1x20 Court Martial

[9.5/10] When I think of Star Trek, I think of its unbridled optimism for the future. Gene Roddenberry became quite famous for the utopic version of what lay ahead for humanity, one in which advancements in technology would free us from want, from material need, to where we could become better, focus on projects of exploration and betterment. The details of that world are often glossed over, and there is still war, malfunction, and conflict, but things like transporters, replicators, and highly responsive computers allowed those in the Star Trek universe comfort and peace beyond what was available to people in the 1960s or today.

And yet, Star Trek, oddly enough, often has a Luddite perspective. With “Court Martial,” the original series is only twenty episodes into its run, and still there’s been a considerable number of episodes with either asides or full on main narratives about the danger of man becoming too enamored with his machines. It’s a strange contradiction, a show about people who journey through the stars in a hopeful future warning about the dangers of technology.

But that’s the major theme of “Court Martial.” Captain Kirk is put on trial by Starfleet for the death of his Records Officer, Ben Finney, whom he has longstanding acrimony with, and it becomes a question of whose word the court should take: his or the machine’s. He’s assigned an attorney who embodies the episode’s caution about the perils of mechanical assistance, named Samuel T. Cogley.
Cogley is an eccentric, one who refuses to use the computer to perform his legal research. He declares that the real law is in the printed page. He gives an impassioned, dramatic speech declaring that men have rights, and machines do not. He is, in effect, the Atticus Finch of “Court Martial” – the sharp jurist with high ideals, ideals we’re supposed to recognize amid the flawed system that’s railroading an innocent man.

What’s both unusual and interesting is that neither Cogley nor “Court Martial” rail against technology directly, but rather, its effect on people. True, there’s some notion of the fallibility of computers, to where, when it’s demonstrated that the Enterprise’s programming has been tampered with, without anyone detecting it it stands for the idea that too much faith and deference is offered to the not-always-reliable devices. But more than some argument about what technology does, the episode reserves its disdain for what it does to those of flesh and blood, Starfleet in particular.

In effect, Cogley and the writers of “Court Martial,” Don M. Mankiewicz and Steven W. Carabatsos, argue that Starfleet has become a machine just like those miraculous devices it uses to travel through the stars. Commodore Stone ignores Kirk’s deposition based on the computer records, and promises to ground him from captaining a ship “for the good of the service.” Lieutenant Commander Finney is effectively demoted and stymied for “one mistake,” with command unable to look past the rough marks on his record, and see the “good officer,” the human being who loved Starfleet, behind it. There is a real sense that the cause of all of this is an unfeeling bureaucracy that has turned to technological solutions and mechanical justice, without seeing the individuals, the ones with those rights Cogley goes on about, coldly caught up the machinery. Even the warm and friendly Lt. Shaw turns cold and methodical in the confines of the court.

I’ll admit, I found that perspective, and Cogley’s grand speech in particular, to be a bit much. But what makes “Court Martial” a great episode is that independent of its theme (which it delivers deftly beyond that bit of oratory), it delivers an exciting mystery, an intriguing courtroom drama, and a thrilling little adventure in the midst of all this. I may not agree with the point that the episode’s writers seemed to be making, but they do a superb job of not only conveying it, but couching it in a story that soars on a pure narrative level.

Granted, “Court Martial” takes a bit of a slow start. Commodore Stone’s “I’m trying to protect the brand!” tet-a-tet with Kirk, the scornful looks of the fellow officers in the mess hall, and the reveal that Lt. Shaw is an old friend of Kirk’s…and also the prosecutor in his case (dun dun dun!) are all pretty cheesy. But once the episode actually gets Kirk to the courtroom, things pick up, and they never really slow down from there.

For one thing, “Court Martial” shows Shaw putting on a pretty damn good case. She is intended to be by the book and, to the theme, almost mechanical in the presentation of her arguments, but she cross examines her witnesses well, she stacks admissions and points to build the story of her case, and she is in unwavering in her sharpness and effectiveness. Between her presentation and the video evidence, Star Trek does an impressive job at making the audience, not just the tribunal, have to wonder whether the man with such a decorated record, really did such a terrible thing as being the cause of an innocent’s man’s death.

“Court Martial” succeeds not only in setting up that suspicion, but in ruling it out as well. One of the other explanations, rather than the pure malice that Lt. Cmdr. Finney’s daughter initially accuses Kirk of, is that he simply had a lapse. Presented with the video evidence, Kirk himself begins to wonder if he just faltered physically or mentally, if in all his training, he was simply not up to such a vital decision in an important moment.

But again, true to the thematic underpinnings of the episode, it is human, or rather Vulcan (Vulcanian?) ingenuity that saves the day. It turns out, of course, that it is the vaunted computer that had a lapse, not Kirk. But while this could be a bargain basement, predictable reveal, “Court Martial” excels both in how it has Spock expose the problem and how it goes about uncovering what really happened. The notion of chess, a human game subject to somewhat mechanized logic, being the key to identifying the issue with the computer, and the fact that it is Spock, the nominally least emotional and literally least human member of the crew who discovers it, is a great way to dramatize that reveal.

And as impractical and implausible as near-evacuating the ship to use a heartbeat monitor is, it’s an interesting technological solution to a human problem, with the irony that it takes one of those cursed machines to detect the beating heart of a broken man. The ensuing scenes, where Kirk goes to confront Finney, are a little too close to Lethal Weapon’s “Let’s let Mel Gibson’s character kick box the movie’s villain” bit to me, but their confrontation is emotionally charged and rooted in shared history, which gives meaning to it, and even their fight, while theatrical, works in a way that not every bit of hand-to-hand combat on the show does.

Of course, in the end, the day is saved, and even the unnecessary added threat of a decaying orbit is thwarted by Kirk’s quick thinking. Kirk gets a book from his Luddite lawyer, a kiss from the woman who tried to convict him (in the episode’s most unneeded scene), and the command of his ship back. And his victory is revealing of another bit of strange essentialism to the episode. “Court Martial” posits that there are “great men,” individuals who are simply unimpeachable, that no matter what the evidence against them or circumstances that point to their malfeasance, we shouldn’t question them.

There’s something that feels very pernicious about that idea, particularly here in February 2017 where the dangers of just taking the word of the flaxen-haired leader seem a little too relevant, but it’s one of the core points of the episode. Even cold, logical Spock gets on the stand and, in his own way, declares that he puts his faith, or at least his belief, in Kirk rather than the circuits he’s responsible for as a Science Officer. Kirk’s virtue, and by extension, the virtue of all mean great enough to handle the burdens of captaining a starship (a challenge Commodore Stone talks up) are like inanimate objects, no more likely to err or do wrong than a hammer is to float rather than fall. This paragon of virtue is simply incapable of the errors in judgment or falters of faculties that we mere mortals are subject to, no matter what trifles like “technology” or “evidence” say.

And yet, Kirk’s flaw in this episode, or at least his weakness, is his own attachment to a machine. When Finney seeks to exact his revenge, whether on Kirk or the leaders of Starfleet, or both, he doesn’t just try to kill them; he attempts to get to Kirk through the thing he loves most – his ship. Even in those great men, there is an attachment to those machines, to their mechanicals whims, that can save or doom a man, even one brave enough to climb through a Jefferies tube and hotwire it on the fly.

In that way, “Court Martial” feels very old-fashioned. The fears of what technology will do the human psyche, to not just our way of life but how we think, was potent at a time when computers were first starting to come to prominence and we were only a generation removed from events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that evinced the danger of a society that put its faith in machine. The notion that there is some ineffable greatness in people, that cannot be captured or superseded by our technological advances, is a comforting one amid the tumult of a changing society in the 1960s.

But for all this Luddite fervor, for all the championing of rights not robots, and the virtue of man, “Court Martial” simply tells a compelling story. It offers the building mystery, the back and forth of the courtroom, and the raucous excitement of the fight and the reveal. For however of its time the viewpoint behind the episode feels, the way it tells that story, and delivers that message, is timeless. As long as people are still making art like Star Trek, the kind that speaks to what humanity is and can be, I suspect we’ll always have a bulwark against the dehumanizing tide of technology that “Court Martial” is so concerned about.