written by Jean Lisette Aroeste
STORY OUTLINE, dated May 24, 1968
report & analysis by David Eversole

"Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines passe, except they do their dutie
Not to a true, but painted chair?"

--From "Jordan (I)" by George Herbert (1593-1633)

This is an extremely professional 16-page outline which hits most of the major beats found in the final episode. I point out this fact only because it was Aroeste’s first television sale, one that came about only because Robert H. Justman read her unsolicited "over-the-transom" submission and recommended it be bought. He also did the same for Joyce Muskat’s "The Empath."

The differences between the outline and the aired episode are all minor, save one flashback called for in Act Four.

TEASER

Instead of the succinct captain’s log voice over which opens the episode and explains the basic nature of the Medeusan physiognomy, the outline calls for this information to be given by Spock in lecture form to the transporter technician who wants to know why he must leave his post as the Medeusan beams aboard. In the aired episode, Larry Marvick also delivers some of this dialogue.

We also learn that the Enterprise is en route to rendezvous with a Medeusan spaceship.

The aired Teaser ends on a close-up of Spock after Miranda and the ambassador (called Ariel instead of Kollos in the outline) materialize. In the outline, Kirk reenters the transporter room, and the Teaser ends as he studies Miranda with "amazement and appreciation."

ACT ONE

Some small differences:

· Kirk tries to heavily flirt with Miranda, even moreso than what we saw in the aired episode, but can never catch her eye.

· Miranda’s telepathic impression that someone in the room is thinking of murder is not in the outline.

· After dinner, Kirk escorts Miranda to her quarters, again fails in his flirtations. McCoy meets Kirk as he heads back to his quarters and ribs him about his failure. McCoy turns serious, says that he is worried about having that Medeusan monster on board.

· After Larry Marvick, rebuffed, leaves Miranda’s quarters, Aroeste calls for a dissolve indicating that some time has passed. Kirk’s log informs us that they are halfway to the rendezvous with the Medeusan vessel.

We then have a scene where Marvick attacks a security guard outside the ambassador’s quarters, takes his phaser, enters and opens Ariel’s habitat box.

ACT TWO

The insane Marvick, armed with the phaser, makes his way to the bridge, kills two crewmen, holds the others at bay, phasers the communications console, then takes over the helm and accelerates the ship into the intergalactic void. Kirk, Spock and security guards burst into the bridge, overpower Marvick, but Sulu reports the helm is jammed.

Marvick does not die immediately in the outline. Raving, he is taken to Sickbay.

The discussions of navigating in the void, and Spock’s idea to mindmeld with Ariel, are located in this act in the outline. In the aired version, these scenes opened Act Three.

The second act ends in Sickbay. McCoy is caring for the critically injured security guard and Larry Marvick. Within hearing of several nurses and crewmen, Marvick raves about Miranda: "She is like the thing in the box. They’re going to destroy us all."

ACT THREE

The act opens with a log entry explaining that word of what Marvick said about Miranda and Ariel has spread throughout the ship. Many members of the crew have begun displaying hostile behavior toward them.

Here it is Spock who realizes Miranda is blind instead of McCoy. When she tries to convince Kirk that she should be the one to telepathically link with Ariel, she says that she can learn to navigate space--after all, didn’t she learn to navigate about the Enterprise without assistance. Aroeste further states that blindness is "a rare affliction in 2100 A. D."

In the aired version, Miranda appeals to the Medeusan ambassador and screams when she learns that she will not be the one to link with him. This bit of business is not in the outline.

ACT FOUR

After Spock sees the true form of Ariel, he screams and falls unconscious, and is carried to Sickbay. No struggle with Kirk and the others.

In Sickbay, we learn that Marvick has died. McCoy is afraid the same fate awaits Spock.

The flashback?

In the televised episode, as Miranda and Spock mindmeld, we see the psychedelic lights and various bits and pieces of Spock’s memory, not to mention Diana Muldaur’s forehead ballooned to This Island Earth proportions courtesy of the "fish-eye" lens.

The outline has Spock relive a certain combat...

From the outline:

Miranda bends over Spock’s form, and her fingers probe at his temples. She is shaking with fury. "I’m going to kill you, Spock!" she hisses. Spock grimaces, and the scene dissolves into another, the vision in Spock’s unconscious mind. He dreams that he is on the surface of an arid planet. The sky is red. The man who faces him in the blazing arena had been his friend, but now Spock, driven by a compulsion he does not understand, must kill him. Their mortal struggle is brief and grim; within moments his opponent’s corpse lies on the barren ground, and Spock turns away in stoical grief. The figure of Doctor Jones appears before him. "This is madness," she says, "but it can be undone." She holds out her hand, and he takes it. She brings him to a black box, which she opens. Blue light radiates from the box, and then a hand shuts out the light.

Hmm, would have been lovely to see, but I suppose they would have had to pay writer Ted Sturgeon and director Joseph Pevney for the footage from "Amok Time," plus it would have been cost prohibitive to recreate a portion of the Vulcan arena for Spock and Miranda to have their very brief dialogue, or even to superimpose them over an existing still shot of the set.

The aired episode ends with Miranda having, off screen, achieved her goal of telepathically linking with the Medeusan.

In the outline, after Kirk gives her a large bouquet of roses, she beams aboard the Medeusan vessel, having yet to achieve this goal.

From the outline:

Kirk is on the Bridge when Spock reports that Dr. Jones and Ariel have been safely beamed to the Medeusan vessel. Uhura relays a message to Kirk from the other vessel, saying that when Dr. Jones arrived among the combined force of the Medeusans’ minds she was able to complete the telepathic link with Ariel. The message ends: "The part of us called Miranda thanks Captain Kirk for the roses."

Another fine third season episode, one often overlooked by many in their hurry to dismiss that final year with hasty overgeneralizations. (Has anyone else noticed that the third season could well be called, for good and bad, "The Season of The Woman"? Several episodes revolve around female protagonists and antagonists, and many more women joined D. C. Fontana in the writing department.) This is the best of Aroeste's two storylines. Had she written this episode for a television program airing today, there's no doubt she would have been immediately offered a position on the writing staff.

Jean Lisette Aroeste (1932- ): A lifelong academic librarian who first served in the Acquisitions Department for the Harvard College Library from 1954-1962. She then became the Reference Librarian for University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). She was the coeditor of 1971's "Directory of Scholarly and Research Publishing Opportunities: A Guide to Academic Publishing Opportunities in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Science and Technology." Her only two sales to television--this episode and "All Our Yesterdays" (originally entitled "A Handful of Dust")--were to Star Trek.

Free counters provided by Andale.

Click here to return to the Unseen Elements Page.
Click here to return to the Articles Page.
Click here to return to the Main Index Page.