The Enterprise is checking on a colony that should be dead, cuz' there's crazy bad-rays (these are like X-rays, only they kill you (X-rays probably do too, given enough of them, in which case, bad-rays are defined by there being enough of them)), only when they roll up (beam down) they discover that the colonists aren't just fine, they're in better health than they were when they left Earth four years previous. To the point that people with appendectomies now have fully functional appendixes.
This magic is due to a magic plant that spits out magic spores that absorb the bad-rays and make happy, perfect, tranquil, peaceful, blissful, hippy-tastic people. EVEN VULCANS! To be fair, while the transition to emotion-feeling awesomeness is pleasant for humans, it briefly hurts for Vulcans, apparently. So they are still better. Or worse.
Which is where the whole made-me-think thing comes in to play: Kirk has some amusing lines in this one, including a few that basically can be summarized as, "Wait, you're happy? What are you, fucking insane? We're not meant to be happy. You should be SUFFERING right now!" And on the face of it, that's kind of a dickish thing to say. Kirk basically states that he thinks his crewmen, and humans in general, should be confronted with struggle and hatred and misery and toil and sadness, and they're all crazy to prefer being immortal (presumably), in good health (definitely) and happy.
My gut reaction was to side with the converted: fuck you, guy, if you want to make everyone suffer. I mean, really, what's the harm? Isn't that what we're all working towards? Not being miserable, even being actively happy? That's a good thing.
And I still don't side with Kirk, but I started thinking about myself, and my own life, and in my own life, I'm doing SHOTS with Shatner. For a specific reason: I don't really see the point to life, and the shots (as well as, to a lesser but probably important extent, the Shatner) make it bearable while I'm trying to find some self-sustaining reason to keep breathing.
Part of the reason I am not dead is that pro-actively dying inevitably involves some pain, and is not entirely sure regardless of methods. I've forgotten where I was going with this, so I'm going to just forge ahead and come up with a NEW reaction to the falling apart of my faith in the purpose of life, I guess. That was an aside, though I did not put it in parentheses, so it may have been hard to tell.
Anyway, living is not innately rewarding, at least to me. So being happy thanks to some spore that made me perfectly healthy and perfectly happy would mostly be exactly like my life when I'm drunk, but would preclude hangovers and would also mean I had no reason to drink (because we drink for the same reason that we commit suicide or tell jokes: because doing so is more satisfying than not doing so).
Being completely happy means having no reason to do anything. And if you're completely happy because you worked for it and suffered to get there, well, that's an accomplishment. Cuz' it's hard as fuck, if me or Kim Kardashian are anything to go by (ironic? or straight? You be the judge...). That's probably a really satisfying place to be. But if you're just happy because of nothing... while it's nice for you, what was the point? You might as well just be dead. There was nothing there before, and there's nothing there now, you're just a thing. You're functional, not living.
So maybe Kirk is right, even if he IS an asshole. Either way, I'm drunk. And I think that's a positive thing.
Cold War-shit: I'm not going to go into it, I'm just going to note that this episode also had some Cold War tropes living large, and I want to know that in prose, because I am really amused by how many of these eps do, and I think I'm going to revisit that after I've watched the whole first season, and just tally up the ratio of 'any-age sci-fi' to 'totally written in the Cold War-era sci-fi' in the first season of Star Trek. Was that really all one sentence?
Random stats: 1 swig from the 100-proof root-beer vodka bottle, two shots of Canadian Club, two Canadian Club and Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi drinks, two shots of Grant's scotch, and... possibly some more shit. Not a lot of food, I can tell you that much. Also, one never-spoken-of love-affair between Spock and a chick who later ended up hippy-spore-food, which was awesome. And a shit-ton of laundry done, tonight. Seriously, I did a lot of laundry. It's nice to have clean clothes n' sheets n' stuff, again. I did it about three days after I needed to do it.
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