The Uncommon Geek

In this week’s episode of Law & Order, er, I mean, Star Trek, Captain Kirk gets put on the hot-seat after being accused of perjury and gross negligence. Join me on The Uncommon Geek for a retrospective review of the episode, “Court Martial.”

In a clash with a particularly violent ion storm, the U.S.S. Enterprise suffers severe, ship-wide damage, and a member of the crew, Lieutenant Commander Ben Finney, is presumed killed in the encounter. Captain Kirk orders the ship to Starbase 11 for emergency repairs, and is forced to complete the unhappy task of recording the circumstances of Finney’s death. I would imagine that this is the sort of grim job which Kirk has to complete every time a member of his crew gets red-shirted.

Everything in Kirk’s report would seem to point toward a tragic accident. He followed procedure to the letter, but Finney was still apparently unable to get clear of the ion pod before it was jettisoned. This is all turned on its head when Mr. Spock beams down with an extract from the ship’s computer log. The computer record does not match up to Kirk’s sworn deposition, and paints a scenario that implicates the Captain not just of gross negligence, but also of willful perjury. Commodore Stone (who has apparently replaced Mendez, the Starbase 11 commander in “The Menagerie”), orders that Kirk be confined to the base while he determines whether a formal court martial will be necessary.

Now, a case can be made that there are other instances of crew fatalities far more indicative of negligence on Kirk’s part, than in this episode. So why only here are the screws put to him? Well, for one thing, Captain Kirk and Commander Finney do have a past: on board the starship Republic, the then-Ensign Kirk reported gross negligence on Finney’s part that could have endangered the ship. Ever since the incident, Finney’s career was stifled, and he was passed up for promotion time and again. In his mind, Kirk was to blame for the failure of his Starfleet career.

There is also the issue of perjury. Even in the worst of his failings as Captain (such as in the later episode, “Obsession”), I would wager that James Kirk was nothing but honest about why casualties had to be suffered during a particular mission, and I am sure that the ship’s computer logs always back him up. But this time the Captain and the computer tell different stories, and that, coupled with the history between Kirk and Finney, lends credibility to the idea of a court martial being leveled against our protagonist.

In the second act, when Commodore Stone grills the now-grounded Captain Kirk about the specifics of the incident, an interesting fact comes to light. In the history of Starfleet up to this point, no commanding officer has ever stood trial. That can be taken to mean that starship commanders are the best human beings that Starfleet has to offer, and no trial has ever been necessary, but it also raises the issue of how their mistakes may be overlooked for the good of Starfleet’s reputation. Stone even offers that Kirk admit to being “played out,” and to accept a permanent ground assignment, all to avoid staining the perception of the service. But asking Captain Kirk to lie down without a fight, is like asking water to not be wet; it’s not in his nature. The dialogue here is charged, furious, and a great example of how conflict can still work, and work well, within the confines of Gene Roddenberry’s idealistic universe. Kirk challenges that Commodore Stone is just trying to sweep the whole matter under the rug, and the Captain along with it. In classic, brash Kirk fashion, the Captain retorts to Stone’s threat of drawing a general court:

“Draw it? I demand it! And right now, Commodore Stone, right now!”

While the performances of the actors in this episode are very engaging, the circumstances that got Kirk into this mess in the first place do leave me scratching my head. This is the only episode in the franchise that I know of which even mentions an ion pod, and it is not really clear why it works the way that it does. It supposedly is a module that gathers data on ion storms, but why it is something that would need to be jettisoned in an emergency is unclear. What is also never really explained is why such a device would be manned, instead of using the standard, unmanned sensor probes. A little more exposition on why this ion pod was so crucial would have helped the drama of this episode substantially. As is, we have some really great performances being undercut by story details that don’t make much sense under scrutiny.

Speaking of the performance of the actors, I do have to give props to this episode’s guest stars. Percy Rodrigues presents a worthy roadblock for Kirk as Commodore Stone, and Elisha Cook Jr. turns in a wonderfully entertaining performance as Captain Kirk’s eccentric lawyer, Samuel T. Cogley. In fact, I like Cook’s turn as Cogley so much, that I really wish that the show’s budget had allowed him to be a guest in additional episodes.

Samuel T. Cogley offers his services to Captain Kirk

Of course, I would be remiss to not mention Joan Marshall, who plays Areel Shaw, yet another ex-girlfriend of Kirk’s. How he found time to have had so many girlfriends, and still maintain his Starfleet career, is baffling to me. Shaw, however, is easily among the most impressive of Kirk’s romantic interests. She is a very intelligent woman with a prosperous career in Starfleet’s justice system. It is nice to see a female guest star who is not used as a simple sexual exploit or a damsel in distress. Joan Marshall lends her character a very respectable, professional quality that I appreciate. And let’s not forget the line she gets out of McCoy, which is among the best Bones lines ever:

“All of my old friends look like doctors. All of his look like you.”

The principal plot unfolds not unlike any conventional courtroom drama. Forced to be the prosecuting attorney against Kirk, Areel Shaw finds her work cut out for her in trying to build her case on the testimonies of Spock and McCoy. Though they did not witness the Captain as he did or did not jettison the ion pod early, getting to them to admit that Kirk is even hypothetically capable of panic or malice toward a fellow officer, makes pulling teeth look easy. The confidence that they have in Kirk’s character is unshakeable, and Kirk’s own miles-long service record also makes it hard for the court to entertain that such a decorated hero, could be capable of the petty action which he is accused of. However, when Shaw plays back the computer visual logs, the evidence against Kirk is damning. Though with what we, as a contemporary audience, know about video manipulation and how easy it is to perform, by the reaction of the characters here, it would seem that in 23rd-century Trek, it is uncommon at best for computer visual logs to ever be doctored.

Also of interest here, is the fact that the Enterprise keeps visual logs of the bridge at all. The Original Series is all over the map about just how much the Enterprise’s internal sensors can pick up. In some episodes they seem to be able to detect, with great precision, any lifeforms on board, though in “Court Martial” they only end up being able to pick up the sounds of crewmember’s heartbeats. Yet, only in this episode is any video recording stored by the computer and referenced later. But in other entries of the series, the sensors don’t even seem to keep track of people beaming onto or off of the ship. It’s an annoying inconsistency that we unfortunately have to roll with, or geekily handwave with some creative in-universe excuse.

Though Cogley does the best he can, Kirk’s case against the computer looks hopeless. Without any other evidence to work with, Cogley even weighs the possibility that the computer could be right. Leave it to Spock, stubborn man that he is, to find the answers on board the Enterprise, through, of all things, chess. Determined that there must some kind of malfunction in the computer, which would cause an error in its recording, Spock tests his recent computer programming of chess. Since the computer, as a machine, cannot make an error in logic, for it to lose to Spock in chess should be impossible. Leave it to Spock to experiment with chess while his Captain and best friend is about to have his career destroyed. It’s not the emotional, human thing to do, but it ends up being the right one. “Spock, you’re the most cold-blooded man I know,” Bones proclaims, which Spock accepts as a compliment, “why thank you, Doctor.”

While we do get a riveting, stirring speech from Cogley once the computer malfunction is presented as evidence, suspension of disbelief in the court martial still gets derailed once it is reconvened aboard the Enterprise. The rest of plot becomes really contrived; as I mentioned, the ship’s sensors are re-tuned to pick up heartbeats (once it becomes suspected that Finney might be alive and hiding aboard ship), and nearly the entire crew is beamed down to Starbase 11. And, for some odd reason, the ship’s engines are turned off (!). Why they would leave Enterprise in a helpless, decaying orbit beats me.

The final fight between Kirk and Finney, while satisfying in that it clears Kirk of any wrongdoing, is just hokey. Fought mostly between painfully obvious stunt doubles who look nothing like the principal actors, this conflict only serves to confirm that indeed, Finney has lost his mind, as tries to crash the ship; otherwise, it isn’t very entertaining. It’s definitely a far cry from the Kirk/Finnegan slugfest in “Shore Leave.” It also begs the questions: how in the heck did Finney hide in engineering for days, if not weeks, without being found? How did he get food and water? These are questions that “Court Martial” doesn’t even ask of itself, and it comes nowhere close to providing any answers.

“Court Martial” is an episode that leaves me very on-the-fence, and rather indifferent in my feeling toward it. The concept is good, especially the idea of conflict within the command branch of Starfleet (it’s interesting to see that in this point in his life, not many people worship at the altar of James T. Kirk. In fact most of his peers aren’t too thrilled with him). The performances of the actors, guests and all, are excellent, but the actual writing and execution of the story is very lackluster. There is too much here that doesn’t make any sense, or isn’t even explained at all, and it just sabotages the enjoyment of the episode. I’d recommend that it be watched at least once by anyone who is checking out the series in its entirety; it’s not a bad episode, but I struggle to call it particularly good, either. It’s watchable, but very mediocre Trek.

FIN

Disclaimer: Star Trek is a CBS/Paramount copyright. All images in this review posting are courtesy of http://www.startrek.com, http://www.trekcore.com, http://www.imdb.com, and http://www.wikipedia.org. Images are used for informational purposes only, and no copyright infringement on CBS or Paramount Studios is intended.