TOS-0310 For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

Image Credits: IMDB 🖖 The Original Series-1966 Season:03 Episode:10

Overall Score:       61.41 / 100
Star Trek Values:    4.25 / 5
Inspiring:           4.25 / 5
Story Development:   4.25 / 5

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The Story, Briefly

Enterprise crew notices that an asteroid was in their course. They investigate the asteroid, they found out it’s a generation ship, built 10 thousands years ago, and designed to bring Fabrini’s to a new planet, suitable to live. But Fabrinis doesn’t recognize the reality of their ship, they think it’s a planet environment.

The ship has an error, which will bring Fabrinis to a crash with a planet. The crew tries to correct the error, without compromising prime directive. During the trials, only Priestess became aware of the reality, and allowed the team to correct the error.

At the end, ancient cures of the Fabrinis, saved the McCoy’s life, which is threatened by an illness with no treatment known so far.

Thoughts

• Star Trek has other examples like this, where a further developed civilization tries to save another civilization, but they cannot know what is a starship. So, they design a system to cover the reality. So it’s not a rare example used. But this is one of the first ones.
• The understanding level over the Priestess was fascinating. I would expect that, a leader who can directly talk to the gods and who can be directly punished wouldn’t develop an understanding to allow others to touch the sacred things. Still, it might be because of some suspicions arose. For example, an elder man tried to touch to the sky (which is subjected to the episode’s name) even it’s forbidden. Suspicions of the people is nearly visible in all the prime-directive subjected societies.
• Ancient cure at the end, is still an interesting approach. It’s not like a pseudo-science. In general, we don’t expect a pre-warp world to be further in some areas of the science. What we research and prioritize is not linked with a universal pathway. Some civilizations are willing to study life sciences, other one is to engineer something and another one is other things. We just know that, in some of the eras, studying one field yielded more powerful outcomes. And countries developed more soft power as a result. But that doesn’t mean less powerful countries has less developed. They were just on another path. The important thing is to see their path. For example, the elder man, who touched the sky, was walking in a path originated from his curiosity.