Mark of Gideon

For my third free episode choice, I watched the Star Trek episode The Mark of Gideon. In this episode the crew of the Enterprise attempted to make peaceful contact with the planet Gideon. Kirk beamed down to the planet but found himself still in the Enterprise, but it was completely empty except for him and a mysterious woman. There were two parallel stories going on in the episode, Kirk trying to deal with being on the empty Enterprise ship, and also the crew of the actual Enterprise trying to negotiate with the Gideons to beam down to the planet and search for the Captain.

The directors did a really good job of making the two parallel stories come together. It turns out that the Gideons live in such a picture-perfect atmosphere that no one ever dies. The planet they live on has become severely over populated, and they are suffering a lot because of that. They requested Captain Kirk to come down because they knew that he had had meningitis at one time. They used his blood to get the woman on the ship sick, so they could spread the disease to the rest of the population, to restore the world to the paradise it once was. The Gideons had constructed a replica of the Enterprise, and they slowly revealed the full extent of the state of Gideon over the course of the episode. I was captivated by the show because the acting was done well and it convinced me that they were really in the situation the show conveyed. The way they slowly revealed information was very well done.

As the last few blogs indicate, I think I’m getting too involved with Star Trek.

Matthew