I’m not going to worry about spoilers for TOS, I think there was an Enterprise episode with these guys too but it was forgettable.
So basically The Feds and the Klingons are doing a lot of saber rattling on a planet of simple farm folk, things are getting serious and could blow up into war. At this point the Organians reveal they are gods instead of simple country law…er farmers and put the kiddies in timeout.
Why do they put on the farmer facade at all? Do they get a kick out of revealing themselves to random space bandits and raiders?
Presumably they were hoping the Feds and Klingons would sort things out themselves without too much violence. It wasn’t sabre rattling, after all, but a full-on interstellar war.
It always bugged me that the Klingons ordered executions and other punishments. Kirk tries to make the point that the Federation is there to help. Then the Organians smugly say no one has died here in thousands of years. Right, thats because you have god like powers? :dubious: Without those powers they’d be begging the Federation for help.
IIRC the Organians didn’t normally live in bodies. They staged that primitive farming community for Kirk’s benefit when they realized he was coming. Then they played along as a test to see what Kirk and the Klingons would do. The extreme violence disgusted them and they used their powers to stop the war throughout that region of space.
I always figured it was partly this – there’s always fun in Freaking Out the Muggles.
That doesn’t explain their living an agrarian life, though. Maybe the easiest way to understand that is to se it as a sort of monastic retreat – they’re getting a spiritual lift (whether religious or philosophical, or both) from Seeking Simplicity in the Simple Life. Maybe their kids take a couple of centuries off, playing Q and “Breaking Organian” as they experiment, blow off steam, and seriously screw around with lesser beings for fun and giggles, but they eventually settle down to become superpowered pastoralists.
It’s their equivalent of a Rennaissance Faire, and then the meat-people wandered in, took it all too seriously, and started breaking the props and backdrops.
I’m not sure what you’re saying. It doesn’t matter whether they’re godlike or simple farmers, the Organians want both the Klingons and the Federation to leave them alone. And neither of them are listening: the Federation is just as busily trying to add the Nicaragu- I mean, Organians as a client state as the Klingons are. Remember, Kirk is ‘helping’ by blowing things up even when the Organians explicitly tell him not to.
I mean, sure Kirk is making all kinds of self-justifying speeches about how he’s here to help and bring this backwards place into the modern world, but you really think the Klingons aren’t making the exact same kinds of speeches to themselves?
Anyway, for the OP, it seems like the Organians, while some kind of ‘pure energy’ beings, still have a location, and for whatever reason, they like hanging out on Organia. When the various cold warriors show up, the Organians figure the most moral way to get them to go away is to appear peaceful and harmless, so they slap together a bunch of matter to look like an agrarian humanoid society.
Neither of the cold warriors is as ethically advanced as the Organians hoped, so they have to reveal their power, but that was Plan B for them.
Me, I’d like to know where the Organians went, and why they allowed the Federation and the Empire to get right back on the brink of war in Star Trek VI. The film mentions nothing about them, and the novelization simply says “they are apparently unwilling or unable to interfere further.”
The thing is, if you don’t have physical bodies, you don’t have boobs. You can’t “check out the warp nacelles on that babe” is is she is pure energy. So you know, dropping the physical body is not a great idea.
I’ve always figured they set up this planet first because it was simple, and they had no use for advanced technology in Potemkin planet, and second because it showed they could be of no practical use to either side.
The reason I love this episode is that at the end Kirk suddenly realizes that he and the Klingon are basically saying the same thing while Spock looks on amused. No many action shows would dope slap their hero that way.
Let’s say that the Federation yields to the Organian’s demands, and does not fight the Klingons for their planet.
Would the Klingons have had any reason to shoot hostages? Probably not at first.
If I recall, Kor presented a list of demands and quotas to be filled by the inhabitants of Organia. (Foodstuffs for the Empire, I guess.) Would the Organians have bothered to fill those quotas? Or would they have just vanished into their energy states and let the occupation force do it’s own farming/mining?
I can see why god-like beings would condescend to communicate with primitive (human) organisms by assuming their form, so as to make speech and body language possible. I just don’t know why they’d ever have to. They could keep their little planet veiled from sensors, I would think.
Seems to me, they enjoy a bit of toying with the inferior species. Maybe even gods are mischievous.
Do they get a kick out of revealing themselves to random space bandits and raiders?
