The Doomsday Machine

DVD, Star Trek S2 (The Doomsday Machine)

If you like mechanical things, if you like taking things apart, if you like scenes of machines being fixed, then this episode is for you! To me it's a very nuts and bolts episode, and not being very handy at fixing things or interested in the inner workings of devices I need more than engineering work to draw me in. This is another of those well regarded stories that I find watchable, but nowhere near the top ten of the series. It does have more to it than circuits and tools, with Commodore Matt Decker a tragic figure, survivor's guilt pushing him over the edge. To me he isn't a sympathetic character and that must be the key to good drama, allowing the 'bad guy' some understanding and motivation. Yes, he does have both, he lost his entire crew to the Doomsday Machine, and we can see it hit him badly, but in contrast to our own Captain and First Officer he rudely butts in on the command hierarchy to put the Enterprise at risk. The scene where Spock must deal with him, first in his takeover, then as his mental weaknesses show, is one of the best parts of the episode, as are the moments where Kirk, stuck aboard Decker's ship, the USS Constellation, must exert his personal power and influence through the Communicator in order to prevent mad Decker from allowing desperation to lose another ship and crew. This is fortunately one of Kirk's strengths, and I imagine, if there were suicide in the 23rd Century, he'd be the ideal man to talk someone down off a bridge or building because he has complete confidence and assurance in his voice, and an unerring logic and daring, as many a deadly computer has discovered.

He still relied on the dependable nature of his First Officer to carry out his orders, and though the regulations would seem to be against it, Spock sees that there is no other alternative than to override the rash Commodore, in spite of protocol, and as we saw after, when he steals a Shuttlecraft and heads straight into the maw of the machine, he was in danger of letting his suicidal tendencies take Kirk's crew with him. Surprisingly, there's no mention of 'Moby Dick,' the famous literary reference that this episode appears to draw from, and that would more obviously be used in both 'Star Trek II' and 'Star Trek: First Contact.' And perhaps the analogy isn't quite as strong in this because we don't have as much time with Decker as I thought we did. He's found sprawled on a desk in Auxiliary Control, a place Kirk spends most of his time in the story, he's sent back to the safety of the Enterprise, proceeds to place himself in command, recklessly endangers the ship and crew in a futile attempt to right past wrongs, gain vengeance for his own dead crew and restore his own pride at losing everything and he comes across as a typical higher up, like an Admiral, except this one isn't on a screen far away, he's right there on the Bridge, stealing into the Captain's Chair and putting his own decisions into law while the real Captain is out of contact.

It's certainly dramatic, I'll give it that, and Decker is one to sell the horrors of this terrible robotic vessel that can destroy entire systems of planets, but the faults of the episode outweigh the strengths. For a start, I didn't quite buy the reasoning for abandoning ship, beaming his crew down to a planet when they knew this thing could take out planets. If they did it to escape, why did the machine not obliterate the Constellation? It leaves it battered and burned, its nacelles at an awkward angle, chunks taken out of it, but it could have swallowed it whole. Another issue I have is that the series has been very good at using all three of the main characters, but here, after McCoy is dismissed from the Bridge by Decker he never reappears in the story, and that's because he would have the power to relieve the intruder of command and the story requires that he be written out for the sake of dramatic tension. It's not badly done, McCoy's all ready to seize on the technicality that Decker can be deemed unfit for command, but Spock points out that unless he can provide evidence it carries no weight. Uncharacteristically, McCoy doesn't press the matter and demand to examine the Commodore as a Doctor should be able to do, and so that part of the story is killed off. McCoy isn't the only one to be driven off the Bridge, Uhura never even shows up! She must have been on a different duty shift, because her role at Communications is played by Lieutenant Palmer. I wonder what the situation was there, was Nichelle Nichols ill? Did they want a change? It's nice to put a face to a name, and Elizabeth Rogers played the voice of the Companion in 'Metamorphosis,' uncredited. Of all the guest characters Palmer is the only one to recur again, in 'The Way To Eden,' a story I enjoy more than this one.

One way they could have added to the drama is if the Constellation's Communications Officer had somehow stayed aboard and Decker demanded that she replace Uhura. That would have both explained the absence and made it more personal and dramatic. I do like one thing about Palmer's appearance, and that is to show there are different shifts and other crewmembers that take on the same roles we see the familiar faces in. It's just strange that in an episode where we board another Constitution-class starship that we also see a different Comms Officer. That's one good thing about the episode: seeing another starship. It began a great tradition in Trek of reusing existing sets to stand in for the same type of ship, thereby saving the production money, but also expanding the scope of the world we're watching. I can't remember if this is the first time we went aboard another Starfleet ship, but it wouldn't be the last, nor would it be the last we saw of the Constitution-class taking part in manoeuvres this season. It's truly fascinating to see the same sets, but blackened, the corridors strewn with debris, and our characters exploring (last week we saw Kirk climb the Tri-ladder, this time we get to see three people climb it at the same time, using it as it was intended!). Both Jerry Catron (Montgomery), and Richard Compton (Washburn), had one other role on 'TOS,' but a better fact is that Compton went on to direct the First Season 'TNG' episode 'Haven,' another one I enjoy more than this!

Auxiliary Control continues the familiar look with those honeycomb grilles, a thicker version of the ones used in their Quarters, and we even get to see them enter Engineering from the upper level. It's not just the Constellation we see some nice internal views of, but our own Enterprise - I'm sure the Shuttle taking off from the inside of the Launch Bay had been reused from Season 1, but it's no less beautiful (imagine if we could have had more of that in 'Discovery,' seeing things at the same scale instead of pumped up Kelvin Timeline-inspired giganto-ship). And Scotty is up a Jefferies Tube desperately trying to reconfigure the Transporters to beam Kirk back just in time (like Chakotay in 'Caretaker' - "NOWWWW!"). For obvious reasons the external views of the new ship aren't up to the standard of the Enterprise, sometimes looking like a half-melted bit of clay when approaching the planet killer. It works for the episode because of all the damage that had been done to it, so it's easy to suspend the disbelief and knowledge that this is just some cheap mockup, but the doomsday machine itself is another area that didn't quite work. For a start, the scale is said to be miles long, and even given Decker was exaggerating we see the starships approaching the deadly mouth, and then the Shuttlecraft doing the same, at the same scale, which ruins the effect. But there's also the limitations of the time, or not enough forethought with the Enterprise coming in firing from one angle and yet we see the Phaser beams blast along the top as the machine advances, then the same shot is used again and again and doesn't fit the angle of approach.

Even the idea that they know where it came from and where it's going doesn't work. They can project its path, presumably a straight line, and yet it doesn't always travel in a line, it returns to the system, again for dramatic necessity, to put Enterprise and Constellation in jeopardy, so how can they know where it's been or where it's going. They say it's headed for the centre of our galaxy, so maybe they should have just let it, then maybe the fake god of 'Star Trek V' wouldn't have had to be dealt with as the machine would have gobbled up his planet! The stakes are there, but they aren't visible. Rigel colony is the target, but we never get close to it. The idea was there, but the implementation didn't really work. Instead it feels more like 1950s B-film sci-fi, something Trek usually tried to avoid. There are other little niggles, too, such as the great green uniform Kirk wears, and which debuted for this season in the episode - I love it, so why is that a problem? Only because it's clearly been planned so he wears a different colour to Decker so we can easily differentiate them, even though that's not necessary. The same thing with the Security Guards on the Bridge right from the start. There isn't usually a guard there, but this time there's two, and it's all so that Spock can threaten to arrest Decker when he's behaving foolishly. Again, not a mistake, but it would have been easy enough to have Spock call for Security to the Bridge and give Decker time to think it over while they're arriving.

While we're at it, Kirk is doing his wild speculations again, just as he conjured up an idea of the Greek gods being powerful aliens, now he's thinking of a doomsday machine that wiped out both sides in war. Sure, it's a good story and may well be true, but it's like the writer is giving us a shortcut to its origins. It makes it more mysterious that we never know for sure, and they hint that there could be a sequel some time as the episode ends with Kirk and Spock speculating on whether there are more of them out there, Kirk wryly concluding the episode on a light note by saying he found one sufficient, but it didn't work for the heavy tone of the episode, and if there was a story that needed McCoy to be there at the end and more discussion of Decker, his rights and his wrongs, it was this one. Chekov's another casualty, not even mentioned, though Scotty gets to play his part with all the miracle-working (using the three-pronged device again that would later be seen in 'Trials and Tribble-ations'), Kirk telling him he's earned his pay for the week after getting a Phaser bank recharged. And it is good to see Kirk up to his elbows in circuitry, fixing things and being the hands-on Captain. It's convenient (or rather the reverse), the Transporter is only capable of taking back everyone except him, but that's an accepted trope of Trek-telling so you can't complain about it. But there isn't a lot to write about this one because it is such a technical story: go here, do this, fix that, manoeuvre there. It's not bad, nor for the most part badly executed (the front view of the planet killer with its fiery depths is terrifying as ships move towards it), but I often find that when a guest star is elevated above the main cast it can be detrimental because we want to know more about our people, not Decker.

Decker cemented his place in Trek lore by being one of the few to have a connection to something later, with his son Will becoming First Officer on the Enterprise in 'The Motion Picture,' and more recently being name-checked as among the best Starfleet Captains in 'DSC' ('Choose Your Pain'), which were nice touches. I can only suppose that people warmed to Matt due to the tragedy of his circumstances and that he was so much of a maverick. We see here exactly how wrong the stereotype of Kirk is, he's not the one to take unnecessary risks, the only one he does take is when beaming off the Constellation at the last moment, and that only because he has one shot at it and wants to get it right, and has faith in his crew to get him out. And even beyond that he's willing to sacrifice himself if they fail, though he admits he doesn't wish to die (I wonder if he thought he would, maybe this was when his idea about dying alone came to him?). It's just that, as a whole, when everything is totted up, whether it be characters, effects or story, there's not quite enough for me to get onboard and I really don't consider it one of the greats. It's not even that the effects take me out of it, on the contrary it's great to see the asteroids flying past on the Viewscreen (it looks so big when we see Kirk walk past it on the Bridge, so much bigger than the usual shot we get from distance), and that they created such an alien design for the planet killer. I just could never warm to it, and that may partly be due to not seeing it on my original viewing in the early 90s. I may have seen it, but if so, it never stuck in my head and so I felt little connection with it, the same way as a few other episodes of 'Voyager' or 'Enterprise' that I didn't see until I had the DVD sets, seeming limp and lacking. Still, out of these first six, only a couple have failed to live up to the Trek name, so that's not a bad hit rate so far.

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