2x09 Metamorphosis

[9.6/10] Part of the Star Trek credo is “to seek out new life and new civilizations.” It’s an essential part of the franchise’s DNA, that around every corner there is some alien being, some unknown species, that lives differently, but whom we can connect and communicate with. Those extra terrestrials often fit into one of two categories -- so called “forehead aliens” who seem like extrapolations from foreign cultures in the real world, and god-like beings who are recognizable as tricksters or tyrants or both.

But “Metamorphosis” offers the rare alien presence that is truly alien. The “companion”, a blob of jello-molded light, is unlike anything The Enterprise has seen before. It is not another humanoid species that seems like a slanted reflection of our own; it is not an omnipotent god toying or testing with our heroes; and it’s not an unknowable force that Kirk and company have to outsmart or outrun. It’s simply another form of life, one that we don’t quite understand and that doesn’t quite understand us, but which nevertheless reveals the potency of caring for another individual, across time and space and species, in even the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

Love is love, as the recent saying goes, and that appears to be the essential theme of “Metamorphosis.” There are ways to read the episode as a metaphor for interracial relationships or gay relationships or any number of other sorts of affections that violate cultural norms (though these stumble a bit given that Zefram only realizes he loves The Companion once she becomes, or at least looks like, the sort of object of romantic affection he’s used to). But I like the story just as well as pure text, an examination of how caring for another person beyond reason and preservation of self transcends culture and even species.

I appreciate the sheer weirdness in which that story is told. One of the great achievements of “Metamorphosis” is that it earns the audience's sympathies for a creature that not only looks like a cross between a beam of light and a baby blanket, who tries to kill our heroes no less, while initially only taking the barest steps to humanize it or “her.” While melding The Companion and Nancy eventually elides that difficulty, there is something laudable in the way that “Metamorphosis” builds a connection between a regular man and something that doesn’t look, sound, or seem human, and makes it something poignant and worth rooting for.

(As an aside, I did bristle a bit about the notion that this light beam creature was necessarily female given the universal character of its brainwaves, but whatever. It was the sixties. You have to take these things as you find them, and the overall message of the episode wins out.)

After all, a being who does not understand love in human terms still nurtures Zefram, cares for Zefram, puts him above anyone else in the universe. It becomes mortal, fates itself to die and gives up its amazing powers to be closer to him, to become something that he could love back. And Zefram, though requiring a change of heart (and, if we’re being frank, change of body), realizes that he too loves The Companion, that it sustained him and likewise means everything to him. As Kirk puts it, love often involves sacrifice, a willingness to give up the whole damn world to get to share in such things with one at the center of your own universe, and piercing qualities of that choice from both Zefram and The Companion are fully felt by the audience.
It helps that “Metamorphosis” is Star Trek at its most poetic. Kirk waxes rhapsodic about the millions of planets with scores of intelligent life as he invites Zefram Cochrane to return with them. Zefram and the embodied companion discuss the rush of emotion, the joy of their shared experience, in lofty tones. TOS can often be a very literal show -- explaining the antigrav thruster adjustment that will defeat the enemy ship or declaring the moral of the story -- but here the dialogue is looser, appropriately florid, when grasping at the infinite mysteries of the human heart and our struggles to understand those so far outside our own experience.

The scoring and direction of the episode enhances that. There’s a softness to the whole of “Metamorphosis,” with gentle romantic tunes wafting in as Zefram calls The Companion or the two walk along the planet. The planet itself is garish but soft, aglow in purples and pinks that make it alien but warm. And the episode is apt to frame Zefram and his light blobby friend with a soulful tack, shooting their “bonding” from a distance, or slowly zooming in on one or another. Even The Companion, joined with Nancy Hedford, holding up a transparent scarf to replicate her old vision of Zefram helps sell the shifts in perspective, the force of the change, in a visual fashion that accentuates the story.

There’s also the hint of poetry in Nancy Hedford’s experience. While there’s some sixties parochialism (to use Spock’s terminology in the episode) in the notion that Nancy was an accomplished diplomat but believed she would have lived no worthy kind of life without love, there is something attendant beautiful about the notion that she is joined to The Companion and that, in the combination, both of these individuals who had not been truly able to experience love have the opportunity to do so as one. It is an unusual, science fiction direction, and it’s commendable in its sideways approach.

But that is what sets “Metamorphosis” apart from even the best Star Trek episodes -- the way that it embraces the truly strange and unintuitive and yet finds the essential truth within. The usual plot mechanics of TOS -- the need to get off the planet, Scotty hunting for Kirk, electric dispersal units -- take a backseat to the unusual but affecting love story between a man and an unknown lifeforce. In that, it posits that love is something universal, which can join even the flesh and blood with the photons and electric impulses on an alien world.

It can cause individuals to give up everything -- their futures, their possibilities, their continued existence in this world -- in favor of the joys of someone dear to them. No matter how strange the partner, no matter how alien the locale, no matter how much adjustment and acclimation are required, this nigh-divine connection between sentient beings can find purchase, can stretch across barriers of culture and language and even humanity. The strange new worlds and new life the heroes of Star Trek find are often distinctive but familiar, but in “Metamorphosis”, the franchise finds something genuinely unique and foreign, and yet finds the thing that unites it, and us, and everyone.

(As an aside that didn’t really fit anywhere else in the review, as a longtime Star Trek fan, it was a minor thrill for me to see a story centered around Zefram Cochrane. It spoiled some of the reveal for me (how many Zeframs are there in the galaxy) but magnified the notion of what he was giving up to be with The Companion/Nancy. I’m not sure how, if it all, this lines up with the version of him we saw in TNG.)

Why is she dressed like this? Does she think that she's Grace Kelly and the shuttle craft is a convertible? And of course, she has a nervous break-down and is dying subsequently because, well, isn't that obvious: she's a weak woman. She's saved though (well sort of). With a twist: she's now operating within the boundary set for 60s women: away with that commissioner nonensense; now she can be the servile companion she should have been in the first place. Who cares? Like Kirk said, the Federation can easily replace her with another random woman.

Overall, I like the story though. Solid. The energy field SFX are perhaps strange but it's a classic Star Trek story: a shuttle craft crashed on a mysterious planet. The shore party must survive; the Enterprise doing some SAR. I remember countless other episodes from later shows that tell very similar stories. Even the studio planet doesn't look totally bad. The interesting part here is the unusual love story. It's somehow credibly told.

PS: it's strange that this is the Zephram Cochrane origin. Here, he's such an unassuming and insignificant figure while his importance in the Star Trek lore can't be overestimated.

PS2: I was immediately petrified when I read the title. It's my Latin trauma from school ... Thx Ovid :-)