Will Kirk find a home In an alien Rome
Where there’s TV, but still slavery? Where the script’s bottom-shelf,
But still pleased with itself, ‘Cause it’s written by Roddenberry.
This is a review of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Bread
and Circuses.” If you have not seen this episode,
and you don’t want to know what happens in it, be warned: spoilers beyond this point!
What do you get when you combine a “what if?” premise where Ancient Rome lasts until the modern
era with a scathing but half-assed critique of the television industry? I guess we’re about to see!
Here we go: missing ship — check — specifically, the SS Beagle, a merchant ship that disappeared
six years ago, captained by R.M. Merik, an old acquaintance of Kirk’s. The Enterprise detects
debris indicating the Beagle was destroyed, but no signs of the crew, meaning they must have survived
whatever catastrophe happened to the ship. They arrive at an Earthlike planet in the nearby 892
star system, and pick up an old fashioned Earth-style television broadcast — hey look,
they must be a somewhat advanced civilization — they’ve got widescreen TV in the ‘60s!
The broadcast is a news program, showing the arrest of a runaway slave, as well as
a brief highlight from a gladiator fight. Spock recognizes one of the gladiators as a
member of the Beagle’s crew. So, Kirk’s like “All right, now we know there’s survivors down there,
so let’s go get ‘em!” and he, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet.
As they walk toward the city, they have a little chat about the prime directive,
to remind us that it’s a thing — and also to remind themselves, presumably,
since they break it all the time. But this time, they’re gonna try real hard not to. They don’t
get very far before they’re surrounded by a group of runaway slaves, led by a
former gladiator named Flavius. Assuming they’re members of some new division of Roman soldiers,
Flavius wants to kill them, but he knows his leader wouldn’t like that, so Flavius and the
others take Kirk, Spock and McCoy to the entrance to the Batcave to meet the leader of their cult.
The leader comes out like, “Hello, my name is Marshall Applewhite, but you can call me
Do. Welcome to Heaven’s Gate — uhh, I mean, the Children of the Sun! Yeah, that’s it.”
The cult leader’s actual name is Septimus. Kirk tries to get some information from him
without revealing any of the “I’m a spaceman from space” stuff that he’s not supposed to mention.
Meanwhile, Spock browses the cult’s modest but thoughtfully curated porn collection.
Kirk mentions to Septimus that he’s looking for an old friend of his named Merik, and Septimus
is like “You mean Merikus? First Citizen and Lord of the Games?” Kirk’s like, “I mean, sure, maybe.”
Septimus has Flavius take Kirk, Spock and McCoy into the city,
but along the way they get arrested by Roman soldiers. They’re brought to a jail,
where Flavius is taken away to once again become a gladiator. Kirk, Spock and McCoy
fight their way through one layer of guards, but then another group of soldiers appears,
these carrying machine guns, and accompanied by the First Citizen, who is indeed the former
captain of the Beagle, Merik, along with the leader of this version of Rome, the Proconsul.
Merikus tells Kirk, “Look, yeah, okay, I broke the prime directive, but when we got here the leader
of these Space Romans told us we had to adapt to their way of living and not tell anyone we were
from space so as not to contaminate their society — pretty funny, right? So anyway, I adapted and
now I’m a big shot, and my crew became gladiators and I think some of them are still alive?” Then,
the Proconsul tells Kirk to call the Enterprise and order his crew to beam down, so they can
become gladiators as well, because the gladiator games, they’re kind of a big deal around here.
Kirk contacts the Enterprise, but instead of doing what the Proconsul told him to,
he tells Scotty that the situation is condition green, which is apparently
Starfleet code for “we’re in big trouble, but don’t do anything.” On the bridge,
Scotty’s like “Okay, but I’ll still do a little something,” and he tells Chekov to
get started on a way of interrupting the power systems on the planet.
Meanwhile, the Proconsul has not taken kindly to Kirk’s refusal to bring down the rest of
his crew. He’s ordered Spock and McCoy to fight in the gladiator games — which are presented to
the audience as though they’re happening in an arena in front of a live crowd, but are actually
broadcast from a soundstage, where the cheers and jeers of the audience are provided by a
guy working a soundboard where everything is helpfully labeled like an episode of Batman.
Normally in episodes like this, Captain Kirk would be getting
ready to do something to radically alter this society, but the society’s reached
the point where it’s about to collapse all by itself — they’ve developed reality TV!
The Proconsul attends the gladiator fight, and forces Kirk to sit next to him and watch
while Spock and McCoy do battle with two of their most fearsome gladiators,
one of whom is the recently re-captured Flavius. McCoy draws him, and luckily
Flavius isn’t really in the fighting mood. Meanwhile, Spock holds his opponent at bay,
repeatedly warning the gladiator that if he keeps fuckin’ around, he’s gonna get hurt. Finally,
when McCoy falls and it looks like the reluctant Flavius will have no choice but to kill him,
Spock knocks down his gladiator with a solid bash from his shield, then drops Flavius with
a neck pinch. Apparently Vulcan neck pinches are against the rules, so they throw out the fight.
The Proconsul orders Spock and McCoy returned to the jail — he doesn’t want to kill them yet,
because he still hopes to force Kirk to deliver the rest of the Enterprise crew.
While Spock and McCoy have a little heart-to-heart in their cell — a heart-to-heart that includes
Spock insulting McCoy’s medical abilities and McCoy calling Spock a “pointed-eared
hobgoblin,” but that’s just their love language — the Proconsul sends Kirk to a room with a girl
in it. And it’s implied that Kirk has sex with the girl, Drusilla, who is a slave.
When in Rome! . . . That’s inappropriate . . .
The next morning, the Proconsul walks in and says to Kirk, “So, the reason you got to have sex with
a slave last night is because I’ve decided to just drop the whole ‘pressuring you to bring down your
crew to become gladiators’ thing and have you executed instead, to show the people the price
of defiance. But I let you get your rocks off one last time because I felt I owed that to you
as a man.” And then he turns to Merikus, who is also here, and says “Not that you’d know
anything about what it’s like to be a man, would you? I do not respect you, and if you’re looking
for motivation to turn on me, here it is. Hey, by the way, one of Kirk’s communicators is missing.”
“. . . Haven’t seen it.”
Kirk is marched back to the soundstage to be killed on live TV, but before it can
happen Flavius rushes in like “You wanna kill somebody? Try this on for size!” And Flavius
is immediately machine-gunned to death. A fight ensues. Kirk grabs a sword to defend himself,
but just then on the Enterprise Scotty puts his “disrupt the power” plan into motion,
and the lights in the studio go out. They come back on in a few seconds,
but by then Kirk’s made his escape — and now he has a machine gun, ho ho ho.
He reaches the jail cell where Spock and McCoy are being held and busts ‘em out,
but they’re soon surrounded by guards, with the Proconsul and Merikus standing
nearby. The Proconsul orders the guards to kill Kirk, Spock and McCoy — swords only, though,
to make it fair — but Merikus carries out his hastily booked babyface turn by revealing that
he stole that missing communicator! He calls the Enterprise for help, but the Proconsul
stabs him before he can get out more than a few words. With the last of his dying strength,
Merik throws the communicator over to Kirk and the others. Scotty uses the communicator
signal to lock on to the landing party and beam them up just as the guards open fire
with their machine guns — ‘cause I guess they forgot about the “swords only” bit.
Back on the Enterprise a short while later, Kirk records a captain’s log, giving Scotty a
commendation for rescuing them without breaking the prime directive. Spock says he wishes they
could have studied that cult, the Children of the Sun, a little more closely — he finds it odd that
a group of sun-worshippers would somehow develop a philosophy of peace and brotherhood. Then,
Uhura chimes in with the explanation: she’s been monitoring planetary radio broadcasts and
it turns out they’re not the Children of the Sun, S-U-N — they’re the children of the son, S-O-N.
In other words — grandchildren.
Also, Christians. This planet’s version of Christians. This Roman Empire was able to hold
back the spread of Christianity for two thousand years, but now it looks like it’s fixin’ to pop.
Kirk’s like, “It’s too bad we can’t stick around to watch that happen all over again! Wouldn’t it
be neat to see Christianity evolve here just like it did on Earth? First they’ll use their
beliefs to fight against slavery, then they’ll use their beliefs to justify maintaining slavery, then
they’ll use their beliefs to get rid of slavery again except a bunch of them won’t want to because
they’ll have slaves — the wheel of history, amirite? Ah well, Chekov, get us outta here.”
The end! The “duplicate Earth with a twist” gimmick is one of my favorite Star Trek tropes,
but even I have to admit that by this point, it’s wearing thin. The basic premise, as much
potential for fun as it holds, is obvious to begin with, and the fact that the writers of the show
repeatedly explore that premise in an extremely formulaic way doesn’t help anything. Neither does
the broadcast schedule — “Bread and Circuses” originally aired two weeks after “The Omega
Glory,” which aired two weeks after “Patterns of Force,” which aired a month after “A Piece of the
Action” — that’s a narrow window to release that many episodes with essentially the same premise.
All of those episodes start with the Enterprise investigating the disappearance of another ship,
and include the discovery of an earthlike planet with a society that is either a duplicate of a
civilization from Earth history or, in the case of “The Omega Glory,” descended from
duplicates of civilizations from Earth history. The Enterprise crew beams down,
loses contact with the ship, gets captured, escapes, gets captured again,
eventually re-establishes contact with the ship, gets rescued, there's a brief epilogue with Kirk,
Spock and McCoy on the bridge, and then it’s off to the next adventure.
Despite being co-written by Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon, “Bread and Circuses” is,
for me at least, the weakest of all the episodes I just named. I know when most
fans sort Classic Trek episodes for quality, “The Omega Glory” lands near the bottom of the pile,
but at least that one has something to say, however hamfisted the delivery.
“Bread and Circuses” doesn’t seem to have much of a point to it at all — surprising,
given how heavy-handed some of the other episodes credited to Roddenberry are.
What “Bread and Circuses” has in lieu of a cogent message about a pertinent
political or social issue is an intermittent, occasionally biting satire of television.
Probably the strongest line in the episode comes when the Proconsul has ordered Kirk
to be taken to the studio for his televised execution. He proudly announces that they’ve
pre-empted another show for fifteen minutes in order to guarantee the largest audience
possible. “You probably don’t understand, since you’ve evolved beyond anything as primitive as
television,” the Proconsul says. To which Kirk replies, ruefully, “I’ve heard it was similar.”
The idea that television had replaced religion as the opiate of the masses, that it was creating
a duller, less civically engaged population by beaming hour after hour of mindless entertainment
into their homes every day — that it was the modern equivalent of what second-century Roman
writer Juvenal dubbed “bread and circuses” — was not exactly a cutting edge observation in 1968,
and watching the episode today, it seems almost quaint — “Oh, look, they thought TV
was hollow and lowest-common-denominator back then! Poor dopes, if they could see it now!”
But even that trite message could have had more of an impact if it wasn’t delivered with such
indifference. If the idea is that the popular entertainment of our society is in its own way
just as primitive and brutal as the gladiator fights of the Roman Empire, maybe it would have
helped to see more of the entertainment produced by this duplicate modern day Roman society? Or see
some example of the negative effect it’s having on that society? Instead, we see relatively little of
Empire TV, as it’s called, and are shown nothing of the broader society beyond the Children of the
Sun cult and the Proconsul’s palace, jail, and soundstage. And sure, the scope of this
episode is limited by the available budget, as was the case with every other Star Trek episode,
but the message falls flat presented this way, regardless of the reason for it.
I dunno, maybe if reality TV as we know it today had existed in the late 1960s,
the creators would have made sure that bit packed more of a punch.
The only other “clever” bit — and I’m putting “clever” in acidly sarcastic
quotation marks — is the sun/son pun. Kirk and Spock and McCoy meet the Children of the
Sun and assume they’re sun worshippers, even though that strikes McCoy as odd,
since this society is a match for Ancient Rome, which according to him had no sun
worshippers (not actually true, but that doesn’t matter), and, as Spock notices,
their principles of tolerance and non-violence are not typical of sun-worship-based religions. Then,
Uhura gives us that last second reveal — not Sun in the sky — Son of god! Ehhh?
Look, I love a pun as much as the next person — possibly a whole lot more than the next person,
because I know some people hate puns — people with whom I can’t, and won’t be friends — I
don’t need that negativity in my life. But, the sun/son pun ain’t no fun. For one thing,
it’s telegraphed repeatedly by characters continuing to point out how unusual those guys
are, given that they’re sun-worshippers and all. For another, when Uhura reveals it at the end,
it’s treated like a Rod-Serling-esque twist at the end of a Twilight Zone episode,
as though it’s the final piece to a puzzle that’s confounded us for the entire show,
the shocking yet inevitable revelation that brings everything into focus.
Only, it’s not. It’s a pun. The Children of the Sun are barely in the episode,
their beliefs are talked about here and there, but they end up having no bearing
on the plot or the theme of the show. It’s just a note to end on, because the episode
needed one. Gene — I’m guessing Roddenberry — realized that “sun” and “son” are homophones,
and thought “Hey, I can do something with that,” and because it’s Roddenberry he
presents it like some really smart, deep shit, when it’s just a pun.
The plot of the episode feels like an afterthought, which is a shame since
this is a really plot-driven episode. It follows the aforementioned formula for these alternate
Earth episodes, only this time instead of Kirk taking charge and bringing about some sort of
meaningful (and probably reckless) change, our three heroes are saved by the actions of Merik,
one of the villains, who has a change of heart that feels sudden and contrived. Kirk, Spock,
and McCoy are beamed up to safety, and that’s it. No change to the Roman society, no comeuppance for
anyone — just the supposedly redemptive death Merik, who never exactly popped as a character.
The action scenes drag on and exist mostly to fill time, especially the televised fight with Spock
and McCoy against the gladiators. Kirk implicitly having sex with Drusilla, a self-described slave,
feels wrong, especially since by this point in the episode they’ve mentioned the existence,
and wrongness, of slavery on this world multiple times. And, the timing of Scotty’s intervention
is an incredibly fortunate coincidence, coming at just the perfect time to aid Kirk in his escape,
even though it’s not established that Scotty has any idea what’s happening
on the surface of the planet when he orders Chekov to knock out the lights.
The one bright spot of the episode is the interaction between Spock and McCoy,
and I credit Gene Coon for that, because characterization and dialogue that sounds
at least something like what an actual human being would say were his most important contributions to
the series. The banter between Spock and McCoy as they walk along the base of the
hill after beaming down, where McCoy jokes that just once he’d like to toss the prime directive
aside and announce himself to the locals of a less advanced planet as the Archangel Gabriel,
much to the non-amusement of Spock, is funny, and the scene between the two of them in the
jail cell later is kind of touching. It starts with them bickering — McCoy trying to thank Spock
for saving his life, Spock being Spock about it — and ends up with McCoy accusing Spock
of not fearing death because what he really fears is life, and seeming to hit a nerve.
But, some good character beats, reminding us of the friendship shared by the three lead
protagonists, aren’t enough to save this episode. Yeah, I’m a sucker for Spock and McCoy and their
love-hate dynamic, but “Bread and Circuses” is so boring, so lazy, so devoid of anything meaningful
or original to say, that I don’t think anything could have redeemed it — not even the Son of God.
Those are my thoughts on “Bread and Circuses.” What do you think of this episode? Please share
your thoughts with me in the comments. If you’d like to support this channel — and I sure wish
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Please join me again next week as this batch of reviews dedicated to episodes dealing with
other Earths continues. We’re coming to the end of this batch, and also to the end of
the year. Two reviews left before I wrap up this series of reviews of episodes featuring
duplicate or parallel or alternate Earths. Next week, we’ll take a look
at an Original Series episode that features, well, not so much an entire duplicate Earth,
but just a little piece — specifically, one town. In the Old West. The episode
is called “Spectre of the Gun.” See you then! Thanks for watching and take care, everybody!