Dead Girlfriends in the Time of COVID-19: Part 2
March 30, 2020
Dear Readers, I sure hope you're all staying safe out there. In this crisis, I'm continuing to attempt to answer the question absolutely no one has asked, "Do any DFGRR contestants lose girlfriends to epidemics or pandemics?" Moving chronologically through our contestant franchises, next up is Star Trek.
Today I'd like to educate you about Odonna, a lovely woman whom Captain Kirk encountered under mysterious circumstances in January 1969.
Odonna ("The Mark of Gideon", aired 01-17-1969)
Odonna is a native of planet Gideon, a secretive planet that has only recently agreed to receive a Federation visitor. It has insisted that the visitor be none other than Captain James T. Kirk. When he beams down to the provided coordinates, however, Kirk finds himself on a completely empty Enterprise with a badly bruised arm. Meanwhile, Gideon calls Spock on the regular Enterprise and says Kirk hasn't arrived.
While Spock, McCoy, Uhura, et al try to negotiate with Gideon to figure out where Kirk has dematerialized to, Kirk searches the vacant Enterprise for clues. The first one he finds is a mysterious young woman in a semi-opaque jumpsuit, who introduces herself as Odonna.
She also seems confused about where they are and why they're all alone. She says the last thing she remembers is being in a room so crowded that she couldn't breathe. When she found herself on an empty ship with lots of space, she "wanted to float."
Most of the episode consists of Spock and Ambassador Hodin of Gideon engaging in diplomacy while Spock demands to know where they've taken the captain, and the ambassador insists that he doesn't know where Kirk went.
Meanwhile, Kirk and Odonna are trying to figure out where they are. Or at least, he is. She starts hitting on him very quickly. Soon, she declares that she would be happy to stay right where they are for a long long time. She likes the Empty-prise because, as she puts it, "All my life I've dreamed of being alone."
Since she's a beautiful and mysterious stranger, Kirk briefly humors her request to stay on this empty ship forever. But he is still upset about not knowing where he is. Eventually, he asks her why she's so happy about this. She tells him that on her planet, it's impossible to be alone because there are far too many people on the planet. In fact, her people would kill or die for a chance to get some space.
This monologue must have been sexier in person than it is on screen, because Kirk reacts to it by pulling her in for a kiss.
Where does the epidemic come in?
After a commercial break, they're shown coming out of a room with their arms around each other, with the implication being that they've been doing more than just kiss. Then Kirk notes that he should find a medical kit to fix the bruise on his arm. Odonna asks if it would kill him if left untreated, demonstrating her ignorance about the concept of sickness.
Kirk is still trying to figure out what's going on, and Odonna continues to distract him with kisses. After one such smooch, the lovers realize they're not alone: someone is watching them through the spaceship's windows. Since that ought to be impossible, Kirk wonders if they're going mad... Or possibly being deceived. Odonna tells Kirk to "be content". But then, she suddenly starts feeling sick. Kirk wonders how that's possible, since she said there's no sickness on her planet. Her response is as chilling as it is mysterious:
Now there will be. There will be sickness, there will be death.
Ambassador Hodin appears on the Empty-prise and explains the whole situation: this has all been an experiment to test whether residents of Gideon are susceptible to Vagan Choreal Meningitis, which Kirk had in the past. Gideon is a dangerously overcrowded planet, and they want to introduce some new diseases for population control. Therefore, Hodin has orchestrated this whole complicated charade - complete with building a dummy starship on his overcrowded planet - specifically to get Kirk's germs out of Kirk and into Odonna.
Why didn't Gideon just ask for help? Also, wouldn't past exposure have left Kirk with antibodies, not actual germs, in his blood? If he's contagious with something, how come he's allowed to beam down to more than 50 planets without any PPE? Finally, wouldn't sudden introduction of meningitis on a planet where no one is immune result in extinction?
The screenwriters weren't worried about those questions, and you shouldn't be, either. You see, this convoluted plot was all an excuse to talk about overpopulation, which people in the 1960s viewed as an existential threat to Earth. I'm not just talking about fringe theorists or doomsday alarmists, either: in 1968 a serious scientific book, The Population Bomb, opened with the following proclamation:
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...
Scientists confidently predicted that India and the UK would be among the first nations to completely collapse due to famine, and that neither would survive to see the 21st century.
Wow, they could not have been more wrong.
No, they couldn't have! But the widespread belief in these predictions inspired the creation of a lot of dystopian sci-fi, including the novel Make Room! Make Room! (later adapted as Soylent Green) and the song "In the Year 2525," as well as "The Mark of Gideon."
Which brings me back to Odonna. It turns out that she's been lying to Kirk this whole time. In fact, she knows exactly where they are and why: she's Ambassador Hodin's daughter, and she has volunteered to be the first Gideon resident to be infected with a disease. Now that she's caught one, she's sanguine about her fate, and calmly describes what it feels like to be dying of meningitis. She compares pain to "what it's like when you see the people have no hope for happiness."
Captain Kirk, however, is horrified to hear that he's been duped into being part of a bio-weapons experiment. He angrily demands to know why Gideon hasn't tried any other types of population control, e.g. sterilization or artificial contraception. Ambassador Hodin explains that Gideon's "one unshakable truth" is that "life is sacred" and "love of life is the greatest gift." Therefore, no one is willing to try to stop having babies. Instead, therefore, they've decided to take healthy adult volunteers from among the population to die of meningitis. Odonna agreed to be the first, and agreed to seduce Kirk beforehand, hoping he'd like her enough that he'd agree to stay on Gideon and use his germs to kill people.
I invite you to watch this 3-minute scene in all its preachy glory, in case you think I'm exaggerating:
Setting aside Hodin's extreme misjudgment of Kirk's character, he comes across as horrifyingly paternalistic in this conversation. His people are so, so pro-life that he cannot possibly ask women to stop having kids, so instead he's being tragically forced to...pimp out his beloved daughter and have her die of a curable disease that will then rip through his species like the 'rona is ripping through ours. Uh, great plan, Hodin.
What happens to Odonna?
She declines Kirk's offer to cure her. Luckily, Spock finds them just in time. Spock and Kirk kidnap her and force her into treatment, because she clearly isn't competent to make these decisions for herself.
She meekly accepts this outcome once she wakes up, even though she's clearly invested a lot of time into this scheme. In fact, she's embarrassed that Kirk isn't angry at her.
She heads back to Gideon to use her infected blood on other people.
Wait a minute, she lives? I thought this blog was about dead girlfriends!
In a stunning twist, she does live! This outcome gives Odonna two distinctions among Kirk's girlfriends.
- First to Survive a Disaster of her Own Creation: As I've mentioned before, Kirk encounters a lot of beautiful women with nefarious intentions. Most of them get punished for their wicked deeds with either death or insanity. Odonna, however, seems to think this all turned out pretty well.
- Only Willing Victim to be Kept Alive by Paternalism: Although Captain Kirk gets emotional about all the women dying in his orbit, he doesn't usually invest a lot of time trying to save them. In fact, in the famous case of Edith Keeler ("City on the Edge of Forever"), he took active steps to ensure her death. So when I tell you that he and Spock risked a diplomatic incident to ensure Odonna would be cured, please understand that this is somewhat out-of-character for him. And she didn't even WANT his help! There's a distinct irony in the fact that, three seasons into loving doomed women, Kirk finally found one who accepted her own death...and immediately decided not to let her die.
Odonna's survival is, therefore, the unlikeliest of all fates among all of Star Trek's women.
Does she pass the Sexy Lamp Test, the Bechdel Test, the Mako Mori Test, or any similar measures of Fictional Female Agency (FFA)?
Uhhhhh....
Well...
In a word, no.
Mako Mori is out because everything she does in this episode is about distracting one man (Kirk) so that she can carry out a plan invented by another man (Hodin.) So much for an independent arc.
Bechdel is out because, on the Empty-prise, she's the only woman around.
As for the Sexy Lamp Test, technically a lamp could not serve as a vector for a disease. However, Odonna's engaged in a very passive mission: "I will lie here and do nothing until I'm dead, and if anyone lifts a finger to save me, I'll apologize to them for being sick in the first place." Her role in this cockamamie DIY genocide is not one that requires a lot of independent agency. I therefore award her the title of Sexy Lamp With Meningitis.
Is there a moral to this story?
Yes, though it's a more metatextual one than they originally intended.
The screenwriter for this episode was hoping to inspire a decline in the American birth rate. In 1969, Americans could not buy birth control if they weren't married, could not easily get an elective sterilization, and could only have abortions in 20 out of 50 states. The original intention was that Kirk's spirited defense of these techniques would inspire the US to legalize all of the above - which eventually, of course, we did. But, those measures aren't what averted widespread famine; after all, the US population is still growing to this day, and we're not all starving yet.
As it turned out, the doomsday predictions about overpopulation were based on a flawed understanding of the situation. While sci-fi authors were wringing their hands and asking "how can we have fewer people," actual scientists started to ask, "how can we have more food?" The latter question turned out to be the more important one.
This re-framing of the issue was amazingly successful. Norman E. Borlaug developed new wheat varieties that drove a Green Revolution. Economic development meant that the global rates of extreme poverty plummeted, even as the population soared. When famines happen nowadays (and sadly, there are still famines), they're the result of a failure of leadership and logistics. That's actually good news, because it means better international cooperation can - and does - end food shortages. Humanity had the solutions inside itself all along!
Consequently, even though the global population has doubled since "The Mark of Gideon" was made, we're not that worried about it. You'll note that, in the COVID-19 pandemic, almost nobody is saying, "Oh thank God! This is a great way to reduce the population!" Instead, we're saying things like "how can we save the maximum number of lives?" and "what resources do the scientists need to make a vaccine?" and "let's try to minimize the number of meals missed during this crisis."
In short, the moral of Odonna's short fictional life is not "stop having kids or you'll be forced to commit biological terrorism." It's actually, "If you're scared about a current trend, you might be misunderstanding it." That, my friends, is the message we need to remember in our current crisis.