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The first Star Trek pilot, The Cage, was produced in 1964. To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, this December we are reviewing the second season of the original Star Trek show. You can check out our first season reviews here. Check back daily for the latest review.

In many respects, Who Mourns for Adonais? is a formative episode for Star Trek as a franchise. It’s a show that really informs a lot of the franchise that would follow, even beyond the confines of the original television show. It’s an episode that represents the first clear articulation of a strand of thought that has been bubbling away through the first season of Star Trek and into the second, exploring the religious side of the Star Trek universe and mankind’s place in the cosmos.

The episode is iconic and memorable. It is packed with images that are familiar to even the most casual of fans. “Kirk confronts a Greek god in deep space!” is a catchy premise. “A giant hand grabs the Enterprise and threatens to crush the ship!” is the type of delightfully insane visual that ranks with “Captain Kirk as a Nazi!” or “space Lincoln!” when it comes to Star Trek visuals that stick with people outside the context of the show itself. Coupled with the distillation of those themes, this is a “big” episode.

Unfortunately, Who Mourns for Adonais? is also a deeply troubling episode. It has problems heaped upon problems. Some of those problems are inherited from the general aesthetic of the show, and are not specific to this episode. However, some of those problems are explicitly articulated here. Who Mourns for Adonais? is an episode that embodies quite a few of the very serious problems that run through the original Star Trek and haunt the franchise for quite some time.

The fact that these problems come baked into an iconic and memorable episode is disappointing.

Gene Roddenberry was an atheist. He was aggressively atheistic. “Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all,” he had stated in a statement that was surprisingly confrontational for a man who claimed to have created a franchise built on tolerance and open-mindedness. “For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.” It should come as no surprise that his views were reflected in the show itself.

As with a lot of things, Star Trek‘s position on religion varied from episode to episode, and occasionally within the same episode. After all, Balance of Terror suggested that the Enterprise had its own chapel, and shows like Who Mourns for Adonais? and Bread and Circuses suggest that the Federation is monotheistic, worshipping “the Son.” However, much like Star Trek seemed to change position on the Vietnam War between broadcasts, the show could also be quite strongly atheist when the mood took it.

There was arguably an atheist subtext to The Return of the Archons in the first season, as Kirk defeats a super-computer that has declared itself the ruler of a gullible population. However, the most obvious example of the franchise’s aggressive rejection of religion would come in The Apple. Even the title of that episode refers to The Book of Genesis, and sees Kirk playing the role of the serpent liberating a primitive people from a malicious self-proclaimed “god.”

Despite a throw-away line from Kirk about how the Federation finds “one god” is quite enough, Who Mourns for Adonais? really codifies this atheistic approach. Kirk and his crew stumble across a genuine god from Ancient Greece. They discover a planet that is controlled by Apollo, who has only simple command for the crew of the Enterprise. “You will gather laurel leaves, light the ancient fires, kill a deer, make your sacrifices to me,” he declares. “Apollo has spoken!”

As such, Kirk and his crew are forced to vanquish the deity once and for all. Who Mourns for Adonais? is endearingly honest in its central theme. There’s no attempt to dismiss Apollo as an imposter or a fake. The episode makes a strong case that Apollo is who he claims to be. Even Kirk and his crew seem to accept the probability that Apollo did visit Ancient Greek and was accepted as a god by the native populations at face value.

However, even accepting Apollo’s boasts at face value, Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise are forced to respond with force. In an act layered rather heavily with symbolism, Kirk orders the Enterprise to destroy the temple. With the place of worship reduced to ruin, Apollo himself literally fades away. He is a nightmare from Earth’s past successfully vanquished by Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise. This is as much a victory for Kirk as the destruction of the fake “God” in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

To be fair, the script for Who Mourns for Adonais? does offer the smallest gesture of respect for religious belief. “Mankind has no need for gods,” Kirk boasts. “We find the one quite adequate.” Even ignoring the way that Kirk’s statement dismisses all polytheistic religions, there’s reason to suspect it was a cynical bone thrown from Roddenberry to the network or the public. As Ross Kraemer, William Cassidy and Susan L. Schwartz contend in Religions Of Star Trek:

After he tells Apollo that mankind “has no need for gods” the apparently irreligious Kirk claims “we find the one quite adequate.” As our introduction discussion of Roddenberry’s tactics for dealing with the religious sensibilities of his audiences suggests, such a line seems more likely to be one of the creator’s throwaway lines designed to mollify American viewers than any serious indication of Kirk’s offended or outraged monotheist beliefs. Kirk might even be understood to suggest that one god is more than enough to handle.

Certainly, while Apollo is nominally a Greek god, Who Mourns for Adonais? paints him a decidedly Judeo-Christian light. He first attracts the attention of the Enterprise as a gigantic hand, recalling the popular depiction of a Judeo-Christian God. (After all, God is the only character on The Simpsons to get five fingers.) Who Mourns for Adonais? also paints Apollo as a “father” dealing with errant “children”, a view of divinity perhaps more appropriate to Judeo-Christian traditions than to Apollo in his classical form.

As such, Who Mourns for Adonais? uses Apollo as a stand-in for all religious deities, with particular emphasis on the major religions in the United States. The episode is very much about Kirk’s refusal to bend down before a god. This isn’t simply a character claiming to be a god, but a character with historical precedent of being worshipped and recognised as a deity. Kirk and his crew come face to face with a god and destroy him.

This sets something of a precedent. The show would reinforce this idea in The Apple, a show that would draw even more firmly on Christian religious traditions and imagery. However, this perspective that suggested religious belief was inherently toxic and needed to be vanquished would be reiterated time and again over the course of the franchise. Even Picard gives voice to it in Who Watches the Watchers?, where he takes for granted that a religious resurgence will set back social progression on an alien world.

There’s a slightly unsettling subtext to all of this, a sense of hubris on the part of Kirk and his crew. As Paul A. Cantor notes in Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization, the episode espouses a particularly one-sided vision of divinity:

Once again democratic ideology demands that Apollo’s superiority be exposed as a merely technological advantage, not a superiority of nature. …The result of breaking Apollo’s spell is to destroy possibly the greatest single archaeological find in the history of the universe – an authentic Greek god. This episode teaches a basic truth about Kirk – as in Star Trek IV, he is willing to save whales, but he feels compelled to kill gods. Kirk can be quite solicitous of the welfare of lower beings, but he cannot accept the idea that there might be something higher than humanity in the universe, something to which human will might have to be subordinated.

This is not tolerance or open-mindedness or understanding. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would be a lot more insightful in its exploration of religious themes. This is jingoism finding expression through atheism.

The universe exists precisely as Kirk understands it to exist. Kirk’s outlook is absolutely and empirically correct. Kirk’s appeals to Carolyn Palamas’ sense of loyalty and duty is do not appeal to her capacity for rational thought or her own experience or education. Instead, Kirk appeals to her directly as a human. Fearing she is getting too close to Apollo, he pleads, “Now feel that. Human flesh against human flesh. We’re the same. We share the same history, the same heritage, the same lives.”

Kirk and Palamas are not bonded because they are rational actors trying to find the best possible solution to this crisis. They are bonded because they are human beings and human beings are much better than anything else in the cosmos. “We’re tied together beyond any untying,” he explains. “Man or woman, it makes no difference. We’re human. We couldn’t escape from each other even if we wanted to. That’s how you do it, Lieutenant. By remembering who and what you are. A bit of flesh and blood afloat in a universe without end. The only thing that’s truly yours is the rest of humanity. That’s where our duty lies.”

This outlook has some unsettling implications. For one thing, it means the immediate rejection of anything that does not conform to Kirk’s outlook on the universe. It paves the way for the human superiority complex that would exist during the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Kirk’s compulsion to kill a god because it challenges his preconception of humanity’s place in the universe foreshadows the smug superiority demonstrated by humans in episodes like The Last Outpost or Lonely Among Us.

Kirk’s self-centred viewpoint is reflected in closing monologue. “They gave us so much,” Kirk reflects. “The Greek civilisation, much of our culture and philosophy came from a worship of those beings. In a way, they began the Golden Age.” Of course, he ignores any non-European civilisations that developed around the same time, and overlooks some of the more reasonable criticisms of Ancient Greece that get somewhat glossed over in the rush to romanticise it.

It’s very clear that despite the ethnically diverse cast of characters working on the Enterprise, Kirk and Star Trek operated from an almost exclusively western perspective. Consider Chekov’s boast about how the Cheshire Cat originated in Minsk, demonstrating that it is a “Russian story.” However, Minsk is actually in Belarus. Sure, this can be excused any number of ways – maybe Belarus has merged with Russia? maybe the cat is a foreigner? – but it plays as if the writers just couldn’t be bothered with the distinction.

There’s another interesting idea at play in Who Mourns for Adonais? What if Kirk isn’t simply vanquishing an old pantheon? What if Kirk is actually making room for a new mythology by burning the old belief systems to the ground? What if this is actually about literalising Star Trek‘s aggressive attempts to establish itself as something of a modern mythology? That would be a suitably bold interpretation of the episode.

John Shelton Lawrence suggests as much in Star Trek as American Monomyth:

This episode bears the clear message that the era of myths is over, that retreating into slavery to the gods of the past would be terrible. Moreover, the episode suggests that the ancient myths can be scientifically explained by assuming that space travelers played the role of gods. The episode implies that meaning is purely of this world; it denies any threshold to mysterious, transcendent reality. In contrast to the illusive message of myths and religions, the meaning of Carolyn Palamas’ life is simply her ‘duty’ to the only reality of which she can be sure, the ‘humanity’ she shares. This conviction of Captain Kirk fits the spirit of the entire series. It is unthinkable that he or his crew, not to mention the strictly scientific Spock, would give credence to myths for a moment. As if to affirm a strongly anti-mythos for the series, a parallel plot of demythification was played out a quarter of century later in the Devil’s Due of TNG. There Picard’s crew exposes the devilishly powered Ardra as a mere hoax. Yet these storylines follow a mythic pattern. David Gerrold defined Star Trek as “a set of fables – morality plays, entertainments, and diversions about contemporary man, but set against a science-fiction background. The background is subordinate to the fable.”

It’s worth noting that Devil’s Due began its life as a script for Star Trek: Phase II. As such, the connection to the sentiments of Who Mourns for Adonais? seems entirely reasonable and logical.

The suggestion that Star Trek might be attempting to supplant older mythological systems suggests an incredible amount of confidence. However, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. Gene Roddenberry would work really hard to sell the idea of Star Trek as an ideology. Ronald D. Moore once observed that he thought “that Gene sort of started to believe in himself as more of a visionary than a writer at a certain point.” Roddenberry’s novelisation of Star Trek: The Motion Picture reads like a manifesto.

So it’s possible to see Who Mourns for Adonais? as Star Trek staking a claim on mythology, with the franchise demolishing what came before so it could build itself back up. There’s a certain appeal to this idea. It’s fun to imagine Star Trek aggressively asserting that it is a mythology for the modern day. Fans frequently claim that the show has inspired them, and that it presents an optimistic glimpse at a potential future for mankind. Why wouldn’t that philosophy trump Apollo’s fearful worship?

Well, the problem is that Star Trek isn’t quite that enlightened and idealised a television show yet. To be frank, Star Trek really isn’t in a place where it is developed enough to build itself up as a mythology. The show doesn’t have a truly consistent philosophical perspective at this point, as the show’s outlook changes from episode to episode. Roddenberry’s own philosophies and politics are hardly a solid foundation for a modern mythology; Roddenberry would be the driving force behind The Omega Glory.

One need look no further than the treatment of female characters so far this season to see why Star Trek needs a bit more work before proclaiming itself a suitable modern mythology or philosophy. Carolyn Palamas is female guest character of the week, and she suffers the sorts of indignities common to female characters appearing on the original Star Trek show. Although some of this casual sexism can be excused as a product of the show’s time, it remains a bit disheartening to see it so frequently.

In A Brief Guide to Star Trek, Brian J. Robb rather effectively documents some of the show’s gender issues – particularly those that apply to Palamas:

Women in The Original Series often find themselves in thrall to powerful men, whether it be Marla McGivers with Khan (Space Seed) or Carolyn Palamas and faux-god Apollo (Who Mourns For Adonais?). The spectre of rape, or at least forced physical contact, seems to haunt some of these relationships. In Shore Leave, the men’s fantasies revolve around whimsy (McCoy sees Alice and the White Rabbit, Kirk encounters Finnegan, a joker from his past, and old flame Ruth), while Tonia Barrows’ fantasy involves a violent seduction at the hands of Don Juan. Similarly, Carolyn Palamas is ravaged by a violent storm of Apollo’s making when she rejects his advances. Both encounters leave the women traumatised and in torn clothing, yet both events are depicted as being a result of their own wishes or desires.

The show has a long history of being worryingly flippant about rape and sexual assault, and Who Mourns for Adonais? is just the latest example.

It’s worth noting that the episode originally ended with the revelation that Palamas was pregnant by Apollo. Kirk, Spock and McCoy would joke about it in the stinger. The scene was ultimately cut, but not because it had a bunch of male characters joking about a rape victim. As Marc Cushman reveals in These Are the Voyages: Season Two:

“The network absolutely would not allow that,” Dorothy Fontana said. “Oh my God, intercourse outside marriage! Usually we could sneak by a lot of stuff, [but] it was ultimately stricken.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that good taste wasn’t the deciding factor here. After all The Enemy Within had ended with Spock cracking a joke about Captain Kirk’s attempted rape of Yeoman Janice Rand, a female character who would be phased out after her actress was the victim of a sexual assault. So Star Trek has a long history of being terrible with female guest stars.

To be fair, you could argue that the show is trying to explore abusive relationships and marriages. After all Who Mourns for Adonais? tries to position Apollo as a stern father figure, claiming Palamas as his wife. There’s an argument to be made that Who Mourns for Adonais? is about the kind of power that these men hold over their victims. Palamas is treated like a woman trapped in an abusive marriage. “A father doesn’t destroy his children,” she insists. “You said you were gentle and understanding.”

Kirk must convince her to see Apollo for the monster that he is, rather than the man that she wishes he were. She struggles with that, despite his brutality and violence. “Oh, but you don’t understand,” she pleads with Kirk. “He’s kind, and he wants the best for us. And he’s so lonely. What you ask would break his heart. How can I?” It’s an argument that sounds like the rationalisations of many abuse victims.

Still, this reading doesn’t quite hold true, for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that Kirk actively enables Apollo’s abuse of Palamas. He sends Palamas into a situation where he has to suspect some form of abuse or violence is inevitable. He uses her as leverage to help him defeat Apollo, leading directly to her assault. Who Mourns for Adonais? does not present this as an ambiguous decision on Kirk’s part. The audience is clearly meant to believe that Kirk is simply doing what he can to protect his ship.

However, there are other problems here. Even before Apollo arrives, Who Mourns for Adonais? is dismissive of Carolyn Palamas. While not as dismissive of Palamas as he had been as McGivers back in Space Seed, Kirk and McCoy still idly gossip about her. The two notice Scotty and Palamas flirting. “I’m not sure I like that, Jim,” McCoy notes. “Why, Bones?” Kirk asks. “Scotty’s a good man.” Their concern seems primarily for Scotty rather than the junior officer being pursued by the ship’s third-in-command.

“And he thinks he’s the right man for her,” McCoy replies, “but I’m not sure she thinks he’s the right man. On the other hand, she’s a woman. All woman. One day she’ll find the right man and off she’ll go, out of the service.” It seems that – even in the future – women are held to a double standard. Apparently a woman cannot have a career and a family. Interestingly, there’s no suggestion that Scotty would leave the service for the right woman.

Kirk and McCoy seem to be whining about the fickleness of women. You almost expect to hear one or either complaining about the fact that they are allowed to join the service at all. These are the sorts of sexist attitudes that still inform certain hiring practices – the worry that a female employee will run off to start a family, leaving her employer in the lurch. It’s not too hard to believe, if Kirk and McCoy are any indication, that Starfleet has its own “mommy-track.”

Who Mourns for Adonais? encapsulated a lot of the themes that would come to be associated with Star Trek. It is perhaps the strongest atheistic statement from the series to date, and it sees Kirk arguing that mankind has ascended beyond the need for worship or faith. It lays out the show’s position quite clearly and quite elegantly, setting a precedent that will continue into the era of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Unfortunately, it’s also a deeply flawed episode. It is very firmly anchored in a narrow understanding of faith and religion, as if to suggest that these things are inherently oppressive. Entire generations will attest that they can be, but this also dismisses the idea that faith can exist alongside science and development, and can strengthen and enable people. It is also rather bullish in presenting Kirk’s world view as unequivocally superior and unquestionably correct, endorsing Kirk’s politics and principles.

As such, it replaces one form of worship with another. Who Mourns for Adonais? cements the worrying implication that Kirk and his crew are not exploring the cosmos to learn about new life forms and new civilisations, but instead to affirm mankind’s superiority. The first half of the first season portrayed space as a mostly-empty graveyard haunted by the ghosts of its past inhabitants. Who Mourns for Adonais? pushes that idea a bit further, suggesting that Kirk and his crew are kings of that graveyard.

The problem is that Kirk’s posturing only emphasises the problems that exist with Star Trek at this phase of its life-cycle. Kirk’s perspective is too narrow, too jingoistic. He suggests that Ancient Greece is the biggest influence on human culture, ignoring the fact that his crew is populated by characters who should be coming from outside the framework of western culture. The show still tries to reduce rape victims to closing scene punchlines.

The show has a lot of improvements to make and a long way to go before it can truly claim to offer an enlightened future. There is much more to be done, more to be learned. This is no time for Star Trek to rest on its laurels.

You might be interested in our other reviews from the second season of the classic Star Trek:

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Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: Ancient Greece, Apollo, Atheism, belief, christianity, faith, gender, god, gods, greek gods, kirk, monotheism, pantheism, polytheism, religions, sexism, sixties, star trek, who mourns for adonais, women, worship |