Review

On yet another planet with aliens that look exactly like humans, Kirk is asked to be a delegation of one to negotiate the admittance of an isolationist culture into the Federation whereupon Kirk is abducted and placed into an identical copy of the Enterprise's interior. Inside there is nobody except for a girl who the aliens somehow expect Kirk to instantly fall for so that he'll forget everything else about his life and commit to spending the rest of his days on Gideon with her. As idiotic as it is already for the aliens to expect Kirk to just drop everything and fall for some random girl he just met shortly after facing the possibility that his entire crew has fallen victim to some terrible accident or attack, the reason why they've hatched this scheme is even more stupid: they want to take diseases he's a carrier for so they can commit germ warfare against their own people as a means to solving their overpopulation problem. Seriously, that's the premise the episode expects us to swallow.

Setting aside the already pesky logical problem of how the Gideons even acquired Kirk's medical history to begin with before specifically requesting that the Federation dispatch Kirk and only Kirk to their planet, their whole motivation reeks of painfully faulty logic. Gideon is depicted as being so overpopulated that it's mostly a standing room-only planet. Kirk asks the obvious question of why not simply mandate the use of contraceptives. The Gideon bureaucrat responds mostly with an alien version of Catholicism, by saying that all life is sacred and contraceptives are morally wrong. He goes on to make the even more dubious claim that their culture's love of life is what's made them so disease-resistant and long-lived in the first place. Kirk then points out the blatant hypocrisy of a society that bans contraceptives but condones committing germ warfare against its own people, which is a thinly veiled satire of a society that bans abortion or contraceptives but condones the death penalty.

All that social commentary might have been profound if the Gideons weren't such poor representations of socially conservative religious values. Since nobody is as stupid as the Gideons were during this episode, it's difficult to take any of the social commentary seriously. For instance, why didn't the Gideons just ask the Federation to help them find new planets to relocate to? Or alternatively since killing their own people to cut down on population numbers seems to satisfy their moral code, why not just directly mass execute a large swath of the population rather than hatch this overcomplicated, indirect germ warfare plan?

The Gideons weren't the only ones suffering from faulty reasoning though. The plot itself has some real clunkers too. If space comes at such a premium on that planet, how were they able to build a giant, empty replica of the entire Enterprise interior? Where do they get all their food? How is waste managed? At one point Spock asks a Starfleet admiral for permission to beam down to Gideon to rescue Kirk. The admiral asks Spock if Kirk's life is in danger. Spock doesn't reply as if to concede that Kirk's life probably isn't in danger. Huh? Kirk is being held against his will! Of course his life is in danger! Later on when Spock beamed down to Gideon he was easily able to order the Enterprise to beam the landing party up with his communicator. So why didn't Kirk bring a communicator with him in the first place when he originally beamed down to Gideon?

All things considered it's a terrible episode. That said there are a few nice moments interspersed with the prevailing badness. My favorite moment was Spock's line to the Gideon bureaucrat that "the wars between opposing planetary systems no longer prevail in our galaxy." Ah, Federation propaganda! I also enjoyed how Kirk wandering through the empty Enterprise was intercut with his crew's efforts aboard the real Enterprise to rescue him. And finally the scene when Kirk is tipped off to the fact that the whole thing must be a sham due to the fact that he can hear sound coming from outside the ship which wouldn't happen in a real space ship was a nice touch of scientific accuracy. All in all though you wouldn't be missing much by skipping this episode.