Podcast Enterprise: S1E22 Space Seed

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
2. Story structure
3. Character analysis
4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis:

When this episode opens, you find that the USS Enterprise has encountered a derelict spacecraft. It’s very, very old. It’s centuries old, and it’s apparently sending out signals in Morse code, which makes the captain and everyone else very curious because nobody uses Morse code these days.

The spacecraft is of a strange design, and Spock identifies as DY100, which is probably built in the 1990s. So, of course, everyone must investigate this derelict ship. So the captain and a small group of people, they teleport to this spaceship and they, they find a lot of people apparently in deep freeze.

They don’t have a heartbeat, but they’re alive and there is some system keeping them in place and alive. And from the looks of it, it seems that these people have been genetically augmented. And this is confirmed by one of the historians in that landing party one Lieutenant Marla McGivers.

And Dr. Mc McCoy also confirms that once the systems start taking off, that these people are coming back to life, especially the leader who’s a huge hulking man who’s with an impressive personality. And long story short, this man is stronger than everybody else. He’s more intelligent than everybody else.

He’s taken back to the Enterprise and there they find that this individual, he’s much smarter than he appears. He is very manipulative.

The historian, McGivers, finds herself drawn to his magnetism and his name is very curious. His name is Khan Noonien Singh, and apparently he’s from Northern India. Apparently I have not heard anyone with that name anyhow, so he is supposed to be a Sikh from Punjab. He is powerful. He was apparently also a dictator of a large part of Earth before he was exiled, along with a lot of other genetically augmented humans.

He’s also relic of the Eugenics War of the 1990s apparently. And now here what happens is Kirk doesn’t know what to do with this guy. He’s scheming to take over the Enterprise. Lieutenant McGivers helps him try and take over the Enterprise. The other sleepers in that derelict ship are also awakened.

What Khan Noonien SIngh exactly wants is made clear over the course of the story. He wants to establish a new world order or new universal order. What happens eventually is he gets into a fight with Captain Kirk and Kirk being the ingenuous captain that he is, manages to defeat him. However, after all this is over, Kirk does not want to have him destroyed or killed or imprisoned or anything like that.

So he takes a decision to have him dropped off at a certain planet called Seti Alpha five. So that he can rebuild his life with the intelligence and the genetic augmentation that he’s gone through. And Marla McGivers decides to go with him.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

Acknowledgements

1. Intro music: Music from anchor.fm
2. Shotcut for editing the podcast
3. References: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/