The Necessary Insanity of Star Fleet Captains

This Valentine’s Day I’d like to do a post about my very first love, Star Trek.

The original Star Trek.

Not the sequels that started with NextGen and continued to the present day with the J.J. Abrams movie, but the original 100 episodes of the first four seasons.

(Unlike many fans, I count the animated Filmation series among the originals.)

One thing that strikes me about those great episodes is the number of starship captains the crew of the Enterprise encounter who have gone around the bend crazy.

Off the top of my head I can think of Commodore Matt Decker, commander of the Enterprise‘s sister ship the USS Constellation, who lost his crew in battle with the The Doomsday Machine. When Kirk encounters him, Decker is insane with loss and grief, and ultimately commits suicide in a reckless attempt to avenge his crew.

I also think of Garth of Izar, former Fleet Captain and a hero of Kirk’s, who went mad and attempted the genocide of an entire planet, only to be committed to a sanitarium for the criminally insane on the planet Elba II. I’ve always hated him because he blew up Marta, the hot Orion girl played by Batgirl actress Yvonne Craig.

Ronald Tracey was the captain of the USS Exeter, who lost his crew to a virus on the planet Omega IV, went mad and decided to use Federation technology to help one group of Omegans wipe out another. Tracey was really evil, and it was hard to see why anyone would let him captain a starship.

Other insane Federation officials include the scientist Roger Korby, who decides to download his consciousness into a robot, Federation historian John Gill who introduced Nazism to the planet Ekos, Dr. Richard Daystrom who used his own insane brain as a model for an insane computer, and Captain Merrick, who fed his crew into gladiatorial games on a world with a Roman Empire that had twentieth century technology.

That’s a lot of insanity. One would think that in the future, there would be better ways of weeding out such people through extensive psychological testing, more advanced than what we have now. It makes sense that the Federation does have this ability, but imagine that instead of using it to prevent insane people from attaining positions of power in the Federation, they use it to encourage them.

Being a starship captain might be the most stressful job ever conceived of. Far from home and safety, the tiny starships must travel into an unknown, chaotic universe full of dangers, with little hope of returning. In the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Gene Roddenberry includes a forward written by Captain Kirk, in which Kirk notes that the Enterprise, under his command, was the only one of the twelve original starships charged with a “five-year mission” to return with ship and crew relatively intact. The other eleven ships were all lost or destroyed.

There’s a lot of evidence that Captain Kirk was more than a little nuts. In an episode entitled “Obsession” Kirk relentlessly and beyond all logic hunts a cloud creature that subsisted on human blood across the galaxy even when Spock and McCoy both believe he might be going too far. His friends literally worry about his sanity.

Consider Kirk’s relationships with women: He seems to fall hard for them and then forget all about them a week later. His weirdest love affair was with Rayna, in an episode entitled “Requiem for Methuselah.” Kirk competes for the affections of a beautiful android woman named Rayna with her creator, Flint. The men ultimate come to blows over her, and Rayna, unable to choose between the two men, overloads her circuits and dies. Kirk is so devastated over her loss that Spock fears he has lost the ability to command. The final scene in the episode is very creepy, as Spock enters Kirk’s quarters and performs a Vulcan mind meld, telling Kirk to “forget.” The implication is that Spock is using his mind meld to repair Captain Kirk’s mind in some way, either helping him to deal with the pain of his loss or perhaps rewriting his memories of the events.

This scene gets me thinking: Maybe the reason all these other starship captains go insane and become dangerous is because they don’t have Spock’s to keep their brains in check. Maybe Spock’s duties include not only helping the Captain run the ship, but keeping the Captain running as a useful and quick thinking sociopath.

As we learn more about the human mind in the coming decades, perhaps we will learn that what makes us great also makes us dangerous, and that we need just a little bit of well managed madness to keep ourselves alive.