YMMV / Star Trek S2 E21 "Patterns of Force"

• Anvilicious: Nazism is bad. Also, totalitarian government is not a good model for a healthy society no matter how well-meaning the founders are. The moral is made all the more blunt in that the only real sci-fi part of the moral is that the "Jews" to this version of the Nazis are an alien race, highlighting the arbitrariness of the enemy needed to sustain the regime. Other than that, the Aesop isn't different from anything you could get out of a normal WWII series.
• Broken Base: A dying Gill denounces his own intervention, saying that the Alien Non-Interference Clause is the only possible moral way to study other societies. Audiences since are divided between the Prime Directive fundamentalists that agree with him absolutely and those who instead feel it's a very debatable point since Gill chose to break that clause by introducing the people to National Socialism.
• Complete Monster: Melakon was a devotee of Nazism, which was introduced to his people by a former Starfleet officer named John Gill in an attempt to soften it. Shunning the attempt to water down Hitler's philosophy, Melakon decided to embrace Hitler's path. He overthrew his mentor and formed a fascist regime on his homeworld Ekos while trying to organize a new Holocaust on a neighboring planet called Zeon. Before murdering his mentor, Melakon was denounced by him as nothing more as a self-seeking adventurer, a traitor to his people and all they stood for.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • So Leonard Nimoy and some other guys disguise themselves as employees of a fascist government as part of an espionage mission? Impossible!
  • Spock states that an alien civilization developing into an identical one to that of Earth without outside intervention is practically impossible. Two episodes later, exactly that happens. And then it happens again.
  • This would not be the last sci-fi franchise that would use thinly-veiled space Nazis and the name "Zeon"... though in Gundam, the Zeons themselves are the Space Nazis. Talk about irony...
• Ho Yay: Metaphysical theses have probably been written by K/S Slash Fic Fangirls on the Shirtless Scene where Kirk and Spock stand there half naked getting whipped.
• Meaningful Name: What is "Eneg" spelled backwards? There's a cute bit in the second season blooper reel where the Creator is standing on a stairway on the Nazi HQ set of this episode smiling and the guy is yelling "Hail to the Führer, hail to the Führer!"
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The premise — coming across a civilization about to go down a path parallel to Earth's during the rise of fascism and exploring the moral dilemma of interference to stop history from repeating itself — is a pretty good one. Unfortunately, the story becomes more about fixing the damage an outsider already caused instead, especially since rather than repeating the parallel pattern, the episode is about an exact replication as a cost-saving measure, using up the production company's old Nazi props.

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