TOS's Darkest Episode: 'A Private Little War'

Añadido: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Spock asked Scotty how long it would take him to reproduce 100 flint locks.

[00:00:06]I didn't exactly get that, Captain. 100 what? 100 serpents. Serpents for the Garden of Eden. We're very tired. Mr. Spock be home.

[00:00:20]Hello everyone. This is Venom Geek Media here and today, well, originally to mark 50,000 subscribers, I was going to do a top five video in the vein of Red Letter Media. Alas, I am not Mike Stlasser and I have yet to acquire myself a Rich Evans, be that body pillow or cardboard cutout. But basically, these are episodes which I like and ideally that haven't been talked about previously.

[00:00:50]But this particular episode warrants, I think, its own video. It's probably the one that I'm going to talk about the most. If I was to do it all as one big video, it would be like 60% this and 40% the other four episodes. I think this is perhaps by far one of the most interesting conversation pieces. And actually, I find that's often the case with original series Star Trek that there's an awful lot to talk about. I didn't grow up watching Star Trek original series. In fact, I only actually came to it um relatively recently. It would be on at sort of mid evening and I'd watch it with my father and we could discuss the episode and some of the themes. As people who have both watched, you know, all of the sci-fi that has come after original Star Trek, it's then quite interesting to see where it started or how those kind of stories are originally presented. Now, it's fair to say that not every toos episode is a banger, nor indeed is every toos episode particularly consistent when it comes to tone. A lot of episodes will like switch between being very camp and dark. Uh, a good example of this might be The Ultimate Computer, which is a very serious episode with a very sad ending, but then is undercut by The Crew of the Enterprise having a joke at the end, which just feels wildly inappropriate. Like, oh You feel like they should have just like, oh people are dead. Other episodes, it's not so bad. you know, the very corny ending of uh Journey to Babel where, you know, McCoy literally has his almost looney tunes. What do you know? I finally got the last left D.

[00:02:37]You know, it's that's fine. You know, that's that's fun. Uh it it works in that kind of episode, but not necessarily in other places. But equally, there are plenty of episodes that are very consistent with their tone and that have a very dark tone. And a private little war is just one of these. There's a lot of elements going on to private little war. And yes, some of them are sillier than others, but nonetheless, these are really just supporting elements to the main story, which is Kirk and McCoy once again alone together on an alien planet. Oh, and also as a theme, women ruin everything.

[00:03:15]In any one original series episode, it's not necessarily that pronounced a theme, but if you watch a bunch of toos in succession, you get this theme of like it's always the women's fault. So, I'll give you a little episode breakdown, but really, you should just go watch it. Go watch it now. And I'll just give you the spark notes. So, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, they beam down to a primitive planet that Kirk had previously visited about 13 years prior. Now, when Kirk had visited, it had about stone age level of technology, bows and arrows, and you had different communities of people, but they're all relatively peaceful.

[00:03:54]They're, you know, keeping to themselves. They're slightly separate.

[00:03:57]They are distinct, but they're not fighting. They're not in constant warfare. However, one group now has flintlock weaponry, and we have some pretty clear parallels between European colonization and Native American genocide. Now, of course, this will create a bit of a prime directive question. Obviously, it's terrible to see this happening. But if this has just happened naturally, there's not much the Enterprise can do. Spock is injured by one of these flint locks and returned to the Enterprise. So, he's now not in the story or he is not there on the planet to sort of offer counsel to Kirk. That's the only council Kirk is getting is from McCoy. Now, this is important in terms of the way original series Star Trek works because you people have this idea that, you know, Kirk is this brash, you know, ladies man, womanizer. We all know that that's not true. You have McCoy who's just very emotional, sentimental, you know, goes with his gut. And of course, you have the, you know, cold sort of objective, logical Spock. And Kirk has to kind of mediate. He has to find a middle ground between the two positions. That's kind of what Kirk tends to do in most original series. But of course, with Spock out of the picture, he's only got McCoy. So, you know, he's sort of left, you know, without one hand. Kirk and McCoy being backed down to the planet in disguise because they're going to investigate.

[00:05:26]They want to see if these flint locks have really appeared on this planet naturally or if there's Klingon interference because they did just see a Klingon ship go into come into orbit.

[00:05:35]Now, this is in neutral space that the K the Klingons are as much at liberty to conduct scientific research in this area as they are. So, on the face of it, that's not necessarily suspicious. But the sudden appearance of flip locks on this planet, that kind of is. Now, immediately after beaming down, Kirk is attacked by the Maggato, which is probably more iconic than the actual episode itself. As costume goes, also it's pretty damn good. You've got to compare this to like, you know, what Doctor Who in Britain was doing at the time. And the Magato is a pretty decent alien costume. Now, because they're separated from the Enterprise, McCoy only has very limited medical technology available to him, not enough to save Kirk on his own. So, he's reliant on the shaman woman, who's called Nona, to help heal Kirk. However, she does this in a kind of weird shame and blood ritual thing, which apparently means that Kirk is going to be bound to her women, am I right? So, there's this whole question running through is, is Kirk under this woman's spell? You know, because Kirk is like, "Don't be ridiculous bones. That's just primitive superstitious nonsense.

[00:06:50]It was just eing herbs. That's all it was. You don't have to worry." McCoy is kind of second-guessing every decision Kirk is now making because it's like, "Yeah, but she's put a she's put a spell on you." So anyway, Kirk and McCoy go to investigate the village. Initially, everything looks right on the surface.

[00:07:08]They have a forge. They do have all the things that if you didn't know any better would kind of indicate that they probably could make flint lock weapons.

[00:07:19]But it's all not quite right.

[00:07:21]Everything's a little bit too good. the carbon content in the gun barrels, the type of smithing equipment that they're using doesn't at all really line up. And eventually Kirk and McCoy get full-on confirmation of this when they literally see the Klingon Krell promising more weapons to the villagers. So with the evidence in hand, Kirk now offers to do the same for the tribe people. This is somewhat reluctant. And the sort of tribe leader that Kirk is close friends with, he's very reluctant. He doesn't believe in war. He is a pacifist. He is so much of a pacifist that when he sees Nona lead Kirk away basically to canoodle with him. Is tempted to kill Kirk, but he doesn't.

[00:08:11]He won't give up his pacifism, not even for the woman he loves. Now Kirk offers the tribe weapons. McCoy strongly objects. He says that this is just going to lead to a cycle of endless war and endless genocide and endless violence.

[00:08:26]Now, while Kirk and Nona are off canoodling, they get attacked by a Maggato yet again. And this time, Kirk is forced to use his phaser to kill it.

[00:08:36]This meaning that she sees that Kirk has a phaser, a very powerful weapon, far more powerful than these flint lock fire sticks, as she calls them. So, she steals Kirk's phaser and attempts to bargain with the villagers.

[00:08:53]That goes about as well as you'd expect because she's just picked up this device with no knowledge of how to actually use it. So, nearly gets didd to death by the villagers, but they settle for killing her because they think she's actually lured them into a trap by the tribe people. By the way, to has an awful lot of implied or very near sexual assault happening. It's very common. I suppose maybe that was just TV of the time. I don't know. But it's pretty like on the nose and not very comfortable to watch.

[00:09:25]And I can't imagine it would have been comfortable to watch back then. Anyway, Nona is then killed in the battle. And this causes Tyrie, the leader of the tribe, to take up arms. And he swears vengeance against the villagers. And he then says, "Kirk, I want more of these.

[00:09:44]more of these. And so Kirk has got what he wanted. He has created a balance of power. Kirk doesn't think he's done the right thing here, but he believes he's done the necessary thing. And like I say, it has a very dark, bitter ending.

[00:10:04]There's no get together on the bridge at the end and a fun joke. It's just a quiet fade out. And so the episode obviously takes this ending very seriously.

[00:10:16]So that brings us to the end of the plot of Private Little War. As you can tell, there's an awful lot to unpack here. So obviously, we've got commentary first on the European genocide of the Native Americans. Now, there's perhaps an implication carried in this episode that, oh, if the Native Americans had flint locks, they'd have won. The fact of the matter was that the Native Americans did have flint locks. There were plenty of people willing to supply them with flint locks. And I'm not a scholar of Native American history.

[00:10:51]There are other channels you can look at to follow that. But essentially what it actually seems that happened was the Native Americans were never particularly united and the Europeans were more able to act in concert and sort of play a bit of divide and conquer with the various Native American tribes. There is all sorts of reasons. I'm not going to get too dragged into it. The point being the episode does kind of have that implication of, oh well, if they had flint locks, they wouldn't have been subjugated. Fact of the matter is they they did and actually a lot of them had very good flint locks. All that's to say is it's more complicated than that. The other thing that it makes pretty explicit is that it is commenting on the various bush wars of the cold war proxy wars. Now the most obvious one this is being written in the 1960s. So this is obviously talking about Vietnam. But the interesting here is that of course classic TRE and this goes right from toos to TNG and DS9. It does not approve nor condemn. It simply suggests that this is an unfortunate reality of the world and it asks that question are weaker nations simply porns in the greater game of empires? Now this is an interesting question. There's a great number of examples that we could put uh point to throughout the 20th century. the various Arab-Israeli wars.

[00:12:15]Now, of course, originally it was the Arabs who had the superior material advantages because they were already receiving supplies not only from the Soviet Union, but actually initially most of them were getting supplies from us, the British uh until of course the playing field gets a bit leveled and then one side gains the advantage and then we get to where we are today.

[00:12:37]Similarly, of course, you have the US in Vietnam and the USSR in Afghanistan where again the other superpower is supplying by proxy. And then of course finally we have the civil wars, revolutions and dictators that take place in South America and Africa. So I mentioned this whole thing of weaker nations are simply pawns in the greater game of empires. And this is very much the sentiment that is echoed by Dr. McCoy that these people are the victims of the great game that is being played out between the Klingons and the Federation.

[00:13:18]Essentially dying for a conflict that they don't even know exists.

[00:13:23]The thing is is that these struggles are in fact individual and sovereign, but they are also part of a great game. So, you know, you can debate to say that, oh, this is always because of these, you know, big imperialist empires is is making these lesser nations go to war with each other. Basically takes away autonomy. It deprivives those nations of sovereignty and autonomy and basically says, "Oh, yeah, they don't have any will of their own. they're just simply doing uh what they're told by their you know colonial or you know superpower overlords which you know I don't think is at all fair and it's a very superpower ccentric uh you know greater great nation ccentric view of the world when in fact it's absolutely eminently possible for the tail to wag the dog. So that's the sort of surface level sort of allegory that the episode is engaging in. And you could sort of say that it's a bit of a it's a bit of a flaccid critique of the Vietnam War. And I would be tempted to agree if I thought that that was really what it was about. I think fundamentally we're actually dealing with a much deeper allegory metaphor that is very much borne out by that final line of the episode 100 serpents for the garden of Eden. And that is the idea of I suppose the noble savage and the corrupting nature of technology. That's kind of the view of Dr. McCoy. And I'll also just give here a quote from Bernard Schneider's review on exastricencia because I'm going to disagree with it.

[00:15:12]This series of twists leaves the impression that the conflict is not imposed on the people by the two alien powers but has actual roots on the planet itself. So we can see Bernard's perspective and I have to disagree with it. I think that's exactly the point.

[00:15:31]Bernardet. Now, this is absolutely a contentious point, and you could argue that maybe the episode does want us to adhere to that idea of, well, before the guns arrived, these people were fine.

[00:15:44]But I I I do have to wonder like what did did Krell literally have to explain to the villagers, oh, you can use these guns to shoot the the hill people and you could, you know, take their women and take all their stuff. I don't think he needed to do that. I think once he gave them the guns, they worked out pretty quickly what they could do with those. My contention is that original series Star Trek to has a pretty consistent anti-romantic view of man.

[00:16:17]Look at episodes like The Enemy Within, The Day of the Dove, The Ultimate Computer. You know, in each of these episodes, we are very clearly confronted with the inner darkness of man in the enemy within. Yes, there's this gentle side of Kirk, this gentle and empathetic side of Kirk, but by no means is it the default. It's equally fair to say that the default is evil Kirk who goes around uh you know trying to assault Janice Rand and and swigging uh Sor and Brandy.

[00:16:50]Both of these are in there and they're then sort of civilized. So that's a very sort of Freudian I suppose you'd say id ego perspective.

[00:16:59]If you look at the day of the dove, yes, there's this aggressive entity on the Enterprise that is causing them to just keep fighting. But again, you could say, well, yeah, but the cause of the fight was in there. And you know, yes, it pushed it further. Nearly made Czechov do something that probably really regret, but it's in there. Same thing in Ultimate Computer, the M5 computer that was created by Dr. Dastrom. You know, it's an imprint of himself. Dastrom himself is a very humane, compassionate, good man, but inside that imprint is this this more aggressive, murderous tendency. So, I think it's fair to say that original series tends to recognize the inner darkness of man. And let's bear in mind some context here.

[00:17:48]toos is being written in the 1960s by people who were born in the 30s.

[00:17:54]World War II would almost certainly be a formative experience. Gene Rodenbury himself was someone who of course uh did serve in World War II and I suspect a lot of these writers again knew people or themselves had served. So they all had sort of an experience of war and they had an experience therefore of that heart of darkness that can come out and I think that's why to readily portrays that that heart of darkness uh because of the imminence of the second world war so they know what really it looks like and what people can be like that is a generation that is very offay with the stresses and the impact acts that uh military service and of course fighting in a war does have on people and how it changes people and what certain people given the circumstances given the correct circumstances are capable of doing. TNG tends to avoid portraying this. Now there are still exceptions. I would say Captain Peicard and Miles O'Brien are actually two pretty good examples of this and it does kind of show the writers still bearing it in mind. But circling back to the actual episode itself, a private little war.

[00:19:14]Like I say, I think it's a good example of showing original Star Trek's I want to say somewhat cynical take on man and the human condition. It's very very aware of the flaws of people and how these kind of get iterated out across time. And to an extent you might say that no matter where you are, where people are in the universe, there's sort of locked into the same cycles. You know, again, Kirk even talks about this.

[00:19:44]It's like I can only give you the same weapons. I can't give you better weapons because that might be even worse the other way. The best we can hope for is that, you know, we preserve a balance of power and basically the hill people aren't genocided off the planet by the villagers. Uh but that there's no really other way to to solve it. And again, there's that thing of like, oh well, if they didn't have the weapons, would this happen anyway? Maybe not immediately, but do you think these people would, you know, the Klingons would say, well, we just accelerated what was already going to happen. sooner or later they'd have developed firearms. So, we're just accelerating the progress of the planet.

[00:20:26]We're seeing which is the truly dominant strongest faction because of course the Klingons will want them as their vassels in the Klingon Empire. So, just to wrap up my final thoughts here, A Private Little War is an excellent gray episode.

[00:20:44]Like I say, there's no happy ending.

[00:20:46]There's not even an outofplace inappropriate joke. It is just a damn sad, bittersweet ending. I do think definitely that the proximity of World War II to original Star Trek renders it a far darker series and far less idealistic about the human condition.

[00:21:07]Now, to an extent, and maybe this is me, maybe I'm just, you know, old-fashioned, but to an extent, I think a show like original series, really like original series, is something that we need today, something with uncomfortable choices and no easy answers. I think one of the reasons that Star Trek Academy and and Star Trek Discovery, one of the reasons that they move to the 31st century, where they're rebuilding the Federation from scratch, is because they then no longer have to make those uncomfortable decisions. They can just do what's right because the Federation is like this now barely existent remnant. So they can just act like, you know, full-on space cowboys and do what's the right thing rather than having to do what they actually have to do in original series.

[00:21:56]Whereas they have to think about the secondary consequences, what's right for the planet, what's good for the Federation, what might be the fallout of doing this? You know, should we just leave things as they are? Yeah, they're not great, but you know, will interfering make them worse? And also, if we interfere, we don't know what happens next because we're gonna bugger off in our starships. But who knows what might happen after this. Star Trek original series does a very good job of showing that if doing the right thing was clear and simple, well, then everyone would do the right thing all the time. But it's not necessarily clear what is the right thing, and it's not necessarily easy to implement.

[00:22:44]And I think that's what Star Trek the original series and what A Private Little War demonstrates very well. And like I say, I think it's why we need a show more in the tone of original series in the modern world. Something that can inform these conflicted and compromised decisions that we have to face. So thank you all for watching. Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Uh, what do you think of A Private Little War? Do you think there are other episodes of original series that perhaps uh portray this better? What episode of original Star Trek really gets you thinking? Is one that you really like to talk about and sort of meditate on? Let me know in the comments below. And I will see you all in the next video. Thank you to my members, new and old, because I wouldn't have made it this far without you. My glorious navs, Tully DT, David Reeves, and Jim Bro. My ever beautiful commanders, Bird Monster, Jeff Halum, Mark Phipe, Sha Farrell, Rea, Gabe Logan, Adam Bowman, JCT Tech, Wizard, Alcar Dreamer, Gloom, Cookie, John Radic, NC98, Valletra, Petra, and David Jackson. And I salute my centurions Pendleberry, Marcus Hall, Julian Arnot, Freedom Trooper, Okulatam, Quaestto, John Nicole, Athena, Tobias Klein, Bird of Play, D3, Khan the Skele Overlord, The Shakiest Gun in the Ozarks, Shipmaster, Jeffrey Hughes, Ian Hans, Rogal Dom, Steven Ross, Tom Mosley, Captain Hellish, John C, and Cornelius.

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