Title: Requiem For Methuselah
Airdate: 2/14/1969
Plot Summary
In Requiem For Methuselah, the Enterprise is fast becoming a plague ship with much of the crew coming down with Rigellian fever. McCoy needs ryetalyn, which they find on a planet owned by a human named Flint. After some early head-butting, Flint agrees to help the Enterprise. While waiting, he introduces them to Rayna, whom Kirk falls in love with rather quickly. Soon, Flint and Kirk are pitted against each other with the crew’s health in the balance. But what is Rayna’s true secret?
Risk Is Our Business
Kirk falls in love with Rayna impossibly quickly. While he’s known as a ladies’ man, in truth, he’s only really fallen in love twice. Once in the Paradise Syndrome, which blossomed over months, and once with Edith Keeler. Which again happened over several days, and it was early stages. Both were quite believable. Here, it’s established they have only about 4 hours to get the medicine back to the ship. So, inside of that 4 hours, he turns into a complete simp. Seriously, it was embarrassing.
Logical
Spock figures out Flint’s secret that he’s very old, and more importantly, he figures out that Rayna is some sort of android. He uses his Vulcan mind meld to help Kirk forget her.
He’s Dead Jim
McCoy mostly works on getting the ryetalyn.
Helm Sluggish Captain
Sulu is absent.
Nuclear Wessels
Chekov was probably bedridden.
Hailing Frequencies Open, Sugar
Uhura is in the background doing…stuff.
My Wee Bairns
Scotty mostly relays the ship status to Kirk and company.
Canon Maker
So Leonardo DaVinci was actually a whole bunch of people and ended up on a planet. Why do I make a note of this? Voyager had Janeway working in DaVinci’s workshop on the holodeck, and at some point, she made a mention of Kirk meeting him once, a claim she found skeptical.
Spock can play the piano. So add that to the Vulcan Lyre.
Canon Breaker
So Flint wanted his privacy kept, and Kirk promised to keep that. So why did Janeway know? Why was he running his mouth later?
Ok, I was having issues finding breakers on this one, given at the end Flint said he would live his remaining days helping humanity so who knows?
Man It Feels Bad To Be A Red Shirt
No red shirts die.
Technobabble
Flint has some pretty impressive technology he’s come up with over his lifetime, including the ability to shrink and transport an entire starship onto his kitchen table, along with suspending the crew in stasis when he does that. Weirdly, the crew is frozen, but the ship’s systems are still on and blinking. Even the viewscreen works as it shows Kirk looking in on them.
I Know That Guy:
James Daly plays Flint in Requiem For Methuselah. He was probably best known for playing in the hospital drama Medical Center.
Louise Sorel plays Rayna. She was best known for her role in Days of Our Lives for many years, on and of,f between 1992 and 2023. She also had a role in the unintentionally hilarious Mazes And Monsters.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
So there is some validity to the idea that the original inspiration for Star Trek was Forbidden Planet. That was a thinly veiled retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. With Requiem For Methuselah we come full circle as this is also a retelling of The Tempest.
And boy does it suck.
Some of the ideas in Requiem For Methuselah are intriguing. The idea of a human that’s been around since ancient Greece is kinda neat. He’s been around forever and has been some famous people over that time. He becomes a recluse on a planet and builds an android woman to live with. This makes sense as all the wives he would’ve had would keep dying on him.
The Enterprise showing up for a plague is suitable enough to get the story going. But then, hoo boy, does it go downhill from there. We got Rayna ,who is fine enough, but there’s no way I would buy Kirk not only falling in love with her, but head over heels, total simp love. It goes against everything we know Kirk as a character.
Sure, he’s smooched a lot of babes on this show, but I would say 90% of them were to gain the upper hand in some life-or-death situation. The two times I can see he really fell in love were with Miramani and Edith Keeler. Miramani took months; he had brain damage at the time, and it all felt organic enough, but not really “Kirk” as he wasn’t all there.
Edith, on the other hand felt completely natural. They were there for days and he just spent a lot of time with her in between looking for McCoy and working at her place. It built up very naturally and worked perfectly.
Here, Kirk’s on the planet for less than 4 hours. Four. Hours. Are you kidding me? They have Rayna play some pool and ask Spock about a brilliant science thing to show she’s brilliant. It’s very ham-fisted.
Flint uses Kirk to try to open up Rayna’s emotions, and OF COURSE Kirk would kiss her so much she would spontaneously get emotions. Not like it’s his first rodeo on that. But really, what was Flint’s plan here? “Oh thanks, I got emotions now. I’m going to go with someone else now. Byyyyyeeee!” He really didn’t think that through at all.
Then, finally,y we have Spock. Now for the vast majority of the episode, he was on top of things. Putting the clues together and trying to stop Kirk from finding out about all the spare Raynas. But then he effing mind rapes Kirk at the end by making him forget her? I know it’s supposed to be an act of compassion, but it’s horrifying he would do that without permission. Indeed, in Star Trek V, Kirk objects to having his pain taken away. Spock should’ve known better.
It’s not like this is just horribly executed or anything. It actually, on the surface,e seems like a decent episode. But once you start thinking even a little bit about it, it falls apart.
