Kirk Your Enthusiasm (4)

By: Stephanie Burt
August 2, 2012

Fourth in a series of posts, each one analyzing a single Captain Kirk scene from the Star Trek canon.

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“No kill I” | “Devil in the Dark” | Star Trek: The Original Series | Season 1, Episode 25 | March 1967

The first Star Trek depicted an empire whose representatives sounded and acted American and tried hard to act benign, with Captain James Tiberius Kirk as its symbolic, charismatic agent in charge. Episodes about aliens and other “natives” were almost always reformist; they portrayed the conversion of old-fashioned outlooks, where “natives” are disregarded or enslaved, into better ones where aliens got respect.

That transformation is one subject of “Devil in the Dark,” in which the unseen monster killing off Janus VI’s miners turns out to be the silicon-based horta, defending her mineral eggs; she not only deserves protection, but invites it, carving “No Kill I” in acid on stone. By the end, miners and horta have moved from a mutually destructive plot — we kill it, or it kills us — to a modus vivendi.

KIRK: Well, Spock, I’m going to have to ask you to get in touch with the Horta again. Tell her our proposition. She and her children can do all the tunneling they want. Our people will remove the minerals, and each side will leave the other alone.

That’s an extraction industry that hurts nobody, at least until minerals run out (we are told they are superabundant); it rests not only on explicit contract, but on the leverage each side keeps — if the human miners damage the eggs, the Horta can just start to kill them again.

It’s a shift from absent-mindedly genocidal extractive institutions to mutual respect and hands-off cooperation: and it’s a shift that historically, in real life, has proven very, very hard to make, both because “natives” rarely have such leverage, and because hatred, let loose, becomes hard to tamp down (cf. Frantz Fanon).

KIRK: The Horta is intelligent, peaceful, mild. She had no objection to sharing this planet with you, till you broke into her nursery and started destroying her eggs. Then she fought back in the only way she knew how, as any mother would fight when her children are in danger.

But what about the miners: agents of empire, armed victims, outpost people? Aren’t they angry too? They are, and it’s Kirk — who admits to that anger — who knows how to deal with them. It’s Kirk, who first realizes that he need not shoot the Horta, who stops the miners:

KIRK: Don’t fire! First man that fires is dead.

VANDERBERG: That thing has killed fifty of my men.

KIRK: You’ve killed thousands of her children.

Captain Kirk has to be as big and loud and dramatic as possible, sharing the miners’ tense energy but not their impulsiveness, in order to get the miners to hear what Spock says, to bring them to the point of accepting a mutually beneficial deal. How many real public figures, in the colonies or in the metropole, have been able to speak to the army, to the commanders of extractive institutions, to the leaders of outpost peoples, and get them to change, even at the point of a gun?

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Kirk Your Enthusiasm (4)

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