TOS - 2.14 - Bread and Circuses

The search for the crew of a lost survey ship takes Kirk, Spock and McCoy to a planet that is identical to Earth in the 20th Century apart from the fact that the Roman Empire had never fallen. This is certainly a fascinating premise for an episode, which it attempts to justify the similarities through a throw-away reference to “Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development”, presumably in an attempt to avoid introducing another parallel universe so soon after “Mirror, Mirror” (since this would have been an obvious means of showing Earth developing in a different way), but it does take a somewhat large suspension of belief as to how very similar things have developed on this alien planet, even more so than the identical Earth featured in “Miri”, since we have even have identical cultures and religion, as well as technology, as well as identical English having evolved again (which is interesting since of course English would not have been spoken in Earth’s Roman Empire).

Unfortunately, even if one can accept the existence of this unlikely planet, the episode isn’t that successful since it pretty much wastes the concept, treating us mainly to a lot of Roman clichés. Aside from a few shots of Roman soldiers with machine guns, the only way in which it actually exploits the idea of a 20th Century Roman Empire is by having the gladiator matches taking place in a television studio, complete with commentator. This is indeed a lovely, incongruous image (and it allows for some nice digs about the primitive nature of television) but even the sequences here get tiresome, as they go on for ever and feature rather too many shots of dials activating canned cheering/booing/clapping.

The episode does throw in a nice early twist when it is revealed that the leader of this civilisation is actually Merrick, the captain of the lost survey ship. Unfortunately, we never get much an understanding of Merrick’s character and his motivation – it is not explained how he got into this position, and the script can’t really decide whether he is a true villain or not. He does ultimately save the lives of Kirk and his crew, but this very much comes out of nowhere and therefore isn’t really satisfying in terms of character development. Indeed, it’s unclear how much power Merrick actually has – the real power appears to lie with Proconsul Claudius Marcus, a character nicely played by Logan Ramsey who manages to be both charming but also dangerous, especially since he knows much about the Federation thanks to Merrick and is able to use the Prime Directive to his advantage – a nice example where a pre-existing element of the series prevents the Enterprise from using its superior technology.

“Bread and Circuses” is very much about the central trio of Spock, Kirk and McCoy, with Scotty, Chekov and Uhura only appearing briefly. The script features lots of banter between McCoy and Spock which does soon become somewhat wearisome. I was suspecting this was leading up to them having to face each other in the gladiator arena, but the episode avoids this (presumably due to similarities with “Amok Time”) and they end up fighting alongside each other. This pays off in a nice scene in which McCoy attempts to thank Spock for saving his life and the Vulcan’s reaction leads to the doctor theorising that Spock is too frightened to embrace any of his human side.

One initially surprising element of the episode is that, whilst Merrick is killed, Claudius Marcus is apparently unpunished and still in power as Kirk and his crew escape. This is of course consistent with the Prime Directive which would of course prevent Kirk from over-throwing him, but has the potential to be less than satisfying. However, the script does attempt to deflect this in its final scenes as Uhura reveals that she has been listening in to the radio transmissions from the planet and has established that Christianity is rising. This is a nice explanation of the new religion referred to by the escaped slaves featured previously (who we thought were talking about the Sun, not the Son) and does at least provide an indication that Marcus’s days are numbered and this Roman Empire will soon fall…

Planetary Gazetteer

The planet on which the episode is set is not named – it is just referred to as the fourth planet in the 892 system. It is an M-class planet that is very similar to Earth, with an identical atmosphere but differing land masses and is slightly different in size. Unlike Earth, it appears to have two moons (at least in the remastered version of the episode).

Starship Spotting

SS Beagle: A Class IV survey ship with a crew of 47 that disappeared six years previously. Kirk discovers that it suffered meteor damage and so the crew went ashore on planet 892-IV in order to obtain iridium ore for repairs. However, the crew never left, with most dying there and the Beagle was destroyed with the Enterprise ultimately finding its wreckage. The Beagle was named after the Royal Navy sailing ship on which Charles Darwin travelled the world in the 1830s.

General Observations

• Four Stardates are given in the episode – 4040.7, 4040.9, 4041.2 and 4041.7.
• George Takei is again absent as Sulu due to his continuing commitments filming “The Green Berets”.
• This episode is not exactly overburdened with female characters. Aside from Uhura and some non-speaking background artists, there is only Drusilla, a slave girl who is sent by Claudius Marcus to entertain Kirk for no apparent reason other than the fact that the captain hasn’t kissed anyone yet this week. Kirk is initially resistant to take advantage, suspecting some sort of trap but it isn’t long before he changes his mind for no apparent reason. This scene, which doesn’t add anything to the episode, does have a troubling morality since Drusilla is a slave who has been instructed to be with Kirk and is therefore unable to truly consent.
• It is mentioned that Earth has had a total of three world wars, building on the reference to World War III in “Space Seed”.
• The cave that provides the home of the escaped slaves is in Griffith Park in Hollywood and is probably better known as the entrance to the Batcave from the 1960s Batman series.