2x21 Patterns of Force

As a German, I'm disturbed. My granddad was actually in the Waffen-SS for almost the entirety of the war. I'm not responsible for what he did (I never found out what he exactly did during the war; he never talked about this; but he certainly never uttered sympathy for anything right-wing as long as I knew him; but his unit's war records make you think]. I'm responsible to speak out when I feel that something is wrong though.

Yes, I have seen SS uniforms in Star Trek before and it made sense back on the Voyager holodeck. But here it feels simply wrong. To start with, I don't get the general premise. Whatever this alien society functions like and whatever their history was, I don't understand how they ended with a copy of mid 20th century Germany. I mean I get it: writers are pretty much aware of this unlikely coincidence (and let Kirk and Spock briefly discuss this), but the explanation given is totally incredible. I guess they really wanted to make clear how evil this regime is but you don't need SS uniforms as a prop to tell this story. In fact, the SS was one of the most evil organizations in Nazi Germany and using them as a cheap prop is really painful to watch. It's almost like this cartoonish depictions wants to belittle the victims. I know about the American fascination about Nazis (just watch the History Channel), but exploiting this fascination feels wrong. It's even worse that you might get the idea that such a fascist regime is commended by the writers for being well-organized and efficient and a justifiable option for the federation observer to bring peace to this alien planet. It also reminds me of what German politician Oskar Lafontaine critized about the negeative side of the so-called "Prussian virtues" which made German militarism that efficient:

Oskar Lafontaine: "Das sind Sekundärtugenden. Ganz präzis gesagt: Damit kann man auch ein KZ betreiben. (:arrow_forward:"Those are secondary virtues. To be precise: They come in handy when running a concentration camp")

In the end the Federation guy realizes he was wrong. But we also learn that he had admirable benevolent motives and the whole Nazi idea spiraled out of control. If only the Fuhrer had known that only a few men, perhaps only one man on this planet (his right hand) was a evil man and turned the Nazi ideology into something bad. Is that what we're supposed to think about Nazi-Germany, too? Good idea, bad execution? Only a few are to blame? The SS was evil, but their uniforms looked like they were designed by Balenciaga?

What was Nimoy thinking? I've heard him speak Yiddish; I know he was very aware of his family background. And now he's "forced" to play this role? (And - if I recall correctly - Shatner also has a Jewish family background).

All that's perhaps a bit alleviated by the fact that this story is of course anti-fascist and quite educative - I don't doubt for a second the writers had good intentions. But they could have done the same w/o using the SS as a visually pleasing backdrop. Is the rest of the story (minus the Nazi stuff) any good then? Nah, it's kind of standard: Evil planet. They get caught. They break free. They find alliances. They fix the planet. It's not really different than A piece of the Action from a few episodes back.

PS: Kirk topless counter: +1 :up:

[5.8/10] Even as a Jew, I tend to take the depiction of Nazis as bad guys in fiction for granted. Whether it’s Captain America or Wolfenstein or any number of other works that use WWII-era germans as a shorthand for evil, it doesn’t usually bother me. There’s something about the cartoonishness of it that should make it feel like they’re taking the horrors the Nazis committed lightly, but mostly just puts them at a remove from reality.

But that didn’t happen here, and I’m not sure why. I was bothered by them being used as a backdrop for a usual Trek-style rough and tumble adventure on an alien planet. Granted, they weren’t real Nazis -- just aliens following their lead like the gangsters in “A Piece of the Action,” but still. Something about their presence here was really off.

Perhaps it was that there was little treatment of them as bad guys, either one-dimensional or more complex. Machron is treated as an evil, power-hungry mastermind, but everybody else is secretly on the side of the resistance or quite pleased when Machron is gone, as if that whole “destroy your neighboring race” thing can be just swept under the rug. That didn’t sit well with me.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a very interesting story to be told about Nazi Germany and how many people under Hitler’s command were true believers, how many just wanted a better tomorrow for Germany and were willing to go along with whatever got them there, and how many were ostensibly decent people following orders and doing what they were told. But this wasn’t that exactly, more of a strange, episode-long excuse of Nazism, or at least a story that elides the ethos of genocide that was at the heart of their worldview.

The premise and reveal of the episode is actually sort of interesting, if bizarre. The notion of a Starfleet observer coming in, realizing that the two major groups on the planet are too divided to advance as a civilization, and wanting to unite them is fairly standard Trek stuff. But the reveal that he chose Nazi Germany as a rubric because of the efficiency with which Germany recovered from World War I under that style of government, with the implication that he believed such governance could be administered benignly (presumably without the bigotry and hate) is absolutely weird, but arguably an intriguing idea, particularly if framed through the notion that in the centuries since the Holocaust, the horrors of the Nazi aren’t as present in the minds of Starfleet officers as they were to people in the sixties.

But that’s not really what we get here. Instead, Kirk’s big speech is about how the Nazi’s weren’t all inherently bad people -- which again, there’s a legitimate point to be made about the villains of history not being akin to inhuman monsters but instead being regular human beings acting in service of a sinister ideology and social influence. The problem is that he then just chalks it up to an “absolute power corrupts absolutely” idea. Rather than engaging with the horrible prejudices and genocide of the Holocaust, “Patterns” just writes it off as a standard tale of power-hungry people getting out of control. That is unsatisfying, and even a little offensive to me.

What’s also strange is that this swastika-filled backdrop is basically just window dressing for a standard Star Trek romp. It’s otherwise a pretty typical story where the senior staff beams down to a strange planet, Kirk and Spock get into and out of some scrapes, and they uncover the big conspiracy and save the day. That’s frankly why I didn’t rate the episode lower. Apart from the strange, tacked-on Nazi stuff, this is business as usual for TOS -- a competent execution of the “how will we get out of this one?” type of story the show goes back to time and again.

Taken as that, there’s some decent stuff, albeit some of it plays more like a James Bond film than an episode of Trek. Kirk and Spock using their subcutaneous transponders to create a makeshift laser that gets them out of their cells is some handy McGyver-presaging material. As with “A Piece of the Action,” our heroes get captured and escaped and captured and escaped several times, with diminishing returns but some entertaining shtick. And McCoy is puzzlingly deposited into the third act for a little comic relief.

But in many ways, that usual romping around -- with secret resistance fighters and pulpy turncoats and a “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”-esque reveal -- feel even crasser. I don’t claim to know what the mood of the country was more than twenty years after the end of World War II, or what the popular assessment of the Holocaust was at that time. But there’s something that feels very inappropriate about setting this standard adventure there without seeming to take the Nazis particularly seriously as a threat or a horror.

Instead, it’s another opportunity for Kirk to pontificate on this and that. The big takeaway seems to be that the Prime Directive is still good (not that it’s stopped Kirk in the past), and that the Nazis were just a garden variety case of lust for power, even confined to one man. Aside from the guy who tortures Kirk and Spock, Machron is really the only guy in the whole episode who seems genuinely committed to Nazism. The Nazis seem like an odd lens to make the “nobody really wanted this but a handful of power-mad despot types” point that “Patterns” is going for.

(As an aside, it’s striking to me that the main characters of Inglorious Basterds use basically the same method to sneak into a Nazi gathering that Kirk & Co. do here. Now there’s a movie that handles Nazism with complexity but doesn’t pull punches either.)

That leaves “Patterns” feeling generally unsatisfying. Taken apart from its larger themes, it’s a standard-issue Star Trek caper, with little that’s awful but little particularly captivating either. But bundled up with the episode’s strange take on Nazism, not only does the standardness of the adventure seem off-putting given the context, but the weird assessment of Hitler and WWII-era Germany is, at a minimum, uncomfortable. I’m not sure what, precisely, “Patterns of Force” was going for, but whatever it was, it didn’t work.