Ailurophilia: The Case of Gary Seven and Isis

Robert Lansing as Gary Seven holding his familiar Isis the Cat

April Tatro as Isis in her human form

One of the strangest and most amusing episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, is 'Assignment Earth' - the 26th and final episode of season two.*

There are several reasons for its queer likeability; the fact that it's set on Earth in 1968; the performance of its two guest stars, Robert Lansing as the interstellar agent Gary Seven and the lovely Terri Garr as Roberta Lincoln; and that it features a black cat called Isis who works her feline charms even on Mr. Spock.**

Whilst appearing at first to be an ordinary cat, Isis is revealed not only to possess great intelligence, but the ability also to take on human form (and what a form it is, as played in the episode by the (uncredited) actress, dancer and contortionist April Tatro). She is Mr. Seven's constant companion and can communicate with him via a form of interspecies telepathy.

Whether he engages in sexual activity with Isis whilst she's in her human form isn't made clear, but it certainly seems likely and Miss Lincoln displays clear signs of sexual jealousy towards Isis (in her human form) at the end of the episode, even though at this point she has no real relationship of any description with Mr. Seven. 

Quite a lovely animal ...

I find myself strangely drawn to it. 

Notes

* 'Assignment Earth', written by Art Wallace (based on a story by Wallace and Gene Roddenberry) and directed by Marc Daniels, was first broadcast on 29 March, 1968. 

Further adding to its uniqueness as a Star Trek episode is the fact that it essentially functioned as a backdoor pilot for a projected new series starring Lansing and Garr as Mr. Seven and Miss Lincoln (a series that, alas, was never to be made).     

** As the following short scene from the above episode demonstrates: click here.

Readers who like this episode, might also find the seventh episode of season two of interest; entitled 'Catspaw', it was written by Robert Bloch (i.e, the writer of the novel Psycho (1959), upon which Hitchcock's 1960 film was based) and featured another shape-shifting alien woman (Sylvia, played by Antoinette Bower) with a fondness for taking the form of a black cat. Directed by Joseph Pevney, this episode was first broadcast on 27 October, 1967, in order to coincide with Halloween. 

For another post on the love of cats, click here.  

Three Cases of Brain Theft

I. The Case of Mr. Spock

As fans of Star Trek will know, 'Spock's Brain' was the opening episode of the third and final season of the original TV series.

Written by Gene L. Coon and directed by Marc Daniels, the episode was first broadcast on 20 September, 1968, and tells the amusing story of how an alien beauty beams aboard the Enterprise in order to surgically remove and steal Spock's brain. Capt. Kirk and his crew have just 24 hours to locate said organ and pop it back into Spock's empty skull before his brainless body dies.

Personally, I quite like the episode for its B-movie charm, although it's widely regarded as the worst of the entire series; even Leonard Nimoy admitted to feeling embarrassed during the shooting of the episode. Claims, however, that it strains credibility seem ridiculous to me. For even at its most plausible, Star Trek is hardly gritty social realism and I'm pretty sure that the Enterprise doesn't even have a kitchen sink.

Long story short, Dr. McCoy - with the assistance of Spock himself - successfully returns the brain to its rightful location and all's well that ends well. 

II. The Case of Adolf Hitler

Unlike Mr. Spock, Adolf Hitler is not a fictional character. However, it's important to stress that the 1968 film They Saved Hitler's Brain, directed by David Bradley, is not a documentary detailing real events.*

Adapted (and extended) for TV from a 1963 feature film entitled Madmen of Mandoras, it tells the tale of how Nazi officials removed Hitler's still-living head at the end of the Second World War and transported it to a (fictional) South American hideaway, in the hope that they might one day be able to bring the Führer back to full consciousness and thence resurrect the Third Reich.      

From 1945, the movie leaps forward into the 1960s and the surviving Nazis, having decided the time is right, kidnap a leading scientist in the field of neurosurgery in order to help fulfil their evil scheme. Unfortunately, however, Western intelligence agencies are aware of what's going on and determined to foil the plan. I'll not reveal the ending, just in case any readers are interested in watching the film for themselves: click here. 

Amusingly, They Saved Hitler's Brain is referenced in several episodes of The Simpsons (and at least one episode of Futurama), suggesting Matt Groening either has something of a fan's penchant for the film, or an obsession with Hitler's brain.

And note also - according to the Dead Kennedys - if you want to make a Tricky Dickie Screwdriver, you'll need to mix "one part Jack Daniels, two parts purple Kool-Aid, and a jigger of formaldehyde from the jar with Hitler's brain in it".** 

III. The Case of Albert Einstein

Finally, we come to the case of Albert Einstein; a case involving a real man, a real brain, and a real theft committed just hours after his death in April 1955.

Even whilst he was still alive, people were fascinated with Einstein's brain. Such an organ, belonging to one of the greatest of all scientific geniuses, just had to have special properties, or be significantly larger in size than the standard model. No surprise, therefore, that before his body had even chance to cool, his cranium was being removed and brain dissected - though what is surprising is that this was done without his prior consent or the permission of his family.***

Einstein's autopsy was conducted by the pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey. Having removed and weighed the brain, Harvey then popped it in a jar of formalin and smuggled it to a lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where he photographed it from numerous angles, before then cutting it into around 240 slices, encasing these segments in a plastic-like material called collodion.

Harvey kept some of these for himself; others, he distributed amongst fellow pathologists, all of whom were eager to have a piece of Einstein's brain. One lucky fellow, Einstein's ophthalmologist, received the great man's eyes that Harvey had also taken time to remove and carefully preserve.   

In 1978, what remained of Einstein's brain in Harvey's possession was rediscovered by a journalist interested in the story (preserved in alcohol in two large jars and hidden in a box). Eventually, in 2010, Harvey's heirs transferred all of his holdings - including the remains of Einstein's brain and fourteen never-seen-before photographs of the organ prior to dissection - to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Silver Spring, Maryland.    

Notes

* Hitler committed suicide along with his wife, Eva, on April 30, 1945, and their bodies were burned according to his instructions. The Red Army, who captured Berlin just a few days later, discovered the charred remains and shipped them back to Russia, where a piece of jaw bone and a fragment of skull were secretly kept in the Soviet State Archives.

** I'm referring to (and quoting from) the Dead Kennedys track 'We've Got a Bigger Problem Now', from the EP In God We Trust, Inc. (Alternative Tentacles, 1981): click here to play. 

*** Einstein's eldest son endorsed the removal of his father's brain, but only after the event and only on the condition that it should be used for serious research to be published in respected scientific journals.


For a related post to this one on brains in jars, click here.

Reflections on Brains in Jars

Dr. Hfuhruhurr meets Miss Uumellmahaye in

The Man with Two Brains (dir. Carl Reiner, 1983)

I.

Readers with knowledge of analytic philosophy will know of the brain in a vat idea that is deployed as an updated version of Descartes's concept of the evil demon in thought experiments concerning mind and meaning, or the relationship between consciousness and reality.

Typically, a brain in a vat scenario is used to support an argument for philosophical skepticism and solipsism. In brief, this argument goes as follows: since a brain in a vat transmits and receives exactly the same impulses as a brain in a skull - and since these impulses are its only way of interacting with the world - it's impossible for that brain ever to know for sure its own location and this has serious implications for the truth or falsity of a subject's beliefs.

In other words, because it's impossible to completely rule out that one is not simply a disembodied brain in a vat, there cannot be firm grounds for believing the things that one believes to be true (or real) with any certainty. As might be imagined, there are objections raised from within philosophy and biology that suggest this thought experiment is fundamentally absurd, but, unfortunately, I don't have time to go into these here.


II.

Readers without knowledge of analytic philosophy - but who know their sci-fi literature and films - will be more familiar with a scenario in which a mad scientist or advanced alien being removes a person's brain and suspends it in a jar containing some kind of life-sustaining fluid that is connected up with electrodes to a machine that simulates reality for the disembodied brain, thus allowing it to continue to have thoughts and feelings without these being related to objects or events in the actual world.

Think, for example, of Anne Uumellmahaye in The Man with Two Brains (1983), starring Steve Martin as pioneering neurosurgeon Dr. Hfuhruhurr, famous for his method of cranial screw-top surgery. Whilst at a conference in Vienna, Hfuhruhurr encounters Dr. Necessiter (played by David Warner), who has invented a radical new technique enabling him to (briefly) preserve living brains in jars (the plan being to eventually transplant them into new bodies, beginning with that of a gorilla). 

Of course, this is just a movie. But, apparently, it is medically possible to keep an isolated brain alive in vitro before one places it into a new body, or, as in the case of Mr. Spock, returns it to its rightful owner. This requires a method of perfusion, or the use of an oxygenated solution of various salts (i.e. a blood substitute).

Any reader thinking of playing Dr. Necessiter, however, should note that they would probably have greater success attaching a whole head to the body of another organism, rather than simply attempting to pop a brain into an empty skull. It might also be noted that so far most of the experimental research in this field has been carried out using guinea pigs and not human test subjects; certainly no such procedures using people have been reported in a peer reviewed scientific journal that I'm aware of.

Click here to watch the scene in The Man with Two Brains in which Steve Martin as Dr. Hfuhruhurr meets Anne Uumellmahaye (voiced by Sissy Spacek, although she was uncredited in the movie). 

For a follow up post to this one on the theft of famous brains, click here.