The Enterprise senior officers and crew arrive at the planet Omicron Ceti III to investigate the fate of an agricultural development colony of 150 people headed by the rugged Elias Sandoval, played by Frank Overton. The colonists have been out of radio contact with Starfleet Command since their departure from Earth four years ago. The landing party is stoically braced for the likelihood that they will find all of the settlers deceased. Two previous groups of pioneers from Terran had already perished on the uncommonly beautiful Class-M planet under mysterious circumstances. But after the most recent catastrophe, Federation forensic and atmospheric scientists determined that the cause of death of the members of the first two expeditions was a newly identified emission from the planet’s sun given the name berthold rays. This deadly radiation causes disintegration of humanoid or animal flesh within as little as three days after a subject’s direct exposure to them.
To their amazement, Captain Kirk, Lt. Commander Spock, Dr. McCoy, Lt. Sulu and other away team personnel are approached on foot by a living, breathing Sandoval and two of his associates within seconds after beaming down to a sparse farm-like setting. All of the land cultivation specialists from Earth are miraculously still alive, but they react evasively when pressed for an explanation. The Starfleet officers learn on their own that the potentially fatal effect of the solar berthold rays is offset by the presence in the bloodstream and central nervous system of special microscopic symbiotic organisms. These sheltering spores enter the individual’s body through his respiratory system from the flowers of dandelion-like pod plants in which they temporarily reside. It is not known which part of the galaxy the spores come from, but it is believed that they drifted through space until they found a star system and planet offering them optimal conditions for rapid reproduction. In addition to providing protection from the dangerous berthold rays (on which they themselves thrive), the spores furnish their human host with more than perfect physical health, healing of old scar tissue, organ regeneration, and complete emotional contentment. The infiltrated Sandoval colonists enjoy feelings of permanent euphoria and harmony, and a profound sense of “belongingness.” But they have also lapsed into idleness and intellectual stagnation. In spite of rich soil and ideal climatic conditions for farming, the settlers have planted little acreage and do not even rotate their crops. They have become passive members of a sect-like Collective of “true believers” whose only ambition is to not be moved from where they are. Kirk receives orders to transfer the colony to Starbase 27, but Sandoval and his people decline to cooperate in any evacuation procedures.
Mr. Spock is the first among the Enterprise landing party to be permeated by the spores. But they affect him in a different way than the others. The Science Officer is walking in an uncultivated field together with botanist Leila Kalomi, played by Jill Ireland, one of Sandoval’s cohorts. Spock and Kalomi knew each other quite well six years ago on Earth. The human female had always felt a deep unrequited love for Spock, who tells her in this episode that his first name is unpronounceable by non-Vulcans. When Leila tries to get him to open up about his feelings, he trots out a stock phrase steeped in rigid dualism: “emotions are alien to me, I’m a scientist.” To this Leila Kalomi replies with assuredness, “someone else might believe that, your shipmates, your Captain, but not me.” “And I never understood you, until now,” she continues. “There was always a place in here [she touches his chest near his heart] where no one could come. There was only the face you allow people to see, only one side you’d allow them to know.”
What the resourceful plant biologist has perceived is that Spock may not wish to conclusively reject his human side. So far in his personal development, he is lacking a language to express himself and his unnamed cyborg existence. Spock’s extraordinary techno-scientific competence could be cracked open as the basis for imaginative and creative practices of new lifeworld construction. Machinic, digital, and technological skills do not have to be constrained by the assumption that the domain to which they belong (in order to maintain its coherence and functionality) must never have anything to do with crafting an intersubjective existence. At the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine says “I know myself, but that is all,” emphasizing perceptible self-understanding as the key to apprehension. In Rupert Brooke’s poem Tiare Tahiti, where the title phrase originates, the sensuality of hands, lips and flowers and the emotions of hearts and songs are chosen over the “wisdom” of logical categories and abstract conceptual thinking. “And my laughter, and my pain, Shall home to the Eternal Brain.”
As Spock stands over a waist-high plant swaying gently in the breeze, a bulbous pod breaks open. The powdery spore projectiles fly towards his face. They penetrate him precisely at the moment when Leila Kalomi has talked out loud about the vulnerability of his logical character formation. Spock doubles over in agony, seeming to suffer from a splitting headache. He screams in pain. “Please … don’t,” he calls out to an undesignated interlocutor. “It shouldn’t hurt, not like this!” Leila exclaims. “It didn’t hurt us!” “I’m not like you,” Spock points out. Leila responds, “there’s no need to hide your inner face any longer.”
After the spores finally exert their full influence on him, Spock’s repressed double appears. He confesses the desire, passion, and tender sentiments he feels towards Leila. They make love. He starts to speak while lying on the ground. “I’ve never stopped to look at clouds before, or rainbows.” He stands up. “You know, I can tell you exactly why one appears in the sky. But considering its beauty has always been out of the question.” Spock begins to notice the radical singularity of objects and the “otherness” of other people, against the obsession of scientific explanation and classification which has always been his habit. This is a “basic Star Trek principle” insight that will stay with him through to his encounter in Star Trek I: The Motion Picture with the mechanistically-minded V’Ger space vessel, and his comment in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country to his Vulcan protégé Valeris that “logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”
Spock is literally swinging upside down from the limbs of trees. This image is reminiscent of the simian or free-ranging primate whom cyborg theorist Donna J. Haraway has recognized as another unsettling boundary creature between the human and the nonhuman, in figurative kinship with the cyborg.
With the single exception of the hard-nosed Captain Kirk, all officers and crew members become “possessed” by the spores. Dr. McCoy has some pod plants transported to the Enterprise, and their spores are carried everywhere by the ventilation system. The crew in effect mutinies, abandoning ship to join the blissful Sandoval colony. Spock disobeys orders and refuses to do his job. Kirk is alone on a silent, unattended starship that will soon fall out of orbit and crash into the Omicron Ceti world. “Draw near, illustrious Odysseus, man of many tales, great glory of the Achaeans, and bring your ship to rest so that you may hear our voices. No seaman ever sailed his black ship past this spot without listening to the honey-sweet tones that flow from our lips.” (Homer, The Odyssey)
Kirk is finally affected by the spores, but their hold over him does not last. He packs his suitcase and goes to the transporter room, poised to leave the Enterprise for good. But feelings of anger rise up within him, releasing him suddenly from the grip of the spores’ rule. He discovers that intense negative or adrenaline-producing emotions cause the micro-organisms to dissolve in the human circulatory system and die.
Kirk hails Spock and deceptively tells him that he has joined the Collective. He asks the half-Vulcan to beam up to the transporter room to help with some final logistical arrangements. Standing face-to-face, the Captain hurls a series of racial epithets about Vulcans at his First Officer to rouse his feelings of aggression. He calls Spock a “computerized half-breed” and a traitorous freak who belongs in the circus, “right next to the dog-faced boy.” Kirk baits Spock into a violent brawl. The discharge of epinephrine-like chemicals into Spock’s green blood finally makes him snap out of his prolonged trance.
Returning to his usual self, but with a subtle change, Spock tells Leila Kalomi with deep regret, “I am what I am … and if there are self-made purgatories and we all have to live in them, mine can be no worse than someone else’s.” The state of alienation and duality cannot be overcome by simply embracing what has been repressed in a headlong rush to touch the “naturalness” of presence, emotion, and sexuality. This Side of Paradise, truly grasping and living the cyborg condition will be a much more difficult undertaking.
Kirk and Spock broadcast subsonic frequencies planetwide devised to get on the nerves of the mutinous crew members. The irritating signals provoke them into fisticuffs and adrenaline-releasing anger that kills the spores. “We’ve done nothing here, no accomplishments, no progress,” laments a sobered Sandoval.
Fielding a question from his superior officer, Spock admits to being without words to describe what he has experienced. “For the first time in my life,” he clumsily manages, “I was happy.”
