Who Weeps for Adonais, Explained

Key recommendations

• Star Trek
  penetrated the gods vs. aliens with Apollo disguised as a Greek god.
• Cough
  episode “Who Weeps for Adonais?” he sees Apollo as an alien, but accepts that he was understood as a god by the ancient Greeks.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks
  introduces the demigod Ensign Olly.

Since it premiered, Star Trek tackled complex subjects and asked questions that make fans think differently about the world. Although Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek creator, he was not a religious man, he and the other minds behind it The Original Series (TOS) he saw the narrative power in asking questions about spirituality and even about the existence of gods or a single God.

They covered this topic in depth in the second season of Cough with the episode “Who Weeps for Adonais?” This episode became famous, or perhaps infamous, for the scene where a giant, green, floating hand grabs the Enterprise and tries to crush it. That disembodied hand belonged to none other than Apollo, the Greek god Apollo, the god of light and purity.

The moment Kirk met a God

As the giant green hand held the Enterprise in a literal death grip, a vision of a giant head appeared, crowned with laurel leaves, and his voice echoed through the Enterprise. Calling the crew his “beloved children”, the giant head welcomed them to his planet, “their home”.

Captain Kirk took a landing party to the surface of the planet, which was known as Pollux IV. When he, Lt. Scotty, Dr. McCoy, Subaltern Chekov, and Lieutenant Palamas arrived, they were greeted by a gorgeous man wearing a golden laurel wreath, a draped golden robe, and golden sandals. His aesthetic was reminiscent of the ancient Greeks, as was the planet's architecture. He introduced himself as Apollo.

Of course, the landing party didn't think he was the Greek god. In fact, the tricorder scans of Dr. McCoy was shown to be basically human, although he had an extra organ in his chest that McCoy couldn't explain. Enraged by their doubts, Apollo transformed into a gigantic version of himself and exploded:

Welcome to Olympus, Captain Kirk!

Apollo demanded their worship and devotion, just as the people of ancient Greece gave him. He spoke of that period of time in precise detail, and his personality indeed corresponded to the depictions of Apollo in the Greek myths. When the crew refused to bow to him, he shot them with lightning bolts, a power Apollo was known to have as the son of Zeus.

Was Apollo really a God?

Although the landing party members could not explain Apollo's supernatural abilities, they still did not believe that he was actually the ancient Greek god. Then Kirk asked one of the most interesting questions Star Trek franchise ever addressed – what if the beings humans have come to understand as “gods” were actually aliens?

He proposed that if they accepted Apollo's story, detailing how he and the rest of the Greek Pantheon were visitors to Earth thousands of years ago, then it made sense that the people of the time would have interpreted these extraterrestrial visitors as gods. After all, they had supernatural powers that the Greeks had never seen and had no idea about life beyond Earth. How else could they interpret the extraterrestrial visitors if not as gods?

The landing party concluded that although Apollo was obviously not a god, he was indeed the being known to the ancient Greeks as the god of light and purity, Apollo. After some investigation, they discovered that Apollo was able to channel energy from any power source through his body to create the “lightning bolts” he shot from his fingers.

Star Trek took this concept of aliens being worshiped as gods several times throughout the franchise. The Cough cast addressed this topic again in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier when they discovered an alien posing as the Judeo-Christian version of God. In The next generation The episode “Who Watches the Watchers”, Captain Picard visited a pre-warp society that discovered a Starfleet observation outpost on their planet and began to worship Starfleet officers as gods.

Of course, the most profound and nuanced exploration of the “god-alien” happened in Deep Space Nine with “alien wormholes/Prophets”. In the very first episode of DS9Commander Benjamin Sisko discovered that the Bajoran “gods”, the Prophets, were actually non-corporeal aliens living in a stable wormhole in space outside Bajor's orbit.

Spoilers for Star Trek: Lower Decks season 5 episode 6 before.

Star Trek: The Lower Decks Demigod

The latest episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks“Of Gods and Angles”, introduces a new character called Ensign Olly. The first thing people notice when they see her is her laurel wreath, identical to the one worn by the being called Apollo, whom Captain Kirk met over a century before. Apparently she's related to Apollo. Zeus is her grandfather, and like her family members, Ensign Olly can channel electricity from any source around her through her body and direct it to a target.

Unfortunately, Ensign Olly doesn't have as much control over her electrical powers as Apollo. She continues to channel energy from the ship and create waves of energy that destroy whatever she is working on, which is not a great skill for an engineer. Because of this, Olly has already been thrown off several ships by the time he reaches Cerritos.

As a former Mariner herself, Lt. Mariner takes on the role of Olly's mentor and helps her figure out how to use her powers for good. Seeing Mariner, the forever rebel, as a mentor is yet another nod to how far the Lower Deckers have come since the show's inception.

It is unclear whether Ensign Olly will appear in any of the remaining episodes of the Lower Decksbut her presence in this episode canonizes the first demigod in Starfleet. Although, as Captain Freeman points out, Starfleet does not condone the use of the term demigod.

Sources: Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Lower Decks