Heteronormativity to the goddamn rescue

Last night I decided to watch an episode of TOS, probably for the same reason I always watch TOS: I was feeling stressed and wanted to be consoled with campy retrofuturism and poor special effects. Something about the sets’ obvious scrims and multicolored parcan lighting—useful for alien ships/palaces/crash sites, indoor and outdoors—is awfully comforting to me.

A few years ago, I was working my way methodically through TOS, since most of my viewing had been at the whims of television programming during childhood. But I ended up jumping around in order to find specific episodes or skip unconscionably bad ones, and now I just try to Netflix through the gaps. Which is how I ended up on “Metamorphosis” (S2:E9), an episode mostly cribbed from midcentury marriage manuals.

We open on a shuttlecraft with Kirk, Spock, and Bones, who, as the senior staff of a Federation starship, should definitely be tasked with things like retrieving sick diplomats. The diplomat in question is Nancy, who is really into headscarves and working.

(Working it, amirite? GET IT GURRRRRL)

She was supposed to be using her diplomacy powers to stop some kind of vague, handwavy war somewhere, but then she caught a life-threatening disease, and now must be taken to the Enterprise to be treated. And she is pissed, not because she might die, but because she didn’t get to do her job.

I like her because not only is she my kind of nerd—she’s mad that she won’t get to, essentially, write a report—but also she’s blaming the patriarchy Star Fleet for not inoculating her properly before her mission. She is leaning in and she is leaning in hard.

Before they can get back to the ship, though, they encounter some kind of mysterious energy floating around in space:

I’ve noticed that this happens in the Star Trek universe with alarming frequency. In fact, these encounters are so common that I would hope Star Fleet maintains a directory of known energy-based lifeforms and provides cadets with guidelines, behavioral models, and recommended interactions for encountering unknown energies. Seriously. Seriously. There have got to be at least as many mysterious energy clouds as there are M-class planets and wow could I possibly have come up with a nerdier comparative sentence

This particular weird energy cloud forces them to land on a planetoid hospitable to human life but devoid of any population—save one fresh-faced, wheat-fed, all-American dude who turns out to be Zefram fucking Cochrane.

EXPOSITION: 150 years prior, while Zefram Cochrane was an 87-year-old man looking for a place to die, the energy cloud brought him to the planetoid, made him young, and now keeps him immortal while he sits in a hovel made out of spaceship parts and tends corn.

FEELINGS: I hate this.

I guess this isn’t anybody’s fault, per se. This episode happened first, so I can’t criticize the writers for making Zefram Cochrane a shitty character when I’m from the future and know he’s supposed to be better than this. I’m guessing they wanted a quickie persona who could be important in the show’s then-idea of Earth history, so they were like, “Make him an inventor of something critical to space travel! Like warp reactors! Yeah! That’ll blow Kirk’s mind!” So it shouldn’t upset me that the result is this dumb cowboy:

instead of the real Zefram Cochrane of First Contact, who is supposed to be older, lanky, a little nuts, and definitely played by James Cromwell:

I am having a very difficult time reconciling these images

Where were we? Our party lands on this planetoid and meets the supposedly long-dead Zefram Cochrane, who immediately starts eye-fucking Nancy because he’s been alone for 150 years. Honestly, this detail is so downplayed. The man has been literally marooned on a rock for longer than he was alive on earth and no one wants to talk about that? And he’s just fine, I guess? What the fuck have you been doing for 150 years in solitary, man? I’m reasonably certain he should have lost his mind by now. Built an upsettingly large sculpture out of his nail clippings. Something. Good god.

Look at those colors, tho. Lovely magenta-lit backdrops, mm-hm.

They have to get off the planetoid and back to the ship so that Nancy doesn’t die (the only symptom is fever, so every time she complains that it’s a little warm, Bones is like, “Jim we HAVE to go NOW OMFG”). Since the energy cloud won’t let their shuttle work, Kirk decides they need to talk to it, by tweaking the shuttle’s universal translator so it can speak electricity. Someday, my friends: someday I will rant about the bullshit technology that is the universal translator, but that day is not today.

Aside from being bullshit, this move also ignores the fact that ZC has been boinking communicating with the energy cloud for the last 150 years. He calls it “the Companion” and regularly… mingles with it whenever he’s feeling chatty.

But that’s not good enough for a telescript: we need to hear it speak in English, so Spock “fixes” the translator, and it turns out: the cloud is a lady. Zefram Cochrane redeems himself very slightly by asking why the translator automatically assigned the cloud a female voice. Good question! Kirk, of course, has the answer and it is that obviously the energy cloud is inherently a woman obviously because reasons which I missed because I was too busy flipping off the screen at that point and ugh

It turns out that the lady energy cloud kidnapped Zefram Cochrane because she was lonely, and after 150 years he was like “can I have some friends,” so she kidnapped another ship. This is what we might call flawed logic, or maybe just a really dumb series of fictional events. And we haven’t even seen the resolution yet!

Here it is: Nancy is half-dead, Kirk is pissed, and Zefram fucking Cochrane is in love with an energy cloud, so: the energy cloud merges her existence with Nancy and decides to live out a natural human life with ZC on this planetoid, and the crew is free to go back to the Enterprise THE END

Here are some things that are extremely not okay with that ending:

nope no wait, that’s it, that’s the one thing, that’s what is fucked up about this entire episode

We have no idea if Nancy is okay with this. Nancy-Energy-Being is downright enthusiastic, but so are all brain-controlling aliens who inhabit other people’s bodies and speak in first-person-plural. Nancy’s wishes aren’t even addressed, because the focus is so entirely on the corporealization of the energy cloud. I suppose we can assume that Nancy is cool with it because she would be dead otherwise, but that is also the energy cloud’s fault, so that’s not exactly a reliable metric here, is it.

And because the energy cloud can’t leave the asteroid, it has condemned Nancy to living her life here—and not even permanently young, but as a regularly lifespanned human, because the merging has removed the energy cloud’s weird immortality powers. It has forced Nancy into a mediocre existence. In asteroid prison. With one extremely lonely dude.

And they’re both thrilled about it. Nancy is thrilled, because on her death bed she was moaning about how she never found love—so caught up in her career, what was she thinking? She’s wasted her life. And ZC, well, being 237 years old and chained to a rock hardly matters now that he has a real flesh-and-blood woman to cook his meals and iron his slacks! Sure, one of the greatest minds in fictional human history could now leave the planetoid to explore space as a young man again, but how could he abandon his beloved energy-cloud-in-a-fuckable-body? This series of events creates multiple distressing existential dilemmas, but why think about them! We’re going to get married, plant a garden, and stencil “Love Laugh Pray” on the dining room wall!

This is the strongest propaganda for white suburban heteronormativity I have ever seen.

Just to summarize, the energy cloud’s actions have:

Finally, at the very end, when someone (I don’t even remember who, I’m so mad right now) asks “what about the war that Nancy was supposed to stop,” Kirk shrugs and says, “They’ll find someone else.” OH GOOD BECAUSE I HADN’T QUITE GOTTEN THE MESSAGE FROM THIS EPISODE THAT WOMEN ARE COMPLETELY DISPOSABLE IN THE WORKFORCE

FUCK YOUR WAR, WE’RE GETTING MARRIED

Your friends don’t write longform Star Trek recaps from the Feminist perspective? 

You need better friends.

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Leading Men Age, Leading Women Don't (via Vulture)

Interesting story about how in Hollywood, leading men get to act through the annals, while the women continually stay younger by replacing them. Where is the place for older women in Hollywood? You can read this story here.