Foone Turing — The short answer is that it was a planet of…

The short answer is that it was a Nazi planet.

The longer answer…

So there was a planet full of aliens (who look like humans because… Makeup is expensive) who were experiencing a societal collapse. An observing scientist (from the same organization as Kirk & Spock) decides to help them by turning them into “like Nazi Germany”, because that was supposedly the most efficient culture humanity had ever known.

He does this somehow, and the aliens that look like humans, they turned their planet into the Planet of the Nazis. They have all the symbols and it looks just like Nazi Germany… But it’s just a reconstruction of it on an alien planet, with aliens playing Nazis.

So the episode is about Kirk and Spock showing up to figure out what’s going on, discovering the Nazi planet and now thinking “wtf?” and having to avoid being killed by the Nazis and figure out why there’s a Nazi planet and try to fix it so there won’t be a Nazi planet anymore. That’s where this screenshot comes from.

Please understand that this simplifies the story a lot to make it more logical. It’s actually a lot weirder than that… There’s a whole thing about how there’s a subordinate who seized power and the researcher had tried to make it “Nazis but without anti-Semitism or war” but it got screwed up. It’s a lot.

This “Kirk and friends go to a planet that is an inexplicable copy of an ancient Earth culture” plot has also been recycled multiple times. This is the “Nazi Germany” version, there’s also “Ancient Roman”, “Native American”, allegedly “Wild West”, “1920s Chicago Mafia”, “1960s America except it’s a society of children because everyone past puberty is dead”, “kind of ancient Greece but with mind control aliens”, “kind of ancient Greece but it’s one of the Roman gods (who’s an alien)”, “post-WW3 Iron Age society still fighting the Cold War but it’s been so long the sides don’t even know what to call themselves anymore”

Star Trek: The Original Series is so much.