"What Are Little Girls Made Of?" - Season 1, Episode 7

A slow episode demonstrates Trek at its best, unfortunately by comparison.

One of the first nightmares I remember having is one about clones. I had just seen Attack of the Clones and was scarred from learning that movies could be bad. But one night soon after I dreamt that everyone around me had been replaced by a clone. The same, but subtly off. As the dream progressed the conspiracy unspooled as more of the people around me knew less and less about me. Eventually I was caught, my investigation undone, and thrown into arena with a clone of my best friend who killed me in gladiatorial combat. At ten years old I met my fate and it was identical to that of Jango Fett. Attack of the Clones really made an impact on me.

I’m glad to know that I am not alone in this fear. “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” runs with a similar plot, swapping clones for androids and a small child’s fears of the impermanence of personality for a debate over whether personality can be controlled. It’s also the worst episode of the show so far.

---

Ruk (Ted Cassidy) and Andrea (Sherry Jackson) prepare to execute me for not liking this episode too much.

---

That’s not to say I disliked it. But “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” has one clear problem that it cannot overcome. By presenting this problem so starkly, it helps clarify what makes Star Trek compelling, both in The Original Series, and, I imagine, in its later iterations as well. Simply put, the Captain needs his crew.

The episode begins as the Enterprise orbits Exo-III, a frozen world where famous biologist Dr. Roger Korby (Michael Strong) was conducting research and has since gone dark. Dr. Korby also happens to be the fiancé of Nurse Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett), who three episodes ago awkwardly confessed her love for Spock. There’s no love triangle there; I suppose we can chalk her feelings up to desperation from the five years she’s spent apart from her fiancé (and former professor). Instead Kirk and Chapel beam down to the planet after contacting Korby from orbit. He requests, somewhat ominously, that he meet the two of them alone.

Kirk brings along two redshirted security officers anyway after he and Chapel arrive in an vast, uninhabited cavern. Kirk, Chapel, and one of the officers go ahead to find Korby. As the trio traverse the cave system, the security officer disappears while they pass alongside a steep drop. Korby’s assistant Dr. Brown (Harry Basch) appears quickly after, assuring Kirk and Chapel that the officer must have slipped. A sad occasion, but nothing that should prevent a romantic reunion. Brown escorts the two to Korby, who is joined not just by Brown, but two others. First is an attractive, demure young woman named Andrea (Sherry Jackson). Second is a hulking, person-shaped tree trunk named Ruk (Ted Cassidy). They’re both robots.

---

Ruk was played by Ted Cassidy, perhaps best known for his role as “Lurch” in The Addams Family. Cassidy suffered from acromegaly, a condition characterized by the body’s production of excess levels of Human Growth Hormone. Cassidy would later play two other roles on Trek in the episodes “The Corbomite Maneuver” and “Arena",” and worked with creator Gene Roddenberry on later pilots he developed.

---

Ruk, it turns out, is the key to all this. He is a surviving android built by the planet’s now-extinct native species, and he’s taught Korby how to create other androids and even transfer human consciousness into android bodies. Korby demonstrates this on Captain Kirk, creating a near identical copy of him and allowing Shatner to go for a dual screen role again, so soon, after “The Enemy Within.” Korby’s plan is to use this copy of the Captain to get his team off the planet and to a nearby colony, where he can begin sneaking androids into the population to show the benefits of the new bodies. “I’m offering you a practical heaven!” he declares at one point. Forever young, exponentially strong, and all it takes is . . . dying?

Kirk has a plan though. As he is duplicated, he focuses intently on a thought he would never have: thinking that his best friend, Spock, is an annoying “half-breed.” When Fake Kirk is sent up to the Enterprise, he snaps at Spock with this racism on full display, tipping off the Science Officer to head down and investigate. In the meantime, Kirk has got to work on Ruk, now his jailer, learning that the androids are not just new bodies for old consciousness but fully programmable as well. Ruk’s “model” rebelled when its creators tried to program his kind into slaves. “Survival must cancel out programming” becomes a running motif for the hulking henchman.

---

Kirk lies naked about to be cloned. There’s a somewhat apocryphal story floating around out there that Gene Roddenberry made Shatner shave his chest because he thought Kirk would always be hairless. I don’t know if this tracks, given that Shatner is shirtless and very hairy in “Charlie X,” as I’ve already discussed.

---

When Korby arrives to check in on the captain, Ruk attacks him, having been convinced the doctor is no better than the old masters. Korby unceremoniously kills him with a phaser. This is an extremely sad development. Kirk fares better, attacking Korby and revealing that the good doctor is an android too. Korby had not gone dark for no reason. The planet had been wrapped in frostbite and he had sent “himself” into an android body just to survive. He created Brown and Andrea to prove his concept and justify his plan. There is, of course, the implication that he created Andrea for something else as well. Nurse Chapel, disgusted with her fiancé, rejects him. Andrea, a loyal program, embraces him. He chooses death for them both right as Spock and the crew arrive, asking where Korby is hiding.

“Dr. Korby was never here,” Kirk tells Spock.

Reading that may make this sound like a fine episode of Star Trek. It’s a solid enough premise that is literally supporting a six episode Marvel Disney+ series later this year. But what I cannot quite convey in writing is what it feels like to spend fifty minutes with Captain Kirk and only Captain Kirk.

I am not here to rag on William Shatner or Kirk the character. I think both are great and have said as much before. Shatner’s performance in this episode is lovely, and I especially enjoyed the bemused, half-impressed look he gives his android copy throughout their interactions. But he truly has no one to play off of in this episode. It’s Kirk, in a cave, with Ruk. Sometimes Andrea but mostly Ruk. And I love Ruk too. But Ruk’s appeal is straightforward; fifty minutes is a long time to coast on “that guy is pretty tall.”

---

See, Ruk is tall.

---

Shatner was the lead of the show. While Spock’s popularity sparked mass engagement and a light on-set feud, production and Roddenberry never wavered in their opinion that Kirk was the “solid foundation” of the Enterprise.¹ But as they also note, Kirk often "sets up the scene" and provides "contrast" for the other actors.² What Roddenberry was talking around in describing this was a problem of economics. Shatner was paid far more than any other actor on the show and Captain Kirk is Star Trek’s lead. But production was writing a transparently ensemble affair. The different perspectives of and debates between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are the beating heart of an episode, the way it interrogates its speculative premises and mines interest from its plots.

At the risk of sounding reductive, neither of the three are particularly dynamic characters individually. That’s not a negative. Star Trek was not serialized; every episode needed to be watchable on its own. In that set up, the characters almost need to be stable poles that you can orient plots around. But with just one pole, there’s no magnetic pull. You’ve lost the tension. There’s not so much conflict as there is a nail with one hammer to meet it.

This is a shame, since the episode has some meaty thematic hooks that I would have liked to see played around with more. “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” takes its title from a classic English nursery rhyme:

What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
  Snips, snails
  And puppy-dogs' tails
That's what little boys are made of

What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
  Sugar and spice
  And everything nice
That's what little girls are made of³

Beyond serving as the recipe for The Powerpuff Girls, this rhyme is a convenient reference for the writers to snag and flag their examination in human nature. Korby desires to create “better humans” with his android copies; he hopes to program away “jealousy, greed, [and] hate.” To Kirk this is “different word[s], but the same old promises made by Genghis Khan, Julius Casesar, Hitler, Ferris, Maltuvis.” It’s totalitarian, as “humans are full of unpredictable emotions that logic cannot solve.” The mere act of taking away our negative emotions makes us less than human, a theme “The Enemy Within” explored too. Star Trek seems to say, over and over again, that while the future may change, humans cannot. At least at the macro level. We may change our technology, travel the stars, and all become utopian military space communists, but those fundamental negative drives will always be with us. If a utopia is human, it must contain room for those as well.

That is interesting, if covered, ground. But I would have loved an alien perspective on that question too!

---

Stray Thoughts

• I could go easier on this given its production history. According to Solow and Justman, the episode was being rewritten as it was filmed and had never been in particularly good shape. Ultimately, it went two days over schedule and over budget.⁴

• The cavern setting is well shot given how clearly limited it is. The camera does a good job of shooting wide in the scenes where Kirk and company move through the winding corridors, allowing the set to breathe.

• Andrea’s outfit was one of many Gene Roddenberry would personally edit to make more revealing.⁵ One thing that came through in reading Roddenberry's biography, and other background material, is that the man was obsessed with women and sex. He was completely incapable of leaving that obsession in his personal life. Sherry Jackson, who played Andrea, said that NBC had an on set censor to make sure the outfit did not slip from its taped down sides, apparently preferable to just designing more practical garb. Jackson may have been used to insane production demands. She started on TV as a child star on The Danny Thomas Show.

1. Herbert Solow and Robert Justman: “Inside Star Trek: The Real Story,” p. 239.

2. Id.

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Are_Little_Boys_Made_Of%3F#cite_note-Opie1997-1

4. Solow and Justman, p. 204.

5. Id. at 217.