"The Galileo Seven" - Season 1, Episode 16
Spock takes center stage on a straightforward episode.
Before she was head of Star Trek’s production studio, Lucille Ball had speedrun a successful career as an actress. Most famous for her comedic work with husband Desi Arnez, Ball dominated television in the 1960s with one of the most popular shows on air. But that was the peak of a career that had begun long before in Hollywood B-Movies, so named due to their lower budgets and secondary placement in double features. One of these, RKO’s Five Came Back, released in 1939 to above average reviews however. Ball, billed second, stood above the rest of the cast in what proved to be one of the very first disaster movies. In Five Came Back, a plane bound for Panama City is blown off course by an unexpected storm and crashes in the middle of the Amazon. The motley survivors, including a Latin American anarchist and Ball’s quasi-femme fatale, fend off attacks from unspecified “natives” as they await rescue. Perhaps that sounds familiar.
“The Galileo Seven” is a homage to Star Trek’s patron mother. Five Came Back was one of her first bona fide hits, and writer Oliver Crawford thought about retelling its basic plot in a science fiction setting, much like “Balance of Terror” had done with The Enemy Below. But instead of anarchism, the episode chooses Spock’s emotionless leadership to aim a critical eye towards. It’s towards enjoyable, if somewhat rote, results. This is episode sixteen of Star Trek. By now, Spock is a somewhat known commodity after coming into his own in “The Naked Time,” and the show truly hit its thematic stride somewhere around “The Corbomite Manuever.” “The Galileo Seven” thus holds little surprise but maintains the streak we’ve been on for over a month of real-time episodes. By now, we know a lot about how Star Trek’s worldview and this episode does little to complicate our understanding.
The eponymous Galileo Seven aboard the shuttle, mirroring a similar shot from Five Come Back. The most prominent beyond our usual players are Yeoman Mears, played by Phyillis Douglas and seated second from the left, and Lieutenant Boma, played by Don Marshall and seated second from the right. Marshall had worked with Gene Roddenberry on his previous show, ironically called The Lieutenant, where he had played Nichelle Nichols’ (Uhura) fiancé. Douglas had first appeared on screen in Gone With the Wind, all of two years old, playing the daughter of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.
The episode begins with the Enterprise escorting a shipment of medical supplies to Markus III, supervised by a Commissioner Ferris. While en route, ship sensors pick up quasar-like readings from a nearby phenomenon, which Kirk has standing orders to investigate. With some time to burn before their shipment deadline, Kirk sends the shuttle Galileo out to investigate the quasar, with Spock, McCoy, Scottie, Yeoman Mears, and science specialists Lt. Gaetano, Lt. Latimer, and Lt. Boma aboard. A sudden burst from the quasar throws the Galileo into a crash landing on the planet of Taurus II. Guess how many come back to the Enterprise?
The bulk of the episode features this team stranded on the planet, cut off from communication with the Enterprise and under attack from unspecified yeti-like creatures who throw telephone-pole sized spears and seem to be ten feet tall. Spock assumes command as Kirk searches for them from above. Spock’s leadership style is in line with his personality and chafes against some of the crew’s more human impulses. When Latimer is killed by a spear Spock shrugs off the idea of a funeral as a dangerous waste of time. He assumes that a show of force will scare off the yetis when it only angers them. He answers the trolley problem by making clear he would leave two of the crew behind in order to achieve a manageable weight on the hobbled shuttle. Boma, fed up with the Vulcan, says that he’s “sick and tired of this machine.”
Spock works to repair the Galileo. The shuttle shots done for this episode were the only ones ever taken; all future shuttle exterior shuttle footage was reused in later episodes, often with different backgrounds and effects for variation.
On board the Enterprise, Kirk deals with pressure from Commander Ferris to abandon the shuttle crew in order to make their rendezvous with Markus III on time. It’s another trolley problem, albeit underemphasized, as the medical supplies are meant to alleviate a plague tearing through the colony of New Paris. Kirk holds out as long as he can but ultimately is forced by Ferris to abandon the search. However, he heads away from Taurus II very, very slowly.
Eventually, the stranded team jury-rig the shuttle to run on their phasers and manage to achieve orbit above the planet. Interference from the quasar blinds the Enterprise to their location though. It’s likely that they will merely orbit for a few hours before falling back to the planet, burning up in the atmosphere. Spock makes a gamble rather than sit with hope. He burns all of their fuel in one go, causing a flare that the Enterprise manages to see. The crew are beamed aboard just as the shuttle begins to disintegrate on re-entry.
One of the few face shots of the Taurean apes shown in the episode. The ape design was done by Wah Chung, Star Trek prop man extraordinaire, and considered too upsetting by NBC to be shown in close up. Thus, the apes were mostly either kept off screen or filmed in wide shots that emphasized their size more than their features.
With everyone safe, Kirk takes time to rib his best friend:
KIRK: There’s really something I don’t understand about all of this. Maybe you can explain it to me. Logically, of course. When you jettisoned the fuel and ignited it, you knew there was virtually no chance of it being seen, yet you did it anyhow. That would seem to me to be an act of desperation.
SPOCK: Quite correct Captain.
KIRK: Now we all know, and I’m sure the doctor will agree with me, that desperation is a highly emotional state of mind. How does your well-known logic explain that?
SPOCK: Quite simply, Captain. I examined the problem from all angles, and it was plainly hopeless. Logic informed me that under the circumstances, the only possible action would have to be one of desperation. Logical decision, logically arrived at.
KIRK: I see. You mean you reasoned that it was time for an emotional outburst.
SPOCK: Well, I wouldn't put it in exactly those terms, Captain, but those are essentially the facts.
As we see over and over again, Star Trek finds Spock’s perspective valuable but ultimately inadequate. Spock is the second lead of the show, Nimoy is the only actor besides Shatner billed in the opening. But he is thesis, not synthesis. The classic Star Trek plot has Kirk at the center, positioned between Spock’s cold logic and McCoy’s firey impulse. It’s up to the Captain to decide and the solution is often a clever trick motivated by emotion but supported by good logical guesses. As Kirk once said, he often knows what to do, but his friends give him “emotional security.”
With “The Galileo Seven” we get the reinforcement of that idea along with a deepening of Spock’s character. Going “full Vulcan” will not work, at least among a diverse Star Fleet crew. Spock’s command style is effective but has to yield to Boma and McCoy’s demands multiple times, only after he’s almost annoyed the former into mutiny. Their lives are saved not through logic but through a gamble. Spock weakly defends that it merely the best option among bad ones, but it’s clear that the episode agrees with Kirk. Spock acted human. Acting human saved lives. A great reminder then that Spock is not “full Vulcan.” In his best moments, he is not just a perspective but a character, the half-human science officer who plays the lyrette and is best friends with a guy from Iowa.
Near the beginning of the ordeal, McCoy notes that this is Spock’s “big chance.”
SPOCK: My big chance? For what Doctor?
MCCOY: Command! Oh, I know you, Mister Spock. You've never voiced it, but you've always thought that logic was the best basis on which to build command. Am I right?
SPOCK: I am a logical man, Doctor.
MCCOY: It'll take more than logic to get us out of this.
SPOCK: Perhaps, Doctor, but I know of no better way to begin. I realize command does have its fascinations, even under circumstances such as these. But I neither enjoy the idea of command, nor am I frightened of it. It simply exists. And I will do whatever logically needs to be done. Excuse me.
Kirk needs command at least in part to prevent the tragedy’s he’s lived through. But the value of Spock’s perspective is exactly this lack of ego. Coterminous with that then is his own loose attachment to these ideas in the face of their failure. Kirk may think he’s stubborn, but that’s a pretty human trait in the end.
Stray Thoughts
Retrospective reviews of this episode seem more divided than others. At this point, Star Trek has a well-established canon of great episodes and a general order of rankings follow. This one was all over the place, with some finding it pretty rote and others enjoying the presence of the entire cast and focus on Spock. I lean towards this being a pretty average episode. The focus on Spock is energizing, but the plot is a bit too standard and doesn’t push the cast too much. And in the end, there’s nothing here we have not gotten before.
Commissioner Ferris and Kirk have a classic “annoying bureaucrat v. loving man of action” thing going on here, even though Ferris is demonstrably well motivated. The man wants to stop a plague, and here he is having to deal with one disaster after another. If only he watched the show!
Oliver Johnson is the original writer, but S. Bar-David also contributed to the script. Born Shimon Wincleberg, he used a variety of pen names and was a prolific short story writer. He also wrote the, in my opinion, much better episode “Dagger of the Mind.”
Photo Credits
Five Came Back poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Came_Back
The Galileo Seven and Five Came Back: https://thecreativelifeadventure.com//star-trek-essays/boldly-rewatching-the-voyages-the-galileo-seven/
Spock at shuttle: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/586242076464592455/
The Taurean Ape: https://www.douxreviews.com//2010/07/star-trek-galileo-seven.html