set phasers on KILL!!! comprises episode 17 in the 24-episode television series Kommander Kobayashi. Over the past 16 episodes, the crew of spaceship La Fenice have established themselves in the minds of the audience, as best described in Go’s monologue which opens each episode:
“The year is 2527. My name is Go. I work for NASA-CIA Earth. Two years ago, I accepted a highly classified mission – to go into space as a crew member of LaF, searching for intelligence related to inter-planetary terrorism. My job is dangerous, difficult and lonely, but it is the least I can do for my country; for my planet.
Our crew number five operatives. Ma oversees our mission planning and is our senior ranking intelligence officer – he deals with mapping and navigation. Scrabble is a human cybrid of the puzzle genus. He functions as decoder. If there is a pattern there, he will find it. Tii is the ship engineer and mechanic. She makes all strategic calculations, and in her own way, keeps the peace. I am an empathiser. My job is to meld with the crew’s minds, keeping us focused and on-track. We are all captained by a man who is unlike any other captain we have ever known. A man we have grown to love and hate. Koba.”
Over the series, Kobayashi has established himself as an inept but lovable captain. He constantly breaks things, spills coffee on vital documents and issues incorrect orders. He is often vague, uninformed and dismissive of important missions. The crew are growing increasingly frustrated with him, but continue their work nonetheless. The crew’s frustration with Kobayashi is augmented by their sense of loneliness and isolation – they have not returned to Earth in two years. The crew believe in the importance of their work, but relations between the crew and their commander are becoming very tense.
Go has grown increasingly close to Kobayashi – as she has carried out empathic sessions with him, she has found a closed door in his mind; she has begun to suspect he is falling in love with her, and is hiding his love for her. She is falling in love with him, and is the only defender of his character against the increasingly-mutinuous crew.
Each episode of the series constitutes an intelligence mission which the crew fulfill. For the past eight episodes, the crew have been assembling a large cache of linked objects, traveling to remote locations throughout the galaxy to retrieve them. Each object has led to the next, and the crew now believe there is one final object to retrieve for their set to be complete.
Scrabble and Ma have been working tirelessly to make sense of the objects. In the last episode, Scrabble told his conclusions to Ma and Kobayashi – that when the final object is retrieved, and the objects are placed in a certain geometry, they can stop time. Scrabble had extrapolated the location of the object – it is on board a ship – and Ma and Scrabble were eager to retrieve it. Kobayashi was dismissive of the pair, but the sense of importance of Scrabble’s conclusion fuelled Ma and Scrabble to set off for the ship against his orders. Kobayashi and Go discovered them as they were about to transport, and after some argument, the four crew members transported to the ship as a team, determined to find the final object.
The opera begins as the crew transport down to the ship. They take out their tracking devices and begin a preliminary search. This is stopped with the appearance of Ine, the being who lives on the ship. Ine is part plush toy animal, part human and part cartoon character animal, and always carries a satin umbrella and a small plush cow. After turning on the lights and startling the crew, Ine uses her umbrella to freeze them in place before they can take out their weapons.
After the credits, Ine attempts to interrogate the crew, but they cannot understand her, as she speaks her own language, which is a combination of different animal sounds. She forces them to speak, but under the force of her ship’s atmosphere, they can only speak in quotations from famous pop songs about space. After a period of attempting to make the crew speak, Ine pauses and looks closely at their faces. She then moves them to the back of the stage, and retrieves a large syringe, making as if to inject them.
In the next scene, Ine teaches the crew her language, forcing them to watch slides while she makes sounds using her voice and a tape-recorder.
Dialogue can then begin – in the following scene, Ine and the crew sit around a table, and Ine asks the crew questions about why they boarded her ship. Kobayashi is friendly, though Ma is reluctant to answer any of Ine’s questions, and the tension between him and Kobayashi grows as he is ordered blithely to do so. The crew tell Ine a cover-story, that they are passing through on a routine mission, and found her ship and decided to investigate. They then ask Ine where she is from. When she tells them she is from the planet Canus, Scrabble is astonished at how long she must have been traveling. Ine then asks the crew questions, specifically asking them how long they have been hybrids. The crew do not understand her; Ma in particular takes great exception to being called a hybrid, and as Ine persists in questioning them about this, tension grows until Ine sends Ma, Go and Scrabble into trances with her umbrella, leaving Kobayashi to talk to her.
Kobayashi and Ine then talk for a while. Ine asks him how long he has been a hybrid, and Kobayashi asks her how she can know such a thing. Ine rises and walks to the theremin. She assembles it, and plays John Dowland’s “Flow My Tears” on it, communicating her story to him through the song. Ine is the last of her people, a people who are part animal – when they understood that an apocalypse was coming to Canus which would destroy their race, they sent her out in space in search of another planet suitable for habitation. She never found one, and has been traveling for hundreds of years, alone. Her entire race is dead, and when she dies they will be no more. She has gone partly insane, traveling alone for so long, her only company plush toy animals which she has nearly worn to shreds over the years. When Ine left Canus, her people understood that she might never find another planet for them to inhabit, and, knowing that as a being born on Canus her immune system would keep her alive for an extremely long time, gave her a super-toxin, a suicide pill which she could use in the event of failure. Ine has put off taking this super-toxin up to now, knowing that it would not only mean her death, but also the death of her race and the failure of her mission. She tells Kobayashi that she plans to take it soon, and sees the crew’s appearance as a sign that her time has come, but she need not die alone. Kobayashi is touched and horrified.
In the following montage, vast swathes of time seem to pass on board the ship. Kobayashi spends time with Ine, questioning her about her life and taking particular interest in the cow she carries everywhere with her. Go becomes jealous of the time Kobayashi is spending with Ine, and Ma and Scrabble become restless and irritable.
The next scene presents Ine and the crew asleep. Ma wakes up Scrabble, and tells him that he thinks the object the crew need to retrieve is Ine’s cow. Scrabble concurs with him, but the pair disagree how best to go ahead with retrieving the cow. Scrabble convinces a recalcitrant Ma to have patience and confer with Kobayashi about the matter.
The next morning, Ma and Scrabble approach Kobayashi, tell him they think the cow is the object, and stress their desire to take the cow and leave. Kobayashi forbids this, telling the pair that more time is needed to learn about Ine and the cow. He dismisses them and goes to talk with Ine. Ma and Scrabble are soon joined by an irritated Go. The three begin hatching a plan to mutiny against Kobayashi and retrieve the cow themselves.
In the final scene, Go takes Kobayashi to one side, while Ma and Scrabble distract Ine and grab her umbrella. Ma tosses the umbrella to Go, who uses it to freeze Kobayashi. The three crew members then attack and fight Ine for her cow. Ine fights them off, deflecting their blows easily, until a certain point where she gives up entirely; she looks at Kobayashi, clasps the cow, then falls dead to the floor.
With Ine’s death, Kobayashi is released from his frozen state; distraught, he runs to Ine’s dead body, screaming at his crew to stand down. The crew argue with him; Ma seems to finally have lost any sense of respect in dealing with his commander. What comes out in the ensuing dialogue (see below) is a massive shock to the crew, ending the episode on a cliffhanger.
KOBA: (pulling GO, SCRABBLE and MA off INE) GET OFF HER! LEAVE HER ALONE!
KOBA continues trying to push the others away, until they finally cease beating her and stand back; KOBA kneels, stroking INE.
KOBA: Oh God….
While MA and GO shout at KOBA he continues to stroke INE, devastated.
MA: (furious) I have had it! How many times have you fucked up our missions? How many
times have we sent back faulty or no intelligence? And now you-
GO: (interrupting, enraged) We’re on a mission, and we’ve spent however long on this ship
doing nothing while you tried to get your hand up her skirt-
KOBA: (finally erupts) We’re not on a mission, we’re on a wild goose chase! And I’m the one who set the goose free (losing momentum, desperate) I set it free….
MA: What the fuck are you talking about? (to GO and SCRABBLE) This is the way it’s always been! Not making sense! I can’t take this any longer-
SCRABBLE: Sir, I think it’s time we returned to Earth, I think we-
KOBA: We can’t go back to Earth.
GO: Koba, I think they’re right, your sessions have indicated-
KOBA: We can’t go back to Earth! The ship is rigged, we are stuck in further space!
MA: (simultaneously with GO) What the hell are you on?
GO: (simultaneously with MA) Koba, you’re not making sense, I think you need-
KOBA: (losing it) We cannot go back to Earth! Ever. And you’ve just destroyed our only chance of ever escaping!
SCRABBLE: (simultaneously with MA & GO) Sir, this is really-
MA: (simultaneously with SCRABBLE & GO) I can’t believe I’ve had to put up-
GO: (simultaneously with MA & SCRABBLE) Koba, you have to listen to-
KOBA: LISTEN TO ME! (silence; beat) The year is not 2525. It’s 2857. You’ve been on LaF for
332 years. Your memories are modified, so you can’t remember anything that happened more than 3 months ago! In 3 months time you won’t remember that I even told you this…
SCRABBLE: What?
GO: No….
KOBA: When you were trained as astronauts, you all underwent experimental gene therapy-
MA: (cutting in) You have me confused with someone else, I NEVER had-
KOBA: You didn’t know it was gene therapy. You were all told you’d been selected for specialized conditioning and taken to a clinic in Dublin. Your DNA was extracted and spliced with different specialized animal genes – dolphins, frogs, fish, birds. We thought we were giving you ultra-strong immune systems, longevity, higher spatial and acoustic intelligence, we thought we were giving you a better chance at longer lives in space-
GO: We?
KOBA: -but in making you into chimeras, into genetic hybrids, you all developed an auto-immune virus…..a virus so dangerous it could kill everyone on earth. You were banished to this spaceship, to these stupid missions, to protect everyone on Earth! We’ve been on the ship for 332 years, masquerading as spies-
MA: You have lost it! I am an agent of the Counter-Intelligence-
KOBA: No, you’re not! You have never provided intelligence! I have planted every object you’ve ever found. Last year we were in Santus and I planted the document you found a month ago; 18 months ago we were in Centaur and I forged documents to create the facility you broke into last week.
MA: You’re crazy! I am not a hybrid, I am not an animal-
KOBA: Why do you think you were able to learn Ine’s language so quickly? Why do you think she even taught us? Because she’s a hybrid too!
SCRABBLE: Sir, this is ridiculous. If we had some virus, why not let us live our lives out on Earth? There are precautions….when we die the virus must die with us-
KOBA: You’re here because you cannot die! You are indestructible. You cannot be destroyed.
You had to be banished because the virus, spread from you, would have eventually killed off the entire human race, everyone except for you.
SCRABBLE: So we’re here for nothing? Ine died for nothing?
KOBA: No. This was the only time the fake missions and real intelligence have overlapped. 3
months ago NASA-equiv received a communiqué that there was a toxin on board this ship, a toxin so powerful it could kill anyone. Even organisms with seemingly-indestructible immune systems. I laid a trail of objects to lead us here to retrieve it. But Ine was here, and she beat us to it….
GO: Ine?
MA: We’re indestructible, and you came here to get a toxin which could kill us?
KOBA: Everything you loved on Earth is dead! The messages you think you get from your mother are from a computer programme designed to simulate her. You can’t ever go back. (beat; desperate) We tried for so long to find other solutions! This was the only thing we could think to do, we discussed it, and we decided it was for the best-
GO: Koba, why do you say keep saying “we”?
KOBA: (pause) Because I’m the doctor who did this to you. I developed the experiments. When I realized what I’d done, I underwent the experimentation and came with you. I’m the only one of us who has a memory. I’m the only one who knows. And I can’t take it anymore. I want to die.
END SCENE