rather than simply lecturing. To my eyes and to my tastes, Kirk pulled this off more convincingly every other week, than all of the hundreds of millions in dollars and effects propping up Sully in “Avatar”.
Adam McGovern says:

August 2, 2012 at 4:44 pm

New life and new civilized-ness is being found in these threads — a superbly charitable and perceptive validation of Shatner’s emotive style, Esoth, framing it as making an intellectual process tangible. And how ’bout a pop-political free association: “Horta Hears a Who”? It never occurred to me.
Greg says:

August 3, 2012 at 1:15 pm

Really interesting thread, following a ‘fascinating’ piece. TOS politics are tricky dishes.

But I think there’s a benefit for Ma Horta in keeping the
Federation around — they’re one of the least worst imperialist industrialists. If the Federation abandoned the site then less liberal interstellar interests might have attempted to weigh in..

Perhaps this was said off screen — as it’s not an unfamiliar imperialist self-justification. Some of the British Empire’s territories were maintained, partially, by hegemonic notion that you were better off with Queen Victoria than with the French. Or certainly the Belgians.
Jessica says:

August 8, 2012 at 11:35 pm

Unfortunately, I was unable to read this analysis due to the spelling error with KHAN. KHAN means sovereign or ruler, a fitting name for Khan Noonien Singh. Kahn is the German word for a small boat.

The dichotomy is too jarring for me to continue. Please emend.
Joshua Glenn says:

August 9, 2012 at 2:15 pm

Fixed! Thanks, everyone who pointed out the error. As series editor, all blame accrues to me.
Adam McGovern says:

August 9, 2012 at 4:30 pm

Couldn’t Kirk’s biblical word-quake just cause the laws of identity themself to waver as the callout dissipates through archetype-space? And anyway I can’t go on if you’re gonna claim that Montalban isn’t a fellow Jew. (Btw why aren’t we reading this beneath the Kahn post? See what I did there…)
Peggy says:

August 13, 2012 at 1:55 pm

The imperialist card is rendered razor-edged given the US war in Vietnam at that time, with the Horta representing the dehumanization of the enemy that is the left hand of conflict. But maybe even more, as Esoth points out, it can be read as a fable for the environment – what if the Horta’s tunneling consumed the minerals the miners wanted to extract? What if there was no shared strategy for growth possible? What if there were Hortas in every pergium mine? Would the miners just do without, or would the larger culture make a shift from extraction to sustainability? So far, we haven’t…

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Kirk Your Enthusiasm (4)

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