The Apple is a very good moral episode. Underneath the weird looking visuals, the underlying meaning is rather interesting. It pins Spock’s opinion that they should not interfere with a primitive culture to Kirk/McCoy’s idea that primitive cultures must be “upgraded”. These people serve a God named Vaal (a giant stone dinosaur head). Vaal is a machine that controls the weather etc, yet it must be fed food?? Anyway this feeds into Kirk’s pet peeve; he hates cultures that worship machines (as we saw in Return of the Archons).
The episode starts off rather goofy as an away team member is killed by a spraying flower and another steps on a rock that explodes. Also the entire time Chekov and this cute Lt. girl are hugging and holding hands. Highly unprofessional. Spock is shot by the flower but does not die … Kirk then picks the flower and smells it!?!?!
The crew then meets a culture that is peaceful and happy. The planet seems like a Garden of Eden. These people do not know of violence or even understand sex (this causes McCoy to remark “well, there goes paradise”). Kirk and McCoy want to help this culture to evolve but this would involve destroying Vaal. Luckily for Kirk he must destroy it anyway as it threatens the Enterprise.
Now that Vaal is gone, this culture has zero direction. Typically it would take a very long time for a society to form from a culture that is completely reliant on Gods to a self sufficient one. I’m guessing that suddenly taking away the only thing that these people have lived for would be a pretty disastrous thing to do. Kirk just doesn’t see it that way. I love the ending, everyone is back on the ship and Spock is comparing what they just did to what Satan did to the Garden of Eden. He “casts Kirk” in the role of Satan. This causes the Captain to say that there’s only one person on this ship that even remotely resembles the devil.
ST TOS COUNTDOWN: 35 down 45 to go
2 comments:
I never really got the federation. I guess they are military ships? But also exploration ships??? They have rankings but seems really laid back about everything. They are exploring new planets so they should be light years away from "civilization" so they are basically alone on that ship for 7 years alone???
Also Kirk should basically be fired for all the stuff he does.
I may have never seen this episode.
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