"[By creating] a new world with new rules, I could make statements about sex, religion, Vietnam, politics, and intercontinental missiles. Indeed, we did make them on Star Trek: we were sending messages and fortunately they all got by the network."
 | |
| Mining destroys the Horta's natural habitat, forcing it to retaliate. Image owned by CBS. |
While Roddenberry was concerned with network censors, Star Trek's basic premise is actually a perfect fit for the traditions of classic sci-fi. Star Trek first aired in 1966; Orwell's anti-totalitarian 1984 was published in 1949. Frank Herbert's Dune, with its then-radical ecological perspective and spice as an allegory for oil, came out in 1965. The classic silent film Metropolis, for all its clumsy naiveté, still attempted a relatable, socially-conscious story in 1927.
None of this is to diminish Star Trek's accomplishments; rather, it places the show in an important context. All the same, it's interesting to look at what had, at the time, been cutting-edge social and political commentary.
For all the goofy, campy adventures that Kirk and Spock embarked on, there were equally as many that could be considered morality plays. "The Doomsday Machine" revolved around a giant robotic space ship that destroyed planets; the crew speculates that this is all that remains of an ancient civilization, having deployed their equivalent of the atomic bomb. "A Private Little War," mentioned above, shows the destruction of a peoples' way of life by the introduction of new, modern weapons--perpetrated by both the Federation and the Klingons, standing in for America and Russia in a metaphor for the Vietnam War.
 |
| Kirk and Spock discuss the irony of a nuclear explosion saving the day in "The Doomsday Machine." |
Of course, Trek's commentary isn't always on the mark. The second season episode "The Omega Glory" features perhaps the worst plot twist in all of Star Trek, revealing that the warring "Yangs" and "Kohms" featured in the episode are actually yankees and communists, having emerged on their own on an alien planet--complete with their own Pledge of Allegiance, American flag and Constitution. Wrap your head around that one.
As Star Trek evolved with spinoff series and films, so too did the questions it tried to answer. The Next Generation featured episodes concerning assisted suicide in "Ethics," veteran health and PTSD in "The Hunted," and even the pain caused by a broken home, seen through Worf's interactions with his estranged son Alexander. In at least one case, the series predicted a social issue that wasn't on anybody's radar yet--video game compulsion. The episode "Hollow Pursuits" sees recurring character Reginald Barclay withdrawing from work and social life, instead preferring to live out power fantasies in the holodeck.
As the questions evolved, so too did the answers--and not always for the better. In my opinion, "The High Ground" takes an almost comedically centrist stance on the issues posed by terrorism. In the climax, Beverly Crusher protests "You didn't have to kill him!"--referring to a man who had repeatedly threatened to kill Picard and was about to do so before being killed himself. The conclusion of "The Hunted" sees the crew simply beam up and warp away at the end, leaving the Angosians to deal with their traumatized veterans--no suggestions as to how. In the episode, it's presented as a matter of simply unplugging a computer chip; this makes the whole story entirely less applicable to real life, and is just one example of the saccharine, idealistic view that broadly characterized The Next Generation, especially in earlier seasons.
 |
| Worf and his son have a complicated relationship, which continues into Deep Space Nine. |
Things would change with Deep Space Nine, the third live-action Star Trek series. Continuing the Cardassian subplot introduced in later seasons of The Next Generation, the series dives into complicated topics like racial nationalism, war crimes, religious sectarian violence, an unofficial "deep state" within the Federation, and even genocide. Rather than ideal scenarios contained to one episode, Deep Space Nine revisits these themes time and again via the overarching story of the Dominion War, and neither side comes out clean.
Rather than using science fiction to soften, obscure and bowdlerise the issues being discussed, Deep Space Nine treats the Star Trek universe as a backdrop on which to paint a picture of the real world. "In The Pale Moonlight" sees Sisko commiting a number of increasingly desperate and immoral acts to bring a new ally into the war. In "It's Only A Paper Moon," Nog escapes to the holodeck to cope with a traumatic injury sustained in a previous episode. Although not entirely realistic, it stands head and shoulders above "The Hunted" in portraying psychological trauma.
These episodes are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Deep Space Nine. Kira openly despises "collaborators," Bajorans that aided the Cardassians in the occupation--yet eventually learns that her own mother was a collaborator, too. Gul Dukat, the primary antagonist of the series, has a warped fixation on Bajor; he despises Bajorans as "soft," yet constantly seeks their approval after his brutal occupation of their planet. An outlaw group called the Maquis is made up of Federation colonists stranded on the wrong side of the border by a peace treaty gone awry. While there are still heroes and villains, every character and organization in Deep Space Nine has skeletons in the closet.
 |
| The leader of the Dominion suffers from a disease Starfleet engineered to wipe out her race. |
Since then, Star Trek's dealings with real-world topics have largely been hit-or-miss. Voyager, the follow-up to Deep Space Nine, tends to focus on more orthodox, totally fictional plots. Although it has some decent qualities, it relied overmuch on time travel as a catch-all solution in many episodes and suffered from a highly variable quality of writing. Enterprise returned to the adventure-of-the-week format of The Original Series, but concluded after only four seasons. I haven't seen Discovery, but plot summaries I've read seem to tell a story about generally seeking peace without drawing any specific parallels.
With Star Trek: Picard having recently wrapped up filming, an animated comedy by Rick and Morty writer Mark McMahan in the works and a host of other rumors to keep fans speculating, only time will tell if the franchise will return to classical sci-fi, using the future as a lens for the present, or continue with action and adventure-focused plots that rattle no cages and may seem safer to Paramount and CBS executives. Whatever happens, everybody will have their favorite series; there's a Star Trek for everybody.
No comments:
Post a Comment