Thread by @SFFAudio

the STAR TREK episode "The Paradise Syndrome" is another visit to a space version of Tahiti - an alluring, enticing, and heavenly planet where peace and love rule and where sexual repression and alienating labour are wholly absent

MCCOY: What's the matter, Jim?

KIRK: What? Oh, nothing. It's just so peaceful, uncomplicated. No problems, no command decisions. Just living.

MCCOY: Typical human reaction to an idyllic natural setting. Back in the twentieth century, we referred to it as...

...the Tahiti Syndrome. It's particularly common to over-pressured leader types, like starship captains.

KIRK: Ah, the Tahiti Syndrome.

"In this secluded abode of happiness there were no cross old women, no cruel step-dames, no withered spinsters, no lovesick maidens, no sour old bachelors, no inattentive husbands, no melancholy young men, no blubbering youngsters, and no squalling brats."

from Melville's TYPEE

McCoy kinda has this wrong tho

In reality it wasn't the

"over-pressured leader types, like starship captains" [or even regular ship captains]

who suffered from the Tahiti syndrome, it was those of the lower ranks

Herman Melville's first novel was an 1846 fictionalized account of his own sailoring and escape from same to the paradise of Nuku Hiva (a Polynesian island in the Marquesas)

Tahiti and Tahitians are part of the true life story of disaffected lower ranking mutineers of the HMS Bounty in 1789 - who, on a mission of making slave plantations possible would themselves attempt escaping slavery & become slavers - with some even adopting the native lifestyle

Early 20th century poet, Rupert Brooke, wrote of his romance and enchantment with a Tahitian woman in his heart and soul shattering poem TIARE TAHITI

Tiare Tahiti

BY RUPERT BROOKE

Mamua, when our laughter ends,
And hearts and bodies, brown as white,
Are dust about the doors of friends,
Or scent ablowing down the night,
Then, oh! then, the wise agree,
Comes our immortality.

Mamua, there waits a land
Hard for us to understand.
Out of time, beyond the sun,
All are one in Paradise,
You and Pupure are one,
And Taü, and the ungainly wise.

There the Eternals are, and there
The Good, the Lovely, and the True,
And Types, whose earthly copies were
The foolish broken things we knew;
There is the Face, whose ghosts we are;
The real, the never-setting Star;
And the Flower, of which we love
Faint and fading shadows here;

Never a tear, but only Grief;
Dance, but not the limbs that move;
Songs in Song shall disappear;
Instead of lovers, Love shall be;
For hearts, Immutability;
And there, on the Ideal Reef,
Thunders the Everlasting Sea!

And my laughter, and my pain,
Shall home to the Eternal Brain.
And all lovely things, they say,
Meet in Loveliness again;
Miri’s laugh, Teïpo’s feet,
And the hands of Matua,
Stars and sunlight there shall meet
Coral’s hues and rainbows there,
And Teüra’s braided hair;

And with the starred tiare’s white,
And white birds in the dark ravine,
And flamboyants ablaze at night,
And jewels, and evening’s after-green,
And dawns of pearl and gold and red,
Mamua, your lovelier head!
And there’ll no more be one who dreams
Under the ferns, of

crumbling stuff,
Eyes of illusion, mouth that seems,
All time-entangled human love.
And you’ll no longer swing and sway
Divinely down the scented shade,
Where feet to Ambulation fade,
And moons are lost in endless Day.
How shall we wind these wreaths of ours,

Where there are neither heads nor flowers?
Oh, Heaven’s Heaven!—but we’ll be missing
The palms, and sunlight, and the south;
And there’s an end, I think, of kissing,
When our mouths are one with Mouth....

Taü here, Mamua,
Crown the hair, and come away!

Hear the calling of the moon,
And the whispering scents that stray
About the idle warm lagoon.
Hasten, hand in human hand,
Down the dark, the flowered way,
Along the whiteness of the sand,
And in the water’s soft caress,
Wash the mind of foolishness,
Mamua, until the day.

Spend the glittering moonlight there
Pursuing down the soundless deep
Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair,
Or floating lazy, half-asleep.
Dive and double and follow after,
Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,
With lips that fade, and human laughter
And faces individual,

Well this side of Paradise! ....
There’s little comfort in the wise.

this poem, from 1916, was Brooke's poetic account of the "open-air life with his Tahitian lover, Taatamaata [Mamua in the poem]"

The title comes from the name of the star shaped flower pictured

the flower is used as an ear adornment - the choice ear conferring a message meaning "looking" or "taken"

and part of the final lines of TIARE TAHITI are actually the title and partial inspiration for an earlier STAR TREK episode, namely "This Side Of Paradise"

more on that here:

https://twitter.com/SFFAudio/status/1431838076968443905?t=wh_-kiT-OD8YKt5N7PuYxg&s=19

Rupert Brooke left his lover in Tahiti, perhaps pregnant with his child, and went off to die a sailor in WWI

RUPERT BROOKE

prior to his death he recieved this letter from her:

"Sweetheart you know I always thinking about you that time when you left me I been sorry for long time. We have good time when you was here I always remember about you forget me all readly oh! mon cherbien aime je t'aimerai

toujours ... je me rappeler toujours votre petite etroite figure et la petite bouche que me baise bien tu m'a percea mon coeur et j'aime toujours ne m'oubli pas mon cher .... I send you my kiss to you darling -- mille kiss."

so after KIRK falls into the obelisk thingy and gets zapped there's a fun HARD SCIENCE FICTION mini-infodump with SPOCK explaining to McCOY why they have to leave the planet and abandon the search for KIRK

SPOCK: Prepare to beam us up, Mister Scott. We're warping out of orbit.

MCCOY: Leaving? You can't be serious, Spock.

SPOCK: Doctor, that asteroid is almost as large as your Earth's moon. Far enough away, the angle necessary to divert it enough to avoid destruction is

minute, but as the asteroid approaches this planet, the angle becomes so great that even the power of a starship

MCCOY: The devil with an asteroid! It won't get here for two months, Spock!

SPOCK: If we arrive at the deflection point in time, it may not get here at all.

MCCOY: In the meantime, what about Jim?

SPOCK: Once the asteroid has been diverted, we'll return here and resume the search.

MCCOY: That may be hours from now. He may be injured or dying.

[at this point SPOCK picks up two rocks]

SPOCK: Doctor, assume this is the planet we're on. This is the approaching asteroid. If we don't get to that deflection point in time, it will become physically impossible to divert this asteroid. In that case, everyone on this planet will die, including the captain.

MCCOY: Can a few more minutes matter, Spock?

SPOCK: In the time it's taken me to explain the problem, the asteroid has moved from here to here. The longer we delay, the less the likelihood of being able to divert it. Beam us up, Mister Scott.

Shocking development, eh?

so now with SPOCK and MCCOY our of the way we get another storytelling innovation...

Amnesiac Kirk's inner monologue, explaining that he's lost his memory, doesn't know he's a starship captain, just like AWOL sailors of old

Also he fulfills a local prophecy, very nice.

now thing is, the people of this planet are not Tahitians

They're supposed to be North American Indians

one of the space Indians is named "Salish" - which is a language group found in Washington state, up in British Columbia, down to Oregon, and out to Idaho

on the other side of Vancouver Island, the Western side, and farther up the mainland coast are the Nuu-chah-nulth speaking people, we know a lot about their early European contact days because of an English sailor who lived with them as a captive beginning in 1803 John R. Jewitt

when Jewitt finally escaped from captivity in 1805 (his skills as an armourer were coveted by a powerful chief named Maquinna) he wrote a book about it

TITLED "A Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt, only survivor of the crew of the ship Boston, during a captivity of nearly three years among the savages of Nootka Sound: with an account of the manners, mode of living, and religious opinions of the natives"

so anyway, Kirk makes himself valuable immediately when some kid drowns in the lake and Kirk does CPR

this angers Salish

and wins him the girl

there's some criticism out there of this episode - pretty weak stuff in my view

stuff like

'the girl doesn't know how to get Kirk's shirt off, so she's dumb'

says somebody

I mean, do you know how they got Nimoy into that blue shirt with those fake ears on?

I don't

Zippers? Do they beam into them?

Im thinking maybe there's a hidden zipper.

Some cosplayer will know, probably

Myself I like it.

it doesn't have the sharpness or unnerving menace of "This Side Of Paradise"

but this episode serves as precursor to the STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION episode "The Inner Light" - captains getting to live a whole alternate life in a single episode

Besides, Kirk leta his pointy sideburns grow into mini mutton, and how often do we get to see that?

MCCOY: Were you able to make sense our of the symbols?

SPOCK: Yes. The obelisk is a marker, just as I thought. It was left by a super-race known as the Preservers. They passed through the galaxy rescuing primitive cultures which were in danger of extinction and seeding them, so to speak, where they could live and grow.

I think the problem people have with seeing Kirk in buckskins is inherent to human prejudices - where there are people there is always the potential of exploitation

the relations between people and peoples is fraught - but it's kinda our human situation, so we really gotta deal

When that captive of the Nuu-chah-nulth, John Jewitt escaped captivity "he looked very wild, painted red and black, wrapped in a bear skin and with green leaves through his topknot"

this is a tv show, with actors, playing roles written by a scriptwriter

It is trying to convey ideas through a story set in space and on another planet

the story involves a lot of claims, positive claims, about how humans can relate to one another

and imma give it a whole lot of slack because of that

Criticism of this sort:

"In this take on a standard white/red miscegenation narrative, the native girl dies so that Kirk, the white male hero, isn't shown unheroically and immorally leaving her and their unborn baby behind."

sounds all thought out, but when u live in abundance, when the nuclear family isn't the end all and be all of your existence, then it looks a lot more like intolerance

the reason Kirk's baby and wife die isn't because it would be unheroic and immoral for him to abandon them

it's because the show has a reset button at the end of every ep and because this is a way, just as we see in "The Inner Light" to see the poignancy of the human condition on a serialized science fiction show

As to miscegenation, how oblivious can you be?

STAR TREK has a

particular aversion to race prejudices and doesn't see 'race mixing' as miscegenation at all

Spock is half Human and half Vulcanian

they deal with it all the time

Kirk wants that alien Indian baby his wife announces she's gonna have

Its and her death are tragic and the point

seems to me RUPERT BROOKE not reuniting with his Mamua and their child in an afterlife is a big deal

"Mamua, there waits a land
Hard for us to understand.
Out of time, beyond the sun, All are one in Paradise"

While the "wise" sneer he and she reveled "there, on the Ideal Reef"