Blog #4

There are a lot of ways to approach a topic as vast as the Star Trek universe. For someone like Lawrence Krauss or Stephen Hawking it is a window into the future of technology and human unerstanding.[1][2] For someone, who might be considered the opposite of the first two, like William Shatner it was a proving ground and a family.[3] While for others still, like myself or Robert Bly, it is a source of irreconcilably large amounts of trivial knowledge.[5] Still for more It is an asorted group up stories and lasting visuals remembered fondly from childhood, young adulthood, and even adulthood.[4]

Some topics regularly covered in Star Trek are still considered far fetched or impossible such as: inertial dampeners, time travel, or something as simple as sound in space.[1] Even with all it’s scientific blunders, however, it plays a significant role in the scientific community.  Stephen Hawking describes his view of Star Trek: “not only good fun but it also serves a serious purpose, the of expanding the human imagination”.[2] Hawking, like many others, recognizes that Star Trek in many ways has been the blueprint that scientist and inventors follow in their own creation. Cell Phones were science fiction in the 1960s when Captain Kirk was gallivanting around the galaxy, but today Steve Jobs would scoff at the communicator as bulky.

William Shatner began his career as Captain Kirk in 1966, but he was not the first captain to appear on the bridge of the Enterprise.  “The Cage”, the pilot episode of Star Trek, was made on a budget of twenty thousand dollars for NBC and featured Christopher Pike in the commanding role.[3] It took a little more time to assemble the troops and by the time the second pilot was shot the only returning character was Spoke, the half-vulcan. After getting the green light after the second pilot Gene Roddenbery took sole responsibility for half the the first seasons episodes. There was so little to draw upon with only the two pilots that Gene felt no one other than himself could yet understand the spirit of what he wanted Star Trek To be.[3] By the end of season one he would have personally written or re-written the script for almost all thirteen original episodes. In his mind he was not only planning out stories for the next episodes; he was engineering entire starships in his imagination and mapping out their vital functions.[3]

Gene was not only the creator of Star Trek, but something of a father figure to much of the crew. Leonard Nimoy talks candidly of guest staring on other shows and wishing for a home that would last more than a few days of shooting. What he finds in Gene is not exactly the validation he hoped for, but it did resemble something like family.[3] Dysfunction is aptly suited to describe his relationship with the management.  With the explosion of popularity with the character Spock he expected praise from his foster father and family, but instead paranoia over what this newly formed star’s demands would be created distance between them. Nimoy requested that a phone be installed in his dressing room at his own expense and this was denied as being “not in the contract”.[3] Shatner theorizes that management was thinking “give him a phone, and he’ll want a car.” Where Nimoy may have found passive agressive father figures Shatner found brothers. While shooting “The Devil in the Dark” Shatner got a call saying his father had died. Travel arrangements made it impossible for him to get to Miami until late that night. The assistant director had said they were going to break for the day, but Bill asked that they keep shooting because he didn’t know what he would do with himself for the rest of the day. He writes fondly of being almost physically propped up by Leonard and Jerry Finnerman (who had recently lost his own father).[3]

For me Star Trek really did inspire me. I can’t help but think it has a large something to do with my chosen (and almost acquired) major of Computer Science. I’m not sure that I wanted to live in a world like Star Trek or create a world like Star Trek. I fantasized almost as often about being part of the team that works on the effects of a Bord Cube exploding as I did about being in engineering getting that elusive last bit of power out of the engines the Geordie always seems to find. Either way I’m glad Gene was around to create something so great and so influential to so many people.

Works Cited

[1] Krauss, Lawrence M. The Physics of Star Trek. New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1995.
[2] Krauss, Lawrence M. Foreword, by Stephen Hawking, xi–xiii.

New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1995.

[3] Shatner, William, and Kreski, Chris. Star Trek: Memories. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1993.
[4] Block, Paula M. Star Trek: The Original Series 365. Abrams, NY: AbramsBooks, 2010.
[5] Bly, Robert W. The Ultimate Unauthorized Star Trek Quiz Book. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1994.

Blog Post #3

    Star Trek has a unique ability to shed light on social topics, analogy being it’s primary tool, that would be far to lofty a goal for most television shows.  In the sixties and seventies Star Trek pushed the bounds by having a hugely diverse crew consisting of  an African woman, a Scotsman, a Russian, a Japanese American, and an alien. What was shocking then is common place now but Star Trek did it first and it did it without apology. Latter in the nineties Star Trek generations tackled everything from drug addiction, homosexuality,  slavery, and discrimination. It is important for us as a society to examine even long held beliefs and, very often, revise them.  It’s an uncomfortable and often painful process. Star Trek can ease us into a place where we can think about those things and just thinking about them Is a large part of the battle.

    In my last post I wrote about the episode in season two “The Measure of A Man”. It explored in an entirely new way the topic of slavery and how we might in inadvertently make slavery live once again if we are not careful.  This admittedly is a problem that is hopefully far enough behind us and probably two far ahead of us to be a problem in our lifetime, but it does have a prophetic sense about it.  Not all topics covered in Star Trek though are so far removed from our current day situations.

In episode seventeen of season five, “The Outcast”, the enterprise is contacted by the androgynous race the J'naii to help find their missing shuttle craft.  In working together Commander Riker begins to have romantic feelings about Soren and she for him. In J'naii culture, however, sexual reproduction has long been abandoned and is considered primitive and a perversion. Soren becomes more and more aware of her feelings for Riker and eventually tells him she finds him attractive. When the affair is found out the leaders of the J'naii force Soren to undergo "psychotectic therapy" for her illness. Riker so distraught at the situation leaves his post on the Enterprise to rescue Soren. When he reaches her she is already too far gone, already convinced she was sick and now is better.

The events don’t end in any grand fashion that would release the J'naii from the oppression many of them suffer through. Riker is not even able to save the one J'naii he loves. What the episode does accomplish is the make the view think about the situation they are seeing and also, maybe even against their will, the situation of the LGBT community here on earth in their own time.  To make people think about topics in a new way without them even necessarily knowing it, or even if they do, is a very powerful thing and a very good reason to learn more about Star Trek.

Not all episodes of moral value are so directly analogous to present day topics. In episode seventeen of season 3, “Who Watches The Watchers”, the Enterprise is resupplying a Federation outpost on Mintaka III.  The outpost is made up of anthropologists who are studying a group of the Mintaka inhabitants who are at an approximate bronze age of development. Because the Mintaka are at such a primitive stage in development the observation must be unknown to them. This non-interference policy applies to all cultures who have not yet developed faster than light travel and it is the corner stone of the Federations mission, The Prime Directive. An accident at the outpost injures one of the Natives. Dr. Crusher is the first to reach him and has to choose weather to leave him and let him die or to violate the Prime Directive and bring him to the ships sickbay. She saves him, but the cost is high. He believes that it is not an advances species who has saved him but god, a religious figure his people abandoned generations ago. No amount of attempts to convince him otherwise work and when he returns to his people this belief is rekindled and spirals out of control eventually ending in the people believing that Captain Picard is God. The injured man believes this so much that he insists that if he shoots Picard with an arrow he will not be injured. Picard seeing no alternative allows himself to be shot. Seeing their God wounded is the key to making them believe that Picard is mortal.

It’s a story about the importance of holding to your convictions and the consequences if you don’t. Picard is so willing to correct the error when contact with the Mintakans is made that he is willing to sacrifice even himself. Star Trek is sometimes a magnifying class that obscures just enough for us to examine a particular topic, sometimes good example of morality at it’s best, and perhaps above all it’s damned good entertainment.