only the ryetalyn, but a number of android bodies, all labeled "Rayna" and with a different number indicating earlier versions of her. Flint reveals the truth. He was born in 3834 BC, and after falling in battle discovered he could not die. Flint has lived "lifetimes" as da Vinci, Brahms, and many others. He built Rayna to be his immortal mate and manipulated Kirk into teaching her how to love. Paranoid about the possibility that the Enterprise crew would reveal him and his location, Flint causes the Enterprise to disappear from orbit and reappear as a tabletop miniature in his laboratory, with the crewmembers in suspended animation. He proposes to keep them that way for up to 2,000 years. Rayna happens into the room and vehemently objects, so he restores the starship to its previous state. When Kirk professes his love for Rayna and pleads with her to leave with him, a fight breaks out between him and Flint for the possession of Rayna. Rayna stops them, claiming her right to choose her own future, and then, overwhelmed by indecision for fear of hurting either Kirk or Flint, dies. Back on the Enterprise, McCoy reports that readings from the earlier tricorder scan show that Flint has been aging normally since he left Earth's environment, and will soon die. Kirk falls asleep on his desk after commenting ruefully on Rayna's fate, and Spock places a suggestion to "forget" into his mind. Production and reception Rayna's last name, "Kapec", is an anagram of Capek, after Karel Čapek, who introduced the term "robot". Reception In a 2010 review, Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club criticized the Rigellian fever scenario as contrived and noted that Flint being numerous famous men from history was both completely irrelevant and contradictory to his claim that he had kept a low profile to avoid his immortality being discovered. He said that though the final scene is a highlight, it is undermined by Kirk's obsessive love for Rayna being so out-of-character as to be unbelievable. He gave the episode a C, summing it up as "forgettable". In 2017, Den of Geek ranked "Requiem for Methuselah" as the 15th "best worst" Star Trek: The Original Series episode, echoing Handlen's criticism that Kirk falling so intensely in love with Rayna over the course of just four hours was highly out-of-character. Analysis According to fantasy and science fiction scholar Ace G. Pilkington,