The Corbomite Maneuver

Written by: Jerry Sohl
Watch online on CBS.com

‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ was the first episode of Star Trek as a regular series.

Premise

While mapping an unexplored region of space, the Enterprise encounters a cube-shaped alien device that homes in on the ship and starts emitting lethal radiation. After destroying the object, the Enterprise crew presses onwards in search of the device’s owner. They soon encounter a starship immensely larger and more powerful than their own, commanded by a being named Balok, who threatens to destroy them. 

Themes

‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ is a story about deceptions and misunderstandings and moving beyond them.

The mind: Intellect vs emotion

As usual, intellect and emotion—more specifically, instinct or ‘gut’—are portrayed in opposition. As in the previous episode, this is expressed through a chess metaphor. In this case, poker is invoked as the opposite of chess.

What it means to be human: Irrationality

Spock’s reason leads to an almost literal dead end. Threatened with destruction by a far superior force, he is forced to conclude:

SPOCK: In chess, when one is outmatched, the game is over. Checkmate.

KIRK: Is that your best recommendation?

SPOCK: [...] I regret that I can find no other logical alternative.

It is then up to Kirk to think laterally and find an irrational solution to their problem, by lying to Balok and bluffing him out of destroying the Enterprise.

The mind: Mind vs body

Star Trek’s familiar dualism is evident both in the puppet that Balok initially uses to represent himself, and in his true appearance. The puppet has proportions similar to the Talosians of ‘The Cage’—a hugely enlarged head and a slender, frail body.[1]

When Balok’s true form is revealed at the end of the episode, the dualism is even more profound: Balok has the appearance of a human child, portrayed with a shaved and polished head. This style draws attention to his cranium, which is further accentuated by the headgear he wears. His voice is overdubbed with an adult, male voice. I do not think that we are meant to understand Balok as a juvenile of his species, but that the advanced nature of his species has gained tremendous intelligence at the cost of a punier physical body.

Benevolence

Addressing his crew, Kirk explicitly states an assumed correlation between a species’ advancement and its benevolence: ‘In most cases we have found that intelligence capable of a civilisation is capable of understanding peaceful gestures. Surely a lifeform advanced enough for space travel is advanced enough to eventually understand our motives.’

This assumption does not need to connote any particular morality, however. It could simply be that there is a self-selecting quality to the observed phenomenon to which Kirk refers. Spaceflight requires the harnessing of tremendous energies, and it could be that overly-aggressive civilizations tend to use those energies to wipe themselves out before they get a chance to explore the galaxy. The Drake Equation implicitly contains just such a notion when considering just interstellar radio communication, let alone starflight.[2]

What it means to be human: Fallibility

As Lt Bailey cracks under pressure, he represents a rare example of Star Trek attempting (however heavy-handedly) to portray a character reacting in a psychologically credible way to the events unfolding around them. The story’s conclusion provides an explicit acknowledgement of human fallibility, as Bailey prepares to join Balok for a time (emphasis mine, in bold):

BALOK: Ah. You represent Earth’s best, then.

BAILEY: No, sir, I’m not. I’ll make plenty of mistakes.

KIRK: But you’d find out more about us that way, and I’d get a better officer in return.

Kirk observes that humans are not what we are despite our flaws, but because of them.

Ethos: Mercy

Balok’s final test for the Enterprise crew is one to assess their mercy. After the Enterprise breaks free from the tractor beam of his ‘pilot vessel’, his ship appears to lose propulsion and life support. It transmits a distress signal so weak that Uhura doubts that Balok’s mother ship can hear it. Despite the Enterprise having been attacked by the buoy and repeatedly threatened with destruction by Balok, Kirk’s immediate reaction is to mount a rescue mission:

‘First Federation vessel is in distress. We’re preparing to board it. There are lives at stake. By our standards, alien life but lives nevertheless.’

He reminds McCoy:

‘What's the mission of this vessel, Doctor? To seek out and contact alien life, and an opportunity to demonstrate what our high-sounding words mean.’

De-escalation

There are two separate and striking de-escalations of conflict in ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’. The first occurs after the Enterprise has destroyed the device that had pursued and irradiated the ship. Kirk discusses his next move with Spock:

KIRK: Care to speculate on what we’ll find if we go on ahead?

SPOCK: Speculate? No. Logically, we’ll discover the intelligence which sent out the cube.

KIRK: Intelligence different from ours or superior?

SPOCK: Probably both, and if you’re asking the logical decision to make

KIRK: No, I’m not. The mission of the Enterprise is to seek out and contact alien life. [...] Navigator, set a course ahead.

Protagonists in adventure series routinely encounter and overcome obstacles in pursuit of some goal. However, the goal here is of a fundamentally different kind from traditional adventure fare: Kirk is not seeking anything other than peaceful contact with a new civilisation. Now that the immediate threat has been removed, the conflict is thoroughly de-escalated and Enterprise continues on as if nothing has happened. There is no grudge here. I suggest that this is highly unusual in an adventure series, even today.

The second de-escalation takes place at the episode’s conclusion, after Balok sends his distress signal and Kirk leads a rescue mission to his ship.  In Star Trek’s signature style, what began as confrontation finishes with the former adversaries holding hands. In the case of this episode, quite literally!

Kirk doesn’t even seem to mind that Balok has been misleading him all along. The bluffs in ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ go both ways. Kirk successfully bluffed Balok out of destroying the Enterprise—or at least, thinks he did. When he finally gets to meet Balok, he learns that he himself has been duped. Most obviously and trivially, the visage they have come to know as Balok is a deception. More significantly, Kirk learns that  Balok has been testing humanity to verify the non-belligerency of our species. This means that Kirk might well have been fooled about almost everything Balok has said: Did he ever really intend to destroy the Enterprise? Was he really towing the ship to a First Federation planet (or just through deep space to see if Kirk would try to escape)? He was certainly lying in the distress call that Kirk treated as genuine. The episode concludes with a protagonist who has been thoroughly misled, but who still extends the hand of friendship.

Romancing the ship

The episode contains an explicit reference to the captain’s romantic relationship with the ship:

KIRK: When I find the headquarters genius that assigned me a female yeoman—

MCCOY: What’s the matter, Jim? Don't you trust yourself?

KIRK: I’ve already got a female to worry about. Her name’s the Enterprise.

Later, Balok identifies in Kirk a kindred spirit. At the episode’s conclusion, he says:

‘Now, before I bring back the Fesarius, let me show you my vessel. It is not often I have this pleasure. Yes, we're very much alike, Captain. Both proud of our ships.’

A captain’s relationship with their ship is cross-cultural in Star Trek.

As science fiction

The bluff at the heart of ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ relies on an encounter between groups of people who do not know each other’s capabilities:

‘Two groups of people meet. The more powerful group threatens to destroy the weaker. The weaker says that any attempt to do so will unleash a tremendous force that will destroy the attacker.’

For the premise to work at all, the more powerful group must believe that such a force might conceivably exist, and have no easy way of testing the claim without risk. The nature of the force is essentially unimportant: it could be magical, technological, or quite mundane (‘My uncle commands three legions and will avenge our deaths!’)

The strongest science-fiction element of ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ is actually in its meta-narrative. Kirk’s bluff—that there is an undocumented destructive material and device incorporated into his ship’s hull—is science fiction. Unable to match Balok’s power, Kirk relies on what we would now describe as social engineering to provide protection for his ship.

‘Dangerous, savage child-race’

Balok accuses humanity of savagery:

‘Your vessel, obviously the product of a primitive and savage civilisation, having ignored a warning buoy and having then destroyed it, has demonstrated your intention is not peaceful.’

I think it’s hard to make any charge of savagery stick to any part of this episode. On encountering the alien device, the Enterprise crew takes no aggressive action whatsoever; they simply wait and observe it. When it does not seem like there’s anything left to learn, they attempt to navigate around it peacefully. Only when the device actively pursues them and emits lethal radiation do they destroy it. Then, even after the device’s hostile actions, Kirk remains committed to making peaceful contact with the device’s builders. Kirk’s explanation of his actions rings completely true:

‘We destroyed your space buoy as a simple act of self-preservation. When we attempted to move away from it, it emitted radiation harmful to our species. If you've examined our ship and its tapes, you know this to be true.’

If anything, it is Balok’s (or, at least, his civilisation’s) motives that are morally suspect. The ‘buoy’ (if that is truly the purpose of the device) does not broadcast any kind of warning message, it pursues the Enterprise when it tries to withdraw peacefully, and it emits radiation lethal to life forms similar to those of its makers. Balok then goes on to terrorise helpless captives. Of course, this is all done in the context of ‘testing’ humans, but these are tests that would be unlikely to impress even a 21st century ethics committee.

Conclusion

‘The Corbomite Maneuver’ offers the Enterprise crew plenty of provocation to offer violent resistance to Balok, but they never give into it. Indeed, they offer Balok assistance when they think he needs it.

Literary and mythic references

Balok explicitly refers to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He describes his menacing-looking dummy as ‘Mister Hyde to my Jekyll’. This cultural knowledge was presumably derived from Balok probing the Enterprise’s computer records earlier in the episode.

Other notes

Thank you to D for pointing out that the Cuban Missile Crisis was recent history when this show was written and aired. In ‘The Corbomite Maneuver’, Kirk dares Balok to find out whether the Corbomite device actually exists. The real-world superpowers knew each other’s destructive capabilities did exist, but dared each other to find out whether their opponent was truly willing to use those powers. Could this have been the real-world stimulus for this episode?

Mission objectives

This episode takes place entirely aboard the Enterprise and Balok’s pilot vessel, with no worlds visited, let along explored. Balok and the First Federation are, however, a first contact for humanity, and Spock explicitly states, ‘We are the first to reach this far.’

Objective	This episode	Series so far
To explore strange, new worlds	0	1 (33%)
To seek out new life and new civilizations	1	2 (67%)
To boldly go where none has gone before	1	2 (67%)

Previous episode: ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’
Next episode: ‘Mudd’s Women’

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Footnotes

[1] Indeed, Balok resembles the Talosians so much in general form that the action figure that toy company Mego released in 1975 to represent ‘The Keeper’ had a head and robe clearly modelled more after Balok’s puppet than the Talosian.

[2] The final variable in the equation, L, represents the length of time during which a technological civilization transmits radio signals into space. Carl Sagan called attention to the way that a civilisation’s tendency to self-destruct was necessarily a limiting factor on the value of L. Roddenberry was certainly aware of the Drake Equation as early as 1964, but I have not seen direct evidence that he had reached the same understanding of L that Sagan developed. On the other hand, if he had developed such an understanding, it could explain the assumption of generally benevolent aliens that forms a core part of the series’ ethos.