This Side of Paradise

One of the world’s most pointless tasks is trying to explain to a stoner what’s wrong with being a stoner. Once issues such as “where do you plan to get the money for pot?” are resolved, the only remaining objection is “don’t you want to do anything with your life?” And when the stoner shoots back a contented “no,” the discussion is done. So when the Enterprise visits the Planet of the Stoners, the story likewise turns out to be unsatisfying.

Our heroes are dispatched to Omicron Ceti III to clean up whatever’s left of a colony that made the mistake of setting up shop on a planet being bathed in deadly Berthold rays. So it comes as quite a shock when the colonists turn out to be alive and thriving.

Well, not exactly thriving. Everyone seems just a little too happy. Though they’ve got plenty to be happy about – country living, plenty of sunshine, vegetarian diet (no farm animals) and oddly perfect health – they’ve got that vaguely dopey aura about them typical of straight 60s society’s idea of what people on drugs or in religious cults are like. The problem turns out to be the former. Or to be more precise, everyone in the colony is high on spores that shoot out of flowers if you get too close to them.

Of all the suddenly-hippified crew members, Spock is the most insufferable. One of the colonists, a woman named Leila (Jill Ireland, probably best known as Mrs. Charles Bronson), knows Spock from way back and has a crush on him. So she’s all too happy to aid and abet as he gets spore-sprayed and turns into a grinning nincompoop. I know the whole Spock-shows-emotion thing is big among Trek fans, but this is way too over the top. By the time he starts swinging from tree limbs like a five-year-old, it’s enough to get us all to agree that too much emotion is at least as bad as not enough.

In short order the rest of the crew is affected as well. McCoy is transformed into a “southern gentleman,” drawling merrily away as he sips a mint julep that looks like an iced tea with a bush growing out of it. Sulu and the red shirts likewise succumb. Nor is the damage limited to the away team. Someone beams a mess of the flowers up to the ship, the spores get into the air system, and in short order a long line of unnaturally-content people are waiting to beam down.

Even Kirk gets spored and at least temporarily stoned. But the prospect of abandoning the Enterprise is enough of a bummer to bring him down. This makes him realize that negative emotions may be an effective way to counteract the effect of the spores. He tries his theory out on Spock, which wasn’t the brightest of plans because the insults Kirk uses provoke his first officer so severely that the enraged Vulcan very nearly dishes out a fatal ass beating before coming to his senses.

Fortunately for the sake of time and safety, Spock figures out that they can create a sub-audible sound so annoying – my choice would have been tracks from The White Album – that everyone will snap out of it at once.

When the leader of the colony comes back to his senses, his remark – “We haven’t accomplished anything here” – exposes the big flaw in the anti-stoner argument: who cares? Sure, none of these spore-heads were going to write the great galactic novel or come up with a cure for cancer. But then odds are that none of them was going to write the great galactic novel anyway. And the spores cured cancer (and every other form of injury and disease). So what exactly was so wrong with the spore life? I’m not a pothead myself, but if for whatever reason I were trying to talk someone out of that particular lifestyle, I wouldn’t use this episode as a case in point.

Episode rating:

Stardate: 3417.3

Episode type: Enterprise crew

Written by: D.C. Fontana

Original air date: March 2, 1967

A Taste of Armageddon / The Devil in the Dark

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