Star Trek: What Are Little Girs Made Of?

Original Airdate: 10/20/1966

Episode Synopsis (from the official Star Trek website):

The U.S.S. Enterprise arrives in orbit around Exo III, to search for exobiologist Dr. Roger Korby. When Kirk asks Spock if Korby could possibly still be alive, Spock glances at Christine, then quietly shuts off his monitor. Christine Chapel, McCoy's chief nurse, is Korby's fiancé. Chapel had signed on with the U.S.S. Enterprise in the hope of finding him. Korby is known as the "Pasteur of archeological medicine."

At Dr. Korby's request, only Kirk and a very excited Christine Chapel beam down to the planet. They find the doctor living in an underground cavern built by what is known as "The Old Ones," the extinct natives of Exo III. He tells them that he discovered the caverns while suffering from severe frostbite, five years before.

Using equipment left behind by these now-dead beings, Korby has learned how to construct androids who look and act like humans. His android companions, Ruk and Andrea, amaze Kirk and Chapel with their realness. Although, Korby explains, Ruk existed long before he arrived — a product of "The Old Ones."

This episode marks the first appearance of Nurse Chapel, played by Majel Barrett Roddenberry, a popular recurring character on The Original Series and later Gene Rodenberry's wife. It also is the first mention of androids in the Star Trek universe, an idea that wouldn't be fully revisited after this episode until nearly 20 years later when an android became a full-time cast member on The Next Generation.

I must admit to barely remembering this episode when I first started watching it-while this is not entirely surprising given how long its been since I have watched all of The Original Series, it gave me the opportunity to approach the episode from a nearly fresh perspective and see how much I liked it relatively free of bias. Fortunately my impressions were mostly positive and I enjoyed the episode quite a bit and found the subject matter appealing.

As with all early Star Trek episodes you know there will be some sort of continuity issue and the occasional part of the show that looks terribly dated. The basic concept of the androids, especially the way they are created and the transferral of a person's consciousness are very, very different from the evolution of this science fiction in later iterations of Star Trek, and also are somewhat incompatible with current real-word scientific ideas.

Creating an android in this episode is as simple as finding some sort of apparently pre-built or grown bio-mechanical husk and placing it on an object next to a real person. That device is then activated and the husk becomes a physically identical copy of the person, at least outwardly. Internally the new android is all circuitry (funny looking 1960's prop circuitry to boot) and aritficial intelligence. Apparently the technology also copies the brain waves and memories of the human counterpart over, but does so without transferring the ability to have emotion (however, this apparently can be done if the human chooses to transfer his consciousness in this manner).

The first issue is with the construction of the android and the machine that nearly instantly creates the android out of a shell. While it is reasonable to expect many species to have technological superiority over the nascent Federation, we rarely see such glimpses of sophisticated technology when it comes to artificial intelligence amongst advanced races nearly 100 years later in the Star Trek universe. That makes the entire process seem to simple (not to mention it makes it look much more like cloning than the actual construction of artificial life). While the technology is clearly ahead of the Federation's, and the androids are very sophisticated, they show no other signs of technological superiority, the race that created them has been lost to history, and the species or their androids are never heard of again in the entirety of the Star Trek lexicon. This poses strange continuity issues that are best resolved by believing, as stated in the episode, that these androids were the last remnant of a race completely extinct at the end of the episode.

I give tremendous credit to the writers of this episode, as they made the androids complex yet limited. They limited their ability to express emotion, established their failings as machines that can be ordered to do terrible things, yet gave the artificial life forms a glimmer of a conscience, just enough humanity that at the very end they were able to do the right thing, or at least process right from wrong and begin to think for themselves. Tragically, at the end the last of the androids finally felt an emotion-love for Dr. Korby, and that love enabled her to realize that the android Dr. Korby was not the same as the man Dr. Korby, and his ideas to save humanity might serve only to destroy it. As long as the androids were alive they could be used to harm others, and she was forced to destroy both of them to prevent it. It was a sad, but fitting end to an excellent episode.

Continuity:
- There is a surprising amount of continuity from this episode to the final iteration of androids in The Next Generation. Concepts such as neural synapses, lack of emotions, and other common ideas originated in this episode and surfaced again in Data's character.
- There are also several incongruities with the type of androids in this episode-the ease and simplicity of their construction, the method to essentially mirror and clone the outward appearance of a human, the necessity of a host human to create an android, the primitive circuitry and ethical programming, and many other minor details that make creatures that should be so technologically advanced seem no more sophisticated than the Federation.

Fun Facts:
- Majel Barrett Roddenberry plays Nurse Christine Chapel. She later married Gene Roddenberry, and played Deanna Troi's mother Lwaxana Troi on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.
- Majel Barrett Rodenberry's also voices the Federation computers in The Original Series and all subsequent Star Trek series.
-In the very first Star Trek pilot titled The Cage, Majel Barrett Roddenberry was cast as the Enterprise's first officer and was given only the enigmatic name Number One-a nickname that would finally see use again 20 years later.