Exploring the Fear of Overpopulation in the Original Star Trek Episode “The Mark of Gideon”

Third in a Series Exploring the Classic Science Fiction Show Through a Faith-based Lens

Inspired by a misguided dread of overpopulation back here on Earth, “The Mark of Gideon” aired in Star Trek: The Original Series’ third season. The episode was written by George F. Slavin and Stanley Adams, who is best known to Star Trek fans as Cyrano Jones from the "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode. This concern for overpopulation reached a pinnacle in 1968 with the publication of “The Population Bomb,” a best-selling book by Paul Ehrlich. A Stanford University professor, Ehrlich warned about the consequences of population growth and scarce resources. His predictions of global starvation and otherwise grim outcomes are now more well known for their wild inaccuracies.

To this day, I keenly remember my World Nutrition class in my college freshman year in the middle 1980s. A requirement of the course was to attend a computer simulation that would help explain to us how overpopulation gradually drained a country’s resources. Back then, you had to schedule an appointment with a graduate assistant and computer terminal, so it was a bit of an inconvenience. The simulation showed (as far as I can recall) an increasingly alarming situation in a simulated country as the population grew and the resources, particularly meat products, grew scarcer. Even back then, I was unconvinced as I realized that a computer simulation was only as good as the data given it. Several important factors, I believed, were left out of the equation. These included not factoring enough for improvements in food production efficiencies and a general calculation that new people came only as burdens on society and not as producers or resources.

While a diminishing supply of resources is a chief concern in regard to overpopulation, the other related one has to be living space, as in, if the planet becomes too full, where do you put all of the people? “The Mark of Gideon” explores that scary aspect of overpopulation. The episode begins in the Enterprise’s transporter room where Captain Kirk is about to beam down to the planet Gideon, which has recently applied for inclusion into the Federation. While the ship’s scanners are unable to penetrate the planet’s atmospheric screen, Kirk mentions that he is expecting a veritable paradise below, as it was described in Gideon’s application. As they cannot perform a transporter lock on the coordinates of the planet’s council chambers, Spock uses the coordinate numbers provided verbally by the Gideons and transports Kirk. After materializing, Kirk finds himself still in the transporter room aboard the Enterprise, with Spock, and everyone else for that matter, absent.

Meanwhile on board the fully crewed Enterprise, they realize that Kirk has gone missing. Spock begins tedious negotiations with the Gideon Council and Ambassador Hodin to permit him to beam down to the planet to search for Kirk.

While this is going on, Kirk explores the vacant ship in search of anyone else aboard, and experiences the feelings of loss and loneliness of being by himself in his vast starship. He comes upon a beautiful woman prancing about in a corridor, simply exulting in her freedom of movement. She claims she does not know how she got there, only that her name is Odona and that she came from a world that was horribly overcrowded. So much so that while there she even struggled to breath. When Kirk suggests that she may be from Gideon, she says that she does not recognize the name.

Later, as they continue to explore the empty ship, while on the bridge, the viewscreen shows that they are moving in space, with no planet visible nearby. But then, the episode takes a scary turn as the view suddenly switches to a crowd of persons standing outside in an eerie greenish light.

Kirk and Odona do not see it, only you, the audience. A little later, the two hear an eerie thumping noise seemingly coming from outside the ship that, as Kirk describes it, sounds like the heartbeat of countless people outside pressing against the ship. This time, when Kirk opens a viewport, they catch a horrifying glimpse of crowds of people outside. Startled, Kirk instinctively moves to protect Odona, but before they can react further, the view of black space returns. But then, it suddenly dawns on Kirk to suspect that Odona may be behind all of this. As he confronts her somewhat violently, she begins to swoon. But it is not out of fear of Kirk; she is actually coming down with a disease.

Soon the Gideons’ plot is unveiled. Sure enough, Odona is indeed from Gideon (and is Ambassador Hodin’s daughter), the empty Enterprise was meant to confuse Kirk, and that meeting Odona was an attempt to captivate him with her beauty so that he would fall in love and, hopefully, be a willing participant in their plan. They need Kirk in order to introduce a fatal disease into Gideon’s population as he is a carrier of such a disease, Vegan choriomeningitis. They had deliberately infected Odona with the disease, and she was going to die from it to prove that the Gideon population’s life cycle could be altered, and, in a strange way, become a symbol of hope to the people that they could in fact die.

All this because Gideon was indeed horrifically overpopulated. And the cause of the overpopulation would normally be considered a dream come true. The peoples’ life cycles and regenerative powers were so great on Gideon that they rarely died there. To his credit, Kirk does not mention abortion as an answer, but (sadly in my opinion) suggests that the Federation could help with new techniques for birth control and sterilization. Hodin informs him that sterilization is impossible as their bodies regenerated any harm done to them. He also explains that the Gideons’ philosophy was inherently pro-life—that their love of life was so great that artificial birth control was inconceivable. “The love of life is the greatest gift of all,” Hodin declares. It is, according to Hodin, the one unshakable truth of Gideon, and this overwhelming love of life developed their regenerative power and their great longevity. And their great misery that they now face, Kirk adds darkly.

 “We are incapable of destroying the creation of that which we love so deeply—life in every form from fetus to developed being,” Hodin continues. “It is against our tradition, our very nature.” No, the only solution, Hodin argues, is to introduce disease and death in a “natural” way. Kirk, finally making more sense, tells Hodin that he will not be their willing sacrifice to this cause of death. When Hodin emphasizes the Gideons’ great love of life, Kirk quickly points out the contradiction to this philosophy with their plans for the death of Odona: “Yet, you can kill a young girl.”

Meanwhile, Spock finally figures out that the verbal coordinates first given to him to beam Kirk down were different than the ones given to them in a test to determine if the transporter was malfunctioning. He uses the first coordinates to beam to the artificial Enterprise. He subdues the guards watching Kirk, and they (Kirk, Spock and the unconscious Odona) return to the Enterprise where Odona is saved by Dr. McCoy.

Odona reproaches herself for deceiving Kirk, and Kirk, as he does with most of his female friends, treats her with graciousness and mercy. Now that she is a carrier of the disease, Odona repeats her intention to continue her mission of introducing Vegan choriomeningitis to Gideon. “I am needed there,” Odona states to which Kirk replies interestingly, “You are needed everywhere, Odona.”

I count this episode as one of my least favorite of the original series. As a child when I first saw the episode, I accepted it without question, and it came across as eerie that Kirk was all alone in an empty ship, and surrounded by ghostly people outside the ship. Yet when the “sadder but wiser” adulthood came upon me, I saw that using the empty Enterprise as a plot element had such obvious budgetary motives as no new sets (other than Gideon’s council chamber) were needed to produce the episode. The plot is remarkably thin, and the main characters are uncharacteristically slow-witted.

It’s hard to know where to begin. It’s never explained how the Gideons would have the ability to create a replica of Kirk’s own ship to such detail that he is fooled. Were, for example, the contents of his personal cabin all replicated with exact detail? And for an overcrowded world, the replica would have taken up an astounding amount of space most assuredly required for other purposes. Even as a child I questioned this.

Furthering the issues with the plot, the Gideons’ reasons for going to the great trouble of reproducing the Enterprise are a bit vague. Why keep Kirk occupied and confused when all they really needed was his body and blood? They could simply have held him hostage and done a better job of faking a transporter accident. This ended up being their fallback plan, as they immediately took Kirk captive after he delivered Odona to the replica sick bay. But even if it was important to them to get Kirk’s voluntary cooperation, wouldn’t it have been better to show him the true horror of living on their planet, rather than the opposite, of being kept all alone on his own ship? It seems like they didn’t think their plan through very carefully at all.

The Gideons are apparently capable of warp space travel, in that they were under consideration for Federation membership. Had it not occurred to them to expand out beyond their current planet? They seem to have the technology to build a ship (i.e., replicating the Enterprise), so why not use that expertise to build ships and make off-world colonies—even space stations in nearby space? No, these supposedly life-loving people seem to be too focused on an attitude of death to think of such things. It would truly be an odd pro-life philosophy that prohibits contraceptives and also promotes death by disease, especially when it was no longer natural on that world to die of disease. Why does death that comes from a natural process become acceptable morally?  

Another important factor unexplored: there is little room for breathing much less anything else, yet somehow they are able to produce enough food to eat, let alone have space (and the privacy) to have sex and give birth? With such extreme conditions, certainly the population would level out—it would have to. But even more so, the expanded population of Gideon are, apparently, only burdens on that world. All the extra people have not produced any more geniuses or problem-solvers.

Compounding issues with the plot, even our heroes aboard the Enterprise aren’t thinking at their best. Spock is easily outmaneuvered and bamboozled by Hodin at each communication with the Gideon Council to find Kirk. So much so it appears, that Spock does not notice the differences in the beam-down coordinates provided by them. Normally, Spock would not be so uncharacteristically slow at noticing such things. And the good Captain, who knows his own ship so well, surely would have thought to check it thoroughly for any dissimilarities. (Would he wonder, perhaps, that he might been sent to another alternate universe, like in Mirror, Mirror?) But that aside, Kirk, as an experienced problem-solver, surely also should have come up with a better solution than suggesting birth control and sterilization! A man who’s visited countless planets, many unpopulated, but habitable worlds, and that’s the best he can do? The Kirk I think I know would have started out by advocating for a Federation-assisted evacuation. Would he not have begun arranging for the largest Federation transport ships available to make regular trips to other worlds for the people to live on? This is the space age, for crying out loud—there’s no need for an overcrowded world!

Speaking of scarcity of living space, I read one time that all of the world’s population could actually fit within the state of Texas. To see if this was true, I did the math as follows. According to the “Worldometer” website, the current population of the Earth (when I did the calculations) was about 7,968,622,600 people. And, on the “List of US States By Size” webpage, which provides the square mileage of each U.S. state, Texas has 261,797 square miles (by land mass). So, if the world’s population all needed to move to Texas, the resulting population density for each square mile of Texas would approximately 30,438 persons. This is higher, but somewhat corresponding to the population density of New York City, which is around 27,012 people per square mile. So, technically speaking, we could all fit in Texas. I’m not suggesting that this situation would be desirable, comfortable or sustainable, only that we have a lot more room to live on the planet than some think. The total square mileage of the planet’s landmasses is 57.3 million.

For Gideon, I can imagine all kinds of “sci-fi” solutions even if the entire population were to remain on the planet. Certainly, something like the planet Coruscant from Star Wars comes to mind—a planet made up of countless 1,000-story buildings. Space stations, underwater cities, floating cities on water and even the clouds would all help alleviate over-crowding. The fantastical solutions are many.

However, just as fantastical, “The Mark of Gideon” demonstrates unwittingly that overpopulation is a problem only in the anxious minds of those concerned about it. It would take place, as this episode suggests, in a most extreme and exaggerated situation. As such, Gideon’s overpopulation is a continuing problem only because the Gideons’ birthrate remains constant despite increasingly negative conditions with no corresponding change in the deathrate. That simply does not happen in reality on the planet Earth. While we are living longer, the current reality is that many countries on Earth are experiencing negative population growth. Simply put, people are not having enough children to replace the people who have died.

Since scarcity of food resources is not discussed in the episode, we may assume that food production is not an important issue for the Gideons. Similarly on Earth, the scarcity of food is not a problem of production. In fact, we produce more than enough food to feed the entire planet’s population. As argued by the late Walter Williams, a noted economist, the problem of hunger in our world is caused not by population density or food production, but by the hampered distribution of food, which in turn is caused exclusively by human evil and corruption. (I paraphrase greatly).

In summary, the solutions to overpopulation advocated in “The Mark of Gideon” are sterilization, birth control, and death by disease. This is not the hopeful look at the future of mankind as Star Trek aspired to visualize. Back here in reality, God has given us a wonderful home that we need to take good care of. We have been given plenty of space in which to live, sufficient resources to survive, and the ingenuity to solve problems. Should the size of our population ever really become an issue, hopefully, and with God’s guidance, we will implement solutions in more life-affirming manner than the Gideons chose.

No, not my favorite episode, but fortunately, this is an exception to an otherwise great television series.