Captain Kirk does not want his pain taken away. If there’s one central message of 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, it’s the idea that human beings should be allowed to be messy, flawed, and a little sad, and anyone who offers you a way to cleanse your soul and be free of pain is likely a lunatic cult leader. This kind of iconoclastic humanism is so ingrained in the original 1960s Star Trek series that a huge number of episodes are preoccupied with Kirk unmasking false prophets in the form of oppressive automated computers, all-powerful aliens, and other Starfleet captains who decide to implement authoritarianism on a backwater planet.
