In this episode: “A Taste of Armageddon”
- Another rare pure science-fiction Star Trek episode: a 500 year war waged by computers.
- While the Federation was first mentioned in “Arena” this episode is first to mention the full name: United Federation of Planets
- The message is not explicitly anti-war, but that if you are going to wage war do so honestly in a way that does not hide the costs. Also, the Kirk speech equates human tendency to kill to an addiction that can be overcome with an approach from a 12 Step program.
- This episode’s Kirk speech serves as an expression of Star Trek thesis of the optimistic human future: it’s not that people will evolve beyond our flaws and brutality, but that we will learn how to better manage them. Coon wrote this speech, but Roddenberry expressed similar ideas in previous episodes including the second pilot “Where No Man…”. He did seem to forget it when he wrote early TNG, where humans were presented as thought their nature had been fundamentally changed, perfected. This was dropped in later seasons. DS9 explicitly returned the idea that humans were imperfect, always struggling to do right. And DSC has been even more explicit about this. But the message is deep in Trek’s DNA going back to the first season of TOS, as this episode makes clear.
