THIS WAY FOR SHAMELESS 'DR.WHO' FANFIC...

 

...sending my own invented Doctor into adventures through time and space. But mostly mainland Britain.  More episodes to follow.

https://analternativeeleven.blogspot.com/

(After which, while I may go back to blogging here, I wouldn't call it likely.)

‘SAPPHIRE AND STEEL’

“So this place is haunted. But the rent’s cheap.”

Like something lost in time ’Sapphire And Steel’ is back on the box, courtesy the good folks of Rewind TV. And though I’ve not seen it since it was first broadcast (1979 to 1982), David McCallum and Joanna Lumley wandering obliquely around empty rooms is something of which I have strong memories.

Each episode starts with as classic a portentous credit sequence as ’The Twilight Zone’ or ’The Outer Limits’. And like those the sober oration fits voice-over takes the place of “explain the premise”, so convincingly you might not notice at first that it actually sews more confusion. (It somehow knows what transuranics are, but not what an element is.)

There’s some kind of helmeted head which draws closer as the sequence goes on, but never quite near enough to be discerned. At the time I fondly imagined there was some elaborate and inventive back story they’d decided to reveal to us a little at a time.

Whereas of course it was all in the British spirit of made do and mend. Given the few sets the meagre budget allowed for each story, there was always going to be some sense of stasis. So why not play into it?

Creator PJ Hammond has said he wanted to reverse the standard orientation of time travel stories, where it's time which comes to the characters. Rob Young, in ’The Magic Box’ commented “each assignment takes place in one location, and rather than emotion or interpersonal drama, it is the space, the architecture of the set and its spatial relationship to time that the characters are most preoccupied with.”

And yes, time. The show opens with the homely image of a child doing his homework. It’s the tick-ticking of a surfeit of clocks which is foregrounded and defamiliarised, four shown in the first minute, before there’s even any dialogue or action. Time’s sometimes presented as besieged by hostile actors. Or at others time itself seems the problem, a recalcitrant force forever needing to be kept on the straight and narrow.

Ostensibly, the titular two are detectives. They show up at a time crime and scan the place for clues, in order to hunt out the guilty party. But logic and deduction play little actual part. Stories are strung together by free association, magical thinking and handwavey references to ley-lines and the like. (Often involving out-and-out urban myths, such as ’Ring-A-Ring-O’Roses’ being about the Great Plague.) Dialogue is almost akin to an Absurdist drama, words turned over and over in the search for meaning in them.

Given this set-up, essentially placing strangers in strangeness, it was going to be either great or terrible. Sometimes it was both. But mostly that first one. In fact, the fact that it makes no actual sense whatsoever becomes its greatest asset.How come? Some pointers…

It seems it was originally pitched for children’s TV but found itself promoted up the schedules to early evening. Which paid off, I remember my Dad would watch it avidly. But it remained based on a child perspective, rooted in childhood fears.

And time, to a child, something you have tasted so little of, seems strange and heady stuff. It is, a Steel puts it, “immense”. You still live very much in a kind of eternal present, against which the influence of the past can seem an inexorable, foreign force. Alan Moore told a story of, as a child, standing watching the clock’s hour hand till he saw it move, something he found giddying.

Added to which, one character says of a Victorian photo “that thing could be a thousand years old”. As a child much more about you seems like antiques than to an adult. And those things don’t seem cosy so much as otherly, ever-present and unparseable. The past seemed more than a foreign country, it was like a different reality altogether, but one always inexplicably breaking into the now.

Which meant you were forever coming across objects and situations which should have been familiar if not homely, shown in such a way as to make them sinister. The world was, in a word, uncanny.

But that undersells it. As we saw when we looked at Rob Young’s ‘The Magic Box’, this was an era where many shows took these paths, following the same prompts of cultural milieu and budgetary necessity. But ’Sapphire And Steel’ was pure neat distilled uncanny! It headered that particular nail then kept hitting it. It feels simultaneously eccentric beyond eccentric and completely built to fit a brief. Which only makes it feel more eccentric.

…which may go to some way to explaining its relatively short life - only six Assignments (as they called them). The general reason given is that it became increasingly difficult to synch the two stars’ schedules, and no doubt that was a factor. But also this was a show fully formed from the get-go, doing just what it needed to be doing. There was nowhere for it to go to. It was the height of an approach, and so inevitably also the end of it. It burnt twice as bright and half as long.

So in the often-asked question, was this ITV’s answer to ’Dr Who’, its actually better to ask the question the other way around. If you look at Who history, like we have, the uncanny was an angle it more seemed to hit upon and then find lucrative. Interestingly, New Who often seemed to borrow more heavily from this show than it did Old Who. (Particularly under Moffatt, though Davies’ ’The Giggle’ (2023) has almost exactly the same central concept as Assignment Four.)

The seeming similarities often turn into differences, just like reassuringly familiar objects did within the show. Steel manages to be brusque and irascible simultaneously, like he’s above these petty humans but also they’re annoying him. Sapphire is more gracious, at times sympathetic, but often in order to be manipulative. They communicate telepathically, beyond human hearing. They relate to humans, they relate to them not.

And the Doctor often had a similarly double nature. Tom Baker’s trademark grin and eye-glint could be taken as warm and humanistic, but also chillingly alien. Hartnell was a stern patrician but also a kindly grandfather. A double nature essentially split into two with their good cop/ bad cop act.

But overall, with ’Who’ it was the companion character who cemented the notion that at least one of these newly-arrived strangers was a person just like you. In ’Fire Of Pompeii’ the Doctor confesses “sometimes I need someone” to keep him grounded in human affairs. A character as absent from this show as is the leads’ lack of concern for human affairs. The solutions they find can be not at all humanistic, with the humans unlucky enough to be in the vicinity just getting instrumentalised.

…which takes us to the biggest difference between the shows. The Doctor’s a traveller, an adventurer, a maverick. Sapphire and Steel are cops. Time cops, that’s still cops. They turn up in the first episode in place of the called-for police. They’re soon to be found burning books. In fact, it's more than that. That big, booming voice-over signifies they don’t work for an authority, they work for Authority. Just like there are Archangels, they are Archcops.

And equally the villains are just villains. Unlike ’Who’, there’s little to suggest they represent psychological states, that mental conflicts are being externalised. It’s more Lovecraftian, they’re things from without and should they succeed in getting in then our whole reality will come crashing down.

The Doctor says come with me, travel in my box to think outside the box. They tell people to stay just where they are, not to experiment with time, or show much curiosity about anything come to that. Leave that stuff to the pros. It's hard-wired conservative.

’Who’ often posed order as the problem. There was a moribund, ossified state of affairs, whose frozen grip on life needs to be broken. Multiple stories end with people hopelessly raging at one another as to what should happen now, with the Doctor delightedly saying “my work here is done.” Here the problem is disorder, things not in their proper allotted place. From the opening narration, it was about ironing out “irregularities”.

And so the stories rely on connections which can seem arbitrary, if not active bizarre. A Thirties-themed party is linked to the megalomania of the host in seeking to defy time. Or upping things further, we have time travel powered by vivisection, just to underline the sheer badness of it all. Each time accompanied by Steel’s stern “I try to tell you but you never listen” speech.

The difference are striking. But, beyond the obvious point that the uncanny doesn’t automatically cleave to one politics or another, its harder to know what to do with them. Hammond wrote all assignments but one. (And that, the whodunnit, was the weakest.) But surely more than authorial intent is at work.

Though the show has sometimes been called Thatcherite, its conservatism seems more small-c. Let’s look at it in a way that’s most likely a post-hoc rationalisation, but by now time’s been disrupted anyway. Its a truism the past no longer leaves our lives in the way it used to. New TV shows aren’t just in ratings competitions with a finite number of other new TV shows, but with most of what’s already been recorded. We have become rather like the future humans encountered in the third Assignment, cosplayers rather than adventurous time travellers, saturating ourselves in other eras and still not understanding them. Because to us they’ve been reduced to an aesthetic, vicarious experience.

As Mark Fisher once said: “In conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost.” He has also commented on the fact the show finishes on a freeze-frame, in a sense fittingly for the last hurrah of a type of programme. (NB Spoilers spelt out in that link.)

In 1982, the date of the final assignment, people spent much more of their time in their time than we do today. But time was already eroding, and Sapphire and Steel’s missions to keep the past at bay already had an increased urgency, as the first video recorders were rolled out. It now seems an assignment they were doomed to lose.

And this was a war on two fronts. The future of broadcasting encroached simultaneously, with its focus groups and market testing. Audiences were to get what they wanted, which of course meant something they already knew, and certainly nothing they might need to get acclimatised to. So insidious, so all-prevalent would this new ideology be that it was us, once the radicals, who were thrown on the defensive and with it into a kind of conservatism. We wanted to hold onto what we were fast losing, and still do. It’s us who have become the ghosts.

Steel would glower that they were always called out too late, and perhaps they were. Time now assails us, from both sides, and not as single spies but battalions. Perhaps he and Sapphire out there still, valiantly fighting a war long since lost. Looked at like that, no wonder he was in such a bad mood all the time.

Coming soon! Time for something completely different...

“TO TOPPLE HEAVEN”: ROGER ZELAZNY’S ‘LORD OF LIGHT’

(with some PLOT SPOILERS)

“You wish to sack Heaven?” 
“Yes, I wish to lay open it’s treasures to the world.”
“This is to my liking.”

The scenario of Roger Zelazny’s ’Lord Of Light’ is that humans have colonised another planet, with the First (the original landing crew) co-opting Hinduism in order to act as Gods and keep themselves in charge. People do as they are told, or get reincarnated further down the chain. Though this involves more than cosplaying. While technology is strictly suppressed among their subjects, they hoard it for themselves to take on Godlike powers. All of which happened so long ago, they seem to have largely come to believe this tale themselves.

First published in ’67, it is perhaps one of the most Sixties of Science Fiction works. It inspired the classic Hawkwind track of the same name (released in 1972, though any lyrical connection is oblique). And there’s really two reasons for that…

Reviews are almost duty-bound to quote Arthur C Clarke’s famous dictum: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Though it seems it wasn’t coined until after the book appeared.) Which is probably normally defined too narrowly. This was the point where technology had become indistinguishable form magic even to those living in that society, let alone savages coming across a landing UFO. So the fusion of the mystical with the mechanical came to be a highly Sixties motif. Bowie’s ’Saviour Machine’, for example, was released in 1970. And here we’ve come across a prayer machine within the first couple of pages.

But also, and happily for us, it’s not the Sixties of the dawning age of Aquarius but the other Sixties - of iconoclastic cynicism, where established doctrine was by definition a lie, where all accepted wisdoms needed knocking down, even if there was little idea what to raise in their place. This is the Sixties of 'Sympathy for the Devil’, not ’All You Need Is Love’. 

And this is embodied in Sam, who dominates the novel from the first paragraph. Though one of the First, he has now decided to sack Heaven and end the Gods’ rule. He’s told “a world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.” Though not necessarily in that order. It's an attitude which proves infectious. Keen to be rid of him, but facing logistical issues in killing him off, the Gods instead award him Nirvana. His spirit is raised from this earthly realm, purely as a means of sending him into exile.

How he’s presented, we’re going to have to sneak up on that…

Novels have an essential choice of mode, between external and internal. They might start, for example…

“The tall man strode purposefully down the street, hat turned against the wind. He entered a small corner shop. ‘Good morning, Mr. Smith’ responded the shopkeeper, ‘you are after more cornflakes I suppose’. ‘I am indeed”, Bert Smith replied.”

…or alternately see it from the inside…

“His hat turned against the wind, Bert Smith strode purposefully towards his local shop. As so often, his mind was turned to cornflakes.”

Once the mode is chosen, they will normally stick to it. And in the first, as in my little example, once he has been named Bert Smith will be referred to as that from thereon in. He doesn't need reintroducing to us.

Zelazny does something more unusual. He introduces Sam by names in his first paragraph. (It is names, we’ll get to why later.) But there’s a recurrence of the second person, as new scenes begin with merely ‘he’ or ‘she’. Sometimes ‘he’ turns out to be Sam, at others someone else. It’s like regularly winding back to the beginning, placing us on the outside of events looking in again. Why do this?

Firstly, for the same reason as the external mode is always used. It creates an immediacy, throwing us into events deep-end-first, so we need to keep reading just to establish the basics. And its very much Zelazny’s style to drop us in this world and expect us to catch up. (This is one of those books which has how-to-read guides online.)

Also, there’s identity slippage. Sam and the Gods are forever going in disguise or changing their names. As reincarnation is a thing here, they can even change their bodies. So the question of who is who must continually be re-posed.

But most importantly, it keeps Sam at a distance from us. There’s both a narrative and a thematic reason for doing this. All the Gods have Aspects, a form of super power. Though unspecified, Sam’s is definitely cunning. Sometimes described as a Trickster, he defeats his enemies by outwitting them, by doing the unexpected. Which means we cannot know his plans before they do.

His decision to sack Heaven doesn’t occupy the book so much as cause it, yet his motivations are little dwelt on. The people he is ostensibly freeing he doesn’t seem to regard especially sympathetically, in fact he casually instrumentalises them in his war. And in the rare glimpses we’re given of the inside of his head, he seems almost a different character to the one on the outside.

“He thought upon this city [Heaven] and these gods, and he knew of its beauty and its rightness, its ugliness and its wrongness. He thought of its splendour and its colour, in contrast to that of the rest of the world, and he wept as he raged, for he knew that he could never feel either wholly right or wholly wrong in opposing it. raged was why he had waited as long as he had, doing nothing. Now, whatever he did would result in both victory and defeat, a success and a failure and whether the outcome of all his actions would be the passing or the continuance of the dream of the city, the burden of the guilt would be his.”

At one point he describes himself simply as “a man who has set out to do a thing.” Ultimately, we could reasonably assume he seeks to overthrow heaven for the sheer hell of it. And this seems central. Part of his plan is to spread Buddhism, to counter the ideological influence of the Hindu gods. He says at one point that he had no belief himself, that he masqueraded as the Buddha, yet “whatever the source, the message was pure, believe me. That is the only reason it took root and grew”.

And yet the opposite proves true as well. A non-believer cannot be disabused, a man who doesn’t really want anything can’t be bought off. He is able to depose the Gods without assuming their mantle precisely because he doesn’t believe in what he’s doing, because he simply plays at it. In the parlance of the times, he’s a Merry Prankster.

So his antithesis may not be his antagonist, Brahmin, but Niritti the Black One. Less for his choice of creed (Christianity) than the fanaticism which he holds for it. He has an army of zombies do his bidding, a dig perhaps less than subtle.

There’s also Taraka. Though the novel’s anti-colonial, this has a peculiarity to it not always dwelt on. The planet’s true inhabitants are not its people but bodiless forces described as demons. As Sam points out: “it was their world first. We took it away from them. To them, we are the demons.” Sam unleashes them at Heaven. Though powerful they find it hard to act collectively, a classic Colonialist trope.

Which suggests the demons perform some other function. At one point Sam becomes possessed by what passes for their head, Taraka. Which suggests the demon represents his own dark side. Taraka says at one point “it is of my nature, which is power, to fight every new power which arises, and to either triumph over it or be bound by it.” And once possessed Sam finds…

“He had been touched by the lusts of the demon-lord, and they were becoming his own. With this realization, he came into a greater wakefulness, and it was not always the hand of the demon which raised the wine horn to his lips, or twitched the whip in the dungeon. He came to be conscious for greater periods of time, and with a certain horror he knew that, within himself as within every man, there lies a demon capable of responding to his own kind.”

Though this street turns out to be two-way. His possession fails to hold because by turn he grants Taraka the curse of his own guilt. Inadvertently on his part, it simply happens. But it still seems a manifestations of Sam’s power, Sam being Sam. He will come at his foes from an unexpected angle, against which they are unprepared and defenceless, simply because that is his nature.

Questions are frequently asked about this book. Is it a form of Orientalism? Is Zelazny in sympathy with Buddhism as the true nature of religion, countering Hinduism with its caste system and other forms of social control? But just like Sam, Zelazny always slips free of them. He’s always somewhere else, himself espousing Sam’s playful attitude to serious matters. He cheerfully offered the explanation that he wrote the book to be uncategorisable either as Science Fiction or Fantasy. Sometimes he even mischievously claimed to have written it to use a single pun, which happens early.

And there may be good reasons for that. Not unusually for Science Fiction, he’s more a writer who throws concepts at the page like mud at a wall, a brainstormer not an architect. An elliptical narrative then becomes a handy way to disguise that, by suggesting at a bigger picture where this all fits together. But then, credit to him for realising that and acting on it.

So… sacking heaven and laying its treasures open to the world with the power of play. Is this the equivalent of a disruptive Yippie action in novel form? Well, sort of. But also, we should remember not just that Sam is one of the First, but that those he’s fighting over don’t get much of a look in. They appear, but come and go, none staying long enough to be called a character. The people don’t free the people here, the nice Gods free them from the nasty ones.

And Sam’s playfulness looks back to the insouciance of the original adventure heroes such as Robin Hood or the Scarlet Pimpernel. An attitude which was closely linked to their aristocratic origins. As said another time, the Pimpernel can effectively be reduced to one line from the source novel - “I vow, I love the game, for this is the finest sport I have yet encountered. Hair-breadth escapes – the devil's own risks! - tally ho! - and away we go!”

Then again, that actually seems pretty Sixties. The underground (as it tended to then be called) was ostensibly non-hierarchical but in practice led by figureheads who tended to come from privileged backgrounds. This all makes the novel more Sixties, rather than less.

Still… sacking heaven to lay open its treasures. That is to my liking.

'ALIEN: ROMULUS' (A MINI REVIEW)

Some while ago now, I said “the Alien films all have to feature Ripley, just like you couldn't make a Dalek film without the Doctor.”

I like to think I’m big enough to admit it when I’m wrong.

She hasn’t shown up in the last two (not counting that one) and ’Alien: Romulus’ even finds ways to turn this deficiency to its advantage. First, where later sequels had become wrapped up in their own continuity this allows for a reset. (In internal chronology, it comes straight after the first film.) Also, this allows a new, young cast to blunder blind into the Alien universe and make their own mistakes. We shout helplessly at the screen “get out of there, it ’s got one of those in it?”. But how are they to know?

Of course in a standard horror film this would just be the teens visiting the haunted house. But here its a course correct, that takes us further back to where we were before then where we were before.

Furthermore, I am won't to complain that contemporary culture insists our protagonists must always be The Special One. (I blame Neoliberalism for this, typically enough, as it means our heroes have to represent not us but me who is not like all the others, not really. I expect you’ve heard me.) Happily, this series has in effect gone the other way. Ripley was not military but she was a capable Warrant Officer. While in ’Covenant’, Daniels was a coloniser. But Rain, our protagonist here, a young wage labourer, the nearest yet to some regular Jo.

And who is our regular Jo set against? I also said “the Alien may be the adversary but the Company are effectively the villain.” And this film is smart enough to get that. Some have complained it starts too slow, but this is info it needs to get over. We’re in a future dystopia, like now only more so. The scenario is ‘the maze and the Minotaur’ in which the Corporation has provided both. The characters become trapped between the Alien’s law-of-fang-and-claw and the demands of rapacious capitalism. (The films tend to exploit Social Darwinism for drama, rather than critique it.)

Plotwise, this is most epitomised by the two Andys. The de rigeur android has two settings; there’s a kind of special needs version who has his skills but also needs looking after himself (not far from the cat in the original), and there’s the other - highly effective but not at all on their side.

But of course, as ever, its most epitomised visually - by the two clashing aesthetics, industrial gothic against the weirdly alien. There’s an effective scene where the corridor they’re about to getaway through is found to be covered in alien… whatever that stuff is. (That industrial gothic look has become almost enhanced by the passage of time. We’re now aware what a mechanical world it is, of chains, metal hatches and grille gates. Monitor screens are analogue and flickery. A retro future.)

’Alien: Romulus’ is rarely lss than involving. You can’t help but get drawn in, feel the tension, jump at the right moments. See it. You won’t be bored.

But the second and third instalments (perhaps even the fourth, to a lesser extent) took all this and took it somewhere new. This is much more more than it is new. It follows the two rules of sequels, ‘bigger’ and ‘faster’. *Aliens’* had already gone for armies of Aliens, so this throws swarms of facehuggers at us, like mobs of spiders. And with this the remorseless inevitability of the first film is, unsurprisingly, gone. Aliens now seem able to not just gestate but grow full size in mere minutes. (I grew hopeless confused as to whether their arrival had let the facehuggers out, or whether the ships had already been overrun.)

The commercial and critical failure of ’Prometheus’ has certainly bounced the series into this more crowd-pleasing direction. (“Less cosmic pontificating, more chest-bursting” read the memo.) So is the result any more than ‘effective franchise instalment’? Not much. Even ’Covenant’, with its Medievalism and bestiaries, had more that was its own.

Added to which, the main place it does innovate doesn’t necessarily work…

(PLOT SPOILERS in next para)

We discover the Corporation have tried to bring capitalism and monster together, thinking to build the strongest creature of all, the best (in their minds) of both worlds. Here the title comes in, they have two spacecraft named after the Rome-founding twins famously raised by wild wolves. That didn’t end well for Remus, and it doesn’t here. But this feels like the film’s own failing, obliged to come up with a new monster variant for the finale, which it then projects onto the Corporation. (I may just object to lanky monsters. Personal reasons.)

But beyond that there are flickers. Trapped in mining jobs on a planet that never sees day is not a bad metaphor for the ceaseless demands of wage labour. Our young team escaping to bathe in sunlight for the first time is a striking moment. (Science Fiction often works best when it shows not the unfamiliar but the familiar from an unexpected angle.) And the zero gravity trick is neat. So… few admittedly, but there. Quite possibly this came out better than might have been expected.

PLANETARY UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS (THE ORIGINAL ‘STAR TREK’)

KIRK: “How long do you plan on keeping me here?”
VANNA: “Until we have help in the mines and our homes are in the clouds.”
KIRK: “That's quite a while.”
- ’The Cloud Minders’

By the late Sixties we’d seen youth revolt, black liberation, women’s liberation... even (by the June 1968 Stonewall riot, shortly after ‘Star Trek’ finished) gay liberation. And what’s missing from this picture? Unrest, great to see you. But you have no class.

In fact there‘d been a sharp increase in strikes throughout the Sixties, by the decade’s close hitting a peak only exceeded by the Forties/ early Fifties. Class issues may have been absent from media representation, but not life on the ground. And perhaps that’s not surprising. The one thing capitalism is most reliant upon is a class system, which is to say on a majority which does most of the work while getting the least of the benefits. Yet there’s one ’Trek’ episode which touches on this subject - ’The Cloud Minders’. And if one swallow does not a Summer make, maybe it could do us for a bit of a Spring.

Third season episodes such as this frequently suffered death by rewrite. Yet, interestingly, Josh Marsfelder claims that it was when David Gerrold’s original script was rewritten, by Oliver Crawford and Margaret Arman, that it transformed from a polemic on slavery into a more relevant account of wage labour. He calls it “unfiltered Marxism on primetime television”. And indeed, when accused of negotiating via force, rebel leader Vanna replies flatly that it’s “the only way we can obtain what is due us”. You know, a bit like how it works in real life.

Dating back to ’Gulliver’s Travels’ cloud cities are one of those recurrent SF concepts which are great eye candy while making no sense whatsoever. Why would anyone think of sticking a city on a cloud? Especially while there still seems no shortage of that rather firmer-looking ground stuff. But this story does at least find a symbolism in them...

Stratus is divided between the highminded cloud city dwellers and the mine-labouring Troglytes, as if only penthouse and basement. The mine contains a mind-numbing gas which all the Troglytes inevitably imbue. If that seems remarkably like a metaphor for false consciousness, check this exchange between Vanna and Kirk. When Vanna scoffs “It’s hard to believe something which is neither seen nor felt can do so much harm”, Kirk replies “but an idea can’t be seen or felt. That’s what’s kept the Troglytes in the mines all these centuries, a mistaken idea.”

And unlike the magic sign-revealing sunglasses of Carpenter’s ’They Live’ (1988), it’s closer to false consciousness as it actually works. The Trogyltes are neither seduced by cunningly crafted lies nor duped by subliminal commands. In fact the city dwellers are themselves unaware of the gas’s existence. It’s social conditions themselves which limit our consciousness. (It was some old bloke with a beard who first said that, I forget his name now.) 

This is admittedly applied in a crudely deterministic way. Trapped in their underground labours, unable to see the expanse of the sky, their horizons are quite literally limited. There’s even a literal fix, the gas-blocking filter masks Kirk wants everyone to wear which does stray back towards Carpenter’s cool-outsider sunglasses. But then again, making things clear-cut is pretty much the point of a metaphor. So far, things do seem pretty Marxist.

But then you might expect the gas, whose effects Kirk describes as “retardation and emotional difficulties”, to keep the Trogyltes passive and docile – in essence, as cattle. Instead it makes them surly and aggressive. In other words it accentuates the characteristics of being working class that we see in the popular stereotype - dim, monosyllabic, quarrelsome. There’s the reactionary but widespread association between the working class and alcoholism, which goes back at least to Hogarth’s prints and continues today in the popular bete noire of the mouthy chav clutching his tinny. And it seems scarcely a coincidence that the gas so closely duplicates the effects of alcohol. In short the Troglites are oiks, semi-rational brutes.

High Advisor Plasus insists that problems are down to the Disruptors, “a small group of Troglyte malcontents” yet “all the other Troglytes are completely dominated by them.” Which sounds an unsquareable circle, and by this stage we’ve already learnt not to trust him. Yet as the episode pans out, it turns out to be an understatement. As far as we see there’s really just one Disruptor, Vanna. An ex-servant she’s mostly lived in the city, away from the gas. And as their token representative of non-dumbness she naturally takes charge.

When Troglyte henchman Midro threatens to kill the captured Kirk she points out “a dead hostage is of no value.” Not the hardest to grasp of notions, but she only seems able to enforce this notion by pulling rank – “I will say what is to be done”. (What’s the word again for people who talk like that? I don’t think it’s Disruptor.) She refers to him disparagingly as “a child.” His desire to kill Kirk seems no more than a desire to gratify his immediate senses. He cannot do that thinking-ahead thing, he needs Vanna for that.

Then in a final fight between Kirk and Plasus, Vanna is left with a choice of going for Kirks’ phaser or communicator. Despite her clear earlier preference for the phaser as an effective negotiating tool she grabs the communicator - to ask the Enterprise for help. In the final scene she’s shown beginning to negotiate with Plasus.

To get this we need… you guessed… some context. In the Sixties, Trade Union membership was still high. But its mainstay was skilled, professionalised and in most cases white workers. Whereas the more recent rise in unrest had come from unskilled and casualised workers, those who had it worst. Often black themselves, they were influenced by the more radical methods of black liberation. (The overlap between civil rights campaigning and labour struggles was huge, and has since been almost entirely airbrushed out of the official narrative.)

Sometimes they formed their own groups outside of official unionism, such as the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. But mistrust of the mainstream unions was more general. During this time, increasing numbers of union-recommended offers were rejected by workers.

And so an inevitable feature of official unions came to the fore. As Sharon Smith has said “in many cases, management came to rely on union officials to ‘police’ the workforce - that is, to enforce productivity rates and shop floor discipline.” (Yes, that’s from the accursed and contemptible ‘Socialist Worker’, but the article itself is largely accurate.)

And it’s in this context that we should see Vanna’s choosing the communicator. In ‘Way To Eden’ Severin, the messianic leader, had to be written out so his more reasonable followers could be brought on board – Learyites without that troublesome Leary. When it’s workers it’s the opposite way up - the story which first flirts with the bog-standard rhetoric about outside agitators then flips back again.

There’s no reasoning with those sullen Troglytes, masks or not. But thankfully we have Vanna as our go-between. Where workers have legitimate grievances they should raise them the right way, through the proper channels. Vanna rejects Kirk’s filter mask only to become one; she turns into the voice of responsible unionism, forceful in negotiation but making only reasonable demands, keeping more disreputable elements in check. Class difference is fine, the problem only arises when those classes get too far apart. ’The Cloud Minders’ is neither filtered nor unfiltered Marxism, but a very necessary filter placed upon the face of Marxism in order to muffle it.

And there’s more… As with ‘Last Battlefield’, the problem with symbolising an issue by means of assigning a planet to it is that this can also externalise it. And as with ‘Last Battlefield’, this is played into. Racism, class prejudice – they’re things outside of me and you, done by people we watch without identifying with. And the look of Stratos is unmissably retro, it’s city in the clouds hearkening back to the days of pulp magazines. Think, for example, of the celebrated ‘Metropolis’ (1927). The upper city dwellers swan about in cloaks, admiring art, recalling the division in Ancient Greece between citizens and slaves.

In other words, Stratos is another degenerate European civilisation. This is the classic American cultural trope of pushing the issue of class back onto Europe. There was an absence of overt social deference, as there’d been in the old world. When the outer trappings of class went, the top hats and monocles replaced by jeans, surely class went too.

And, as so often with this trope, a very particular form of class is being used. Stratos, referring to a type of cloud, may seem a fitting name. But it is also associated with the term stratified. And effectively Stratos has no surface, at least not one anyone lives on. It is underground and sky, with no messing with Mr Inbetween – planetary upstairs downstairs. If Crawford and Arman did drag forward a script about slavery, they really only took it as far as a kind of serfdom.

In an echo of ’Metropolis’ even the younger generation have come to question, with Plasus’ daughter Droxine asking “Father, are we so sure of our methods that we never question what we do?” By the end she’s decided. “I shall go to the mines. I no longer wish to be limited to the clouds.”

But overall it becomes Kirk’s job becomes to bring this retro world up to the present. He and Spock first land on the planet’s uninhabited surface, like that’s where they naturally gravitate to. It’s nominally a member of the Federation, but because they’ve been kept unaware of how the Troglytes are being treated. Spock believes “all forms of violence have been eliminated”, as if this is all kept a guilty secret. A fundamental piece of ’Star Trek’ lore is thereby preserved, the solutions to the problems of the Old World all lie with the New.

THE ORIGINAL 'STAR TREK': JUST SILLY SEXIST SIXTIES HOKUM SET IN SPACE?

”Male and female are universal constants.”
- Kirk, 'Metamorphosis'

When Men Were Men (And Girls Green)

Is there anything left to say on Star Trek’s sexism? Certainly the show’s insistence on always presenting life, Jim, but very much as we know it has not gone un-noticed. Kirk’s line about this being what us earth creature call luuurve is one of show’s the best-known catchphrases. (Though the actual wording was “Love is the most important thing on Earth, especially to a man and a woman”.) While the green Orion slave girl is helpfully flagged up in the end credits on a weekly basis.

Its costume designer led to the term for women's clothing which is not just skimpy but almost entirely unsuited to the seemingly essential task of staying on the person wearing it. With Zap Brannigan, ’Futurama’s Kirk parody, the narcissistic girl-chasing became his central feature.

Alongside which there’s the repeat gag where Kirk has to awkwardly explain to some innocent the… ahem!… the, you know, the facts of… well… how it’s done to some youngster. And the combination of these two seems to define the thing.

Despite Scotty’s protestations, the laws of physics are broken on a weekly basis. The true universal constants are fixed gender identities and high hem lines. It seemed pretty much out of date by the time of Next Gen in the Eighties. Today it’s less notorious than risible, in the overlap between the cringy and the comic. Perhaps ’Futurama’ had it right. You don’t analyse this sort of thing, you take pot shots at it. Or can we manage more?

Take ’The Empath’ and ’Elaan of Troyus’. Okay, there was probably never a plan to broadcast them back to back. But both have women as effective children, not just in need of adult male guidance but basic socialisation. (Elaan even needs to be taught table manners.) However one is good, mute and… well, empathic, exhibiting the official feminine virtues. While the other is haughty, mouthy and downright tantrummy, but much happier once taken in line. And naturally only the second one – the one who needs taming - is sexualised. The thing’s almost schematic.

Perhaps it's better to take a slightly different question. Ideology is not about convincing people by arguments but shaping their unconscious assumptions. In short, its role is to insinuate itself as apparent common sense. As such entertainment is an ideal propagator; it’s precisely because it doesn't seem anything more than ephemeral than it slips below your perceptual radar. (Transmission is a term both for TV shows and diseases.) But then how much are their creators aware of any of this? Are they merely making their own unconscious assumptions ours by sharing them?

'Metamorphosis' is perhaps the show’s most gender essentialist moment of all. A female spirit (or, as they're described in SF, energy field) is keeping astronaut Zefram alive, long past his natural span. When Kirk asks hopelessly “How do you fight a thing like that?” McCoy shrewdly replies “Maybe you're a soldier so often that you forget you're also trained to be a diplomat. Why not try a carrot instead of a stick?” And they resolve the situation not by devising a weapon to hit the Companion with, but a translator so they might communicate with her.

Now the story’s main female character, Nancy, is a diplomat. So Kirk should be borrowing her carrots. Yet not only do we never see her perform any actual diplomacy, she’s repeatedly demonstrated to be sharp-tongued and unreasonable, blaming Kirk for every plot development. Perhaps unusual behaviour for someone of her profession.

The Starfleet directive as plot impediment, which tries to push them away from the adventure, is a recurrent device. (Like the chief in cop shows always bellowing “you’re off the case!”) And it can be enhanced by adding a Starfleet stuffed shirt they need to ferry, who can shout directly at Kirk rather than have Uhura relay orders. ‘Galileo Seven’ had Galactic High Commissioner Ferris, insisting he should be obeyed despite just being a guest on the show.

But making this permanently displeased bigwig into a woman brings up the subject of the career woman. And soon she’s saying “I've been good at my job, but I've never been loved. Never. What kind of life is that? Not to be loved, never to have shown love?”

It’s the perfect trade-off. A feminine spirit without a body runs into a woman after a career, so she clearly doesn’t want to be a woman in the first place. The natural order is restored by the closing credits.

It's commonly thought of as a love story. But that's to see the thing though it's resolution. For most of the time, the Companion behaves like a Mother. (Note how her name is contingent, in fact contingent on Zefram.) When he complains of feeling lonely, she goes and gets him a play date – nabbing Kirk and co, so setting off the story.

In the story's most interesting moment, finding the energy field is actually a female energy field, he initially recoils at the notion. Not at it's ludicrousness, but at the idea they've had some sort of affair. It's resolved through her taking female form, via the dying Nancy's body. The Freudian forbidden suddenly becomes possible, becomes the… and there’s no nicer way of saying it... Mum you can fuck.

And it’s Kirk who persuades her to cut the apron strings. He's soon off on the classic 'Star Trek' bugbear, railing against the static utopia. Zefram wasn't just any astronaut, but the inventor of the warp drive – another Historically Important Individual. Yet since then he's sat back with every need taken care of. “Our species can only survive if we have obstacles to overcome,” Kirk cries. “You take away all obstacles. Without them to strengthen us, we will weaken and die.”

When Spock prompts “ask it about its nature” deliberately or not he’s being tautological. For the Companion is strongly associated with nature. For reasons entirely unexplained within the story Zefram has to go outside to communicate with her, leading to the iconic scenes of her field descending over him. She can't leave the planet for any length of time without dying, suggesting she is in some way the Gaia-like spirit of the planet.

And in this way the romance story overlaps with the Romantic. The term 'Mother Nature' goes back to the Middle Ages, but Romanticism bestowed a feminine spirit upon Nature with renewed vigour. The more technologically advanced human society became, the more important the Romantics felt it was to stay in touch with the feminine. And Zefram communicating with the Companion “on a non-verbal level” does seem remarkably similar to the Romantic poet communing with nature. The techno-futurism of 'Star Trek' doesn't deny and even plays up all that, but makes of it something which must be put in the past. The Companion, in short, is not just the Mum but also the Earth you get to fuck.

Using the Assets You Have

But let’s get back to the bad girls. 'The Man Trap', the first episode to be broadcast, started things off the way they meant to go on. Like a cross between 'Species' and 'That Obscure Object of Desire', an alien impersonates desirable women to lure in its targets. Shapeshifting is a common weapon of villainy, inherently suggesting deception. But gendering the alien as a woman is significant.

Its hunger for salt (aka the human life force) is almost an inevitable result of being a woman in a man's world. Deprived of the means of her own survival unless granted by a man, she inevitably becomes a vampiric force. At one point, prompted by events, 'it' switches genders and immediately switches from male to female targets. Yet even this underlines what a she it really is, perpetually named after Nancy, her first victim. (Yep Nancy again, they were no better with naming women than charactersing them.)

One image strikingly sums this up. We never see Nancy attack her first victim, just her standing over his already-dead body like a tableau. It's a memorable moment, making more of an impact than if they'd gone for the more obvious action sequence. But its impact partly comes from suggesting at an inevitability to all of this. For if society is made up by men, then women will inevitably become something outside, something alien. To misquote the pop psychology book title, in SF Men are from Earth, Women aren't.

Yet amid all this reactionary sexual politics there's an ecological message. This is the last creature of its kind, explicitly compared to the buffalo. Sorry, the what? Given that we’re dealing with an intelligent creature, why isn’t the analogy the genocide of the American Indian? (Besides, one was contingent on the other. Buffalo were often slaughtered as a means to either starve Native Americans or drive them into reservations.)

Further, Darren at The M0vie Blog is almost certainly right to point out that, this all being a frontier analogy, the death of those who came before cannot help but be presented as regrettable - but a regrettable necessity. Progress determines that they need to be got out of our way, and anyway our pausing to get a bit rueful about it shows how good we really are. (Making Kirk a bit like that cop in ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide’ who might shoot people but always agonises about it to his girlfriend afterwards.)

They talk of not wanting to kill her. At one point, she even gets to makes the case for her life. Except, in a somewhat delicious irony, at that point she's disguised as McCoy. In other words, literally given a man's voice. (It's never quite explained why they don't just up and give her some salt. Are they supposed to be short of the stuff? Would she have fared better asking for pepper? We get few clues.)

 

And these two themes do tie up. Through Nancy's 'true' appearance, an old and ancient thing. Her long straggly hair, her lined snout and what the production crew called “ashen skin”, the “old hag” of folklore, matches the dialogue where McCoy is blinded to her grey hair.

In Tennessee Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1947) Blanche exclaims “I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.” A notion Stanley rebels against: "It’s dark in here…. I don’t think I ever seen you in the light. That’s a fact!.. You never want to go out till after six and then it’s always some place that’s not lighted much… What it means is I’ve never had a real good look at you."

And Nancy’s the Blanche Dubois of alien life forms, her devices to mask her age with appearance merely more sophisticated. But both plan to keep up her required level of desirability – the commodity which keeps her alive. Women are inherently about appearance and appearance is about deception.

And in fact we see a similar combination later, in 'Devil In the Dark'. The last of a kind is almost tragically wiped out through failure to communicate. Except one factor is reversed. Rather than impersonating humans, the Horta is one of the few non-humanoid aliens on the show. They could have talked to Nancy at any point, but only do so obliquely. 'Devil in the Dark' intentionally with-holds communication, only to devise a way to enable it. (The coining of the Vulcan mind meld.) And with it things come to a happy ending. So why can one live when the other has to die?

The real difference is of course that the woman in 'Devil in the Dark' is primarily a mother, acting only to defend her children. Unless you have a thing for duvets with varicose veins (and I concede there may well be an OnlyFans for that), she's not sexualised. Whereas Nancy’s sexualisation is associated with her predation. The only crew member resistant to her charms is Spock, and he survives her advances literally through not being a red-blooded male. Women don't have to die, at least not when fulfilling their biological roles. But female sexuality, inherently a threat, has to be killed off.

Yet ’Map Trap’ itself doesn't seem so convinced the two do tie up. Like 'The Doomsday Machine', it sets up two parallel themes then figures it needs to favour one of them. The episode is built around McCoy’s dilemma over his feelings for Nancy, with the last-of-it's-kind theme a late addition to the script. Yet that’s the one they play into. It's like the gendered stuff is so hard-wired into the story its own tellers look straight through it and instead focus on a more indirect analogy. It's tempting to argue that even on the level of metaphor it's disguised, one metaphor hidden beneath another.

And if we're taking on the show's sexism, why not go for the jugular? 'Mudd's Women' is the infamous episode which reassures the viewer that in the future prostitution will still be alive and well. It seems to have been part of Roddenberry's original pitch, suggesting it was integral to the show's world-view. (Or at least his.)

For plot beats, ’Mudd’s Women’ and ’The Way To Eden’ almost perfectly match. Both the women and Severin’s space hippies are unwillingly beamed aboard the Enterprise from a breaking-up ship, to stupefy the crew with their outrageous behaviour and scanty costumes. Both follow their leader’s instructions to seduce/befriend the crew to hijack the ship. Only when they reach their destination do their plans unravel. (Slightly bizarrely only one group uses drugs, and it’s not the hippies.) Yet they don’t feel similar.

Which may be because ‘Way To Eden’ is clearly about something. In its crass fashion it’s exhibiting an ideology in order to critique it, making it a fitting subject of critique itself. Whereas ’Mudd’s Women’ seems a relic of as time when women were goods (they’re specifically referred to as his “cargo”), better consigned to the past. Yet should we separate them that quickly?

Their ability to seduce and enchant the male crew into doing their bidding comes from the magic Venus pills they take. (Leading to McCoy’s classic line “are you wearing some unusual kind of perfume, or something radioactive?”) Much of the episode is like one of those old Warner Brothers cartoons when the guy’s heart honks and eyes bulge uncontrollably out on stalks. While men feel sex, as a drive, women possess sexuality – like it’s a weapon at their disposal. But without a regular supply of pills, which they fall on like junkies, they fall back into plainness. In a fairly direct echo of 'Man Trap', women are associated with illusion and deception. Let’s remember glamour originally referred to a magical enchantment, a possessing spell.

Perhaps the most interesting sequence in the whole episode lasts only seconds. A scene of the women holding the Venus drug in their eager palms cuts to Spock with the lithium (not yet named dilithium) crystal needed to power the ship. For if the women in 'Mudd's Women' are to navigate a man's world, they need their power source as much as a starship does its. They’re simply striving to survive, using the limited options left to them. What else are they supposed to do? Study at the Academy for years and finally be allowed to answer the phone? Get to serve the Captain his coffee, hoping he notices your legs? And this segue admits as much.

One segue, of course, does not a redemptive reading make. We should remember that in selling themselves they require a pimp, who rations their drugs and whose ownership of them is telegraphed even in the episode title.

Let's note something about Mudd. He's built around the gag that his salesman's patter continually falls on impervious ears, making him an irresistible force continually bashing into an immovable object. This recurs so often you might wonder why he doesn't take one of his own pills, and stroke his beard alluringly at Kirk. He doesn't seem to have much to lose. But his inability to do what 'his' girls can is neither played up nor explained away, it's just accepted as a fact of life.

In 'Naked Time’, when the insane Riley usurps Kirk's place as Captain, he issues a decree that women shouldn't wear too much make-up. It’s a gag, but the moral of 'Mudd's Women' is oddly similar. Imagine it as a set of instructions for a young female viewer. Your chief asset is your looks, but you only have ‘em for so long so make sure you snag your man and settle down before they’re spent. And don’t overdo it even then. Powerful medicine.

Notably, the plot contrives to switch the women’s attention from the crew to a planet of well-off and available miners. And even then the deception fails when one of the girls won't go along with it. Which dodges something not just about plot resolution but ‘manhood’. To successfully resist them would suggest the crew were not 'real men' at all. While to succumb would mean they couldn’t be heroes. This dilemma surfaces elsewhere, and most consistently over Kirk.

Watching ’Star Trek’ all the way through, and in defiance of the cocksure Zap Brannigan stereotype, it’s notable how fallible a character Kirk is. He snaps at underlings when under pressure, makes small mistakes, very nearly makes big ones. But when this seems to happen over attraction to women it turns out to be a feint. He’s often shown seeming to do the wrong thing, abusing his command and even jeopardising missions by chasing skirt. Yet this always turns out to be part of some overall plan of his. See for example ’Conscience of the King’. 

(There’s precisely three genuine exceptions, where Kirk truly falls in love, in three series - ’City On the Edge of Forever’, ’The Paradise Syndrome’ and ’Requiem For Methusaleh’. Each of which is presented as something out of the ordinary.)

Jules Feiffer said “our cultural opposite of the man who didn’t make out with women has never been the man who did – but rather the man who could if he wanted but still didn’t.” (‘The Great Comic Book Heroes’, 1965) Kirk can be shown getting his wicked way, with some off-screen shagging nudged and winked at (especially in ‘Wink of an Eye’). But mostly scripts repeatedly find mission-critical reasons why Kirk needs to seduce or counter-seduce the girl of the week. It’s victory, more than sexual gratification which drives him. “So that was your plan”, Kirk cries in ‘Mark of Gideon’ after another entrapment via seduction scenario. “That I would fall so under her spell that I’d give up my freedom and become a willing sacrifice”. And note that “spell”.

If women of the era only have power via sexual allure then, reassuringly, Kirk is shown as constantly able to out-allure them. Take ‘Elaan of Troyus’. Elaan’s plot is to get Kirk to fall in love with her, using evil juju, which jeapordises the Enterprise’s peace mission. But of course it’s her who falls in love with him, despite the absolute lack of magic affects on his part. Women endlessly launch themselves at his manly torso, but persistently miss and end up at his feet. About the only girl of the week he doesn’t seduce is Miranda in ’Is There In Truth No Beauty?’, and she turns out to be blind.

Harpies and Jezebels

Let’s look at a comparison, or at least what should be a comparison. ‘The Outer Limits’ ran from 1963 to 5, just before ‘Star Trek’, effectively passing the baton of TV SF. If there’s less temptresses in titillatory costumes, it was a different show, chasing a different market. One opens with a portentous all-knowing extra-diegetic narrator, the other with a triumphalist speech by it’s heroic lead.

But it was still a Sixties show with unsurprisingly Sixties attitudes. Women are “pretty nurses,” dutiful lab assistants, dutiful wives, or dutiful lab assistants doubling as wives. Admittedly, there’s exceptions. In fact Joanna Frank’s otherworldly performance as an elemental femme fatale in ’Zzzzz’ is more mesmerising to watch than all of Mudd’s Women put together. But exceptions is what they are. Women’s secondary nature is simply taken as an established fact. No need to hold them down there, it’s just where they are.

As much as they have a role, it’s as a necessary counterbalance to man’s rationality, with their handy ‘feminine’ virtues such as sensibility. See for example ’The Architects of Fear’, or ’The Borderland’ where a wife’s loving hand pulls her husband back from an experiment gone awry. The closing narration spells it out for us:

”There are worlds beyond and worlds within which the explorer must explore, but there is one power which seems to transcend space and time, life and death. It is a deeply human power which holds us safe and together when all other forces combine to tear us apart — we call it the power of love.”

Needless to say, such notions try to sell confines as virtues. But the bigging up of male virility and power… the “no we’re in charge, honest” is largely absent. It doesn’t feel like it’s insistently about sexism the way ’Star Trek’ does. What could have changed in those few years?

The short answer is that the early Sixties were not like the late. A rough and ready history of the rise of American feminism would be the publication of Betty Friedan’s ’The Feminine Mystique’ (1963), the formation of the National Organization for Women (1966) and the Miss America protests where the supposed “bra burning” took place (1968), which roughly equate to base camp, shoulder summit and highly visible peak.

’Star Trek’ also ran into Black Power and the counter culture head on, as much as it did the Romulans. You can almost see it happening in real time, from mildly indulgent inclusionism to identification of a perceived threat. But its relationship to feminism, while as heated, while more heated, is less distinct.

So ‘Star Trek’ fluctuates strangely in it sexism. ’Mudd’s Women’ is very much a pre-feminist story, about the role patriarchal society assigns to women, then in its paranoia panics over them having. But in ’Metamorphosis’, as seen, they had to deal with a woman diplomat who issued orders. Its sexism becomes a war on two fronts, against temptress jezebels and demanding harpies.

And there may even be a point where this switch happens. ’Requiem For Methusaleh’ is another story where Kirk goes off-mission and falls in love. (Though least credibly of all. The other stories at least allow some span of time where this might happen. Here, it’s during the ads.) He ends up scrapping over Rayna with his rival suitor, Flint. (Flint having built Rayna as an android companion for his life on a remote planet. You know, like you do.)

Horrified at their violence, seemingly on the spot she formulates the notion that maybe she could be the one making the decisions about her life. “Please stop. Stop! I choose where I want to go... what I want to do. I choose. I choose... Do not order me. No one can order me!” This might sound like a good starting point. In fact, out of shock of this strange new notion, she’s promptly struck dead.

While a later story, ‘Turnabout Intruder’, starts with a woman presuming she has that right to choose. Naturally she’s the villain...

Janice Lester plans a body swap with Kirk, as it’s her only chance to command a starship like the Enterprise. (Yes, the same series that dismisses racism as “primitive thinking” insists women can’t captain starships.) Now a feminist tale might involve the yeomen and telephonists getting together to agitate for more equal pay and less leering, something like what was starting to happen in the real world at the time. You know, collective action, based on shared identity, that sort of thing.

Whereas this goes straight for the single woman with a glass ceiling obsession. (Even her henchman’s a… well, he’s a man.) But it is a story which encounters feminism, is specifically anti-feminist. In a nice touch she gets to do the expository Captain’s log, as if threatening to take over the show.

Except of course her plan is deranged, and its execution merely reveals conflicts within herself. Her desire to be a starship Captain is casually conflated with her desire for a starship captain, she’s (yawn) another old flame of Kirk who feels spurned. And they’re not done yet...

Almost immediately on their being switched, she exults to Kirk “now you’ll know the indignity of being a woman…. Believe me, it's better to be dead than to live alone in the body of a woman.” While the temporarily feminised Kirk refers to “her intense hatred of her own womanhood.” At a time when the call for equal rights was commonly parsed as “we don’t want to be women any more”. It’s as if even she can’t really imagine herself in the big chair, at least not as her self.

There are those who imagine all wrongs can be handwaved away by use of the phrase “of its time”. It’s more mantra than argument. Yet the irony is that this is a time the description fits, just in the opposite way to their imaginings. ‘Turnabout Intruder’ is typical of a story produced not in the absence of feminism, but precisely because of it’s presence. Feminism is raised, but only to be repudiated. This panic reaction is a hysterical reaction to something it tries to pass off as hysterical. The dread threat of a woman after a Captaincy powers the episode, as the very same time we’re supposed to find that idea a total absurdity.

Race-swapping stories, such as ’Black Like Me’ (1964) or ’Gentleman’s Agreement’ (1947), where Gregory Peck poses as Jewish, were films in the tradition of George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out In Paris and London’, undercover agents exposing the situation of poverty and discrimination. Can criticisms be made of them? Yes. But, particularly in their time, they were progressive. In both cases, the protagonist is a crusading journalist gone undercover.

Whereas gender-swapping stories are more traditionally played as comedies, such as ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959). They’re associated with Shakespearian tradition, where the drama lies in the world being turned upside down and the resolution of it being righted again as the men re-don their trousers. Yet here, when facing off feminism, Lester’s threat seems more real and the humour is dissipated. Except even then it can’t quite be expunged. Scotty calls Lester-as-Kirk “red-faced with hysteria”, and Shatner’s embracing of hissy fit drag cannot help but draw laughter. (It’s also tempting to suggest that with the preening, narcissistic Lester it’s the closest he ever came to playing himself.)

Formally, this is very similar to to good Kirk/ bad Kirk of ‘Enemy Within’, except noticeably the crew’s reaction becomes more foregrounded. Everyone, up to and including the regulars, notices the change and rejects the new Captain. In fact the script seems confused over whether resolution should come by the Shakespearian route of body-swap reversing (revealing it’s essential unnatural-ness) or the anti-feminism of Lester’s command being stymied by mutiny (revealing the absurdity of the situation). The two happen at about the same time, as if double booked.

So, in short, ’Star Trek’ didn’t insist so hard on strict gender roles and a boys-club Starfleet because this was all some innocent time before feminism, but precisely as a reaction to feminism. Yet the feminism it was reacting to was still emerging, perhaps even nascent. So there’s other times where it comes across as pre-feminist, with a quite different set of concerns. And by fighting both fronts it comes to feel obsessive on the subject, like sexism condensed.

It effectively launches with a Jezebel (‘The Man Trap’) and ends with a Harpie (‘Turnabout Intruder’). But we shouldn’t be seduced by that superficial neatness. In practise, the show switches arbitrarily between these two types, there’s no overall shifting from one to the other as feminism became more widespread. It seems more the case that feminism stirred up a more general anxiety, which stoked both simultaneously.

PS Should you wish to read more by a bloke about women’s rights (over which I’m supremely unqualified to comment) and SF (alarmingly over-qualified), with particular reference to the Amazon planet trope, go here.

Coming soon! And finally… about time we showed some class…

ON RACE IN SPACE (THE ORIGINAL ‘STAR TREK’)

“To expect sense from two mentalities of such extreme view points is not logical.”
- Spock, ’Let That Be Your Last Battlefield’

One of the things ’Star Trek’ is known for, almost as much as the bold use of catchphrases, is its much-paraded multiculturalism. Non-white characters might seem to us to be assigned only subservient roles but, we’re quickly told, this was an advance for the time. And others have responded just as often that this is really a liberal inclusionism forced upon the dominant culture by the Civil Rights movement. Racial minorities bust their way in, don’t look like they’re leaving and so the only response left was to claim you welcomed them aboard. It was not a granting, it was a getting.

And there was a prior inclusionism to riff on. Though famously, and accurately, dubbed “Wagon Train’ in space”, the series was just as steeped in war movies. Two episodes, ’City On the Edge of Forever’ and ’Patterns Of Force’, involve the war era directly. And others, such as ’Balance Of Terror’, borrowed heavily from war films.

And war movies often involved a similar inclusionism. In ’Sahara’ (1943), for example, Humphrey Bogart ends up leading a rag-tag division including American, British, French and Sudenese soldiers. A Nazi scoffs at this motley array of a crew, insisting they should give up now. They reply this actually makes them stronger. Naturally enough, it's soon demonstrated that the Americans must lead, and the Sudanese guy essentially sacrifices himself for the others. In reality, all army divisions were racially segregated throughout the war. But it’s a handy shorthand to contrast ‘us’ against Nazism, while telling the home front this is a time to unite. And it’s precisely this which ’Star Trek’ borrows.

’Miri’, seen last time, takes place on an upside-down earth. Which has no impact on the story whatsoever, apart from the general suggestion we should be seeing this stuff allegorically. But the blatantly allegorical episode, the one where ostensible characters are actually walking symbols and get treated as such – that’s the anti-racist one, ’Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.’

So it doesn’t matter that the half-black and half-white faces of primary antagonists Bele and Lokai are absurd and blatantly theatrically made up, as they’re only there to provide a metaphor for racism. In fact, the absurdity of their look helpfully enhances the absurdity of their antagonism. “You half white!” one yells at the other as they struggle. Each ascribes every event to the other, like they’re the only two forces in the universe. (And as one is half-black and the other half-white they’re literal mirror images of one another.) There’s little to no attempt to sketch in their back story. We know a book’s worth about the Romulans by comparison.

Bele claims the chase has been going on for fifty thousand years, despite the fact they seem as mortal as us. (Lokai is near death before his rescue.) Which suggests their real existence is as metaphors and so they’ve been around as long as the stuff they’re metaphors for.

While there’s an unusual attempt to present the Enterprise as a workplace, with scenes of the crew going through duties and procedures. (Something they worked hard to convey at first, but had given up on even before the middle of the first season. Here, midway through the third, it’s back.) And the result is that they’re treated as metaphors, they're to provide a salutary life lesson, even within the story. They make mistakes so we don’t have to. Kirk does some imploring about reconciliation, but finally flies off leaving them to duke it out. They go wrong so we don’t have to.

In short, our photo-op multi-cultural crew encounter racism, presented as a thing from without. Their initial response is to not know what Lokai and Bele are on about. Only later do they come to feel recognition, and with it revulsion.

As both Bele and Lokai’s characters are literally written on their faces from the get-go there’s nowhere for them to go, which results in a very padded episode. And the threatened self-destruct sequence may well be so extended as part of that padding. But it’s effective nonetheless. And it’s purpose is clearly that the Enterprise crew, who can only action the sequence as a joint venture, would rather die together than be as divided as Lokai and Bele. Underlining the essential difference between them.

At one point Chekov comments “there was persecution on Earth once. I remember reading about it in my history class.” To which Sulu replies “Yes, but it happened way back in the twentieth century. There's no such primitive thinking today.”

And there are two ways to parse this. One is to emphasise the reference to the twentieth century, and accept that if our species is to find a future for itself we’ve got to smarten up a bit. Martin Luther King’s wise words finally got heard, we did get to that promised land. Our descendants have survived, where Lokai and Bele’s world hasn’t, precisely because of this. Their race through the Enterprise corridors, accompanied by a montage of war footage, we know this was introduced only to stretch the episode out to full length. But regardless, it’s a pretty good visual image of the futility of their war.

But there’s another reading. These are the characters we’ve watched week after week, and so we cannot help but identify with them. We look at that enlightened, multiracial crew and figure they are our characters, people we know , perhaps even stand-ins for us. It at the same time upholds and reverses the perspective on the trope Jack Graham dubbed “nice-but-then”. He used the term for inexplicably enlightened figures from the past, Iron Age feminists and the like. Whereas here they’re from the future. So we’re the nice-but-then; we’re civilised, proto-enlightened, upgrade-ready for this future to beam us aboard.

And yet despite Kirk constantly insisting “you’re two of a kind” Bele is a cop, with authority placed on his side, and Lokai is on the run from him. They may both be half-black but there’s no question who’s whitey. This is underlined by an exchange between them. Asked by Lokai “why should a slave show mercy to the enslaver?” Bele replies incredulously “Slaves? That was changed thousands of years ago. You were freed.” Yet he later boasts “We've got your kind penned in on Cheron into little districts.” So not, you know, that kind of freeing that actually leads to any freedom.

Pretty much anyone this side of Elon Musk can see the doublethink going on here. But it’s less often asked, why can't the episode itself? It openly weaves the rope to hang itself, then hands that rope over to us as if oblivious to what it’s doing. Yet this is a story, a work of fiction. The deck can be stacked any way the writer chooses. Why not make the characters as bad as each other, perhaps split Cheron into two warring hemispheres? Then have Kirk point at them at intervals and say “see, racism be bad. Just say no, kids.”

And if its not because they can’t, then it must be because they don’t want to. Because accepting what’s self-evident would have too many uncomfortable ramifications. You could not longer think of racism as a residue of “primitive thinking”, which will eventually go away all by itself. If racism is a structural problem, embedded in our society, to challenge it will require fundamental change. To expect people to see what’s not in their interests to see, perhaps that’s not logical Captain. Let that be the limits of liberalism.

But then, why do they get so close, then refuse the final hurdle? To get this we need some context. This episode was aired in January 1969, meaning it was developed during the tumultuous year of 1968. By then black Americans had repeatedly been tear-gassed, beaten, imprisoned and in many cases killed, often for rights they were officially due as a matter of course. They didn’t always react to this with serene calm, you may be surprised to hear.

And the ante was perpetually being upped. The mid to late Sixties had seen a shift from Civil Rights campaigns to Black Power movements, abruptly exacerbated in April 1968 by the assassination of Martin Luther King. The chief proponent of non-violence being murdered, somehow that seemed to push people into a more radical direction.

The immediate result was riots. They weren’t “race riots”, and in fact the Black Panthers (the most prominent Black Power group) criticised them as an ineffective substitute for political organisation. But they were portrayed that way by the popular press. And Cheron, it is implied, has been destroyed by extended race riots.

And what would white audiences think when they first heard Sulu’s line about “primitive thinking”? At school they’d have heard the ‘Lincoln freed the slaves’ line. Slavery was racist. So when that was over, naturally racism ended with it. So any blacks still complaining today are nothing but uppity troublemakers. Many conservatives even claimed that the riots had happened because blacks had been given too much freedom, that this was proof they had to be subjugated for their own good. In short, black activists were held responsible for their own oppression, because they’d resisted it.

Plus there’s another axis. Black Power was largely a youth-based movement, and Bele is clearly older than Lokai. Lokai is presented as self-righteous and disdainful to the point of petulant. (“My need gave me the right to use the ship… I'm extremely tired, made so by your vindictive cross examinations. I will answer no more questions.”) While Bele is more calculating and tactical. In a scene reminiscent of Khan in ’Space Seed’ he becomes a dinner guest with Kirk and the officers. While Spock spies Lokai on the lower decks, orating agitation to the lower ranks. (We don’t see him, just his rabble-rousing shadow playing over his attentive audience.)

And these circumstances enforce themselves on the script, characterise the antagonists more closely than an instalment of ’Spy Vs. Spy’. Black Power casts itself into the drama. By this point in the decade it cannot be held back. But alas it doesn’t seize control of the script. The episode affects colour blindness, as part of a genuine attempts to portray race as an absurd and counter-productive thing to fight over. But what it really suffers from is privilege blindness.

Nor was this all that unusual. The Mothers of Invention song ’Trouble Every Day’ was recorded in 1966, after the earlier Watts Riots. And as we might expect from a radical underground band, themselves mixed race at a time when that was still unusual, there’s more sympathy for the causes of the riots. (It includes the line “I’m not black but there’s whole lots of times I wish I could say I’m not white.”) But it still slips into the same both-sides equivalence of “race riots”, as if black and white gangs were at one another like the Sharks and Jets.

“And all that mass stupidity
“That seems to grow more every day
“Each time you hear some nitwit say
“He wants to go and do you in
“Cause the color of your skin
“Just don't appeal to him
“(No matter if it's black or white)
“Because he's out for blood tonight”

Then years later, in 1979, the radical anarcho-punk band Crass sang “Pogo on a nazi, spit upon a jew/Vicious mindless violence that offers nothing new.” As if Nazism and being Jewish were equivalent things. Racism runs deep because privilege blindness runs deeper.

A perpetual awkwardness in the original ’Star Trek’ is whether it portrays a techno-utopian future we should aspire to, or presents us with our ugly reflection in a distorting mirror. Which is both good and bad. The difference between it and ’Next Gen’ isn’t so much that the sequel show is more utopian, as that it’s so goddamned ordered. (At it’s worst, watching ’Next Gen’ feels like being inculcated into a cult.) ’Star Trek’ shows a more volatile Federation in a more volatile universe. And at times that tension becomes creative. Whereas at others… well, it turns out like this.

Also, there’s perhaps an inherent problem with the planet as parable trope... It can externalise what it wants to symbolise. The foreign planet is put in place to reflect aspects of us, including ones we might not want to look at. But if the resemblance gets too close we can always push the planet away – turn it back into just a story, set in a galaxy far away. And ’Battlefield’ highlights that, all but encouraging us to push away.

And it may be significant for that to come to a head in this episode. To this day racism is too often seen as “primitive thinking”, the opposite of having gone to college. But history tells us the opposite. The racial categories we now have were developed in the colonial era, and racism is perpetuated in order to have a sub-class who can have the worst work dumped on them. Its basis lies not in instinct but economics. Its best challenged by political struggle, not awaiting some mooted year of Enlightenment when all will change.

The other element of “primitive thinking” is that it assumes we choose to be or not to be racist, the way we choose to put out our recycling. The idea that racism might exist in structures of power is acknowledged, but then dismissed as unimportant. White folks such as myself might oppose racism, might even attend Black Lives Matter marches. But white privilege still sticks to us, whether we acknowledge it or not. We have been planted in Bele’s soil.

As we saw last time, white hippies can steal starships, endanger galactic peace treaties and nearly kill the entire crew. And Kirk will respond by saying “I used to get into a little trouble when I was that age, didn’t you?” But if you’re black, even if you’re black only down the one side, expect a less indulgent response from people with rank. Even in fiction. Even in liberal fiction.

Coming soon! Is it possible, do you think, that ’Star Trek’ was ever sexist? No, hear me out…