[Flux Capacitor]

----Why does it not surprise me that DUmmies are rabid Trekkies? Gene Roddenberry's goofy utopianism probably gets them all hot and bothered, though as Thomas Disch rightly points out, Star Trek is all about conformity--everyone puts on a uniform, sits at a desk, and gives complete loyalty to the boss while he goes off to jump it with the hot alien women and they work their boring desk jobs.----

Actually, the original show wasn't like that at all -- the characters in it acted like actual human beings. All of that utopian, "enlightened humanity" junk didn't get started until the '70s, when Roddenberry started believing his own press and decided that STAR TREK was a philosophy (rather than just a damned good television drama, the last gasp of television's Golden Age), and gladly accepted the godlike status that the fans laid upon him. The guy was an egomaniac and a serious hypocrite; that's how "The Next Generation", along with all of its anti-capitalist "we've evolved beyond the need for money" crap, and its squishy, dehumanized Stepford Crew, got going.

But the original show was excellent, and "The Cage" is one of the best examples of it. As far as conformity went, well hell, it was a military vessel.

(And you DON'T have to be a slobbering leftist to be a Trekkie. Ask Jonah Goldberg.)

-Dan

[Darkwolf377]

I guess we saw two different shows. The utopianism was pretty obvious--the "non intereference directive" was talked about while in every episode the enlightened crew brought the joys of liberalism to every world they encountered. The conformity is pretty obvious. And the SF ideas were "new" to TV but ancient in terms of written SF. I did enjoy it as a kid, but the few episodes I've seen as an adult convince me this show was wildly overrated. The three lead actors were well-suited to the roles, but that's pretty much all this had going for it.