In season one episode 23 of “Star Trek: The Original Series,” in an episode entitled “A Taste of Armageddon,” the USS Enterprise approaches a planet called Eminar VII, which sends a message: “Do not approach at any cost.” Despite this warning, Captain Kirk is ordered by a diplomat on board, who outranks him, to attempt diplomatic relations with the planet anyway. The ship scans the entire planet and finds only a civilization in utter peace. Kirk, Spock and a small landing party beam down to the surface and meet with the planet’s primary leader, Anan 7, who tells them that Eminar VII has been at war with a neighboring planet for 500 years. The crew of the Enterprise is confused; there is no evidence of the destruction of war anywhere on this planet. Anan 7 goes on to tell them of the incredible annual death count of 1-3 million. Then, as they are standing there discussing, there is an attack. Lights and alarms go off in the room; the personnel in the background scramble around. Anan 7 remarks that “half a million people have just been killed.” But there is no explosion, no radiation, no evidence that anything deadly has occurred. Kirk and his landing party then learn that this war is being fought with computers. But instead of remote bombings, there is no real physical damage and the people “hit” by the attack are then supposed to “report” their deaths and be executed by their own people within 24 hours. The reasoning from Anan 7 is that despite 500 years of war, their civilization is still able to live on because the culture, though not the people, is able to survive.
Then, in a horrible twist of fate, the USS Enterprise in its entirety is hit in one of these virtual bombings. The entire crew, as well as the members of the landing party on the ground, are marked as casualties, and told to report to the planet’s disintegration chamber within 24 hours, or else they break the treaty and risk the enemy planet’s bombs becoming less virtual and much more destructive. After approximately half an hour of the ensuing chasing, arguing, hostage crises and attempts at negotiation from the very same diplomat who encouraged the captain to approach the planet in the first place, Captain Kirk uses a laser gun to destroy the disintegration chamber. He threatens to use the powers of the Enterprise to destroy the entire planet if the crew is not released. When asked why he would force them to break their treaty and incur real, physical war in Eminar VII, he says, “Death, destruction, disease, horror. That’s what real war is all about, Anan. That’s what makes it a thing to be avoided. You’ve made it neat and painless. So neat and painless, you’ve had no reason to stop it…I’ve given you back the horrors of war…You can either wage it with real weapons, or you might consider an alternative. Put an end to it. Make peace.” The episode ends as the Enterprise safely flies away and they receive a communication from Eminar VII that they have begun peace negotiations with the other planet.
I watched this episode for the first time very recently and I still have not stopped thinking about it. At the beginning of the episode, I was angry at Kirk’s imposition on the planet’s methods of keeping relative peace. I thought that even though his crew was sentenced to death, the writers could have found a way to allow the Enterprise to escape safely while not disrupting Eminar VII’s treaty and leaving them to their own peacekeeping methods. The show could have very well made him do that without forcing the viewer to think about the horrors of war at all, keeping it as a happy ending for the people that the viewer mainly cares about: the crew of the Enterprise. Instead, the show faced the consequences head-on, breaking the treaty and making the viewer consider the value of human life relative to the value of a prosperous and peaceful civilization. What really was peace, and could a prosperous civilization exist with such an incredible death toll? Upon reaching the end of the episode, I realized the show had just expertly forced me to answer all these questions for myself.
When you really think about it, Eminar VII could be considered a fascist utopia. The citizens are entirely peaceful to one another, and the culture is thriving. This is made possible by the people in power who decide that large groups of people must die at certain moments and the people submit, believing it to be their moral imperative to give their lives to maintain this “prosperity.” The primary flaw, of course, is that this type of utopia is not possible. Over 500 years, not only would the culture shift numerous times in many different directions across the entire planet, making it impossible to maintain a monolithic ideology, but the death toll is so large on Eminar VII that no culture, big or small, would be able to last very long. The entire population of the planet is never specified in the show, but it makes the broad — and, I think, poor — assumption that culture could possibly exist without the people in it passing it down. If communities constantly have large amounts of their populations die, they are going to change very quickly and likely will never have a strong foundation of values given their necessarily ever-shifting nature. Culture cannot thrive that way.
The show knows this truth but allows Eminar VII to have this idea of prosperity in order for the crew of the Enterprise to reveal that it is a delusional and harmful fantasy. Kirk valiantly destroys Eminar VII’s moral crutch; with the treaty broken, they are no longer able to justify sending their own people to death. They must now face the task of saving every life they can because, as Captain Kirk and his compatriots know, a civilization truly cannot survive nor thrive without the lives of its people being prioritized over all else.