- Gene Roddenberry
Continuing our series on the original ’Star Trek’, let’s note its oddly bifurcated reception. It's seen by some as a beacon of progressive liberalism, giving us an enlightened future to aim for. And by others as a byword for cultural imperialism, where America first remakes the world in its image, then gets started on the rest of the universe. As counter-examples you could cite ‘Star Trek Has Always Been Woke’ by Joshua M Patton and ’Starve Trek’ by the radical cartoonist Polyp, which took over an issue of ’New Internationalist’ magazine in 1991. ("It's five year mission to exploit strange new worlds, to rip off new life and new civilizations and to boldly take what’s barely been paid for.”) If you were to read these without having ever seen the show, you’d find it hard to conceive they were talking about the same thing.
Yet for all this the Cold War is surely a clincher. Surely the show was partisan, if not propagandistic in its Red scaremongering. Who cares how diverse was the crew who carved out such a space empire, their phasers forever set on re-educating the natives into their own image? Its the same argument as over the Tory cabinet. Notably, the ‘progressive’ camp have become more vocal, and the ‘cultural imperialists’ quieter since the Cold War ended.
While ’Star Trek’ is steeped in the Cold War, so steeped it can be hard to frame. An episode like ’The Alternative Factor’, where someone is trapped in perpetual conflict with an oppositional version of himself, which can only be resolved by the destruction of the whole universe so must be perpetually deferred - it’s not about the Cold War the way other stories are, but could scarcely have been created at any other time. But if we went with ‘stories informed by the Cold War’, that would quite possibly be the whole three seasons. So lets restrict ourselves to the direct analogies, the Cold War in space…
Naturally this takes us straight to the Klingons. In an American SF show broadcast during the mid to late Sixties, naturally the chief antagonists were the other side, were stand-ins for…wait for it… the Commies.
The first use of the name comes from Kirk’s log at the opening of ‘Errand of Mercy’:“Negotiations with the Klingon Empire are on the verge of breaking down. Starfleet Command anticipates a surprise attack.” And as things turned out negotiations with the Klingons remained in a permanent state of breaking down without things ever quite reaching open hostilities. Much like… oh, you guessed.
Other, more primitive planets are either strategically important or contain a vital resource unvalued by the locals. (In ’Errand’ Organia is a chessboard square, with “little of intrinsic value” but “ideally located for use by either side”. In ‘Elaan of Troyus’ the jewels decorously adorning the titular Queen’s necklace turn out to be vital dilithium crystals.) The Federation and the Klingons are effectively the adults in the room, the good and bad parents. The primitives can either remain in their state of innocence, or fall under the guardianship of one or the other. Just as the Cold War was waged by proxy, the hands-off illicit arming of either side to stir up Third World conflicts while both powers stood before the UN General Assembly whistling innocently.
The other scenario is espionage stories, where a Klingon plot involving secret agents is gradually exposed, such as ‘Trouble With Tribbles’. In both, Klingons tend to operate on the periphery of the story, often in disguise, scheming and meddling. Which would seem to reinforce the point.
Aaron Angel’s ‘Cold War Images and the Enemies of Star Trek’ sums up the widespread view: “Star Trek enemies and the actual enemies of the Cold War era share many similarities. The Klingons, antagonistic and warlike, truly portray the American image of the Soviet Union. The parallel is strongly reinforced by the continual threat they, the Klingons, were to the Federation.” The Romulans, meanwhile, are the Red Chinese.
It all seems so obvious, so clear-cut. Everything readily assignable, every nail nailed down. In fact, the more of that piece I read, the more I found myself mentally screaming “curse this witless literalism that passes for material analysis!”
Let’s focus on the Klingons here, the Romulans can lurk around awaiting a future instalment. First, a story is not its scenario. What of the Klingons themselves? Beyond military aggression the dominant feature of Cold War depictions of the Soviet Union was deindividualisation. Its society was a mechanism where every person was reduced to a cog in service of the state. Daily life had the paranoia of a spy movie, everyone permanently professing loyalty while treacherously conspiring to betray everyone else. These darn commies spout a lot about loyalty, yet are primarily exercised about saving their own skins.
In ’Errand’ there’s one reference which might match this when Klingon chief Kor comments: “Do you know why we are so strong? Because we are a unit. Each of us is part of the greater whole, always under surveillance. Even a commander like myself, always under surveillance.”
But take that out and it would leave no kind of hole in the story. And there’s little in succeeding episodes. The scenarios may well be Cold War, in which the Klingons fulfil the requisite antagonist role, but there’s little to make them actual ‘commies’ as normally depicted.
In fact, from the first they’re a warrior culture. Mostly they’re found insisting they’re so strong because they’re so brave. They respect the stuff even when found in their antagonists. Kor for example disdains the unresisting Orgonians and relishes in Kirk’s defiance. (“You are much like us... We are similar as a species. Here we are on a planet of sheep. Two tigers, predators, hunters, killers, and it is precisely that which makes us great. And there is a universe to be taken.”) And warrior cultures are very much individualised, not ranked by decree but arranged in a dynamic pecking order of personal status.
Rather than Reds, it would be truer to say that the Klingons are Cossacks. In fact Chekov twice calls them Cossacks, in ‘Trouble With Tribbles’ and ‘Day of the Dove’. Which is odd. Because, rather than representing the Soviet Union, the Cossacks were repressed by it, to a degree which quite possibly bordered on genocide.
Also, the Cossacks were a Caucasian group. While Soviet leaders were, and looked, Caucasian. Brezhnev, General Secretary at the time of transmission, had been born in what’s now Ukraine. Yet the Klingons are brownfaced to the hilt. Make-up designer John Colicos based their look on Genghis Khan.
In ‘Errand of Mercy’, the Klingon’s main job is to be so oppressive that us viewers naturally side with Kirk, swayed by the urgency of his actions, and so we are implicated when the rug is pulled from under him. Unsurprisingly, they were at that point conceived as a one-off antagonists. (In a series which, up till then, had only dealt in one-off antagonists.) The problem is, they don’t change much even when we get past this.
We meet two Romulan commanders, who are not only very different but through those differences power the story. We meet a different chief Klingon every time, and this only confirms how interchangeable they are. Even their names are chipped from the same gutteral block as Khan – Kor, Krell, Koloth… Kraw will probably be along in a minute. They never really lose that original function, to be the lurking heavies of the cosmos.
As such, they’re depicted in broad strokes. We never, for example, see their homeworld. Inasmuch as we know, they have always been as they appear - antagonists to the Federation.
And these strokes are broad enough to allow for some both-ways fuzzy logic. The Klingons are simultaneously a centrally controlled expansionist empire and roving bandits, showing up places and kicking things over. They’re built out of signs of Banditry, a generic enemy made up of off-the-shelf parts – moustaches, even those tasseled sashes look somewhat like gun cartridge belts. Making them dark and swarthy just went with that. (In ’You Only Live Twice’, Bond yellows up as a local and looks remarkably like a Klingon. Despite the fact he’s supposedly passing for Japanese.)
And, for a series so keen to proclaim loudly how opposed to anti-black racism it is, ’Star Trek’ has remarkable trouble with Asians. There was Khan in ’Space Seed’. Or ‘The Savage Curtain’ (‘Arena’ with celebrity guest stars) where the ‘evil’ team enlisted to battle Kirk includes Kahless, founder of the Klingon empire, Genghis Khan, Zora and Colonel Green. (These are so generic that it’s the same line-up as the bad guys in ’Superman II’, - criminal mastermind, bad babe and lurking heavy.) Which brings the Klingons together with their original inspiration. It means Kahless and Khan are both brown-skinned, with the dusky, feral brunette Zora scarcely a world away.
But inevitably it’s the one white guy, Green, who’s the natural leader. Khan, a supreme military strategist who carved out an empire of unprecedented size, is reduced to lobbing rocks on command. He and Zora get precisely no dialogue whatsoever. These Asiatics are inherently bad. But they need a white guy around to show them how to be bad. They’re history’s henchmen, the equivalent of the Penguin’s stripy-jerseyed heavies in the Batman TV show.
But the significance of this is not that it disregards actual history. Folk histories overwrite actual events all the time. After all, at this time “the Russians” and “commies” were often used as interchangeable terms. But there’s no Klingon equivalent to, for example, the Russian revolution. Which abandons one of the chief Cold War arguments, that such a revolution had been a rupture, a break with the natural order which inevitably turned out badly. What’s normally seen as a winning card isn’t even played.
If the Cold War conflict is hard-coded into race-essentialism this is at its strongest in Omega Glory’. AA Gill has described this as “really where Star Trek comes clean about what it actually was all about.” The infamous scene where Kirk finds a Stars and Stripes on an alien planet then starts waving it while reciting the Declaration of Independence, it feels like the Peace Corps sequence in ‘Airplane’ without knowing that it’s funny.
It’s not a well-regarded story, commonly dismissed as an aberration. Yet with its opposition of caucasian Yans (Yankees) and Asian Cons (Communists), one so white even their furs are blonde, the other described by Spock as “Asiatics”… in too many ways it fits right in. There’s no intra-story seeding or cargo culting (as used elsewhere), the implication is that every society has those divisions, even ahead of the two superpowers showing up.
Kirk insists to the Yans that their sacred “worship words” such as “freedom… must apply to everyone or they mean nothing”. Yet there’s no indication within the story these words will ever penetrate the hard, foreign faces of those Cons. It’s just that the inability to succeed doesn’t stop you from having to attempt the Sisyphean task. Freedom and democracy are Western values, born in the New World of America. Yet at the same time they’re held to be universal (“inalienable and self-evident”, as the Declaration of Independence put it), so must be made into universal exports to be sold with evangelical zeal. The story is best understood as an articulation of these contradictions, rather than any kind of attempt to resolve them.
Tell us About the Talking Cure
So should we dismiss the show’s fabled liberalism out of hand, as a mere fig leaf? Roddenberry himself said:
“It troubles me that there are no programmes on television, at least none that I've seen, that point out that the world is operating in a very primitive way on the basis of hate. Our own president hates the Commies, and he and his henchmen believe that therefore everything they do to defeat the Commies, whether it's illegal or not, is justified because of their hate. If we are ever to turn the corner away from that, we need our artists and poets and entertainers pointing it out.”
While Zac Handlen at the AV Club commented:
“Again and again on the series, we see that communication is the solution to problems, and that understanding your enemy (if they even are an enemy) is the only way to resolve a dangerous situation. It’s a concept that seems to belie every piece of Cold War doctrine foisted on the American public. The Red Menace was a danger so insidious, so malignant, that even trying to understand its beliefs and systems meant a form of surrender. This wasn’t just a physical force, but a kind of philosophical brain snatcher whose tendrils, if left unchecked, would lay waste to the free world.”
True, Roddenberry was a great mythologiser of the show, ever-willing to tell fans what they wanted to hear. And I suspect that 1986 interview represents his 1968 thought processes partially at best. But even if we want to qualify this (which is pretty much what Handlen goes on to do himself) it’s still something rooted in the series, too rooted to be dismissed as a mere disguise.
If there was little call to develop the Klingons much there are a couple of exceptions to this rule, and they happen near the end. ‘Day of The Dove’ was the last-but-one Klingson appearance. And it’s the only time a Klingon story returns to the original concept of facing your most natural enemy and learning not to fight them. It’s almost ‘Errand of Mercy’ in reverse, where an outside element brings not peace but war. (The Orgonians are discovered to be coloured lights, the entity is one throughout.) The entity feeds off hatred, like the frequent stories which use disease as a metaphor.
The Enterprise hurtles out of known space into a void, a spatial metaphor for what’s being done to them psychologically. There’s a similar purgatorial notion of war to ‘Omega Glory’. There the people lived almost immortal lives. Here you recover even from severe injuries, in order to get up and back in the melee. Yet they’re forced to fight with swords, and it’s this fighting up close which allows them to address one another, and finally refuse to do the entity’s bidding. In the original series, it’s the best we ever got to knowing the Klingons. They even have more than one character. Okay there’s only a second, Marta the Science officer. (Hi, Marta!) But from tiny acorns…
And Marta explains “we have always fought. We must. We are hunters, Captain, tracking and taking what we need. There are poor planets in the Klingon systems, we must push outward if we are to survive.”
Which segues quickly between two things. First it reiterates the Klingon identity – they’re warrior people, it’s in their nature. But then, more unusually, it almost sounds like a genuine description of the Soviet Union. There were vast areas of underdevelopment within it, and a largely hostile world outside. Stalin had said “We are a hundred years behind the capitalist West. We must catch up with them in just ten years… or they will crush us.” And much of what the Soviets did to catch up, such as forcing peasants from the land into the factories, was loudly decried despite more or less mirroring what (for example) Britain had done during its own industrial development.
It’s no more than a hint, but it’s the only hint we get. If the Federation is a young emerging power in an old, decadent and somewhat Gothic universe, the Klingons are younger still. As with the Soviet Union, for the Klingons a strong military and an expansionist drive are prerequisites for survival.
Yet something haunts ‘Day of the Dove’ more than the malevolent entity. Its mission seems to be to make the Klingons more than generic heavies. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that it doesn’t want to burn its boats to the next time the show needs them to be generic heavies again. (Which turned out to be six episodes away.)
Kirk insists to Mara that tales the Federation torture their prisoners are mere propaganda, but notably there’s no such reassurance the other way round. Things might have worked better had the antagonists not been the Klingons but some newly encountered species, where there’s lots of mutual suspicion in the place of hard facts, which is finally revealed as only fear of the unknown.
Also, the entity is such a perfunctory non-thing it feels a bit of a cop out. It simultaneously has too much and too little of a presence, given too much screen time and plot function when it has little to fill it with. Really, the Mysterons in ’Captain Scarlet’ had more personality. The moral becomes about as trite as Culture Club’s ‘War Is Stupid’. The two sides are stupid to fight each other when the sole beneficiary is a voyeur. But mostly war is stupid, like it’s a thing in it’s own right. The original concept, that resolution would come through a peace march, is one of those ideas that’s simultaneously brilliant and terrible.
Josh Marsfelder points out: “The script… doesn’t talk about the origins of violence or why people might be pushed towards it, or how power structures provide a climate where violence is not only allowed to exist but encouraged to… it just says ‘fighting is bad’ and that it strengthens the real enemy, which is...fighting, I guess?”
And he’s right. War and violence are seen as intruding on our society from without, like freak storms, rather than arising from within. At the very least there could have been an explanation the entity showed up after sensing the conflict, like a shark scenting blood. While at the same time the one episode which could have suggested conflict is not some eternal rule instead implies that they’re going to start fighting all over again, they’re just going to wait for when that nasty light thing isn’t around to gloat about it.
And ultimately, what this does is take its own simple-minded thinking and projects it. As Sebastien Roublen says “What binds these episodes together is their treatment of war as a product of animalistic hatred and paranoia — primitive emotions that could be overcome through rational analysis, compassion and communication.” Communication isn’t employed so much as fetishised. It’s Churchill’s “jaw, jaw is better than war, war.”
Yet ’Errand of Mercy’ (the first, let’s not forget) Klingon appearance is designed all around techno-utopianism winning out. Pure creatures, the Orgonians exist purely to dish out the moral. Which is that one day, if we keep doing our best, we can put our warlike nature behind us and unite:
”Millions of years ago, Captain, we were humanoid like yourselves, but we have developed beyond the need of physical bodies… eventually you will have peace, but only after millions of people have died. It is true that in the future, you and the Klingons will become fast friends. You will work together.”
We will solve the problems of the Cold War by evolving out of them. We will become things of spirit. The technological goes with the teleological.
Which bumps straight into the central question. How can ‘Star Trek’ believes in a techno-utopian future where racism’s a thing of the distant past then create an ethnically defined enemy? But a crucial difference between ideology and theory is that ideology is uninterested in consistency. Point out a logical flaw to an ideologue and they’ll shrug it off uninterestedly, like Donald Trump caught out in a lie. And America was at war throughout the production history of the series. The more the actual war occupied the headlines, the more of an imperative there was to push their warlike actions onto another.
Furthermore… In ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, Kurt Vonnegut claimed an actual reading of the story of the crucifixion would come up with the moral “before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected.” And similarly, ’Errand of Mercy’ would insist on the importance of detailed research before you invade anybody. The story only works if we don’t ask what would have happened if Orgonia had been a primitive planet.
If fans favour ‘Errand of Mercy’ and dislike (often detest) ’Omega Glory’ that may tell us more about fans of the show than the show itself. Both Gill’s critique and their defence come from selective example. The point is that these are not antonyms so much as opposing poles, with a lot of other episodes strung between them. ’Star Trek’ is some chimera creature made of Hawk and Dove, even if it's desperate to be more Dove-like.
‘Star Trek’ is, citation not needed, fond of pop psychology. So just as there can be a bad Kirk, there’s a bad Federation. In fact, the only difference between the Klingons and the Bad Federation of ‘Mirror, Mirror’ is the actors playing the roles. If anything the Klingons come off better, their warrior nature and ruthless discipline resulting in conquest and empire building. If nothing else, they’re good at what they do. Whereas with the Bad Federation these qualities turn inwards – into feuds and back-stabbing. We’re told explicitly they will destroy themselves.
The No-Men of No War
'A Private Little War', though widely seen as the Vietnam episode, works better representing just about anywhere else in the Third World. As said earlier the norm for the Cold War was proxy war, open conflict only occurring when the gloves were involuntarily pulled off. America got involved in the conflict in Vietnam only gradually, reluctantly and with great concern over its effect on popular opinion.
And even the Korean war, despite directly involving American troops, had been for the most part kept out of the headlines to the point it came to be known as the forgotten war. Finding an analogy for America’s secret, hands-off approach to wars on a popular TV show, suggests this was more a conspiracy of silence than an official secret.
And, perhaps the prime directive episode, its predicated on the reluctance of Kirk's interventionism. He previously visited the planet when it was an innocent paradise and is almost desperate to keep it like that. A plot contrivance sends Spock to sick bay so Kirk’s mostly left to argue alone against the emotional McCoy. “Not what I wanted”, he says of arming his side. “What had to be”. McCoy has to admit he sees no alternative.
Perhaps the strangest thing is how easily it maps to religion. When in ‘Day of the Dove’ Kirk says to the Klingon Kang “go to the devil” it seems more than a chance expression. Like 'The Apple' or ’The Paradise Syndrome’, ‘Private War’ takes place in a kind of Eden. The Klingon (yes, in the singular) only appears in one quite fleeting scene, mid-way through the episode. He's like the Devil in a Christian drama, tempting the weak and manipulating events from offstage. (One of the ‘evils’ of communism was atheism, which was – with characteristic irrationality - associated with diabolism. Though ’Star Trek’, while it dips into this, only uses it symbolically.)
Yet unlike ’Paradise Syndrome’, this Eden is despoiled before the story starts. The first event they come across is an ambush by the Villagers of the Hill People. Plus there's scheming brunette Nona as the counter to the innocent Miramanee, an Eve not with a snake but a phaser. There’s the sense all of this was primed to happen anyway. A Villager tells the Klingon “I thought my people would grow tired of killing. But you were right. They see that it is easier than trading and it has pleasures. I feel it myself.” All of which leads up to Kirk’s famous closing line where he refers to the guns they’ll be running as “...serpents. Serpents for the Garden of Eden. We're very tired, Mister Spock. Beam us up home.”
Reviewing ’Private War’ Darren at the M0vieBlog pointed out how “the Second World War is treated as the beginning of the future.” And of course that is, or was popularly conceived as being, when once-isolationist America got thrust into in its interventionist role. Notably Surak in ‘Savage Curtain’ has almost exactly the same roles as the Thals in ‘The Daleks’ five years earlier, to demonstrate the innate nobility but practical uselessness of pacifism.
So war has a start date. Yet can never have an end one. The unusually spy-fi ’Outer Limits’ episode ’The Hundred Days Of The Dragon’ (1963) ends with the line “there is no war as we know it.” It is futile and yet perpetual. How could it ever end if it didn’t start? Yet it can never start. “The bomb” was then a common expression, not even distinguishing between the weapons of the two sides, as if rather than being a human product it had some innate existence. It was like a nightmare, where you keep running but you go nowhere.
The orthodoxy line was that ‘communism’ was an unviable ideology at odds with ‘human nature’, its adherents hopeless fantasists upholding their beliefs through fanaticism alone. It was like a jigsaw of forced pieces, with real people as the pieces. And yet in this way that unviable system came to seem undefeatable. At best it could be held at bay like some Manichaean version of geopolitics.
So the Cold War came to be seen as a psychological state blown up to planetary (or here interplanetary) proportions. Jung wrote “our world is… dissociated like a neurotic, with the Iron Curtain making a symbolic line of division. ... It is the face of his own evil shadow that grins at Western man from the other side of the Iron Curtain.” This feeling was widespread. As seen with ’Omega Glory’, hawks had it too. But doves were likely to feel it more acutely.
The advantage of science fiction as analogy is often seen to be its scaling up. In ’Last Battlefield’ a private grudge which should never have got started extinguishes life on a whole planet. But with the Cold War it’s slightly different. If the world isn’t just in conflict but inevitably divided, then the same is likely to apply to the whole universe.
Far from a critique of the Cold War, ‘Private Little War’ doesn’t even qualify as self-doubt. Kirk doesn’t doubt what he has to do, he just doesn’t want to do it much. And yet neither does it fit the other popular picture of ‘Star Trek’ as a self-justifying propaganda piece. In fact it makes most sense if it’s taken at its word, where the angst Kirk expresses is simply a mouthpiece for the angst of his scripters. His tiredness is real, not feigned for the cameras.
The Red Scare films were made in the early Fifties, when the Cold War was still young enough to seem winnable like other wars. But over time the honest and open fisticuffs, the clash of supposed right and wrong, gave way to the world of espionage, perpetually played games of mutual deception, the light swapped for the shadows. In ’The Hunt For Red October’ (1990), while putting on his best Russian accent, Sean Connery articulates this shift:
”I miss the peace of fishing like when I was a boy. Forty years I’ve been at sea. A war with no battles, no monuments, only casualties.”
Let’s reduce techno-utopianism, just for a moment, to an ascending line of innovation. Then the Cold War to an endless round. What does that give us but the classic clash of the irresistible force and the immovable object? And how does that play out? Of course the ceaseless effort makes the force tired, even if it doesn’t let up. While the immovable object just has to stay there.
And this sense of entrapment, of being robbed of decisive action, of every gesture merely pulling you deeper into this murky modern world, brings with it a moral weariness, a feeling of being contaminated by your surroundings, greyed by a grey world. Connery has lived a life banished from living.
This isn’t anything propagandist. This is the voice of the liberal who is confronted by the brute realities of their world and genuinely wants things to be better, but can see no way out. You're very tired, but there's no beaming up out of this. This may well be because the liberal is too constrained by their own world-view, but this is still how things seem from their perspective. And its their perspective we're hearing.
Compare it for example to the Cold War spy stories of John le Carre. Control, the head of the Secret Service, explains his system of morality in ’The Spy Who Came In From The Cold’ (1963):
”We do disagreeable things, but we are defensive… Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things… And in weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can’t compare the ideals of one side with the methods of the other, can you, now?… I mean, you’ve got to compare method with method, and ideal with ideal. I would say that since the war, our methods – ours and those of the opposition have become much the same. I mean, you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?”
But such calm divisions can only be made inside Control’s office. Once out in the field they corrode. And Kirk’s victory that feels so much like defeat seems remarkably similar to Smiley’s response to finally bringing down his Iron Curtain antagonist, Karla, in Le Carre’s later ’Smiley’s People’ (1979):
“...an unholy vertigo seized him as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and possess him and claim him despite his striving, calling him a traitor also; mocking him, yet at the same time applauding his betrayal. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other’s frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man’s land.”
Notably, both ’Private War’ and ‘Spy’ had an impotent conscience character: McCoy, the raging heart unconnected to a head, and the youthful idealist Liz Gold. And notably both Le Carre stories end up in No Man’s Land. While ’Private War’ doesn’t end up the standard way - with Kirk back in command position on the bridge.
And that’s the irony, that in a bifurcated world we don’t end up locked in opposing camps, able to communicate only by recrimination. It’s that we all become trapped in No Man’s Land, caught in a conflict so deep it’s effectively within ourselves. It’s now the universe which has become dissociated like a neurotic.
You wouldn’t necessarily assume ‘Star Trek’ was something coherent. It was not cut from whole cloth, but a motley array. It didn’t just have multiple writers, it didn’t really even have a single creator. (Gene Roddenberry got his name on the credits, but the smart money is on his being the Stan Lee of ’Star Trek’, to Gene Coon and DC Fontana’s Ditko and Kirby.)
But least so here. To quote one last time from the M0vieBlog: “Star Trek is very much a product of its time, a snapshot of sixties America captured on film. The sixties were a confusing and chaotic time, it makes sense that Star Trek would be just as confused and chaotic... Sometimes that confusion comes within the same episode.”
One of the reasons ’Star Trek’ could be polarising was that it was such a ‘message show’. (‘Doctor Who’ could have messages too, but they were less foregrounded.) It always wore its heart on its sleeve. But that heart was in itself conflicted. And never more so than over the Cold War.
Coming soon! How ’Star Trek’ made history…
No comments:
Post a Comment