Since their first literary appearance in Homer’s Odyssey, sirens have been luring men astray with their deadly voices in many a pop fiction. Homer and his crew were forced to float passed the singing snare, but Kirk and his band of space sailors were sent to the doomed site intentionally.
While investigating the mysterious disappearance of ships every 27ish years or so, the Enterprise stumbles upon a group of alien women who have the power to lure men to their planet and drain their life force for energy. From the moment Kirk and crew encountered the strange women, the men were transfixed…drunk almost. In one of Uhura’s more badass moments, she very professionally takes control of the ship from an incapacitated Scotty and assembles an all-female rescue team to save the landing party.
After some threatening from Uhura’s rescue team, the sirens eventually surrender and agree to return the men. It turns out that when their original people settled the planet, they found that this world drained the life out of them. The women had the ability to drain the energy of the men to live, but it turned out to be a curse. As long as they continue to lure new men to the planet, they never age, never reproduce, and never die. Imortality became a stagnant existence.
One should ask whether it really is a better strategy to steal someone else’s life to perpetuate your own, or should they have just died? If the women were so miserable with their immortal existence, why don’t they choose to stop summoning more men? The fear of death is a powerful instinct in humans, so it is possible that the very first time the women did this it was a panic response. Everyone who arrived on the planet was quickly dying and the women were able to grab a life preserver that extended their time by a couple of decades, and kept them young to boot!
The original morality of the situation was more of a gray area. Both the men and women from the first ship were dying in equal measure, and the women made use of the energy left in the men just to survive. It seems comparable to eating one’s dead companions during a survival situation, which is often considered ethically permissible when done with the intention to preserve life. However, the ethics change completely when the women choose to take extra steps to lure fresh victims. If they had the power to call anyone to the planet, why not simply ask for transport off the surface? Ironically, Uhura arranges just that, and explains that once the women leave the planet, they will be back to normal. It is possible they were unaware of such a convenient solution, but this is not explained in the story.
Perhaps the planet did more than just drain life energy. Although no further details are given in such a short episode, another explanation for the strange siren behavior could be that the women were compelled to fill a new biological niche, functionally becoming a new species. The fact that the women lose their ability to reproduce and just become some everlasting immortal entities is reminiscent of how parasites lose certain functions when they become completely dependent on the host. For example, most species of dodder (genus Cuscuta), a tangled tendril of a parasitic plant, completely lack the ability to photosynthesize. They are now so dependent on their host plant for life that the ability to do so became superfluous.
The sirens of Lorelei were forced into a new lifestyle, one that did not require reproduction. Immortal beings would not need to have offspring to replace adults that do not die. However, this would also halt any evolution and change, trapping the women in a perpetual prison. The he ability to live forever also came at the horrifying expense of other people. The price of becoming murderers was pure, dull existence, and although they hated living like that, they could not stop. It took another group of women to save both the sirens and the men they captured.
Hopeless Trekkie 