Stardate: 5029.5
Captain’s log. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to Triacus, a scientific outpost, responding to a distress call. They materialize to find a whole lot of dead bodies. There’s only one survivor: Professor Starnes, but he dies after a minute, and he doesn’t recognize Kirk before he croaks.
One of the corpses has a bottle of poison in her mouth, and Starnes’s last log entry on his tricorder indicates that they have to all kill themselves because of the enemy within. (Gee, that would make a great title…)
A bunch of kids run out and start playing, completely oblivious to the fact that their parents are all dead around them. A security team beams down and forms a burial detail. But the kids are still all completely unconcerned. McCoy feels this is their extreme reaction to the horror of their parents killing themselves, a kind of traumatic amnesia to not face the reality of their situation.
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Following Roddenberry s template, Star Trek is a meditation on morality, ethics, leadership, politics and power as seen through a formula where there is a problem of the week (or now season) to be solved by the crew and its allies.
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Of course, in Star Trek there are great enemies of humanity such as the seemingly unstoppable Borg. But there is always a future beyond where such foes are beaten back (perhaps to become future allies), and the Federation s core values may be challenged but in the end are not broken.
Star Trek is also a business; it is one of America s and the world s most enduring popular culture franchises, which in addition to TV shows and films also includes novels, comic books, toys, video games, and other products.