star trek space hippies

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“The Way To Eden” Remastered Review + Screenshots & Video

| June 15, 2008 | By: Jeff Bond 144 comments so far

REVIEW by Jeff Bond

Finally Trek Remastered arrives at one of the biggest targets where classic Trek third season silliness is concerned: Star Trek’s infamous space hippies episode. You know the drill: the Enterprise overtakes the space cruiser Aurora which explodes while attempting to escape the starship; elephant-eared Dr. Sevrin (Skip Homier) and his gang of followers are beamed onboard, Spock-jams ensue. While people who actually watch the show may conjure up “Spock’s Brain” or “And the Children Shall Lead” as representing the worst of Trek, I’d argue a lot more casual viewers—or people who’ve never sat through an entire episode—can recall that there was a terrible Star Trek episode about space hippies.

So we all know the bad—I’d like to try to concentrate on what’s actually good about this episode.

Okay, gimme a minute…

Seriously—if you remove a few key squirm-inducing elements (Charles Napier’s grinning whack-job performance as Adam, the jam sessions and the soapy romance scenes between Chekov and his old flame), “The Way to Eden” is a serviceable episode with a few nice touches. Remember that the American counterculture was a huge force at this time, something both terrifying and compelling to the millions of viewers who would have been watching this show in 1969. Like Kirk himself, the production crew of the original series was made up of quite a few military men, and you have to acknowledge the bravery of the attempt here to reach out to the angry youth culture that was rebelling against the status quo at the time.

“Way to Eden” functions best as a time capsule—its hippy outfits aren’t really much more out there than a lot of what was being worn at the time, and if anything the whole story is just too on-the-nose. Where better Trek episodes clothed their metaphors in more elaborate sci fi trappings, Arthur Heinemann’s teleplay simply puts recognizable hippies in outer space (and the story is radically different from Dorothy Fontana’s original script “Joanna,” a story that would have not only fleshed out McCoy’s character but offered some unusually hard-hitting inter-character drama and conflict for Trek’s third year).

Nevertheless, the decision to have Spock mediate the conflict between authority figure Kirk and the countercultural Edenites was right on the nose. Spock was a figure who conceivably spoke to the counterculture well before this episode was written—he was hugely popular with young people and it’s clear from Leonard Nimoy’s thoughtful performance that he took the responsibility of playing this episode seriously. Shatner’s Kirk too is put in an interesting position, confronted with a group for whom he represents unthinking authoritarianism. Kirk is clearly ill at ease with the Edenites, yet Shatner underplays enough that there’s a sense that he’s rather more crestfallen and a little embarrassed than offended that these people just don’t “get” him. (By the time Shatner has to portray being attacked by sonic waves, however, any remaining subtlety is out the airlock)

Dr. Sevrin himself is a compelling figure and his concealed illness is quite forward-thinking as a concept—if you listen to McCoy and Sevrin describe it, they’re talking about the kind of “super-bug” that’s actually threatening hospitals right now due to the over-prescribing of antibiotics (and for all we know, the use of antibacterial soaps). Having Sevrin totally reject a technological culture that’s made him into a deadly Typhoid Mary, yet having him be in total denial about his situation, makes perfect sense. And blue-haired Tongo Radd is an interesting minor character, well played by Victor Brandt.

As for the rest, well…how do you produce a handful of songs that play as counterculture anthems but sound like they could be played 300 years from now? Charles Napier (who would follow up this role with bits in a number of Russ Meyer soft-core porn films before doing movies like Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and Silence of the Lambs) co-wrote and performed his own songs in the episode, and as goofy is the lantern-jawed actor looks in his half-dome wig and bare chest, he’s got a tough role (and some of the worst lines in the teleplay) as the poetic cheerleader for the Edenites. At least he’s better than Mary-Linda Rapelye as Chekov’s old flame Irini and her dueling Russian accents scenes with Walter Koenig (watching their two-shots in the new hi-def transfers you’re just blown away by all the friggin HAIR sticking out all over those shots). As for the songs, yes, they’re lame—but I’m more amused than embarrassed now by scenes like the Enterprise bridge crew rocking out while Scotty shakes his head disapprovingly. In fact, I’ve developed a weird fondness for Napier’s “Headin’ Out To Eden” song—so one of the big annoyances of the syndication cuts this time is that they eliminate it almost entirely from the episode, which drains the impact of some purely instrumental quotes of the material late in the story.

Speaking of which—the fact that Eden is a.) found so easily, and b.) covered with acidic plants doesn’t really help matters. It’s ironic, but wouldn’t Sevrin’s own disease killing off his followers have been a bit more appropriate? In any case, we can all give thanks for one thing about this episode: it inspired Shatner’s unforgettable Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. And in that one God’s planet was every bit as easy to find as Eden.

As CBS-Digital moves into the final handful of episodes on the Remastered project they seem to be pulling out all, or at least some, of the stops, which is ironic in itself since the episodes they’re lavishing some bold new shots on are generally considered to be the worst of the original series. “Way to Eden” gets a brand new Aurora, a nicely-detailed retooling of Harry Mudd’s ship from “Mudd’s Women” (appropriate since the opening chase sequence is almost a blow-by-blow remake of the Mudd pursuit sequence minus the asteroids). CBS-D takes a subtle approach to the Aurora’s overheating, adding a glowing impulse/antimatter mixing deck and gradually glowing engines to replace the overall red glow on the original miniature, as well as a nicely detailed explosion.

Other than library Enterprise shots that’s it until the starship reaches Eden, where CBS-D conjures up what may rank as the most “super-Earthlike” of all their Earth-like planets (so super it’s got two moons). But it’s also enhanced by a ravishing matte painting that really helps to open up the original’s simple planet set. Somebody should produce some posters of these matte shots as they crystallize Star Trek’s idealized Chesley Bonestell aesthetic better than just about anything I’ve seen.

SCREENSHOTS

Remastered vs. Original

BONUS VIDEO: Spock Rock

Seasons One and Two discounted at Amazon The Season Two box set is now available at Amazon for pre-order, discounted to $63.99 (Amazon has a low price guarantee that if they drop the price before ship date of August 5th you will get that lower price). The Season One DVD / HD DVD combo disk is available now for $129.95 (retail is $194.99).

Herbert: if you don’t know what it is, you probably are one.

When people I know mention having seen this episode, I cringe in admitting I’m a fan of the series! What a stinker!

All the cgi came together nicely. I always enjoy seeing some of the original opticals recreated as in the overhead saucer shot. Overall, the use of cgi in the context and sensibility of what they might have done in back in the 60’s, really works with this episode.

And if they seems to pulling out all the stops in these last few episodes, whatever the reason, I’ll take whatever they can give. I was hoping for a little different take for only a few shots in remastered episodes, so I’m very glad they have done this project.

It gives me something to type about.

Pretty backdrop! Still a silly episode.

*illicit substances sold seperately.

Star Trek truly was a mirror of our species and the time it comes from, not surprising then that a reflection of the 60’s, including hippies and counter culture would be included.

I couldn’t help but think of other social groups that reject technology or modern society like the Amish or the FLDS group from Texas.

One of the worst episodes flat out. The episode wouldn’t have been so mad if it hadn’t fallen on its face at the very end. The scene on the planet was ridiculous. It’s like the director just told everybody to do whatever they wanted. How can the grass be acidic but not the tree Dr. Severin climbs up? He should not be able to climb up the tree or eat the fruit. The same goes for Adam. Ouch! This apple is really acidic. I’m gonna eat it!

I’m a firm believer that any story (even one that sounds weak) could be well-done, but that it depends on the execution. This could have been a good episode if some things were done differently. I agree with the point that it would be more interesting for Sevrin’s followers to die from his disease than the poisonous plants.

# 8. “How can the grass be acidic but not the tree Dr. Severin climbs up? He should not be able to climb up the tree or eat the fruit. The same goes for Adam. Ouch! This apple is really acidic. I’m gonna eat it!”

You’re being far too literal, dude! Look, it’s about hippies looking for paradise. And when they think they’ve found it, it turns out to be made of deadly… ACID!!!

Get it? ; )

Come on, get with the third season hit you on the head with a frickin’ shovel “half-black, half-white” social “messages”!

The only way a viewer can take “The Way to Eden” seriously is to see it as a parable of how idealistic young kids + an insane, charismatic leader = doom. Otherwise it has none of the inspired elements of the Godshow from STV, to which it is compared. One of the worst episodes of this or any other generation…only made more bearable by the excellent FX and matte work this week. Can someone post a larger, brighter still of the Eden planet matte? That was gorgeous.

Im gonna crack my knuckles and junp for joy i got a clean bill of health from dr. mccoy. Yay brother. True about the planet being acid like. How can you walk on the grass and not get burned and also why were they taken off the shuttle and then layed on the ground when there feet were badly burned. Should’t the ground burned them more and climbing the tree should have been a big no no. I liked the ship and the explosion was good to. But everyone listning to music on the bridge and kirk letting them. man im not reaching that. Thats the only time kirk ever relaxed the disipline on the bridge.Even though this was one of the worst trek from the tos it is still good trek.Yay brother. Are you reacing me brother. If not you must be a herbert.

herbert! herbert! herbert! herbert! herbert!

It’s really to bad that the original DC Fontana story wasn’t filmed. The idea of McCoy dealing with his feelings for his daughter and being confronted with seeing Kirk with the eyes of a father instead of a comrade would have made the episode the highlight of the otherwise dismal 3rd season. McCoy would not have simply rolled his eyes at Kirk’s advances or Joanna’s attraction. I can envision him lecturing both of them rather angrily.

i actually liked this episode- the space hippies are still not as annoying as neelix or the incomparable jar jar binks…

nice FX- wish they had done a set extension- butt new matts r always welcome.

I think there’s only ONE way to really watch this episode, (Cough)

*hides in corner and quietly admits to having liked this episode.*

Does being ashamed of it make me a herbert?

That groovy tune with Spock on harp and the alien hippy chick on bike wheel really reached me, bother! I’ve got it on an mp3 file and I’m gonna make it my ring tone.

Then I’m gonna have all my friends call me every 5 minutes.

For kicks, me and my buddy would drive around using his PA system in his car and sing that “steppin into Eden, yay brother!” and annoy the heck out of everybody that was within earshot.

Thanks for posting the video, but is it just me or… is the video pixelating wildly to be almost unwatchable in parts? It’s like it “burps” every so often.

Nice review (except for the “sonic over-acting”, of course – I mean, have you ever been attacked by sonic waves…?? Do you know what it feels like..?? Ok, shut up then, will ya…;)

I.do.like.this.episode. (No, I won’t run for cover;) I like the message, I like it when Spock tells them “I have no doubt you will find it… or make it yourselves”, I like the jam session and those crazy silly wonderfully oldfashioned hippy songs, and I like finding out whether I’m “Herbert” or not…

#18 We reach, sister..:)

Yeah…, …those guys must have been smokin’ some pretty crappy space weed… …a least Spock could jam with them ;-)

Michael Richards is actually a pen-name of D.C. Fontana. She also used it in TNG.

And the original “lake shot” on Eden was just stock footage from “Shore Leave”. I’ve noticed it first when I was ten years old. It was a huge disappointment.

Herbert….yeah….this video is of pretty poor quality. Too bad someone talented couldn’t post one that we could watch without spilling the bong water. I guess the life of BIG DADDY Herbert must be too overwhelming. Seriously…its jumps like a space hippie sitting in the Captains Chair with a ditch (or space weed) in one hand and a phaser on overload in the other. Just not kewl – cool!

Moral of this story: Acid is bad (in ALL its forms).

I’m not sure what I think of this explosion. I think the other one looked a bit more real.

GREAT matte shot. It almost looks photo-real. In fact, it makes me wonder if someoe on staff didn’t just contribute this photo they had of a real place, and they just photoshopped in a couple of moons.

Another good review by Jeff Bond (all you TREK people need to check out Film Score Monthly — is Mr. Bond still writing there?)

Yes, The Way to Eden is weird and dumb but it’s still, strangely better than Masks or Phantasms (both of which I sort of watched in syndication recently) — not meaning to make this anti-TNG, which I love sort of, but The Way to Eden almost exemplifies how the “worst” of TOS is at least more fully entertaining than the worst of TNG.. Not that that should be the mark of good television.

In some respect, The Way to Eden is a freaky (and foolish) peak and peek into 60s counterculture at least in TOS’s last season, and now it is a way for new fans to look into the America of 1968 that spawned some of TOS, as cartoonish as it may be depicted. Actually, watching the the third season again recently, I’m surprised how many good (and haunting) episodes there are– but thee are also a lot of dogs and dross.

I actually like Star Trek V’s revisionist take on the same basic material; it embraces what is the core theme of TREK: mankind’s rejection of Paradise in order to achieve something higher and more hard-earned on our own terms.

Also: “I’m gonna crack my knuckles and jump for joy, I got a clean bill of heatlth from Doctor McCoy!”; I know ot was said elsewhere but what the hell.

I love this episode. Wonderful music and some funny scenes. A camp classic.

I could swear that Dr. Sevrin says “Rejoice, brothren!”

Unfortunately, “brothren” is not word.

Yeah, brether!

We reach… I like the music. Damn KPDX Fox Frackin’ 49 in Portland, Oregon instead ran an infomercial on colon cleansing! Bloody hell! Borgus frat! Yes, I’ll buy the dvds and show these TV programmers who to mess with.

I think this episode really exemplifies the whole “Everything I know I learned from Star Trek” idea, for me.

Growing up in Iowa in the 80s, I didn’t know what a hippie was when I was a kid. But I was raised on Star Trek from the moment I could talk. I didn’t know what those weird people were in this episode. Later, when I was maybe 10 or 11, some of my family members were talking about hippies. I said, “Oh they sound like those guys on Star Trek!”

Amazing how many things that happened with . . . Oh how weird it feels to have your first memories of President Lincoln being the “Giant Space Abraham Lincoln” on the Enterprise View Screen. :P

I grew up in a house hold where pop music was basically verboden. As sad as it is to some to hear me say this….The Monkees and this episode were my introductions to something other than classical music. I seemed to also see a little deeper into this episode than some give it credit for. I saw a whole culture and language being introduced to the audience in a short amount of time (something I believe Star Trek’s writers did well). Even as a little kid I picked up on that and recognized how well done that was. Just dig that little exchange between Spock and Adam in his quarters. “Give”. (I use that to this day when I’m soloing in a group.)

Something I don’t think anyone’s pointed out….I always thought Sevrin was supposed to represent Timothy Leary and his ideas. Maybe I was wrong.

I still love seeing the crew being knocked out with the hippie pinch behind the ears and letting out a drug induced, orgasmic sounding groan.

Yay, brother.

Unfortunately, Star trek Remastered is not shown anywhere in Central, Southern, or Western Louisiana anymore, the stations that carried it up until last week now air infomercials in their place, money hungry I guess. Good news is it happened when this episode was to be shown, I think I just saw all the good parts on the remastered FX reel. Although #11 makes a good point, you have to view it in a certain perspective, not as just another sci fi story from outer space.

#33, I had to add this, how synonymous, as I pointed out in another post, I was flipped out by the songs in this episode when it first aired, and I still like the hippie songs from it, but I also was exposed to this and The Monkees and that was it, other than my Dad’s C&W and Bluegrass records!

And speaking of Tongo Rad’s groovy way of knocking people out (did anyone else think he looked like Mind Worm from Spider-Man 139 but me?)…there’s a topic that needs to be addressed some time…not really the physics of Star Trek but “The anatomy” of Star Trek. That maneuver is right up there with that blow right above the tail bone that seems to be part of hand to hand training at Star Fleet. We used to practice all these moves on each other as a kid.

Yay brother. That’s real now.

I reach that, brother. I really do.

That Spock Rock video is real now, brother!

A lot more watchable than all the bad episodes of TNG, though.

It may be hard to find, but there was an LP released in the 70s of Star Trek bloopers. Basically someone found magnetic tapes of the raw, on set audio. One track is listed as “The ol’ Vulcan Harp Bicycle wheel duet”.

It’s on the intrawebs if you google it.

Insert lame space hippy joke*

Well the new effects are decent anyway

The 1st window on the side of the Aurora looks like a stylized Peace sign.

We reach, baby.

This episode is, like, totally 1968. Dr. Sevrin totally deserved to buy the farm. He was a complete a**hole.

The rest of the Space Hippies probably got drafted and sent to Vietnam.

I wish the deleted scene with Uhura, McCoy and Spock in the rec deck had survived on film, all we have now are pictures. According to the script it would have been a nice scene.

Is it just me, or was there some effort to make Scotty sound old? “Why can’t a young mind be a disciplined mind?’ he asks here. And in “Lights of Zetar”, Kirk refers to “a man of Scotty’s years…”

The only TOS episode that makes me embarrassed to be a Star Trek fan!

Did anyone notice Phyllis Douglas, who played Yeoman Mears in “The Galileo Seven” was in this episode as the dark haired female hippie, listed as Girl #2 in the credits?

Herberts need to lighten up! This is fun stuff.

I reach brother, I reach!.

Very nice lipstick on a pig for this one!

I actually enjoy this episode. The only part that doesn’t work for me is the Chekov subplot — the rest is fun, and I even like the songs and the made-up slang.

Did they fix those two image-reversed shots of Kirk near the end of the episode?

No, they didn’t.

I know that, if they had flipped them, Kirk would then have been looking in the wrong direction when Dr. Severin ran from the shuttlecraft; but that’s the lesser of two evils compared to having the badge on the opposite side of Kirk’s shirt. Twice.

I really thought CBS-D would take a moment to flip those shots over. Ah well.

good move to cut the songs out, they sucked.

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Recap / Star Trek S3 E20 "The Way to Eden"

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Original air date: February 21, 1969

Kirk and the Enterprise are in hot pursuit of the stolen spaceship Aurora . The Aurora isn't giving up easily and leads them on a high speed chase. The cruiser's engines become strained from the chase and the whole thing goes ka-blooey! Fortunately (or not), Scotty manages to beam aboard the six miscreants before the cruiser explodes.

The six spaceship jackers are a group of young idealists in search of the mythical planet Eden and led by the brilliant but insane engineer Dr. Sevrin. Among them are Tongo Rad, the son of a Catullan ambassador ( which prevents Kirk from simply throwing them all in the brig ), Adam ( Charles Napier ), who mostly sings Protest Songs , and Irina Galliulin , a New Old Flame of Chekov's.

Kirk wants to bring this group to the nearest starbase, but of course they have other ideas. They've come up with a Zany Scheme involving pressure points, ultrasonic sound waves, the Galileo , and a musical hubcap.

The Way to Tropes:

• Actual Pacifist : Tongo Rad and Irinia briefly balk at Sevrin's plan to use sound waves to knock out everyone but them, noting that ultrasonics have the potential to cause harm, but he assures them he'll be careful.
• Alien Food Is Edible : It's really, really not. The "apples" are so acidic that a single bite can kill.
• All Planets Are Earthlike : A planet that was technically habitable (right sunlight and air quality), but all the flora secreted a deadly acid, and the fruit was lethal.
• Artistic License – Botany : Flowers would not form on a planet unless they were meant to attract pollinators. Flowers require a fair amount of resources and water to develop and maintain. One might make a similar argument about the fruit, except that some fruits disperse seeds via exploding fleshy capsules.
• Bald of Evil : Dr. Sevrin.
• Belief Makes You Stupid : The hippies' belief that Planet Eden existed and that it was a perfect place leads to Adam and Sevrin's death by alien fruit and painful injuries for the others.
• Beware the Silly Ones : Sevrin and his followers go from being a nuisance singing nonsense music to knocking out everyone on the ship and taking control. Kirk should've really had a talk with security after this fiasco.
• Contemplate Our Navels : The space hippies are into the philosophy of "One", from which all is derived, and seek to return to the beginning. You reach?
• Culture Clash : Starfleet may only be Mildly Military , but still military enough to seriously clash with the way of life and the attitudes of the space hippies. Ironically, Spock of all people is the crew member who has the least problems dealing with them. Adam, in particular really takes a liking to Spock.
• Deconstruction : A rather anvilicious one, of idealistic societies framed outside accepted social norms. A blatant Take That! at hippies.
• Didn't Think This Through : Picking the first vaguely Earthlike planet you stumble across to settle and going down with no supplies or equipment whatsoever, then going barefoot and eating random plants? Bad idea, it turns out.
• Dramatic Irony / Foreshadowing : One of Adam's songs, early in the episode, proclaims proudly that he is "gonna live, not die". In the one he sings just as the group prepare to land on "Eden", he declares that he will "eat all the fruit and throw away the rind". After arriving, he does indeed eat a fruit... and he dies, he doesn't live.
• Driven to Suicide : Dr. Sevrin had to have known the fruit was poisonous, but he was so distraught that he indirectly caused one of his followers' death he just didn't care.
• Evil Luddite : Dr. Sevrin. And wouldn't you know it? He's a carrier for a disease that makes it dangerous for him to visit any world that isn't sufficiently scientifically advanced.
• False Utopia : Eden, as the plants turn out to be acidic, and the fruit is poisonous.
• Flowers of Nature : You can't have hippies without them! Irina wears violets in her hair. Sevrin has a daisy painted on his bald head. Body artist George Barr did body painting for all the hippies.
• Foreshadowing : Spock's sensors indicate a total lack of animal life on Eden. Turns out that all of the vegetation on the planet is toxic and acidic.
• And if you don't like it, you're a total Herbert!
• That Vulcan instrument in Spock's quarters is real now!
• Good Is Old-Fashioned : Sevrin believes this.
• Gotta Get Your Head Together : Dr. Sevrin uses ultrasonics to stun the Enterprise crew. Even The Spock can't bear the pain and Kirk mimes turning his head into a Large Ham sandwich.
• The one Red Shirt assigned to watch Sevrin gets too caught up in listening to music to do his job. Meanwhile, nobody else is bothering to keep an eye on the other hippies.
• "Eden" turns out to be located in Romulan space, which naturally worries the hell out of Kirk after Sevrin and company take over; before beaming down, he tells Scotty to try and explain the situation if they show up * because that would clearly go SPECTACULARLY well — "Sorry, laddies, it wasn't our fault; our ship was hijacked by hippies!" . Somehow, though, the Romulans — who usually show up to surround the Enterprise the moment they stray into the Neutral Zone, and who would probably love to get their hands on Kirk after " The Enterprise Incident " — never show up. Presumably, everyone at the border monitoring stations was on break that day or something.
• Irina and Tongo Rad, both who used to be Star Fleet students, express concerns over Sevrin setting the speakers on a certain frequency, remembering their studies on high ultrasonic frequencies being fatal to humanoid life forms. They shrug off their concerns in favor of reaching “Eden”.
• Ignored Expert : Spock tells the hippies (who've stolen a shuttlecraft) that Sevrin is both dangerously ill and insane, even telling to them to look up Starfleet's files on him. Unfortunately, by this point no one's listening.
• Literary Allusion Title : Gene Roddenberry may have been a proud atheist (if not antitheist), but he was fond of alluding to themes from The Bible .
• Make Some Noise : Sevrin uses an ultrasonic tone to knock out everyone on the Enterprise so the hippies can make their getaway.
• Meaningful Name : The Space Hippie who ate the deadly fruit was named Adam. Also, the name "Irina" means "Peaceful". Good name for a hippie chick.
• My God, What Have I Done? : It’s implied by Sevrin’s expression that he realized he led his group to a dangerous and uninhabitable planet that resulted in the death of one in their group.
• New-Age Retro Hippie : Well, hippies weren't retro when the episode first aired!
• New Old Flame : Irina, one of the hippies, is an old girlfriend of Chekov's, whom he's never mentioned before and will never mention again.
• Out-of-Character Moment : Chekov's character (which in the original story, was meant to have been Kirk's character) is portrayed in this episode as a rigid, rule-quoting straight arrow, in contrast to the writers' initial concept of the character as a younger, less authoritarian character who might appeal to teenage viewers. Walter Koenig has called the episode "badly written" partly because of this. He also called this episode the low point of his character's tenure on the show.
• Pressure Point : Spock isn't the only one who can neck pinch! Tongo Rad used his knowledge of human anatomy to knock out an Enterprise crewman by squeezing the nerve pressure point at the back of the jaw, just under the earlobe ( Truth in Television , though it causes great pain and delayed unconsciousness rather than instant).
• Protest Song : Adam's raison d'etre, and he plays a bunch of them on an odd-looking guitar-stick thingy.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits : The Space Hippies see themselves as this. Spock sympathizes with their feeling of not being able to fit in, and is much more tolerant of them than Kirk is, which is why they take an immediate shine to Spock and immediately distrust and dislike Kirk. Spock : Miss Galliulin... it is my sincere wish that you do not give up your search for Eden. I have no doubt but that you will find it, or make it yourselves.
• Recycled Soundtrack :
• Rhymes on a Dime : That Adam's a real character. Adam: Gonna crack my knuckles and jump for joy; I got a clean bill of health from Dr. McCoy !
• Secretly Selfish : Sevrin is the carrier for a deadly disease which endangers the lives of those around him unless he's in a controlled environment, which he refuses because he hates technology. He hasn't told his fellow hippies, with whom he travels in close quarters with and hangs out about this little problem. His search for Eden is also implied to be more motivated by his desire to get away from technology than the "return to the beginning" the others seek.
• Some Kind of Force Field : Protects the door to the isolation cell that holds Dr. Sevrin.
• Soundtrack Dissonance : In an especially eerie moment, once Dr. Sevrin and the hippies have control of the ship and have knocked everyone else out, Adam plays one of his upbeat little folk songs... as we pan across all the unconscious crew members.
• They re-use the footage of Nurse Chapel being knocked out from " Spock's Brain " at the beginning of the season. That's why the lights go out in that shot whereas they don't anywhere else in the scene.
• A brief shot of the surface of Eden is reused footage of the lakeside from " Shore Leave ". A shot of the surface of Gamma Trianguli VI from " The Apple " is also recycled and used in the same scene.
• Strange Salute : The Space Hippies greet people by making an oval with their fingers; the future equivalent of the peace hand sign of the 60s. The oval is also seen in the ceramic egg-shaped pins they each wear. The egg represents their philosophy of "One," which Spock understands, as these people "seek the beginning".
• Subculture of the Week : Hippies In Space
• Want to live in an ideal society outside the established norm, hippies? Too bad, it will turn out to be a dystopia all along.
• The insult "Herbert" was apparently aimed at a real-life person, but it's still unknown exactly who. The most common theory is that the show's former production executive, Herbert F. Solow was the target, though others have suggested it was Herbert Hoover .
• Temporary Substitute : Uhura doesn't appear in this episode, her duties assumed by Lt. Palmer, played by Elizabeth Rogers.
• That Reminds Me of a Song : We spend quite a lot of time with Adam singing his songs.
• Too Dumb to Live : "Well, here I am on an unexplored planet! What will I do first? I know! I'll eat this fruit about which I know absolutely nothing!" Especially since the fruit tree is so far from the shuttlecraft that Adam must have been able to see and hear the others getting their feet burned by the grass.
• Tractor Beam : The Enterprise tries to take the stolen ship in tow with a tractor beam.
• Typhoid Mary : Dr. Sevrin, carrier of the Synthecoccus novae bacterium who was crazy more than he was malicious. While the episode had no reported infections, having to isolate him to ensure that did really tick off his followers.
• Utopia Justifies the Means : Reaching Eden justifies killing everybody on the Enterprise .
• Well-Intentioned Extremist : Dr. Sevrin and company see themselves as such.
• You Fool! : Kirk shouts this as Sevrin takes a bite out of the poisoned fruit. (Incidentally, the image of him yelling this is obviously flipped. His insignia is on his right instead of his left.)
• You're Insane! : A line that's blunt even for Spock. Spock (to Kirk): Dr. Sevrin is... insane.
• Star Trek S3 E19 "Requiem for Methuselah"
• Recap/Star Trek: The Original Series
• Star Trek S3 E21 "The Cloud Minders"

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My Star Trek Reviews

Jeremy A Perron's multiple year mission to complete an interesting and witty review for every Star Trek series, every movie, and maybe branch out into my novel collection. Spoilers! Spoilers! Spoilers beware!

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

The enterprise finds some space hippies.

Episode Title:   The Way to Eden

Air Date: 2/21/1969

Written by Arthur Heinemann and Dorothy C. Fontana  

Directed by David Alexander

Cast: William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk     Leonard Nimoy as Commander Spock              DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard H. McCoy AKA “Bones”               James Doohan   as Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott AKA “Scotty”         George Takei   as Lieutenant   Hikaru Sulu               Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura           Elizabeth Rogers as Lieutenant Palmer           Bill Blackburn as Lieutenant Hadley         Frank Da Vinci as Lieutenant Brent          Roger Holloway as Lieutenant Lemli             Jeannie Malone as unnamed lieutenant               Majel Barrett as Nurse Christine Chapel           Walter Koenig as Ensign Pavel Chekov       James Drake as unnamed Nurse        Skip Homeier as Dr. Ton Sevrin                  Charles Napier as Adam                  Mary Linda Rapelye as Irina         Victor Brandt as   Tongo Rad              Deborah Downey as unnamed Hippie Woman#1                  Phyllis Douglas as unnamed Hippie Woman #2  

Ships: USS Enterprise NCC-1701, Gallio II NCC-1701’7, Aurora NC-17740

Planets: “ Eden”

My Spoiler filled summary and review: The episode begins with the Enterprise chasing down a stolen starship.   It is not the first time we have seen them do this for they had to do the same task in “ Mudd’s Women .”   Like with Mudd’s ship the stolen vessel was still destroyed, but the adventure was still a step up.   The Enterprise crew were able to perform better this time as they saved the people on the stolen ship without incurring any damage to their own vessel.   Instead of finding a space pimp and his ladies, they find a group of space hippies.   Kirk’s log entry lets us know that one of these space hippies is Tongo Rad, the son a prominent Catullan diplomat, whose people are involved in a delicate negotiation with the Federation.   Therefore, Kirk must proceed more gently than he would otherwise like.

The space hippies are led by a Tiburonian, named Dr. Sevrin, who teaches a philosophy that rejects the artificial world of technology and seeks a return to the primitive and natural that he calls “the One.”   Sevrin believes there is a world called Eden that is untouched by the modern and his followers can live life in a natural paradise.     They don’t like Kirk who they call a “Herbert” for insisting that he is going to return them to the authorities.   They do take to Spock who is sympathetic to their plight and even offers to help find a potential “Eden” planet for them to live on once things are settled with Federation authorities.  

Ensign Chekov is both surprised and horrified to discover that his ex-girlfriend, who he dated while they were both at Starfleet Academy, is part of their group.   Kirk can’t believe that any space hippie was once an Academy cadet.   This leads Spock to point out that most of the space hippies are remarkably intelligent with their leader, Dr. Sevrin, being a top scientist in his field.   Kirk allows Chekov to go check on his old flame and they do a little bit of bonding as her people are being medically checked in sick bay.  

Trouble starts when McCoy discovers that Sevrin suffers fromsynthococcus novae .   This condition is generated by the technology in modern Federation society.   It’s treatable and most Starfleet personnel are vaccinated against it.   However, as a carrier Sevrin cannot leave artificial environment society in exchange for the natural as his condition would spread untreated and begin to kill people.   Sevrin strongly rejects this and Kirk orders him confined to the brig.   This leads his followers to try to recruit Enterprise crewmembers to revolt.   Spock tries to reason with Sevrin only to come away convinced that Sevrin is insane.  

The space hippies mingle with the Enterpris e crew, learn things about the ship, and sing songs. At one point the one named Adam invites Spock to participate in a jam session.   All of this is a ruse however to get knowledge of the Enterprise and control of the ship.   They re-route everything to the emergency control room and take the ship to the area of space they think Eden is.   It just so happens to be in Romulan space so they could be in a lot of trouble as they fly past the Neutral Zone.   When they arrive at the planet, they make the ship produce a sonic noise that knocks out the crew.

With the crew unconscious the space hippies take a shuttle to the surface.   However, the planet turns out to be toxic to humanoid life.   Adam had died because he ate a piece of fruit.   Sevrin not willing to accept defeat does the same.   The crew of the Enterprise brings the hippies back.   Spock tells Chekov’s ex that they should not give up their search for Eden.

Additional thoughts: Given the popularity and growing power of the counter-culture that existed in the 1960s it was probably inevitable that Star Trek would do an episode to comment on it.   I think this probably would have been a better episode to do time travel trip to 20 th century Earth (maybe to stop some rogue time traveler hiding out) and encounter some real hippies instead of inventing their own.   The real hippies protested and fought against unjust war, racial segregation, institutional sexism, greedy unrestrained capitalism, the environment, and rigorous patriarchal standards on family structure .   What do the space hippies fight against in the ideal future?   The answer: the Federation is just too awesome.   We have technology that can do almost anything! Rebel!  

It is not to say the hippies cannot be criticized they certainly can be.   Amongst hippie culture there was a rapid spread of drug use and STDS.   There is also some bone head political decisions such as publicly endorsing Chairman Mao and Ho Chi Minh.   However, the episode doesn’t really work with legitimate criticisms.   The focus seems to be why are young people so crazy sometimes? Even the space hippies’ worldview of the return to the primitive never sees legitimate critique either.   As much as they may hate artificial environment it is better for us than pure nature.   If you don’t believe me, take a look at what bananas are really supposed to look like.   Not only that but corn, apples, and anything else. There is a reason why hunter/gather had to remain small it is not the best way to feed yourself .   That is why we developed agriculture; it is far more secure. For some reason no one, even Spock, mentions this.  

This happens to be one of the few Star Trek stories that Kirk has a really passive part.   The Captain is just along for the ride in this one where the focus of the story is on Spock and Chekov.   Considering we know how hard Chekov can fall for a girl he is the most logical choice to be made to suffer over his ex’s defection.   Chekov, with his Monkey’s haircut, can also represent the non-hippie youth, who continues to believe in the values of the prior generation and who is repulsed by the hippies.

  FINAL GRADE 3 of 5

2 comments:

Why do the space hippies keep saying, "Yay, brother!" when they sing? Does that mean anything, or was it just a nonsense phrase made up for the episode?

I believe many hippies back in the sixties referred to all people as "brother" and "sister."

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Star Trek – The Way to Eden (Review)

This July and August, we’re celebrating the release of Star Trek Beyond by taking a look back at the third season of the original Star Trek . Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the latest update.

Like any television, or any piece of popular culture, Star Trek is a product of its time.

That does not mean that the show speaks only to its time or that it has no relevance beyond that moment in time, but in means that the series is very much anchored in the zeitgeist of the late sixties. Sometimes that influence is obscured by advances in the intervening years, like the fascination with the novelty of transplant surgery that played out in the background of Spock’s Brain . Sometimes that tangible connection is more like ambient background noise than direct influence, as with the sense of apocalyptic dread that permeates the third season as a whole.

“You reach?”

Sometimes, however, it is impossible to look upon Star Trek as anything other than a product of the late sixties. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was undeniably a product of 1968, with its anxiety about civil strife and civil rights, its somewhat reductive metaphor for race relations and its general production aesthetic. However, that is nothing compared to The Way to Eden , which might be the most flamboyantly and stereotypically sixties episode of the entire original run.

The Way to Eden is the episode that opens with a bunch of space! hippies staging a sit-in in the Enterprise transporter room and escalates from there.

Trippy hippie shakedown.

Star Trek has always been somewhat anxious about the hippie movement, reflecting the anxieties of a writing staff who belonged to an older generation. Gene Roddenberry, Gene L. Coon and Fred Freiberger had all served in the armed forces during the Second World War, and so were a generation removed from the flowerchildren attending Woodstock, staging university sit-ins, organising peace protests, and attempting to levitate the Pentagon. The show had touched on these ideas in a number of earlier episodes, with a recurring sense of befuddlement.

In the first season, This Side of Paradise featured literal flower children. In that episode, Kirk encounters a colony of idle layabouts living lives of absolute luxury under the influence of sinister spores. No longer motivated to work or strive, the colonists lie around and debate philosophy and Spock even falls in love. Naturally, Kirk stirs them from this illusion of paradise. While This Side of Paradise could be read in light of the first season’s many critiques of communism and socialism, it also felt like a criticism of contemporary youth in general.

Music to his ears.

This subtext became more overt early in the third season, with the production of And the Children Shall Lead . In that episode, which is very much a precursor to The Way to Eden in terms of theme, a malevolent entity manipulates a bunch of children into turning against their parents and enabling it to spread insanity across the cosmos. It is only through the intervention of James Tiberius Kirk that order is restored. The children inevitably learn the value of listening to their elders, who clearly know best.

In many ways, this reflected the contemporary sixties anxieties about the counterculture movement. Parents who had lived through the Second World War and enjoyed the relative peace and prosperity of the fifties were perplexed and confused by the fact that their children had taken to doing drugs and protesting the status quo . Coupled with the chaos of the Vietnam War and the larger strife associated with the civil rights movements, parents were understandably concerned about the world into which their children were stepping.

Staging a sit-in in the Enterprise transporter room.

Star Trek was late to the party. The hippie movement had enjoyed its big cultural moment in the gap between the first and second seasons of the show, the Summer of Love in which up to 75,000 young people descended upon San Francisco to live a dream of free love and free expression . Things did not necessarily work out as intended, serving to instead highlight the movement’s weaknesses more than its strengths. As Peter Braunstein argued in Forever Young :

By late summer 1967, the Flower Child charade of the hippies had begun to wilt, overheated by the media hype it had generated. The advertised lifestyle of communalism, free love, and abundant drugs had enticed young people from across America to the two largest urban hippie enclaves, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and New York’s East Village, and the crescendo of immigrants soon overwhelmed the hippies’ meager resources and ad hoc organisations assembled to aid the newcomers. As a result, the “Summer of Love ’67” featured scores of young would-be hippies, many of them confused runaways, victimised by unscrupulous drug dealers, crammed in overpopulated hippie “communes”, harassed by police and municipal authorities, and objectified by commercialisation and tourism meant to capitalise on the hippie phenomenon. By summer’s end, two well-publicised murders in both coastal meccas redirected media scrutiny, which now focused on the “dark underside” of the hippie dream.

These flaws within the movement would ultimately prove fatal. Drug addiction was rampant, Speed becoming an epidemic; long-haired flower children become long-hair urchins begging for spare change . Counterculture would seemingly acknowledge the tarnished brand of the hippie by organising “The Death of the Hippie” in October 1967. The event was staged as a symbolic funeral, complete with a progression down Haight Street .

Purple haze.

Nevertheless, the hippie remained an object of popular fascination for the remainder of the decade and beyond. In fact, it could legitimately be argued that The Way to Eden exists as part of a much larger subgenre of “hippiexplotation.” To many older people and professionals, hippies were a source of endless fascination. They seemed as alien and as exotic as the characters featured here. It seemed inevitable that popular culture would latch on to the hippie, channeling the icon through a variety of pop culture lenses.

Exploitation powerhouse America International Pictures quickly cashed in on the craze. Highlights included Riot on Sunset Strip , a film that was shot and released within six weeks of the 1966 Sunset Strip curfew riots. Indeed, a young Jack Nicholson would start his career in the genre; he starred as the hippie musician “Stoney” in Psych-Out and wrote the script for The Trip . Audiences were fascinated by this movement, and studios were eager to provide a glimpse into that world. The Way to Eden is just Star Trek ‘s twist on the idea.

My, what big ears you have.

Meanwhile in the real world, the “Youth International Party” adopted the nickname “yippies” , and came to be seen as a more aggressive and proactive offshoot of the movement. The yippies would sieze control of Grand Central Terminal in New York in March 1968, leading to a tactical police response and dozens of arrests . They would play a major role in the disruption of the Democratic National Convention in August 1968 , which would lead to scenes of incredible violence and unrest .

The narrative that formed around the hippie movement was one of manipulation. Parents feared that their young children were being misled and manipulated by troublemakers seeking to forward their own agendas, authority figures like Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman abusing their positions in order to exploit teenagers and young adults not mature enough to know better. These fears would crystalise with the Tate-Labainca murders , which would lead to the arrest of manipulative cult leader Charlie Manson. Manson embodied all the elder generation’s fears about counterculture.

Just spinning their wheels.

These anxieties bled through into The Way to Eden and the way that it approached the counterculture movement by imagining a story wherein Kirk and his crew encountered what could only be described as space! hippies. As author Sean Munger points out, The Way to Eden needs to be viewed in that context :

There’s a sense in The Way to Eden that the makers of the show – writer Fontana (who took her name off the script) and director David Alexander – simply didn’t know what to make of hippies in the real world. The creatures in Severin’s crew, which includes some aliens, seem shallow and childlike, idealistic to a fault and not really in tune with how the universe really works. Their quest for Eden, which Spock says at the end of the show he admires, is portrayed as worthy, but the hippies’ motives are very reductionist, defined solely in terms of what they’re against rather than what they really believe in. Consequently the group comes off as a bunch of buffoons, as much as characters like Chekov and Kirk seem like rigid authoritarians who are incapable of “reaching” the hippies’ motivations. The two groups seem to be talking past one another. That is real. That’s the way it really was in America in 1969, especially within families where middle class suburban parents couldn’t quite understand why their son now had long hair or why their daughter started calling herself Moonbeam. This is what The Way to Eden gets right, albeit unwittingly.

The Way to Eden is extremely patronising and condescending in its portrayal of the space! hippie commune members, who are presented as reckless fools with poor judgment. However, it saves its real scorn for the figure who is misleading them. Doctor Sevrin is the villain of the piece, responsible for what happens.

Sevrin all ties to reality.

Doctor Sevrin is very much a stand-in for key counterculture figures like Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman. As his title implies, Sevrin is very much an academic. After all, many of the key figures in the counterculture mythos were rooted in academia; Timothy Leary had been an assistant clinical professor of medical psychology at the University of California and a lecturer in clinical psychology at Harvard University, while Abbie Hoffman began his involvement with radical politics while studying for a masters in psychology in Berkeley.

According to Spock, Doctor Sevrin is “a brilliant research engineer in the fields of acoustics, communications and electronics on Tiburon. He was dismissed from his post when he started this movement.” This seems to fit with the general public perception of the counterculture as removed and disengaged from legitimate concerns, arguably reflected in the condemnation of idleness at the heart of This Side of Paradise . There is a sense that the people driving the movement had little practical experience.

Kirk is hip to their games.

Sevrin is repeatedly described as “insane” over the course of the episode, a fact borne out in his stubborn refusal to abandon Eden even when it proves to be toxic. Indeed, The Way to Eden is careful to assure viewers that the classification of Doctor Sevrin as “insane” is not mere hyperbole. Instead, it is presented as incontrovertible fact. On consulting with the would-be revolutionary, Spock assures Kirk, “Doctor Sevrin is insane. I’ve not consulted Doctor McCoy, but I have no doubt of it.” Spock later references “a full psychological profile” of Sevrin suggesting as much.

Sevrin is shown to be callous and manipulative. Early on in the story, Sevrin is identified as the carrier of an extremely dangerous bacteria, one that can be treated using contemporary medicine. “Of course I knew,” he boasts to Spock. “You’ve researched my life. You’ve read the orders restricting me to travel only in areas of advanced technology because of what my body carries.” Spock responds, “What I fail to understand is why you disobey those orders.” Sevrin explains, “Because this is poison to me.”

Who is pulling the strings?

Sevrin’s recklessness knowingly puts the lives of his followers at risk, even before he leads them to a toxic hellhole. Sevrin is not affected by the bacteria, but he knows that it will likely kill his followers if they do not take “full spectrum immunisations.” Given their desire to live away from technology, Sevrin must know that he carries something that would doom any primitive world that he chose to visit. “There wouldn’t have been enough primitives left to bury their dead,” McCoy bitterly reflects of Sevrin’s long-term plans. But Sevrin is so selfish that he doesn’t care.

Of course, there is also a sense that the bacteria serves as an extended metaphor for what makes Sevrin so dangerous. “He carries the disease and spreads it to others,” McCoy tells Kirk. The bacteria spreads from Sevrin, even though it does not affect him. Similarly, Sevrin’s politics and beliefs infect those around him, even if he is much more cynical and hypocritical than he pretends to be. Sevrin’s ideas are contagious, inspiring young minds to dangerous antics. After all, it is Sevrin who leads his followers to hijack the Enterprise and potentially start a war with Romulus.

“You might laugh now, but big ears are going to be all the rage for Star Trek villains in 1987. I can feel it now.”

In fact, Sevrin rather brutally conspires to murder the Enterprise crew after he finds his way to the planet surface. He initially attempts to mislead his followers as to his intentions. “Well, I’m using sound against them, beyond the ultrasonic,” Sevrin explains. “It will stun them and allow us time to leave.” Naturally, sound is a weapon to Sevrin, just as words have been. However, Irina sees through Sevrin’s bluff, “Sound pitched that high doesn’t stun, it destroys.” Tad agrees. Sevrin acknowledges as much, “We cannot allow them to come after us.”

Sevrin is effectively cast as a pied piper figure, leading an entire generation of young people towards danger and death while on his own ego trip. The Way to Eden is entirely sincere in this regard, presenting Sevrin as a delusional psychopath who cares about nothing beyond himself and his followers as shallow fools who are easily mislead. It is very much the way that many parents saw the counterculture movement as a whole. (Sevrin, to a certain extent, fits the template that would seem tailored to Charles Manson upon his arrest in August 1969.)

Adam played gui– or whatever the hell that thing is.

In some ways, The Way to Eden seems at least a little sympathetic to its subjects. It is certainly less aggressive in its condemnation of the movement than And the Children Shall Lead had been. As Aniko Bodroghkozy contends in Groove Tube , this was a relatively positive portrayal of hippiedom in the context of the late sixties:

More positively, the narrative opened a space for sustained attack on conformist technological society. The Way to Eden, unlike the vast majority of Star Trek episodes, questioned and challenged the benefits and superiority of the technocomputerised universe put into place by the supposedly utopian United Federation of Planets. Spock’s position as ally to the space hippies, against a fairly unattractive Kirk, strengthened and, to some  extent, legitimised the critique. By displacing the ideological dispute into the future and, for the most part, dispensing with the issue of drugs (except at the end – and, even then, only punningly), the episode allowed for a reading of the counterculture and its rebellion against the dominant social order that was equivocally sympathetic.

Certainly, the suggestion that Spock is sympathetic to the space! hippies helps smooth over the more reactionary tendencies. Spock was very much the show’s breakout character, and frequently positioned as the voice of reason on Star Trek . The fact that Spock does not dismiss the space! hippies immediately (and pithily) suggests some measure of sympathy for the movement.

Playing along.

After all, Spock joins Adam for a “session” in the messhall, demonstrating that his is groovy. “What makes you so sympathetic toward them?” Kirk asks Spock at one point. Spock responds, “It is not sympathy so much as curiosity, Captain. A wish to understand. They regard themselves as aliens in their own worlds, a condition with which I am somewhat familiar.” In fact, it is that attribute that had served to make Spock so compelling and so fascinating to the counterculture in the first place.

Over the course of the show’s run, Spock had seen himself transformed into the most unlikely of sex symbols and countercultural icons. After all, Spock was at least as much a military man – and embodiment of the establishment – as James Tiberius Kirk. With his emotional detachment and stoic demeanour, Spock was far removed from the idea of “free love.” However, his alien nature spoke to an entire generation of viewers. Episodes like The Naked Time and Journey to Babel suggested Spock’s domestic situation was one with which many younger viewers might identify.

It’s okay, space! hippies, Spock can reach you.

To be fair, this reading of Spock is not entirely consistent and convincing. As Ina Rae Hark points out in the BFI guide to Star Trek , this counter-cultural version of Spock was largely a reimagining and reinvention of the half-Vulcan’s character:

As the series progressed and Spock became a counter-culture icon, his advocacy of deadly expediency waned and his non-violent temperament took precedence. Leonard Nimoy introduced the Vulcan neck pinch so that Spock, a vegetarian, would not engage in fistfights. Since so much violence is the result of overheated passions which Vulcan logic holds in check, this makes perfect sense. Unlike humans, Vulcans don’t ‘kill without reason’.

After all, Spock could be quite brutal and ruthless when the situation called for it. He advises Kirk to kill Gary Mitchell in Where No Man Has Gone Before , and insists on destroying the Romulan ship in Balance of Terror . He assures Kirk that Edith Keeler must die in The City on the Edge of Forever .

“Kids these days, with their space! rock and their space! roll.”

There is a sense that Spock was very much “softened” over the course of the three-year run of the series, allowed to mellow out a little bit. Of course, there are moments when Spock’s callousness and calculating nature can shine through; he seems ready to kill the kids in And the Children Shall Lead and cynically seduces the Romulan Commander in The Enterprise Incident . Nevertheless, the use of Spock as the token “cool” member of the Enterprise crew in The Way to Eden speaks to how counter-culture had embraced Spock and how Spock in turn embraced it.

Spock seems to genuinely believe in what these young people are trying to accomplish. “I can use the resources of the Enterprise to determine whether or not Eden actually exists and to plot its exact location,” Spock promises Sevrin early in the episode. It is not merely a ruse to get Sevrin to cooperate. Spock tells Kirk, later in the episode, “I made a promise which I should like to keep. With your permission, I must locate Eden.” Later, when the space! hippies hijack the Enterprise, it is Spock who tries to appeal to them by acknowledging their beliefs.

‘Ear him out.

“Adam,” Spock appeals. “You know I reach you. I believe in what you seek. But there is a tragic difference between what you want and what he wants.” Of course, Spock’s use of the space! hippie terminology “reach” makes him sound like a dad trying to be cool. Nevertheless, the point stands. Positioning Spock as an ally (in spirit) to the space! hippies represents a quasi-endorsement of their position. In many ways, it is a striking position for Star Trek to take, given how reactionary the show could be in episodes like And the Children Shall Lead .

At the same time, there is also something very patronising about all this. Painting Sevrin as a narcissistic psychopath is a very effective way to discredit the movement and its ideology, something that The Cloud Minders had touched upon with Plasus’ fixation upon “disruptors” as the cause of social unrest on Ardana. In the real world, many politicians had sought to discredit the labour industry and the civil rights movement by suggesting that they were largely driven by communists.

This sort of things is his bag, baby.

This line of attack allows for various social movements to be completely dismissed and ignored, a lazy smear that is used to invalidate the root causes and justified complaints that such organisations have. As much as Spock might claim to support the young space! hippies in their pursuit of Eden and their desire to create their own utopia, recognising the intrinsic worth in those ideas, would any of those young people have ventured forth in search of a better life without Doctor Sevrin to inspire them? Attacking Sevrin is a way to undercut the group.

More than that, there is something incredibly patronising in the way that The Way to Eden treats the young space! hippies. They are presented as incapable of independent or critical thought, waiting for direction from Doctor Sevrin and more loyal to one man than to the ideals of their movement. When Sevrin asks them to hijack the Enterprise, they do so blindly. When Sevrin plots to murder the entire crew of the Enterprise, they object momentarily but quickly go along with it. The space! hippies might not have a bad core idea, but they are dangerous idiots.

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give Adam.

In fact, there is something very reactionary in how The Way to Eden treats these ideas as inherently and unquestioningly dangerous. The Way to Eden seems worried about the potential effect that such beliefs might have on society as a whole. In many ways, it recalls the reactionary subtext of Let That Be Your Last Battlefield , which suggested that Lokai’s criticisms of institutional racism were valid, but his decision to act against them (and to constantly voice them) was just as responsible for tearing his society apart as the racist policies themselves.

The Way to Eden has its space! hippies hijack the Enterprise during a “session” in the messhall. Adam plays a song and dances, while Spock plays the lyre with accompaniment from another member of the group. The concert is broadcast on the ship’s intercom, and various members of the crew are shone to appreciate the anti-war songs. The redshirt guarding Sevrin is swinging his head. A redshirt on the bridge is playing air guitar. Even Sulu seems to sway to the rhythm that those hip cats are playing. Who could object to such funky music?

“Hey, the kids are all right.”

It’s a trap! That sweet smooth soul music is all an elaborate ruse to catch the Enterprise crew off guard while those sneaky space! hippies hijack the ship. The guard bopping to the song while guarding Sevrin? He is easily ambushed by Rad, who takes the opportunity to free Sevrin. Sulu is having such a good time that he does not realise that the space! hippies have seized control of the ship from the auxiliary control room. Those space! hippies used their pacifist jams to lure the crew into a false sense of security and then bam!

There is something quite knee-jerk and distasteful about this sequence, which seems to suggest that the counterculture movement is really just trying to lull the establishment into thinking they are a bunch of pacifist idealists before springing some sort of radical coup d’état . There is a stubborn refusal to accept that a bunch of pacifists singing some corny anti-war songs might just be a bunch of pacifists singing some corny anti-war songs. It is an episode that would seem to agree with President Richard Nixon, who saw Timothy Leary as “the most dangerous man in the world.”

Productivity was down after Sulu picked up those brownies in the space! hippie bake sale.

To be fair, there were always limits on how truly progressive Star Trek was willing to be. For every episode protesting Vietnam like  A Taste of Armageddon or Errand of Mercy or The Trouble with Tribbles or Day of the Dove , there was another supporting it like Return of the Archons or Friday’s Child or The Apple or A Private Little War or For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky . Despite the show’s carefully cultivated reputation as progressive and liberal, there was always a reactionary impulse buried within Star Trek .

The show might push the edges of liberal progressivism, but it always pulled back. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield made a number of very clever observations about how inequality did not end with the abolition of slavery, but it tempered those observations by condemning those who protested such inequality as much as those who perpetuated it. The Cloud Minders explored issues of class and economic distribution, but insisted on a trite ending where all of those problems were solved by issuing slave labourers with gas masks.

Turn on, tune in. Chekov’s out.

Allowing for the most charitable reading of the episode, The Way to Eden does something very similar. It expresses sympathy and understanding to the members of the counterculture movement, the people who feel left out of modern society and object to the direction that contemporary culture has taken, but it treats their ideas as inherently dangerous to the established order of things. There is an underlying conservatism to the episode, one that suggests Kirk might have been better served just to lock up those damned space! hippies, diplomacy be damned.

The twist ending is particularly barbed. Sevrin leads his followers to a planet that is actively hostile to human life. The first body that the away team encounters is Adam, who has died taking a bite from a poisoned fruit on a planet called Eden. Even more than This Side of Paradise or The Apple , the ending of The Way to Eden rejects the idea of utopia. As in a lot of third season episodes, there is a strong sense of apocalyptic dread running through the conclusion to The Way to Eden . Even the most beautiful of worlds is deadly; to enter paradise is to die.

Engineering a takeover.

Then again, this sense of doom and gloom rather accurately reflected both the anxieties of the late sixties and also the mood among the show’s production staff. The third season of Star Trek was always on borrowed time, having been improbably resurrected by a fan campaign at the end of its second season. The third was always going to be the last. According to guest star Deborah Downey interviewed by Starlog , the production team knew it was the end of the line:

“It was a very friendly place to work,” Downey recalls, “but I’m sure from their side, it probably wasn’t as comfortable as it was for me. The series was cancelled by that time. The cast and crew  knew Star Trek was dead in the water, but they still had four more [episodes] to go. I sensed a depression on the set. It was Thanksgiving ’68, and Lee Meriwether had just been injured on the [nearby soundstage]  set of Mission: Impossible. She was a friend of theirs, because she had done a Trek  [That Which Survives] a little before mine, so they were quite upset that she was hurt.”

News that Star Trek would not be renewed for a fourth season was not officially confirmed to the public until February 1969, when NBC published their schedule for the coming year . However, those working on the show know that the production’s days were numbered. After all, NBC had delayed in confirming the order for the last eight episodes of the season, slotting in an interim order for The Mark of Gideon and The Lights of Zetar before confirming the final six.

One of the episode’s nicer touches is the fact that Scotty seems to (for no reason explored) have a pathological mistrust of space! hippies.

It goes without saying that this was not an optimum working environment for anybody involved in the production of the show. After all, it was not as if the show wasn’t already under pressure from a number of different sources. Leonard Nimoy had already decided that he did not want to remain a part of any hypothetical fourth season. William Shatner was going through a divorce, and going through a conflict with Nimoy over who was actually the lead on the series. Veteran directors like Marc Daniels and Ralph Serensky had left.

This is to say nothing of the pressures facing producer Fred Freiberger behind the scenes. Tighter budgets forced less location work, more modest sets, more bottle episodes and tighter schedules. While it could be argued that some episodes like Spectre of the Gun and The Tholian Web found ways around these restrictions, they were the exception. Veteran staff members like Gene Roddenberry, Gene L. Coon, Dorothy Fontana and Robert Justman were no longer available to support Freiberger. Things were not healthy.

Pyramid schemes.

There was also a palpable sense of disappointment in the work that was being produced. Leonard Nimoy had strenuously objected to creative decisions in episodes like Is There in Truth No Beauty? and Whom Gods Destroy . In an interview with Starlog , guest star Phyllis Douglas suggested that nobody on set was particularly enamored with The Way to Eden :

“I was embarrassed to be in that one,” Douglas confesses. “If you watch the episode, you’ll notice that I hide in every single scene! I did Galileo Seven first, and I was really proud of that  show, so I was excited to be in another one.  After I got the job on Eden, I learned that the space hippies were going to sing. I thought, ‘Singing on Star Trek? That’s absurd!’ I just knew it wasn’t going to work. “It was really funny, because when I was  on the show, several regular cast members came up and told me how embarrassed they were, because Eden was the worst episode  they ever made! I realized that as soon as I read the script. It was a dumb song, too. Unless you know me well, you won’t recognize or see me too clearly in that episode. I just hid!”

Indeed, various actors working on the show took the time to trash the episode in their memoirs. James Doohan suggested in Beam Me Up, Scotty that he considered recusing himself from the shoot. In many ways, The Way to Eden is treated as one of the most embarrassing moments in the entire run of the show. It is one of several episodes, like Spock’s Brain or And the Children Shall Lead , that is used to illustrate all that is wrong with the third season.

Music to their ears.

It is easy to point to ridiculous elements in the episode. The space! hippie terminology is absurd, to be frank. “Reach” is used instead of “dig” , while “Herbert” is used as an insult. It all seems to be trying a little too hard, right down to giving the space! hippies musical instruments that recall a crucified guitar and a bicycle wheel. The Way to Eden is an episode with no less than three musical interludes, which is quite striking for an episode of Star Trek . It is very easy to mock, and none of it is particularly good of itself.

However, the real problem with the aesthetic of The Way to Eden is that it does not go far enough. The episode is far too transparent in what it is trying to do, transforming hippie subculture into something half-alien. Star Trek audiences love weird details in their alien cultures. The Klingon language is built from having actors in ridiculous make-up bark consonants at one another, for example. Nobody complains too hard about Klingons singing in episodes like Melora or The Way of the Warrior . Fans (and even casual viewers) appreciate world-building.

“Dammit, Mister Chekov. Did you learn nothing from The Apple ?”

The problem is not that the space! hippies in The Way to Eden are ridiculous. After all, Star Trek has done ridiculous aliens before. Orion Slave Girls are beautiful women covered in green paint, while Andorians have white wigs and blue antennae. The problem is that The Way to Eden is trying way too hard to ensure that the audience knows what it is doing. The Way to Eden is incredibly condescending and patronising in crafting its central metaphor. It is thunderingly obvious. The first thing that the space! hippies do on arriving on the Enterprise is stage a sit-in.

More than that, the look and feel of The Way to Eden is surprisingly bland and dull for a television episode episode that can be reduced to the sentence “a bunch of space!hippies hijack the Enterprise and fly it to Eden.” Given the beautiful production design associated with Star Trek , thanks to Matt Jefferies and William Ware Theiss and Fred Phillips, it is surprising that The Way to Eden looks so plain and so bland. The space! hippie characters are colourful, but they are really just variations on the kind of hippies who were appearing on the nightly news.

Sparking mistrust.

The third season of Star Trek is largely notable for how skilfully the production design and aesthetic can elevate weak scripts. The Cloud Minders is a clever premise and clunky teleplay, but it looks absolutely beautiful. Whom Gods Destroy is striking to look at, even as it refuses to make any sense. The third season is populated with memorable and striking visuals that demonstrate just how much craft went into the show, even with the budget cut. Even bottle episodes like Elaan of Troyius had striking imagery.

The Way to Eden is quite simply visually unimaginative, as it is narratively unimaginative. It is bland. It is generic. It is predictable. Indeed, this is a recurring detail that ties together the weakest episodes of the season. Spock’s Brain is a terrible episode, but it looks and feels incredibly cheap. And the Children Shall Lead has a singular memorable image of Melvin Belli in a sparkling silver dress, but that alone is not enough to sustain fifty minutes of television. The third season of Star Trek is at its worst when none of the elements work at all.

Fools Russia in.

The Way to Eden is notable for devoting attention to the character of Pavel Chekov. In fact, this is the episode which eventually reveals Chekov’s first name. Neither Uhura nor Sulu would get first names until the feature film franchise. In that respect the episode is remarkable. However, The Way to Eden does nothing particularly interesting with the character of Chekov. It offers no unique insight into the strange little navigation-slash-science officer. It seems to exist purely so that Walter Koenig cannot claim that he was never given anything to do.

In a way, this indicative of how Fred Freiberger approached characterisation. Freiberger really pushed the idea of romance on the show. The third season’s big McCoy-centric episode was For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky , in which the character got both a terminal diagnosis and hitched. Just a little earlier in the season, Scotty had his own moment in the sun with a love story in The Lights of Zetar . Neither love interest was ever seen (or mentioned) again.

“When’s our turn in the limelight?”

Of course, Walter Koenig had been itching for material throughout the season and the production team had tried to incorporate him into scripts like Spectre of the Gun . Quoted in The Fifty-Year Mission , Walter Koenig pointed to the episode as something of a monkey’s paw situation:

As a matter of fact, prior to that I had submitted a four-page statement of how I felt Chekov could be improved and made more multidimensional without subverting the story. Freiberger’s response was, “I read it. Forget it.” I knew the character was always going to be subordinate, but instead of spending the time pushing buttons, we could have spent that same thirty seconds on Chekov in a more fruitful way. Even though he said, “I read it, forget it,” the episode was his way of giving me something and making Chekov a featured player. But I knew that it just wasn’t any good when I read it, and then the casting was terrible. They were all good actors, like Victor Brandt, but they were totally miscast. They’re supposed to be playing thirty-year-old flower children, hippie types, and they looked much rougher and much tougher than that.

There is something strange in the way that The Way to Eden characterises Chekov by making him a stickler for authority and order. Chekov had been introduced as a character intended to court young viewers, yet he seems more hostile to the space! hippies than anybody on the ship other than Kirk and maybe Scotty.

“Hey, at least we get a goodbye scene. That’s more than Romaine got.”

Of course, The Way to Eden was never intended to focus on the character of Chekov. The Way to Eden is the final episode of Star Trek to originate with writer Dorothy Fontana. Fontana is one of the best writers in the history of the franchise, and her distance from the third season likely a major role in the season’s creative inconsistencies. Fontana had stepped aside as story editor at the start of the year, but had agreed to contribute a number of scripts to the season. She had not been happy with how The Enterprise Incident was treated, but she kept her word.

While working on That Which Survives , Fontana pitched the story that would develop into The Way to Eden . However, her original pitch did not centre on Chekov as a character. It also did not place as much emphasis on the idea of space! hippies as the centre of attention. Fontana pitched a story that seemed to be much more character-driven, focusing on a familial dynamic for one of the leading trio. Even if that didn’t sound like Journey to Babel , there would be a lot to be excited about.

“Jim, it appears he was bludgeoned to death by a belaboured metaphor.”

Fontana explained her original pitch to Starlog :

“The Way to Eden was originally called Joanna, who was Dr. McCoy’s daughter,  but the producers didn’t care for that idea,” Fontana reveals. “Instead, they made the character Chekov’s Russian girl friend, and then they shifted the story’s focus. I’ve never  seen the episode.”

Joanna would never actually appear in Star Trek , but she is mentioned in The Survivor .

Adam ate of the poisoned fruit.

In many ways, Fontana’s script suffered from the defining aesthetic of the Fred Freiberger era. Freiberger was very invested in the idea of giving his cast material with which they might work. There was a conscious effort in the third season to spread a little attention around to bit players like Chekov and Scotty and McCoy. However, there was never any emphasis on what made these characters unique. There was nothing in those stories focusing on those characters that spoke to or about them.

McCoy is a great example. McCoy finds out that he is dying in For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky . That should be a beautiful moment for character reflection and introspection. Does McCoy regret that his relationship with his daughter didn’t work out better? Does McCoy rush into Natrina’s arms because he never made peace with his divorce? There are all sorts of interesting ideas there very specific to who McCoy actually is, but none of them make into an episode that treats the love story as strictly generic.

Materialistic concerns.

Fontana’s original pitch for Joanna sounds quite lovely, actually :

“I had gotten out of the show because I realized that the people running it — not Gene Roddenberry, he removed himself — but the people running it did not know the characters,” Fontana said. “What became The Way to Eden was originally a story called Joanna. It was about Dr. McCoy’s 22-year-old daughter and, after having been away from her because of his space missions, etc, for a number of years, he’s now introduced to his 22 year-old grown up daughter, who is a nurse. So, she’s in his profession and she’s kind of a stranger to him, and he is a stranger to her. How do they react?”

Her treatment of the episode is interesting, although maybe in need of some polish .

No fears, big ears.

However, Fred Freiberger was not interested in that story. In These Are the Voyages , Fontana offers her own version of events and how the story came to be jettisoned in favour of The Way to Eden :

“Despite the fact that Gene had liked and approved the idea of Joanna, Freiberger told me that McCoy was a contemporary of Kirk’s. … He did not know that De was playing it at least ten years older than Kirk. He as the senior member of the trio. He was the older, wise head. He was about 45, 46 then. So I knew [Freiberger] hadn’t even read the bible. Joanna is mentioned in the bible, because at the end of the first year I had spoken to De Kelley and said ‘I think we really need your character to have a grown-up son’, and he said, ‘Well, how about a daughter?’ And so we made it a daughter, in the nursing corps. McCoy and his wife had divorced, and [Joanna] and he had never spent too much time together — with him being out in space — and she grew up feeling kind of neglected. So she had a bone to pick with her father. … The basic idea of Joanna was that she comes aboard and Kirk starts paying attention and, suddenly, McCoy has to be a father. And, you know, he’s reacting like a father. And she says, ‘You don’t have that right! You may have contributed the sperm that brought me into being, but where were you when I was growing up?! Where were you when I needed a father?! I’m 21 now, get out of my face!’ … I thought that would have been a hell of a story, and so did Gene Roddenberry. But Fred Freiberger couldn’t see it because he thought that McCoy was the same age as Kirk.”

Fontana was already disillusioned with Freiberger over the changes that were made to The Enterprise Incident . The tinkering with Joanna was the last straw. Fontana abandoned both That Which Survives and Joanna to fate.

Not quite a treat(ment)…

It is a shame that this happened. Fontana is probably the best character to have worked on the original Star Trek , demonstrating an uncanny understanding of the crew and their psychology. There is a specificity to the way that Fontana writes characters like Spock, a care and craft that elevates even troubled scripts like The Naked Time and This Side of Paradise . That sort of specificity is sorely lacking from the third season as a whole. One need only look to John Meredyth Lucas’ attempts to channel Fontana’s voice for Spock in That Which Survives .

Given that The Way to Eden is such a spectacular mess, it seems fair to say that Joanna would almost certainly have been an improvement. In fact, the third season of a whole would likely have been much improved if Fontana and Freiberger had been able to work together instead of butting heads so spectacularly. More than David Gerrold or Margaret Armen, it was Fred Freiberger’s inability to establish a professional and cordial relationship with Dorothy Fontana that contributed to the troubles with the third season.

Et in Arcadia ego.

In Freiberger’s defence, every decision that he made was perfectly within his remit as executive producer. Freiberger made this argument during and interview with Starlog , in what occasionally feels like a very passive-aggressive swipe at Fontana’s difficulty accepting that she was just a writer and no longer the story editor:

Using the Harlan Ellison Star Trek script as an example… Roddenberry and Gene Coon rewrote his “City on the Edge of Forever” and Ellison submitted his first draft to the Writer’s Guild awards, and it got the award. Now, that doesn’t mean that the staff people were wrong in what they wanted to do, or that he was right. This is the nature of this business. If people come in to produce a show… Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon or whoever, that show has to be shaped in terms of what they think. There are 1,200 active writers in the Writer’s Guild. Writers have fragile egos. The come in and submit something. You generally know your show better. You change that show; you rewrite the show. You suggest what they do. You make suggestions. The professional writer is one who has been in the business and knows what it is. No writer likes to have what he’s done changed. Some of them will accept the fact that some good suggestions are made and will follow the guidance of the people who are running the show. The writer comes to the producer and tells him the idea. The get the assignment. All are cut-off assignments, cut off after story. They then come in with the story and discuss it. They adjust. At no time does a writer have to, if he’s got such integrity, and I do not say that disparagingly, accept the change. All he has to do is leave and say, “Just pay me my money for that story and I’m finished.” They don’t have to go on with it after that. The people who are running a show have to run that show. The can’t let 22 different writers come in and determine how the show should go. You’ve got to shape it, rightly or wrongly, ratings and otherwise. The average writer that I know, if he’s been around, he gets 50 percent up there on the screen.

Freiberger was a very traditional producer, an television veteran who understood the industry. He lacked a specialised understanding of Star Trek , and that was a major problem with his stewardship. Many of the people who could have guided him were absent, by their choice or his. Fontana was a major loss, no matter what the cause.

Also, yes. That is veteran character actor Charles Napier.

The Way to Eden is a disaster of an episode, a demonstration that Star Trek will not be finishing with its best foot forward. The end was in sight, but even that would prove to be somewhat toxic.

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Filed under: The Original Series | Tagged: counterculture , dorothy fontana , fred freiberger , hippies , review , sixties , spock , star trek , Television , the way to eden |

12 Responses

This is a great and exhaustive analysis of one of Star Trek’s most interesting (but least satisfying) episodes. Thanks for linking and quoting my own analysis of it.

It’s a good analysis! I think there’s very little new ground to be charted in exploring something as well-trodden as Star Trek, at least not without acknowledging and building (and sometimes even contrasting or comparing) the work done by others.

I don’t love this episode, but I don’t hate it as much as most Trek fans do, either. More clearly than any other TOS episode, it’s obviously a time capsule from 1968, and I find it completely fascinating from that point of view.

I was ten years old in 1968, so I remember some things about that era, though I wasn’t quite old enough to have a serious understanding of the political and social changes that were happening at that time.

In 1968, young people were taking over public buildings by sitting down and singing. The authorities had no idea how to handle this, and people were Very Concerned about What This Means For Our Civilization. Of course, from the perspective of 2016, the sit-ins of the 60’s are ancient history; we know that civilization managed to survive young people sitting down and singing. 🙂 But at the time, it was a big deal, and I like this episode because it reminds us of how things were seen at the time. It’s kinda laughable, in this day and age, to see authority figures Very Concerned about young people who were — *gasp* — sitting down and SINGING , and the whole episode reminds me of the innocence that we had — and lost — back in the 60’s.

Plus any episode that has Spock playing the Vulcan lute can’t be seen as a total loss. 🙂

The episode was rather heavy-handed in its condemnation of Severin, but then, TOS was frequently heavy-handed; I’ve learned to kinda hold my nose and overlook at least a percentage of the heavy-handedness. After all, even at its worst, TOS usually tries to be about something, and that’s so much better than most of what was on TV at the time. And as the Manson case would show, there really WERE some leaders who were psychopaths.

I really like what you have to say about Dorothy Fontana here. So many fans worship Roddenberry, without paying attention to what Fontana and Coon and Justman did for the show. Much of what people like about TOS wasn’t due to Roddenberry at all; it was the work of Coon and Fontana, but Roddenberry was so shrewd in propagating the “lone visionary” myth that many fans have bought into it.

I adore “Journey to Babel,” and I SO wish that Dorothy Fontana had been given the opportunity to do for McCoy in “Joanna” what she’d done for Spock in “Journey to Babel.” Really, I wish they’d locked up Roddenberry once he’d created Star Trek and given Coon and Fontana their heads; it would have been interesting to see what we’d have gotten. 🙂

Anyway, thanks for another thoughtful and insightful review!

Fontana is fantastic. And it’s great that she is still around and still an active participant in discussions and debates around the show. She recently wrote some comics for IDW, and she has given a few commentaries, and she still offers interviews talking about her work. In many ways, Fontana is very much the godmother to Star Trek, and I’m disappointed that she’s not appreciated anywhere near as much as she should be. Fontana is at least as responsible for the character of Spock as Leonard Nimoy, and yet is never recognised as much. (The same is true of Coon, who obviously was not involved for anywhere near as long owing to his premature death.)

While I’m generally quite sympathetic Fred Freiberger’s conflicts with other writers like Margaret Armen or David Gerrold, it’s the loss of Fontana which really cripples the third season. Had Fontana been convinced to stay, the third season would have been a lot more consistent in terms of quality. While a lot of that is likely down to the fact that Freiberger and Fontana simply didn’t seem to hit it off, and seemed antagonistic from the first, I wonder whether some of the blame lies with veterans like Roddenberry or Justman.

(Roddenberry certainly had Freiberger’s ear at the start of the year, as demonstrated by Freiberger’s attitude towards comedy in the first half of the season and the fact that Freiberger pressed ahead with episodes like Elaan of Troyius or The Paradise Syndrome despite his apparent ambivalence towards the latter. And Justman seems to have had some influence on Freiberger’s attitude to David Gerrold. Freiberger himself has conceded that he had no idea what he was doing when he started on the show. I’m surprised that Roddenberry or Justman didn’t champion Fontana more, to the point that These Are the Voyages… suggests that they all but ignored her protests on The Enterprise Incident. But then we’ll probably never know the day-to-day person-to-person reality of the internal workings.)

Watching The Way to Eden? Ohhhh, brother.

>Leonard Nimoy introduced the Vulcan neck pinch so that Spock, a vegetarian, would not engage in fistfights.

This conjures up lovely images of a pre-vegetarian Spock gnawing the flesh off his enemies’ bodies.

All the episode is missing is Joe Friday lecturing the kids on their life choices. And yet it’s *still* given call-backs in the franchise via DS9’s “The Ship!”

But all these years later, we still don’t know who Herbert is…

We do, actually. Herbert Solow was listed as “Executive in Charge of Production” for the first two years of TOS; he’s also the primary author of the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Using “Herbert” in this episode was said to be a friendly way of teasing Herbert Solow for being the “authority” on the studio lot.

Good spot! I had wondered that myself. Didn’t Richard Arnold go on to suggest that there was some bad blood between the production team and Solow, to the point that he wasn’t invited to the party celebrating Roddenberry’s star on the walk of fame?

I thought it might be a reference to the 1968 Democratic nominee, the Vice-President to Lyndon B. Johnson, given the way that convention turned out to be a flashpoint for the chaos of 1968; but it turned out that I was misremembering “Hubert” Humphrey as “Herbert” Humphrey. Bah.

To be fair, Ira Steven Behr and Robert Hewitt Wolfe love their callbacks, even when those callbacks are not necessarily the best idea.

I always saw this episode as the Star Trek equivalent of Reefer Madness. Both have an extremely condescending attitude to some they don’t really understand. Heck, both even have random odd musical numbers.

That’s a pretty apt comparison. I’m surprised that there’s wasn’t an accompanying PSA with Kirk and Spock in character.

“You might laugh now, but big ears are going to be all the rage for Star Trek villains in 1987. I can feel it now.”

Neat review as ever Darren. This is actually one I do recall, and how bizarre it was.It is quite interesting looking back however to see the way a similar story was told in ‘Star Trek V’. We have an expedition to find paradise led by a charismatic guru with a key link to Spock. Sybok is just as manipulative as Sevrin, but treated much more sympathetically, almost tragically. I wonder whether that was a concious reappraisal or if was largely a coincidence they played of similar beats.

By the way the musical interludes positively drip Sixtyness don’t they? A couple of years ago I saw a lot of ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ on TV (kind of a fascinating insight into period pop culture and – this is going to sound weird – in some ways much more progressive than the held in higher regard ‘Bewitched’). Aside from having at least two hippie episodes, one episode stopped the plot for four full minutes for a Don Ho interlude! It wasn’t even part of the plot, the main characters just walked into a night club, watched him perform and otherwise didn’t interact with him. I realise I’m talking about a sitcom based on an astronaut and three thousand year old genie being a couple but that really was surreal.

The sixties were a weird time for television, weren’t they?

I say, eagerly awaiting a prestige television so about killer robot cowboys in a futuristic theme park.

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Star Trek: The Original Series

“The Way to Eden”

Air date: 2/21/1969 Teleplay by Arthur Heinemann Story by Michael Richards and Arthur Heinemann Directed by David Alexander

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan

Review Text

"The Way to Eden" is an example of trying to fit an elephant into a birdcage, and it comes off looking about as silly as a visualization of the said analogy. For starters, whoever came up with the idea of "23rd-century hippies in space" was stretching the idea of allegory beyond even Trek 's abilities. (Does this strike only me as a Federation oxymoron?)

Maybe a new view of the Federation could've theoretically been revealed, but the episode is far too inept to come up with one. Instead, the "insanity" of Dr. Sevrin (Skip Homeier) becomes the driving force of the story's impenetrable plot involving the search for "Eden." And what about "Eden," anyway? Is it supposed to be a myth or a planet? The episode can't seem to decide. One wonders if the search becomes one for a charted planet that simply happens to be named "Eden."

Characterization is also way off: Chekov as a stolid, conservative, by-the-books Voice of Starfleet doesn't make any sense given his character, and Spock being absorbed by the hippie cause lacks dramatic payoff, instead seeming like an excuse to warrant his presence in several annoying musical numbers. Honestly, I'd rather watch "Spock's Brain" again, because at least it's dumb enough to laugh at. "Eden" is not particularly laughable. But it is rambling, unenlightening, misconceived, mischaracterized, pointless, and requires sheer endurance to sit through—comprised of yet another plot where a group attempts to commandeer the ship for its own purposes. It's like "And the Children Shall Lead" with older children; the meanings behind the hippiedom aren't considered for a moment, resulting in zero digestible substance.

Previous episode: Requiem for Methuselah Next episode: The Cloud Minders

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Comment Section

95 comments on this post.

Myth or reality, season 3 was the worst season. It didn't lack quality episodes, but it did have by far the most phoned-in-turkeys. One of those I'd like to discuss here is "The Way to Eden". In a transparent attempt to be 'relevant' (a catch word of the day) they give us future hippies! I'm going to disagree with Jammer here in that Chekov, though young, hip and brash relative to the other Enterprise officers would indeed come off as conservative compared to his anti-establishment, hippie ex-girlfriend. After all, he is still military. Also, Spock being somewhat sympathetic to their cause is also in character IMO. Besides, it allows him to walk in and jam albeit uninvited with the space hippies! It's the message that irked me back when I saw it in its original run as a kid. Keep in my mind that one of the target demographics were middle aged, middle class people of the late 1960's. It's to these sensibilities that this (and many other) epsiodes were meant to appeal. Though it clung to a standard TOS theme echoed in so many episodes - humanity was not meant for paradise and if you find one, it's a false one - this one has an insidious edge to it. The message to the youth was: Come back to us! Cut your hair, shave, change your clothes back to grey, put your bras back on and throw away your rock records! Your paradise (peace, love?) is a fallacy, and though it may appear beautiful it is dangerous and even deadly (drugs?) and your leaders or older mentors (Timothy Leary?) are actually insane and will only lead to you ruin! Hmm, exactly what parents of the late 60's wanted to hear.

karatasiospa

The "way to eden" is perhaps the only really "reactionary" episode in the history of star trek. whatever the faults of the youth movements in the '60s these were the people who ended the war in vietnam and fought for civil rights. They deserved a better treatment. And perhaps the "middle aged", "middle class" people were the demographic target (aren't they allways?) but they were not, in the end, the people who liked and supported star trek.

I extremely disagree with your rating on "The Way to Eden" - I thought it was one of the best episodes of the season. I also really liked the musical numbers. "And what about "Eden," anyway? Is it supposed to be a myth or a planet?" - Well that was the point of the story: if the myth is just a myth or if it also reality. "Chekov as a stolid, conservative, by-the-books Voice of Starfleet" He wasn't portayed like this at all, kissing and making out during work time.. His anger towards his ex girlfriend was obviously out of frustration about their break up. I also found Spock's fascination with the space hippies' quest plausible. The episode had very funny moments like the flowers being full of acid and Scotties look during the sit-in and also quite beautiful metaphors like the sickness of the doctor which was caused by technology and which also circumvented him from returning to a simpler life - or the databanks with all the knowledge of the world which Chekov had and he still missed something: love. I also disagree with another poster's notion that this episode has a reactive message. The space hippies (exept the crazy doctor) where all extremely sympathetic and likeable. In the end Kirk says, they did what they had to do and Spock encourages them not to give up their way of life and their search and added that he believed that they will someday succeed.

Jeffrey Bedard

"The Way to Eden" is one of those frustrating episodes for me because if you rip away the silliness and the goofiness there is some great stuff here which is unfortunately not presented well. I wish DC Fontana's original script could have been made. It would have been great to see Joanna McCoy. It's a shame she couldn't be included later on in TAS or in one of the films, but oh well. This is a definite 1 star episode. But there are aspects of interest here. 1) I love the extra focus it gives on Chekov. While the "former love interest" subplot isn't new at least it gets Chekov away from the navigation station for a time and opens up his character more. I've heard that Koenig wasn't happy that Chekov was written as being rigid, but to me it makes sense. I don't think Chekov comes across as rigid. But Starfleet is a para-military organization based on the US Navy and Chekov would know that going in. I also like how the character of Irina provides a window to a part of TREK society we rarely see: those people who not only aren't in Starfleet, but who DON'T want to be in Starfleet. 2) Through the character of Doc Sevrin we have a slightly sympathetic villain. Until he contracted his disease Sevrin was probably a pretty nice guy. He most likely never had any desire to visit or live in a more primitive environment, but from the moment he found out he never could I'm sure that's when his transformation began. The concept of this disease is fascinating to me and had it been presented in a better story I think it would make for a great sci-fi concept. His scene with Spock allows us to see past the silly costume and make up and see a person who now loathes the very type of 23rd century environment so many TREK fans (myself included ) wish was real. 3) Tongo Rad is interesting because he seems like the type of spoiled son of a famous father. Being the son of an ambassador probably gave Rad license to do a lot of bad things and get away with it and we see it here in the fact that none of them get arrested for stealing a shuttle. Also, Rad doesn't appear to be upset (unlike Irina) with the idea that Sevrin's manipulation of the Enterprise's acoustics will kill the crew. It's a hint of a dark streak behind the facade of love and peace. I wish it had been developed more. 4) Adam is the one tragic character in all this. Unlike Irina (who seems to allow herself to be convinced by Sevrin that he won't really kill the crew) Adam appears to believe heart and soul in the idea of Eden and Sevrin's message. He befriends (to a degree) Spock and then fails to listen to Spock when Spock tries to convince him of Sevrin's true intentions. He hides behind his music. Once Sevrin starts tampering with controls what does Adam do? Start singing a song about the beauty of Eden. For him to be only one of Sevrin's followers to die makes sense. While we don't see the landing of Sevrin and his followers I can picture Adam being the first one to leave the shuttle and go running onto the field and grabbing that piece of poisonous fruit. 5) It's not touched upon much but I like how Kirk is seen to at least attempt to give Sevrin and his group a chance. His initial conversations with them are rather heated, but once Spock explains to Kirk what a Herbert is Kirk says "I'll try to be a little less rigid." And we get to see a bit of follow up with that. Kirk allows the jam sessions to be broadcast across the ship (I can't imagine Picard ever allowing such a thing). And when Scotty complains about the followers Kirk recalls doing a few reckless things in his youth. So he's at least trying, until of course the crew and ship are threatened. And the final line of the episode is Kirk saying "We reach" to Spock. And he's not saying it in a patronizing or mocking tone. He's learned a bit from this experience. "The Way to Eden" is definitely one of the worst TOS episodes which is a shame. Had they stripped away the space hippie theme and the protest songs, it's possible that some of these other themes could have been explored more fully and with a more interesting story. Oh well...

In the 1960s, the counterculture movement (which shared some of Roddenberry's ideals, albeit not all), was omnipresent. Many shows wanted to have their own 'hippie' episode. Even "Get Smart" had "The Groovy Guru". "Trek", mixing a moral play with sci-fi, making it experimental for the time, did clearly stretch things too far. I can handle a bunch of rogue malcontents being led by another, stealing a ship, et al, but the hippie allegory is way too direct. Chekov is rewritten as a lapdog for Kirk, obeying every order like a good little tin soldier. This is at odds with his previous persona of being a loose cannon, campily championing Russia at every turn. Chekov as a serious character without the camp was great, but this episode altered his personality solely for the sake of the story. Stories are made for characters; not the other way around. Especially in a long-running show with established character types, even in the 1960s when each episode ending was its own 'reset button', meaning there was no real continuity to move forward with. On the plus side, when the full TOS soundtrack comes out, the music from this story is the first I will be listening to. :) I liked the inconsistency of Eden. It meant Spock had to do research and for Kirk to take a chance on such information. It sweetened the pot that the planet was, you guessed it, in the Neutral Zone, but given the pacing of the story there was no time to fill it with angry Romulan birds... I also enjoyed Jeffrey's analysis above on the miscreants. While I disagree re: Chekov's newfound personality, I do like how he pointed out the side of people we don't see... He nailed the point of Severin perfectly. The story itself is almost a scary precursor to AIDS in a way, and Severin himself is a proto-TNG villain (shades of gray; a villain having a sympathetic side is not easy to do, and TNG would often play with this sort of moralizing.) With Severin, as he said, there was potential for a good story, which failed to materialize. I too wish the facade of love and peace was explored more; especially as that was one of the goals to this story and discussing the hippie movement. John Lennon was not identical to the songs he wrote for sure, and the counterculture participants were - arguably - too idealistic. Or, perhaps, high at the time. Real peace takes commitment and effort. Drugs are means to escape commitment and effort. As such, Rad does make for an interesting - and dangerous character. Had this story, here we go, been a two-parter and given some gravitas, the creators could have really put out a strong story. Season 3 often put out very strong messages with strong contention-based concepts ("Battlefield", "Cloud Minders", "Plato's Stepchildren", etc), but "Eden" was a missed opportunity to really say something. Sadly, a certain affair at Kent State University a few years later would have - more loudly - end the counterculture and, perhaps, evolution as we know it... Adam definitely comes across as a total acolyte, devoted to the cause. He hides behind his music and, man, does he have a good signing voice. But that's Charles Napier, a known character and voiceover actor. And even as a mixed bag of a story, the coherence of Adam being the total acolyte of this Severin cult figure and being the only one dying does pack a certain punch. Picard, the one who fired a volley of photon torpedos over a planet just to inanely scare the entire inhabitants of the planet, wouldn't entertain any ideas. While I adore the music, the ideas in this story could have been better if the story was not so strongly hippie-themed, without the padding of the music, some of these ideas could have been a little more effectively explored... Still, it's not bad because it's mere rubbish, it's bad because the ideas could not be fully explored.

Sorry, Jammer. You're way too hard on this one. It's better than "That Which Survives", "Mark of the Gideon" and the absolutely horrible "And the children Shall Lead." The worst of the third season are the boring episodes where the cast and creators apparently were mailing it in. "The Way to Eden" is a misfire, but there's some good stuff in here. I actually liked Spock's part. It was in character. And I thought Checkov was overcompensating, more than anything. I actually liked some of the ideas here -- the rebellion against the "sterilized worlds and controlled atmospheres." You're right that Sevrin's insanity cheapened the drama, but it didn't ruin it. It was annoying that the Romulans all seemed to be on vacation.

This episode struck me as an analogous to the Jim Jones People's Temple movement. Lead by an insane rejector of civilized America, seeking utopia, and a mass suicide was preferable to life in the sanitized, civilized world. It's allegorical to all utopian movements, which are all doomed to failure because of the frailties and failings of man. Sevrin could easily be Jim Jones, Marshal Applewhite, or David Koresh.

The Romulans never showed up because they knew better than to get involved in this horrible pile of crap. Still, two of the hippies die horribly at the end and the rest suffer severe burns, so the ep isn't a total loss.

I was a teen in the late 60's when this episode aired. So I liked the premise of "The Way To Eden" Although it was a lot different from most of the rest of the series it had at least one good point, the dream of brotherhood still lives. The character of Adam to me represented The musical soul of his generation. I have always wondered if the song "Heading Out To Eden" was ever recorded in full. It would have been a good hit.

I respectfully disagree, Jammer. I thought this episode was hilarious. I put it right up there with Sharknado as one of the campiest, most unintentionally hysterical things I have ever seen. Now I just need to watch it high! XD

I wouldn't call this episode "reactionary". Honestly, I feel it gave the hippies a fair shot at expressing their opinions. They were clearly illusioned, their views were allowed to be demonstrated. Even though I dislike hippie culture, I find that kind of tolerance pretty refreshing. Nowadays when someone expresses a negative view on television, they're automatically wrong no matter what. Crap, the most tolerant of the Treks is TOS. I don't mind the music too much. While it does take up time that could have been used on the themes, it's funny as crap and fits in with the 60s. I bet if someone played this to someone of my parent's generation and said it was by the Mamas and the Papas, they would like it. That being said, the hippies were annoying, the costumes were awkward, and it's entirely implausible to actually find Eden, as there are no characteristics given as to what Eden actually is. On the plus side, the most annoying hippie died, and I actually like the direction things took in the end. Though I find it highly implausible that a hippie would go so far as to steal a starship.

I just can't get past the Enterprise getting easily taken over yet again. First there was Riley, Charlie X, Khan, the Kelvins, Commissioner Biel. At least that group had superpowers.

I thought this episode was ok, actually. It certainly sparks interesting discussions/debates regarding the quest for "simplicity" and whether it is well- or ill-advised. (Simpler feels easier, but reality and nature are complex, requiring complex technologies and solutions to problems.) To each their own. I'd have given this ep 2 stars.

Interestingly I really enjoyed this episode, and much more than 15 years ago when I first watched it (one reason is the terrible German synchronization voice of Adam, the English is much better). Aside from the annoying music, these silly Herbert-shoutings, the forced Russian dialect of Irina and the once again insanity of the villain, I found it quit compelling - much more so than the similar fifth ST-movie. I especially liked Spock's role here. What was a bit

Contra Jammer, I think this episode *is* nearly as funny as "Spock's Brain." I'd rather watch this a few more times than watch "And the Children Shall Lead," "That Which Survives," "The Alternative Factor" or "The Lights of Zetar," and probably more than "The Omega Glory" (though that one is almost as funny as this and "Spock's Brain" too). It's ridiculous throughout, with a few highlights for me being: * the way Chekov basically flat-out tells Irina that it's possible to take over the whole ship from auxiliary control even with having no prior knowledge because the computer banks are so good, as if in casual flirting conversation * "yayyyyyyyy brother yayyyyyyyyyy" * the repeated shots of Sevrin smiling evilly! * bizarre editing glitches, including several shots of Kirk which are mirrored! (you can see his insignia on the wrong side) * great little moment: after Spock starts to suffer from the acoustic attack, and then it hits Kirk, while Spock and Kirk are stumbling around the camera widens to reveal that Scotty is already unconscious. Something about that just kills me. * that redshirt on the bridge who can't help but toe-tap along to the music! * Spock saying "His name was Adam" with a serious voice after Adam has died eating fruit to shove home the Biblical allusion, which...doesn't make any sense? (Like, the problem with the Garden of Eden was not that the fruits were poisoned.) * Sevrin running out to eat a fruit himself like a madman. Anyway, buried under layers of ridiculousness the episode does have something to say: hippies have an understandable and even admirable desire for a better world. Their counterculture trappings are maybe weird and silly, but Spock's admiration for them drives home that there are things about the movement that are worth preserving: their emphasis on peace and art is something that I think does make sense as something Spock would appreciate, although it's pretty weird that Spock doesn't at least mention that their total lack of self-discipline seems like a bad idea, considering how much Vulcans emphasize discipline as absolutely central. But anyway, the problem is that by believing that Eden is a place they can actually get to, they can fall prey to charismatic (or "charismatic" as in this episode) leaders who are either charlatans out to exploit them, or simply madmen who have lost touch with reality. And once they get to that "Eden," it's poisonous because, uh...well, okay, it's poisonous because it's very possible that when they get to the kind of society that their counterculture leaders insist they should try to make, it may have problems they hadn't anticipated. This is the most in-your-face way of showing that. Anyway, the episode is held back by the hippies' really unconvincing lingo, which really sounds like old guys trying to either match or satirize hippiedom, though it may be that some of the counterculture's excesses are parody-proof. Whatever. The songs just go on forever. The ship is ridiculously easy to take over. That acoustic weapon seems like it might in fact be a weird metaphor that the hippies can knock out the squares with their awful sounds? No explanation is ever given for what Eden is supposed to be, and Chekov's explanation that they check for planets based on the orbits, positions etc. of other planets (inferring what other gravitational forces must exist) consist of an explanation of how to find new objects/planets in space, not how to find the specific "planet"/place/whatever which is "Eden." It's lazy, grating, painful, frustrating, and incredibly the "crazy charismatic leader spreads his peace by taking over the ship to bring it to paradise" was repeated for Star Trek V. Probably 1/2 star.

Oh yeah, having just watched sfdebris' takedown of the episode, I have to agree that the hippies' switching from peacenik to murdering the entire crew is really awful, too. I think Jammer's right on Chekov, I should also say. The whole subplot feels so out of place for Chekov's characterization, such as it is.

Couldn't agree more, this episode was pure stupidity. The writers and producers must have just finished a pot-smoking session when they dreamed up this mess. Bad, bad, and more bad.

Dutchgamer1982

I disagree with the low ranking this recieves by most. in fact I find this one of the best TOS episodes of them all. I give it a solid 4.25 stars Why? *well the story is unique and plausible, and starts quite logical : -group steals ship and runs away with it. -normally that would involve space-police, not the pride of the army (what the enterprise is) -however this is a political incident, so they might like to show force, to gain the upper hand in the negociations. This is a totally logical story, and one of the few ones like it. I usually hate TOS because like 95% of all episodes are "yet oneother earth" "kirk falls in love with a woman" and "kirk outsmarts the computer" non of that here. Than there is the issue TOS is FAR to focussed on sex, with the ridiculous dress-uniforms, kirk frigging around and such. That makes me dislike TOS a lot. So when this apeared to be a hippy-episdo, I feared the worste of it. But I was totally pleasantly surprised, this is one of the few TOS series without sexism, just a sensible talk between two people who deeply love eachother, but know their love is impossible, a nd logically make the right call and go their seperate way. A nice fresh breeze What looses it halve a point though is how a buch of space-hippies are able to take controll of the ship so easely. That it only looses halve a point is because they actually have this explained in the little talk between chekov and his ex. Also they pointed out how they are geniusses, and not average joes, and they planned this muteny in much detail ahead. Still I find it hard to figure that there would not be needed any passwords to transfer bridge-control, or to even get controll at all. A comment like -dang we should have installed security codes- or checkov giving away his code, by having his ex distracting him and looking down on his fingers.. would have prevent this star loss. (perhaps he did, as he takes blame in the last shot, but than he would have done so off-screen, as all he did say on screen is : the computer fills in the blanks if you ask it what you want it to do and is in full control and you can controll the ship from here too) And than there is the moral-plot of the story (all TOS are moral-story's and I am ok with that) : *don't follow leaders blindly *don't trow away wise teachings because they are brought by the wrong teachers (catholic priests come to mind) *hold on to your idealism and dreams. *adapt a little bit to society in order to change it. Still stands strong today, good message. There are a few dated-events though. Giving the leader space-typhus, was not neccecairy for the story, even though it helped he was insane and a treath against his own preaching. only to have him commit suicide some time later, when he discovers he is wrong. such insane leaders that refused medical treatment, and suicide commiting when prooved wrong, was however quite common in the 60's, so I let this get away with that. Than there is the computer locating eden. Nowever is explained what defines for them eden, do they really believe they can find the place God kicked us out from? Or do they just look for a pristine planet that fits their idea of eden, and they can live their desired way of life on. This is not explained enough, and looses it quarter of a point. That spock later sais eden is still out there at least admits that what they found was not eden, and their search-algoritm was wrong, this in some small way fills in this hole, but I'd liked a little more information. FInally there is the whole acid-point of the planet, and them hiding in fear inside of the shuttle. acid burns on touch, but adams body lies wit bare chest on those plants without the acid having damed his skin? And why are they hiding in fear inside the shuttle (for the acid?) but run out without problem when the enterprise crew arives? (if they were hiding FOR that crew, what would be logical, they left them for dead after all, punishment is to be expected, why would they come out?) I am sorry but I will have to pushing with halve a point deduction for these clear contractions to this story It would have had 5 stars would those last plotholes fixed and the space-typhus part cut out.. but those were minor plotholes and some attempt was done to closing them. making this one of the best and well-written TOS stories of them all. Finally What gains it a bonus +0.5 stars are the nice songs in this episode, I really love them, and the atmosphere it makes.

Enjoyable, funny, chaotic, great music. But definitely not a Standard TOS. Beware of that both Kirk and especially Spock are very tolerant. Kirk do understand that he is not the right person to deal with this, he takes Spock's advice. The crew get a great time. They (the establishment) though identifies the false prophet, they try to warn, but the followers does not listen. A theme valid also today. In the end Kirk and Spock shows great understanding. "let the sun shine in" I believe this is a Episode I will re-watch soon.

Spock Van Halen

I figured I had to be in the minority here but several of the comments seem to agree. This episode has such a negative reputation I expected it to be awful, but shock & horror...... I really enjoyed it. I thought it was an interesting look at the characters, and how they could well be viewed by outsiders who don't idolise our heroes. The look at counter-culture was respectful and I felt the views of the characters were on point. Chekov reminded me of Riker. Within the system he's a player, he's charming and loves the ladies - but to to those opposed to the ways of Starfleet he will defend the system, structure and ethos to the hilt. It really helped that I dig on the music, man :-) I enjoyed it far more than other Season 3 episodes that I found rather thin such as Troiyus, Children shall Lead, Zetar, Battlefield etc. I'd go so far as to say 3 stars. I have to also say, I think Season 3 is a little undeserving of it's poor reputation - there are some really interesting ideas around here - Spectre, Enterprise Incident, Empath, World is Hollow, Wink, Gideon, this one, I've enjoyed them all. Only a couple more to go in this season. Looking forward to the last 4 :-)

'Star Trek' meets 'Lost in Space.'

I think Jammer's rating is low. I agree this is a bad episode - probably 1.0 star. However, at least it is not boring, unlike The Alternative Factor (which Jammer to my surprise gave me two stars). I also think it is better than That Which Survives and The Lights of Zetar. My main problem with this episode is the implausibility, which James Doohan discussed in his book "Beam Me Up, Scotty". Doohan said you could respect bad guys like Khan and his crew (at least for their abilities, if not for their morals). But a bunch of space hippies taking over a starship? Also, as Doohan pointed out, how much patience would Kirk have with this bunch of fools? The 1st time they shouted "Herbert", he should have thrown them in the brig and been done with it. Doohan correctly stated that Kirk had no trouble telling ambassadors where to go, much the less the obnoxious son of an ambassador. Doohan originally did not want to appear in this episode. However, the producers changed his mind. Doohan said he should have gone with his original instincts.

Ahahahaha! I think I finally get what "Herbert" means, after all these years! I just realized it must be a reference to Frank Herbert, whose book "Dune" had come out just a few years prior. That book contains a setting where a huge amount of technology is banned, especially computers. The Dune series is also largely about not trusting authority figures, a theme that was particularly important to Frank. I guess that would make "Herbert" a fitting epithet coming from a group of anti-technologist hippies in the presence of a technocrat authority figure like a Starfleet Captain.

I'm confused - if Frank Herbert wrote about and cautioned of the dangers of modern technology wouldn't the space hippies want to be "Herberts".

Well I never said they were smart...

One of the worst episodes of 60's Trek, but I actually think Jammer's review is too harsh and his rating is definitely too harsh. This is not the worst TOS episode. The premise is poorly conceived, being blanketed in this hippie nonsense. But the idea of a renegade group trying to go out on their own is fine. Searching for an "Eden" is fine as well as a purpose, given that the leader is insane and has some kind of a hold on his followers. Kirk has to treat them with kid gloves because one of them is the son of some big shot and that creates an interesting dynamic. The episode gets silly with too much time spent on the music and the crew being unprofessional -- how about the red shirt on the bridge snapping his fingers and grooving out while Scotty stands right beside him? I don't have an issue with Spock trying to understand them and even jamming with them -- actually made for some fun scenes that have some purpose as the takeover of the Enterprise gets underway. I like Chekov in this episode -- he falls for the ladies typically and it's nothing different here. He regrets his actions in the end. Anyhow, I think "The Way to Eden" gets notoriety for the wrong reasons. There is an attempt at social commentary for the 60's and I wouldn't call it boring. It's definitely one of the turkeys in 60s Trek but not as bad as "And the Children Shall Lead" or "Spock's Brain". I give it 1 star out of 4.

Space hippies... what did we do to deserve THIS? Honestly it's not the worst episode of TOS or Season 3, so I think the zero stars is unwarranted in this case. This plays more like a 1.5 or 1 star episode to me, nothing substantial or particularly worthwhile, but not blatantly horrid. I commend the writers for *trying* to give Chekov some sort of history/storyline with that one girl. The supporting characters (Sulu, Chekov, Uhura) usually feel way underutilized in TOS, so I appreciate when they actually use them. But... definitely one that I would skip if I were to ever rewatch this season. Friggen space hippies.

Hated this episode as a kid but it has certainly grown on me as an adult. I even find Adam's songs to be catchy but as some have said, many great possibilities in this story that were never fully developed. The sequence on the planet seems rushed and poorly directed. I do enjoy "Eden" a lot more than the other original series stinkers. If played for laughs, they could have had a bikini-clad Goldie Hawn dancing in the background and a surprised Kirk ask, "Sock it to me?" Yeah, brother!

When I was young, I disliked this episode for the harsh comeuppance the idealistic hippies receive in the end, but now that I'm older and a bit wiser I've come to really enjoy it as an allegory about the dangers of seeking Eden (paradise in this life) without working for it. As such, much like "This Side of Paradise," this episode actually epitomizes the classic Trekkian belief that easy utopias are illusions, because the enlightened future envisioned by Roddenberry is the result of centuries of human struggle and hard work to make progress as a species. As a respectful exploration of the hopes and limits of utopian societies, I give it 3 stars. The counter-culture movements of the 1960s and 1970s accomplished much in terms of non-violent protest, but they also made many mistakes, seeking easy comfort in sexual license and recreational drug use that altered users' perceptions more than their realities -- and not always in a good direction. To be honest, the reality is that most 1960s hippies ended up cutting their hair, raising families, and quitting drugs to become productive members of society. And the rest -- those few who kept living the hippie life without "selling out" to society -- ended up sick, homeless, and addicted. Having lived in Berkeley CA, I can show you where they live in People's Park or on Shattuck Avenue any day you please. But preferably not at night, because they ARE violent and they ARE dangerous, just as this episode shows in Dr. Sevrin. Disease and drug use really *do* make people dangerous over time. Perhaps that's putting things too harshly, because "The Way to Eden" actually treats the hippie movement with tremendous respect, as Spock even says at one point that Sevrin's madness does not alter his respect for the cause at all. I love how Spock, totally in character as a cultural outsider himself, is the simpatico one with the hippies here. It's great to see him jamming with the musicians led by Adam (the great character actor Charles Napier of "The Blues Brothers" and "Austin Powers" among many other films) on his Vulcan lute here. It's cool seeing Spock as the most hip and sympathetic to the hippie outsiders who have abandoned technological society. I also love Chekov's back story here as he encounters the Russian hippie, a Starfleet Academy dropout and former romantic interest. Honestly, I'm not sure why Jammer finds Chekov's defense of Starfleet and anger that the girl he wanted turned her back on it out of character here, as his character on the show has been defined entirely by his DEEP pride to be in Starfleet and his STRONG love of technological knowledge. He's always been a know-it-all who loves all of humanity's technological accomplishments -- i.e. the grain in "Tribbles" -- which are precisely the things these hippies scorn. And he's angry that Irina turned her back on the things he loves. Of all the TOS shows, this one is the biggest "Chekov episode," as his thread actually runs through the whole show from start to finish, and he even gets a cute exchange of advice farewell scene with his crush. Too bad TOS was cancelled: It would have been great to see Uhura and Sulu get stories like Chekov got here. And Spock gets a nice line at the end, telling Chekov's girl to keep looking for Eden, which again defies the "reactionary" tag some people give this one. Good touch of continuity here, too, with the reference to Sulu's love of botany and other skills. And I *love* the teaser where we watch the hippies (presumably stoned) fly their stolen spaceship into ruin, then promptly form a drum circle on the Transporter Room floor when the Enterprise beams them aboard. It's just a lot of goofy fun to see contemporary hippies on the ship, fitting for the age, and somewhat thoughtful as well when we consider that someone in the 23rd century might one day revive the old hippie movement for a new generation of space travelers. In the end, the message of "Eden" is that we all have to grow up sometime, resisting the urge (which is dangerously infantile according to all modern psychologists) of returning to a womblike state of childlike innocence and freedom from responsibility. To be a healthy and mature adult is, ultimately, to take responsibility for our own actions and make hard choices in life. And folks, this message of "Way to Eden" is PROFOUNDLY in line with *everything* we've seen on TOS, even if the style makes it feel different from the rest of the series: Much like "The Apple" (where the "Eden" planet is likewise poisonous) and other episodes earlier in TOS, the Federation here encourages people to think for themselves rather than seek easy answers in messianic groupthink, and so "Eden" is perfectly consistent with Trekkian ideals. If "Way to Eden" is reactionary for saying we all have to leave the Garden of Eden to overcome infantile dependency, then so is pretty much every TOS episode where Kirk refuses to let alien races be the pawns of charismatic leaders seeking artificial utopias. (See also "Return of the Archons.") Having said all of that, I was sorry the Romulans were teased without actually showing up, as I was totally game for the kitchen sink to drop in our laps. Yet the concept of paradise being a poisonous planet in Romulan space, so useless that even the Romulans don't patrol it, makes for a memorable ending where the hippie named "Adam" (as Spock reminds us with irony) dies from eating a poison apple in "Eden." Even the hippies here have to grow up, except of course for Dr. Sevrin who takes the Jim Jones-style exit. The hippies turning evil through Sevrin's influence isn't a total loss, as the episode maintains respect for them and their cause despite their crazy leader. And it's not like Sevrin is trying to kill the crew, take over the ship, or conquer the universe: He just wants to go to this planet he's obsessed about and stay there with his people. So the hippies here are dangerous, but not necessarily murderous, and the episode raises good questions about well-meaning people who give up their best judgment to charismatic visionaries with mixed motives. Incidentally, it amuses me that some people get upset at TOS for too often making that charismatic leader a computer, but also get upset when TOS makes that leader a hippie or a Nazi. Is there someone else you had in mind to exemplify the excesses of groupthink? Perhaps Paris Hilton? Anyway, "Eden" isn't a top tier episode for me, as it's a bit too weird/atonal to feel truly satisfying, and it kind of meanders in the shipboard scenes for a while without advancing the plot. But I like it. And like several commenters here, I don't understand why some people are okay with Trek criticizing religion or AI run amok in a society, but self-righteously hate on "Eden" because Trek dares to take the counter-culture to task for the same problems. The truth is that any big social movements, even a counter-cultural or justice-oriented one, is vulnerable to the unhealthy whims of a charismatic leader -- it's not just religion and computers. Hitler also started as a social reformer: We tend to forget that the National Socialists (like the German Communists and others who favored government ownership of property) were liberals/progressives in 1930s Germany, not conservatives like the German Republic group or reactionaries like the pro-Kaiser German monarchists. So let's not throw the word "reactionary" at Trek so easily.

Poor but not as bad as the review makes it out to be. (IMHO) A beautiful planet with acid plants? Interesting concept.

I guess weed still exists in the far future. And is probably universally legal. That's all I take away from this epidode.

Gonna crack my knuckles and jump for joy. I got a clean bill of health from Doctor McCoy.

I’m seized with a desire to make a felt infinity egg and slap it on. Who’s with me?

Other Chris

Not good, but not the worst of the season.

Not good, but not the worst of the series or season. Requiem, right before this, was much worse. It's just one more silly episode, in a sea of them.

So, here’s another DC Fontana script about technology, except this time the episode seems to be pro-technology - or, at least against rejecting technology for the sake of ideology. While I’m on the subject of ideology, here we have the big anti-religion episode of TOS. I think the idea is that the hippies (who Roddenberry must relate to on some level) have a pure and true vision about what paradise should be, but they’re taken in by Dr. Sevrin, the local preacher/cult leader/kool-aid drinker. The episode spends enough time emphasizing the strengths of the philosophy of the non-Sevrin hippies that we get a sense that the hippies might be onto something. At the very least, I agree with William B that Spock’s character was used well to help us try to understand the benefit of hippie beliefs. At first I was a bit surprised at the rating by Jammer, but having read about all the technical glitches of the episode and mischaracterizations (Walter Koenig called this the low point of his career as Chekov) I can understand why we reach zero. Personally, I thought it was nice that Chekov got something else to besides be the naive kid, yet the episode still played that card as needed. One thing that screamed at me, though. DS9 missed a golden opportunity for the Maquis to be people still searching for Eden. That would’ve given them a righteous enough cause in the same vein as the Native Americans, instead of just making them petulant children. Peter G. wrote: “I think I finally get what "Herbert" means, after all these years! I just realized it must be a reference to Frank Herbert, whose book "Dune" had come out just a few years prior.” Weird, yeah, Memory Alpha says that the slur is a dig at one of the original executive producers, Herbert Solow, who was replaced by the third season. I don’t know, your idea is probably better. But the episode itself leaves the audience in the dark about this and many other things.

@Chrome No way does this episode deserve zero stars -- the music of the hippies alone is almost worth 0.5 star on its own. Seriously, Charles Napier is a good singer and I these are cool lyrics: "No more trouble in my body or my mind Going to live like a king on whatever I find Eat all the fruit and throw away the rind Yeah brother ... yeah" Granted -- listening to "pop" music is not what Trek is supposed to be about but this episode deserves props for coming up with some good tunes that many people love to this day. TOS music was just fantastic. The little sorrowful music at the end as they find Adam dead -- actually quite a touching moment. And I actually liked Chekov's part here -- granted he was unprofessional and later regretted his actions, but his character got a bit of development in that we learn he's uber-dedicated to Star Fleet and could not understand why Irina would go off pursuing Eden. But objectively and critically speaking, to me it's a 1* episode -- it has a ton of flaws and is a weak premise that is poorly executed. But I have a soft spot for it!

@Rahul I thought the music was pretty catchy too. One thing that's fun about this one is it's sort of a period piece (a 1960s show based on a popular movement of the 1960s), so you feel like you're seeing a little slice of history here. It's also pertinent to Trek's history as Roddenberry is known to have affection for the philosophy of free love. Sure, It's cheesy, but I think it engages counterculture and anti-authority on an intellectual level. What's more, there's a surprisingly large amount of meat to delve into with the planet Eden analogy, although it's all a very rough idea. Still, compare this to say, TNG's "Up the Long Ladder" which included some of the most horribly stereotypical cliches of a "primitive" race with no redeeming value, and I think you'll find this one comes out way ahead.

@Chrome That's one of the "virtues" of TOS is that you get these period pieces -- the sci-fi analogies of real world issues (counterculture, cold war, Vietnam, etc.), which became a hallmark of Trek. And some of them are different for TOS than for the later Treks. And yes, this episode is plenty cheesy but I actually think it fails to really engage in a sensible discussion of the counterculture movement or the aspect of a group following an insane cult leader. It gets lost in plenty of goofiness and the takeover/regaining control of the ship is just a mechanical exercise -- not particularly riveting. And with the Eden planet popping up right at the very end, there isn't much chance to reflect on the deaths of Adam & Sevrin. But I suppose you could also argue that it's left for the viewer to come to his/her own conclusions. Interesting comparison with "Up the Long Ladder" -- I also see that as a 1* episode but overall I rate that a tad higher due to the presentation of cloning and rights of the individual. It has a modicum of more intelligence to it. But the Irish group were worse than the space hippies!

@Rahul Yeah, unfortunately there’s too much dialogue given to the actually crazy guy about his motives so we aren’t given a lot to think about the hippie movement. There is something interesting about the protest in the med bay and the crew getting caught up the music that I think works well. But to be clear, this is plenty silly. One funny thing was how they kept bringing up the Romulans and — they actually invaded Romulan space which, you know, should have some huge repercussions. But the episode kind of forgets about that in the ending and they’re just kinda hanging out speechifying.

This was my favorite episode as a gradeschool kid—because of the music and the costumes. Adam was my favorite character, for reasons others have noted above. My issues with it (because "favorite" doesn't mean "best"—by a longshot!) include: For a crew on a ship traveling the galaxy, seeking out new civilizations and encountering a multitude of ways, mores, and cultures, it makes no sense for them to find this group so strange—certainly no stranger than most other groups. And with humans from earth already living on maybe tens or even hundreds of planets by then, certainly the already widely-varied cultural expressions found on earth over the millenia would have further splintered into more and more variation. I agree with comments above about Tong (or is it Tongo?) Rad's darkness. He's just a spoiled privileged a$$. Re: Irina and Chekhov, I found it kind of a chilling commentary on Federation society for him to express such horror at her ostensibly throwing her life away, just because she decided not to use her education/talents as part of the Federation's military industrial complex. Surely in their century, there are myriad streams of professional and personal opportunities. If only a military one is really respected as a "success"... ugh. Dr. Sevrin is of course not the only time in TOS we see a well-respected genius type figure losing his or her mind. In his story, it's especially sad as he acts like a selfish and greedy colonizer. As far as looking for the planet Eden... I think the perfect planet for this group would have been Omicron Ceti III (from "This Side Of Paradise.) No Indigenous animal life forms to be hurt by synthecoccus novae disease. The plant sports would protect the hippies from any harm from the Berthold rays. And, the laid back vibe created by the spores' influence on human behavior is, frankly, no different from how Sevrin and his gang were already striving to live as, as a value system. In fact, they wouldn't even need the spores (though they'd probably find a way to smoke them, lol.) That planet truly was a paradise for anyone who desired that lifestyle. Then, for the Romulan element... I did find the hippies dismissing of that threat highly... illogical. Even by their hippie logic. They were all citizens of the Federation (even if they reject its norms.) Surely all know that crossing the Neutral Zone is a BIG F*ing DEAL. Surely they would know, with 100% certainty, that the minunte Romulans discover Federation citizens colonizing one of their planets would bring swift attack and they'd all be killed. At most—even if the plants weren't filled with acid poison!—they'd get a few weeks or months, then they'd be killed. None of them seemed to understand their journey to Eden as comprising a suicide trip. Therefore, why do what they did? Kirk wasn't trying to keep them from that "Eden" to be a d*ck. He forbid them from going because (a) The Romulans would come and kill them all, and (b) it could spark a war with the Federation. There was no possibly scenario in which they would get to go to this Eden to actually make and live a life. Despite all that, despite it being silly often enough, it's still an episode I always enjoy watching. For the singing (yes, the sining!), for Adam, and for Chekhov finally getting some action! Yay, yayeeee.... brother :)

Sarjenka's Brother

Adam = Matthew McConaughey Yeah, brother! This could never legitimately top a "best of" list, but worst of all 72? Nah, it ain't that bad. And I thought some of the music was pretty cool.

John E Brengman

^.^ The high points of this episode really didn't save the episode very much. As ti a cimment made earlier ... "The "way to eden" is perhaps the only really "reactionary" episode in the history of star trek. whatever the faults of the youth movements in the '60s these were the people who ended the war in vietnam" Actually nope! Although the youth movement and the entire anti-war element put pressure on the government, in reality, after Tet, the communists had momentum, and that was sealed after the US removed their support for the South Vietnamese military. " and fought for civil rights." Not really. Martin Luther King was not part of the youth movement. The youth were more interested in sex, drugs, rock music, stepping off, and dropping out ... of society. More than a few adults in the room did what they could to push the US to get out of Vietnam, and it was adults in the room who pushed civil rights. However, the anti-modern stance of the episode is kinda interesting. How many people nowdays remember when there was not an Internet? I was at Subway earlier, and I saw a couple, but rather than talking to each other, the guy was engrossed in his smart phone, rather than talking to the girl sitting across from him. John B. John B. They deserved a better treatment. And perhaps the "middle aged", "middle class" people were the demographic target (aren't they allways?) but they were not, in the end, the people who liked and supported star trek.

David Strobel

A little 60's sci fi TV trivia: this episode wasn't the only one with space hippies. Lost in Space did it at least twice. First was a bit over a year before "Eden" with "Collision of Planets," then a few months later in "The Promised Planet."

I've read that the original concept for this show had, instead of Irina, divorced Dr. McCoy's daughter, Joanna, in whom Kirk takes a romantic interest. If only they'd made that one instead. Another irony... The parallels between this episode and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, where a madman leads his followers on a quest not for Eden, but for God's home planet. What were they thinking?

Sleeper Agent

Except for the somewhat foggy main plot, I don't see the critique here. On the contrary the crew felt very much in line with the personalities we have gotten to know over the past 3 seasons. It was indeed very nice with an episode focusing on Chekov and Spock. I also really dig the music, which felt fresh and daring to include so much of in a Trek episode. Would watch again. II I/II of IV

Would have given it three stars if it wasn't for Uhura's complete absence.

SouthofNorth

Hippies get their comeuppance? Nothing less than 3 stars from me. "I'm gonna snap my fingers and jump for joy, I got a clean bill of health of Dr. McCoy" and Spock's jam session puts it in the 3 1/2 stars range.

This episode absolutely rocks. Stupid hippies--who accomplished absolutely NOTHING and didn't (and fundamentally couldn't) help humanity or the earth in any way but were just self-indulgent masturbators all get blown the hell away in this wonderful rejection of hippie culture by Gene Roddenberry and crew. I just wish they all died.

I hate this episode. It’s giving something of the middle finger to the entire premise of original Trek, in essence saying “remember all that Roddenberry stuff about how humans had evolved beyond the petty differences that plagued it in the relative dark ages of the 20th century, such as Sulu saying there was no such thing as the ‘primitive thinking’ of racism? Remember how the show commented on social problems by have the enlightened Earth people encounter beings on OTHER planets with those problems? We’re going to JUNK all that. Not only does Earth still have social problems, it has a social problem that’s practically IDENTICAL to that of 1968-69, which just happens to be when the episode airs”. The ripping away of the “enlightened 23rd century” veneer in order to engage in naked pandering to the then-current hippie movement is revolting. None of the hippie characters is at all interesting or worthy of admiration. Also, teenagers TODAY are so joined to their smart phones that the line by Chekov’s ex girlfriend about never doing what a computer says is ludicrous. BTW, I have quite a different perspective on the whole “Herbert chanting” business after watching the Youtube video “Inside Star Trek The Real Story Herbert Solow Robert Justman”.

Terrible episode but the blonde hippie who jams with Spock is stupid hot, 4 stars

This isn’t so bad, though it is flawed. It’s fascinating to see Spock here, considering the Final Frontier revelations about his brother. While I doubt Shatner spent a moment’s thought on this episode when writing that, it does compliment this well. From this, it makes it look like Spock was far more than just aware of Sybok’s activities, and may have been strongly drawn to them or even participated to some degree.

Haha, wow I spit out laughing when Spock sat down to jam with that blonde hippie. Did they realize they were creating a classic meme when they filmed that? Anyway, there are interesting ideas with some flaws, as many here agree. Not the worst episode by a long shot.

The Way to Eden Star Trek season 3 episode 20 "If a man tells another man: out of my way, he piles up trouble for himself all day. But all kinds of trouble come to an end, when a man tells another man: be my friend.” - Adam 3 1/2 stars (out of 4) [For the record, the review at the top of the this thread from 2009, is not me] As we approach the final five episodes of The Original Series, it gladdens my heart to see one true classic Trek ere the end. Here is a simple tale of a mad man with sane thoughts, SEVRIN: This is poison to me. This stuff you breathe, this stuff you live in, the shields of artificial atmosphere that we have layered about every planet. The programs in those computers that run your ship and your lives for you, they bred what my body carries. That's what your science have done to me. You've infected me and his outcast followers of high birth. But first I have to say how much of a pleasure it is to see both Shatner and Nimoy at absolutely peak performance. Scotty and Bones do good work too. And this is really a splendid Chekov outing as well. When things clicked on TOS, they really clicked! Kirk is an incredible leader. There is a scene when he notices Chekov is uneasy, and he places his hand on Chekov’s arm, and asks just as gently as a Captain can be expected to be, KIRK: Do you wish to see her? Permission to leave your post. CHEKOV: Thank you, sir. Kirk’s tenderness towards Chekov continues to be a highlight of the episode through its very end, when poor Chekov, obviously embarrassed that he let his guard down around an old flame, presents himself for a flogging, CHEKOV: Captain, I wish first to apologize for my conduct during this time. I did not maintain myself under proper discipline. I endangered the ship and its personnel by my conduct. I respectfully submit myself for disciplinary action. But Kirk again understands that youth is, after all, inexperienced, KIRK: Thank you, Mister Chekov. You did what you had to do. As did we all. Even your friends. You may go. CHEKOV: Thank you, sir. Indeed. Next vote of commendation for an exemplary performance goes to Nimoy. His connect with the kids, especially with Adam through music, was such a delight! When Spock tries to convince Adam to check the computer’s files on his mad, mad leader, it damn near broke my heart, SPOCK: Adam. You know I reach you. I believe in what you seek. But there is a tragic difference between what you want and what he wants. ADAM: You're making me cry. Adam tries to blow it off, but these are good kids led astray by an insane adult. Irina is scared the ultrasound will do more than stun the crew ("Sound pitched that high doesn't stun, it destroys. I remember when we read in the text”). Rad, the ambassador’s son fears the same, but blows it off. But kids are stupid. Or not stupid per se, but naive. That’s why we protect them. Because otherwise they’re likely to be led astray and get themselves killed. The episode piles on a needless biblical narrative, both with the “Eden” episode title, and and fruit, as foreshadowed by the key line from Adam’s song in the control room, ADAM: Headin' out to Eden. No more trouble in my body or my mind. Gonna live like a king on whatever I find, Eat all the fruit and throw away the rind. And for sure that’s what they do. And that’s what kills them. Nimoy’s stunning line at seeing the dead boy rings all the more true given the real-life name Nimoy chose for his son, who at the time this episode aired, would have been almost 13, and probably going through a rebellious phase of his own, SPOCK: His name was Adam. There is no doubt Nimoy did Reach. For the life of me I cannot fathom how @Jammer has scored this one so low. My only guess is that he was a Herbert when he wrote it ;) Maybe now that @Jammer's kids are older, he’ll give this episode another look see. KIRK: I used to get into a little trouble when I was that age, Scotty. Didn't you? This is the Star Trek I have loved all my life. One with a rich message (@Chrome) and good music (@Rahul). https://youtu.be/z2MEYMMDhKk?t=35 Like Voyager’s “Living Witness,” TOS’ “Way to Eden” is an enduring tale that will continue to stand the test of time.

Did anyone else notice that the orderlies who take Dr. Severin away to Dr. McCoy for a medical examination are identical twins?? Whoa!

Say what you like about the space hippie music. This episode is worthwhile, if for nothing else, for the piece of advice that makes a great life motto: Be incorrect (occasionally).

I can't help but laugh thinking about a casting director looking at Charles Napier and saying "yep, we found our space-hippie."

Loved the opening scene. Talk about “Drive it like ya stole it!” Lol. And the Space Antifa hippies? Throw in a set of Viking horns on Brother Adam, and he would be right at home in a 22nd century Federation Capital building riot. Nothing has changed. Some people are born to serve, others are going to be starving artists because there is no way they are doing nine to five. And of course Chekov is conflicted. It takes a good 10 years for the military to stomp the Liberal out of you... The sabotage during the Spock Jam is going to be a tough one for him to live down. Spock with his eye off the ball. Disappointing Mr. Spock. Dr. Sevrin fooling his followers into believing in Utopia, just another dashing young Castro. The Left always ends up becoming the Right. Of course he was “diseased. “ The highly intelligent psychopath Pied Piper, leading his followers on the path to Totalitarianism...Thank goodness he got Kirk Blocked. If only they could have got Spock to go full Snoop Dogg, they might have had a chance. Maybe next time Galactic Flower Power...

Beard of Sisko

Well, I'm not going to say Jammer is "wrong" even I think "The Children Shall Lead" is the absolute worst. But it's not hard to see why some would pick this as the worst

Ultimately a good episode with flaws. Pros (from most important to least): • Makes its message clear without hitting you over the head. o A group of people looking for Eden continue to be flawed individuals. Severin in particular is focused on his own interests above others. Thus, Eden won’t let them in. The acidic plants are the same idea as posting an angel to keep Adam and Eve out of the original Eden. o According to the Trek writers, you don’t get to live a perfect life by separating yourself from society; usually, you have to help improve everyone around you. So Spock encourages one of the characters to keep looking for Eden, but any Eden they find will likely still be within the larger society. • Spock is able to look outside himself and relate to someone whose thoughts don’t conform to his rigid Vulcan logic. • We are given more back story for someone in the Checkov-Sulu-Uhura group. • In some season three episodes, I would have spent the entire episode wondering why the guest characters aren’t just thrown into the brig. The reasoning behind this was written into the episode satisfactorily. • We are given more glimpses of Federation society outside of Starfleet. • Kirk’s initial annoyance with the counter-cultural people and his move towards being understanding is an incremental enough change to be believable. Cons (from most important to least): • The guest characters realize that their supersonic attack may actually “destroy”, but we don’t see follow up to that. In my head cannon, I chose to help the episode out by assuming that most of the ship’s crew did suffer hearing impairments. Even the away team had to speak louder than usual to one another than we saw on camera. McCoy had technology on the ship to help most recover. But some had to go back to Earth to get proper treatment, remaining effectively deaf for months. • Even though some guest characters have above-average intelligence and education, it’s still hard to accept that they could take over the ship. • The mythology of “oneness” is not sufficiently explained. We never learn what attributes it predicted Eden would have, so what was the computer looking for? • The music served its purpose of extending the illusion that the characters were counter-cultural people, but it failed to create the illusion that the music was from the future. • The guest stars’ costumes weren’t great, but that’s pretty minor. The most annoying episodes for me are the ones where I spend the entire episode thinking that this isn’t how the characters would act. That didn’t happen to me here.

@ benji, It's interesting you see the ending as Eden not letting them in because they're unworthy. Admittedly this interpretation never occured to me. Knowing TOS and its extreme wariness about so-called paradise, I always assumed the ending meant that Eden wasn't what they thought it was. That is what a poisonous idea in the way they conceived it. The similarity to David Koresh's cult comes to mind, of trying to reach paradise by escaping the world. It's a death wish by another name.

S3 continues its political themes with The Way To Eden, obviously inspired by the hippie/student unrest of 1968. Produced pre-Woodstock, it reflects American society’s unease with certain elements of youth culture of the time; which didn’t just include hippies but also the more violent groups like The Weathermen. I always found the episode’s lampoon of hippie culture to be unintentionally hilarious. Take the lyrics of one song: No more trouble in my body or mind Be the king of all I find Eat all the fruit and throw away the rind LOLOLOL It’s a confused episode, never quite sure of what message it’s trying to convey. Spock as krypto-hippie was inspired; Chekov’s love interest less so, though Koenig did his best. It was also interesting that the Typhoid Annie bug had been caused by the artificial way human society had constructed “ideal” environments; so far, so sympathetic to 60s hippie concerns. There was never an outright condemnation of 60s youth, and even a nod to some of its more “digestible” (qua middle-class values of the era) ideals. It’s quite a hilarious episode though the ending is predictably tragic. In all though, it’s not a ‘no stars’ (unfair!) ... I’ll give it 1.5, perhaps a bit more for the musical interest and the occasional belly laugh.

A planet full of food containing acid? Far out, man, I’m there!

Hah, Tidd, it never occurred to me the “acid” of the plants might have been a dig at LSD. Or maybe this planet is the true origin of the Xenomorphs?

So Chekhov got the show’s Uber hottie this time , hooray for him. She was something. The rest of the episode was pure fluff. That 6 space hippies could take over a ship of 430 crewmen should have had Captain Kirk up on competency charges. The part that made zero sense was that Eden was not only in Romulan space but 3 hours inside Romulan Space!!! What, did Kirk have a “Get 3 hours into Romulan Space Free Card”? The Romulans have been quick on the scene every other time a federation ship enters their space. If this doesn’t scream that the show’s budget is toast, I don’t know what does. Why did they mention the Romulans at all if they were not going to even show them? Eden could have been anywhere. This episode is the worst in my book, the only F I’ve ever given out.

Jeffery's Tube

Does this episode benefit from being a cultural curiosity, now in retrospect? Not really. Would the episode have benefited had Nichelle Nichols shown up that week to sing a few songs with the hippies as Uhura? Undoubtedly. But would that have saved it? No. I do find it funny that of all the episodes, THIS is one she's absent from, though. Spock hanging out with the hippies reeks of a desperate attempt by the network to say "See, kids? Spock isn't a square. Spock is cool! He's a counter-cultural symbol! Watch us! Support us! Ratings. RATINGS!" An ill-advised attempt to correct a perception issue with the character that was never there. Chekov, on the other hand, is obviously defending his decisions here. His girlfriend left Starfleet Academy to do . . . well, this, I guess. He had the same opportunity to leave Starfleet with her and do something else with his life. He must have been tempted. He must not be all-the-way sure, on some level, that he's made the right choices in his life. So this is why he's so defensive of Starfleet and its worth--his lifestyle--even if it's otherwise somewhat out of character. I read this in the subtext just fine. We could alternatively attribute his behavior to suits at the network wanting the young "cool" character to be seen conforming and behaving respectably, as an example to other young people of the time to model. But I don't credit this. I just don't think that much thought went into it, frankly. Let's also not forget that Chekov will later become security chief/tactical officer. A more military-minded Starfleet man than most. It tracks. Third worst TOS episode after The Alternative Factor and And The Children Shall Lead, followed on by Catspaw, Spock's Brain, The Omega Glory, and then The Lights of Zetar. For my money, anyway.

To add, even best case scenario, the space hippies’ plan to colonize Eden would have never worked and had zero chance of success. Even if the fruit had been edible and the grass, trees, etc. been non acidic and suitable for humanoid life, the Romulans would have discovered the settlement sooner or later. They would have interpreted it as an invasion and killed everyone there. So the whole idea was senseless from the beginning. I guess that is what following a madman is all about.

Contumacious

Adam reminds me of a live action version of Beavis from Beavis and Butthead.

I agree with the defenders of this episode. It was funny (Adam was a hoot!) and an interesting reversal to see Kirk (The Great White Captain) so completely unable to control the situation and looking diminished, while Spock has the insight and nuance to be able control the group. The Chekhov /Irina back story and relationship was well scripted and acted. True, the taking over of the ship was silly and the costumes were bad, but that is par for the course in this series. I liked the common understanding that was reached in the end between the characters who initially disapproved of each other so vehemently. And Kirk’s final statement, tongue in cheek, that “We reach, Mr. Spock” was perfect. I give this 2.5 stars.

Not sure if this deserves zero stars, but it's definitely one of the worst episodes. Hippies annoy me, especially ones who lip sync, although John Rambo would eventually punish his bad singing in Rambo II. It was fitting that some of these cultists met an untimely end due to their foolish actions. As in all Trek series, civilians can walk into sensitive areas of the ship (which are not locked, guarded, etc.), operate the controls without any training, and also lock out the crew. What are all the security red shirts doing when they are not getting killed on away missions? They can't spare two guys to watch the secondary control center? No login/password to access a console or a shuttle? And why does anyone goto Starfleet Academy if you can learn how to drive a starship on your first try? It makes you scratch your head as to how mankind can travel faster than light but hasn't figured out how to lock a door.

Not an easy episode to love, but hardly the worst. It does make the interesting point that the Federation, as glorious as it takes itself to be, had its detractors. Dr. Sevrin is the guru of a whole 'reject artificiality' movement and at one point he speaks powerfully about this. Consequently, I diverge from Jammer's caustic judgment, which leads him to remark that: "the meanings behind the hippiedom aren't considered for a moment, resulting in zero digestible substance." There is plenty here to digest. Spock tries to be, what he later becomes in Trek, an ambassador, here using music to somehow build a language of understanding with these rebels. It's about relying on trust and trying to subdue self-protective cynicism in dealing with unlikable people...obstinate people who reject your way of life. This is actually what many hippies were back then, an angrier variant of the nihilistic Beat generation critical of all the squares. It is a far more coherent episode than, say, The Alternative Factor, which no matter how many times I see it still confuses me. At least in The Way to Eden, we see a realistic battle between generations being waged. I think that it gives a solid look at how the 'disingenuity of the few' (understand a small cabal of 'bad actors' at the leadership level) can doom a utopian project. I like it for that message.

Lawrence Bullock

Yeah, I suppose if you didn't see this as a kid, it would push yer "suck" button quite a lot, but I did see it as a kid, and me and most of my friends didn't mind it, but we just thought the "hippies" were corny because we knew real hippies and most were cooler than these dweeb. But what I really want to know is, who the hell was that red shirt who stopped to horn in on the conversation in the passageway between Chekov and an old gal friend from Starfleet Academy days? I would said, "Buzz off, away team meat, you weren't invited." Ha!

Had to laugh at this exchange given the times we live in. Dr. Severin was definitely an anti-vaxer MCCOY: I don't know. They all had full spectrum immunizations before boarding. Now my guess is that his friends have had their shots too. But a regular program of shots is necessary. I'll have to check everyone on the ship. There could be some skips. In the meantime, he should be placed in total isolation. SEVRIN: This is outrageous. You're not isolating me, you're imprisoning me. You invent a crime, find me guilty and sentence me! MCCOY: Would you like to run the test, Doctor? You knew you were a carrier before you came aboard, didn't you? SEVRIN: No! MCCOY: Then why did you fight the examination? SEVRIN: It was an infringement on my rights. KIRK: Put him in isolation.

EventualZen

No good sci-fi theme but entertaining episode. Nothing special but not as bad as Jammer says, I don't see how you can justify rating this as low as "Threshold" which is in a league of it's own. I think there are some Herberts amongst the reviewers. Over all score: 4/10

The character of Dr. Severin had potential, imo. A man who is a danger to a squeaky clean anti-septic civilization because he is a modern Typhoid Mary turns his back on society. His natural desire for companionship leads him to recruiting young naïve followers even though his search and maybe even his existence poses a threat to them. Severin seeks to "return to nature" only to find his personal Eden is inimical to him. If the "space hippie" stuff had been dialed way back and Severin had been treated more sympathetically so that the tragedy of his situation was more obvious this would have been a much better episode. Say what you will about TOS, but many of even the worst episodes had an interesting idea at the heart of the story. It's just that you sometimes couldn't see it because a mini-skirt wearing Charles Napier gets in the way.

Maybe 1 or 1.5 stars An underlying theme of TOS is the progress human civilization has made in the past 300 or 400 years Then why are these proto hippies no different definitely not progressed from the hippies of the 1960s Were our hippies Luddites? Funny how Kirk appoints Spock to be the primary interface with the group Spock’s dealings with them seems out of character for him Illogical Kirk immediately starts out on the wrong foot with them after he’s called ‘Herbert’ LOL Come on be a little tolerant and diplomatic

I saw this in syndication when I was 10, and it was one of my favorite episodes back then, because I liked seeing the crew (as in Charlie X) hang out, and I enjoyed the music. Joining cults led by charismatic leaders can often turn out badly; it's a reasonable message. I never got the impression in prior episodes that just because Chekov had an amusing shtick in his "Russia did it first and best" comments and was the youngest regular that he was supposed to be especially hip compared to, say, Sulu or Uhura, so I didn't feel he was acting in any way out of character. It's not the most subtle episode, but it sure didn't bore me, and it is way ahead of something like Turnabout Intruder.

In a way this episode is prescient, in that in 1966-68 it was characterizing a Charles Manson type hippie leader (coming to public attention in 1969-19700 with a music-based following, who promised a utopian future and fed it on cultic behavior & violence.

Funny to see the comment above - maybe it's anachronistic but I can never watch this episode without being reminded of Manson and his followers. Of course, Star Trek didn't start to be broadcast by the BBC until 1969 so by the time this episode was shown in the UK the Manson atrocities must already have happened. The hippies in this are culpable - they all are complicit in their leader's planned murder of the whole crew which he admits he is doing to prevent anyone following them down to the planet. So people they have been befriending are all expendable. Really they are all accessories to attempted mass murder.

This is truly an aggravating episode, but not because it features hippies. In fact it's irritating precisely because it does not feature hippies, but rather cultists in mock--60's costumes. I would not have minded at all watching an episode showing common ground between peaceniks and a Vulcan dedicated to peace. Too bad that's not what we get. I checked out the story writers to see if I could understand what they were thinking, and on Heinemann I cannot glean anything useful on a quick search. But to my surprise I learned that "Michael Richards" (not Kramer) was in fact a pseudonym for D.C. Fontana. I really can't understand what kind of story Fontana thought she was authoring here. The episode, both through costume, music, and Spock's point of view, tells us again and again that these are anti-establishment peace-lovers who just want "the man" to leave them alone. Yet time and again in the episode they're portrayed as being knowingly criminal, using violence to get their way (and being good at it), and not caring at all how many get hurt or die for them to get what they want. And all of this surrounding the buffoonishly insane Dr. Sevrin. When I was a kid I wrote them all off as weirdos, but it becomes pretty clear to me now, for example through their violent attempt to get to their leader when he was being medically examined, that they are very reminiscent of the Charles Manson cult. And those people were neither hippies nor peace-loving. Yes, they may have had the trappings of 60's folk who used terms like "brother" but these were not the flower children who just wanted to smoke weed and protest war at Berkeley. That Sevrin's people are at heart a death cult is shown pretty clearly by Sevrin committing suicide at the end rather than be taken alive. The only thing it was missing was him getting the others to do the same first. The writing here is so mixed up I can only surmise that the writers either thought that hippies were all essentially murderous cultists, or that they lacked even the slightest nuance of the difference between anti-establishment students and manipulative sociopaths. The worst part is there is just literally no way we're going to accept someone's POV that Kirk is a narrow-minded fascist, so even if the writing was better there would be zero chance that we'd accept the proposition that trying to take over the Enterprise is some kind of liberation from tyranny. The escape from technology angle is not new, but a curious McGuffin is present in the story in that Sevrin has a disease legally forcing him to stay in the technological society he hates, therefore requiring him to become a criminal just to get away. But this tidy formula is contrived to the extreme, even putting aside that it results in him wanting to be a mass murderer and therefore making him a loony even if he didn't act like such a maniac. In passing, the story also expects us to accept that somehow living in a technological society is the only reason he's infected with some disease. Naturally we might ask how many diseases he'd have without any technology. But never mind that, the episode isn't about such logic, it's about how he misled his well-intentioned followers... or something. Even though Irina knew full well the sonic attack would kill everyone and went along with it. But actually it didn't kill anyone, so was Dr. Sevrin meant to be telling the truth when he said he was "going beyond" the textbooks? Earlier we're told he studied acoustics, so I suppose this is plausible, but then why have Irina's friend also chime in saying it would kill, as if we're meant to understand Sevrin knows this? And if Sevrin really is an acoustics master, why have him deliver this plan as if he's playing Dr. Evil? None of this story writing makes any sense. Was Heinemann so drunk on delusion juice that he thought we'd connect everyone being alive with Sevrin really being able to produce a stun effect, and conclude that he never meant anyone any harm? I can also fall back on a more simple analysis, which I also used in thinking about This Side of Paradise: if we're to accept even for a moment that these people believe in something legitimate and are misunderstood, why are they all complete assholes? Adam's beliefs don't inspire much more in me than a desire to punch him in the face every time he shows off his impudent smile. Dr. Sevrin is about as charming as a mushroom. Which leaves Irina, who honestly (and I hesitate to say this) just comes across as an airhead who was too dumb to make it through the Academy. Chekhov has text implying that she was too independent to ever listen to anyone, and maybe it's the casting and the direction, but she comes across as really the opposite of that; just a mindless follower without a thought in her head. I'm being a bit mean, and I'm not trying to be acerbic but rather trying to communicate the visceral feelings I get when these people are in scenes. They are really unsavory persons, and I would not want to be friends with them. They are really rather scary, even on an interpersonal level. It's almost shocking that Chekhov and Irina have a makeout scene at the end - on the bridge!! - after what she pulled. Can you imagine your ex trying to kill you and everyone on the ship, stealing the Enterprise, and on a personal level lying to you and using you to gain intelligence to undermine you? And you'd feel all nostalgic after that and wish you were still a couple? Wow. These are different kinds of complaints than I had when I was 8. Back then I didn't like that Sevrin was so mean, I didn't like the music, and I didn't like that these people were so bad to people trying to be respectful toward them. Now I see other things, but still cling to this idea that they're just not nice people. You're going to stamp your feet and shout stuff when someone is trying to talk to you respectfully? What ideal is that suppose to exemplify, other than being a rotten brat? Interestingly, when they do think they've found Eden, they have this glee on their faces like the biggest orgy ever is about to happen. It doesn't feel peaceful, but more like gluttons about to satisfy the craziest lust for desserts ever. Is the writing supposed to suggest that 'Eden' is really a place where you just stuff your face and have all your desires satisfied all the time like a little emperor? Or is the writing condemning people who think of paradise as having the world bow to them and their whims? But this is a stupid question because the story just doesn't care. On the positive side, I think this is the first truly Chekhov-focused episode, and he's really great in it. I don't think we see him play a dramatic part at any time prior to this, other than maybe Spectre of the Gun, but in that one the setting is rather too theatrical to give him a serious scenario to act. I can actually see Koenig's turn as B5's Bester having a precedent here, in the more introspective and brooding side of his talent. I don't know whether they knew he could do this when they originally cast him, but it's just one more reason for me to conclude that the talent level of this cast was by far the best of any Trek. Every person cast on this show is good enough to steal scenes and captivate my attention.

Yet another ghastly 3rd season practically unwatchable episode. Truly painful to try to watch this, and I am a fan of Skip Homeier. Take into concert this episode with others like "Plato's Stepchildren", and you realize how Star Trek got canceled. Nothing could save it.

Yeah, "trying to fit an elephant into a birdcage" sums it up pretty well, but I don't think this a zero stars. It was funny, and one thing I like is that they didn't just "take over the ship"; instead, we actually saw them working on the crew, charismatically convincing them for the cause. Unfortunately the resolution for this plot was just "well, the leader was crazy and the utopia was poisoned" so we didn't had Kirk actually having to win back the heart of his crew, nor a more profound debate about hierarchy vs anarchy. But still a fun episode, at least 1 star for the beautiful hippie ladies and actually groovy songs.

I saw this as a teenager when it first aired. It was hilariously over-the-top then; it is the same now. I don't suggest watching it more than once.

Another hour that I'll never get back. Closest thing to a saving grace is watching a young Charles Napier going against his eventual type. You wouldn't hear Adam saying, "You're gonna look pretty funny tryin' to eat corn on the cob with no f***in' teeth!" Deep in Romulan space, and no Romulans show up. 1/4

This episode breaks the cardinal rule of avoiding cultural clothing, hairstyles, music and language of the time period in which it was produced. While all TOS episodes reflect women’s clothing of the 1960’s, this episode literally screams 1960’s instead of circa 2266–2269. I can hear the space hippies saying “groovy” and “I can dig it” when they utter their futuristic equivalent sayings. This episode does NOT stand the test of time. One more thing: the music, while attempting to emulate 1960’s music, is a million times more painful to listen to than anything else I’ve heard from any time period.

Man, you herberts just don’t reach man. I mean, I’m not saying this episode is really now, you know, it doesn’t totally sound or anything, but if you don’t have too hard a lip it can really make you bleed, you know? Yeeaaa brother. Cough, hack, ahem, whoa sorry about that. I got caught up in the spirit of oneness there for a sec. But seriously, this isn’t the worst episode ever, in fact if you strip away the incessant singing it had the potential to be a very good episode. I appreciate that Star Trek made the attempt to deal with the contemporary social movements and issues of the 60s. The idea that there’s a segment of society that rejects the techno-utopia of the federation is a pretty interesting concept that of course paralleled similar notions of discontent in the late 20th century. If anything the tech rejection idea at the heart of Eden has become more prescient as we become more technologically intertwined as a society. There’s a particularly strong premise at work given that Dr Sevrin is at least partially driven by a sense of victimhood due to being a carrier of a disease literally created by the thing he wishes to escape, he’s essentially a prisoner of the technology he hates. It’s a tragic circumstance that, given the proper expression, could have been quite poignant. Unfortunately, they went with a much sillier means of expressing the point of view of being “one”. I also found the general attitude of the “space hippies” to be unfortunately inadequate, whether you agree with counter culture philosophies or not, generally if you engage with people of that mindset they’ll give you better arguments than sarcasm and condescending petulance. It would have been nice to have less spontaneous jam sessions and more exploration of ideas in this outing. It’s a missed opportunity that also heavily dates the episode, which makes it interesting from an historical artifact standpoint but doesn’t make for pleasant viewing. I don’t see Spock as out of character in this episode at all, quite the opposite actually. These space hippies might have ideas that run counter to what most of us would prefer, they hate technology and want to return to “the simple life”, which to most people, just sounds naive. Personally I think paradise seekers are missing crucial data points which results in a loss of perspective. But just because I don’t generally agree with their ideas doesn’t mean their ideas don’t exist. If their ideas exist, they can have a measurable impact, if they have a measurable impact they represent a phenomenon that can be considered when constructing a logical framework. Spock doesn’t extol their worldview, he simply acknowledges it and seeks to understand it better. As a logical being I find this approach most appropriate. Lastly, it’s so very weird to me that of all the episodes to inspire a movie, THIS was chosen. It’s no surprise that ST:V was a bit weak. Also, Tongo Rad is a douche bag. 1.5/4 fields of acidic foliage.

My first comment; Chekov's hair. Could they have made that hairpiece even more obvious or horrible than it was? They should have talked to Shatner about hairpieces. He got it right, even back then. I have been streaming 'Upstairs/Downstairs', the British aristocracy/British servants depiction series of the early 1970's. Surprisingly, I came across an episode which reminded me so much of this one. The characters, however, were not referred to as hippies, but instead, bohemian. The daughter of the aristocratic side of the story finds this group and is so entranced by them, she immediately changes her style of clothing and joins up. I wasn't exactly sure what this group was trying to accomplish, but from her perspective, she wanted to help the poor. This group did not travel or live together as Sevrin's group did, but met at different places to quote their poetry or dance. Speaking of costumes, the women dressed in flowing, colorful kaftans. And the daughter very diligently searched for attire that would allow her to fit in with the group. Like Eden, they sang, and danced, quoted poetry, and ate at the aristocracy's expense. Of course the aristocracy was appalled but these bohemians were just as appalling to the servants. Eden mentions that several members of Sevrin's group are highly intelligent. I had to wonder why, then, they went about barefoot and scantily clad in space. I know this is Star Trek, but these people are supposed to be seeking paradise, presumably one on a planet somewhere. The clothing they were wearing wasn't exactly that which would aid in protecting them. Then there was that white and yellow (was it a rock?) on the lapel area of their costumes. It made me think of a little fried egg with glasses, lol. I have no problem with a group of people taking a different outlook on culture and so, they look for the new and different. The issue I have is that, for all of these brilliant members, they have a very skewered perception of how things work. Not one of them has any idea that they might have to work to get what they need to find their Eden. It'll just come to them. I watched this episode today, and was surprised at Kirk's attitude toward Sevrin's group. Although I thought it was dumb that the guy on the bridge was almost dancing to the music, I liked that Kirk tried to reach by allowing it to be piped over the ship and treating the group as guests. It falls right in with the whole concept of exploring strange, new worlds. Even though Kirk took a likeable approach, I do find it idiotic that these people were able to so easily take over the Enterprise. As for the music, the only tune I really liked was the one Spock and the blonde hippie girl played together. The rest I could have done without. Star Trek continues to make errors with their music, which started with Uhura's tune in Charlie X. I would not give this episode zero stars. It was not a bad episode. It had some bad elements that pulled it down, but also had some very good plot points as well. It'd certainly rate a 2.5 in my estimate.

Marlboro wrote: "The character of Dr. Severin had potential, imo. A man who is a danger to a squeaky clean anti-septic civilization because he is a modern Typhoid Mary turns his back on society. His natural desire for companionship leads him to recruiting young naïve followers even though his search and maybe even his existence poses a threat to them. Severin seeks to "return to nature" only to find his personal Eden is inimical to him." It's too bad that Star Trek once again tediously attempts to explain the antagonist's thought processes by pinning a label of insanity on him. Spock is not a doctor, and insanity is not a diagnosis. I'm not trying to be picky here, but this is an annoying part of the episode, and dampens the whole idea of this group seeking an Eden like planet, which happens to be a planet in Romulan space. Star Trek has never explained how anyone, or even a group of people, go about "owning" a planet. The actor who played Dr. Severin also appeared as Melakon in Patterns of Force. I wonder if the episode would have been among the better ones if the two stories had somehow been intertwined.

Not quite the infamous disaster it's remembered as. At least the equal of Spock's Brain as being redeemable just for being entertaining. It's endlessly quotable... you know what I mean., brother. Charles Napier! A tough guy in everything else, but not here. Spock's speech about "aliens in their own worlds, a condition with which I am somewhat familiar" is a genuinely memorable Spock character moment which later got sampled by at least one punk rock band later... it struck a chord. Nimoy sells it. Sevrin's ears are dumb. Even a Vulcan or Ferengi would agree. Star Trek can't seem to let go of the stupid "Eden" planet idea. What does that even mean? And just making everything acid and killing everyone was stupid. Hippies! Beware of Acid! The 1960s current events angle is somewhat redeeming even though every other show on TV was also doing something like this at the time, to varying degrees of silly. It was at least better than "Dragnet"

I suspect the end result would have been better had TWtE retained the counterculture theme, but ditched the ersatz hippies. That would have required more writing effort at a time when TOS was slogging through its final few productions after having learned there would be no Fourth Season. Perhaps because I don't mind the music, I find TWtE more watchable than several other "Turd Season" entries. One of a handful of episodes to air only once on NBC. 1.5 of 4 jumps for joy

I'm surprised to see no reference to Space Seed, a cultish leader takes over the ship by deploying his followers to gain knowledge of ship functions, then pirates the ship toward a destination. The fact that the participants commit criminal acts, the Enterprise seems to forgive in order assist the culture in locating a favorable habitat. I got a laugh out of the crew members being distracted and tapping along with the hippie jam band broadcast only to be easily overcome by a Spock like nerve pinch. There is also a bit of Mudds Women where the ship overtakes a smaller rogue or stolen vessel and is forced to transport its occupants just as the craft is destroyed in the effort of trying to escape. And the shock of the crew upon seeing how those transported appear. And Yes they were told to sick Chekhov with kissies since the audience (that by now was still left) supposedly connected with him. Well, at least I tried to make an un-dumb opinion of the episode instead of just saying it's stewpid. But that is hard to do because the episode is stewpid. Scott is the most "square" of the bunch, always looking disapprovingly of the space hippies and not enjoying their entertainment, no wonder Doohan tried to get out of getting filmed in it.

Gideon Marcus

Well. Maybe it's because I live in the context (Galactic Journey, natch), but I just watched this show with a whole bunch of folks who just started watching Trek this season (and some who have been along since Season 1). We watch it with original episodes. Not streamed. Not binged. Not edgy. Not ironic. Not trying to be the coolest folks in the room. Just watching it as it was. The ages of the folks watching ranges from 19 to 61, and we actually loved the episode. It was extremely timely (not dissimilar to a Mod Squad episode from this same season) and very much a return to 1st season form and characterization, save for the subject matter. We really dug the music, too—it's the first real music we've heard on the show. Again, it made the world feel lived in. And how cool that we have a rejection of the antiseptic utopia of the Federation. The first inkling that all is not perfect in this perfect future. And Spock reaching the hippies because he's an alien? That sounded, man. So yeah, bag on this episode all you want. But I've got a dozen folk with fresh eyes who gave it 4 or 5 stars out of 5. It doesn't objectively suck

Gonna post a comment to share my views This episode got a zero on Jammers Reviews! That chad guitarist was the best part of the episode to give you an idea of how bonkers this episode is.

Eastwest101

Man you Herberts are going to harsh out my peace man! There is just something so naive and yet unintentionally hip, silly and charismatic about this rather silly but charming fumbled incomplete counterculture comedy/satire with possibly some darker Manson overtones. Some great guest performances and fantastic music, I can understand why some view it as being the 'reactionary' episode of Star Trek and certainly some technical and characterization flaws by the squares in the writing room. Does have some major problems though with leaps of logic and poor use of the main cast as noted above.

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Star Trek: The Way to Eden

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A little programming note: Ben P. Duck and I both had a lot to do this fall, and the last few Star Trek reviews had to wait. But they're now done, and all of them will go up before the new year.

Watching this episode as a 10 year old boy in 1970 I always thought there was something profound about this episode that I was missing as just a kid. Looking back on it now I realized that nope, I wasn't missing a think. This was a stinker, even worse than "Spock's Brain" which I always considered the worst!

OK, it's tidbit time - the original story, if not the first draft, came from the pen/typewriter of D.C. Fontana herself, although she wound up putting her pen name ("Michael Richards" on it). And the Irina character was originally supposed to be Dr. McCoy's daughter Joanna; indeed, the working title of the episode was "Joanna". Kirk was supposed to get into a, um, relationship with her too, which would have caused great consternation to the good Doctor. Unfortunately, Fred Freiberger, the 3rd season producer, felt that McCoy was too close to Kirk's age to have an adult daughter. Skip Homeier (who played Sevrin) also played Melancon in the Nazi episode. He should have fired his agent for putting him into two of the worst TOS episodes of all. I reach, brother. ;)

It's amusing, in hindsight, to compare books and notes too - back in the 1970's, when "Star Trek Lives" came out, Nimoy basically ruined what reputation Freiberger had, placing the blame for the third season woes squarely on ol' Fred's shoulders. Twenty years later, Shatner's "Star Trek Memories" features an interview with Freiberger and Bill had some laudatory things to say about ol' Fred. Then came the Justman/Solow "Inside Star Trek", which explains the disparity of opinions - Bill and Leonard were feuding, as was so often the case, over who the star of the show was. Freiberger eventually forced the issue by calling a meeting between the three of them and Roddenberry, and Gene was forced to state that Bill Shatner was the star of the show. Nimoy never forgave Freiberger for that, and that explains his comments in "Star Trek Lives".

I genuinely didn't mind it. It is the only ep I am sure I have never seen before and I think it had plenty going for it (apart from the ears that looked like giant genital warts, the songs, the costumes, and the overtones of the Manson Family Meets The Brady Family Singers). I didn't even mind being hit over the head with biblical references and I adored Spock's open mind. What a champion!

tinkapuss, I am so loving your comments. Genital warts. Lol.

I enjoyed this episode, the jam session and music was cool. they worked with what they had in those days. I think that I watched the original episodes on TV, or first reruns on CBS. It was on 6PM sunday nights along with Lawrence Welk, 'world of Disney', and 'How Come?' kids science tv show. cheers

The part that has stuck in my mind the most over all these years was them finding out that despite how lovely their Eden looked, the vegetation was deadly. Not a fan of this one overall, (and Tinkapuss's genital wart ear comment made me lol), but as you both point out, Billie and Ben, it once again had sound ideas to build on, but they made a mess out of that foundation. We will always have folks that want to get away from our reliance on technology, and the more advanced the technology, the more stark the differences will be, so having the Star Trek level of scientific progress means those wanting to have a simple life (at least how they define it), will come off even more regressive than today!

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Space Hippie

What exactly is Una's problem with Pelia?

SPOILER WARNING: This clip may contain spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2, Episode 6 "Lost in Translation"!

In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ' "Lost in Translation," Pelia questions why the Enterprise crew has an issue with her presence on their ship.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Latin America, Brazil, South Korea, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In addition, the series airs on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and on SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Central and Eastern Europe. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

Star Trek : "Requiem For Methuselah"/"Way To Eden"

I wouldn't mind living forever. Despite all those  Twilight Zone  episodes about the dreariness of immortality, I, personally, would be willing to take the risk of boredom and despair ten thousand years down the line, if that meant not having to be dead. I imagine most people would. Generally, fiction that deals with excessively long life tries to convince us that this is the wrong choice. You have the occasional pro-immortality piece (I always thought Neil Gaiman had the right idea of it in  Sandman:  no major revelations, just existence prolonged with all its minor triumphs and loss), but mostly, writers are heavily invested in convincing us that death is natural and therefore desirable. Maybe undertakers have a very strong lobby, I dunno, but "natural" to my way of thinking doesn't invariably mean "necessary."

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"Requiem For Methuselah" would disagree with this. Well, all right, it's a fifty minute episode of a forty years gone television show, it doesn't really get much in the way of active verb sentences. But the seemingly immortal Flint has definitely developed some issues as a result of being kept long past his expiration date. He bought a planet (I love how casually this is mentioned, as if buying planets that could support life were the sort of thing you'd expect from any reasonably well-off gentleman) just so he could avoid the company of others, and when Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down, he's not very happy about the surprise visit. The  Enterprise  has caught a bad case of Rigelian fever, and they're short on ryetalyn, the only known cure. Thankfully, Flint's planet is loaded with the stuff, and after some very heated debating, he gives in to their demands and offers to send his robot probe, M-4, to collect the plague-stopping chemical while the others come back to Flint's place and, y'know, hang out and stuff.

For an apparent hermit with no recorded history, Flint's amassed an impressive art collection, from a series of unknown Da Vinci's painted on modern canvases with modern materials, to a new Brahms' waltz written in fresh ink. But the jewel of his collection is a young woman named Rayna. Cultured, beautiful, intelligent, and charmingly naive, Rayna makes an immediate impression Kirk, and she on him. So, while the rest of his crew on the ship is battling sickness and waiting desperately for a cure, Kirk starts seducing the ward of his barely tolerant host. Spock's getting suspicious, though. What's with all the fresh/old art? And his suspicions are confirmed when McCoy's sensor reading on Flint reveals Flint to be somewhere in the area of really, really old.

There was discussion last week about my "soft" grading for this season of  Trek , and I won't deny that. I'm not trying to create some kind of textbook perfect scale here. Unless an episode is particularly horrible or particularly good, I'm more interested in working out the oddities and making cheap jokes. I start each ep assuming it's in the B/B+ area, and then adjust accordingly. So "Requiem" started off okay for me. There's a certain level of improbability you have to swallow here, that the  Enterprise  would get hit by a virus that gives them a very specific timetable to survive, and that the only cure for that virus would be found in substantial quantities on a nearby planet that just happens to have a human immortal who just happened to have been born on Earth. A less charitable person than myself would also point out that the Rigelian subplot is the worst kind of MacGuffin, one that seems deathly important when first introduced but becomes arbitrary and perfunctory as soon as is deemed narratively convenient.

I'm willing to look past that, though, especially in the third season. But "Requiem" kept disrespecting my goodwill. Again we have an episode where the audience is always a few steps ahead of the cast, and those few times it did manage to surprise me where more ridiculous than thrilling. That Flint just happens to have been Leonard Da Vinci and Brahms and a bunch of other famous guys is absurd, and needless, especially considering his explanation about how he had to learn quickly to not let his "special" nature become public. Right, so you live forever, and the best way to conceal that is to keep being insanely famous and influential. Some super genius. Also, for someone who's spent such a terribly long time watching people be people, he doesn't really understand humans very well. (Tip: Ordering someone who doesn't like you like that to stop caring for another man will  never  work out in your favor.)

Not to mention the ridiculously blase explanation for his immortality—apparently, he's just really good at healing. That's it. I'm a little torn on this one, because it's so bald-faced and unconcerned that I kind of like it. When there's no possible reasonable explanation for a situation, bluffing can work as well in fiction as it can in poker, depending on how straight-faced it's delivered. That neither Kirk, McCoy, nor Spock question this discovery goes a long way towards making it work. Still, it seems like a lost opportunity for something more clever than "I was born this way." (Admittedly, the episode justifies Flint's extraordinary abilities as a result of his longevity, but I'm not sure I'm buying. Bill Murray was a pretty great piano player after all those   Groundhog Day lessons, but he wasn't a master composer just because he had a lot more time on his hands.)

What really killed "Requiem" for me, apart from Flint's inconsistencies and the story's familiar  Forbidden Planet  parallels, was how much it had to betray Kirk's essential nature in order to justify its story. We've seen Kirk falling for beautiful women, and them falling for him in turn. You can make jokes about it, but it's an established element of the show's mythology. But here, we're supposed to believe that Kirk is so instantly and irrevocably smitten with Rayna (an android Flint built to be the perfect woman) that he's willing to put his ship and the lives of everyone aboard at risk. Despite Spock's repeated warnings, Kirk flirts with Rayna, pursues her, and then demands she leave with them, because he can't bear to see how Flint treats her. He's known this girl less than four hours, and he's so blinded by love (to put it charitably) that he loses the sense of duty that has been his strongest single characteristic since the first episode? I'm not buying that.

And it's too bad, because as others have noted, the final scene could've been moving if it had had a stronger foundation to rest on. Spock uses his mental powers to erase Kirk's memory of Rayna, sort of a one-time only Lacuna, Inc. treatment. It's a beautiful idea—Spock's outsider status doesn't just mean making snappy comments and having to clean up after the stupidity of his co-workers, it also gives him the responsibility of total observation, of holding onto memories that others would rather let go. McCoy lectures him on his inability to feel love, but that final gesture is definitive proof otherwise. (As if we needed it.) Were it not for the absurdity of Kirk's grief, this could've been a series highlight. Instead, it's a brief blip in an otherwise forgettable ep.

Still, forgettable isn't necessarily the worst thing. At least there aren't any space hippies. "The Way To Eden" is one of the notorious season three episodes that's hard to view straight, partly because it's been a punch-line for  Trek  fans for years, and partly because SPACE HIPPIES. It's gets ugly when popular culture tries to address a sub-culture it doesn't entirely understand. Regular hippies can be annoying enough, but the goofy nutjobs we see here are like a photocopy of a parody of an idea. A really tedious idea that keeps  singing . Oh man. I was doing okay until the songs started happening. That about killed me.

"Eden"'s premise should be familiar to anyone who's seen  Star Trek V.  (Yeah, seriously, if that doesn't give you a chill, you are made of stone. Or else you haven't actually seen  Star Trek V , which means you are made of something significantly smarter than stone.) A small cult of true believers gets on the  Enterprise —Kirk has to treat them well because one of them is the son of an ambassador—and that cult is determined to use the ship to help them on their quest. They're disillusioned with modern life, with all its computers and sterility and insistence on bathing, and they're trying to find their way back to where it all started, the very first planet, Eden.

Given how generally perfect the future of  Star Trek  seems to be, I will give "Eden" this much: it gives us a dissenting voice in Utopia. That that voice comes out from the touring cast of  Hair  damages its credibility somewhat, but the fact that Spock adds his support is hard to ignore. Spock has always been the sanest person on the ship, and to have him come out in favor of a bunch of trippy sland spouting airheads creates an odd dramatic tension. We see Dr. Sevrin and his motley band of morons babbling along, and then we hear Spock calmly defending their cause, and suddenyl, you've got to take the dolts seriously. Obviously they have problems, and their dress sense could use some work (but then, it's not like freaky costumes are a rarity on the show), but maybe there's something to their yearning for a new beginning, a freer, purer home. Maybe they  aren't  just a group of spoiled morons who use the pretense of idealism in order to distract from their essential wounded selfishness.

Still, there is all that singing. (From character actor Charles Napier! Playing an instrument that in no way could make the sounds it's supposed to be making.) While I appreciate the contrast between the space hippies appearance and Spock's calm, rational assessment of their goal, the group is too strange and irritating for me to view them sympathetically. Kirk is stuck as the straight man for once, as none of the hippie girls fall for him, and as funny as it is to hear people call him Herbert, we're firmly in Kirk's corner. Plus, even Spock admits that Sevrin is insane. He's a carrier of a virus that could kill the perfect world he yearns for, and he refuses to accept this. Kirk throws him in the brig, but the hippies spring into action, distracting and seducing the crew, and ultimately stealing the  Enterprise  so they can find their way to their precious destination.

The crew seduction never goes anywhere; even Chekov is able to resist his old girlfriend's advances. Sevrin has to knock everybody out with a sonic device that should be fatal, only Kirk is just too badass to die. It's all a set-up for one of other parts of "Eden" I honestly liked: the hippies steal a shuttlecraft to visit their new home, and it nearly kills them. All the vegetation is poisonous and highly acidic. Nothing can be touched, nothing can be eaten. Spock tells the surviving cultists that he hopes they continue their search, but I like to think that this place really was Eden, and that when God kicked Adam and Eve out the door, He made damn sure they wouldn't be able to sneak back in.

Really, I would've been a lot more patient with this one if it weren't for the songs. The action stops cold every time Napier picks up his whatever-the-hell-it-is and starts warbling. I think Sevrin's quest is foolishly naive, and the condescending emptiness of his followers is nearly intolerable, but at least those have something to do with a story. At least all the "Herbert" crap has a point. The singing is just the worst kind of padding, and it burns more than a few Edenic bushes ever could.

"Requiem For Methuselah": C

"The Way To Eden": C-

Stray Observations:

• "That's now, that's the real now!" Ahh, it's like poetry.
• I did like the explanation that Flint was already dying when Kirk and the others met him. It explains why he looked fairly old for somebody with perfect cellular regeneration.
• Irina tells Chekov, "Be incorrect… occasionally." Oh sister, he is way, way ahead of you.
• So, how about you—you wanna live forever?
• Next week, it's "The Cloud Minders" and "The Savage Curtain"

One Star Trek Actor Absolutely Hated The Infamous 'Space Hippies' Episode

"Star Trek: The Original Series" called the small screen home from 1966 to 1969, giving audiences numerous memorable characters, moments, and lines in that time. Of its 79 total installments, "Star Trek" fans consider some a cut above the rest as the best episodes of the original series . Meanwhile, a handful have become recognized among the science fiction series' weakest links. Season 3's "The Way to Eden" -- an episode centered on a group of "space hippies" attempting to take over the USS Enterprise to find the mythical planet of Eden -- is among these disliked installments.

Of course, this sentiment isn't just held by "Star Trek" fans. One of the original series' most prominent cast members also felt that "The Way to Eden" is one of the program's worst episodes. In her and James D. Denney's book "The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy," Janice Rand actor Grace Lee Whitney expressed her distaste for the episode. She referred to it as a "clinker," citing it and "Spock's Brain" from the same season as paling in comparison to others, especially those written by Harlan Ellison such as "The City on the Edge of Forever."

So, why have Whitney and numerous "Star Trek" fans given "The Way to Eden" a hard time? Here are some of the standout reasons for its negative reputation.

Read more: Star Trek Stories That Are Actually Horrifying

The Way To Eden Remains Pretty Unpopular Decades Later

"The Way to Eden" made its small-screen debut in February 1969, and decades later, in the age of the Internet, it is still being lambasted by "Star Trek" fans. In a thread by Redditor u/Kayfim20 , several folks chimed in to offer critiques of this infamous episode.

"This episode feels like a middle aged adult in 1967s interpretation of the counter culture," commented u/rebuilt2150 , claiming that the minds behind the episode missed the mark in attempting to adapt the then-modern hippie culture through a "Star Trek" lens. A now-deleted Reddit user felt similarly, noting that writing of "The Way to Eden" fails to make anyone on-screen look good. u/AllOverThere also compared it to "Spock's Brain," noting that the third year of "Star Trek" is all around pretty weak.

Surprisingly, a few of the thread's commenters expressed less harsh feelings toward "The Way to Eden." u/Software_Samurai looks at it as a product of its time, while  u/tjareth found Deborah Downey's work in the episode worthy of a watch alone. "I enjoy this episode for how silly it is - I too am glad it exists. The musical bicycle wheel is excellent," wrote u/WildW in quite an outlier of a comment. u/2HBA1  also offered up a comment in support of "The Way to Eden" in all of its '60s sci-fi silliness.

With some positivity headed its way, perhaps the majority opinion on "The Way to Eden" will sway down the road. For now, though, it's still widely considered one of the worst "Star Trek" episodes out there.

Read the original article on Looper .

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The way to eden (1969).

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Herbert (slang)

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The term "Herbert" was an uncomplimentary slang term used by the acolytes of Dr. Sevrin . The basis for the term was a minor official named Herbert , notorious for his rigid and limited patterns of thought.

In 2269 , Sevrin's group referred to Captain Kirk by this moniker several times, and Spock once (who denied the comparison), as the officers were interfering with their attempt to locate Eden . Unfamiliar with the term, Kirk asked Spock what it meant, and Spock told him, prompting Kirk to reply that he'd try to be less like the individual described. When blocking the halls of the USS Enterprise , they protested by shouting the phrase over and over. ( TOS : " The Way to Eden ")