2x24 The Ultimate Computer

[8.5/10] I’ve said it before, and I imagine I’ll say it again -- Star Trek is a surprisingly luddite show for a series so steeped in the potential and possibility of the technology of the future. Every time the Enterprise crew runs into some sort of artificial intelligence (which is roughly once every five episodes) there’s endless meditations on how all the ones and zeroes in the world just cannot capture the soul of man, and how well-meaning A.I. invariably goes wrong.

But what sets “The Ultimate Computer” apart -- and what sets virtuoso Trek scribe D.C. Fontana’s scripts apart as a general rule -- is that it focuses on the effect the M5, a computer that can potentially guide an entire ship all by itself, has on the people who made it, who service it, and who will possibly be replaced by it. The episode is not simply founded on ideas of “robots = bad” (though there’s some of that too, certainly) -- it’s rooted in how everyone involved is affected by the prospect of computers rising to the level of humans in their capabilities, or perhaps even surpassing it.

That makes “The Ultimate Computer,” with the attendant fears of automation that are baked into its premise, still very relevant fifty years later. There were understandable insecurities at the time the episode was made that the rise of these new machines would put the old flesh and blood workers out of a job. (There’s a funny All in the Family episode about this same fear.) To some degree, those fears were warranted, with automation in factories and other parts of the manufacturing sector.

But here in 2017, the world is being Moneyball’d; big data is providing the next big breakthroughs; A.I.s are beating our champions in jeopardy and driving cars on their own and even raining death down from above with drone strikes. The same insecurities that fuel “The Ultimate Computer” are very much present today, and that fact makes the episode seem both prescient in how the concerns it identifies are still relevant, but also a bit overblown considering we’ve had these same conversations for fifty years and seen the world tick up for the better.

Still, apart from the fascinating (a word I hesitate to use given McCoy’s playfully meta-prohibition on Spock saying it) social commentary aspect of the episode, what really struck about “The Ultimate Computer” is its focus on character motivations.

That starts with Kirk. He’s the fulcrum for those automation anxieties, thinking out loud with McCoy about whether he’s resistant to the M5 because of concerns about its abilities to function or whether he’s instead sublimating his own fears about being replaced, whether he’s taking natural precautions on new technology or being unduly reluctant given all that the duotronic computer has allowed the Federation to do. It creates layers in Kirk’s reactions when things inevitably start out right and then go wrong, and Shatner actually plays those shades pretty well, whether it’s his self-questioning with Bones or his almost cheerful resignation to being called a dunsil and seemingly consigned to the scrap heap.

But it ends with Daystrom. To the extent “The Ultimate Computer” has one, he’s the villain of the episode (and as it’s neat to meet the namesake of The Daystrom Institute) but he’s not treated as a mustache-twirling baddie or even the usual incompetent Starfleet potentate. Instead, he’s depicted is a man with a dream, someone who had a breakthrough in his twenties and has been struggling in vain to match it the rest of his life.

He wants to deliver the benefits of space travel and exploration without the risks posed by sending people hurtling through space and confronting hostile creatures. That’s not crazy, given the number of scrapes the Enterprise alone has had to make it through. But he also treats M5 as his child, something accentuated by impressing his own n-grams into its circuits. Daystrom isn’t just hopeful and a true believer about the benefits that this technology will bring to humanity -- he is invested in it as his creation, as an offspring of sorts, excusing its behavior until it becomes too much for him to bear. He is a proud papa when the M5 is succeeding, mastering transportation, away team rosters, and even war games.

Of course, that spirals out into the usual Asimov-like business of taking the well-meaning directive -- “preserve yourself” -- and turning that into an overzealous license to kill and destroy starships it misperceives at threats. But what works about the way that Kirk disables the M5 after it proves dangerous, and what distinguishes it from all the other times that Kirk has felled some evil robot with an oversimplified paradox, is that it’s rooted in something ironically very human.

He relies on the parts of Daystrom’s ethical code molded into the M5 and disarms his mechanical foe not by using logic, but by presenting him with a moral quandary. There is irony and poetry in defeating a robot who seems inhuman in its disregard for the value of life (or at least a very generous definition of self-defense) by teaching it the horror of what it’s done and having it effective give its own life as penance. It’s sort of deeply thought, affecting take on this whizbang world of lasers and spacemen that makes Star Trek more than just a rollicking adventure in the cosmos.

Of course, the episode ends with Kirk reaffirming the value of human beings in the usual, trite manner, in this case talking about how he banked on the commodore’s compassion in a way a computer would not, and reiterating the “computers can’t feel, man” tack that the show’s taken before. But it also ends with the show finding its balance, as it often does, in Spock.

One of the most touching moments in the episode (and one that frankly feels a little out of character), is Spock reassuring Kirk that whatever his fascination with computers, he’ll always be loyal to and appreciative of his captain and the ship couldn’t run without him. He doesn’t say it in so many words, but in his own Spockian way, it offers Kirk exactly what he needs to know and hear right then. And in the episode’s final moments, Spock explains that even he, much more embracing of the possibilities of artificial intelligence and embracing of efficiency, does not think they’re better than humans.

That’s the cinch. As much as “The Ultimate Computer* goes Frankenstein’s Monster with the M5 here, there is an affirmation, that the balance between technology and human labor is an important one -- than man needs the tools to allow him to fly, as Kirk himself once put it, to improve his lives and create greater possibilities, but that even the most stoic and open-minded person on the Enterprise isn’t ready to trade in his friends for those tools. The fears of being replaced are natural, as are the worries that technology gone wrong could prove a catastrophe, but in suggesting some manner of symbiosis, the idea that technology and humanity can grow together (and I don’t mean you, Borg Collective), there is still the sense of optimism and measured potential that undergirds the everlasting ethos of Star Trek, and all that followed from it.