An Episode Of Star Trek That Ian Likes: The Doomsday Machine

Captain James Kirk is in trouble: he’s answered a distress call from the U.S.S. Constellation only to find it a wrecked hull, floating in space. The only survivor, Commodore Matt Decker, is wracked with guilt after sending his crew to what he thought was safety, only to watch them killed as the planet he thought would provide them with safety was consumed by an unknown machine of colossal size. That survivor’s guilt then turns to vengeance as Decker commandeers Kirk’s ship, Enterprise, to destroy this… doomsday machine. Kirk must commit an act of mutiny, then one of certain death if he is to save his own crew…

Star Trek (as if you didn’t know) was created by Gene Roddenberry (with help from a lot of other people) and aired from 1966 to 1969. After it limped through three seasons, the adventures of Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise became a cultural touchstone in the US during the 1970s. After the middling success of an animated series (critics claim that it is glacially slow and dull, but they have clearly never sat through other cartoons of the time period before) it was picked up for a sequel series that would have tackled a second five-year mission of the Enterprise crew. However, the success of Star Wars meant that the TV series was abandoned in favour of a movie series.

I came to Star Trek quite late. I saw The Wrath Of Khan and The Search For Spock (the second and third movies in the series respectively) in cinemas when they were released and enjoyed them, but then Trek dropped off my cultural radar for a couple more years until our local TV station repeated chunks of TOS (The Original Series as it is known now) during Saturday afternoons during 1986. They wisely started with The Corbomite Maneuver, which I enjoyed a lot, and I became a fairly regular viewer of it after that. Having been raised largely on print SF in my young life, I tended to sneer a bit at movies and TV series as being of less depth and profundity than what was on pages and I was also 16: there was no way on Earth you were going to get me to admit that I liked something that had been made before I was born – or that my parents might have watched and enjoyed!

(Mum and Dad, I hope I wasn’t that bad.)

At any rate, I became quite impressed with what had been achieved in Star Trek. The stories could have been action-based shoot ‘em ups, but the writers made a deliberate choice to have violence be a close-to-last resort for the crew and had them choose diplomacy and intelligence instead.

Sometimes, though, we would get a thoughtful and intelligent thriller. Like we did in “The Doomsday Machine.”

Later on in life, when I became a “proper” fan of Trek and bought books, magazines, videos, and other fan gear, I learned that Roddenberry had wanted to create an SF series different to anything that had gone before. A lot of that came down to the universe the characters lived in. The background of Starfleet, the organization that Kirk represented, was thought out long before the series went not production, although some details were being ironed out after the cameras started rolling, and the idea of a paramilitary expedition that was exploring in the name of knowledge and friendship captured the imagination of a lot of people. The actors cast as that that crew played a major part in that, too. There were many positions of authority on board the Enterprise that were held by people who had never seen people like them doing such important jobs on television. Whoopi Goldberg, for instance, famously tells of the first time she saw Nichelle Nicholls’s character Uhura onscreen, and how she yelled out to her mother that “there’s a black lady on television and she’s not a maid!” Nicholls herself was disappointed with what Uhura wasn’t doing after the first season and was ready to resign until she met Dr Martin Luther King at a reception. When she told him she was quitting he was saddened, telling her that Uhura was an important character, that she showed that the future could be a place where everyone was welcomed. George Takei, who played Sulu, the helmsman, also realized how important his character was for other Asian people: having spent time in an internment camp during World War 2, he also appreciated the value of having a multicultural crew in a vision of the future.

Admittedly, the designed future of Star Trek wasn’t all original. I remember watching Forbidden Planet for the first time shortly after I started watching Trek and being struck at how similar the organization that the heroes of that movie belonged to was to the United Federation of Planets. And just a couple of years ago I chanced upon a story from the mid-50s where the villains of the story refused to conquer any worlds that hadn’t yet developed spaceflight for various reasons pertinent to the plot. But, as Mick Jagger sang, it’s the singer, not the song.

So, Trek became what Ron Burgundy would describe as “a bit of a big deal.” Roddenberry and his producers put thought into the background, and to ensure that it remained a literate and intelligent show that highlighted the best of Science Fiction (despite Roddenberry pitching it to the studio as “Wagon Train to the stars”) some of the leading lights in written Sf were invited to pitch stories. This produced a literary line-up for a show that hadn’t been seen since The Twilight Zone, several years before, which was terrific, because while Roddenberry was a fantastic ideas man I do not enjoy the scripts he wrote for his own show. His genius, at this moment, lay in selecting authors who could express his ideas brilliantly…

One of those authors was Norman Spinrad. He was a rising star in SF, having produced a couple of novels and several short stories by the time the second season of Trek rolled around (1967). What he gave Roddenberry was a retelling of Moby Dick for the screen.

But he did it brilliantly. Walter Windom plays Matt Decker as a broken man who discovers his fire for vengeance and will not be stopped in his quest to achieve it. The rest of the regulars react against his assumption of command reluctantly but with the acceptance that they have to follow orders. It doesn’t stop them from ousting him from command at the first possible opportunity, though.

What really makes Windom’s performance incredible is the way in which he takes the role completely seriously. He could be seen as just the latest in a long line of officers superior in rank to Kirk who are revealed to have gone bonkers as a result of them becoming entangled in things they shouldn’t have become entangled in. Future incarnations of the show even hang a lamp on it when we have characters like Picard and Riker in The Next Generation refusing to accept promotions because they know where they belong. Kirk even rejoices in a moment when he gets busted down from Admiral back to Captain in The Voyage Home (and as a defence against all the modern day ”fans” complaining that Star Trek has gone “woke” in its more recent incarnations, The Voyage Home is the one where Kirk and company travel back in time to… (checks notes)… save the whales).

But we forget all of that baggage when we watch Decker take command of the Enterprise and launch it on a suicide mission. He sits in Kirk’s chair, playing with his data cartridges in a piece of business that Windom stole from Humphrey Bogart’s performance as Queeg in The Caine Mutiny a decade earlier, making the audience think of that paranoid captain as well.

And when it seems that Decker has finally been outwitted by the crew of the Enterprise, he still manages to try and destroy the Doomsday Machine. He fails but he inspires Kirk and his crew to launch a scheme that does succeed…

Aside from being brilliant, this is an important episode in Trek history. When The Motion Picture launched the movie series in 1979, one of the supporting characters in that film was Will Decker, the son of the Commodore. His character, as you might guess from the similarity in names, inspired will Riker from The Next Generation. And it began the tradition of referencing Captain Ahab throughout the series: Khan meets his demise in his titular movie quoting Ahab; Captain Picard is likened to Ahab in First Contact; and any number of antagonists in other episodes and movies over the last almost-60 years have shown similarities to the hapless harpoonist. Spinrad was also invited to pen a foreword to a collection of James Blish‘s novelisations of Star Trek (although not the one that held his episode: that honour went to David Gerrold, author of The Trouble With Tribbles).

However, for all that I’ve talked it up, The Doomsday Machine is not quite perfect: the Constellation is very obviously a model of the Enterprise, beaten up and with its serial number rearranged. The sets within it are also very plainly redressed Enterprise sets. The titular machine also bears a close resemblance to an ice-cream cone that has been left out in the sun to melt, and because of the vagaries of special effects filming in the 1960s we don’t really get a proper idea of the scale of the machine.

But for me, brought up on a diet of Doctor Who, Blakes 7 and any number of SF epics produced on a shoestring and the smell of an oily rag, that wasn’t a problem. The production crew had done the right thing and focused on the story, so that when we got a less than satisfactory effect, you really don’t notice or care: your investment in the story is such that you are focusing on the characters and what they are doing.

I was gripped from start to finish: the cosmic irony of Decker’s dilemma was a believable cause for his descent into a fevered state of total revenge; Kirk’s sympathy for his superior while still wanting to unseat his weaselly appropriation of the Enterprise made him seem to be even more decent and honourable; and Spock and McCoy’s bickering over their approaches to the same problem was making them two of my favourite characters already after only having seen a few episodes.

At the time I was a firm fan of UK science fiction on TV: the aforementioned Doctor Who and Blakes 7 had long since stolen my heart and I viewed Trek until that moment as a rival series that didn’t deserve the same devotion that those other two shows had. Until this episode…

Of course, I didn’t have many opportunities to watch more Trek, and while The Next Generation was being screened elsewhere in the world (and Australia), Tasmania was being let down again by our two parochial TV stations (we were blessed with a third channel in the late 80s) refusing to play anything but legal and medical dramas with a ton of soap operas thrown in. Thankfully things began to change in the years after that and we were treated to The Flash (1990), Max Headroom, Alien Nation and several other shows that captured my imagination and made my family’s VCR work overtime because they were almost always screened after 10:30 in the evening, and usually on a Monday or Tuesday night when nobody was staying up to watch things which provided poor ratings and more “proof” that nobody was watching.

Thankfully things changed in the years after that and we received the new incarnations of Trek roughly concurrently with the rest of the world. But if it hadn’t been for Norman Spinrad’s script and Walter Windom’s wonderful performance, I don’t know if I would be as invested in Trek today as I am.

You can find out more about Star Trek at https://www.startrek.com/en-un