I tried re-watching the relevant scenes to try and understand the rationale for this episode, but was left simply scratching my head. With a strong anti-abortion theme, and the Gideon Council Elder (David Hurst) proclaiming life sacred and love of life the greatest gift, the idea that his own daughter (Sharon Acker) would submit to a radical experiment to adjust the planet's life cycle sounded entirely contradictory. In this case, the 'adjustment' desired amounted to introducing a virus to the blood stream of young volunteers, thereby nullifying the effect of the Gideons' long life span, in effect reducing the overpopulation of the planet. But that flew in the face of Hodin's own ideas about life being the greatest gift. The whole thing just didn't make sense.
On top of that, you had the comical representation of the population of Gideon, herding like cattle in a limited space, and looking every bit like the forerunners of the Blue Man Group, except they weren't wearing blue as far as I could tell. Opposed to violence and warfare, Hodin's two henchmen didn't have any problem attacking Captain Kirk when he got just a little too logical.
The one thing that stood out for me in this story was Spock's comment about the purpose of diplomacy - that being to prolong a crisis. He could have been talking about the Israeli-Palestinian problem just as well back in 1969, because that issue is still going on today. Anyway, with most other Star Trek episodes, even if they weren't very good, they generally managed to establish some kind of continuity from start to finish. This one just keeps looping around in my mind as annoyingly contradictory with a resolution that was anything but.
On top of that, you had the comical representation of the population of Gideon, herding like cattle in a limited space, and looking every bit like the forerunners of the Blue Man Group, except they weren't wearing blue as far as I could tell. Opposed to violence and warfare, Hodin's two henchmen didn't have any problem attacking Captain Kirk when he got just a little too logical.
The one thing that stood out for me in this story was Spock's comment about the purpose of diplomacy - that being to prolong a crisis. He could have been talking about the Israeli-Palestinian problem just as well back in 1969, because that issue is still going on today. Anyway, with most other Star Trek episodes, even if they weren't very good, they generally managed to establish some kind of continuity from start to finish. This one just keeps looping around in my mind as annoyingly contradictory with a resolution that was anything but.