Synopsis: Starfleet Command orders the Enterprise to go to Ekos to investigate the loss of communication with historian John Gill.
“Patterns of Force” is the episode in which a historian is sent to a developing planet as a cultural observer and ends up patterning its development on Nazi Germany.
In my last post on “Return for Tomorrow,” I ended it with a thought about hubris. This episode is all about hubris, the greatest sin for the ancient Greeks (Lopez-Pedraza, 2000, p. 8). Hubris is a trait of the Titans, who were also associated with “unbound energy that appears in many areas of life . . . religion, politics, business, technology, communications, and art” (Lopez-Pedraza, p. 7). Zeus managed to imprison the Titans by use of a thunderbolt, and one Titan, Prometheus, tried to work within the Olympian framework, but he “remained a Titan in essence” (Lopez-Pedraza, p. 9).
In this episode John Gill arrives on Ekos and finds its society “fragmented . . . divided” and decided to take a “lesson from Earth history” and use the organizational structure of the “most efficient state Earth ever knew” and use it benignly. Gill misidentified the Ekosians as Titans, and put himself in the role of Prometheus, bringing fire, or knowledge, to a young civilization. However, their warlike tendencies might have been more closely akin to Ares, warlike, and if that is the case, perhaps a little Athenian restraint and strategy might have been the better choice. Gill failed to take into account human nature, and the Ekosian nature, which seems to be very similarly aligned. Gill thought he could do better on Ekos than what happened on Earth, and that was hubris. He admitted as much in his final words to Captain James T. Kirk: “the non-interference directive is the only way” and admitted that “even historians fail to learn from history. They repeat the same mistakes.”
At the end of the episode Kirk blames the leader principle on Gills downfall, that “a man that holds that much power, even with the best intentions, just can’t resist the urge to play god.” That is the definition of hubris to the ancient Greeks, and inflation to Depth Psychology.
Reference:
Lopez-Pedraza, R. (2000). Dionysus in exile: On the repression of the body and emotion. Chiron Publications.
Original post created 1 March 2021
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