I am... really quite conflicted on this episode. There are some really fantastic elements here, but then some parts that are just downright misogynistic and - I never thought I'd find a context to truly use this word unsarcastically - heteronormative. Some of these can be accounted for as "well, it was the 60s, even if they tried their best they couldn't have developed that much of a consciousness about these topics," but some of it is just plain inexcusable.
The premise is intriguing enough, that while bringing a sick female Commissioner to the Enterprise, the crew's shuttlecraft is abducted and drawn out to a small planetoid in the middle of nowhere. There they find the inventor of the warp drive, Zefram Cochrane (the same character who would later appear in First Contact) who has been sustained for over 150 years by a mysterious energy cloud that seems to have a symbiotic relationship with him - and it was this cloud that brought the crew to him, as it sensed his loneliness and sought them out to keep him company, intending to trap them on the planetoid for eternity with him.
The first act overall is fantastic, and the writing shines. Zefram is a conflicted character - fundamentally a good man, he didn't want the creature (known as The Companion) to kidnap anyone else, but he can't reason with it enough to let them go. He's willing to help the crew, but at the same time feels he owes the Companion his life. Add the ticking clock element of Commissioner Nancy Hedford quickly falling ill, with her death inevitable if the crew can't make it back to the Enterprise, you've got a great setup.
And then things start to get... dated. After some failing to fight the Companion, Kirk opts to try and bargain with it, using a modified translator device. The voice that comes from the translator is female, and at first I thought nothing of this, but Kirk and Spock both react in surprise, immediately asserting that this non-humanoid sentient cloud of electricity and gas is "female," and that, in Spock's own words, "the matter of gender changes things." They all immediately decide that the Companion is in love with Cochrane, based only on the fact that he is a man, and their translator gave the Companion a female voice. Through further communication, this is proven entirely correct, which really detracted a lot from the mysterious appeal. I was thinking the episode would explore the strange symbiotic relationship between Cochrane and the Companion in a lot more depth, but no, it's just reduced to "love between human man and space cloud woman" like ok
Spock asserts that "male and female are universal constants," which, no the fuck it isn't, that's not even true on earth, aren't you supposed to be the Chief Science Officer dude. Kirk proceeds to give the Companion a lecture on how the cloud can never truly love Cochrane because only human women can love human men, which, wow, alright dude. This is Star Trek I'm watching, right? The Companion seems to understand and accept this, and so... so it...
it decides to possess the dying body of Commissioner Nancy Hedford, so that it can love Cochrane.
Okay. Okay. There's a lot going on there. That's really fucked up, but yeah, like, the crew is going to understand how fucked up it is and tell the Companion that it absolutely Cannot Do This, right? RIGHT?
Spock is kinda confused and asks how Nancy and the Companion can coexist, it gives a vague answer about how she would have died anyways and they are both One now bla bla bla, and then that's it. The Companion reasons it needed a female body to love Cochrane, and that's just fine with everybody. Nobody questions Nancy's autonomy in this situation after that. Nobody has an issue with this entity possession her body. It could have at least had the decency to wait for her to actually fucking die, at least. It'd still be totally screwed up, but a little less...
Putting aside for a moment how completely fucked all of this is, the dialogue shared between Cochrane and the Companion here really is quite nice... too bad it's coming from the mouth of a woman it stole the body of.
The Companion frees everyone because now that it's human, it can't stop them anyways. The Companion tells Cochrane she can't leave the planet without dying, so he decides he'll stay with her on the planet. The Enterprise crew are just like "you sure? alright bro see ya" and turn to leave, but then Bones asks the obvious question. Wasn't Nancy Hedford supposed to be working to prevent a war? To which, Kirk gives the final line of the episode:
"Well, I'm sure the Federation can find another woman somewhere who'll stop that war," with a smug grin, the Enterprise soars off, roll credits.
Do I even have to explain to you how incredibly misogynistic this whole ordeal was? The Enterprise crew, normally all about human rights, just lets an alien entity take over a woman's body so it can have sex with a man she never knew, and when queried on what her absence would cause, Kirk replies, "oh well, there's other women." Like holy fucking shit dude. This is not just "it was the 60s" this is straight up "women don't have autonomy and are imminently replaceable in every context."
Someone on reddit warned me about this episode, said it was by far the worst of the whole show. I thought perhaps they were exaggerating, but I'm thinking they were right. Don't get me wrong, I've seen more boring episodes (looking at you, The Alternative Factor), but the true crime of this episode is how fascinating and intriguing its premise is, only for it to be shafted by Gene L. Coon's weird antiquated ideas about women, men, and love.
If it had simply been a story about a lonely man and the ambiguous, genderless, nonverbal space cloud that both needed each other to survive, you could have had something really compelling. Instead, you get an episode that digs its own grave with every successive scene. Wasted opportunity, 3/10.