The Magicks of Megas-Tu

DVD, Star Trek: The Animated Series (The Magicks of Megas-Tu)

If 'TAS' were better known then this would undoubtedly be the most infamous episode of Trek full stop, even more than The One Where Paris and Janeway Become Lizards and Have Babies, or The One Where Tasha Yar Is Killed By An Oil Slick, or The One Where Spock's Brain Is Stolen. Sympathy for the Devil? More like defence, consent and support! After all, Satan is 'a living being, an intelligent life form…' There couldn't be a more twisted episode of Trek than to plant such ideas in a child audience's head that all those stories about the Devil being out to steal, kill and destroy are just bad PR - he was a victim, according to this jumbled mess of a story and now humanity has saved him! Ugh, it's insidious, insulting and harmful, something I don't think I could say about any other episode of Trek, which is quite an achievement for the humble animated series. Could this indeed be the worst episode of 'Star Trek' ever made? It even gives 'Discovery' a run in that department with very little making sense.

If it had been no more than a plea to reevaluate the Devil that would be bad enough, but we see Trek's poster boy, the voice of reason, logic and thought, our own Mr. Spock, use occult symbols in order to muck about with magic, and for no apparent reason! All he does is move a 'Vulcan chess piece' (Sulu's the one that takes it a step further by conjuring up a supermodel of his very own!), but it comes out of nowhere and has no bearing on the story, unless it is that Kirk is reminded later that he can do anything through faith - you'd think that would be a good lesson to learn except it's couched in support for the demonic forces that were said to merely be these aliens from another dimension (plus it's about having faith in oneself, the true humanist point of view). The story doesn't even seem to know what it's doing in itself - at first, in common with the later 'Star Trek V,' the mission is to pop down to the Centre of The Galaxy just to see if the theories of perpetual creation continuing there are true. While I somehow accept the conceit in the film, this just seemed more unrealistic. Maybe it's that there's no outside force such as Sybok or his false god-infused power to modify the engines for such a vast journey, or perhaps it's just the rather casual way they nonchalantly sail through the maelstrom in the middle, the 'creation point' of matter.

It was a thoroughly daft idea that had merit on its own as truly charting the final frontier, but then to bring 'Lucien' into the picture as this genial host, a defender of humanity who only wants to protect these extraterrestrial visitors whom he's always admired, from the anger of his own people… I'd probably have been lost for words if I hadn't already heard of this bizarre episode on a podcast and read about it in the pages of the Star Trek Magazine. I almost wish I'd come to it with no knowledge because I have no idea how I'd have reacted coming into it cold! As it was I knew what to expect so I didn't have the surprise or shock at the writer's gall. It's not even like the usual Trek episodes that deal with the supernatural and like to leave things agnostic - the chief prosecutor at humanity's (or maybe it was just Kirk's crew's), trial, even says the other name of Lucien is Lucifer! So it's not like you can talk around it and see it as some kind of allegory, it's barefaced, right-out-in-front defence for a being that according to the Bible goes around like a roaring lion seeking who he may devour! That's not a being who loves and respects humans. The issue raised could be a good one: does complete evil deserve the same respect for life that others do? Just because a being is intelligent does that mean it should be protected, in spite of its calculating evil heart? I refer back to Armus, the black slime creature that was the embodiment of a race's evil sloughed off and left alone, except 'Skin of Evil' was at least interesting and had some logic within it.

The story here doesn't have much of a focus at all - they want to go to the centre of the galaxy. They do. Then this mythological faun appears (like Abraham Lincoln in 'The Savage Curtain'), on the viewscreen before shimmering onto the Bridge and kidnaps Kirk, Spock and McCoy, makes them feel welcome by turning the weirdness into a world they can understand full of grass and trees, a 17th Century town. Except in this alternate version wizardry is accepted as normal ('need a castle built? Stop in to your friendly sorcerer-contractor to do it for you'), even though this is just a vision of what they can understand. So why would some of the beings have magic and others not? None of it really makes any sense although it is fun to speculate that this trial was what inspired Q's at the start (and end), of 'TNG,' right down to humanity's plea that they've learned compassion since the violent past. It's ironic that 'Star Trek V' should be the other spinoff from this inspiration what with that film's quest for 'God' only to find the 'Devil,' and since it was originally planned that God would turn out to be the Devil until they realised that might be just a tad offensive to a large proportion of the audience, you can see that as a live-action, virtual remake of this concept here. Most disdain that film as the worst and if it had the same level of silliness and nonsensical narrative as this did I'd agree, but instead it can be read as a warning against false gods and blind faith and has the charm of using the characters so well.

With the abuse of Spock in this I can't say the same, and he ends up defending 'Lucien,' just as Kirk does, effectively our two main heroic, humanitarian characters literally playing Devil's advocate in a misuse of the Trek brand and its reach. If it wasn't so disturbing it'd be hilarious! There isn't much to say about the episode beyond the unbelievable anti-Biblical standpoint, but there are a few little things that came to mind: George Takei gets to perform a rare extra character when he voices the ghostly creatures that fly around the Bridge. James Doohan, as ever, performs the guest role of Lucien, though there appeared to be a new voice for the chief prosecutor in the trial and it's always frustrating they never show credits for guest star voices. In common with 'Threshold,' the aforementioned infamous 'Voyager' episode, the Enterprise goes to Warp 10 when it's being pulled into the vortex (although we know from 'TOS' that they used a different warp scale in this time period), and I enjoyed seeing the extra hole in the stocks used to hold Lt. Arex with his third arm! It's also good to hear Kirk talk of General Order Number One: that no starship may interfere with the normal development of any alien life or society (not that he followed it very consistently!).

It always comes back to the scarily wrongheaded message being peddled by this mess of an episode, however: 'I knew humans would come searching for me eventually,' Lucien crows, and how much he 'always loved the people of Earth.' But even the aliens' own point of view is confused: do they come from the centre of our galaxy or do they come from another dimension? Or is this other dimension reached through the centre of the galaxy? And why do they have a planet there if they live in another dimension, or was the Enterprise sucked into this alternate dimension? None of it is clear. Then there's the whole battle of sorcery Kirk engages in with the prosecutor simply by thinking he can do anything. It was obviously designed as an exciting way to end the episode, but it just looks daft and… well, cartoony. It's episodes like this that give the series a bad name in a run of what for the most part I've been surprised by the quality of. I really don't know what they were thinking when they came up with this, I suppose they may have been inspired by the idea of Apollo and the other Greek 'gods' of ancient times being revealed to be aliens who enjoyed human adoration until faith was lost in them (in 'Who Mourns For Adonais?'). It's one thing to do that with fake gods, but quite another to take the universal Western symbol of personal evil and try to make him into just an ordinary good guy who's been slandered. But then the Devil is in the detail, and with only half an hour to tell a story we never got into his true character. Thumbs down for this one!

*