Whom Gods Destroy - Countersign Strats Imba, Pls Fix

This episode pulls a truly classic Star Trek move by casually informing us in the opening seconds that mental illness has been almost completely eradicated from existence, besides a small handful of fifteen people on the toxic asylum hell planet Elba II and every other antagonist they've ever encountered on the show. I liked this episode overall, despite a lot of dated and cringe things about it. Like the previous (horrible) episode, it helped that they painted some people green. The Star Trek recipe for success is a good script and green people. That's why Journey to Babel is one of the best episodes of the show! If you ask me, they probably should've done that more often, instead of having so many bad episodes without a single green person in sight.

Kirk and Spock travel to Elba II to deliver a new medication that promises to fully cure all mental illness that remains in the galaxy, which, again, is fifteen people. Unfortunately, the man who greets them is actually an escaped inmate and shapeshifter who took the form of the asylum's governor and traps both of them on the planet. Kirk discovers that the shapeshifter is former starship captain and iconic Federation hero, Garth, who Went Insane after receiving life-threatening wounds on Antos IV. Luckily for him, the Antosians were able to teach him their technique for cellular regeneration. Unluckily for everyone else, he was so good at it that he discovered he was able to shapeshift his entire body and also his clothes. Having Gone Insane, he ordered his crew to eradicate the people who saved his life, the crew mutinied, and here we are.

After locking up Kirk and Spock, Garth takes Kirk's form and attempts to beam up to the Enterprise, where he plans to take command of Kirk's crew and force them to help him take over the galaxy. Like many of the antagonists' actions in this episode, it's obviously never going to work, but we have no choice but to chalk that up to "well, he's Insane!" More on that later. Before he can even get that far, though, he is foiled by a sign/countersign exchange that Kirk planned with Scotty beforehand. Considering how often Kirk is mind-controlled, body-swapped, space-drunk, and god-ensorcelled, this seems like something that should probably be standard procedure on the Enterprise. It's so effective, in fact, that it practically breaks the episode.

The majority of Whom Gods Destroy is a series of attempts by Garth to trick Kirk into revealing the countersign, most notably in a lengthy sequence where his green girlfriend Marta tries to bone/murder Kirk. Spock arrives at the last moment to disarm her, and he and Kirk return to the control room to disable the asylum force field and call for reinforcements. Spock insists that Kirk return to the Enterprise for his own safety, which Kirk agrees to do on the condition that Spock give Scotty the countersign on his behalf. In a twist that genuinely surprised me, Spock angrily reactivates the force field and shapeshifts back into Garth. You got me, Star Trek! I think my exact words when I realized what was happening were "hee hee!"

Meanwhile, Scotty spends the entire episode shrugging his shoulders at their complete inability to do anything helpful. Kirk is clearly in some sort of trouble, seemingly having been surprised at the need for a countersign, but with the force field in place, they have no option short of obliterating the entire planet and killing everyone. You might think, hey, it sounds like Federation starships could use some more delicate weapons for situations like this! Well, they have them, and in the final minutes of the episode, Scotty realizes they could use their precision phasers to fire on the weakest part of the force field. This amounts to nothing in the end, as Kirk and Spock will manage to defeat Garth and disable the force field themselves before the phasers can do anything. Thanks for nothing, Scotty! You continue to be a worthless loser who can't do anything right.

Garth inexplicably invents a powerful explosive offscreen (this plot point is as jarring in the episode as it is in this summary, don't worry) and uses it to blow up Marta to show he means business. RIP! At that moment, the real Spock arrives with a phaser to save Kirk, only to find two Captains Kirk. They both try and fail to prove they're the real one, and after a brief fight, one of them tells Spock to shoot them both. In what the show will helpfully inform us is a King Solomon allegory, Spock recognizes that only the real Kirk would selflessly consent to being shot to save his crew, and stuns the other Kirk whose shapeshifting deactivates. I think the "cut the baby in half" parallel is somewhat broken by Spock's ability to reveal Garth without harming anyone, but whatever. I think it would've been funnier and better if Spock had simply walked into the room, logically observed the situation, made Spock Face at the camera for a beat, and then stunned them both. Too bad nobody asked me!

With the force field disabled, McCoy joins them in the asylum and assists the governor in administering the cure for mental illness to all fifteen fourteen of the prisoners. Garth is disoriented and confused as his head begins to clear, and Kirk warmly welcomes back the Captain Garth he's always admired. The governor says he should make a full recovery. Kirk and Spock end the episode with obligatory banter about King Solomon in case we didn't get it.

There's a lot of characters Being Insane and Acting Insane in this episode that, frankly, I would say is dated and cringe if it weren't for the prevalence of modern Insane Acting (see Jared Leto's Joker, Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor, every villain in everything Steven Moffat has ever written, etc.) I guess I should say it should be dated, but it's most definitely cringe. Characters are screaming and raging, then suddenly smiling and dancing and it's all pretty exhausting. It didn't disqualify this episode from being pretty good, in my opinion, but there were a couple of scenes where almost the entire point was to show the antagonists Acting Insane and I largely zoned out for those and waited for them to be over. At least it was pretty funny when Garth-Kirk realized he didn't know the countersign, calmly ended the call with Scotty, then proceeded to throw a full-blown temper tantrum.

Despite that, I was surprised at the level of compassion that the episode showed these characters. Kirk and Spock came to this planet to help them, and they maintain that mission throughout. As much as Kirk wants to protect his crew, the governor, and the galaxy at large, he also wants to protect the inmates from themselves and from each other. There's a scene where Kirk tries to appeal to the side of Garth whose exploits he remembers studying as a starry-eyed young cadet which I thought was particularly nice. He truly sees Garth as a good man who is suffering from an illness that has taken control of him, and I'm choosing to appreciate the well-meaning sentiment behind that. In an exaggerated Star Trek way, it did resonate with me as a person who lived several years of my life in a haze of depression, feeling powerless to stop myself from obeying the urge to make choices that I knew would only hurt myself and the people I cared about. I'm also choosing to ignore the eugenicist undertones of "a medicine that cures all mental illness" and take it entirely at face value as it applies to all fifteen fourteen people in existence who suffer from Space Madness.

Good thing they're all fine now! I guess that's the galaxy sorted out, huh? Well, they've got an extra dose with Marta gone. Hopefully they keep it handy in case that Khan guy ever shows up again!