What Are Little Girls Made Of? TOS Season 1 Episode 7

Plot Synopsis

We start the episode in orbit of the planet "Exo-III" where a brilliant scientist Roger Corby was apparently on the surface. He had gone missing a while ago and they think he is here. It is difficult to imagine he has survived on this planet, as the surface temperature stays below 100 degrees, but they guess that he perhaps stays underground. They get a transmission from Corby that only Kirk and his Fiancee Christine (who is a nurse on this Enterprise) should beam down. They comply, but when they beam down Corby isn't right there and Kirk thinks things are suspicious so he calls down a few security guys as well. It doesn't take long for these security personnel to be killed, one by a really scary looking guy

We finally meet up with Corby and he is acting very strangely. He certainly shows no compassion for the security who just died, and he refuses to let Kirk contact his ship. He's made some important scientific discoveries and he is afraid that they will be lost if they are not properly handled. He says

Do you realize the number of discoveres that have been lost because of superstition? Of ignorance, of a layman's inability to comprehend?

I certainly don't want shortsightedness to inhibit scientific discoveries (stem cell research comes to mind), but we really don't know what he's up to yet.

But we soon learn that Corby has been making androids based on the technology from the ancient race from this planet. Corby shows his servant android (pictured above) to everyone, but we soon learn that everyone down on the planet with Corby is an android, and ultimately Corby himself is revealed to be an android too. He was dying and transferred his mind into the android body, but he insists he is still himself.

But he's not himself any more. His emotions have been taken away, or at least changed significantly. He claims that everyone should be transferred to an android body, it would remove jealousy, greed, hate. Kirk retorts that it would also remove love and tenderness. Christine argues that he had no compassion for the people he is hurting and he is not acting like himself. He insists that he has constructed a perfect being, all of the benefits of humanity without the flaws. But it is clear that he doesn't even believe what he is saying and ultimately kills himself along with the hot servant android

Interesting Themes

• What makes us human?

Obviously a major point of this episode was the question of what makes us human. Is it our flesh? What if we could transfer our brains into android bodies? Would we still be human? It took the position that even if we transfer our memories we lose something in the transfer. I would argue that it should be possible to make a better android and transfer mechanism to remove this, but it is still a really interesting topic, at what point would you not be human any more?

• Is there a point when technology has gone too far?

The race that lived on the planet previously got wiped out by their own creations. At some point they tried to shut the android down, they rebelled and killed their creators. It reminds me of I Robot.

• Programming consciousness is too complicated to really control

The hot girl android was supposed to be a simple machine to take commands, and yet it wound up having some emotions and acted unpredictably in the end. Even if we could make machines like this, should we? We would have to acknowledge that controlling them might not be possible.

Rating

7/10

I enjoyed this episode, but something is keeping me from giving it a higher score. I guess I would have liked to have seen some of those themes explored a little more deeply. It was certainly good fun, and a bit step up from last week.