Synopsis: The crew of the Enterprise comes across a planet that they cannot explain and go to investigate it.
“That Which Survives” asks an interesting question: can a computer be, as Captain James T. Kirk exclaims, “too perfect”? This is especially fascinating when the reason for Kirk to make this remark is that an alien computer made a replicant of a humanoid too complete, because it included her emotions. A beautiful female humanoid, whose ability to destroy is to “live as one even to the structure of your cells, the arrangement of chromosomes.” Is that not theoretically akin to marriage? This analogy is further emphasized when the replicant of Losira, the former commander of this station and the last of her kind, pleads to touch Kirk because “you are my match.”
The depth psychological concept of the sacred marriage, or union of opposites, is the wedding of the conscious with the unconscious, the Logos with the Eros, the rational with the irrational. Therefore, when the computer made a replicant with both logic and emotion it made something that embodied the ideal of a sacred marriage. That the replicant had emotion is the only reason that Kirk, Dr. Leonard (Bones) McCoy and Lt. Hikaru Sulu were not killed. Interestingly, whereas in other instances when a computer intelligence was a metallic object, Kirk used logic to convince it of its own faulty thinking, but when a computer intelligence, as it is here, is in the form of a beautiful woman, he uses emotion to fight back. Even Sulu, who barely escaped death remarked: “How can such people be, Captain? Such evil. And she’s so . . . so beautiful.” I would argue that this statement mirrors the perception not only of an androcentric monotheistic culture, but one that has been amplified by Hollywood – that women are to be good and beautiful, and if not, they are evil.
Original post created 26 March 2021
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