In The Original Series episode Spock’s Brain, a mysterious humanoid woman clad in a purple minidress tunic and thigh-high boots, played by Marj Dusay, appears on the Bridge. She materializes in a transferral beam unlike that of Federation transporter technology. She presses a button on her multicolor jeweled bracelet. Amid a humming sound, all ship’s personnel are instantly frozen in their tracks and impelled to the floor into a state of unconsciousness. Upon reawakening, they discover that Mr. Spock’s “tremendous brain” has been surgically removed from his “useless body” and taken by the alien woman. Dr. McCoy establishes temporary life-sustaining functions for the half-human body, stabilizing its physiological equilibrium in a transparent bubble inside a chamber. Later McCoy sets up a mechanized remote operation of the mindless hull with a handheld device, making Spock’s body into a walking automaton robot. Helmsman Lt. Sulu stalks the ion propulsion trail of the ship presumed to belong to the kidnapper of the Vulcan brain. The Enterprise sets a course at warp factor six for the Sigma Draconis star system.
After beaming down to the wintery sixth planet, the landing party of Captain Kirk, Lt. Commander Scott, Ensign Chekov, and two red-shirted security guards (soon joined by Dr. McCoy and the Spock automaton) finds the inhabitants of the equatorial region divided into two separate and unequal societies. The male population of Morg hunter-predators with long hair and scraggly beards lives in primitive conditions on the planet’s barren, glaciated surface. The Morg subsist on meager foodstuffs and use rocks, clubs, and spears as weapons. The female Eymorg clan lives comfortably underground in a millennia-old sepulchered city. The Eymorg are provided for by high-tech systems they do not understand, and which function due to the remarkable information management intelligence of the Controller wetware. The only contact between the male and female groups is for mating purposes. The Morg call the Eymorg “the Others” or those who give “pain and delight.”
The logistical software running the Eymorg life-support system flows through an amalgam of unfathomable physical machinery extending below ground for hundreds of miles. This network of systems and applications was guided for ten thousand years by the “living brain” of a Controller who recently expired and must be replaced. The computing infrastructure was erected by systems architects from a sophisticated ancient civilization which also built the ion-powered interstellar spaceship on which the Council leader Kara, the abductor of Spock’s Brain, was merely a passenger. “Who controls this complex?” asks Captain Kirk of Kara, using the terminology of first-order cybernetics. Mr. Spock’s stolen gray matter is inside a black box attached to the Controller hub of the life-maintenance internet of the Eymorg. His literally disembodied brain is wired to the fundamental technical facilities (temperature control, water purification, air recirculation) of an entire underground society.
Dr. McCoy transiently gains the exalted medical knowledge to micro-surgically transplant the purloined brain of Mr. Spock back into his skull by placing himself under a helmet-like technological contraption called “the Great Teacher.” The device, which emits possibly hazardous energy surges and spikes, allows access to the super-advanced knowledge of many kinds possessed in abundance by “the Ancients,” but which the latter mete out (via pre-programming) to the current-day Eymorg only on the rarest of occasions. The extravagantly dependent Eymorg are practically incapable of cogitation. But after Captain Kirk deprives them of their substitute Controller, they are obliged to change and exert themselves. For the sake of survival, the Eymorg must learn to be self-reliant and to cooperate with the above-ground dwelling male Morg.
After steadily handling more than ten quadrillion transactions per seconds in the middle of the Eymorg network, Mr. Spock’s partly re-sutured brain finds it child’s play to verbally instruct Dr. McCoy in the finer points of making his bio-informatic command center fully operational again in the context of his real body. “If you will finish reconnecting my speech center,” the reimbodied voice tells McCoy, “I might be able to help.” Even though he is rapidly forgetting what he learned from the Teacher, the Doctor must reconnect the last ganglia and nerve endings before sewing up the Science Officer’s scalp.
The seminal Original Series episodes about Mr. Spock, like This Side of Paradise, The Devil in the Dark, and Amok Time, deal subtly with the tension between Spock as an emblem of first-wave cybernetics (Norbert Wiener’s command and control in objects of socio- and bio-power-knowledge, treated as information systems by the logos) and Spock as potentially subversive male cyborg. But the episode Spock’s Brain tries too literally to tell us that Spock is “identical” to the mode of technical progress called cybernetics or information science. Writer-Producer Gene L. Coon, who also penned The Devil in the Dark, A Taste of Armageddon, Arena, and Metamorphosis, wrote Spock’s Brain under the pen name of Lee Cronin. David Gerrold, author of the acclaimed Original Series episode The Trouble With Tribbles and the novelization of The Next Generation pilot Encounter at Farpoint, speculates that Coon, who resigned his Producer title and position in the middle of The Original Series’ second season, was taking revenge against Star Trek with the “stupidity” of the script for the third season’s opening episode. “I suspect that Spock’s Brain was Gene L. Coon’s way of thumbing his nose at Roddenberry,” Gerrold told an interviewer. (Gross and Altman, Captain’s Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages)
Although Spock’s Brain is considered by posterity to be one of the worst episodes in the history of Star Trek, it can be fruitfully reinterpreted in light of the long tradition of “The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction” investigated by Justine Larbalestier. The story taking place on Sigma Draconis VI is a classic SF “battle-of-the-sexes” text in Larbalestier’s sense. It is about relations between men and women, and belongs to a “genre where the negotiations that produce and shape heterosexual subjectivities are explicitly realized.” Female rule is demonized and depicted as “wrong.” A specific kind of heterosexual relationship between dominant men and submissive, scantily clad, women is lamented for its absence. A group of males from the outside (the Enterprise officers) intervenes to restore the patriarchal “order of things.” As novelist Joanna Russ writes, “The strangest and most fascinating oddities in science fiction occur not in the stories that try to abolish differences in gender-roles but in those which attempt to reverse the roles themselves. Unfortunately, only a handful of writers have treated this theme seriously.” (Joanna Russ, “The Image of Women in Science Fiction,” in Vertex, 1974) Larbalestier discusses David H. Keller’s 1929 story “The Feminine Metamorphosis,” Nelson S. Bond’s 1939 story “The Priestess Who Rebelled,” and Edmund Cooper’s 1972 novel, Who Needs Men? as important examples of SF narratives of this type. In Keller’s short story, thousands of women take over the world in a conspiracy. In the latter two tales, a male protagonist establishes heterosexual economic exchange for an entire culture by sealing the heroine’s acquiescent allegiance through a symbolic penetrating kiss that is overwhelming and nearly orgasmic. The foundational kiss is the prerequisite to a new system of circulation. It marks the turning point from matriarchy to patriarchy, and reinstates both sexes to the status of “real men” and “real women.” In “The Priestess Who Rebelled,” the hunter-gatherer male Wild Ones, like the Morg of Spock’s Brain, are shaggy and unkempt, and are “not real men.”
In common with the seminal 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet, Spock’s Brain shows a planet running on a secret underground infrastructure and power source of super-technology, stretching for hundreds of miles, built by a defunct Scientific Civilization. As in the Fred Wilcox-directed movie that inspired Gene Roddenberry’s creation of Star Trek, the ancient civilization presumably disappeared due to its hubris of designing a nanotechnology-style system to realize the phantasmagoria of total “virtual reality” control over the physical world, which instead ended in total self-destruction. In Spock’s Brain, the leisure provided by the leftovers of this technological system has the effect of perpetuating the “mistaken constellation” of female rule. The Eymorg and Morg are both stupid, because intelligence resides in the technological Controller. The Eymorg have access to spurts of intelligence through the Great Teacher, just as Dr. Morbius, played by Walter Pidgeon, had access to the “Plastic Educator” or “IQ Booster” in Forbidden Planet.
Matriarchy functioned for thousands of years on Sigma Draconis VI, but its death knell has been rung by the expiration of the Controller. This very stable system of technoscience has depended on one great Methuselah-like male brain and a female civilization. Mr. Spock might have become the replacement Controller, but he is needed for something of higher priority: Star Trek. Captain Kirk disconnects the “wrong system” of women in charge and gets the planet back on its feet.
Instead of the symbolic kiss of male penetration, which stands in for sexual intercourse, there is the homoerotic encounter between Dr. McCoy, with his surgical hands, and Mr. Spock, with his incredible brain. As in the narratives analyzed by Larbalestier, the metaphoric act (of McCoy operating to reconnect Spock’s brain to his body) is climactic and occurs near the end of the story. Heterosexuality per se is tossed aside. It is reserved for the reformed yet lowly Eymorg and Morg, who will resolve their conflict on “long, cold winter nights,” as Captain Kirk condescendingly suggests in the James Blish “more original” adapted version. Their fate is largely irrelevant.
The usual sarcastic banter between Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy conceals their sexual tension, which is released in the eroticism of the brain restoration procedure. Working behind a vertical shield on the insides of a body part we are not supposed to see, McCoy’s fingers, rendered super-skillful by the Teacher, intermingle and have their way with the erogenous zones of Spock’s most precious organ. For the half-Vulcan Science Officer, it is like getting a satisfying scratch in a difficult to reach place. As each nerve and ganglia is precisely massaged, Spock sighs with contentment. His voice is throaty and choked as the Doctor reconstructs his orality. The give-and-take between them, like a kiss of sexual equals, tilts in the First Officer’s favor once he can speak and give instructions. Spock overturns his supine position and “tops” McCoy.
After the deed, Spock is installed in a male dominant role, and McCoy in a female submissive one. Mr. Spock is exhausted and sleeps for a long time. Later he is exhilarated and even grinning. Dr. McCoy feels guilty and ungratified. “I knew it was wrong. I should have never reconnected his mouth,” the Doctor says. In a conversation referring to the Eymorg and Morg, he complains, in the Blish version, that the half-Vulcan knows nothing about cuddling (“a human predilection, Spock. We don’t expect you to know about it.”) McCoy’s final verdict is that Spock is the most ungrateful patient he has had. (James Blish narrative version)
