- Professor Gill, 'Pattern of Force'
History has Its Gravity (Future Classicism)
The Romulan commander in 'Balance of Terror' is never actually given a name. But he's still one of the classic 'Star Trek' characters, much better-drawn than there seems any functional requirement for him to be. Compare him to Kor, the first Klingon adversary in 'Errand of Mercy'. Kor is, it’s true, more than a mere pano villain. By his own culture's codes, he is honest and even valiant. But, in a complete inversion of the two, Kor is named though he's there just to be a Klingon - to represent to us what Klingon culture is.
While the Romulan drives the plot one way while all the time wishing there was another. In a story clearly based on World War Two submarine films he’s a recognisable type - the good German general. Battle-weary and worldly wise, he can see straight through the cult of war, and recognises Kirk as not just stuck in the same slot as him but as cut from the same cloth. Yet he’s too embedded in his culture to extract himself now, and the way things are going he’ll be dead soon. His last words are: “We are creatures of duty, Captain. I have lived my life by it. Just one more duty to perform...”
So if the Klingons are the Reds the Romulans must be Fascists. Simples, right? Not really. Much like the Daleks and the Cybermen, things aren’t that reductive. Yes, Fascism was forever keen to borrow the iconography of Classicism, from its Italian birthplace. But the Romulans are frequently portrayed as more Classical than anything appropriated by Mussolini. Take the uniforms, or the bird of prey motif. Events takes place between the planets Romulus and Remus, just in case the name Romulan alone wasn't enough of a tip-off for us. (Something set to repeat. The later episode ’Elaan of Troyus’ is blatantly Helen of Troy playing the telephone game.)
And 'Mirror Mirror' ostensibly set in a parallel universe where the Federation are imperious and backstabbing, is as full of classical references. The Starfleet insignia, an upward-pointing arrowhead is transmogrified into an unsheathed sword running through a planet. It's almost akin to one of those alternate histories where Rome never fell, so elements of our world get mixed up disconcertingly with theirs.
Partly this is a grab for gravitas. Previously, much televised SF in America had been juvenile and Gene Roddenberry was keen to establish some counter-credentials. Proper SF authors were recruited as scriptwriters. When, disliking being rewritten, Harlan Ellison wanted his script credit to revert to the generic Cordwainer Bird he was refused by Roddenberry. Much of his script went, his name remained. It was of more value than the words he wrote.
And speaking of namedropping, there’s the penchant for classical or literary quotes to be employed as episode titles. ’Plato’s Stepchildren’ even begins with the helpful explanation “Plato, Platonius, see?” (Oh yes, right!) Shakespeare is cited in 'Conscience of the King'. At the outset, ex-dictator Kodos is wanted for war crimes and hiding out. The particular hiding spot he chooses being a travelling theatre troupe, appearing before different audiences each night across the galaxy. So much for the believer in eugenics being a superior life form. Except of course it's not happening that way round. It seems a safe enough bet that the Shakespearian players in space, with the lead actor himself in disguise, was the impetus. This was to be a 'phasers on impress' episode.
So it logically follows they're performing 'Hamlet', despite there being no-one in the troupe who could really play the Dane. 'Forbidden Planet' borrowed the plot and theme of a Shakespeare play, 'The Tempest', without mentioning it explicitly. 'Star Trek' does precisely the opposite. The title comes from the line “the play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King”, referring to 'Hamlet's' play-within-a-play structure. Yet there's no mirroring of that in the plot. They merely use the play title most people will have heard of (and not, say, ’Pericles Prince of Tyre’), in the same way they used the best-known playwright. And naturally the name is taken as permission to justify some truly scenery-chewing acting.
...While Time Has Weight
But another means, by which SF might more genuinely emulate the historical sweep of Classicism, is time travel. Which allows for future history, surely a branch of historical fiction. As any fan knows, Asimov’s Foundation series came from his reading Gibbons’ ’Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’. Kim Stanley Robinson even went so far as to define SF as "an historical literature... In every SF narrative, there is an explicit or implicit fictional history that connects the period depicted to our present moment, or to some moment in our past.”
Which couldn’t help but raise an intriguing question? Mostly we consider history subjectively, the way we do evolution - it was all about us, a timeline designed to get to here, at which point it handily stops. By extending the timeline further, into dates not yet on calendars, does SF open our minds beyond that narrow notion? Or by ostensibly setting dates in the future where the same shit happens (people commute by jet-pack, but of course there’s still wage labour) does it actually reinforce it?
Time travel was one means by which science fiction conveyed these connections, or general historical sweep. Which means it's probably significant that the original series had more episodes with the word “time” in the title than it did actual time travel episodes. (Seriously, where did 'Amok Time' ever get its handle from?) Just like ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Time’ is a word with connotations.
But let's look at the two actual time-travel stories...
‘City On the Edge of Forever’ has something of a metafictional undercurrent. This was when TV’s primacy had become embedded in our culture. TV now gave you your history, alongside your news and your entertainment and telling you when to go to bed. So history became a movie you already knew the ending to. The crew see history through the lens of a black-and-white screen (showing actual film footage), which they then find the magical power to enter. For a screen entices more than the pages of a book.
This heightens a prevalent question. What if you could jump through that border, and punch out the bad guys before anyone contemporary to them got wise? But like a cursed magic object from a folk tale, the portal only offers the appearance of that power. All you can do is watch from close up as the course of history happens. (More on that sort of thing here.)
'Tomorrow is Yesterday', whose 'Friends' title would be 'The One Where The Enterprise Ends Up Back On Earth In The Present Day, Sparking The UFO Craze', makes an element implicit in 'City' into a definite rule. Most of history, you see, is just busywork. You and me are like the extras in the ships' corridor scenes, walking up and down, ostensibly doing stuff but really just making up the numbers. Only a few important individuals have an actual historical impact. Providing the Enterprise gets involved only with us historically insignificant types, it can head back to the future with no harm done. It's like offing red shirts. There’s no consequence, everyone just forgets they were there.
So when they beam up pilot John Christopher and he first seems insignificant, all looks fine for the future. But the twist is that he's carrying historical importance like a recessive gene, as a descendent will have a major role in developing space travel. To underline this point a second character gets beamed aboard, a base guard. Clearly not an alpha type but a B lister, he spends his whole time on the Enterprise in stupefied awe. Luckily, they're able to fix everything by putting time back where it was when they found it.
And this dividing people up into the historically significant and insignificant, doesn't it sound rather close to Kodos self-aggrandising doctrines about superior beings, despite his being the ostensible villain of 'Conscience of the King'? When there's insufficient food to stave off starvation on the planet he ruled, he worked out a programme where only the important will be permitted to survive. As so often ’Star Trek’ liberalises this, expects more benevolence from its Alphas, but doesn’t question the division.
All of which sounds a good deal like the 'great man' theory of history. In 1840, Thomas Carlyle helpfully explained:
“The history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones: the modellers, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwell in the Great Men sent into the world.”
Alphas make history, not just in the sense of getting their names on the statues and portraits but in the sense of creating it. And the Great Man theory makes history into an adventure story, where we’re enlisted troops permanently in the throes of battle and the great perpetually triumph over adversity.
Leaving The Past Behind
But there’s also an insistence on the linearity of history. It aligns with the conceit of the Federation having a Richter Scale of Cultures, against which anyone they run into can not only be mapped but assigned a number from a progress chart. (Cultures might progress through this at different speeds, but it’s specified the points are fixed.) More primitive societies are presented as being like children, needing our guidance. And just as history is assumed to be linear, lack of progress is associated with arrested development, like time's on freeze frame. (The classic example here would be 'The Apple', but there's no shortage to choose from.)
Let's look at an apparent exception. 'Errand of Mercy' feigns to be another episode where a primitive culture (the Orgonians) requires an appropriate adult to beam down to them and give them a big of a leg-up. The story spends much time contrasting the free West against the Evil Empire of the East... sorry, the Federation against the Klingons, then spanners its own works by throwing in a perspective which makes that distinction merely trivial.
We find we're the ones who need the appropriate adults, and Kirk and his Klingon adversary are effectively told “if you children can't play nicely together we shall have to take your toys away”. This time the 'Friends' title would be 'The One Where the Vietnam War Was Won By Buddhism', and in Buddhist terms the Organians are off the wheel – beings of pure light, opposed to any form of physical violence… in fact anything physical.
But crucially, the standard perspective is reversed not undone. In many ways it's reinforced. The story ends with Spock speculating that they took millions of years to evolve as far as they have, and so in time might we. Their revealing their true form looks similar to the transporting effect, as if they were one day ‘energised’ and saw no reason to revert. And his assertion is given weight by the Orgonians asserting that in the future the Federation and Klingons will become friends.
It’s teleological and techno-utopian at once. Are there strange new worlds, new life and new civilisations out there? They say yes but they mean no. The future can just be predicted through extending the curve of a graph. But at the same time, the Orgonians are effectively angels, just from a heaven which has been displaced from above us to ahead of us. And heaven has always been where you could leave your imperfect physical existence behind.
Most of this story takes place within an illusion created by the Orgoniains, which the viewer shares. Shouldn't that make them similar to the Talosians of 'The Cage'? Yet one is coded as destructive and the other as positive. Something achieved by emphasising how the Talosians are the remnant of an ancient civilisation which became degenerate. The Organians are beings of pure energy who only take on human form to make other people feel better. The Talosians have a misshapen version of the human form, most notably with enlarged craniums. While outside events impact upon the Organians, disturbing their serenity until they feel they're left with no choice but to step in and resolve them, the Talosians need to lure and trap humans for their survival.
In other words, the Organians are the - possibly our - future while the Talosians are stuck in the past. They spend their time doing nothing but bathing in memories, made tactile by the power of illusion. It's vitality, “primitive emotions”, with which the tough young Pike is still in touch, which have the power to defeat them.
Similarly, in the ’Outer Limits’ episode ’The Sixth Finger’ (1963) a character evolves on speed dial, to the point he first decides to wipe out us primitive creatures, then later to the point where he decides not to any more because now he’s above being above things, that had just been a phase he was going through. Which is again associated with leaving behind bodily form. Evolution will take us to a point “when the mind will cast off the hamperings of the flesh and become all thought and no matter – a vortex of pure intelligence in space.” Physical existence in inherently tainted. But don’t worry, we will evolve out of it.
And in case we didn’t get the point the first time we go through it all again with ’The Empath’, except this time it's Kirk raging against a dying alien race of bigheads. “You don’t understand what it is to live. Love and compassion are dead in you. You’re nothing but intellect.”
Getting Out the Garden, Staying on the Road
So history is teleological, leading to some kind of utopia. But beware of utopias you meet along the road lest they stall your progress. This is made clear enough by titling an episode 'This Side of Paradise'. “Our philosophy is a simple one” say the planet's rustic commune-dwellers, ”that men should return to a less complicated life. We have few mechanical things here. No vehicles, no weapons. We have harmony here. Complete peace.” They’re even vegetarians, an indication of subversion if ever there was.
In fact they’ve hit upon such a state of indolence that they don’t have to tend their dope plants or roll their own joints. Instead the plants obligingly wander up to them and blow spores in their faces. Cool, man. Not entirely unsurprisingly, the Enterprise’s crew has soon tuned in and dropped out too, leaving the Captain alone on the Bridge.
Despite the presence of these handy plants, the commune-dwellers aren’t an indolent lot, picking at the low-hanging fruit. It’s specified they’re farming, a form of labour. But, and this is underlined, they’re merely producing enough for their own subsistence. As they don’t have anyone to trade with, or even give stuff away to, this doesn’t seem all that daft. But surpluses here have become some sort of moral imperative, proof that the Protestant work ethic is present. (Similarly in ‘Plato’s Stepchildren’ Platonius acknowledges “we have become bizarre and unproductive,” like the two are synonymous.)
The target's about as clear-cut as the Klingons. The back to the land movement, undergoing a revival in this era, saw modernity as a mis-step, and the urban landscape as inherently dehumanising, somewhere to escape from. The downside of this is the obvious one. A wage labourer, dreaming of an alternative to the daily grind, might romantically imagine himself lolling in an idyllic farmyard. But show up at one and it soon becomes clear it’s another workplace.
Yet not everyone gave up at that point of discovery. The Whole Earth Catalogue, first issued about eighteen months after this episode aired, is usually seen as the Bible of this movement, with its various editions the chronometer. And it's purely practical in nature, based around getting hold of and using tools (ie mechanical things). Including, in point of fact, early computers. Their supplements used the by-line “difficult but possible”, and never hid the fact there’s no clocking off at five.
True, back to the land overlapped with hippy subculture. And hippies, not necessarily the world’s biggest realists, were wont to blissfully imagine somehow returning to Eden. (Think of Joni Mitchell trilling “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden”.) But rather than undermine this romanticised ideology the episode inflates it, the better to counter with an ideology of its own. “We must live in a state of nature” versus “we must continually progress, at whatever cost”. Each exists only as an antonym for the other. “Maybe we weren’t meant for paradise,” Kirk rages. ”Maybe we were meant to fight our way through... Maybe we can’t stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.” Shame they never made more than two musical instruments.
Which, for an American TV show made in the Sixties, seems strangely close to the Whig view of history, which took history as “teleological (or goal-directed), hero-based, and transhistorical narrative[s]… histories that present the past as the inexorable march of progress towards enlightenment… putting its faith in the power of human reason to reshape society for the better, regardless of past history and tradition. It proposes the inevitable progress of mankind.”
There’s a presumed association of political with technological development, and both with prosperity, in a kind of positive feedback loop. Arguably the whole doctrine relies upon a cod-materialism induced by the Industrial Revolution, where bigger and better machines equates to bigger and better people. (Hence the joke in ‘1066 and All That’ about history having only two memorable dates to it. In this history dates are no longer events, merely milestones set along the way of an already-mapped path.)
But don’t these two contradict, history as the long arc of progress and as something hammered out by the sinews of Great Men? In theory it would seem so, but putting them together has a… you know… a history to it. The popular phrase “cometh the hour, cometh the man” was most likely coined to paper over these problems. iA succession of Great Men ‘proves’ British superiority was something innate, our Empire inevitable and all the rest of it.Note the use of “hero-based” in the quote above. While Wikipedia boils Whig history down to five bullet pointed assumptions, one of which is: “Presenting political figures of the past as heroes, who advanced the cause of this political progress, or villains, who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph.”
In History, as an academic discipline, this theory was scuppered some time ago by pesky interfering evidence. Though of course it lurches on undead in popular histories, and as a general rule the more populist they are the greater the degree to which it appears. (Sometimes reaching a risible terminus.)
”The Old Doth Fall”
Yet there's also an important difference. The Whigs saw, for example, ancient Rome as a prototype for their more advances civilisation. Yes there were problems with it, but only because it wasn't as far advanced as we are. Besides, it's since obligingly vanished off the map, so there's not much point focusing on those flaws now. Whereas in 'Star Trek' effective Romans plague our heroes no less than three times.
Despite Claudius’ speech mocking the Prime Directive (a favourite of clip shows), 'Bread and Circuses' is the one episode where the Directive holds. (Well, just about.) Kirk is clearly not just willing to die for it, but sacrifice Spock and McCoy into the bargain, and even earns Claudius’ respect for sticking to it. At the end they essentially escape rather than cure things. And this is possible because we’re on a parallel Earth. The rise of Christianity and its notions of ‘brotherhood’ is seen as proof the Roman empire will fall anyway, just as it did on Earth. (Actual students of the era please look away now.)
All the Shakespeare quotes the show bandies about, and one it noticeably doesn't use is Edmund's from 'King Lear' - “the younger rises when the old doth fall”. To Shakespeare this was the voice of villainy, when even the prospect of power passing down generations felt precarious, risked breaking the natural order. Whereas to 'Star Trek', this is the voice of inevitability.
Though 'Man Trap' had not been intended as the opening episode, in one way it's fitting. Its ruins turn out to be Gothic ruins, not as dead as they seem. And its adversary is an ancient vampire, a creature which by natural law should have died, which perpetuates its existence by snatching life from those which should be its heirs.
As Darren of The M0vie Blog comments: “Star Trek returns – time and time and time again – to the image of dying ancient societies…. Their decay and collapse (and even their withdrawal from the universe) is contrasted with humanity’s energy and enthusiasm as the Federation begins to truly claim their place among the stars. There’s a sense that the old world is passing, and a new world is dawning.” In short the series is riddled with, and obsessed by, decadence.
This is at it's dullest when the new world is simply a like-for-like replacement of the old. In 'The Paradise Syndrome' the Preservers have been remotely watching over a planet of Space Noble Savages, placing an obelisk to keep marauding asteroids at bay. The Federation first show up to deflect the asteroid themselves, then repair the obelisk. Kirk is... wait for it... mistaken for a God. Except 'mistaken' isn't really the word. Not only is the God's name strangely similar to his (Kirok to Kirk, what are the odds?) his “Kirk to Enterprise” line triggers the obelisk into action. They're so much the New Preservers they can comfortably step straight in the old shoes like worn-in slippers.
This isn’t even a a story about that, which we’re expected to take for granted. Instead its about Kirk, about his shaking off the white man's burden to live in some fictitious primitive paradise, shacking up with a nubile savage in a fetchingly short poncho. It could really be called 'The Last Temptation of Kirk'. Which just makes it worse. We're so secure in the knowledge we're preservers, the tale’s focus naturally falls on us. We're the next crop of parents, and they're our children. Children you get to shag, who can even bear children of their own. But children nonetheless.
Things can get more interesting, however, when the Old Ones don't disappear obligingly offstage but rub up against us. 'Star Trek' is full of dimming suns, ancient ruins with strange and powerful alien technology left lying about for us to stumble on. Underground chambers and tunnels abound, SF’s version of crypts and catacombs. “When they moved from light to darkness”, we're told of one lot, “they replaced freedom with a mechanistic culture.” (It's from 'What Are Little Girls Made Of?' but could be applied to many other episodes.)
The series has avowedly Gothic episodes, such as ’Catspaw’, or 'Little Girls', which even starred Ted Sasidy from 'The Addams Family’. But these can act as a kind of decoy, suggesting Gothic was an extra - something the show sometimes went in for. Whereas in fact it’s there in the DNA. Like in the Gothic novel, those chambers and catacombs are ever-present and always work as metaphors for decadence and degeneracy.
And in the post-war world who were the old ones? Of course they’re us, the old-world Europeans, those imperial Romans as hubristic as Ozymandias. We may have given them their conception of history, but now it belongs to them. Yet here we are hanging about obstinately rather than getting offstage while we should. The Platonians in ’Plato’s Stepchildren’ are Ancient Greeks, so naturally they speak with English accents. American dramas in general love an English villain, but its science fiction allows the trope to reunite with its source.
“You’re half dead,” Kirk rages, effectively at us. “You’ve been dead for centuries! We may disappear tomorrow. But at least we’re living now.” The ancient European God Apollo concludes in 'Who Mourns For Adonias?' “The time has passed. There is no room for gods.” Except that's a lesson that needs re-learning week by week, the coffin lid re-nailed down on the old vampire, history inevitable yet continually pressed into service.
(Noticeably in ’Earth vs. Flying Saucers’ (1956), ostensibly a red menace film, the invaders come from a dying solar system, so physically frail they need space-suits-of-armour to stand up and who assume an American-led Earth will submit to their demonstrations of superior power. To be told: “When an armed and threatening power lands uninvited in our capitol, we don't meet him with tea and cookies!”)
And we’re frequently represented by incongruity, something which really has no place in this world and yet appears anyway. This is perhaps most effectively conveyed by 'Who Mourns For Adonias?', in the surreal moment where a giant hand reaches out in space to grab the Enterprise. (Which of course also represents stalled development.)
Note in the quote above Kirk emphasises “we may be gone tomorrow”. It’s the brevity of life which makes you seize it. ’The Mark of Gideon’ perhaps goes furthest in associating sex and virility not just with life but also with death. Gideon is a planet of un-life, populated by shuffling shades lacking both life and death. After perhaps the most elaborate blind date arrangement in galactic history, building Kirk the habitat of a full-scale replica of the Enterprise, they get him to mate with a daughter of Gideon. But rather than conception what they hope for is a disease, not new life but death, which will helpfully decimate their population.
Diegetically, this bizarre switch goes largely unexplained. Third season episodes often lose their way, like someone’s forgotten why they’re telling you this and is hoping to stumble back on their purpose. No wonder Spock finds the whole thing so exasperating.
But if we see the thing symbolically, as Kirk injecting a shot of adrenaline into their culture, it works better. By jolting them back into life he also reintroduces death. It’s similar to ’Zardoz’ (1974) where a savage appears in a sterile utopia, simultaneously stimulant and infection.
Historically, monotheism did not originate even in Europe but goes back to the early civilisations of the Middle East. Honest, its on Wikipedia and everything. Yet 'Star Trek' seems particularly keen to label it “new” and appropriate it as American, thereby associating the polytheistic Old Gods with the Old World. Old Gods to be treated literally the way they have been culturally, we must tell them to their faces we are breaking up with them.
Darren at the M0vie Blog claims this "draws rather heavily from The Book of Genesis [with] some biblical name-dropping.” And certainly Kirk speaks of Sargon in terms of experiencing God-like benevolence - “for an instant we were one. I know him now. I know what he is and what he wants, and I don't fear him.”
Yet while lead alien Sargon intends to keep to the bargain of borrowing short-loan, he is deceived by Henoch. Who could be associated with the betraying Lucifer, justifying Darren's description of him as “Satanic”. Yet in all the millennia up to now he appears to have been trusted by the others. The show's keenness to portray him more as a trickster than an 'evil one' would make him part of an older tradition, the antagonist who is also family member, something more like Loki in Norse mythology. (There's a brief, unexplained reference to him being from “the other side”.)
Perhaps the point is that in the past the Gods could be embodied, but must now be beings of spirit. They should leave this material realm to us. “We now know we cannot permit ourselves to exist in your world, my children.” (There isn't an automatic link between monotheism and an immaterial God, but the association is strong.)
The plot of ’Deadly Years’, accelerated ageing until everyone gets better again, is somewhat hackneyed. And as characters keep walking off and back on again with more grey slapped on, it’s hard not to find the whole thing comical. But the competency panel scene, where it becomes increasingly clear to everyone but Kirk he’s no longer who he was, and they respond by merely falling silent, is both awkward and tragic. Just like when it happens with real friends and relatives.
True, you need a double-think. Old age’s trick is to creep up on you by stealth, leaving you oblivious. Shrink that process down to a few days and you’d find it hard not to notice. You need to pretend at points that this is a future episode, that Kirk has reached this age the long way round, and then at others that it’s been induced and so can be cleared.
But it reads quite differently if seen in the overall context of the show. In a nice but easy to miss touch, they originally speculate this to be a weapon of the Romulans. But it turns out the cause of old age is… well, old age. The death trap there’s no leaping clear of. The show’s near-obsession with debilitating disease is the inevitable phobia of its philia with youth and virility. And here seems the point where they just come out and say it.
No escaping mortality? As things turn out, there is.
Chekov’s grumble, that they solve the problem by scraping bits off him, proves prophetic. What gave him immunity was adrenaline, which they then feed to the others. Somewhat tautologically, the cure for old age is a shot of youth. This makes scant story sense. Even if that warded the virus off him initially, why should giving it to the others later reverse the ageing process?
But, as we may have grown used to, it has a certain symbolism. The sheer ancientness of the universe is in itself enough to destroy you, by subjecting you to its scale. But whatever we are as individuals, our race is young and vibrant. The cure is found literally within ourselves. The Enterprise survives boldly going out there precisely because it boldly goes.
We saw last time how the show’s view of the Cold War was conflicted, and considered how that may have been inherent to a multi-writer show. Yet when it comes to history it’s remarkably consistent. Where there’s paradoxes in the show’s view of history, they tend to exist overall rather than be created in the friction between different episodes. While storylines are often based around moral dilemmas, so much of what’s outlined here is simply assumed - American exceptionalism, technology bringing development, history as the march of progress and so on. This happened inside an era when America seemed the dominant global force.
At the same time the Cold War was at its height, and had dragged the country into a war which would ultimately prove unwinnable. Yet rather than competing, culturally speaking the two things allied, insisted on the nation’s manifest destiny all the more strongly. When questioned, double down on your doctrines with greater fervour.
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