And the Children Shall Lead (S03E05)
Airdate: October 11th 1968
Written by: Edward J. Lakso
Directed by: Marvin Chomsky
Running Time: 50 minutes
The third season of Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) arrived at a pivotal moment in American history, when the fractures in post-WW2 consensus were widening into chasms. The Vietnam War’s unrelenting brutality, the civil rights movement’s intensifying demands, and the countercultural upheaval of 1968 had exposed a generational rift that seemed almost existential. As a show born of the mid-1960s, Star Trek had always been a mirror to its era, but by Season 3, its allegorical lens had grown more urgent, even desperate. Unlike the later, globalised Star Trek franchises, which often grappled with abstraction, the original series had no choice but to engage with the raw nerve endings of its time. “And the Children Shall Lead” (1968) exemplifies this collision of art and reality, though its clumsy execution renders its message more muddled than profound. The episode’s central premise—that rebellious youth are tools of an alien force—feels less like a nuanced critique of 1960s unrest and more like a reactionary panic response, a symptom of the very cultural anxieties it seeks to interrogate.
The episode opens with the USS Enterprise responding to a distress signal from the Federation science team on the desolate planet Triacus. Upon arrival, Captain Kirk, Spock, and Dr. McCoy discover the researchers dead, save for Professor Starnes (Jamie Wellman), whose final words—“the enemy within”—hint at a sinister force. The team soon locates five children, the offspring of the slain scientists, who display eerie detachment toward their parents’ deaths. McCoy, misreading their trauma as a need for medical intervention, transports them to the Enterprise. It quickly becomes clear, however, that these children are not victims but vectors: they possess the ability to implant illusions in adult minds, manipulating the crew to steer the ship toward Marcus XII, a planet where a malevolent noncorporeal entity known as the Gorgon (Melvin Belli) plots to harness their obedience for galactic conquest. Spock, leveraging his Vulcan mental discipline, resists the Gorgon’s influence and helps Kirk break free, leading to a confrontation where logic and reason dismantle the creature’s power.
This was not the first time Star Trek pitted the Enterprise against child antagonists; Season 1 episodes like Charlie X and Miri explored themes of youthful power and its potential for destruction. Yet “And the Children Shall Lead” feels uniquely tethered to the chaos of 1968, a year marked by the Tet Offensive, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and the Democratic National Convention riots. The episode’s core metaphor—children as unwitting agents of an external, corrupting force—echoes the fears of older generations who viewed the anti-war movement as a loss of moral compass. By framing the youth rebellion as the work of a “hostile foreign entity” (a thinly veiled nod to Cold War paranoia), the script aligns with the era’s conservative backlash against the counterculture. The Gorgon, with its promise of power and destruction, becomes a stand-in for communism, suggesting that the generation gap was not a legitimate clash of values but a case of brainwashing by external forces. This interpretation, while unintentional, reveals the script’s reactionary undercurrents, undermining the show’s progressive reputation.
Directed by Marvin Chomsky, a future luminary of historical television dramas like Roots (1977), the episode suffers from a disconnect between its technical competence and its narrative bankruptcy. Chomsky’s handling of the shipboard scenes and the children’s eerie affect is competent, but the script’s flaws are irreparable. Chief among them is the lazy tokenism in casting the five children—comprising a white boy, a Black boy, an Asian boy, a white girl, and Caesar (the son of guest star Melvin Belli)—to represent a multicultural Federation. This diversity, while forward-thinking on paper, feels like box-ticking, with no character development beyond their assigned demographics. Worse still is the premature revelation of the Gorgon’s role. By exposing the entity’s existence and motives early, the episode sacrifices suspense for didacticism, leaving the narrative to trudge through predictable beats: the children’s hypnotic gestures (a repetitive, grating gimmick), the crew’s increasingly absurd subjugation, and Kirk’s ham-fisted struggle to resist control.
The decision to cast Melvin Belli, a flamboyant real-life attorney known for defending Jack Ruby, as the Gorgon was a publicity stunt that backfired. Belli’s performance, marked by stilted line delivery and a lack of gravitas, falls far below the standards set by TOS’s usual guest actors. Roddenberry attempted to compensate with rudimentary visual effects but the result leaves a lot to be desired. Belli’s presence feels less like a creative choice and more like a cynical ploy to generate buzz, a stark contrast to the show’s usual emphasis on storytelling over spectacle. The inclusion of Belli’s son Caesar in the role of one of the children further muddies the waters, adding a layer of nepotism that detracts from the episode’s already shaky credibility.
The episode’s most infamous scene arrives as Kirk battles the Gorgon’s mind control, delivered with Shatner’s signature overacting. His wide-eyed stares, exaggerated grimaces, and staccato line readings veer into unintentional self-parody. While Shatner’s theatrics often served the series—particularly in episodes requiring emotional volatility—this sequence lacks the narrative or emotional justification to elevate it beyond caricature. The scene encapsulates the episode’s broader failures: a reliance on bombast over subtlety, and a failure to balance allegory with compelling drama.
And the Children Shall Lead is frequently cited as one of Star Trek’s weakest episodes, and for good reason. Its clumsy metaphor, underdeveloped characters, and technical missteps expose the strain of producing 79 episodes of science fiction on a shoestring budget. Yet its infamy is instructive. The episode lays bare the contradictions of late-1960s Star Trek: a show that aspired to progressive ideals but occasionally succumbed to the conservative fears of its time. While Gene Roddenberry’s vision often transcended the era’s limitations, this entry serves as a reminder that even the most idealistic projects can falter when allegory outpaces execution. In its attempt to mirror the generational conflicts of 1968, And the Children Shall Lead instead became a cautionary tale about the perils of heavy-handed messaging and half-baked storytelling.
RATING: 3/10 (+)
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