The shuttlecraft Galileo, with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy aboard, is bringing critically ill Assistant Federation Commissioner Nancy Hedford, played by Elinor Donahue, to the Enterprise for emergency medical treatment. Hedford is a diplomat who was recently dispatched to negotiate a peace settlement on the planet Epsilon Canaris Three, where she contracted the rare and potentially fatal Sakuro’s disease. If the shuttle does not reach the Enterprise within the next few hours, Hedford’s life will be endangered. The Galileo is diverted off course by the powerful tractor emissions of a pure energy cloud creature, which pulls it down to the planetoid Gamma Canaris N. There the Enterprise’s highest-ranking officers find Zefram Cochrane, played by Glenn Corbett, the original heroic scientist and late twenty-first century inventor of the warp drive engine, alive and unharmed. Dr. Cochrane was believed to have died 150 years before at age eighty-seven. But Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Hedford see a man in the prime of his years and in excellent physical shape. The rejuvenated Cochrane has been kept youthful, given immortality, and cared for all these years by the nebulous alien creature known as the Companion, which seems to be composed of ionized hydrogen and discharges “erratic electrical impulses.” After his final round of galactic explorations, the celebrated physicist from Earth and Alpha Centauri set out in a small vessel to willfully die in Deep Space. The Companion found Cochrane’s disabled craft in the vicinity of its asteroid belt and brought it to the gaseous entity’s home planet.
The shuttle is not functional, and communications with the Enterprise are cut off. There is an energy “damping field” on the planetoid that interferes with the operation of all power systems. Captain Kirk and the others appear to be stranded. Assistant Commissioner Hedford’s medical condition is swiftly deteriorating.
Zefram Cochrane and the Companion have a symbiotic relationship that is more a love between equals than the bond between a “pet owner” and its domestic animal. They communicate in a “nonverbal” mode which the human initiates by entering a meditative state. The pure energy being is possessive of Cochrane’s attentions and affections. But the Companion is also aware that, after decades of living as a recluse, Cochrane misses human company. “Immortality consists largely of boredom,” the renowned techno-scientist tells Captain Kirk. Rather than release Cochrane from his enforced stay on the isolated planetoid, the intelligent electrical cloud life-form has drawn the Galileo to Gamma Canaris N to keep Zef from dying of loneliness. Having been apart from humanity for so long, the pioneer of faster-than-light speed falls almost instantly in love with Assistant Commissioner Hedford. He announces his intention to leave with Hedford and the Starfleet officers and return to civilization. He is even willing to help Kirk destroy the Companion, if that is required to get the shuttlecraft working again and allow them to depart the planetoid.
The Companion thwarts all attempts to repair the shuttle, burning out the vessel’s circuitry with its potent discharges. It attacks Mr. Spock with a high-voltage shock. Sensing that the newcomers are plotting against it, the Companion defends itself by violently menacing the humans and Vulcan with a massive electrical energy storm.
To discern its true motivations, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock use the Universal Translator to communicate with the Companion. Via the translation device, they ascertain that the Companion is of female gender and is in love with Zefram Cochrane. Since Cochrane’s scientific knowledge is outdated by more than a century, Kirk explains to him the principles underlying this language technology. The linguistic instrument “instantaneously compares the frequency of brain wave patterns,” selects recognizable “universal ideas and concepts,” and “provides the necessary grammar” to generate English sentences. “Companion, we wish to talk to you,” Kirk begins the conversation. “It is wrong to keep us here against our will. A man needs the company of his own kind or he will cease to exist.”
With a voice approximating “whatever the creature is on the sending end,” the female alien life-form speaks. “The man [Cochrane] needs others of his species. That is why you are here. The man must continue.” Captain Kirk tries to convince the Companion that human beings cannot survive in circumstances of captivity or too much idleness, which are unbearable to them. If the creature really cares for Cochrane, then it should permit the humanoids to leave the planetoid rather than condemning them to “nonexistence.” The Companion finds this line of argument to be illogical and not communicative. “The man must continue. Therefore you will continue. It is necessary.” In a second conversation, Kirk challenges the extraterrestrial being to honestly consider the possibilities and limitations of love between members of such radically other species. “You are the Companion. He is the man. You are two different things,” says Kirk through the Universal Translator. “You can’t join… You will always be separate, apart from him.” After this discussion, the Captain tells Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy that his hope was to appeal to and reach the entity’s deepest feelings towards Cochrane, to incite it to alter its existential position, because “love sometimes expresses itself in sacrifice.”
Zefram Cochrane is at first disgusted to learn that he has been desired and intimately known by an “inhuman monster” that has “crawled around” inside him so many times. The half-human, half-Vulcan Mr. Spock severely criticizes this attitude. He contrasts an ethics of openness towards radical otherness with the “parochial” morality expressed by Cochrane. The rapidly declining Assistant Commissioner Hedford overhears this exchange from her makeshift sickbed and tells Dr. McCoy that she agrees with Spock. Increasingly aware that she is dying, Hedford profoundly regrets that her life is going to end and she has never experienced being loved or loving an other.
The Companion surprisingly ends the general standoff by devising a creative and ingenious solution to the dilemma. As a way out of a situation that has become desperate for all parties, the alien entity enters expiring Assistant Commissioner Hedford’s body, merges “consciousnesses” with her, and cures her of her terminal illness. The Commissioner’s passing had been just a moment away. Inhabiting its new physical body, the portion of the originated individual which is the Companion is startled to recognize the utter loneliness of the human condition, tempered only by love. “You said we would not know love because we were not human,” the metamorphosed life-form says to Captain Kirk. “Now we are human. We will know the change of the days. We will know death.”
The Companion loses its immortality and special powers. It “gave up everything to be human.” Zefram Cochrane has both of his “loves” combined into one very attractive and suddenly radiant being. He and the anthropomorphized, materially embodied female Companion will live out their normal human lifespans together.
The shuttlecraft Galileo is restored to working order, as are communications with the Enterprise. Zefram Cochrane and the Companion-Hedford symbiont will remain on the planetoid. It is the only environment in which the Companion can survive. Captain Kirk promises to keep his knowledge of the celebrated Cochrane’s whereabouts a secret. Assistant Commissioner Hedford is recorded as having tragically died of Sakuro’s disease, and being buried on Gamma Canaris N.
The Star Trekking of Feminism
From a mainstream feminist viewpoint, Metamorphosis falls clearly in line with the classic sexism of The Original Series. Radical feminist critiques of early Star Trek teach us that Captain Kirk is a prototypical patriarchal sexist and phallocentric womanizer. Through his macho swagger, overstated virility, and promiscuous libido, Kirk conquers hyper-sexualized, scantily clad female aliens and female crew members in almost every Original Series episode. In other instances, through his emphasized competence, level-headedness, and virtuousness, Kirk exercises non-erotic domination over female aliens, female scientists, and female Starfleet officers, who are consistently depicted as incompetent, hysterical, and demonic. (see academic essays by Blair, Cranny-Francis, and Helford) For feminist psychoanalyst Ilsa J. Bick, the Companion (in Metamorphosis) symbolizes the perfect nurturing and intuitive mother with whom Zefram Cochrane communicates in a “telepathic” space outside of language, and whom he truly loves. Yet Cochrane is repulsed by the thought of an erotic relationship or sexual union with the maternal other. He accepts the sexuality of the Companion only after its merger with another female that results in the literal materialization of a stereotypically “beautiful woman.” (see Bick essay in Enterprise Zones) What is notable is the crucial role that the Universal Translator plays in the transformation of the Companion from radical alien Other (the amorphous pure energy being) to familiar figure of the cultural system of simulated differences (the sexualized, full-bodied woman of projecting male fantasies). Hearing the Companion speak in the translation software’s output language (American English) is a critical intermediate step in our acceptance of the legitimate, card-carrying alien Other. The Universal Translator is a security identification technology for distinguishing extraterrestrial aliens which are deserving of our attention from those which are not. Bick’s Freudian reading interestingly identifies the psychologically regressive narrative of reunion reiterated in Metamorphosis. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Cochrane are stuck in an “adolescent latency stage,” and require the “depths” of the woman to give them life. But Bick (along with other radical feminist, “deconstructionist,” and “multiculturalist” contributors to the volume Enterprise Zones) never examines the question of how critiques of “local instances” of the suppression of difference (tied to the unjust privileging of the terms of meaning of the male, the Logos, the white European, the Western ethnocentric and latency narratives) feed so efficiently into the standard operating procedures of Star Trek’s self-reforming Universal Culture Machine. The system of recombinant media commodities is forever digitally resequencing the nostalgia-laden items in its content database into more “politically correct” forms of hyper-reality. Most of the essays in Enterprise Zones suffer from rote academic jargon. Their authors have lost nearly all subjective passion for Star Trek by seeking the “identity refuge” of a dry and purist conceptual distancing from the object of their cultural critique.
An alternative feminist reading of this Original Series episode is that it is a story of sacrifice and Metamorphosis as positive principles. A sacrifice of the woman, Assistant Commissioner Hedford, occurs. The alien entity, the Companion, sacrifices herself. A Metamorphosis of becoming-other (Deleuze and Guattari), becoming-woman, and crossing the line of demarcation between species, takes place. The story presents the possibility of a sacrifice that requires the courage of transformation and disappearance, but is not death. After the Christian myth of work, sex, and death, there is suffering positively revaluated in relation to creativity and creative transformation. Both Hedford (who was dying) and the Companion sacrifice their individuality to merge into or become a new being. Each loses her constituted self but not her life. The narrative is beyond the “unresolvable” dichotomy between the “modern” worldview of sacrifice as murder and the “primitive” worldview of sacrifice as culturally and spiritually valued. Like birth, death, or a passage of initiation, the cloud creature’s transmutation into a “posthuman” female is a decisive moment of disappearance and reappearance, an “impossible exchange” or recognition of radical otherness. The gifts of a second chance at life and reversal of linear temporal fate are transacted.
The body of Metamorphosis or the “Body without Organs,” as in Dionysian dance movements, opens itself to states of being that are not limited to the permutations of identity and its mirror reflections. In the consumer culture of simulated differences, by contrast, there is not Metamorphosis but metastasis, the spread of cancerous cells due to their mere contiguity. The endless substitution of elements and the operationally coded definition of all things are rigorous laws of the assemblage of multiplicity. Instead of real becoming, there is its simulacrum in “change.” It is the condition of Alice in Wonderland, of dizzying and incessant transfigurations. This “chaos” results when Metamorphosis is grafted onto a system of equivalence and exchange, torn from its original context of the duality of the world in relation to itself, the duel yet reciprocal strange attraction between subject and object, yin and yang, masculine and feminine. In the contemporary cyber-culture of multiplicity, the self can swap with its own avatars and fractals, but these are mere “technical possibilities of individuation.” (Jean Baudrillard) They demonstrate the versatility of the chameleon, not the Metamorphosis of the caterpillar to the pupa to the butterfly. The becoming of Metamorphosis relates to my inseparability from others, from those who have influenced me, on whose shoulders I stand, or whom I could become. There is no strictly individual destiny, no own life or thinking. “Neither existence nor the world belongs to us. They have been passed on to us… The world thinks us, the other thinks us, the object thinks us. Everything comes to us from elsewhere — intelligence, potential, seduction.” (Jean Baudrillard)
