The Intellectual Content of Star Trek

One night I was sitting at home innocently minding my own business, the TV on with the sound down as I prefer it, and I happened to look up and see Captain Christopher Pike (Jeffery Hunter) in that original pilot episode of Star Trek. (For you purists, this was the one they reused the pilot in, the 2-parter called "Menagerie.")

And now there he is, battling some big Mongol-looking guy with bad teeth on this Other Planet that's got this real fancy castle and ringed planet like Saturn painted in the background. And it occurred to me: why were there always planets with big Mongol guys with bad teeth fighting with battle-axes on all those Star Trek shows?

And let's just say I go to one of these planets with these giant Mongol guys, and I have a laser gun or phaser beam or whatever. Why, if I'm one of these Star Trek guys, do I always end up fighting with them hand-to-hand, and get my velour pajama shirt all artistically ripped and torn? And why don't the giant Mongol guys just chop me up with their axes, especially when I'm just a little phaserless Earth runt in velour pajamas?

I guess it's supposed to show how tough Earth men are, that they can throw down their phasers and fight hand-to-hand with giant gap-toothed Mongols on another planet and always come out on top with only their velour pajama shirts ripped strategically.

Later—or was it earlier?—I was watching this other episode about this giant tinker-toy spaceship that turned out to be run by this ugly-looking baby with a really annoying laugh. Remember that one? A high-caliber mental exercise, if ever there was one.

And it was then, right then, like I was shot with a diamond bullet in my forehead, as Marlon Brando said in Apocalypse Now, that I realized what a truly intellectual experience Star Trek is. Or was.

I began to ask myself a sober and serious question: why did I ever like this show, even as a kid? Was it because it was the only thing of its kind on at the time, and I didn't know any better? Hmm.

To go boldly where no man has gone before would, obviously, be an impossible task for the late, but unlamented, Gene Roddenberry, at least not without splitting an infinitive. Clarity in language is necessary for precision in thinking. Star Trek got off on the wrong foot from the very beginning.

Now one of my favorite episodes is called "Arena." It's loosely based on a real science-fiction short story of the same name by Fredric Brown, and it has this really neat alien starship commander who's a lizard-man with eyes like golf balls. I was never quite sure how or what he was supposed to see with those golf-ball eyes; but he wore a really snazzy caveman costume, sort of a laminated leopard skin. And I'm watching this today and I'm thinking, "Yeah, do I wear my leopard skin, or my velour pajamas, when I go to captain that starship?"

Better put in a call to Versace—oh, shucks! Like Gene Roddenberry, he's dead, too.

Nobody ever wears a spacesuit in a spaceship on a space show on TV. Why is that, do you reckon? Okay, I think maybe Buck Rogers in the 25th Century did, once or twice. Erin Gray, who played the slinky Colonel Wilma Deering opposite Gil Gerard's Buck, occasionally wore a thing that looked like it might have been a space suit, I don't know. (Didn't look too bad, did it? No.) But then they had that damned robot. "Beedeelee-beedeelee-beedeelee; t-that's all, B-Buck!" (Choice role for Mel Blanc, too, eh?)

But back to Star Trek. I guess it's no secret now that, as the seasons wore on, William Shatner had to start wearing a truss under his velour pajama shirt to keep his gut from hanging out. Leonard Nimoy published several books during and after the series, with titles like I Am NOT Spock, followed by Well, Maybe I AM Spock, and finally If I'm Not Spock, I'm NOBODY! But I never read any of those books; though a guy I knew once did have a book of Nimoy's poetry, which was especially hilarious under the influence of certain drugs.

True enough, by the end of my teens, I was totally disenchanted with the original Trek. Was it just the little things that I instanced in those comic-book parodies of the show that I wrote and drew in high school? All those planets that looked like ancient Rome, Chicago in the 30s, or Nazi Germany? Was it the fact that this was supposed to be the 23rd Century, and they still couldn't cure Sulu's acne? ("Old Zits," as I used to call him.) If there were no more nationalities, and everybody spoke the same language (even, conveniently, all the aliens), why did everybody have those weird accents, especially McCoy, Scotty and Chekhov? Chekhov could hardly speak in an understandable fashion: "Keptin, ve are beink hailt by an awien wessel." As Miss Uhura ("whose name means 'freedom'!") might ask, "Say what?"

Yes, it might have been those rather obscene youthful parodies that killed Star Trek for me. It is always such an easy show to lampoon mercilessly. (Or, to use old Gene's formulation, "to mercilessly lampoon.") You never knew when you'd find the plot of an old movie shamelessly ripped off, like The Enemy Below with Robert Mitchum and Curt Jurgens. Or find a bunch of really stupid ideas for aliens, like giant disembodied brains or glowing blobs of "mental energy", or tunneling rock-creatures who were not only "good mothers", but intelligent, no less. Star Trek had a lot of rock-creatures; one time one of them turned into the likeness of old Abe Lincoln. I'm sure that's something a rock-creature could, and would, want to do. Aren't you?

I kept waiting for one to turn into Jeff Davis, or maybe Nathan Bedford Forrest; but, alas….

How about those "acclaimed" episodes, eh? Like where McCoy went back in time and saved goody-goody Joan Collins from being killed, and that allowed Hitler to win World War Two? Broke Kirk's heart to let old Joan get run down like she was supposed to. I was only 12 or 13, but I hadn't seen anything that stupid since that Outer Limits episode a few years before about the future soldier brought back in time who kept calling the housecat "C.O." Could it be merely a coincidence that they were both written by Harlan Ellison, perhaps the most pretentious non-talent in all of science fiction?

My favorite highly acclaimed but really stupid episode, though, was "Amok Time," by the most-acclaimed non-talent that science fiction has ever produced, the vacuous Theodore Sturgeon. My parody of that was called, "Spock Gets Horny." I should probably spare you the obscene details, shouldn't I? Probably. It was pretty racist and sexist and no doubt homophobic, even though the queers were never mentioned. Typical, in other words.

I will say that, at the end, they all had a good laugh at Spock's expense, as they usually did in the series itself. In my parodies, I had a thing on the bridge there at the science station like a toilet bowl for Spock to stick his head in, ostrich-fashion, when everybody started laughing at him.

Reason and logic were almost always ridiculed on Star Trek. Almost always. Ever notice that? Emotion, passion, "faith" were always extolled; reason and logic shown to be empty, inadequate, and worthy only of derision and mockery. I found that offensive then, as a boy, and I find it even more so now, as a man.

We humans need not fear losing our emotions. Show me an animal that doesn't feel, and I'll show you a dead animal. It's logic and reason we have in very short and apparently extremely limited supply; hence this exhortation to passion over reason always seems to me perverse, and self-flagellant, to say nothing of supremely delusional and suicidal.

But I'll confess, there are a couple of episodes I like. One is called "A Taste of Armageddon," by writer Robert Hamner. This is a very clever show about two planets locked in a 500-year war which they fight "virtually," using computers—and march their casualties off to suicide stations! This is a wonderfully novel idea, and just the sort of stupid, delusional thing you could actually see human beings convincing themselves to do at some future date, for the very reasons expounded in the show: to "preserve" civilization, to deal with our "killer instincts" rationally.

(Rationally, you would think that if you had killer instincts, and you found them appalling and self-destructive, you would try to thwart them somehow, not exercise them in a vain and pointless manner; but then, I often wonder if what I mean by "rationality" is a completely different thing from what others mean. Others seem to think rationality means only the ability to rationalize—that is, to use "reason" in the service, or rather self-service, of the emotions, which is hardly the "superior" position!)

Kirk, of course, puts an end to this nonsense, and in a fashion I approve of—by blowing up their suicide stations and their computers, leaving them open to the real thing. And there is also that truly wonderful business of "General Order 24," which Kirk gives Scotty at one point, and which essentially means, "Wipe the bastards out!" I often wonder how that little apocalyptic directive "fit in" with the later almighty and sacrosanct "Prime Directive", which Kirk's gutless, emasculated successor, Little Man Picard, the Cosmic Social-Worker, couldn't bring himself to violate on a technicality.

And there is in this episode a genuine message, which is that war is a serious business that should never be undertaken lightly; effete, bloodless civilized guys should leave it to savage hot-blooded barbarians like James Tiberius Kirk—who nonetheless always managed to be enough of a man to avoid making it, whenever and wherever he could. Kirk may've been a jerk, as I called him in those youthful parodies; but he was at least a man, not a bloodless corpse like Jean-Luc Picard, who was stuffed so full of his own phony self-righteousness that the rotten reek would've gagged the viewer, had we been able to smell him.

The other episode I really like highlights one of Star Trek's best attributes, female costume design. That one is "Mirror, Mirror," the parallel-universe "imperial" episode. Spock with a beard! The costumes really make this. Jerome Bixby's script is passable, but no real empire ever worked like this, and no navy or space fleet could function as this one is depicted, not for long, anyway. But there is also a wonderful irony to Spock's piratical bent; and my favorite scene is early on, when he requests that a crewman present him with the little torture-device they all carry around so that their superiors can use it on them when need be. Spock demands: "Your agonizer, please."

That's our ever-"rational" Mr. Spock: always polite, even when he's behaving like a Nazi.

But check out the costumes in this episode, seriously. Those bare midriffs are intriguing. Miss Uhura ("whose name means 'freedom'!") looks downright foxy. And I love those thigh boots and ceremonial dress daggers. That is class TV-show spacewear, folks!

(Another thing I always liked was that loud ROARING sound the Enterprise made as she passed through the vacuum of space. Did I mention that? When of course she wasn't swishing along at warp speed. Swish!)

Female costume design was often all a Star Trek episode had going for it. Nobody ever sat through "Paradise Syndrome" just to hear William Shatner yell "Miramanee!" at the top of his lungs; no, it was that cute Italian chick, Sabrina Scharf, in that little Indian get-up, that made that one worthwhile. Even Mariette Hartley went around in a fur bikini under her polar clothing during an ice age in one episode. Ah, "Spock's Brain", an episode originally written as a joke, but which they filmed anyway! Thigh boots, miniskirts and halter tops. Is this space travel, or what?

Which brings me to a Congressional law I'd like to see passed. I'm not generally in favor of laws, since I regard a law as being just a gun pointed at somebody's head, and I figure if you're going to point guns at people's heads, you'd better have a pretty damned good reason for it. But in this case I've got a good reason; and the heads this law would point a gun at are those pointy little butthead types in Hollywood. In fact I think all my readers should get with me behind this bill, and let's all do our best to enable this legislation.

I call it "An Act To Improve the Quality of TV Sci-Fi Shows." It will require that all female cast members on a TV sci-fi show must wear either:

a: a miniskirt (micro-miniskirt; nothing longer than would be worn by Ann Coulter)

(Legal note for Constitutional scholars: "space bikini" herein defined as "any bikini worn by a female humanoid going into, passing through or coming from outer space.")

Now my friends I guarantee that the watchability of TV sci-fi will improve dramatically as soon as my legislation goes into effect. In fact, right now I demand that all new Star Trek franchise shows depict female Vulcans in nothing but thong space bikinis—preferably studded black-leather thong space bikinis. This should go into effect immediately for that chick Jolene Blaylock who plays the decidedly mammalian female Vulcan on the new Enterprise show. Thigh boots would be good, too. Can't go wrong with thigh boots, in my opinion. Thigh boots and a thong space-bikini. You can't tell me that wouldn't be a vast, paradigm-shifting improvement to that show. Hell, they could let Scott Bakula wear a dress if they wanted—he probably misses one from his days on Quantum Leap anyway.

And speaking of self-righteous sacks of shit, let's skip over Richard Dean Anderson's character on Stargate SG-1 and go right to that walleyed bottle-blonde bitch who pretends so badly to be an Air Force major and a physicist. (Ouch!) For her I recommend the bare-midriff look—micro-miniskirt and halter top, in appropriate military colors and stylings, of course.

You just don't realize, sometimes, do you, just what a big difference these "little" things can make!

That is, unless of course you still cling to the delusional pretense that there's some sort of "intellectual" content to these shows, as is stubbornly pretended in the case of Star Trek.

Reason and logic were almost always ridiculed on Star Trek. Almost always. Ever notice that? Emotion, passion, "faith" were always extolled; reason and logic shown to be empty, inadequate, and worthy only of derision and mockery. I found that offensive then, as a boy, and I find it even more so now, as a man.

We humans need not fear losing our emotions. Show me an animal that doesn't feel, and I'll show you a dead animal. It's logic and reason we have in very short and apparently extremely limited supply; hence this exhortation to passion over reason always seems to me perverse, and self-flagellant, to say nothing of supremely delusional and suicidal.

I, too, remember being rather annoyed as child at the illogical attack on logic that was a pervasive theme in Star Trek.

"Could it be merely a coincidence that they were both written by Harlan Ellison, perhaps the most pretentious non-talent in all of science fiction?"

What about Kurt Vonnegut?

My favorite highly acclaimed but really stupid episode, though, was "Amok Time," by the most-acclaimed non-talent that science fiction has ever produced, the vacuous Theodore Sturgeon.

I met Theodore Sturgeon once. He lived in an old house up on a hill behind Dodger Stadium. Can you believe he actually wrote a screenplay for a movie called "Killdozer" about a bulldozer that comes to life and kills people and someone actually PRODUCED THE MOVIE?!

My favorite episode isn't mentioned: "The Doomsday Device". A miles-long pacakage of robotic death which eats planets for food, plus a psychotic commodore ..... man, it doesn't get much better than that!

;-)

I saw the late Robert Urich on the Tonight Show several years ago, Leno made him wince when he mentioned Robert's role in the movie "Killdozer". He hoped people had forgotten about it.

A quote about this movie from the Internet Movie Database Inc.

"If you only ever watch one movie about a killer bulldozer, make sure it's Killdozer!"

OK. I agree with you. Star Trek TOS, TNG, and Voyager were socialist, wussy little shows. But what about Deep Space Nine? Except for the first couple of seasons, the show was about fighting off a suicidal and unrelenting enemy who worshipped a false god. Parallels??? Pretty good writing and direction on the show too. IMHO, it was one of the best Sci-Fi serials to date.

Closet ST fan weighing in. Don't tell anyone, I could ruin my reputation.

I noticed something about the new ST series's vs the original.

In the original the Enterprise would go around kicking butt. We (the federation) were the good guys and we were the best. We had the best weapons (ususally) and were the smartest. It was the 1960's and we weren't ashamed of being the best.

Then the later series, like TNG. Get in a battle? Geez, the shields go down after 3 enemy shots. Use our weapons, humph. Not much effect.

And then I realized. The new series reflected a new time. Think America is the best? Tisk tisk tisk. That would mean our culture was superior. Superior????!!!! You nationalist, racist, whateverist.

I realized that the show did not potray the federation as all powerful and superior, because we are now ashamed of being superior. We are not allowed to be better since that would hurt someone's feelings.

And that, my friend, is why the Romulans are going end up kicking our asses one day.

for one who seems to dislike science fiction, you certainly seem to have 'encountered' a lot. But, you finally got to the important part - the sexy 'aliens'. ( Personally, I particularly liked that one Blue girl villan ( don't remember the episode or her name) but what a face and bod.

And now they have really improved the skin tight 'uniforms', complete with curves in all the right places on Star Trek Estrogen, OH, I mean Star Treck Voyager, which is so overly politically correct that most of the men's spandex uniforms have cut off the circulation between their legs.

But, a for real question, which no one ever asks, when moving forward/backward through time, where would one stand? As the earth would either not be there yet or have moved beyond, thus no place to stand, while in the same place at a different time.

Yeah Voyager was too politically correct for some fans. On the other hand the new Enterprise series looks and feels like the original. The first season ended on a twister time travel cliffhanger. Can't wait til the fall to see how its resolved, lol.

I like Enterprise much better than Voyager... But they're doing the same thing they did with Voyager, i.e., showing six episodes and then repeats, showing another one or two shows and then repeats... Its difficult to build viewership when you do that...

My favorite among all the STs is DS9.

I own the OS on DVD complete, all the movies on DVD, and am starting to get STNG on DVD with the first three seasons...

I really want DS9 on DVD bad...

I'd like to see DS9 come out in a DVD boxset. I think the last two seasons with its unique "serial matinee" format had among the finest work ever done for television. The telling of the final events of the Dominion War and the liberation of Cardassia was a homage to the classic Saturday matinee serials. You know, the ones where a story was told a chapter at a time in the theater and you were told to come back to watch how the next one unfolded. It also is the first real look at religion (Bajor's Prophets) we've seen in ST. When it finally comes out is any one's guess. In the meantime we will all have to with the TNG boxsets being released once every other month or so til the end of this year.

All of those shows were nothing but military soap operas. That's why my ex liked them so much; of course, she would always vehemently deny that they were military soap operas but that's what they were/are.

Other than the original series that I saw the first time around as a kid, which is hilariously ridiculed here, I couldn't sit through 15 minutes of any of the more recent resuscitations any more than I could sit through "Days of Our Lives - In Space"

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