3x19 Requiem for Methuselah

[7.7/10] I find myself drawn to stories of world-weary immortals. There’s something about the idea of something that feels human, that started out with the same wants and hopes and limitations that we all do, and slowly had the tides wash away what we’d recognize as humanity over the course of millennia that feels like boring into the human soul. Stories about such beings present the opportunity to do what science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular do well -- experience those strange other forms of life second-hand, to push the boundaries of our perspective and try to imagine what witnessing the ages would do to a person.

Enter “Flint” the mysterious lord of a planet that just so happens to contain the necessary ingredient in a serum that will cure the Enterprise’s latest epidemic. He seems to be a solitary man, living on the planet by himself and disdaining any visitors or company other than M4, his bulbous, Nomad-like floating robot butler.

But the clues start piling up that Flint isn’t merely some misanthrope on a remote world. Spock notices that he has original, unidentified Da Vinci paintings, made with contemporary tools and materials. He has a new Brahms composition, written in Brahms’s own hand. He has a collection of books and artifacts that would be the envy of any museum, with no one, and thus no need, to show them off to.

Eventually, the evidence piles up and Flint confesses the truth. He is Da Vinci, Brahms, Methusula, and a hundred other famous (and not so famous) names throughout history. He’s basically a Highlander, several millennia old, acquiring knowledge and artifacts, jumping from life to life to keep himself from detection and questioning. He is curt if begrudgingly welcoming with his guests, treating them with the jadedness and lack of concern for their beings as someone who’s seen billions of lives enter this world and, just as quickly (from his perspective), depart from it. What would the values be, what would the temperament be, what would the worldview be of someone who has seen that much life and death and change and folly for so long?

Oh yeah, and he’s the villain! Or at least the antagonist. That’s often when Trek is at its best, creating foils for our heroes that are not just evil robots or snarling baddies, but equals and foils who have their own motivations that are understandable even if we’re rooting against them, or stand a little horrified at what they’ve done.

What Flint’s done is create the perfect mate for himself, a young woman named Rayna who turns out to be an android. There is something inherently unnerving about the moment, early in the episode, when Flint tries to kiss her and she doesn’t respond or seem to understand. For one thing, there is a certain creepiness in her blank affect in response to such a gesture that makes her feel alien or not fully a party to this. For another, the age difference made me mistake Flint for her father.

I don’t think that’s unintentional though. There’s something uncomfortable about the way that Flint has constructed Rayna to be his perfect partner. It brings to mind notions of grooming, of (as the episode so laboriously underlines) a lack of choice for her in this. She is his puppet, one whom he seems to love, but one who exists to satisfy him, not to be a person in her own right.

The great feat of “Methuselah” is how it makes those acts from Flint both comprehensible and horrifying. His monologue about how he once lived in the world, loving and losing and seeing people he cared about die, until it broke him, makes his notion of building and teaching someone who could be his mate forever a choice that comes from a place of hurt, of needing something extraordinary to complete an extraordinary existence. But the notion of this kept woman, who exists under Flint’s thumb and only lives to serve his purposes is chilling.

Kirk, naturally, falls in love with her, the same way he falls in love with any pair of batted eyelashes, and it proves the weakest part of the episode. Maybe I just have Kirk romance fatigue, but there was nothing particularly compelling, and much kind of disquieting, about Kirk romancing this woman who is childlike in many ways, and something implausible about him (or, at least, someone who doesn’t find “true love” like normal people find dishwashing detergent) discovering such a depth of feeling for her so quickly.

That undercuts the force of the end of the episode, where Kirk is so distraught at losing Rayna that he can’t be consoled. What about the “native american” woman he fathered a child with? What about the dozens of other ladies of the week he’s canoodled with? How many times has Spock mind-wiped him to keep him from being so heartbroken that he can’t command?

Maybe I’m applying too much continuity from a show that was never particularly interested in it. The thrust of the scene seems to come from Bones’s speech that Spock, with all his stoicism, will never understand the dizzying highs and crestfallen lows of love, and Spock’s ensuing gesture to ease his captain’s pain which suggests that in his own Vulcan way, Spock does understand these things. But (a.) it’s not really okay to mindwipe somebody without their consent and (b.) the whole dilemma of Kirk’s distress rings false after how many weekly women he’s “fallen in love with” over the course of the series.

But the core of the episode, apart from Kirk’s part in it, absolutely works. Rayna is mostly a cipher (and when she’s called upon to emote a little more strongly, the actress falters) but that works for a character who is just discovering what emotions are. It’s a little convenient that the stress of discovering strong emotions kills her, but there’s a solid theme and irony and parallel there -- that by trying to gin up the same sort of emotional experiences in Rayna that Flint himself felt bereft of and created her to solve, he kills her from the overwhelming nature of those experience.

It works at a plot level -- Flint only kept Kirk around despite seemingly wanting to rid himself of his visitors as quickly as possible because he realized Kirk’s casanova qualities might awaken Rayna’s emotional side. It works at a horror level -- because the idea that Flint would use another man to stoke Rayna’s emotions so that he could swoop in and capitalize on them is abhorrent. And it works at a theme level, that love is such a strong motivator, such a temperamental thing, that it drives Flint to try to recreate it, Kirk to preserve it, and kills the woman they were fighting over.

Sure, Methuselah devolves into a great deal of on-the-nose speechifying after the big reveals, and the fist-fight between Kirk and Flint seems like a bit of shoehorned-in action meant to up the wow factor of what is otherwise a pretty cerebral episode, but what Star Trek is exploring here is worthwhile and compelling.

Someone who has lived through millennia, had the people closest to them perish and watched the great joys of their life fade to nothing under the yoke of eternity, would be almost incomprehensible to we mortals. They would do things we find horrifying, try to recreate eternal feelings that become strange and disconcerting when stretched to an eternal scale. “Methuselah” offers its antagonist a measure of sympathy even as it casts him as a villain, and offers Rayna, the object of his and Kirk’s misplaced affections, more than a measure of empathy. That shows the complex territory the episode enters, and the way that Trek, when it's pitching its fastball, to dig into poignant, philosophical territory, while grounding it in the experiences of human beings, however unfamiliar they may seem.

What's wrong with Kirk? That pool scene is like the beginning of a real bad adult movie. But he's a natural. The girl with the good hair wants to measure her intellectual capacity against Spock's Vulcan intellect but she quickly forgets and prefers to be courted by our space Casanova. And Kirk also forgets that he's on a mission necessary to fight an endemic - he got only one thing on his mind. That's outright disturbing. I don't get why he is so angry over Rayna in the end? Does he feel betrayed 'cause he fell for a sex robot? Is that the idea here? He realizes that he's a pervert for loving an android? And then he's glad that he made her have real human feelings? Like an alpha male in a real bad fantasy who persuades a lesbian to become heterosexual? Only Kirk could pull this off? Is that the story? The end ruins the whole episode.

Which is a pity cause Flint and his robots/androids and his art and his castle are actually fascinating.

Kirk: "Stay out of this we are fighting for a woman."

Wtf? That's one of the low points of how women are treated in this show.

This could have been a great episode. Flint is one of the most interesting characters Star Trek has created and the mystery surrounding him should have been the story. Than there is the part about an AI evolving feelings. Again in itself not a bad starting point for any sci fi show. I even would have gone for the concept as love as a trigger for that. But here comes the "could have" part into play.

It is too much to ask from me as the viewer to accept Kirk to madly fall in love with her within hours. Oh, I don't dispute those things can happen. I know they do. But with Kirk ? The guy has a different woman in every third episode.

And if you want to talk about something, why not talk about it why it matters if she's human or an android. If he fell in love with her the way she was, what does it matter ? There is a topic worth discovering. Suddenly he can't love her because of her status. Until he accepts her as being human again. Kirk then yelling at Spock to "stay out of it, we fight for a woman" is one of the low points of the show.

But the most blatant display of convenient writing came at the end when Spock erases the memory of Rayna from a sleeping Kirk and tells him to "forget".

That's the straw that broke the camel's back.