THE ORIGINAL 'STAR TREK': JUST SILLY SEXIST SIXTIES HOKUM SET IN SPACE?

”Male and female are universal constants.”
- Kirk, 'Metamorphosis'

When Men Were Men (And Girls Green)

Is there anything left to say on Star Trek’s sexism? Certainly the show’s insistence on always presenting life, Jim, but very much as we know it has not gone un-noticed. Kirk’s line about this being what us earth creature call luuurve is one of show’s the best-known catchphrases. (Though the actual wording was “Love is the most important thing on Earth, especially to a man and a woman”.) While the green Orion slave girl is helpfully flagged up in the end credits on a weekly basis.

Its costume designer led to the term for women's clothing which is not just skimpy but almost entirely unsuited to the seemingly essential task of staying on the person wearing it. With Zap Brannigan, ’Futurama’s Kirk parody, the narcissistic girl-chasing became his central feature.

Alongside which there’s the repeat gag where Kirk has to awkwardly explain to some innocent the… ahem!… the, you know, the facts of… well… how it’s done to some youngster. And the combination of these two seems to define the thing.

Despite Scotty’s protestations, the laws of physics are broken on a weekly basis. The true universal constants are fixed gender identities and high hem lines. It seemed pretty much out of date by the time of Next Gen in the Eighties. Today it’s less notorious than risible, in the overlap between the cringy and the comic. Perhaps ’Futurama’ had it right. You don’t analyse this sort of thing, you take pot shots at it. Or can we manage more?

Take ’The Empath’ and ’Elaan of Troyus’. Okay, there was probably never a plan to broadcast them back to back. But both have women as effective children, not just in need of adult male guidance but basic socialisation. (Elaan even needs to be taught table manners.) However one is good, mute and… well, empathic, exhibiting the official feminine virtues. While the other is haughty, mouthy and downright tantrummy, but much happier once taken in line. And naturally only the second one – the one who needs taming - is sexualised. The thing’s almost schematic.

Perhaps it's better to take a slightly different question. Ideology is not about convincing people by arguments but shaping their unconscious assumptions. In short, its role is to insinuate itself as apparent common sense. As such entertainment is an ideal propagator; it’s precisely because it doesn't seem anything more than ephemeral than it slips below your perceptual radar. (Transmission is a term both for TV shows and diseases.) But then how much are their creators aware of any of this? Are they merely making their own unconscious assumptions ours by sharing them?

'Metamorphosis' is perhaps the show’s most gender essentialist moment of all. A female spirit (or, as they're described in SF, energy field) is keeping astronaut Zefram alive, long past his natural span. When Kirk asks hopelessly “How do you fight a thing like that?” McCoy shrewdly replies “Maybe you're a soldier so often that you forget you're also trained to be a diplomat. Why not try a carrot instead of a stick?” And they resolve the situation not by devising a weapon to hit the Companion with, but a translator so they might communicate with her.

Now the story’s main female character, Nancy, is a diplomat. So Kirk should be borrowing her carrots. Yet not only do we never see her perform any actual diplomacy, she’s repeatedly demonstrated to be sharp-tongued and unreasonable, blaming Kirk for every plot development. Perhaps unusual behaviour for someone of her profession.

The Starfleet directive as plot impediment, which tries to push them away from the adventure, is a recurrent device. (Like the chief in cop shows always bellowing “you’re off the case!”) And it can be enhanced by adding a Starfleet stuffed shirt they need to ferry, who can shout directly at Kirk rather than have Uhura relay orders. ‘Galileo Seven’ had Galactic High Commissioner Ferris, insisting he should be obeyed despite just being a guest on the show.

But making this permanently displeased bigwig into a woman brings up the subject of the career woman. And soon she’s saying “I've been good at my job, but I've never been loved. Never. What kind of life is that? Not to be loved, never to have shown love?”

It’s the perfect trade-off. A feminine spirit without a body runs into a woman after a career, so she clearly doesn’t want to be a woman in the first place. The natural order is restored by the closing credits.

It's commonly thought of as a love story. But that's to see the thing though it's resolution. For most of the time, the Companion behaves like a Mother. (Note how her name is contingent, in fact contingent on Zefram.) When he complains of feeling lonely, she goes and gets him a play date – nabbing Kirk and co, so setting off the story.

In the story's most interesting moment, finding the energy field is actually a female energy field, he initially recoils at the notion. Not at it's ludicrousness, but at the idea they've had some sort of affair. It's resolved through her taking female form, via the dying Nancy's body. The Freudian forbidden suddenly becomes possible, becomes the… and there’s no nicer way of saying it... Mum you can fuck.

And it’s Kirk who persuades her to cut the apron strings. He's soon off on the classic 'Star Trek' bugbear, railing against the static utopia. Zefram wasn't just any astronaut, but the inventor of the warp drive – another Historically Important Individual. Yet since then he's sat back with every need taken care of. “Our species can only survive if we have obstacles to overcome,” Kirk cries. “You take away all obstacles. Without them to strengthen us, we will weaken and die.”

When Spock prompts “ask it about its nature” deliberately or not he’s being tautological. For the Companion is strongly associated with nature. For reasons entirely unexplained within the story Zefram has to go outside to communicate with her, leading to the iconic scenes of her field descending over him. She can't leave the planet for any length of time without dying, suggesting she is in some way the Gaia-like spirit of the planet.

And in this way the romance story overlaps with the Romantic. The term 'Mother Nature' goes back to the Middle Ages, but Romanticism bestowed a feminine spirit upon Nature with renewed vigour. The more technologically advanced human society became, the more important the Romantics felt it was to stay in touch with the feminine. And Zefram communicating with the Companion “on a non-verbal level” does seem remarkably similar to the Romantic poet communing with nature. The techno-futurism of 'Star Trek' doesn't deny and even plays up all that, but makes of it something which must be put in the past. The Companion, in short, is not just the Mum but also the Earth you get to fuck.

Using the Assets You Have

But let’s get back to the bad girls. 'The Man Trap', the first episode to be broadcast, started things off the way they meant to go on. Like a cross between 'Species' and 'That Obscure Object of Desire', an alien impersonates desirable women to lure in its targets. Shapeshifting is a common weapon of villainy, inherently suggesting deception. But gendering the alien as a woman is significant.

Its hunger for salt (aka the human life force) is almost an inevitable result of being a woman in a man's world. Deprived of the means of her own survival unless granted by a man, she inevitably becomes a vampiric force. At one point, prompted by events, 'it' switches genders and immediately switches from male to female targets. Yet even this underlines what a she it really is, perpetually named after Nancy, her first victim. (Yep Nancy again, they were no better with naming women than charactersing them.)

One image strikingly sums this up. We never see Nancy attack her first victim, just her standing over his already-dead body like a tableau. It's a memorable moment, making more of an impact than if they'd gone for the more obvious action sequence. But its impact partly comes from suggesting at an inevitability to all of this. For if society is made up by men, then women will inevitably become something outside, something alien. To misquote the pop psychology book title, in SF Men are from Earth, Women aren't.

Yet amid all this reactionary sexual politics there's an ecological message. This is the last creature of its kind, explicitly compared to the buffalo. Sorry, the what? Given that we’re dealing with an intelligent creature, why isn’t the analogy the genocide of the American Indian? (Besides, one was contingent on the other. Buffalo were often slaughtered as a means to either starve Native Americans or drive them into reservations.)

Further, Darren at The M0vie Blog is almost certainly right to point out that, this all being a frontier analogy, the death of those who came before cannot help but be presented as regrettable - but a regrettable necessity. Progress determines that they need to be got out of our way, and anyway our pausing to get a bit rueful about it shows how good we really are. (Making Kirk a bit like that cop in ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide’ who might shoot people but always agonises about it to his girlfriend afterwards.)

They talk of not wanting to kill her. At one point, she even gets to makes the case for her life. Except, in a somewhat delicious irony, at that point she's disguised as McCoy. In other words, literally given a man's voice. (It's never quite explained why they don't just up and give her some salt. Are they supposed to be short of the stuff? Would she have fared better asking for pepper? We get few clues.)

 

And these two themes do tie up. Through Nancy's 'true' appearance, an old and ancient thing. Her long straggly hair, her lined snout and what the production crew called “ashen skin”, the “old hag” of folklore, matches the dialogue where McCoy is blinded to her grey hair.

In Tennessee Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1947) Blanche exclaims “I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.” A notion Stanley rebels against: "It’s dark in here…. I don’t think I ever seen you in the light. That’s a fact!.. You never want to go out till after six and then it’s always some place that’s not lighted much… What it means is I’ve never had a real good look at you."

And Nancy’s the Blanche Dubois of alien life forms, her devices to mask her age with appearance merely more sophisticated. But both plan to keep up her required level of desirability – the commodity which keeps her alive. Women are inherently about appearance and appearance is about deception.

And in fact we see a similar combination later, in 'Devil In the Dark'. The last of a kind is almost tragically wiped out through failure to communicate. Except one factor is reversed. Rather than impersonating humans, the Horta is one of the few non-humanoid aliens on the show. They could have talked to Nancy at any point, but only do so obliquely. 'Devil in the Dark' intentionally with-holds communication, only to devise a way to enable it. (The coining of the Vulcan mind meld.) And with it things come to a happy ending. So why can one live when the other has to die?

The real difference is of course that the woman in 'Devil in the Dark' is primarily a mother, acting only to defend her children. Unless you have a thing for duvets with varicose veins (and I concede there may well be an OnlyFans for that), she's not sexualised. Whereas Nancy’s sexualisation is associated with her predation. The only crew member resistant to her charms is Spock, and he survives her advances literally through not being a red-blooded male. Women don't have to die, at least not when fulfilling their biological roles. But female sexuality, inherently a threat, has to be killed off.

Yet ’Map Trap’ itself doesn't seem so convinced the two do tie up. Like 'The Doomsday Machine', it sets up two parallel themes then figures it needs to favour one of them. The episode is built around McCoy’s dilemma over his feelings for Nancy, with the last-of-it's-kind theme a late addition to the script. Yet that’s the one they play into. It's like the gendered stuff is so hard-wired into the story its own tellers look straight through it and instead focus on a more indirect analogy. It's tempting to argue that even on the level of metaphor it's disguised, one metaphor hidden beneath another.

And if we're taking on the show's sexism, why not go for the jugular? 'Mudd's Women' is the infamous episode which reassures the viewer that in the future prostitution will still be alive and well. It seems to have been part of Roddenberry's original pitch, suggesting it was integral to the show's world-view. (Or at least his.)

For plot beats, ’Mudd’s Women’ and ’The Way To Eden’ almost perfectly match. Both the women and Severin’s space hippies are unwillingly beamed aboard the Enterprise from a breaking-up ship, to stupefy the crew with their outrageous behaviour and scanty costumes. Both follow their leader’s instructions to seduce/befriend the crew to hijack the ship. Only when they reach their destination do their plans unravel. (Slightly bizarrely only one group uses drugs, and it’s not the hippies.) Yet they don’t feel similar.

Which may be because ‘Way To Eden’ is clearly about something. In its crass fashion it’s exhibiting an ideology in order to critique it, making it a fitting subject of critique itself. Whereas ’Mudd’s Women’ seems a relic of as time when women were goods (they’re specifically referred to as his “cargo”), better consigned to the past. Yet should we separate them that quickly?

Their ability to seduce and enchant the male crew into doing their bidding comes from the magic Venus pills they take. (Leading to McCoy’s classic line “are you wearing some unusual kind of perfume, or something radioactive?”) Much of the episode is like one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons when the guy’s heart honks and eyes bulge uncontrollably out on stalks. While men feel sex, as a drive, women possess sexuality – like it’s a weapon at their disposal. But without a regular supply of pills, which they fall on like junkies, they fall back into plainness. In a fairly direct echo of 'Man Trap', women are associated with illusion and deception. Let’s remember glamour originally referred to a magical enchantment, a possessing spell.

Perhaps the most interesting sequence in the whole episode lasts only seconds. A scene of the women holding the Venus drug in their eager palms cuts to Spock with the lithium (not yet named dilithium) crystal needed to power the ship. For if the women in 'Mudd's Women' are to navigate a man's world, they need their power source as much as a starship does its. They’re simply striving to survive, using the limited options left to them. What else are they supposed to do? Study at the Academy for years and finally be allowed to answer the phone? Get to serve the Captain his coffee, hoping he notices your legs? And this segue admits as much.

One segue, of course, does not a redemptive reading make. We should remember that in selling themselves they require a pimp, who rations their drugs and whose ownership of them is telegraphed even in the episode title.

Let's note something about Mudd. He's built around the gag that his salesman's patter continually falls on impervious ears, making him an irresistible force continually bashing into an immovable object. This recurs so often you might wonder why he doesn't take one of his own pills, and stroke his beard alluringly at Kirk. He doesn't seem to have much to lose. But his inability to do what 'his' girls can is neither played up nor explained away, it's just accepted as a fact of life.

In 'Naked Time’, when the insane Riley usurps Kirk's place as Captain, he issues a decree that women shouldn't wear too much make-up. It’s a gag, but the moral of 'Mudd's Women' is oddly similar. Imagine it as a set of instructions for a young female viewer. Your chief asset is your looks, but you only have ‘em for so long so make sure you snag your man and settle down before they’re spent. And don’t overdo it even then. Powerful medicine.

Notably, the plot contrives to switch the women’s attention from the crew to a planet of well-off and available miners. And even then the deception fails when one of the girls won't go along with it. Which dodges something not just about plot resolution but ‘manhood’. To successfully resist them would suggest the crew were not 'real men' at all. While to succumb would mean they couldn’t be heroes. This dilemma surfaces elsewhere, and most consistently over Kirk.

Watching ’Star Trek’ all the way through, and in defiance of the cocksure Zap Brannigan stereotype, it’s notable how fallible a character Kirk is. He snaps at underlings when under pressure, makes small mistakes, very nearly makes big ones. But when this seems to happen over attraction to women it turns out to be a feint. He’s often shown seeming to do the wrong thing, abusing his command and even jeopardising missions by chasing skirt. Yet this always turns out to be part of some overall plan of his. See for example ’Conscience of the King’. 

(There’s precisely three genuine exceptions, where Kirk truly falls in love, in three series - ’City On the Edge of Forever’, ’The Paradise Syndrome’ and ’Requiem For Methusaleh’. Each of which is presented as something out of the ordinary.)

Jules Feiffer said “our cultural opposite of the man who didn’t make out with women has never been the man who did – but rather the man who could if he wanted but still didn’t.” (‘The Great Comic Book Heroes’, 1965) Kirk can be shown getting his wicked way, with some off-screen shagging nudged and winked at (especially in ‘Wink of an Eye’). But mostly scripts repeatedly find mission-critical reasons why Kirk needs to seduce or counter-seduce the girl of the week. It’s victory, more than sexual gratification which drives him. “So that was your plan”, Kirk cries in ‘Mark of Gideon’ after another entrapment via seduction scenario. “That I would fall so under her spell that I’d give up my freedom and become a willing sacrifice”. And note that “spell”.

If women of the era only have power via sexual allure then, reassuringly, Kirk is shown as constantly able to out-allure them. Take ‘Elaan of Troyus’. Elaan’s plot is to get Kirk to fall in love with her, using evil juju, which jeapordises the Enterprise’s peace mission. But of course it’s her who falls in love with him, despite the absolute lack of magic affects on his part. Women endlessly launch themselves at his manly torso, but persistently miss and end up at his feet. About the only girl of the week he doesn’t seduce is Miranda in ’Is There In Truth No Beauty?’, and she turns out to be blind.

Harpies and Jezebels

Let’s look at a comparison, or at least what should be a comparison. ‘The Outer Limits’ ran from 1963 to 5, just before ‘Star Trek’, effectively passing the baton of TV SF. If there’s less temptresses in titillatory costumes, it was a different show, chasing a different market. One opens with a portentous all-knowing extra-diegetic narrator, the other with a triumphalist speech by it’s heroic lead.

But it was still a Sixties show with unsurprisingly Sixties attitudes. Women are “pretty nurses,” dutiful lab assistants, dutiful wives, or dutiful lab assistants doubling as wives. Admittedly, there’s exceptions. In fact Joanna Frank’s otherworldly performance as an elemental femme fatale in ’Zzzzz’ is more mesmerising to watch than all of Mudd’s Women put together. But exceptions is what they are. Women’s secondary nature is simply taken as an established fact. No need to hold them down there, it’s just where they are.

As much as they have a role, it’s as a necessary counterbalance to man’s rationality, with their handy ‘feminine’ virtues such as sensibility. See for example ’The Architects of Fear’, or ’The Borderland’ where a wife’s loving hand pulls her husband back from an experiment gone awry. The closing narration spells it out for us:

”There are worlds beyond and worlds within which the explorer must explore, but there is one power which seems to transcend space and time, life and death. It is a deeply human power which holds us safe and together when all other forces combine to tear us apart — we call it the power of love.”

Needless to say, such notions try to sell confines as virtues. But the bigging up of male virility and power… the “no we’re in charge, honest” is largely absent. It doesn’t feel like it’s insistently about sexism the way ’Star Trek’ does. What could have changed in those few years?

The short answer is that the early Sixties were not like the late. A rough and ready history of the rise of American feminism would be the publication of Betty Friedan’s ’The Feminine Mystique’ (1963), the formation of the National Organization for Women (1966) and the Miss America protests where the supposed “bra burning” took place (1968), which roughly equate to base camp, shoulder summit and highly visible peak.

’Star Trek’ also ran into Black Power and the counter culture head on, as much as it did the Romulans. You can almost see it happening in real time, from mildly indulgent inclusionism to identification of a perceived threat. But its relationship to feminism, while as heated, while more heated, is less distinct.

So ‘Star Trek’ fluctuates strangely in it sexism. ’Mudd’s Women’ is very much a pre-feminist story, about the role patriarchal society assigns to women, then in its paranoia panics over them having. But in ’Metamorphosis’, as seen, they had to deal with a woman diplomat who issued orders. Its sexism becomes a war on two fronts, against temptress jezebels and demanding harpies.

And there may even be a point where this switch happens. ’Requiem For Methusaleh’ is another story where Kirk goes off-mission and falls in love. (Though least credibly of all. The other stories at least allow some span of time where this might happen. Here, it’s during the ads.) He ends up scrapping over Rayna with his rival suitor, Flint. (Flint having built Rayna as an android companion for his life on a remote planet. You know, like you do.)

Horrified at their violence, seemingly on the spot she formulates the notion that maybe she could be the one making the decisions about her life. “Please stop. Stop! I choose where I want to go... what I want to do. I choose. I choose... Do not order me. No one can order me!” This might sound like a good starting point. In fact, out of shock of this strange new notion, she’s promptly struck dead.

While a later story, ‘Turnabout Intruder’, starts with a woman presuming she has that right to choose. Naturally she’s the villain...

Janice Lester plans a body swap with Kirk, as it’s her only chance to command a starship like the Enterprise. (Yes, the same series that dismisses racism as “primitive thinking” insists women can’t captain starships.) Now a feminist tale might involve the yeomen and telephonists getting together to agitate for more equal pay and less leering, something like what was starting to happen in the real world at the time. You know, collective action, based on shared identity, that sort of thing.

Whereas this goes straight for the single woman with a glass ceiling obsession. (Even her henchman’s a… well, he’s a man.) But it is a story which encounters feminism, is specifically anti-feminist. In a nice touch she gets to do the expository Captain’s log, as if threatening to take over the show.

Except of course her plan is deranged, and its execution merely reveals conflicts within herself. Her desire to be a starship Captain is casually conflated with her desire for a starship captain, she’s (yawn) another old flame of Kirk who feels spurned. And they’re not done yet...

Almost immediately on their being switched, she exults to Kirk “now you’ll know the indignity of being a woman…. Believe me, it's better to be dead than to live alone in the body of a woman.” While the temporarily feminised Kirk refers to “her intense hatred of her own womanhood.” At a time when the call for equal rights was commonly parsed as “we don’t want to be women any more”. It’s as if even she can’t really imagine herself in the big chair, at least not as her self.

There are those who imagine all wrongs can be handwaved away by use of the phrase “of its time”. It’s more mantra than argument. Yet the irony is that this is a time the description fits, just in the opposite way to their imaginings. ‘Turnabout Intruder’ is typical of a story produced not in the absence of feminism, but precisely because of it’s presence. Feminism is raised, but only to be repudiated. This panic reaction is a hysterical reaction to something it tries to pass off as hysterical. The dread threat of a woman after a Captaincy powers the episode, as the very same time we’re supposed to find that idea a total absurdity.

Race-swapping stories, such as ’Black Like Me’ (1964) or ’Gentleman’s Agreement’ (1947), where Gregory Peck poses as Jewish, were films in the tradition of George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out In Paris and London’, undercover agents exposing the situation of poverty and discrimination. Can criticisms be made of them? Yes. But, particularly in their time, they were progressive. In both cases, the protagonist is a crusading journalist gone undercover.

Whereas gender-swapping stories are more traditionally played as comedies, such as ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959). They’re associated with Shakespearian tradition, where the drama lies in the world being turned upside down and the resolution of it being righted again as the men re-don their trousers. Yet here, when facing off feminism, Lester’s threat seems more real and the humour is dissipated. Except even then it can’t quite be expunged. Scotty calls Lester-as-Kirk “red-faced with hysteria”, and Shatner’s embracing of hissy fit drag cannot help but draw laughter. (It’s also tempting to suggest that with the preening, narcissistic Lester it’s the closest he ever came to playing himself.)

Formally, this is very similar to to good Kirk/ bad Kirk of ‘Enemy Within’, except noticeably the crew’s reaction becomes more foregrounded. Everyone, up to and including the regulars, notices the change and rejects the new Captain. In fact the script seems confused over whether resolution should come by the Shakespearian route of body-swap reversing (revealing it’s essential unnatural-ness) or the anti-feminism of Lester’s command being stymied by mutiny (revealing the absurdity of the situation). The two happen at about the same time, as if double booked.

So, in short, ’Star Trek’ didn’t insist so hard on strict gender roles and a boys-club Starfleet because this was all some innocent time before feminism, but precisely as a reaction to feminism. Yet the feminism it was reacting to was still emerging, perhaps even nascent. So there’s other times where it comes across as pre-feminist, with a quite different set of concerns. And by fighting both fronts it comes to feel obsessive on the subject, like sexism condensed.

It effectively launches with a Jezebel (‘The Man Trap’) and ends with a Harpie (‘Turnabout Intruder’). But we shouldn’t be seduced by that superficial neatness. In practise, the show switches arbitrarily between these two types, there’s no overall shifting from one to the other as feminism became more widespread. It seems more the case that feminism stirred up a more general anxiety, which stoked both simultaneously.

PS Should you wish to read more by a bloke about women’s rights (over which I’m supremely unqualified to comment) and SF (alarmingly over-qualified), with particular reference to the Amazon planet trope, go here.

Coming soon! And finally… about time we showed some class…

ON RACE IN SPACE (THE ORIGINAL ‘STAR TREK’)

“To expect sense from two mentalities of such extreme view points is not logical.”
- Spock, ’Let That Be Your Last Battlefield’

One of the things ’Star Trek’ is known for, almost as much as the bold use of catchphrases, is its much-paraded multiculturalism. Non-white characters might seem to us to be assigned only subservient roles but, we’re quickly told, this was an advance for the time. And others have responded just as often that this is really a liberal inclusionism forced upon the dominant culture by the Civil Rights movement. Racial minorities bust their way in, don’t look like they’re leaving and so the only response left was to claim you welcomed them aboard. It was not a granting, it was a getting.

And there was a prior inclusionism to riff on. Though famously, and accurately, dubbed “Wagon Train’ in space”, the series was just as steeped in war movies. Two episodes, ’City On the Edge of Forever’ and ’Patterns Of Force’, involve the war era directly. And others, such as ’Balance Of Terror’, borrowed heavily from war films.

And war movies often involved a similar inclusionism. In ’Sahara’ (1943), for example, Humphrey Bogart ends up leading a rag-tag division including American, British, French and Sudenese soldiers. A Nazi scoffs at this motley array of a crew, insisting they should give up now. They reply this actually makes them stronger. Naturally enough, it's soon demonstrated that the Americans must lead, and the Sudanese guy essentially sacrifices himself for the others. In reality, all army divisions were racially segregated throughout the war. But it’s a handy shorthand to contrast ‘us’ against Nazism, while telling the home front this is a time to unite. And it’s precisely this which ’Star Trek’ borrows.

’Miri’, seen last time, takes place on an upside-down earth. Which has no impact on the story whatsoever, apart from the general suggestion we should be seeing this stuff allegorically. But the blatantly allegorical episode, the one where ostensible characters are actually walking symbols and get treated as such – that’s the anti-racist one, ’Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.’

So it doesn’t matter that the half-black and half-white faces of primary antagonists Bele and Lokai are absurd and blatantly theatrically made up, as they’re only there to provide a metaphor for racism. In fact, the absurdity of their look helpfully enhances the absurdity of their antagonism. “You half white!” one yells at the other as they struggle. Each ascribes every event to the other, like they’re the only two forces in the universe. (And as one is half-black and the other half-white they’re literal mirror images of one another.) There’s little to no attempt to sketch in their back story. We know a book’s worth about the Romulans by comparison.

Bele claims the chase has been going on for fifty thousand years, despite the fact they seem as mortal as us. (Lokai is near death before his rescue.) Which suggests their real existence is as metaphors and so they’ve been around as long as the stuff they’re metaphors for.

While there’s an unusual attempt to present the Enterprise as a workplace, with scenes of the crew going through duties and procedures. (Something they worked hard to convey at first, but had given up on even before the middle of the first season. Here, midway through the third, it’s back.) And the result is that they’re treated as metaphors, they're to provide a salutary life lesson, even within the story. They make mistakes so we don’t have to. Kirk does some imploring about reconciliation, but finally flies off leaving them to duke it out. They go wrong so we don’t have to.

In short, our photo-op multi-cultural crew encounter racism, presented as a thing from without. Their initial response is to not know what Lokai and Bele are on about. Only later do they come to feel recognition, and with it revulsion.

As both Bele and Lokai’s characters are literally written on their faces from the get-go there’s nowhere for them to go, which results in a very padded episode. And the threatened self-destruct sequence may well be so extended as part of that padding. But it’s effective nonetheless. And it’s purpose is clearly that the Enterprise crew, who can only action the sequence as a joint venture, would rather die together than be as divided as Lokai and Bele. Underlining the essential difference between them.

At one point Chekov comments “there was persecution on Earth once. I remember reading about it in my history class.” To which Sulu replies “Yes, but it happened way back in the twentieth century. There's no such primitive thinking today.”

And there are two ways to parse this. One is to emphasise the reference to the twentieth century, and accept that if our species is to find a future for itself we’ve got to smarten up a bit. Martin Luther King’s wise words finally got heard, we did get to that promised land. Our descendants have survived, where Lokai and Bele’s world hasn’t, precisely because of this. Their race through the Enterprise corridors, accompanied by a montage of war footage, we know this was introduced only to stretch the episode out to full length. But regardless, it’s a pretty good visual image of the futility of their war.

But there’s another reading. These are the characters we’ve watched week after week, and so we cannot help but identify with them. We look at that enlightened, multiracial crew and figure they are our characters, people we know , perhaps even stand-ins for us. It at the same time upholds and reverses the perspective on the trope Jack Graham dubbed “nice-but-then”. He used the term for inexplicably enlightened figures from the past, Iron Age feminists and the like. Whereas here they’re from the future. So we’re the nice-but-then; we’re civilised, proto-enlightened, upgrade-ready for this future to beam us aboard.

And yet despite Kirk constantly insisting “you’re two of a kind” Bele is a cop, with authority placed on his side, and Lokai is on the run from him. They may both be half-black but there’s no question who’s whitey. This is underlined by an exchange between them. Asked by Lokai “why should a slave show mercy to the enslaver?” Bele replies incredulously “Slaves? That was changed thousands of years ago. You were freed.” Yet he later boasts “We've got your kind penned in on Cheron into little districts.” So not, you know, that kind of freeing that actually leads to any freedom.

Pretty much anyone this side of Elon Musk can see the doublethink going on here. But it’s less often asked, why can't the episode itself? It openly weaves the rope to hang itself, then hands that rope over to us as if oblivious to what it’s doing. Yet this is a story, a work of fiction. The deck can be stacked any way the writer chooses. Why not make the characters as bad as each other, perhaps split Cheron into two warring hemispheres? Then have Kirk point at them at intervals and say “see, racism be bad. Just say no, kids.”

And if its not because they can’t, then it must be because they don’t want to. Because accepting what’s self-evident would have too many uncomfortable ramifications. You could not longer think of racism as a residue of “primitive thinking”, which will eventually go away all by itself. If racism is a structural problem, embedded in our society, to challenge it will require fundamental change. To expect people to see what’s not in their interests to see, perhaps that’s not logical Captain. Let that be the limits of liberalism.

But then, why do they get so close, then refuse the final hurdle? To get this we need some context. This episode was aired in January 1969, meaning it was developed during the tumultuous year of 1968. By then black Americans had repeatedly been tear-gassed, beaten, imprisoned and in many cases killed, often for rights they were officially due as a matter of course. They didn’t always react to this with serene calm, you may be surprised to hear.

And the ante was perpetually being upped. The mid to late Sixties had seen a shift from Civil Rights campaigns to Black Power movements, abruptly exacerbated in April 1968 by the assassination of Martin Luther King. The chief proponent of non-violence being murdered, somehow that seemed to push people into a more radical direction.

The immediate result was riots. They weren’t “race riots”, and in fact the Black Panthers (the most prominent Black Power group) criticised them as an ineffective substitute for political organisation. But they were portrayed that way by the popular press. And Cheron, it is implied, has been destroyed by extended race riots.

And what would white audiences think when they first heard Sulu’s line about “primitive thinking”? At school they’d have heard the ‘Lincoln freed the slaves’ line. Slavery was racist. So when that was over, naturally racism ended with it. So any blacks still complaining today are nothing but uppity troublemakers. Many conservatives even claimed that the riots had happened because blacks had been given too much freedom, that this was proof they had to be subjugated for their own good. In short, black activists were held responsible for their own oppression, because they’d resisted it.

Plus there’s another axis. Black Power was largely a youth-based movement, and Bele is clearly older than Lokai. Lokai is presented as self-righteous and disdainful to the point of petulant. (“My need gave me the right to use the ship… I'm extremely tired, made so by your vindictive cross examinations. I will answer no more questions.”) While Bele is more calculating and tactical. In a scene reminiscent of Khan in ’Space Seed’ he becomes a dinner guest with Kirk and the officers. While Spock spies Lokai on the lower decks, orating agitation to the lower ranks. (We don’t see him, just his rabble-rousing shadow playing over his attentive audience.)

And these circumstances enforce themselves on the script, characterise the antagonists more closely than an instalment of ’Spy Vs. Spy’. Black Power casts itself into the drama. By this point in the decade it cannot be held back. But alas it doesn’t seize control of the script. The episode affects colour blindness, as part of a genuine attempts to portray race as an absurd and counter-productive thing to fight over. But what it really suffers from is privilege blindness.

Nor was this all that unusual. The Mothers of Invention song ’Trouble Every Day’ was recorded in 1966, after the earlier Watts Riots. And as we might expect from a radical underground band, themselves mixed race at a time when that was still unusual, there’s more sympathy for the causes of the riots. (It includes the line “I’m not black but there’s whole lots of times I wish I could say I’m not white.”) But it still slips into the same both-sides equivalence of “race riots”, as if black and white gangs were at one another like the Sharks and Jets.

“And all that mass stupidity
“That seems to grow more every day
“Each time you hear some nitwit say
“He wants to go and do you in
“Cause the color of your skin
“Just don't appeal to him
“(No matter if it's black or white)
“Because he's out for blood tonight”

Then years later, in 1979, the radical anarcho-punk band Crass sang “Pogo on a nazi, spit upon a jew/Vicious mindless violence that offers nothing new.” As if Nazism and being Jewish were equivalent things. Racism runs deep because privilege blindness runs deeper.

A perpetual awkwardness in the original ’Star Trek’ is whether it portrays a techno-utopian future we should aspire to, or presents us with our ugly reflection in a distorting mirror. Which is both good and bad. The difference between it and ’Next Gen’ isn’t so much that the sequel show is more utopian, as that it’s so goddamned ordered. (At it’s worst, watching ’Next Gen’ feels like being inculcated into a cult.) ’Star Trek’ shows a more volatile Federation in a more volatile universe. And at times that tension becomes creative. Whereas at others… well, it turns out like this.

Also, there’s perhaps an inherent problem with the planet as parable trope... It can externalise what it wants to symbolise. The foreign planet is put in place to reflect aspects of us, including ones we might not want to look at. But if the resemblance gets too close we can always push the planet away – turn it back into just a story, set in a galaxy far away. And ’Battlefield’ highlights that, all but encouraging us to push away.

And it may be significant for that to come to a head in this episode. To this day racism is too often seen as “primitive thinking”, the opposite of having gone to college. But history tells us the opposite. The racial categories we now have were developed in the colonial era, and racism is perpetuated in order to have a sub-class who can have the worst work dumped on them. Its basis lies not in instinct but economics. Its best challenged by political struggle, not awaiting some mooted year of Enlightenment when all will change.

The other element of “primitive thinking” is that it assumes we choose to be or not to be racist, the way we choose to put out our recycling. The idea that racism might exist in structures of power is acknowledged, but then dismissed as unimportant. White folks such as myself might oppose racism, might even attend Black Lives Matter marches. But white privilege still sticks to us, whether we acknowledge it or not. We have been planted in Bele’s soil.

As we saw last time, white hippies can steal starships, endanger galactic peace treaties and nearly kill the entire crew. And Kirk will respond by saying “I used to get into a little trouble when I was that age, didn’t you?” But if you’re black, even if you’re black only down the one side, expect a less indulgent response from people with rank. Even in fiction. Even in liberal fiction.

Coming soon! Is it possible, do you think, that ’Star Trek’ was ever sexist? No, hear me out…

COUNTERING THE COUNTER CULTURE (THE ORIGINAL 'STAR TREK')

”The enemy from within – the enemy!”
- ’And the Children Shall Lead’ 

To Boldly Get Far Out

The voyages of the starship Enterprise began in 1966, the year John Savage has claimed youth culture exploded. And should anyone doubt it was a Sixties show in the way we think of them, and the hemlines alone weren’t convincing, show them the scene in ’Wink of an Eye’ where Kirk literally drinks the Kool-Aid.

Okay, officially it’s coffee. But the drink-me potion speeds him up to the point where he can see the aliens aboard the Enterprise, moving too fast to be visible to mere human perception. Who, most noticeably, don’t try to conquer him but convert him to their perspective.

Kirk’s view of slowed time is presented by Dutch angles, a visual conceit often employed to represent drugs or general derangement. And much of the episode’s appeal lies in seeing something once familiar rendered askew. (Beyond a brief intro, everything takes place on the familiar Enterprise sets.)

There’s a clear parallel between its time distortions and the contemporary fashion in psychedelic music for speeding up and slowing down sounds. Wikipedia cites as one of the main characteristic of the style as “Dechronicization” which “permits the drug user to move outside of conventional perceptions of time”, mimicking the effects of LSD (allegedly).

George Harrison said after first taking the stuff: “There was no way back after that. It showed you forwards and backwards and time stood still.” The aliens are even called the Scalosians, as if associated with musical scales. The episode itself becomes a little like dropping something in the coffee cup on the viewer’s armchair.

However unlike other adversaries (some of which we’ll move on to) the Scalosians themselves don’t represent the counter culture. In fact they’re a(nother) dying race who vampirically require humans. Accelerated time isn’t an enemy to be overcome so much as a setting for the story.

But then the Sixties themselves seemed an accelerated blur, something hard to take in at the time. (A point made by Darren in The M0vie Blog.) This wasn’t just the tempo of music or the rapid spread of the counter culture, though it included both those things. Rather than anything, it was everything. Art, politics, technology... the world seemed to be changing right under you.

Hindsight can have a flattening effect. The Futurists, the art movement operating before the First World War, boldly asserted in their manifesto “Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.” But by the Sixties their time would have seemed sedate if not actually quaint. Much as the Sixties do to us today. But what matters how those eras felt from the inside. Objects which to us seem quaintly retro then felt almost impossibly futuristic.

And this has an extra resonance for ’Star Trek’, itself futurist in the techno-utopian sense of linear progress. But is all that progress now happening too fast, too soon? Characters here “burn out”, die from being accelerated.

As it turns out, the answer’s a reassuring no. It’s all happily resolved, with time turned back to its standard speed and cameras set back to their right angles. ’Wink of an Eye’ raises these concerns only to dispel them. In the future we’ll teleport places rather than catch the bus. But people will remain recognisably human, have comprehensible motivations, and coffee will just contain coffee.

At other points the show just temporarily tries on the counter culture, like a wage slave donning a hippy wig for the weekend. In ’I, Mudd’ the crew stage a happening to freak out the robotised squares holding them captive, who are soon crying out “Illogical! Illogical!” and overheating. (Actually not so soon. In the opposite to the Scalosians the scene transcends it’s literal length to become interminable.)

While ’Miri’ presents the generation gap as an infection. (One of many times when a negative social force is manifested as a disease.) In an era where youth protest was often dismissed as a simple failure to grow up, this literally infantilises those draft dodgers. Their ideology is irrationality, tantrum as political statement. The sloganising of demonstrators is reduced to taunting playground chants – literally “nyah, nyah, nyah”. They call adults ‘Grups’, short for ‘grown-ups’, midway between a childlike mispronunciation and a protest term like ‘pig’. Naturally they take against the Enterprise crew as more Grups and (in a somewhat symbolic move) steal their communicators, shouting “blah! blah! blah!” at Kirk as he tries to reason with them.

Yet it turns out even alien planets have outside agitators, and the children are revealed to be led by an older boy – Jahn. His resemblance to Scorpio in in the later ‘Dirty Harry’ (both below) is presumably coincidental, suggests they’re aiming at similar types.

Kirk insists “children have an instinctive need for adults; they want to be told right and wrong." And the episode is built, even titled, around a child who comes round to just that. We’re explicitly told both that Miri is barely pubescent and that she has a crush on Kirk, which is… well, let’s move on.

The adults are found to have caused the disease, with a resulting generational war fought on both sides. Yet it’s the children who are the antagonists. The adult characters appear early, offering portentous warnings which they underline by promptly dropping dead – like the harbinger in horror films. Perhaps significantly, the planet’s not an Earth nor a colony, yet looking exactly like the Earth even down to the shape of it’s continents. There is something cake-and-eat-it about this, that it’s our world yet simultaneously not. Yet it does hint the adults share at least some of the blame, a hint which is enlarged on in other episodes.

The infamous space hippies of ‘The Way To Eden’ are remarkably like the Planet People in ‘Quatermass’ (1979). They pursue a paradise planet which is almost certainly mythical. They reject rationalism like it’s a poison, when confronted with inconvenient facts they simply disregard them. “We recognise no authority, save that within ourselves” they insist. (In words strangely close to Crass’ dictum “there is no authority but yourself”.) Though professing to be free sprits they’re the duped disciples of their monomaniacal leader Severin, a clear Timothy Leary stand-in.

They hijack the Enterprise to take them to their Eden. Severin carries a disease (yes, another one), which this risks spreading to the natives. While their flight route also risks violates a fragile peace with the Romulans. When they get there the planet looks idyllic, but every living thing is full of acid (the other kind) and going barefoot in the grass does not end well. Severin would have poisoned a planet already poisonous, and almost triggers a space war to do so. Which feels a little like over-egging it, like one of those ‘Road Runner’ endings where the Coyote not only fails to catch his prey but falls off a cliff, gets hit by a rock and then run over by a train.

And yet at the very same time it’s busily lampooning those daft hippies with their silly costumes and daft slang it’s conceding they might have a point. Their music, while like a copy of ‘Hair’ except even worse than the original, allows them to extra-diegetically critique events, like the Ooma Loompas drawing moral through song in ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ (1971). When Spock explains to Kirk the origin of their much-chanted insult, "Herbert was a minor official, notorious for his rigid and limited patterns of thought," he replies "Well, I shall try to be less rigid in my thinking."

As Josh Marsfelder comments “the Hippies were very much middle class in a way the previous and contemporary countercultural movements really never were: The major nerve centres of the Hippie movement were big Southern Californian universities… Now, look at who comprises our Space Hippies in ‘The Way to Eden’: "Starfleet Academy dropouts, the son of an ambassador, a disgraced physician and several scientific specialists.”

The hippies weren’t the black militants who could so easily be written off by resorting to racist stereotypes. They were our children, white as white, the educated youth who should be set to become the next generation of managers. And the episode itself seems unsure whether Kirk has a bemused sympathy with their youthful idealism or just has his hands tied by their social connections, dialogue veering between one and the other.

If one thing defined the hippie counter-culture it was a rejection of social conformity. Why should you spend your life doing what was expected of you? Why not live it like it was yours? They jeer “Herbert” at rule-makers and rule-takers alike. But that’s too broad to be a philosophy. They could be presented as anti-war, anti-consumerist or even anti wage labour. But the thing they go for is anti-technology. Not the environmentalism often parodied as anti-technology but the full monty.

True, hippies were latter-day Romantics, to whom science and technology represented a confining mindset. (Think of Blake’s quote: “For man has closed himself up till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”) And in a quite overtly techno-utopian series this being even quasi-sympathetic would seem the biggest digression of all.

(In fact, proving that every parody will find its literalisation if you wait long enough, the Primitivist ‘thinker’ John Zerzan has written: “What ’Star Trek’ has to convey about technology is probably its most insidious contribution to domination… Always at home in a sterile container in which they represent society, the crew could not be more cut off from the natural world. In fact, as the highest development in the mastery and manipulation of nature, ’Star Trek’ is really saying that nature no longer exists.”)

Scotty proves their chief critic, grumbling about the “barefooted what-do-you-call-‘ems.” Yet in a series ever-fond of personalised debates he never argues the point with the crewman most sympathetic to them. Which turns out, despite their supremely illogical behaviour, to be Spock. He comments “there are many who are uncomfortable with what we have created. It is almost a biological rebellion – a profound revulsion against the planned communities, the programming, the sterilized, artfully balanced atmospheres. They hunger for an Eden.”

So why should the biggest technophile of them all, a character ceaselessly likened to a walking computer, harbour such sympathies? This homes in on something. The hippies seemed to their elders to be rejecting not even what seemed worst in modern society but best. Having lived through the Depression and the deprivations of the war years, their parents revelled in the new-found and hard-won material abundance. Now their own children rejected it outright. The Ex’s ‘We’ve Got Everything We Never Wanted’ was a later punk song, but it captures this sentiment. It felt so at odds, yet coming from a source so close… was this so deranged it had to really be visionary?

But perhaps the real clue as to how this can be tied up, after the over-laboured ending, is the final exchange between Chekhov and the space hippy chick he’s had the inevitable crush on….

“Be incorrect, occasionally.”
“And you be correct.”
“Occasionally.”

We’ve got out of balance, see. Their yanking of the steering wheel might initially be disruptive and careering, but is necessary to keep us on the straight and narrow. Timothy Leary said “you’ve got to go out of your mind in order to use your head.” Luckily, here others are volunteering to do the out-of-mind part for us, so we can still use our heads only better aligned.

A similar expression of the same idea comes in (the really not very good at all) ‘Assignment Earth’ where Roberta says: “That’s why some of my generation are kind of crazy and rebels, you know. We wonder if we’re going to be alive when we’re thirty.”

And wondering if they’ll let you make it to that magic age, suddenly not trusting anyone over thirty doesn’t seem quite so crazy after all. Except rebel is precisely what she doesn’t. Her role is structured over the dilemma over which appropriate adult to obey. When Special Agent Gary Seven convinces her he’s CIA she immediately trusts him, despite their not being entirely down with the kids. When she susses he’s fibbing it turns out okay anyway, because he’s from an even higher authority. 

If the kids are playing up, the cause is obviously poor parenting skills and there’s no need to listen to what they’re actually saying. (All of which is remarkably similar to the way Marvel comics of the era treated youth revolt.)

And yet as a child, when that line was first transmitted to me, I was gobsmacked. It had never been suggested before that the peace-freaks and deviants you saw on the news, who asked for trouble then complained when cops hit them, might have a point. Was this the much trumpeted ‘Star Trek’ liberalism, challenging the official orthodoxy? Or radical groups pushing their ideas into the mainstream, past the point where they could be simply suppressed? They only answer is yes. There’s no real way to assign proportions to each.

Coming soon! Racism. No wait, that’s already here. Racism in ‘Star Trek’…

HOW TO MAKE HISTORY (THE ORIGINAL 'STAR TREK’)

“Even historians fail to learn from history.”
- Professor Gill, 'Pattern of Force'

History has Its Gravity (Future Classicism)

The Romulan commander in 'Balance of Terror' is never actually given a name. But he's still one of the classic 'Star Trek' characters, much better-drawn than there seems any functional requirement for him to be. Compare him to Kor, the first Klingon adversary in 'Errand of Mercy'. Kor is, it’s true, more than a mere pano villain. By his own culture's codes, he is honest and even valiant. But, in a complete inversion of the two, Kor is named though he's there just to be a Klingon - to represent to us what Klingon culture is.

While the Romulan drives the plot one way while all the time wishing there was another. In a story clearly based on World War Two submarine films he’s a recognisable type - the good German general. Battle-weary and worldly wise, he can see straight through the cult of war, and recognises Kirk as not just stuck in the same slot as him but as cut from the same cloth. Yet he’s too embedded in his culture to extract himself now, and the way things are going he’ll be dead soon. His last words are: “We are creatures of duty, Captain. I have lived my life by it. Just one more duty to perform...”

So if the Klingons are the Reds the Romulans must be Fascists. Simples, right? Not really. Much like the Daleks and the Cybermen, things aren’t that reductive. Yes, Fascism was forever keen to borrow the iconography of Classicism, from its Italian birthplace. But the Romulans are frequently portrayed as more Classical than anything appropriated by Mussolini. Take the uniforms, or the bird of prey motif. Events takes place between the planets Romulus and Remus, just in case the name Romulan alone wasn't enough of a tip-off for us. (Something set to repeat. The later episode ’Elaan of Troyus’ is blatantly Helen of Troy playing the telephone game.)

And 'Mirror Mirror' ostensibly set in a parallel universe where the Federation are imperious and backstabbing, is as full of classical references. The Starfleet insignia, an upward-pointing arrowhead is transmogrified into an unsheathed sword running through a planet. It's almost akin to one of those alternate histories where Rome never fell, so elements of our world get mixed up disconcertingly with theirs.

Partly this is a grab for gravitas. Previously, much televised SF in America had been juvenile and Gene Roddenberry was keen to establish some counter-credentials. Proper SF authors were recruited as scriptwriters. When, disliking being rewritten, Harlan Ellison wanted his script credit to revert to the generic Cordwainer Bird he was refused by Roddenberry. Much of his script went, his name remained. It was of more value than the words he wrote.

And speaking of namedropping, there’s the penchant for classical or literary quotes to be employed as episode titles. ’Plato’s Stepchildren’ even begins with the helpful explanation “Plato, Platonius, see?” (Oh yes, right!) Shakespeare is cited in 'Conscience of the King'. At the outset, ex-dictator Kodos is wanted for war crimes and hiding out. The particular hiding spot he chooses being a travelling theatre troupe, appearing before different audiences each night across the galaxy. So much for the believer in eugenics being a superior life form. Except of course it's not happening that way round. It seems a safe enough bet that the Shakespearian players in space, with the lead actor himself in disguise, was the impetus. This was to be a 'phasers on impress' episode.

So it logically follows they're performing 'Hamlet', despite there being no-one in the troupe who could really play the Dane. 'Forbidden Planet' borrowed the plot and theme of a Shakespeare play, 'The Tempest', without mentioning it explicitly. 'Star Trek' does precisely the opposite. The title comes from the line “the play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King”, referring to 'Hamlet's' play-within-a-play structure. Yet there's no mirroring of that in the plot. They merely use the play title most people will have heard of (and not, say, ’Pericles Prince of Tyre’), in the same way they used the best-known playwright. And naturally the name is taken as permission to justify some truly scenery-chewing acting.

...While Time Has Weight

But another means, by which SF might more genuinely emulate the historical sweep of Classicism, is time travel. Which allows for future history, surely a branch of historical fiction. As any fan knows, Asimov’s Foundation series came from his reading Gibbons’ ’Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’. Kim Stanley Robinson even went so far as to define SF as "an historical literature... In every SF narrative, there is an explicit or implicit fictional history that connects the period depicted to our present moment, or to some moment in our past.”

Which couldn’t help but raise an intriguing question? Mostly we consider history subjectively, the way we do evolution - it was all about us, a timeline designed to get to here, at which point it handily stops. By extending the timeline further, into dates not yet on calendars, does SF open our minds beyond that narrow notion? Or by ostensibly setting dates in the future where the same shit happens (people commute by jet-pack, but of course there’s still wage labour) does it actually reinforce it?

Time travel was one means by which science fiction conveyed these connections, or general historical sweep. Which means it's probably significant that the original series had more episodes with the word “time” in the title than it did actual time travel episodes. (Seriously, where did 'Amok Time' ever get its handle from?) Just like ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Time’ is a word with connotations.

But let's look at the two actual time-travel stories...

‘City On the Edge of Forever’ has something of a metafictional undercurrent. This was when TV’s primacy had become embedded in our culture. TV now gave you your history, alongside your news and your entertainment and telling you when to go to bed. So history became a movie you already knew the ending to. The crew see history through the lens of a black-and-white screen (showing actual film footage), which they then find the magical power to enter. For a screen entices more than the pages of a book.

This heightens a prevalent question. What if you could jump through that border, and punch out the bad guys before anyone contemporary to them got wise? But like a cursed magic object from a folk tale, the portal only offers the appearance of that power. All you can do is watch from close up as the course of history happens. (More on that sort of thing here.)

'Tomorrow is Yesterday', whose 'Friends' title would be 'The One Where The Enterprise Ends Up Back On Earth In The Present Day, Sparking The UFO Craze', makes an element implicit in 'City' into a definite rule. Most of history, you see, is just busywork. You and me are like the extras in the ships' corridor scenes, walking up and down, ostensibly doing stuff but really just making up the numbers. Only a few important individuals have an actual historical impact. Providing the Enterprise gets involved only with us historically insignificant types, it can head back to the future with no harm done. It's like offing red shirts. There’s no consequence, everyone just forgets they were there.

So when they beam up pilot John Christopher and he first seems insignificant, all looks fine for the future. But the twist is that he's carrying historical importance like a recessive gene, as a descendent will have a major role in developing space travel. To underline this point a second character gets beamed aboard, a base guard. Clearly not an alpha type but a B lister, he spends his whole time on the Enterprise in stupefied awe. Luckily, they're able to fix everything by putting time back where it was when they found it.

And this dividing people up into the historically significant and insignificant, doesn't it sound rather close to Kodos self-aggrandising doctrines about superior beings, despite his being the ostensible villain of 'Conscience of the King'? When there's insufficient food to stave off starvation on the planet he ruled, he worked out a programme where only the important will be permitted to survive. As so often ’Star Trek’ liberalises this, expects more benevolence from its Alphas, but doesn’t question the division.

All of which sounds a good deal like the 'great man' theory of history. In 1840, Thomas Carlyle helpfully explained:

“The history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones: the modellers, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwell in the Great Men sent into the world.”

Alphas make history, not just in the sense of getting their names on the statues and portraits but in the sense of creating it. And the Great Man theory makes history into an adventure story, where we’re enlisted troops permanently in the throes of battle and the great perpetually triumph over adversity.

Leaving The Past Behind

But there’s also an insistence on the linearity of history. It aligns with the conceit of the Federation having a Richter Scale of Cultures, against which anyone they run into can not only be mapped but assigned a number from a progress chart. (Cultures might progress through this at different speeds, but it’s specified the points are fixed.) More primitive societies are presented as being like children, needing our guidance. And just as history is assumed to be linear, lack of progress is associated with arrested development, like time's on freeze frame. (The classic example here would be 'The Apple', but there's no shortage to choose from.)

Let's look at an apparent exception. 'Errand of Mercy' feigns to be another episode where a primitive culture (the Orgonians) requires an appropriate adult to beam down to them and give them a big of a leg-up. The story spends much time contrasting the free West against the Evil Empire of the East... sorry, the Federation against the Klingons, then spanners its own works by throwing in a perspective which makes that distinction merely trivial.

We find we're the ones who need the appropriate adults, and Kirk and his Klingon adversary are effectively told “if you children can't play nicely together we shall have to take your toys away”. This time the 'Friends' title would be 'The One Where the Vietnam War Was Won By Buddhism', and in Buddhist terms the Organians are off the wheel – beings of pure light, opposed to any form of physical violence… in fact anything physical.

But crucially, the standard perspective is reversed not undone. In many ways it's reinforced. The story ends with Spock speculating that they took millions of years to evolve as far as they have, and so in time might we. Their revealing their true form looks similar to the transporting effect, as if they were one day ‘energised’ and saw no reason to revert. And his assertion is given weight by the Orgonians asserting that in the future the Federation and Klingons will become friends.

It’s teleological and techno-utopian at once. Are there strange new worlds, new life and new civilisations out there? They say yes but they mean no. The future can just be predicted through extending the curve of a graph. But at the same time, the Orgonians are effectively angels, just from a heaven which has been displaced from above us to ahead of us. And heaven has always been where you could leave your imperfect physical existence behind.

Most of this story takes place within an illusion created by the Orgoniains, which the viewer shares. Shouldn't that make them similar to the Talosians of 'The Cage'?  Yet one is coded as destructive and the other as positive. Something achieved by emphasising how the Talosians are the remnant of an ancient civilisation which became degenerate. The Organians are beings of pure energy who only take on human form to make other people feel better. The Talosians have a misshapen version of the human form, most notably with enlarged craniums. While outside events impact upon the Organians, disturbing their serenity until they feel they're left with no choice but to step in and resolve them, the Talosians need to lure and trap humans for their survival.

In other words, the Organians are the - possibly our - future while the Talosians are stuck in the past. They spend their time doing nothing but bathing in memories, made tactile by the power of illusion. It's vitality, “primitive emotions”, with which the tough young Pike is still in touch, which have the power to defeat them.

Similarly, in the ’Outer Limits’ episode ’The Sixth Finger’ (1963) a character evolves on speed dial, to the point he first decides to wipe out us primitive creatures, then later to the point where he decides not to any more because now he’s above being above things, that had just been a phase he was going through. Which is again associated with leaving behind bodily form. Evolution will take us to a point “when the mind will cast off the hamperings of the flesh and become all thought and no matter – a vortex of pure intelligence in space.” Physical existence in inherently tainted. But don’t worry, we will evolve out of it.

And in case we didn’t get the point the first time we go through it all again with ’The Empath’, except this time it's Kirk raging against a dying alien race of bigheads. “You don’t understand what it is to live. Love and compassion are dead in you. You’re nothing but intellect.”

Getting Out the Garden, Staying on the Road

So history is teleological, leading to some kind of utopia. But beware of utopias you meet along the road lest they stall your progress. This is made clear enough by titling an episode 'This Side of Paradise'. “Our philosophy is a simple one” say the planet's rustic commune-dwellers, ”that men should return to a less complicated life. We have few mechanical things here. No vehicles, no weapons. We have harmony here. Complete peace.” They’re even vegetarians, an indication of subversion if ever there was.

In fact they’ve hit upon such a state of indolence that they don’t have to tend their dope plants or roll their own joints. Instead the plants obligingly wander up to them and blow spores in their faces. Cool, man. Not entirely unsurprisingly, the Enterprise’s crew has soon tuned in and dropped out too, leaving the Captain alone on the Bridge.

Despite the presence of these handy plants, the commune-dwellers aren’t an indolent lot, picking at the low-hanging fruit. It’s specified they’re farming, a form of labour. But, and this is underlined, they’re merely producing enough for their own subsistence. As they don’t have anyone to trade with, or even give stuff away to, this doesn’t seem all that daft. But surpluses here have become some sort of moral imperative, proof that the Protestant work ethic is present. (Similarly in ‘Plato’s Stepchildren’ Platonius acknowledges “we have become bizarre and unproductive,” like the two are synonymous.)

The target's about as clear-cut as the Klingons. The back to the land movement, undergoing a revival in this era, saw modernity as a mis-step, and the urban landscape as inherently dehumanising, somewhere to escape from. The downside of this is the obvious one. A wage labourer, dreaming of an alternative to the daily grind, might romantically imagine himself lolling in an idyllic farmyard. But show up at one and it soon becomes clear it’s another workplace.

Yet not everyone gave up at that point of discovery. The Whole Earth Catalogue, first issued about eighteen months after this episode aired, is usually seen as the Bible of this movement, with its various editions the chronometer. And it's purely practical in nature, based around getting hold of and using tools (ie mechanical things). Including, in point of fact, early computers. Their supplements used the by-line “difficult but possible”, and never hid the fact there’s no clocking off at five.

True, back to the land overlapped with hippy subculture. And hippies, not necessarily the world’s biggest realists, were wont to blissfully imagine somehow returning to Eden. (Think of Joni Mitchell trilling “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden”.) But rather than undermine this romanticised ideology the episode inflates it, the better to counter with an ideology of its own. “We must live in a state of nature” versus “we must continually progress, at whatever cost”. Each exists only as an antonym for the other. “Maybe we weren’t meant for paradise,” Kirk rages. ”Maybe we were meant to fight our way through... Maybe we can’t stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.” Shame they never made more than two musical instruments.

Which, for an American TV show made in the Sixties, seems strangely close to the Whig view of history, which took history as “teleological (or goal-directed), hero-based, and transhistorical narrative[s]… histories that present the past as the inexorable march of progress towards enlightenment… putting its faith in the power of human reason to reshape society for the better, regardless of past history and tradition. It proposes the inevitable progress of mankind.”

There’s a presumed association of political with technological development, and both with prosperity, in a kind of positive feedback loop. Arguably the whole doctrine relies upon a cod-materialism induced by the Industrial Revolution, where bigger and better machines equates to bigger and better people. (Hence the joke in ‘1066 and All That’ about history having only two memorable dates to it. In this history dates are no longer events, merely milestones set along the way of an already-mapped path.)

But don’t these two contradict, history as the long arc of progress and as something hammered out by the sinews of Great Men? In theory it would seem so, but putting them together has a… you know… a history to it. The popular phrase “cometh the hour, cometh the man” was most likely coined to paper over these problems. iA succession of Great Men ‘proves’ British superiority was something innate, our Empire inevitable and all the rest of it.Note the use of “hero-based” in the quote above. While Wikipedia boils Whig history down to five bullet pointed assumptions, one of which is: “Presenting political figures of the past as heroes, who advanced the cause of this political progress, or villains, who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph.”

In History, as an academic discipline, this theory was scuppered some time ago by pesky interfering evidence. Though of course it lurches on undead in popular histories, and as a general rule the more populist they are the greater the degree to which it appears. (Sometimes reaching a risible terminus.)

”The Old Doth Fall”

Yet there's also an important difference. The Whigs saw, for example, ancient Rome as a prototype for their more advances civilisation. Yes there were problems with it, but only because it wasn't as far advanced as we are. Besides, it's since obligingly vanished off the map, so there's not much point focusing on those flaws now. Whereas in 'Star Trek' effective Romans plague our heroes no less than three times.

Despite Claudius’ speech mocking the Prime Directive (a favourite of clip shows), 'Bread and Circuses' is the one episode where the Directive holds. (Well, just about.) Kirk is clearly not just willing to die for it, but sacrifice Spock and McCoy into the bargain, and even earns Claudius’ respect for sticking to it. At the end they essentially escape rather than cure things. And this is possible because we’re on a parallel Earth. The rise of Christianity and its notions of ‘brotherhood’ is seen as proof the Roman empire will fall anyway, just as it did on Earth. (Actual students of the era please look away now.)

All the Shakespeare quotes the show bandies about, and one it noticeably doesn't use is Edmund's from 'King Lear' - “the younger rises when the old doth fall”. To Shakespeare this was the voice of villainy, when even the prospect of power passing down generations felt precarious, risked breaking the natural order. Whereas to 'Star Trek', this is the voice of inevitability.

Though 'Man Trap' had not been intended as the opening episode, in one way it's fitting. Its ruins turn out to be Gothic ruins, not as dead as they seem. And its adversary is an ancient vampire, a creature which by natural law should have died, which perpetuates its existence by snatching life from those which should be its heirs.

As Darren of The M0vie Blog comments: “Star Trek returns – time and time and time again – to the image of dying ancient societies…. Their decay and collapse (and even their withdrawal from the universe) is contrasted with humanity’s energy and enthusiasm as the Federation begins to truly claim their place among the stars. There’s a sense that the old world is passing, and a new world is dawning.” In short the series is riddled with, and obsessed by, decadence.

This is at it's dullest when the new world is simply a like-for-like replacement of the old. In 'The Paradise Syndrome' the Preservers have been remotely watching over a planet of Space Noble Savages, placing an obelisk to keep marauding asteroids at bay. The Federation first show up to deflect the asteroid themselves, then repair the obelisk. Kirk is... wait for it... mistaken for a God. Except 'mistaken' isn't really the word. Not only is the God's name strangely similar to his (Kirok to Kirk, what are the odds?) his “Kirk to Enterprise” line triggers the obelisk into action. They're so much the New Preservers they can comfortably step straight in the old shoes like worn-in slippers.

This isn’t even a a story about that, which we’re expected to take for granted. Instead its about Kirk, about his shaking off the white man's burden to live in some fictitious primitive paradise, shacking up with a nubile savage in a fetchingly short poncho. It could really be called 'The Last Temptation of Kirk'. Which just makes it worse. We're so secure in the knowledge we're preservers, the tale’s focus naturally falls on us. We're the next crop of parents, and they're our children. Children you get to shag, who can even bear children of their own. But children nonetheless.

Things can get more interesting, however, when the Old Ones don't disappear obligingly offstage but rub up against us. 'Star Trek' is full of dimming suns, ancient ruins with strange and powerful alien technology left lying about for us to stumble on. Underground chambers and tunnels abound, SF’s version of crypts and catacombs. “When they moved from light to darkness”, we're told of one lot, “they replaced freedom with a mechanistic culture.” (It's from 'What Are Little Girls Made Of?' but could be applied to many other episodes.)

The series has avowedly Gothic episodes, such as ’Catspaw’, or 'Little Girls', which even starred Ted Sasidy from 'The Addams Family’. But these can act as a kind of decoy, suggesting Gothic was an extra - something the show sometimes went in for. Whereas in fact it’s there in the DNA. Like in the Gothic novel, those chambers and catacombs are ever-present and always work as metaphors for decadence and degeneracy.

And in the post-war world who were the old ones? Of course they’re us, the old-world Europeans, those imperial Romans as hubristic as Ozymandias. We may have given them their conception of history, but now it belongs to them. Yet here we are hanging about obstinately rather than getting offstage while we should. The Platonians in ’Plato’s Stepchildren’ are Ancient Greeks, so naturally they speak with English accents. American dramas in general love an English villain, but its science fiction allows the trope to reunite with its source.

“You’re half dead,” Kirk rages, effectively at us. “You’ve been dead for centuries! We may disappear tomorrow. But at least we’re living now.” The ancient European God Apollo concludes in 'Who Mourns For Adonias?' “The time has passed. There is no room for gods.” Except that's a lesson that needs re-learning week by week, the coffin lid re-nailed down on the old vampire, history inevitable yet continually pressed into service.

(Noticeably in ’Earth vs. Flying Saucers’ (1956), ostensibly a red menace film, the invaders come from a dying solar system, so physically frail they need space-suits-of-armour to stand up and who assume an American-led Earth will submit to their demonstrations of superior power. To be told: “When an armed and threatening power lands uninvited in our capitol, we don't meet him with tea and cookies!”)

And we’re frequently represented by incongruity, something which really has no place in this world and yet appears anyway. This is perhaps most effectively conveyed by 'Who Mourns For Adonias?', in the surreal moment where a giant hand reaches out in space to grab the Enterprise. (Which of course also represents stalled development.)

Note in the quote above Kirk emphasises “we may be gone tomorrow”. It’s the brevity of life which makes you seize it. ’The Mark of Gideon’ perhaps goes furthest in associating sex and virility not just with life but also with death. Gideon is a planet of un-life, populated by shuffling shades lacking both life and death. After perhaps the most elaborate blind date arrangement in galactic history, building Kirk the habitat of a full-scale replica of the Enterprise, they get him to mate with a daughter of Gideon. But rather than conception what they hope for is a disease, not new life but death, which will helpfully decimate their population.

Diegetically, this bizarre switch goes largely unexplained. Third season episodes often lose their way, like someone’s forgotten why they’re telling you this and is hoping to stumble back on their purpose. No wonder Spock finds the whole thing so exasperating.

But if we see the thing symbolically, as Kirk injecting a shot of adrenaline into their culture, it works better. By jolting them back into life he also reintroduces death. It’s similar to ’Zardoz’ (1974) where a savage appears in a sterile utopia, simultaneously stimulant and infection.

Historically, monotheism did not originate even in Europe but goes back to the early civilisations of the Middle East. Honest, its on Wikipedia and everything. Yet 'Star Trek' seems particularly keen to label it “new” and appropriate it as American, thereby associating the polytheistic Old Gods with the Old World. Old Gods to be treated literally the way they have been culturally, we must tell them to their faces we are breaking up with them.

'Return to Tomorrow' features… you’ll never guess... ancient all-powerful aliens. This time they’ve been reduced to disembodied energy fields hanging out in glowing globes, and keen to borrow our bodies. The theme of the old unnaturally usurping the place of the young was recurrent throughout the Sixties, such as the 1967 film 'The Sorcerers'. But this episode adds a religious element to it. It's suggested the aliens are effectively our Gods, having seeded life throughout the universe. In a reverse of ’The Paradise Syndrome’ they refer to us as “our children”. 

Darren at the M0vie Blog claims this "draws rather heavily from The Book of Genesis [with] some biblical name-dropping.” And certainly Kirk speaks of Sargon in terms of experiencing God-like benevolence - “for an instant we were one. I know him now. I know what he is and what he wants, and I don't fear him.”

Yet while lead alien Sargon intends to keep to the bargain of borrowing short-loan, he is deceived by Henoch. Who could be associated with the betraying Lucifer, justifying Darren's description of him as “Satanic”. Yet in all the millennia up to now he appears to have been trusted by the others. The show's keenness to portray him more as a trickster than an 'evil one' would make him part of an older tradition, the antagonist who is also family member, something more like Loki in Norse mythology. (There's a brief, unexplained reference to him being from “the other side”.)

Perhaps the point is that in the past the Gods could be embodied, but must now be beings of spirit. They should leave this material realm to us. “We now know we cannot permit ourselves to exist in your world, my children.” (There isn't an automatic link between monotheism and an immaterial God, but the association is strong.)

The plot of ’Deadly Years’, accelerated ageing until everyone gets better again, is somewhat hackneyed. And as characters keep walking off and back on again with more grey slapped on, it’s hard not to find the whole thing comical. But the competency panel scene, where it becomes increasingly clear to everyone but Kirk he’s no longer who he was, and they respond by merely falling silent, is both awkward and tragic. Just like when it happens with real friends and relatives.

True, you need a double-think. Old age’s trick is to creep up on you by stealth, leaving you oblivious. Shrink that process down to a few days and you’d find it hard not to notice. You need to pretend at points that this is a future episode, that Kirk has reached this age the long way round, and then at others that it’s been induced and so can be cleared.

But it reads quite differently if seen in the overall context of the show. In a nice but easy to miss touch, they originally speculate this to be a weapon of the Romulans. But it turns out the cause of old age is… well, old age. The death trap there’s no leaping clear of. The show’s near-obsession with debilitating disease is the inevitable phobia of its philia with youth and virility. And here seems the point where they just come out and say it.

No escaping mortality? As things turn out, there is.

Chekov’s grumble, that they solve the problem by scraping bits off him, proves prophetic. What gave him immunity was adrenaline, which they then feed to the others. Somewhat tautologically, the cure for old age is a shot of youth. This makes scant story sense. Even if that warded the virus off him initially, why should giving it to the others later reverse the ageing process?

But, as we may have grown used to, it has a certain symbolism. The sheer ancientness of the universe is in itself enough to destroy you, by subjecting you to its scale. But whatever we are as individuals, our race is young and vibrant. The cure is found literally within ourselves. The Enterprise survives boldly going out there precisely because it boldly goes.

We saw last time how the show’s view of the Cold War was conflicted, and considered how that may have been inherent to a multi-writer show. Yet when it comes to history it’s remarkably consistent. Where there’s paradoxes in the show’s view of history, they tend to exist overall rather than be created in the friction between different episodes. While storylines are often based around moral dilemmas, so much of what’s outlined here is simply assumed - American exceptionalism, technology bringing development, history as the march of progress and so on. This happened inside an era when America seemed the dominant global force.

At the same time the Cold War was at its height, and had dragged the country into a war which would ultimately prove unwinnable. Yet rather than competing, culturally speaking the two things allied, insisted on the nation’s manifest destiny all the more strongly. When questioned, double down on your doctrines with greater fervour.