One five-minute scene made Matt sit up: a man flatly refuses to accept he carries a deadly disease, and it feels ripped from 2026. Matt and Sean talk about the accidental anti-vax parable buried in Star Trek TOS Season 3, Episode 20, "The Way to Eden." Space hippies hijack the Enterprise chasing paradise, and one man's denial of the science reads very differently today. So is this clunker secretly ahead of its time? Or does the DayGlo nonsense smother the one idea worth keeping?

Chapters

  • 00:00: Intro
  • 02:37: Mailbag
  • 04:17: Today’s Episode
  • 05:04: This Time in History
  • 10:46: Today’s Discussion

Transcript

Intro

Sean Ferrell: In today's episode of Trek in Time, we're talking about rebellion. Welcome, everybody, to Trek in Time, where we're watching every episode of Star Trek in chronological stardate order. We're also taking a look at the world at the time of original broadcast. We're currently in the last days of the Original series. You heard me right. I said we're in the last days of the original series. Why am I emphasizing that, you wonder? Why am I saying that in the way that I am?

Matt Ferrell: Well, because we're liars.

Sean Ferrell: Gentle viewers and listeners, we have to apologize to you. We lied to you last week. With all the best of intentions, Matt and I said, yeah, let's watch the new season of Strange New Worlds, which is beginning to drop next Thursday, Thursday being the day we record, which means the new episode dropped at 3am this morning. And Matt and I didn't realize that watching it the day of recording would basically be an impossibility. So we're not going to talk about Strange New Worlds yet. We're going to start that watch next week. I super duper promise. I triple promise it's going to be next week. We'll be watching the first episode of season four of Strange New Worlds, which means those of you who scrambled to watch that episode in anticipation of us talking about that episode, well, I got some good news and I got some bad news instead. Today on Trek in Time, we're going to be talking about the Way to Eden, which originally broadcast on February 21, 1969. As I mentioned, we'll also be talking about what the world was like at that time. So that's the good news. The bad news, we're going to be talking about the Way to Eden, which originally broadcast on February 21, 1969. Talking about the world at the time of original broadcast. That's right, everybody. I'm letting the cat out of the bag early on this. This one's a stinker. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Today's episode, directed by David Alexander, story by Arthur Hyneman and Michael Richards. No, Matt, not that Michael Richards. A different Michael Richards. Should I tell you which Michael Richards this is now, or should I wait till the end? And that's a serious question. I'll let you pick.

Matt Ferrell: It's a good tease.

Sean Ferrell: Wait until the end. All right. Okay, we'll talk about Michael Richards at the end of the discussion. If I somehow forget, please remind me. Before we get into our conversation about this episode, we always like to visit the mailbag and see what you've had to say about previous episodes. Matt, what did you find for us this week?

Mailbag

Matt Ferrell: There were a couple and it was from the Lights of Zetar episode, everybody's favorite. We had AJ Chan who wrote at 146 in our podcast wrote written by Sherry Lewis. This is the Sherry Lewis who created Lamb Chops Play along according to IMDb. I did. When I read this comment AJ I heard a record scratch and I went that can't be. Let me go to IMDb and look up Lamb Chops. Sean. She wrote this episode.

Sean Ferrell: I wish now that Lamb Chop had appeared in the episode. Wouldn't that have been fascinating?

Matt Ferrell: Yes, it's Lights of Zetar.

Sean Ferrell: That would have been great.

Matt Ferrell: And the other comment I wanted to call out was Mark Loveless. He wrote quoting you. It would have been Red Mist filling that room when we talked about the pressure scene but have just like crushed her. He wrote, oh my God, that is burned into my brain forever. Plus plus now I have to re watch the movie Kick Ass just to see Red Mist which means I also have to rewatch Superbad. Thanks, Sean. There goes my weekend. The sexism was hard to deal with. Even taking into account the 60s I half expected some male to accuse her of having her monthlies.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it really.

Matt Ferrell: Yes, it was hard, sadly. Yeah.

Sean Ferrell: Thank you everybody for your comments. We always enjoy reading them and we love sharing them. Jump in now if you'd like to respond to any of those responses and we'll get a chain going of just responses to responses.

Matt Ferrell: Let's do it.

Sean Ferrell: That sound you hear, those lights you see. No, it's not you falling in love, it's the read alert. It's time for Matt to tackle the Wikipedia description. Take it away, Matt.

Today’s Episode

Matt Ferrell: The Enterprise is hijacked by a criminal doctor and his loyal hippie like followers who are attempted to find paradise.

This Time in History

Sean Ferrell: That's right. We have with us the the full cast except for Nichelle Nichols. I'm not sure where Ms. Nichols was at the time of filming, but we do get some everything from Captain Kirk all the way down to Nurse Chapel, who, Nurse Chapel, in a good turn of how to really provide good bedside manner, is clearly judging every person in sick bay through this episode. So that was fun to see. The original time of broadcast, February 21, 1969. So basically a week earlier than last week's episode. What does that mean, Matt? Well, yes, it means you're about to sing Everyday People by Sly and the Family Stone, which was the number one song this week. Take it away, Matt. If anybody's confused, it's just occurred to me. We're in episode, what, 4 million of this podcast. And if anybody's confused as to why when I introduced the number one song of you might not hear anything, it's because of copyright. We're not able, even if it's Matt singing, we're not able to share the song because of copyright. So trust me, Matt's singing voice, it's in rare form. And the number one film this week at the box office. Yes, Matt, we're still in the midst of the 93 year long streak of Funny Girl being the number one film in the box office. Yes, Barbra Streisand, Omar Sharif, Funny Girl still number one. And we've been talking about the shows that were the top programs in the nielsen ratings of 1969, as opposed to what we did for the first half of season three, which was to look at the competition on Friday nights. These are just the major programs, regardless of the evening that they aired. We've talked about everything from Rowan and Martin's Laugh in all the way down to here's Lucy, which was Lucille Ball's return to return to television. She had ended one program on NBC. It started up a new one at CBS.

The same thing was happening or about to happen with the Red Skelton Hour, which was a 20 year long program. It was a variety show. It was hosted by Red Skelton. And Red Skelton had had a career as a radio and a motion picture star. And he was very much of the vaudeville history of early film and television entertainers. So it was very broad comedy. The image that I found for this program is literally just him in a hobo clown outfit. So it's that style of comedy. He was on the air in this program for 20 years. However, it was not 20 years straight on one network. The network that he started on, NBC, is also the network he ended on for basically two years starting in 1970. At this point, he was on CBS. He was on CBS for about 15 years and was, I mean, I'm talking about it as one of the top ten programs on the air of 1969. Matt, remember the program that I talked about where it was a well received spinoff of the Andrew Griffith show, the Mayberry RFD and it was canceled merely because CBS was moving away from middle America programming and moving to let's go where the hip young kids are living in the cities? This is another program. They effectively canceled one of their top rated programs starring a beloved entertainer who had been on the air for 20 years simply because his show appealed most to people in the Midwest and those Midwestern, more elderly audience dollars were not as valuable as the younger dollars in the cities. CBS was going through a massive if it's rural, get it outta here, we're going urban attitude. People still talk about that today. I do not believe it is happening today, but the fact that it ever actually did happen is. I mean, it's bonkers.

Like, what are you doing? What are you doing? And in the news on this day, February 21, 1969, wanted to highlight a article from the New York Times about the recently sworn in president Richard Nixon, who over a two day period made two major addresses to Congress. And this is the second one. And at this second one he made a call to not do away with, but to evolve the Electoral College in presidential elections. Calling for a change to the rules that would allow for a person to win the presidency if they gained 40% of the electoral vote. If nobody reached that number, then there would be a popular vote runoff. I did not realize that during the campaign for presidency in 1968, which obviously Richard Nixon won, one of his campaign platforms was to end the Electoral College. Once he got into the presidency, however, it evolved with him saying he understood historically the necessity of the Electoral College to protect smaller states from being overrun by the desires of the larger states. Hold back from saying the Electoral College should be removed and instead went with a more nuanced the Electoral College should evolve. One of his suggestions being, you should no longer be a winner take all system. It should be apportioned according to the vote of the popular vote. Therefore, if you win 60% of the popular vote in Tennessee, you should get 60% of their electoral votes. A nuanced argument about evolution of the Electoral College, which I found surprising considering who it was and what era it was. I tend to think of the calls for the Electoral College removal and evolution as being born in the year 2000. Why do I think that, Matt? I think you know why. Yes, a guy named Hanging Chad on. Now to our discussion of this episode. This is the Way to Eden. Where do we start? I've already started. I already let the cat out of the bag. I already started like this.

Today’s Discussion

I feel like everything we've said about previous episodes that were not great, that were clunkers, this makes those that we've been talking about basically for like the last six episodes of this podcast, we've had, like, this isn't great. We had one last week that rose above the others and we were pleased to see it. But this is like, this is not a great era of Trek. This episode sticks out like a sore thumb in my childhood memory. I loved Star Trek enough as a kid. Like most young viewers, I would watch terrible episodes of shows that I loved simply because I loved the program overall. Even as in that moment as a child, I would be thinking, this is dumb. And this one ho-boy. Like, let's put in a bunch of musical numbers. Let's. Yeah. The guy who played Adam, his last name is Napier, he got this role in an audition where he jumped up on a table and belted out a Doors song in front of everybody that he was auditioning against. That's how he got this role. And he and the blonde singer wrote these songs. And as one comment I found, as I was doing research for this episode pointed out, this is the worst kind of padding. Watching people be sung at makes me feel awkward in a way, as if I am in the room with this awkward singing. And it makes me feel so cringy that not only is it like I'm in the room while watching this episode, I feel like I'm standing next to the performers, just standing there. And then they cut to the audience, these Starfleet uniformed officers who are grooving along. If you look at their eyes in the one sequence where they're. It's. The room fills up with Starfleet officers. Whenever they showed the Starfleet officers from the front, no two Starfleet people are looking in the same place. It is moments of just like extras basically going, like, what are we supposed to be enjoying? Like, I feel that awkwardness. I feel the forced nature of it.

I feel the lack of. There's like a lack of respect for the audience and for the characters at the same time. It's weird. It's just in this one in particular, the kind of vacuous presentation of the hippie movement in what has been pointed out by other analysis of this episode. This is effectively a takedown of Timothy Leary. This is. He's a learned man. He is a college professor. He is supposedly an intelligent person, but he's gone off the rails, clearly insane, and embraced this weird culture. And the depiction of this weird culture. It's like Star Trek in this moment, decided, well, we've taken the progressive side in a lot of different ways. How about we do a takedown episode in an unfair way of the rebellion movement in the United States? We're going to, like, take these kids down a notch. And it's just. It's. They are attacking them for being overly intellectual. They are attacking them for being unwilling to accept authority. They are attacking them for the parody of hippie talk, the use of Herbert, the chanting, the like, the music, the colors of the clothing, the style, what they're wearing, putting one of them in an ear, prosthetics that look like somebody with a two handfuls of Silly Putty just kind of slammed their hands into his sides of his head and then let go. And it's like, I can see your fingerprints in there. It's just. It's everything about this. As a kid, I would watch this episode and be like, this isn't fun. This isn't fun. Of course, ultimately, the takedown at the end of like. And they can't get what they want because Eden is actually full of poison. And it's just. What. What were we.

What were we offered? What was this?

Matt Ferrell: Can I add to this?

Sean Ferrell: Oh, sure. And then I've got a. And then I've got a spin at the end. I've got a spin at the end, which is the Michael Richards connection, which we'll get to after you talk. Okay, so go ahead.

Matt Ferrell: My notes on this are short and they parallel a lot of what you just pointed out. The whole aspect of hippies, am I right? Was basically the attitude of the entire episode, which was perplexing. And the idea of that they're so disconnected, hippies don't really understand reality and that they're going to basically end up getting themselves killed. That's like the lesson that they're trying to teach us. By the end of the episode, which is so unbelievably stupid and hacky and just bad, I was just perplexed at how much this episode just is just like. It's like watching an episode of the Gong Show.

Sean Ferrell: It's just awful.

Matt Ferrell: But, Sean, I'm not going to defend it, but there was an element in this episode that made me go, wait, wait, is this having a kind of moment? Is this. Is this kind of. I'm having an out of body of experience that this episode still has something to actually say today. And it's the Anti Vax movement, Sean.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt Ferrell: The Anti Vax moment. It was when that scene happened where they said, he has a disease. He's in denial about this disease. And he's like, I refuse to accept your science and what you're saying. And he's basically just flipping off at them. I'm sitting there watching this, and for the entire episode, Sean, I'm basically sitting there half asleep. This episode was so boring. It was making me angry. And then that scene happened and I sat up and went, holy crap. It actually has something to say that's like very 2026. Holy crap. They of course would have no idea that that would be the case when they wrote this. But I gotta tip my hat. They had a point of, there is a movement of people in our world, not just the United States, that refuse to accept reality as it is. And they have. Whatever their reasons are, they believe their own reality. And that's, that's actually very dangerous. And we're witnessing it in 2026. RFK Jr everybody. Oh my God. Like what's happening here in the United States right now is literally take that character and put him in charge of the U.S. healthcare. That is what we have right now. And I was just dumbfounded that there was a five minute sequence in this episode that made me go, you go, that's awesome. Well done show. Now can we skip the rest of this crap? Because this makes no sense. And the other thing I wanted to point out was the takeaway at the end of the, killing the characters off at the end.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah.

Matt Ferrell: I thought was like the most heartless, harshest way they could have ended this episode. Kill the hippies. Yeah. Who.

Sean Ferrell: Who thought that was the hippies? The hippies would kill themselves. Like the hippies are so head in the clouds that they will kill themselves. And it is again, evocative of the response to a lot of the anti vaxxers which was, well, it doesn't really matter. They feel that way because if that's how they feel, they won't take care of themselves and then they will end up dying off. And it's like, no, that's cutting your nose off to spite your face because it's a destabilization of the protection of the wider society. That's the problem. Not that John doesn't believe in vaccines, but that because John doesn't believe in vaccines, he's putting us all at risk of a thing. I agree with you. That's the one element here that stands out. And it made me wonder about like the alternative version of this, which was like, if you sucked the hippiness out of it. And it was just a story of like, we've been sent to stop this ship because we know it's full of people who, who are carrying a disease and they do not believe it's real, but it is. They are all carriers. They will not get the disease themselves, but they are carriers and they are trying to find a new home and they won't stop visiting planets. And whenever they do, there's an outbreak of that disease. And we need to stop these people. And we're trying to figure out what to do with them. That would be a compelling story of we are here to help you find a place where you can be safe. And those people saying, just leave us alone. We're going to go wherever we want because we reject your rules and we reject your society and we reject your conclusions. That would be a fascinating episode. Instead, this one is so dressed up in DayGlo colors that any wider message like you picked up on is hard to see. It's really kind of. It feels strangely like.

I don't know when this episode would have been going into production, but at this point it's being broadcast early, early, early in the days of President Nixon, only a month into his presidency. But it likely was being written and being produced right around the time of the elections in 1968, if not just after that. And it made me wonder, is this somehow a network or production response to all of the conflict of 1968? The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And RFK, the chaos of the Democratic Convention, the rising hippie movement, the calls for peace and ending Vietnam, civil rights? Is this somehow a reactionary response to all that? To say, you know what? People are asking for too much? It just kind of feels like this knee jerk response in a way, which is really strange considering, like, you take these people out of this episode and put them on Laugh in and they would have fit in perfectly because Laugh in was a extremely successful program that was effectively putting hippie movement attitude on television every week. So it's this kind of weird. Which side of this discussion are you landing on? When you are arguably one of the more progressive programs on television, it's really surprising to say, have them paint with such a broad brush. People who are rejecting wider society is just being painted with this kind of like. And look how dumb they are. And we're gonna make fun of them. Very, very odd.

Do you want to hear the twist?

Matt Ferrell: Yeah. What is this Michael Richards connection?

Sean Ferrell: Michael Richards is the pen name for one DC Fontana. DC Fontana did not want her name on this episode, so she used the name Michael Richards. She also wrote the first version of the episode, That Which Remains, in which the artificial intelligence guardian of the planet kept showing up and touching people. I am for you touching them. She wrote the first draft of that. They made big changes to it. She did not like it. She put her pen name on that one as well. She did it on this one. The original story of this one was not a Chekhov meeting. We didn't even talk about the Chekhov love story, which is so forgettable and silly as to be like, just completely put it into a. Put it into the shuttle bay and eject it from the ship. Originally, it was going to be McCoy's daughter was brought on board the ship and she and Kirk begin to have a romance. And then through multiple revisions, it ended up being like, what put into Chekhov instead of Kirk? I'm not saying I would have liked that better. I think it's actually kind of creepy if McCoy's daughter shows up and then Kirk and she start to have some sort of romantic entanglement that seems completely unnecessary. But DC Fontana's involvement in the original draft of this makes me think it would have been a lot smarter. I do not know what the plot of her original draft was, other than to know that McCoy's daughter was going to be involved in it. But I have to think there was a bigger message and probably not painted up in hippie colors the way this one was. For it to reach the point where she would rather have her name taken off of the episode than to be associated with it speaks volumes. And it really kind of. We've talked about her before and how, you know, if Gene Roddenberry is the father of Star Trek, she's the mother.

And she's in fact, responsible for a lot of those elements that are the key elements for me and my fandom of, like, what are Vulcans and how does this work? And the progressiveness that we are very often giving credit to the overall program for. Seems like it often comes from her. Found myself sitting here and thinking, like, wow, she really must have loved the opportunity, the possibility of Star Trek, because she hung on to coming back for the animated series and for Next Generation, despite the fact that she was asking that her name be taken off of episodes. There must have been things going on behind the scenes that really made her willing to say, I want to stay within this family as it moves forward. Because when you're taking your name off of episodes, you would assume that you. That the worm had turned. You'd assume that it'd be like, okay, this is this. I'm out. But that's not what happened. She wanted to be a part of it all the way into Next Gen. And then when we get to Next Gen, things forced her out for good. Finally, at that point, in a. In a way that had to do again, with things being changed in her scripts in ways that she did not like, the same thing kept happening to her here. And it's really tragic, like, to have an episode under the name of Michael Richards and we're sitting here like, what a clunker.

But it started off with some other possibility under her.

Matt Ferrell: So whatever that possibility was, it would have been better. There's no doubt in my mind.

Sean Ferrell: Yeah, it's. This is a hard one to watch. So I guess my, My only question for the viewers and listeners. We had a comment from Babarudra, I think it was last week, where he basically hinted at this episode coming up and he was like, there's one on the way. That's really gonna be a rough watch. Yep. Babarudra, you weren't wrong. But is there anybody out there? And I invite this with genuine curiosity. Is there anybody out there who's like, no, this one is one of my favorites. I really would love to know what it is about this episode that some people might connect with. Or is this one where you're all seeing the same thing we're seeing, which is like, boy, rough terrain ahead. So jump into the comments, let us know. As always, commenting, liking, subscribing, sharing with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. If you'd like to support us directly, you can go to trekintime.Show. Click the join button. It'll make you an Ensign. Which means you'll be signed up for our spin off program, Out of Time, in which we talk about things that don't fit within the confines of this program. We hope you'll be interested in checking that out. As always, thank you so much for taking the time to watch or listen and we'll talk to you next time.