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.