The Enterprise is tasked with rescuing a research crew on Minara II before its star goes supernova. While on the planet, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy can’t find the researchers, but video footage shows them disappearing at random. Soon, the three officers are also transported to the center of the planet for some strange reason. There, they find a mysterious woman sleeping. Upon waking, she doesn’t appear to be able to communicate or understand anything, but she possesses strong empathetic powers. McCoy names the woman Gem. It soon becomes apparent that Gem is as much a prisoner as Kirk and crew when a pair of hostile aliens known as the Vians begin experimenting on the confused captives. Gem demonstrates her miraculous ability to heal others and absorb their injuries, but the purpose of these torments is still unclear.
As the experimentation progresses, the tests become more elaborate. For example, the group tries to escape, thinking they see Scotty and a rescue party, but it’s all just an illusion. Eventually, McCoy sacrifices himself to save the others. He offers to be the main test subject to keep the others from being tortured, and almost dies as a result. It is up to Gem to decide to help McCoy, which turns out to be all a part of the test. The entire charade was an evaluation to see if Gem and her species are worthy of saving as their sun goes supernova. The aliens can save one planet, and they wanted to know if she was willing and empathic enough to sacrifice herself to save another, or in other words, whether she has compassion. Her choice to save McCoy would also save her planet, even though she is not aware of it.
It’s also interesting that McCoy refuses treatment, because absorbing so much of the empathetic healing powers would kill Gem, and he is bound by an oath to preserve life even at the cost of his own. The weird alien scientists still refuse to stop the test, even though Gem has proven that she was willing to sacrifice herself. Jim accuses them of being ‘nothing but intellect’ and that compassion doesn’t exist in them. They are just cruelly letting an experiment run for no reason. They agree (apparently?) and float off with Gem in the end. McCoy says it was good old fashion human emotion that won them over eventually, despite their cold, hard logic and calculating demeanor.
The story of Gem was meant to explore the nature of compassion, altruism, and self-sacrifice. However, by putting altruism to the test, do we really get true altruism? It helped that Gem couldn’t speak or communicate in any way, but one may also wonder how advanced a species could be if they can’t communicate. If the whole point of altruism for a species is to make social groups function better, then any creatures that aren’t social by nature wouldn’t need to develop altruism because there would be no need to form bonds within a group. We would have to assume she has some way of communicating with other members of her species, or at the very least, some vested interest in working with the other members of her species to ensure her survival.
Many scientists have rationalized altruism, arguing that it only exists as an evolutionary utility. It can be seen as a calculated risk, in which the individual never really intends to die. This is quite cynical considering that sometimes sacrifice really means inescapable death, such as if a parent was choosing to die in place of their child. In that case, you could make an evolutionary argument that the parents are more interested in protecting their genes, but if we all have free will and higher thought processes that help us overcome more base instincts, would we not do away with altruism? Sometimes humans can be unbelievably selfish. We tend not to think of long-term outcomes, especially not multi-generational effects. Things like short-term gratification have so much more to offer our reward system. It is also interesting to consider the alien scientists’ value judgements and reasons for the experiment. What does it mean to ‘earn the right to survive’? Why did they value empathy so much, as opposed to any other trait? It is possible that they had no empathy themselves, so they thought of it as a rare and precious gift.
Hopeless Trekkie 