Boarding the Enterprise: Transporters, Tribbles, And the Vulcan Death Grip in Gene Rodenberry's Star Trek (Smart Pop series) by

Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781935618706
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2006-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

“BODY SWITCHING” AND MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES

In “Turnabout Intruder” (3-24), Dr. Janice Lester (an old lover of Kirk’s) forcibly traded bodies with Kirk, using a machine she found on a planet. This transfer of each person’s “life-entity” (as Spock put it) was presented visually by ghostly figures resembling each person’s body (Lester and Kirk) switching between the two bodies. Janice Lester’s memories, personality and knowledge—in our terms, her various psychological patterns—were then present in Kirk’s body, and vice versa. Lester was motivated by hatred of Kirk; he (a man) could become a starship commander, whereas she (a woman) could not. Her obsessive hatred had left her psychologically unstable. This gave her away to Spock and other crewmembers, such as McCoy, who noticed her “emotional instability” and “erratic mental attitudes,” even though when McCoy forced her (in Kirk’s body) to undergo a physical and psychological examination, she passed. Spock mind-melded with Lester’s body and was convinced Kirk was “in” it. The dominant metaphor in the episode is clearly of the body as a “container” for a “life-entity,” which seems to be conceived of as a kind of object separate from the body—perhaps non-physical, though how it could have been transferred by a machine then would be puzzling. Moreover, it seemed to have a kind of affinity for its body, since the transfer “broke” during a fight (seemingly of its own accord) as the episode reached its climax—Kirk’s “life-entity” returned to his body, Lester’s to hers. Thus, though what clearly separated and helped the crew to identify Kirk and Lester were their psychological characteristics, the episode assumed an object view, as evinced by the term “life-entity.”

An equally puzzling episode about body switching is “Return to Tomorrow” (2-20). In this episode, three beings that existed as “pure energy” were found in a hitherto unexplored region of the galaxy. The being first encountered, Sargon, was able to manipulate the Enterprise mechanically and was aware of what was in everyone’s mind. The ship’s instruments could read the “energy” that composed him (though he wasn’t identified as a life form). Since this “energy” was physically detectable, it would seemingly have to have been physical; it was even “stored” in globular “receptacles.” (Consistent with this, Spock referred to it as “pure energy . . . matter without form.”) He and the other two survivors, Thalassa (Sargon’s wife) and Henoch (a former enemy), asked to take over three human bodies (Kirk’s, Spock’s and Dr. Ann Mulhall’s) to build androids into which each would transfer its consciousness. While their bodies were inhabited by the aliens, the crewmembers’ three consciousnesses were stored in the globular receptacles (apparently humans are the same kind of “energy,” only “weaker”). Unknown to Sargon, however, Henoch planned not to “return” Spock’s body (androids, he said, are “without feeling”) and almost convinced Thalassa to do the same with Mulhall’s body. Henoch was thwarted when Sargon, “inhabiting” the Enterprise, convinced Henoch that Spock’s body was dying. Henoch fled the body, and, as his “energy” supposedly had to be housed

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