"Who Mourns for Adonais?" - Season 2, Episode 3
The Enterprise meets a god, for real this time.
Peter Paul Reubens “Venus and Adonis,” c. mid 1630s. On display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
James Kirk talks to a lot of gods and has killed around 3. Numerous episodes of Season 1, - “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” “Charlie X,” and “The Squire of Gothos” - feature the crew of the Enterprise facing off against an all-powerful being of questionable sanity. These episodes confronted the implications of omnipotence, and the danger it presents when filtered through arrogance, misogyny, ignorance, and immaturity. Despite omnipotence being so wrapped up in religion here on Earth, Star Trek has been significantly more secular in its treatment of the concept. It’s about time the characters met Apollo.
“Who Mourns for Adonais?” takes its title from a line in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s elegiac poem “Adonais,” published in 1821. Shelley, grieving the recent and untimely death of his friend and fellow poet John Keats, composed the piece as an exhortation of Keats’s talent and a polemic against the dead man’s critics. Stanza 47 reads:
Who mourns for Adonais? Oh, come forth,
Fond wretch! and know thyself and him aright.
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth;
As from a centre, dart thy spirit's light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference: then shrink
Even to a point within our day and night;
And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink
When hope has kindled hope, and lur'd thee to the brink.
Here, Shelley writes of a healthy grief. Those that mourn for Adonais (i.e. Keats) must embrace the void of his absence, yes, but be careful not to be swallowed by it. The heart is heavy with loss, one must avoid being weighed down by the burden. Hope that the lost may return is a siren’s song of depression, a subtle call from the void that initially comforts but ultimately lures. Only a qualified, tempered grief can be sustained. In later stanzas, Shelley is clear that we should mourn loss but not death. A committed atheist but unable to leave spirituality behind, Shelley imagines Adonais as having become one with the universe, a common spirit we all feel and draw from, the past not quite personified but felt.
John Keats in a posthumous portrait by William Hilton. Keats was a Romantic poet who was largely unknown in his time, but whose reputation grew substantially after his early death by tuberculosis at age 25 in 1821. Keats was both an accomplished poet by also philosopher of poetry, whose ideas - often contained in his correspondence with other poets - are still studied and debated to this day.
Star Trek is, funnily enough, a bit more literal about the “Adonais” metaphor Shelley employed. “Adonias” refers to the Greek hero Adonis, a lover of Aphrodite who in classical tradition was gored by a wild boar while hunting and died in the goddess’ arms. As he died, his blood turned to anemones around him. In one plausible reading though, Kirk and crew mourn the death of gods themselves. “We’ve outgrown you,” Kirk says to Apollo at one point; and the episode certainly agrees.
The crew’s troubles begin when they receive a strange message from an unknown planet they are surveying. The messenger, who refuses to identify himself, traps the Enterprise with a giant green hand of energy and demands that the Captain and other crew, "though pointedly, not Spock, come visit him on the planet below. Among this crew is Lieutenant Carolyn Palamas, the ship’s resident classical anthropologist, along with Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and young Chekhov. Once on the planet, they’re confronted by their host. It’s Apollo.
Apollo reveals himself to the crew. The god was played by Michael Forest, who began his career in television acting but transitioned into a very successful career in voice acting. Forest claimed that he was the second choice for the role after producers failed to sign Jon Voight.
Not just “Apollo” or a random being adopting that form, but the literal, honest-to-gods Apollo. He remembers when humans used to worship him and would like some of that again, please and thank you. Hinted at, but never quite said, is the implication that Apollo and his fellow gods are alien beings who draw at least some of their power from the adoration of others. The other Greek gods have long since passed on - in a potential reference to the Shelley poem they have rejoined nature - but Apollo remains. With his disinterest in Spock thus explained (Vulcans never worshipped him after all) Apollo presents the crew with a deal: deboard the Enterprise, establish a new cult dedicated to him, allow him to marry Palamas, and live happily ever after.
Kirk and the rest of the crew bristle against this for the obvious reasons, and Scotty’s anger debuts at a higher level due to his less-than-subtle crush on Palamas. Carolyn, for her part, finds herself smitten with the god in front of her, redressed in a hilariously revealing sparkling gown, and ready to marry the guy in a day.
Kirk persuades Carolyn Palamas to help the captured crew take down Apollo. Palamas was played by Leslie Parrish, a successful television guest actress in the 1960s and 1970s who was also heavily involved in politics and liberal issue movements. Parrish campaigned heavily for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Democratic primary and served as a George McGovern delegate at the Democratic National Convention in 1972. After the 70s, she began promoting environmental causes and stopped acting altogether in 1977.
The captain and the god share barbs about the nature of worship itself. Kirk and McCoy quickly deduce that the god is indeed who he says he is, a “Chariot of the Gods” alien who once ruled over Earth, but they refuse to bow down again. "We don’t bow to every creature that has a bag of tricks,” Kirk declares, and given the show we’ve been watching, we believe him. Apollo is infuriated. His courtship of Palamas and attempted reign reflect a desperate clinging to the past. His ideas are explicitly conservative and hierarchical. “There is an order to things in this universe,” he says. “Your species has denied it.”
He is wrong, of course. Ultimately, Kirk and the crew manage to overcome Apollo’s restraints with some clever help from Spock and Palamas, who snaps out of her puppy love after being reminded of the duty she owes humanity. Apollo, seeing that his old worshippers have no room for him anymore, apologizes to his long passed Olympian family:
APOLLO: Zeus, Hermes, Hera, Aphrodite. You were right. Athena, you were right. The time has passed. There is no room for gods. Forgive me, my old friends. Take me. Take me.
[APOLLO disappears]
MCCOY: I wish we hadn't had to do this.
KIRK: So do I. They gave us so much. The Greek civilization, much of our culture and philosophy came from a worship of those beings. In a way, they began the Golden Age. Would it have hurt us, I wonder, just to have gathered a few laurel leaves?
“Who Mourns for Adonias?” titles itself as a question, and the answer is “us.” Throughout the episode, Kirk and McCoy debate the idea of whether humanity needs gods anymore at all. It’s a surprisingly secular idea for a network television episode in 1968. Throughout, humanity’s technological and cultural progress is presented as in direct conflict with the idea of worship itself. The Enterprise sees no need to bow to a seemingly higher power, instead they analyze, study, and hypothesize about its source. Omnipotence is a problem to be solved, and here Kirk and friends manage to discover that Apollo has a special organ allowing him to channel mass amounts of energy contained in his throne, which they are then able to destroy. The worship of Apollo is compared to slavery; the benevolence of the master is beside the point when unquestioned devotion is required. What *need* does a spacefaring species have for a god?
Well, as Kirk says, need is maybe not the right question. The Greek gods “began the Golden Age,” led to the focus on rationality and philosophy that made the Enterprise itself possible. Worshipping them would be regressive. Despairing over their loss is pointless. But perhaps, as Shelley wrote too, we can embrace that grief and honor the memory. Do not mourn what has returned to nature but do not hope for its return. Instead, be content that it has passed, and touched us greatly in some way.
Stray Thoughts
The episode was directed by regular Star Trek director Marc Daniels, who worked on six episodes of Season One, including “The Naked Time” and “Space Seed.” Daniels later said this was his favorite piece of work on the series.
At one point, Kirk snipes at Apollo, “Mankind has no need for gods. We find the one quite adequate.” It is unclear which god he is referring to, and the idea is never mentioned again. I find the line to be well out of place within the episode, and wonder if it was a concession to network standards of the time. Given the Cold War, explicit atheism was probably not going to be popular with NBC viewers.
When the crew arrives on Apollo’s planet, McCoy quotes Spock’s famous line from “The Corbomite Manuever”: “To coin a phrase, fascinating.” Cute!
Photo Credits
Reubens painting: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437535
Keats portrait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats
Apollo stands tall: https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Who_Mourns_for_Adonais%3F