Television Review: Lights of Zetar (Star Trek, S3X18, 1969)

Lights of Zetar (S03E18)

Airdate: January 31st 1969

Written by: Jeremy Tarcher & Shari Lewis
Directed by: Herb Kenwith

Running Time: 50 minutes

The Original Series of Star Trek, though abbreviated to a mere three seasons, achieved a longevity and cultural resonance that few contemporaries could have predicted. Its brevity, often lamented, inadvertently fostered a fervent, niche following—a fanbase whose obsessive dedication would outstrip the programme’s initial lifespan by decades. Crucially, this cohort was not merely passive in its admiration; it comprised individuals whose creative input actively shaped the show’s trajectory. Among them, Shari Lewis—a trailblazing puppeteer, ventriloquist, and children’s television icon—stood out. Collaborating with her husband Jeremy Tarcher, Lewis submitted a script explicitly designed to leverage her own performance talents, only for the production to eschew her involvement in the lead role. The resulting episode, Lights of Zetar, while not a masterpiece, serves as a testament to how the franchise’s third season—often maligned for its declining budgets and narrative ambition—could occasionally stumble into competence.

The plot hinges on a routine Starfleet mission: the USS Enterprise ferries new equipment to Memory Alpha, the Federation’s central data repository. This premise, mundane on paper, gains tension through the introduction of Lt. Mira Romaine (Jan Shutan), a rookie officer thrust into her first deep-space assignment. Romaine’s presence, however, is not merely administrative. The episode’s early scenes foreground Scotty’s uncharacteristically overt infatuation with her—a subplot that risks veering into cringe territory. Yet this levity proves short-lived. A mysterious storm intercepts the ship, inducing dizziness and sensory disorientation among the crew. Romaine, the most afflicted, experiences hallucinatory visions that later transpire to be the influence of alien non-corporeal entities—the last remnants of Zetar’s humanoid race. These beings, having exhausted their own biological forms, seek to possess living hosts to reclaim physicality. Their target, Romaine, becomes a battleground for survival, her resistance threatening both her life and the Enterprise itself. The storm’s link to Memory Alpha’s catastrophe—a destroyed computer and a staff killed by neurological trauma—ties the plot’s threads together, though with a mechanical simplicity that underscores Season 3’s strained creativity.

Herb Kenwith, a Broadway and television sitcom veteran best known for his friendship with Lucille Ball, brings a surprising degree of stability to the director’s chair. While not a visionary helmer in the vein of Trek stalwarts like Marc Daniels or Joseph Pevney, Kenwith navigates the episode’s limitations with pragmatic flair. His handling of the titular “lights of Zetar”—visualised through a haunting, swirling effect within Romaine’s eyes—avoids the garish excesses typical of Season 3’s experimental visuals. The sequence, shot with a blend of practical effects and subtle editing, evokes an eerie dissonance that lingers far longer than the episode’s narrative justifies. More broadly, Kenwith’s sitcom pedigree manifests in the early scenes’ brisk pacing and character-driven banter, particularly between Scotty and the crew. Yet his theatrical background also lends a stagy, almost claustrophobic tone to the later acts, as the Enterprise grapples with an invisible, metaphysical threat. This duality—a lightness undercut by existential dread—mirrors the episode’s tonal schizophrenia, yet Kenwith’s steady direction ensures it never fully collapses under its own contradictions.

The script, co-written by Lewis and Tarcher, oscillates between tonal registers with a disconcerting abruptness. The first act revels in Scotty’s awkward romantic overtures, a subplot that strains credibility given his usual gruff professionalism. This whimsy is shattered when the storm’s true nature emerges: a desperate, ancient race attempting to hijack a human host. The shift from comedy to cosmic horror is jarring, though arguably reflective of Trek’s willingness to experiment. However, the resolution—Kirk deploying a decompression chamber to force the Zetarians out—abruptly resets the mood to breezy optimism. Such tonal whiplash has long drawn criticism, with detractors arguing that the narrative never coherently reconciles its extremes. Equally contentious is the treatment of Romaine, whose agency is repeatedly undermined by the male crew. This epitomises a regressive attitude toward female characters that Season 3’s writers, hamstrung by network constraints, rarely challenged. Feminist critiques have since lambasted the episode for reducing Romaine to a passive vessel, her intellectual contributions overshadowed by her role as a romantic distraction.

Yet the episode’s most fortunate stroke was its last-minute recasting. Shari Lewis’s absence, while a missed opportunity to showcase her talents, spared the series a potential gimmick. Jan Shutan’s performance as Romaine avoids caricature, imbuing the character with a fragile dignity that elevates the material. Her portrayal during possession—alternating between guttural menace and desperate vulnerability—prefigures the visceral horror of The Exorcist (1973) with uncanny prescience. The Zetarians’ voices, provided by series veteran Barbara Babcock, achieve a chilling otherness that transcends the script’s banality. One might speculate that Lewis, with her puppeteering expertise, could have infused the role with a more overtly theatrical flair, but Shutan’s groundedness anchors the episode in a way that aligns with Trek’s best traditions: humanity amid the absurd.

The decompression chamber sequence, a literal deus ex machina, is emblematic of the episode’s paradoxical strengths. Kirk’s gambit—to use a mundane engineering fix to expel incorporeal beings—defies logic yet resonates as a clever nod to Starfleet’s problem-solving ethos. The chamber itself, becomes a symbolic arena for the clash between human ingenuity and alien desperation. Romaine’s subsequent survival, though narratively unearned, allows the episode to conclude on an upbeat note, even as it sidesteps the existential implications of the Zetarians’ extinction. This abrupt pivot back to light-heartedness feels less like narrative cowardice than a reflection of 1960s television’s reluctance to dwell on ambiguity—a compromise that, while frustrating, preserves the series’ family-friendly veneer.

Despite its flaws, Lights of Zetar holds an underappreciated place in Trek canon. Memory Alpha, introduced here as a sterile, bureaucratic archive, has since evolved into one of the franchise’s most iconic locations, appearing in feature films and later shows. Its depiction as a repository of knowledge, vulnerable to both cosmic and human frailty, foreshadows later explorations of data’s fragility in a universe governed by entropy. More tangibly, the episode’s title has been immortalised by Memory Alpha, the crowd-sourced Star Trek wiki, whose founders drew explicit inspiration from the fictional archive. This recursive homage underscores how Trek’s community—a phenomenon birthed by Season 3’s diehard viewers—has shaped the franchise’s post-canon identity, transforming throwaway concepts into sacred texts.

Lights of Zetar is a flawed but fascinating artefact of Star Trek’s twilight years. Its tonal inconsistency and regressive treatment of women render it a target for modern criticism, yet its pragmatic direction, inventive visuals, and canonical contributions ensure its survival in fan discourse. The episode exemplifies how Season 3, often dismissed as creatively bankrupt, could still produce moments of intrigue when writers and directors leaned into constraints rather than against them. It emerges as a minor yet intriguing entry in Trek lore, notable less for its execution than for its historical role in cementing the series’ enduring legacy.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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