Deconstructing Year Four: Is There In Truth No Beauty?

​The song I wrote for this episode is a love song. It’s one of those that’s not really directly related to the episode itself, but once I had the idea and the song started to take shape, I just had to go with it.

This episode features a Medusan ambassador, Kollos, who is so ugly, to look at him drives humanoids insane. Rough, right? His traveling companion is Miranda Jones, and she, being a telepath, is trying to achieve a mind meld with Kollos in order to understand the alien species better and to be able to utilize their unique senses and navigation abilities. This is all very interesting, and there’s this other guy, Marvick, who is in love with Jones, and he goes crazy and drives the ship outside of the galaxy, and then Spock goes crazy, and it’s a big mess. But instead of writing about one of those things, I had this other idea. Kollos and Miranda Jones are kind of stuck together, and I just imagined Kollos being secretly in love with her. In the episode, we learn that Miranda is jealous of anyone else who is able to communicate with Kollos the way she wants to, and I just thought, what if Kollos has made a connection with Miranda Jones, much the same way she has made one with him? The song is from the perspective of Kollos as he tries to explain to Miranda how he feels.

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The song itself was one of those that just kind of happened. I started with a chord progression, and the words just flowed out. Some of our songs go through a lot of changes once they move from demo to the practice room, but this one didn’t change much at all. We filled it out with instrumentation, but the core remains as it was initially conceived for the most part. ITITNB LyricsThe little intro at the beginning was the only thing we really added on down the line. All in all, I really like how this one turned out.

My favorite line in the song is, “You can’t look at me, doesn’t mean that you can’t see for any other reason than you won’t.” I just really like the double meaning here. Spoiler alert, as it turns out, Miranda Jones can tolerate the sight of Kollos, because she herself is blind. In this line, Kollos is basically saying that even though she can’t physically see him, she can see who he is if she’ll just try. I think that’s an idea we see every day: the idea that people only see what they want to see, and they don’t bother to penetrate any further than surface level. In this case of unrequited love, the concept is even more frustrating, and it just lends itself well to this kind of angst-ridden pop tune.

For the trivia lovers, this episode features Diana Muldaur as Miranda Jones. The actress later appeared in Star Trek TNG as Dr. Pulaski. Also, this episode has one of the most irritatingly convoluted titles of all the songs we’ve done before. It was months before even I would get it right without thinking, and the other guys in the band still mess it up from time to time. I’m convinced learning the title is just a matter of memorization and not paying any attention to what the actual words mean. Incidentally, the title is derived from a poem, “Jordan,” by George Herbert, which is said to exemplify the idea of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (IDIC). So there you go.

Five Year Mission
Year Four
Is There In Truth No Beauty?
Written by Chris Spurgin

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