"This Side of Paradise" - Season 1, Episode 24
A different kind of utopia makes for a surprisingly ambiguous Trek.
Whether you take Genesis literally, metaphorically, or not at all, the message seems clear. Man had it good. No pain, disease, death or conflict. But the promise of greater power led us astray. When created, we had no knowledge of good or evil, and by eating the fruit, we gained knowledge but lost paradise. Paradise was only possible through ignorance and ignorance was our intended state. While it offers a complicated answer, “This Side of Paradise” expertly ponders if Eden was no paradise at all.
The Federation lost contact with the colony of Omicron Ceti III three years ago, and the Enterprise is assigned to investigate. A scan from orbit reveals that the planet is under constant bombardment from deadly Berthold Rays. There is no chance the colony has survived. But when the crew beams down to inventory the dead, they find the colonists alive and well, living in pastoral bliss with aesthetics right out of early 1900s America. They are all happy and content. They are all in perfect health.
Kirk and crew are greeted by the colony’s leader, Elias Sandoval, played by Frank Overton. Overton was a reliable character actor in film and television for decades. This marked Overton’s last credited acting appearance, as he died of a heart attack merely two months after the episode was filmed. He was only 49 years old.
Too perfect, it turns out. Tests reveal that the colony’s leader, Elias Sandoval, regrew an appendix that was removed years ago. No animals exist on the planet despite them having been brought along. Everyone seems just a smidge too happy with mere subsitance farming. Spock is offered answers to these questions by the colony’s botanist, Leila Kalomi, who he knew years ago and whose romantic advances he rejected. She takes him out alone and shows him a bundle of flowers, where his coldness and distance towards her continues. Until the flowers ejaculate spores all over him.
Spock melts. He professes his love for Kalomi and ignores Kirk’s calls for assistance in investigating. The two instead lay and ponder a rainbow. “You know, I can tell you exactly why one appears in the sky, but considering its beauty has always been out of the question.”
Spock and Kalomi have some fun climbing trees. The episode’s focus on Spock’s dual nature came during Dorothy Fontana’s rewrite of Jerry Sohl’s original draft. Fontana was promoted to story editor after her rewrite impressed Gene Roddenberry, and she had already scripted “Charlie X” and “Tomorrow is Yesterday” while working as his secretary.
Kirk and the others set out to find Spock personally as the Federation-mandated evacuation of the colony begins. The flowers get to work though, gradually “infecting” the rest of the crew and getting themselves beamed up to the Enterprise as well. Once the spores hit the ventilation system there, it’s all over. As the newly emotive Spock explains, the flowers thrive on Berthold rays, protecting the colonists, providing perfect health and contentment. Kirk offers up a weak objection:
SANDOVAL: In return [for the host body], they give you complete health and peace of mind.
KIRK: That's paradise?
SANDOVAL: We have no need or want, Captain.
SPOCK: It's a true Eden, Jim. There's belonging and love.
KIRK: No wants. No needs. We weren't meant for that. None of us. Man stagnates if he has no ambition, no desire to be more than he is.
SANDOVAL: We have what we need.
KIRK: Except a challenge.
The captain fails to carry the day. Soon there is only Kirk, alone on his bridge, with no help to come.
Kirk stands alone at his bridge. This is a surprisingly effective image. Kirk wonders out-loud what he “can offer against paradise?” The episode’s answer is depth of feeling. That it makes this point by primarily demonstrating anger is why I find it rather ambiguous.
It is a mere accident that ultimately saves the day. After a surprise infection, Kirk moves to beam himself down to the surface and leave the Enterprise abandoned. But his rage breaks through and overwhelms him before he can leave. As he correctly deduces, the spores induce a content passivity, and are thus overwhelmed by any strong emotions. A plan comes quick. He naturally first turns to Spock.
Tricking his first mate aboard proves fairly easy, as he offers up a lie about needing to beam down some necessary equipment before the ship is left for good. Kirk then berates Spock with personal and racial insults. He says the Vulcan’s “father was a computer and his mother an encyclopedia,” he yells that Spock is from a race of traitors, a disloyal people of “printed circuits,” a literal circus freak who should be studied and paraded around. The strategy works.
Sulu unwittingly rests by the offending plants while underlining the Garden of Eden comparison. The plants were initially supposed to be a collective consciousness taht were manipulating the crew, but in the final draft come across as entirely passive. Their effects are accidental and unmotivated. The episode is stronger for it; the moral stakes are raised when no one is being manipulated.
The two men quickly decide on a course of action: a low frequency signal that can induce irritation and anger among the colonists, which will overwhelm all of the spores. But before they get to work, Spock personally beams Kalomi up for the episode’s best scene.
She immediately realizes that something is wrong. Spock’s walls have been rebuilt. She begins to cry and begs Spock to return with her.
LEILA: I love you. I said that six years ago, and I can't seem to stop repeating myself. On Earth, you couldn't give anything of yourself. You couldn't even put your arms around me. We couldn't have anything together there. We couldn't have anything together anyplace else. We're happy here. I can't lose you now, Mister Spock. I can't.
SPOCK: I have a responsibility to this ship, to that man on the Bridge. I am what I am, Leila, and if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Mine can be no worse than someone else's.
It turns out anger is not the only emotion that can overwhelm the spores. In Kalomi’s sadness, she is cured. The signal works soon after and the rest of the colonists agree to the evacuation. Despite their happiness, there had been “no accomplishments, no progress.” As the episode ends, McCoy notes that humans have rejected Eden yet again. And we are given two fascinating responses to the observation.
“This time we walked out on our own,” Kirk confidently states.
“I have little to say about it Captain, except that for the first time in my life, I was happy,” says Spock.
Spock rejects Kalomi in favor of Kirk and his duty. Kalomi was played by Jill Ireland, who married famous action star Charles Bronson a year after this episode was released and subsequently acted in 16 movies with him.
This is easily the most ambiguous ending Star Trek has ever offered, and credit to Dorothy Fontana for an excellent script that mixes light hearted humor and relatively low-stakes (regarding violence at least) with genuinely affecting moments that allow the cast to breathe in ways they haven’t for many episodes. Typically, Trek operates by presenting a premise and offering a clear counter-argument to it, often by way of Kirk synthesizing input from Spock and McCoy. Often, I’ve disagreed with its counter-arguments, but the structure has remained mostly intact - except when it goes off on a lark, like with “Shore Leave”. Here though, the show merely presents the premise and has the characters react as they would, but offers seemingly little judgment on their actions as right or wrong.
Kirk’s perspective could have been anticipated. He views Omicron Ceti III as a false paradise, a place of contentment with no drive, life with no ambition. For Kirk, life is about ambition, about a goal, about progress. He believes strongly in the mission and the plants offer a world where missions are not just absent, but irrelevant.
Spock has a lot more going on, and Nimoy provides his best performance in the show yet. “The Naked Time” allowed him the dramatic, emotional monologue, but here we get a much more honest, if less bombastic, series of scenes. While under the influence of the spores, Spock is aloof and relaxed, but not threatening or inhibited. He retains all of his intelligence and gains his emotions. He fills in, and Nimoy’s performance doesn’t even approach off putting or uncomfortable. He’s *still* Spock, he’s not a member of the Body, he’s just happy. Nimoy allows the episode its ambiguity by choosing to shift his normal performance around rather than abandon it completely. Considering that what we are typically seeing is a self-described “self-made purgatory,” it makes the whole character a touch more tragic.
In this tragedy we see the power of the episode’s ambiguity. The colonists had abandoned ambition and would not dominate the planet. They would have “no accomplishments, no progress.” But what is the point of progress, if not a better life? And what would be a better life than perfect health, with enough time to consider the beauty of rainbows? Why is the purgatory of duty preferable to the ignorance of Eden?
In Spock’s final conversation with Kalomi, he ends their time together with the following:
LEILA: I have lost you, haven't I? And not only you, I've lost all of it. The spores. I've lost them, too.
KIRK: The Captain discovered that strong emotions and needs destroy the spore influence.
LEILA: And this is for my good? Do you mind if I say I still love you? You never told me if you had another name, Mister Spock.
SPOCK: (wiping away her tears) You couldn't pronounce it.
But in Eden, he may have had time to teach her how!
Stray Thoughts
For some reason, being infected with the spores turns McCoy extremely Southern. He calls Kirk “Jimboy,” becomes obsessed with mint juleps, and talks about Georgia peaches a lot. This is never explained.
As far as I can tell, the absence of animals on the planet is never contextualized or explained either. Trek episodes often went through numerous rewrites by different writers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a vestigial portion from an old draft.
I won’t do the whole nickel joke but this is the second time in the show that Kirk has used anti-Vulcan racism as a way to manipulate Spock. Weird that it seems to be a go-to strategy!
Photo Credits
Kirk and Sandoval: https://www.tor.com/2015/09/01/star-trek-the-original-series-rewatch-this-side-of-paradise/
Spock in the tree: https://kethinov.com/startrekepisodes.php?id=173
Kirk on the bridge: https://per-ineptia-ad-astra.tumblr.com/post/635362079283511296/star-trek-episode-124-this-side-of-paradise
Sulu with the flowers: https://per-ineptia-ad-astra.tumblr.com/post/635362079283511296/star-trek-episode-124-this-side-of-paradise
Spock rejects Kalomi: https://www.tor.com/2015/09/01/star-trek-the-original-series-rewatch-this-side-of-paradise/