Star Trek Retrospective: Episode 69 Whom Gods Destroy
I’m working on my 2013 review but wanted to throw another one of these out there. I enjoy doing them, they are quick, and above all greatly enhance my nerd credibility.
So Whom Gods Destroy. I have to say I like this film. Insanity is a great plot device and it was refreshing to see someone get tortured other than poor Chekov. 
I have often wondered if Roddenberry was trying to make some point about how we treat the criminally insane or just using the insane asylum as a platform for a cool story ala Arkham (image courtesy of the Batman t shirt collection). If there was a message to be had it wasn’t terribly strong (or at least did not resonate over time). Of course since we now more or less have turned out all our crazy people as the homeless it has even less relevance.
I do have one issue with this episode. When Garth is impersonating Kirk and orders Scott to beam him up Scotty demands a countersign. At that point we had seen Kirk beam up about 100,000 times and never once was there any kind of countersign protocol. Did he and Scott make it up just in case this one time a shapeshifter had replaced Kirk in an attempt to take over the Enterprise? Granted since that was the plot of about 15% of all the episodes it would not have been a bad idea, but just pulling it out of nowhere was kind of lame surprise. However even as a fan of this series I admit TOS was never going to get any awards for strict continuity.
The title comes from a quote by Euripides, the ancient Greek equivalent of Ayn Rand: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad”. It was also the only episode banned by the BBC in the UK for having “sadistic plot elements”. Hey, high tech torture is cool. Haven’t you ever listened to J-Pop?
Dave
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