Neverending Frontier: Star Trek's Rejection of Utopia

 

 

THE  NEVERENDING  FRONTIER

Star Trek’s Rejection of Utopia

 

K. J. L. Kjeldsen

I.             Introduction   

II.          Wagon Train to the Stars

III.       The Cage & The Paradox of Progress

IV.        The Way Out of Eden

V.           God in the Machine

VI.        Conclusion: Enemies Within

I. Introduction

            “Star Trek speaks to some basic human needs: that there is a tomorrow — it's not all going to be over with a big flash and a bomb; that the human race is improving; that we have things to be proud of as humans. No, ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids — human beings built them, because they're clever and they work hard. And Star Trek is about those things.”

                        -- Gene Roddenberry[1]

            All too often, we hear the description, “utopian”, in the popular discourse surrounding Star Trek. One can easily glean from the title of this essay that would I take issue with that characterization of the show. On the contrary, the underlying thesis of Star Trek (1966), the original television series created by Gene Roddenberry, is that utopia is impossible, and man needs an endless frontier to be happy.

Numerous voices in popular culture take exactly the opposite view of the series’ significance. In the popular interpretation that is now very familiar, Star Trek’s significance is its boldness in portraying a future for mankind that is better than our present. It is a future in which mankind attains to all the ideals that we in liberal, democratic society claim to believe in, but to which we can never measure up. These observations about the spirit of the show, stated in the most general sense, are not wrong. The devil is, as always, in the details.

There is a real difference between a view of the future that is optimistic about mankind’s ability to solve problems, and a view of the future that is utopian. Even if all or most commenters don’t use the term “utopian”, we often see a regard for the Earth depicted in Star Trek as a preferable end-state for society. The terms, “post-scarcity” is often used. Furthermore, Gene Roddenberry’s positive view of our future is often contrasted with the notable dystopian works of science fiction of the 1960’s and 70’s, and thus the connotation has stuck.
            For one example, we might look to the discussion of the “Amazing Economics of Star Trek”, held at a New York Comic Con event on October 11^th, 2015[2] – where Noble Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argued against the idea that the post-scarcity society depicted in Star Trek would necessarily lead to a utopia. The various panelists all made their critiques of the show, challenging whether it truly was a “utopian society”. I cite this example as illustrative because all of the panelists took it for granted that the show did intend to portray a utopian vision. That is why they felt compelled to engage in a critique of that idea. They accepted the underlying premise: that Star Trek is an attempt at representing a utopian future for mankind, created by a post-scarcity economy.

To the extent that they criticized this idea, the panelists did so by pointing out aspects of the show that ran astray of their idea of what constituted utopia. The problem, quite simply, was that the panelists’ own ideas of utopia did not match with Star Trek. No one questioned the central idea, and raised the issue of whether or not the show was ever intended as a portrayal of utopianism. And certainly, no one argued that the central thesis of the show was a rejection of utopia.[3]
            The anti-utopian message of the original series of Star Trek is usually stated outright by the characters. Given this, I’m not sure why this element of the show has been erased. Perhaps, for many, it is trivial to make a distinction between what one might call a positive, or optimistic view – descriptions that I believe can be justifiably applied to Star Trek – and a utopian point of view – which I believe Star Trek rejects. But I think it is important to make this distinction. The show’s thesis includes the assertion that progress is possible – which is no more outrageous a claim than the inverse. A collapse into anarchy or degeneration into tyranny is always equally possible. Star Trek does not claim that such progress is inevitable, and more importantly, it does not claim that such progress can ever be “complete”, for whatever that might mean.

            The issue is made blurry whenever Star Trek is held up in contrast to apocalyptic or dystopian sci-fi books, films, and series such as 1984, Soylent Green, Mad Max, or Battlestar Galactica. It is easy enough to say that Star Trek puts forward a belief in the better angels of our nature, whereas the dystopic sci-fi storytellers never thought this would be enough. If Star Trek stands in contrast to the dystopian, then it is, at the very least, “more” utopian – so the thinking goes. But that is obviously a very fallacious assumption, and should be rejected.
            As Gene Roddenberry said of his show, it is supposed to speak to, “a basic human need”. Star Trek for Roddenberry was not a far-flung, ideological thought experiment, but simply the statement that mankind could have a future, in which we all survived the existential challenges of the 20^th century. Naturally, after overcoming that set of problems, new ones would present themselves. It is not a claim of the show that human beings are inherently good, or that a state of affairs can be reached where there are no problems, or that human beings will ever achieve perfection in running society.[4]

To assert that humanity has the capacity to solve the problems which face us now is not a utopian position. It is simply the level of self-confidence one needs in order to attempt to tackle any problem. Without some hope that the problem is solvable, a sense of helplessness sets in. We need not reduce to utopian the simple claim that our current problems are solvable with the right amount of ingenuity and willpower, even when they seem daunting.

            I would include even the existential questions that challenge our very way of life: climate change, the vast environmental destruction wrought on our planet, the oppressive systems which cause people to live in immiseration. Just as humanity has the capacity to give in to our basest instincts and crumple in the face of these challenges, we also have the capacity to conquer them.

            Certainly, the easier position to defend is that mankind will fail. Star Trek rejects the utopian view, but it just as well rebukes this dystopian view in science fiction. Dystopian portrayals of mankind’s future are a valuable tool that should serve as a warning to us, or a call to vigilance, in order to prevent such a hellscape. But without the positive counter-view, that mankind will flourish, the dystopic view turns to poison. Purely dystopic storytelling propagates an attitude of anxiety, impotence and defeatism. This will, ironically, only serve to beckon the dystopia forth, and thus makes such art entirely self-defeating as a means of instilling vigilance.

 

            In the mythology of Star Trek, Earth has survived the most horrific war it had ever seen, in which tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of people died, many of them in nuclear strikes.[5] After the horrors of WWIII, the planet’s various peoples somehow managed to reorganize their societies out of the chaos into a single, global alliance. Poverty, hunger, and most diseases were eradicated by new advancements in technology; those same advancements eventually brought mankind into the stars to explore the galaxy.

            This all may seem quite fantastic to us, but our own ways of life would seem quite fantastic to any homo erectus dwelling on the savannah. The moral universe of Star Trek is very much in favor of the project of civilization, and the Enlightenment ideals that mankind can achieve intellectual, biological, and social liberation through greater knowledge, and through the command of science. In the fictional history of the Star Trek universe, there were of course pitfalls, and countless mistakes made.  The Federation is often portrayed as flawed and somewhat bureaucratic from the very beginning. The admirals, and even the Federation Council, often seem out of touch with reality. But the show is premised on the idea that institutions can be functional, that the state can embody a moral position, and that it can enact that position with at least an attempt at consistency, and finally that people can be trusted to be productive without the bootheel of scarcity at their throats.

            There are drawbacks to each of these positions, as there are advantages and disadvantages to almost every way of doing things. Moral quandaries arise from the contradiction between the characters’ desires to commit wholeheartedly to their ethical code, and the practical realities of their duty. But on the whole, Star Trek argues that this is not a losing battle, and that the continued commitment to a given ethos will eventually bear fruit in the form of real, positive change, even if there is suffering along the way, and sacrifices are made in getting there.

And perhaps most importantly, it is not the “getting there” that is the point. Sorry to get all ‘space hippie’ on you, man – but the happiness is in the journey.
           
            Before we go any further, I should explain what this essay isn’t. I will not be examining the entirety of Star Trek in all the franchise’s various incarnations. When one takes into account everything which has been made with the name Star Trek, and included in the broader mythology of the series, what one finds cannot be said to be a single, coherent, artistic vision. To be sure, there was a continuity of leadership over the direction of the show that existed across multiple incarnations of the franchise, with some of the same producers such as Rick Berman, Michael Pillar and others taking over after Gene Roddenberry died. One could argue that it’s possible for later writers, even those who had no personal or professional connection whatsoever with Roddenberry, to nevertheless grasp the central ideas of the show and write within the same moral universe. It is certainly possible that there can be an artistic continuity to the property, even as a commercial franchise.

But we should still expect to find a multitude of ideas and interpretations of the core ideas of the show among its writers. Every artist is a different chimera of styles, techniques, and moral opinions. The artistic perspectives of multiple people, when applied to a commercial franchise over many decades, will inevitably produce a show with unrelated and sometimes conflicting messages.

As such, there are perhaps episodes from other shows in the franchise that have a utopian message in a real sense. One might be able to find numerous plot points or underlying morals in later Star Trek series to contradict or challenge the case put forward here.[6] The focus of this work is not to analyze and distill the artistic message behind all of Star Trek as a commercial franchise. I am solely concerned with the original series, which had a more coherent anti-utopian message than was ever portrayed by the later shows in the franchise (although, in the conclusion we will briefly touch on how this idea made its way into The Next Generation).

            This is not to say that the ethical and political consideration of the later shows were not significant – but that is simply the topic for another essay. But in order to even formulate a coherent view of the entire series, we have to examine each incarnation on its own terms. Only then will we be able to come up with an overarching narrative to describe the artistic trajectory of the show, and we must accept the possibility that certain artistic goals or decisions made in the original show may be now incommensurate with the artistic goals and decisions of the later shows.[7]

All in all, it is certainly a fun mental exercise for the fans to imagine all of a commercial franchise as part of a coherent, consistent mythos. But, in solely examining the first such outing in the series, we need not concern ourself with such frivolity. When Star Trek (1966-69) was created, it was the only entry in the series, and represented the entirety of the mythos and the moral universe of the franchise. That is how I will treat it here.
            I will, of course, have to draw a few conclusions about the intentions of Roddenberry or the rationale behind his moral aims contained in his storytelling. The intention is to focus on the content of the text as primary, whenever possible. First, however, we will consider the show’s inception, and the cultural background in which Star Trek emerged.

 

            The characters portrayed in Star Trek[8], notably, do not live in a utopia. They certainly do not exist in a cinematic universe that exists without problems. Nearly every episode portrays the crew confronting monumental and horrifying problems. Often these are existential threats to the Enterprise crew, or sometimes even to humanity itself.

            Mankind is portrayed in Star Trek as somewhat more ‘enlightened’ than the people of today – however subjective such a statement may be. But man is also a sort of inherently driven creature, and an irrational creature at that. Often, mankind is the cause of its own troubles. The problems the crew encounter are often caused by mankind: by our exploration into new worlds, or by new technologies, or by humanity gaining a new power.
            A masterful idea in the show’s presentation of mankind is the contrast with the hyper-rational Vulcans. And yet, the Vulcan to whom we are most accustomed is Mr. Spock, who is half-human. Spock’s character, with his human mother, cannot ever properly measure up to the demands of total logic. There is still too much that is human in him – and plenty that is human about the alien species encountered, who oftentimes bear little make-up to designate them as alien, or sometimes no make-up at all, appearing simply as humans with funny clothing. Often, they quite obviously mirror elements of the human psyche or represent a past form of society or culture on Earth.[9]
            Mankind’s problems are eternally caused by his inquisitiveness. Any of the main characters could choose to simply remain on Earth, after all. On Earth, there is no hunger, medical science has taken care of most of the diseases, and human beings mostly focus on creativity and self-improvement. In spite of their apparently paradisiacal home planet, Star Trek portrays humans that have chosen to leave that comfortable existence and strike out into the unknown.

            None of this should be surprising. A good story requires that there still be problems, obstacles, conflict. It’s boring when all the problems have been solved. These characters out in deep space are far more interesting to us than a portrayal of the day-to-day affairs on 23^rd century Earth would be. While one might chalk this up to the demands of producing a weekly television program, this would be simply an avoidance of the real question that such an observation ought to raise. For if we, the audience, do not wish to see a utopia portrayed – because this would be boring – what does this say about us? Do we really want utopia? Or is there something within mankind that demands conflict?

We devote so much time and energy toward improving our society, making it safer, more comfortable, and more equal – but in the end, we can never be satisfied, and would actually find the elimination of all conflict and challenge to be unsatisfying, by definition. The meaning of life is found in the act of overcoming challenges, but this sense of meaning vanishes as soon as the challenge is defeated.

 

II. Wagon Train to the Stars

There is an idea behind Star Trek that might be regarded as uncomfortable by many of the fans of the series today – but we cannot really understand Star Trek without addressing it. This idea is known in American history as, “The Closing of the Frontier”.

In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau broadcast that the western frontier of the country was now closed. What this meant, in practical terms, is that there were no longer any tracts of land without settlers. The Indian Wars had mostly ground to a halt by then, aside from a few scattered conflicts in the ensuing decades. There was no longer a wilderness within the borders of the United States, or any kind of organized Native American polity to fight. The genocide and forced relocation of the Native Americans had reached completion for all practical considerations. The West Coast was now connected to the East by railroads that girdled the countryside. In a word, “The Wild West” was now, formally, tame.

A few historians have written of the profound effect that this had on the American psyche. The first serious outbursts of overseas colonialism from the United States began directly after this period. America looked out across the waters, and began to claw away colonies from the now weak and decrepit Spanish Empire. The occupation of the Philippines that would ensue was horrific in its violence and racism. But we must note the timing: effectively, the United States had exhausted its frontier at home and now relocated that frontier, halfway across the world, on the other side of the Pacific, into the jungles around Manilla.

During the late 1800’s, the greatest excesses of capitalism were allowed in the United States, which produced the period or extreme inequality known as The Gilded Age. An accompanying ideology of radical individualism became ascendant. This produced a reaction in the form of the labor union movement, and the widespread civil unrest of the early 1900’s. Eventually, the lasseiz-faire consensus fell out of favor, and was replaced by an era of progressivism. Individualism became deeply inculcated into American culture nevertheless, and a large part of this was because of the frontier.

The individualist mythos in America was based on the notion that any man could make his own way. This had been embraced by the working populace because of the days of the old west, when such a notion was, arguably, true. One could take his family out into the wilderness, and settle it. The United States had possessed in abundance what many European nations squabbled over constantly: land. With a surplus of land, America could actually bring itself to believe in the story of the self-made person. With a government to incentivize and fund their settlement of the west, and government subsidy of the railroads, many people were able to live a largely individualistic existence. Or they could return to an idyllic lifestyle in a small, rural community, rather than a crowded, polluted city.

Most importantly, what was offered was not simply land, but a way of life. American life on the frontier was difficult and day-to-day survival posed a challenge. One felt the connection between their own actions and their success in life. Truly, many people failed – due sometimes to poor decisions, but also due to bad luck – but the possibility to live a self-sustaining and truly free life out on the frontier nevertheless allured.

 

What collective story could America tell itself when all that free land evaporated? After the frontier closed, it is not as if there wasn’t still plenty of living space, and cheap property. And, following WWII and F.D.R.’s New Deal programs, much of the popular immiseration created by The Gilded Age was mitigated. The Postwar wealth was distributed at least somewhat throughout the populace[10], through measures such as the G.I. Bill.

The Postwar decades of the 1950’s and 1960’s thus represented the promise of a wealthy, strong, and confident society. And yet, there was a deep conflict in the American mind. It was the yearning for the challenge of new frontiers. This yearning was all the more deeply felt in a world where all the frontiers had gone away, and most everything was now divided between two giant superpowers. The individual felt increasingly insignificant and absurd in the face of the grand geopolitics, and the rapidly accelerating pace of technological advancement. 

The western was a genre in radio, television and film that became incredibly popular in the Postwar years. Gunsmoke is the perennial exemplar of such a program. It began as a series of radio plays, then ran on television. It lasted from 1955 until 1975 was until recently the longest running scripted television series[11]. In the show, Matt Dillon is the reserved, honorable sheriff, who takes on the challenge of bringing law and order to the frontier out of a sense of duty. The show perfectly encapsulates the idea of a single man with a gun being able to enforce a higher moral or societal ideal. 

 

James Arness as Gunsmoke's Matt Dillon

As the saying goes, “God made man, but Sam Colt made man equal.” In the moral universe of the western, an individual’s responsibility is significant, and his power to change the world for good or for evil is tangible. The small-scale societies portrayed in the westerns, and the power of any man (or woman) to strike someone dead with the all-powerful firearm, made these settings ideal for a morality play. Through this type of storytelling, the western reinforced the ideology of individualism.

This individualism was embraced in the popular culture because of the need to distinguish Americans from the collectivist countries of China and the Soviet Union. I would argue, however, that the appeal of these settings in popular culture as a means of escape existed for the very reason that the individualist dream was lacking. The ethos of the self-made person was questionable even in America. The open frontier was gone; now the American dream existed in the Suburbs. The Suburbs were more sparsely packed than the cities, but nothing like the free and open spaces of the old frontiers. Life was safe now, and existed within the auspices of an all-encompassing law and order. Infrastructure, built during the New Deal and afterwards, both improved Americans’ lives and made them dependent on the system.

By the mid-1950’s, the idea of forging your own destiny out in the wilderness as a solitary, confident individual, or as part of a small band – had become, for all intents and purposes, a fantasy. And thus, the western filled this role of escapist fantasy for the American population, and the stories of Matt Dillon, or some other firm-jawed cowboy, were beamed into their homes every night.

 

During the latter half of this zeitgeist, Gene Roddenberry pitched a science fiction television series, called Star Trek. But according to Roddenberry, he didn’t pitch it as science fiction. The way that he sold the show to the executives was by comparing it to the likes of westerns like Gunsmoke and Wagon Train; he described Star Trek as a “Wagon Train to the Stars”. In effect, Roddenberry tried to portray the initial idea of Star Trek as a western in space. Roddenberry had experience in writing westerns; he had written for “Have Gun – Will Travel”, for example. It was not so much of a stretch for him to conceive of a ‘space western’.

The setting of the series was a vessel, traveling the galaxy, instead of a stationary settlement. This idea had been rattling around in Roddenberry’s head for a few years at this point. He was a fan of the Horatio Hornblower novels, involving a sea captain and his crew. He’d also pitched concepts to the producers involving the crew of both a seafaring vessel in one proposed show, and the multi-ethnic crew of an airship in another. Roddenberry’s time and in the airforce and interest in sci-fi eventually transformed the concept into Star Trek. Elements common to the western and these other influences are: the total self-reliance of the protagonists, who live where there is neither law nor order other than themselves; the morality play as the usual story form; the protagonist who upholds his principles no matter what.

The opening narration is so iconic that it almost does not bear repeating; on the other hand, perhaps we can think of the show’s western influence when considering it:

            “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

 

            Roddenberry has sometimes alleged that he simply had to frame Star Trek as “Wagon Train to the Stars” because the executives wouldn’t have accepted such a high concept sci-fi show otherwise. The idea of a realistic depiction of human beings living and working in space – and in a post-racial and more equal society, no less! – scandalized the network, at least according to Roddenberry’s insinuations. On the other hand, Inside Star Trek by producers Solow and Justman suggests that the NBC executives loved having a show as smart and sophisticated as Star Trek on their network, and that this is why they were willing to continue the show for three years in spite of lackluster ratings and expensive production costs. Whatever the truth may be, it seems doubtful that the comparison of Star Trek to a western is simply a byproduct of Roddenberry tricking the executives. The opening narration by Kirk, played before every episode, seems to belie this assumption.

            Kirk’s opening narration has continued to be one of the most widely recognizable memes from the franchise. The term, “The Final Frontier”, in reference to space, is now ubiquitous in our culture. If we take the idea of Star Trek as a space western seriously, however, it would make the interpretation of show’s ideal of a “utopia” strange to say the least – and in fact, we would be forced to say that if the show is utopian, it is so in the same way Ragnarok might be utopian to a Viking.

Taken through to its logical conclusions, the idea of space as the ultimate frontier for mankind synthesizes the contradiction: between Star Trek as the depiction of an ideal society, and Star Trek as an attack on utopianism. The frontier is the ideal situation for mankind, and some not technocratically-planned terrarium. This means that the ideal situation is struggle, conflict, challenge.

 

            C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels, as mentioned, were similarly influential. Roddenberry alternatively described Captain Kirk as “Horatio Hornblower in space”. In Forester’s novels, an intrepid sea captain and his crew sail on distant missions. Far away from civilization, the captain is often the sole authority tasked with legal and moral decisions, with the lives of his entire crew in his hands. This description might seem to fit more with the popular consciousness view of Kirk’s successor, Picard – but this is just another injustice done to the original series of Star Trek by the popular interpretations. 

Gegory Peck as Horatio Hornblower (1951)

 

Captain Kirk is often discussed in the popular consciousness as a reckless womanizer. This sort of confusion is just as bad the descriptions of Star Trek as utopian. 2009’s reboot film is somewhat to blame for this rebellious, hormone-driven Kirk, though this mischaracterization existed before that. But if we watch the show with fresh eyes, one notices that Captain Kirk rarely makes rash decisions, consults and listens to his crew, involves his crew in the decision-making process, and struggles with both his morality and the demands of his post.[12]

            Captain Kirk is therefore the “individual” in the show – the central protagonist who takes up more screen time than any other character, and is only rivaled by Spock in this regard. The central triad of Kirk, Spock and McCoy is featured so consistently that some fans have suggested that they occupy the roles of the superego, the ego and the id. However one wishes to interpret things, there is clearly a model of the rational subject and his decision-making processes when it comes to the commanding officer and his two closest friends. But this individualism is tempered with the recognition of mankind’s advancement as a collective project. The ship depicted is one that exists as a community, who share a common set of values. They are hierarchical, yes, and meritocratic. But the crew of the Enterprise shares a common destiny, and lives or dies by the action or inaction of those around them. The project of the Enterprise is larger than any one individual, and their ideals mean more to them than material gain. The contradiction between collectivism and individualism is one of the core conflicts within liberalism as an ideology. Star Trek is, among many other things, an attempt to synthesize the ideals of individualism and collectivism.

            The dream of Star Trek, then, is the dream that mankind can get over its intraspecies problems by directing its energies outward, into the stars. The stars are, in effect, an infinite frontier – one that will never be closed because it can never all be settled. Space offers new challenges and conflicts in the form of encounters with unusual and hostile alien species. Space is so vast that, conceivably, mankind could go out into its depths to explore forever… and settle forever; colonize forever.

            When we survey the episodes of the original series, we find that human settlers, peacefully colonizing uninhabited planets to either farm them or mine them, is a recurring theme. In “Mudd’s Women”, the crew is forced to seek the aid of a colony of lithium miners: hard, disagreeable men who have chosen to live outside civilization. In “Conscience of the King”, Kirk recalls his own upbringing on a colony of a few thousand people (albeit an upbringing that ended horrifically). The famous episode, “Arena”, begins with the destruction of a human colony in deep space by a threatening species of lizard people. We also see deep space colonists in “This Side of Paradise”, and a company involved in deep space mining in “Devil in the Dark”. The fan favorite episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles”, while mostly involving hijinks with the cuddly infestation of tribbles on both space station K-7 and the Enterprise, takes place against the backdrop of the Federation’s obligation to prove that it can develop and ‘improve’ a neutral, uninhabited planet, which will assure that they gain custody of the coveted land on the planet, instead of the Klingons.

            The show even draws a distinction between colonizing – in the nonviolent style of the Federation – and conquest, in the episode “By Any Other Name”. Kirk argues with the Kelvan invaders from the Andromeda galaxy that they need not find a new home by conquest, and offers the prospect of colonizing a world as an alternative. Rojan, the Kelvan commander rebukes him: “We do not colonize. We conquer. We rule. There is no other way for us.”

            My description of the show in these terms is not meant as a moral indictment of Star Trek. Indeed, the kind of “colonizing” that, for example, the British or the Belgians attempted in Africa, or the genocidal Indian wars of America’s past, would qualify as “conquest” and not merely “colonization”, at least in the way Kirk and Rojan use the terms. The entire pretext of the Federation’s expansion is that there is plenty of room for everyone, and therefore they can peacefully colonize uninhabited worlds. When the Federation discovers, as they do in “Devil in the Dark”, that they’ve accidentally intruded into the home of an intelligent native species, they attempt to reconcile, and come to an agreement with the species, rather than conquer them or wipe them out.

            Nevertheless, there is still a dark side to colonization that will always be there, because it is driven by man’s insatiable hunger for overcoming opposition, expanding, growing. The desire for endless expansion is arguably rooted in instincts for domineering, predatory behavior. Cecil Rhodes, the infamous businessman who made himself rich in the British colonies in Africa, once wrote in his journal:

 

“The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach, I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”[13]

 

Reading this, I cannot help but think that this insatiable hunger expressed by Rhodes is itself an indelible part of the “frontier spirit” that so captivated the Americans of the 1960’s and today – and also cannot help but wonder what Rhodes would have thought of Star Trek. We can confront that the historical frontier was such a violent place, and that the conflicts on the frontier were historically fueled by racism and imperial ambitions, but also be generous to the show in granting that this sort of frontier is not what Roddenberry wanted. Perhaps this is wanting to ‘have your cake and eat it too’, and perhaps that was Roddenberry’s utopianism, if I am to permit that he had some form of utopianism: a frontier without horrors such as genocide.

Whether this is possible in actuality is beside the point. The American psyche needed a frontier to believe in. While it was popular in those days to project that frontier into the past, onto the “old west”, and escape into fantasies of a bygone age of freedom, we must recognize this as a form of romanticism. Roddenberry’s show was a suggestion of a future frontier as better than the past frontiers. Rather than obfuscating the violent details of a storied past so that we may escape into an idealized version of history, we would instead turn our imaginations towards future horizons. This is the simple reversal Roddenberry was attempting. It didn’t work, obviously, as Star Trek was a complete flop when it first aired. By the time the series returned in the form of a cinematic universe, the popular culture had abandoned the western and Star Trek was now one of many ‘space’ franchises: it was now slotted into a different category of entertainment and was perceived with a different emotional and intellectual lens.

As to whether or not mankind ought to want a frontier at all, in my opinion, is a foolish question that we can lay aside. We may be kind to the human race in recognizing ourselves as animals: it is in our very nature to be violent, tribal creatures who are driven to endlessly struggle for land and resources.

Star Trek recognizes these irrational drives in mankind as integral to our being. The show’s answer to this problem, as regards the dual-nature of mankind, is quite in line with the Enlightenment roots of liberal society: by conscious reflection, we can simultaneously embrace our baser instincts whilst using reason to transcend them. As Kirk says, in the episode, A Taste of Armageddon, “We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes.”

 

 

 

III. The Cage & The Paradox of Progress

           

The idea of a neverending state of contentment – a state of joy that is also static, in which state one wants for nothing – is impossible. While moments of joy exist (for most of us anyway), they are not permanent and cannot be sustained forever. It seems that, neurologically, the brain’s experience of happiness is based on the feeling of having a valued goal towards which one is working. Without this experience – of a goal, of work to be done, of progress – whatever it is that we call happiness cannot exist.[14]
            The theory behind Star Trek agrees: mankind is driven. Illogically driven, even. We have to grow. Isn’t that the nature of life? –  To grow, to develop, to expand, to explore, to create.

Call it what we may, but nature dictates that stagnation is not an option. One may choose between growing and decaying, but cannot choose to remain in stasis. Whenever the possibility of a static state of contentment presents itself, it represents a degeneration rather than an advancement. It is on these grounds that Star Trek attacks utopianism, and particularly the doctrine of romanticism, which promises the return to a simpler, easier, more desirable past.

            To reformulate this central thesis of the show another way, Star Trek has identified what we might call the paradox of progress. What we shall call progress is the development of new technologies. For our purposes, this refers to scientific as well as social or cultural technologies (new social ideas, new forms of governance, new ways of life). The paradox is that technology exists to serve man’s needs, but the better it serves individual needs, the more it erodes man’s general need. Man’s general need is to be useful, productive, powerful. The better the new technology is, the more effectively it serves the specific need for which it is created, and the more needs it eliminates, the more dangerous a given technology is.

This produces a Catch-22. If we accept this trajectory for technology, then the servant becomes the master, and technology becomes more powerful than we are. Mankind becomes obsolete. To stand still is not an option – for man must keep moving, expanding his frontiers. And to turn the clock back will instead harm mankind in other ways.

There is always a backlash against any sort of progress – sometimes for ignorant reasons, but sometimes for good reasons. Whenever mankind attains new knowledge, technology, or power, this achievement always brings with it a constituent danger of the misuse of said knowledge, technology, or power. Advances which at the time seem to be unmitigated positives have disastrous long-term effects. There is always an accompanying countercurrent to progress: a yearning for a regression, to when things were “simpler”. This is an act of selective remembering. Advocating for regression almost always involves forgetting about the problems of yesteryear (the ones we solved), since the problems we experience in the present always seem more oppressive than the problems we did not personally have to endure. Sometimes this is an act of hubris, as man designs systems that he imagines will somehow allow for the regression into the idyllic past state, but with none of the drawbacks.

However one conceives of their romanticism, the rejection of progress ultimately has the same result as following technological progress through to its natural conclusions. In both the complete dependency on technology, and the romantic return to the simple life, mankind ceases to grow or change. The result, of course, is that no one can be truly happy, because in a state of stasis, the process of exercising power upon the world in order to shape one’s own destiny is now lacking.

            The paradox of progress is exemplified by the civilizations and human colonies often encountered by the crew, who have advanced to the point of eliminating all labor, conflict or want. In this paradisiacal state, the inhabitants begin to atrophy. Their physical bodies become frail. Eventually they forget the knowledge that advanced their society in the first place. And yet, because the state of paradise is pleasant, and the frontier is unpleasant, the inhabitants of paradise are always pushed by their pleasure-seeking drives to remain in stasis.

            It is worth noting that the problem of progress as it is depicted in Star Trek does not take a view of technology akin to, for example, Terminator. In Terminator, the danger depicted is the possibility of technology becoming murderous and destroying us. Star Trek usually does not take this approach (there are some exceptions). Rather, Star Trek depicts civilizations that have been defeated by their own triumph. Again: technology is dangerous because it does its job too well. We continually rise to the challenge of new innovations in technology, but those innovations make our lives easier, more comfortable, and thus less satisfying. We get progressively less happy. Eventually, we have to escape into fantasy in order to deal with our reality.

             

 

The Cage

 

Episode 0x01

Production number: 6149-01

First aired: 4 October 1988

 

Written by

Gene Roddenberry

 

Directed by

Robert Butler

 

            These themes are fleshed out in the very first episode: the first pilot that was filmed in 1964, but never aired in its entirety until 1988. As is commonly known, it was rejected by the network. In “The Cage”, Jeffrey Hunter stars as Captain Christopher Pike. In the mid-season two-parter entitled “The Menagerie”, footage from the pilot was used in flashback, establishing the events of the episode as taking place eleven years prior to Kirk’s tenure on the Enterprise.

In “The Cage”, Mr. Spock is a member of Pike’s bridge crew – though he is not quite as emotionless and stoic in his portrayal as in the rest of the series, as his character is not yet fully developed. Majel Barrett portrayed the second in command of the Enterprise, called simply, Number One. Her character was envisioned as coldly logical and in control of her emotions, as Spock would later be portrayed. The network dismissed the idea of a female first officer, however, as one of their many criticisms of the first pilot.
            The plot of the episode concerns a conflict between the crew of the Enterprise and a race called the Talosians. After picking up a distress signal from an Earth ship that crash landed on Talos two decades prior, the crew investigates the planet. The Talosians are masterful telepaths, who can create illusions so complete that they involve all of one’s sensations, and so perfect as to be indistinguishable from reality. It’s speculated by the crew that they could easily destroy any ship that came into their orbit by simply making someone believe that they were going about their normal routine while they were actually arming the self-destruct mechanism.
            While on the planet’s surface, Captain Pike is kidnapped, and put in a cell with a young, beautiful woman named Vina. She is a human, and crashed on Talos with the ill-fated expedition. It quickly becomes clear that the Talosians want Pike as breeding stock, and what follows are all manner of powerful illusions to entice Pike into wanting to stay on their planet and make offspring.

            Pike’s character arc in “The Cage” concerns an onset of world-weariness, and a subsequent disinterest in exploration. While having a drink with the ship’s doctor, Pike questions whether he wants to continue on as a starship captain. The responsibility of commanding a starship has begun to weigh heavily upon him. In the face of the stress of wielding such immense power, and the dangers of the frontier, Pike is looking instead to return to stability.
            Pike’s crew has just taken losses after a recent battle. He wants to get to the nearest colony and deal with their own sick and wounded, and uses this as rationale to initially ignore the distress call from Talos. He confesses to his doctor that he’s imagined leaving the service. Pike describes his hometown:
            “Nice little town with 50 miles of parkland around it,” he says, wistfully. “Have I told you I have two horses?”
            The doctor ridicules the idea of a man like Pike, an adventurous starship captain to the very core, returning to the simple life on Earth. Pike, somewhat angrily, suggests instead the idea of his becoming a trader, maybe “on the Orion colonies”. The doctor pegs this for a fantasy of living in luxury on an exotic planet – a place where morality is lax and hedonism is the rule. Pike has lost the taste for the frontier and now is taken with the desire for a static existence. Implicitly, it will be an existence ruled by material comforts and pleasure. Hedonism will fill the void where purpose in life is lacking. The doctor tries to dissuade him, but Pike’s mind seems made up.

           
            After the Talosians capture Pike, the fantasies that the Talosians offer involve the idyllic existence he mentioned earlier to his doctor: it is the first enticement they conjure up, in fact. Suddenly, instead of a dark cell, he is in his hometown, with a picnic lunch and his two horses. Vina is there with him, desperate for him to immerse himself in the fantasy.

When Pike is able to resist giving himself up to that illusion, he is then shown the possibility of a life of luxury on Orion, with Vina playing the green Orion slave woman. Their attempts to entice Pike therefore feed into his desire for a simple, comfortable way of life. Both the Talosians and Vina argue that, since the illusion is indistinguishable from reality, this should be the fulfillment of Pike’s wish.
            “Suppose you had all of space to choose from,” says one of the characters in Pike’s illusory palace, created by the Talosians. “And this was only one small sample.”

Another chimes in:

 

“Wouldn’t you say it was worth a man’s soul?” 

 

 

            When the Talosians wish to punish Pike with negative reinforcement, he is made to relive the ambush on their last mission that led to the deaths of several of his crew. His aversion to trials and challenges of exploration – his weariness, are weaponized against him. At one point, the Talosians seemingly transport Pike to hell, or at least some kind of burning, sulfurous pit. “From a fable you once heard in childhood,” the Talosian Keeper says.             

            Nevertheless, Pike resists the Talosians. He objects that none of it is real, and that he would know this no matter how real the Talosians make these illusions seem. He staunchly commits to a difference between the objective, material world, and mere appearances. Furthermore, Pike has a deeper problem with his situation, as he pleads with Vina to understand, “We're in a menagerie, a cage!” Pike simply has an illogical need for freedom that will never be satisfied by the facsimile of a vast, open field, or an empire to command, or whatever else. There is no facsimile of freedom.

  Pike eventually discovers that it is strong emotion – particularly strong negative emotion – which has some degree of disruptive affect on the Talosian’s powers. He stirs himself up into emotional states of rage or hatred in order to negate their control over him. This is met with punishment, where the Talosians use their telepathy to cause the physical sensation of pain. The Keeper’s understanding of things appears to nothing more than operant conditioning: the carrot and the stick. The societal system as managed by a series of rewards and punishments, imagined by B.F. Skinner, is in a sense the ultimate technocratic approach to governance. Arguably, this ideology guides the behavior of the most extremely authoritarian and technocratic regimes today, such as China.
            After various travails in Pike and his crew resisting the Talosians, the conflict is resolved, but not by the power of the protagonists. The Talosians simply realize their mistake in trying to imprison humans and expect them to behave themselves. The Talosians explain that it took them a long time to scan the Enterprise’s records (since they’re such an outdated technology), but once they were able to absorb all of the knowledge, the conclusion was clear. Pike and his crew are released. The Keeper explains:

            “The customs and history of your race show a unique hatred of captivity. Even when it's pleasant and benevolent, you prefer death. This makes you too violent and dangerous a species for our needs.”

            While it might be absurd to read a ‘unique hatred of captivity’ into the history of the human race, we might nevertheless take this as a description of the psyche of liberal society.

At this point, the “needs” of the Talosians bear some examining. The Talosian race is somewhat archetypal in Star Trek, insofar as their story would be told again and again in various other forms. Nevertheless, the thought experiment is the same: a society that has become so powerful in its mastery of a technology that they become fundamentally altered by that technology, become dependent upon it, and begin degenerating. Eventually, they start dying out.

In the case of the Talosians, the concept of a “technology” is represented by telepathy. Presumably they are also a technologically-advanced species, but telepathy is the means by which they effect the world around them. It is entirely a technique of the mind, and creates a world of the mind. The metaphor of the Talosian telepathy as technological progress is a metaphor that marries technology with an increasing intellectualism, a sense of strict rationality, as well as declining physical health and effectiveness. The hyper-realistic nature of their telepathic creations also bears comparison to modern technological distractions that simulate reality in some fashion, or otherwise entice people to spend more time in fantasy than in reality. Vina explains:

 

“They found it's a trap. Like a narcotic. Because when dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating.”

            The Talosian plan was that Pike and Vina (or one of his female crewmembers) stay and breed a new race of human beings for the Talosians to guide in their evolution. They say they need such a species to become craftsmen and artisans. The Talosians became so decadent as a species that they lost the knowledge of how to repair and maintain the machines and infrastructure that kept their society working.
            The surface is barren. Their population has seemingly declined to a few beings, albeit super-powered. With a kind of symbolism that is impossible to mistake, they are portrayed as thin and small of frame, but with disproportionately huge, pulsating brains. It’s only a courtesy to the humans that they communicate by speaking.
            This failed pilot episode foreshadows another fundamental conflict in Star Trek – the battle between logic and emotion – that becomes apparent here. The cold, deliberate Talosians are in stark contrast to the emotional and expressive Captain Pike, who literally uses strong emotion to nullify their powers. Thus, emotion is the magic boon in the hands of the hero. It is the violent emotions of humans that make them unfit to be slaves, and thus, it serves the source of deliverance in the episode.

 

 
            Number One, the logical and seemingly emotionless first officer, was the prototype for Spock’s character. Similarly, she is not actually devoid of emotion. “Although she seems to lack emotion, this is largely a pretense,” The Keeper says to Pike. “She often has fantasies involving you.”

            It can be safely inferred that Roddenberry wanted the second in command of the ship to be a person who is governed by reason and who projects professionalism, but who has deep passions churning under the surface. Note that he did not want this character to be the captain. Spock, similarly, is not strictly a “logical” character. His command of reason does make him one of the most powerful and valuable crewmembers. But his character is based on the control of emotions, not their absence. He has numerous losses in emotional control throughout the series, sometimes resulting in emotional meltdowns when the flood of emotions surges over the dam of logic. This internal conflict is Spock’s central character arc throughout the series. But because his character is centrally oriented around logic as a guiding principle – cut off from concerns of the emotions – he is generally shown to be unfit for command (see, for example, “The Galileo Seven”).

            Our passions – which are of the body, and of the material world – are meanwhile, held up by Roddenberry as an antidote to the calculating, wicked, detached logic of the Talosians, who have let their society decay while they cultivated abstractions and distractions. As the representatives of a potential future path for our society, they stand for all that can transpire when the only guiding principle is “rational self-interest”. The irony is that hedonism – a base existence involving the quenching of every desire and the fulfillment of every sense pleasure – is the perfectly reasonable thing for every organism to seek. While it may seem obvious to associate hedonism and sentimentality, it is not an “emotional” approach to life, per se, to seek pleasure.

            Thus, “The Cage” referred to in the title is not the physical cell in which Pike is held, nor the planet Talos, nor the illusions of the Talosians. “The Cage” is the allure of technology. It is the dream of utopia. It is the elimination of all of our problems so that human beings can exist in a state of comfort and stagnation. It is the desire to “Return to the Garden”, either by a regression to a more basic mode of living, or by complex, centralized social planning by means of the intellect.

“The Cage” that imprisons the human mind is story of Genesis. We are shackled by the idea that there is some paradise we are trying to get back to, which we do not really deserve, but to which we may gain entry if we behave ourselves according to some set of moral rules. The Garden which the Talosians offer Pike is, in Vina’s words, quite literal:

            “I'm a woman as real and as Human as you are. We're like Adam and Eve.”

            The other characters have a bit of comedic banter about this line during the final scene of the episode. But this line hints most strongly at the underlying thrust of “The Cage”: the Garden that the Talosians offer is an illusion. Becoming entranced by the desire for such an unreachable illusion would not be a new beginning, but the death of mankind.

 

Digital restoration of a photograph from the filming of "The Cage", by Great Bird of the Galaxy

 This particular metaphor is what I call “Inverted Genesis”, and it is one of the favorite narrative archetypes of the writers of Star Trek. Rather than taking place at the beginning of civilization, an Inverted Genesis story takes place at the end of civilization. Instead of being kicked out of paradise, mankind rejects paradise. In the Bible, the expulsion from paradise is portrayed as tragic: it is the original sin that man committed, for which all the work of salvation is done to deliver him. In Roddenberry’s Star Trek, as illustrated first in “The Cage”, the expulsion from paradise is a triumph. It is the defeat of a disembodied reason by the passions.

The passions do not discard reason, as man must also recognize reason as part of the whole self and his greatest tool on his journey. This self can only survive through transformations and integrations brought about by self-reflection. The core of the human being is the irrational longing for freedom, which makes him unable to live in any of the paradises that the intellect dreams up. Man must get over the Genesis story: that is the trade that he must make for his life. The frontier calls.

            As Pike says, earlier in the episode:

 

“You either live life – bruises, skinned knees and all – or you turn your back on it and start dying.”

 

 

 

IV.  The Way Out of Eden

 

“Mamua, there waits a land

Hard for us to understand.

Out of time, beyond the sun,

All are one in Paradise”

 

– Tiare Tahiti, by Rupert Brooke

 

Gardenia taitensis, also called Tahitian gardenia or tiaré flower

            The Inverted Genesis myth recurs again and again in Star Trek. While we have examined the core elements of this narrative archetype, “The Cage” is merely the first, prototypical example of such a story. In fact, the importance of the Genesis myth endures well into the cinematic adaptations of Star Trek. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the last film to feature the original cast in its entirety, Mr. Spock has an exchange with Lt. Valeris, a Vulcan who seems to have less experience with human culture. She inspects a somewhat abstract painting in Spock’s quarters.

 

            “I do not understand this representation,” Valeris says.

            “It is a depiction from ancient Earth mythology,” Spock answers. “The expulsion from paradise.”

            “Why keep it in your quarters?”

            “It is a reminder to me that all things end.” 

 

            Spock’s response to the expulsion from paradise may be a little too… well, logical, for human tastes. We need to see this attitude encapsulated in a narrative, in order to emotionally reorient ourselves towards Genesis. In Roddenberry’s interpretation, it is the Genesis myth that shackles us. Moving beyond this narrative of man’s origins and destiny is essential for the furthering of human life and dignity.

This is the main artistic/aesthetic project behind the original series of Star Trek: the stirring of positive emotions such as pride, dignity, and revelry, associated with the willful rejection of utopia. At the very least, man must gain an understanding of the necessity of the departure from Eden, and the impossibility of ever returning. Even if we cannot always celebrate our separation from wild nature, we must at least accept it, and kill the idea haunting our minds that the goal of life is to find a way back to Eden.

            We’ll now briefly examine the Inverted Genesis myth as a recurrent theme across all three seasons of the series. 

 

 

This Side of Paradise

 

 

Episode 1x25

Production number: 6149-25

First aired: 2 March 1967

Teleplay by

D.C. Fontana

 

Story by

Nathan Butler and D.C. Fontana

 

Directed by

Ralph Senensky

 

 

            In this episode, the Enterprise is dispatched to check on some colonists. This group of settlers founded an agricultural colony on a planet in deep space, on Omicron Ceti III. The Federation has discovered a new type of radiation that was unknown when the colony was first settled, and now realize that the colonists have been being bombarded by lethal radiation ever since they arrived on the planet. According to what the crew now knows, everyone on the colony should be long-dead by now.

But when Captain Kirk and his landing party beam down to the surface, they discover that everyone is still alive. In fact, the small settlement insists that they’re fine. Both the crew and the audience can sense that something isn’t right: for example, there are no farm animals. When Kirk asks the leader of the colony, Elias Sandoval, about the animals that were on their flight manifest, he brushes this off.

“We’re vegetarians,” he says.

            Sandoval expounds their way of life to Kirk. He explains that they have transitioned to a simpler, less technologically-driven lifestyle:

 

“Our philosophy is a simple one: that men should return to a less-complicated life. We have few mechanical things here. No vehicles, no weapons. We have harmony here.”

 

             Kirk insists that the colonists must evacuate, in accordance with the Enterprise’s orders. Sandoval insists that they will not go. Further complicating the situation is the presence of Leila Kalomi, a former love interest for Mr. Spock (things didn’t work out presumably because of Spock’s emotional deficiencies). Kirk exercises restraint in trying to convince the colonists to go willingly, rather than beaming them up against their will. But it quickly becomes clear that they’re not going to be removed of their own volition.

            It is the glassy-eyed look of the colonists, and their plotting to make Spock one of them, that clarifies to the audience that we should regard them with suspicion. One has the feeling of being among cultists. Cults and breakaway sects often sought out a place to secede from the rest of society on the American frontier.

More commonly this episode is interpreted as a reaction to the Hippie Movement, which it is almost certainly is. But we should remember that in the text itself, this is not the story of a counter-cultural movement in a broader society, but of a small collective on an isolated world, embracing a retrograde ideology of a return to nature. This bears less resemblance to the Hippie Movement than to the idea of the “City on a Hill”, which unlike the Hippie Movement was not a new development, but a thread interwoven into the tapestry of the American psyche for the better part of two centuries.[15]

In truth, the colonists are under the influence of neuropathic spores from the local flora. The spores induce a state of ceaseless contentment and bliss, and meanwhile keep those under their influence healthy. McCoy even records regenerated organs when scanning the colonists. As such, they are apparently protected from the lethal radiation. When Leila takes Mr. Spock on a walk with her, she takes the opportunity to expose him to the spores, which causes happiness and contentment to wash over Spock for the first time in his life. The experience is intensely painful, but the discomfort soon passes. Spock immediately gives in to his feelings for Leila, suggesting that they were there within him all along, suppressed by his Vulcan mental discipline.

All of the crew, one by one, give in to the alien spores. Eventually, only Captain Kirk is left unaffected. When he is finally exposed to the spores, as the last holdout, he nevertheless manages to break free of their influence. He is able to resist by, first, remembering his higher ideal, to which he has devoted his entire life (the Enterprise and its mission); second, he discovers that by harnessing the raw, negative emotions of rage and hatred, he can muster enough strength to break free of the zombie-like bliss. His subsequent plan is to agitate everyone on the planet into wakefulness.

 

The dynamics of this episode are interesting if we consider them in light of the superego-ego-id hypothesis, whereby Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, respectively, are the three constituent parts of the psyche. Even if one does not buy a literal interpretation based on psychoanalysis, it seems clear that McCoy is the more emotional of the three main characters, whereas Spock is the most logical. Kirk listens to the counsel of both, but ultimately represents the individuated, ideal person, whose values are in line with his actions and character.

The episode’s narrative indicates that both the reasonable man and the emotional man alike (Spock and McCoy) will gravitate toward the idea of paradise. McCoy is immediately enamored with the idyllic setting, and the prospect of sipping a cool drink on a warm day – all of the sensory excitement and nostalgic feelings belong to McCoy. He asks Kirk, “Who wants to counteract paradise, Jim-boy?”

Spock is in fact the worst afflicted, and the hardest to rouse from his bliss-like state, because he is the most logical. Spock stands here for the person of modernity, who lives in his head and in a constant state of social obligation and the requisite self-presentation, and finds himself suppressing his emotions. Deep within, he yearns for a release – for the complexity to fall away, for the struggle to end, for the tension to be released from the bowstring.

This is, in effect, the ultimate romantic ideal: a return to nature on your own private world, perfectly healthy and free of any injury or disease, to live out your days in bliss on a farm. Fontana’s representative for this allure in the form of an ex-girlfriend is inspired: it is a retrograde allure, a desire for an imagined version of the past. Perhaps a chance to do things over and not make the same mistakes as last time. If we don’t screw it up this time, maybe we’ll get to stay in the Garden.

But this is all still in the moral universe of the original Genesis myth. Through the power of the spores, all of the crewmembers succumb to it. But Kirk finds the Inverted Genesis deep within himself, and the source of it is somewhat paradoxical. For on the one hand, it is his ideal: his values, his image of himself, his free will as an individual to choose his destiny, and so on. But on the other hand, it is his rawest and darkest emotions. This means that Kirk, as a complete individual, lives in full recognition of the power of his unconscious self and his animal instincts. He does not oppose this part of himself to his higher idealism, but uses it as the fuel for his primal struggle with either his heart or his mind when they come into conflict with his moral truths. Kirk represents the integration of the conscious and unconscious mind, a state that most cannot attain to.

Kirk knows, deep within himself, that his higher duty is to the Enterprise, to his crew, to Earth, and to the Federation. The false promise of utopia cannot pull him away. To conjure the same in others, he must tap into their primal capacity for rage.

           

            When all of the crew and the colonists have awoken from the influence of the spores, Kirk’s actions more or less justify themselves. The crew of the Enterprise, of course, wants to return to their duties. There is the unanimous sense even among the colonists of having lost something while in the spore-trance. Sandoval says, once freed: “We've done nothing here... No progress. We wanted to make this planet a ‘garden’.”

One of the crewmembers earlier in the episode also notes that there was barely enough food produced to feed the colonists and nothing of a surplus. In no time, the colonists agree to be relocated, with Sandoval declaring: “I think we’d like to get some work done.”

            As a character study of Spock, the episode is somewhat tragic, however. Spock more or less resigns himself to the fact that it is his nature to be logical, detached and emotionless. Both he and Leila have a bittersweet realization that their relationships is not meant to be, and that to be truly free, they must part ways. Spock must depart from the bosom of nature: for, once he’s been rekindled in his humanity by Kirk, it is the only logical thing he can do.

            Kirk summarizes the episode by concluding that mankind no longer can return to Eden. He counters McCoy when he says that it is the “second time” man has been “thrown out” of paradise.

 

 “No, no, Bones. This time we walked out on our own. Maybe we weren't meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through. Struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.”

 

The episode notably does not include the colonists trying to brutally murder the Federation crew, or the spores manipulating them to build a superweapon, or any other such plotline that would taint the spores or the colonists as being malevolent. By all accounts, the spores simply offer a chance for a blissful, contented existence – albeit one where no real progress will be made because all of the challenge has disappeared from life. Human dignity is therefore tied to our capacity for behavior that is emotional, irrational, and not always fitting with an idealized community; a basic human need is the need to step outside of the safety and comfort of the community.

But the moral universe of this episode treats the paradise-spores as innately harmful to human existence, even without the element of malevolence. Neither the spores nor the colonists are treated as villainous, with the underlying problem simply being a lack of drive or willpower to resist, and the solution simply taking the form of everyone waking up. From start to finish, the episode is purely a dramatized rejection of the old Genesis myth and embrace the Inverted Genesis myth. 

 

           

A Private Little War

 

Episode 2x16

Production number: 60345

First aired: 2 February 1968

Teleplay by

Gene Roddenberry

 

Story by

Jud Crucis[16]

 

Directed by

Marc Daniels

 

            The plot of “A Private Little War” is at least as concerned with the Cold War as it is with the Inverted Genesis myth. In this episode, Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down to a planet whose populace that is still on the cusp of transitioning from bands of hunter-gatherers to a stationary, agrarian society. While the “hill people” (hunter-gatherers) and the villagers (agriculturalists) have always lived in peace, inexplicably they are now at war. What’s more, the faction of the villagers now apparently have weapons that are far more advanced than their level of technological capability. Someone has been providing the villagers with primitive firearms, and Kirk suspects the Klingons.

            The obvious parallel between the events of the episode and 20^th century history would be the numerous proxy wars fought between the Western capitalist countries and the Eastern communists. Nations with far less industrial capacity or overall level of technological advancement – such as Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, and others – were supplied with arms and materiel from foreign governments so that factions could battle for the ideological future of the country. In “A Private Little War”, the planet Neural is just such a place, but on the planetary scale.

            The situation is even more profound, however, in that the civilizations on Neural are primitive in comparison to any of the aforementioned countries. It is not as if Vietnam hadn’t yet fully undergone the agricultural revolution before the French or the Americans got there – in fact, it was a millennia-old civilization. Therefore, the Federation and Klingons, by engaging in such behavior, are fundamentally altering the development of an entire species at a cultural and evolutionary inflection point.[17] Since this planet is standing at the threshold of civilization, and thus further technological and social development, the characters perceive the situation as akin to the departure from the Garden of Eden. This is another Genesis story, again in the characters’ own words.

            This episode differs from those we’ve so far discussed insofar as the overall tone of the episode as regards the departure from the Garden is more somber, and insofar as the two main characters charged with debating the issue – Kirk and McCoy – betray something of a romantic admiration for the hunter-gatherer way of life. Notably, Spock is shot during the pre-credits sequence and must undergo medical treatment aboard the ship. This means that the strictly logical element has been taken out of the triad; this episode concerns the superego confronting the id over the rejection of paradise. Kirk and McCoy disguise themselves as hill people and go down to investigate, and serve as the main characters for the plot of the episode from there on.

 

            Kirk visited the planet Neural years prior on a planetary survey. During that time, he befriended a man from one of the hill tribes, named Tyree. Kirk’s first order of business is to attempt to locate Tyree, but while on their way to the hill people, he and McCoy are suddenly attacked by a local monster, the Mugato. Kirk is bitten by the creature, and gravely wounded; McCoy, thankfully, manages to locate the hill people and save Kirk’s life. A shamaness named Nona, the wife of Tyree, from a neighboring tribe called the kahn-ut-tu, performs a ritual to heal Kirk. 

 

All of these details bear mentioning strictly for the purposes of pointing out that both the “hill people” and Nona (the only kahn-ut-tu we see on screen) are portrayed, more or less, as Native Americans cast as white people. They dress in furs and tanned leathers, have spears and bows, and live a simple, idealized existence in a cluster of tents in the wooded hillside.

            A cultural by-product of the western genre on television, and of the “frontier spirit” in the American psyche, was a romantic attitude toward the American Indians. Robert Pirsig, the author of the iconic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, discusses this phenomena in another book of his, called Lila. Pirsig argues in Lila that many of the terms used by Europeans to describe Americans were similar to how Americans described the American Indian – an indication, for Pirsig, that European Americans consciously attempted to emulate the Native Americans. Pirsig goes so far as to argue that even the archetype of the cowboy is somewhat derived from the view in the popular consciousness during the 1950’s, of the Indian Brave.

In terms of contemporary American life, there was a rising popular sympathy in the 1950’s and 1960’s towards the Native Americans which had not existed as strongly in the past.[18] Whether these sentiments translated into action or not, the idealized vision of the Native American as being from a purer, simpler time, caused many Americans to psychically identify with the Native American. The Indian became a symbol of nature, of innocence, of a time before the ugliness of industrialization, the complexity of bureaucracy, and the horrors of large-scale warfare.

            Of course, modern anthropologists are much keener to tell us that life in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans was not as rosy a picture. As in all places before the development of agriculture and central, organized authority, murder was commonplace, infant mortality was high, torture and animal-cruelty were routine.[19] This does not excuse the genocidal behavior of the Europeans or negate that there were many negative aspects to industrialization and complex society. Nevertheless, the Native American still represented this primordial purity in the 1960’s among the growing counter-cultural movements of primitivism, environmental leftism, and broad swathes of the New Agers and Hippie Movement.

            In effect, the thought experiment of the episode is not simply a direct allegory for Vietnam or Korea, but for the idea of two superpowers giving tribes of Native Americans guns and letting them fight it out. In terms of symbolism, it is the idea that Westerners wronged the Native Americans by dragging them out of a Rousseauian peace. It should be clear from this summary that the episode is a bit confused, something of a tangled expression of grief and guilt – perhaps an unconscious identification of the Native Americans with a time of innocence in order to tell a story about the loss thereof.

            Kirk’s report, gathered when he infiltrated the people of Neural years prior, reads:

 

“Inhabitants superior in many ways to humans. Left alone, they undoubtedly someday will develop a remarkably advanced and peaceful culture.”

 

            One cannot help but think that Roddenberry was expressing a longing for a world where the Native Americans had been allowed to advance to a greater technological level before meeting Europeans.

In any case, Kirk and McCoy eventually learn through spying that the Klingons have provided the villagers with rifles, and have been steadily increasing the sophistication of the weaponry they provide. Given the Klingons’ urging, the villagers have thus turned to raiding the hill people. The leader of the villagers, Apella, remarks that their new system of raids is much like the hunt, “but with richer rewards.” The Klingon commander tells him in no uncertain terms that his empire intends to push Neural’s development forward at an unnatural pace, with the eventual goal of making it a Klingon world.

            Nona, the kahn-ut-tu shamaness, is an ambitious woman who advocates from the very beginning for obtaining firearms of their own to repay the villagers in kind. She is constantly pushing Tyree toward the course of war, and when she discovers that Kirk is an alien with powerful technology, she attempts to convince him to give her a phaser.

            Kirk explains why he cannot help:

 

“We once were as you are – spears, arrows. There came a time when our weapons grew faster than our wisdom, and we almost destroyed ourselves. We learned from this to make a rule during all our travels – never to cause the same to happen to other worlds.”[20]

 

In the absence of Spock, McCoy and Kirk are left to debate the issues themselves. Kirk argues that the balance of power must be maintained, which means furnishing the hill people with their own rifles, to hold their own against the villagers. McCoy furiously argues against this idea.

 

            “It's not bad enough there's already one serpent in Eden teaching one side about gunpowder, you're gonna make sure they all know about it.” McCoy says.

            “Exactly,” Kirk answers. “Each side receives the same knowledge and the same type of firearm.”

 

While it’s hard to imagine the strictly logical Mr. Spock coming up with or endorsing such a plan as “give them guns”, Kirk is driven just as much by instinct as by reason. While peaceful development of this native society is preferable to a descent into violence and war, Kirk aptly points out that this is not one of their choices. If the choice is between a period of violence and the abject destruction of the morally-superior hill people (Native Americans), then Kirk asserts that the violence is necessary. Earth itself survived this kind of brutal period: the people of Neural will have to do the same.

 

“I don't have a solution,” McCoy admits. “Furnishing them firearms is certainly not the answer.”

            “Bones, do you remember the 20th century brush wars on the Asian continent? Two giant powers involved, much like the Klingons and ourselves? Neither side felt that they could pull out.”

            “Yes I remember. Went on bloody year after bloody year.”

            “What would you have suggested? That one side arm its friends with an overpowering weapon? Mankind would never have lived to travel space if they had. No, the only solution is what happened back then. The balance of power.”

 

Firstly, Kirk’s assessment of the motivations behind “brush wars on the Asian continent” are at least a little dubious. The United States would have preferred that the South Vietnamese completely control Vietnam, for example, and did use overpowering weaponry such as napalm on people mostly just armed with rifles. Nevertheless, we’ll accept Kirk’s explanation as relevant to this particular conflict. The superego position (Kirk) is that the higher ideal dictates violating the lesser principles, and maintaining a balance of power in order to negate the Klingon interference with that balance. The Inverted Genesis position here is thus born out of a somber sense of hard-boiled rationalism. McCoy, as per usual, plays the role of irrational id, and naturally has an affection for the idyllic hunter-gatherer way of life.

            The Klingons, as the antagonists, are cast as Satan in this retelling. It is “the evil that men do” that casts us out of the Garden. This is another way in which this episode differs notably from all of the others, in that it is not the protagonists bringing an end to Genesis, but the antagonists.

If there is a theory of the Inverted Genesis story in this particular episode, it is more like the Hobbesian position overruling the Rousseauian position. As much as we may like the hill people, that group will be selected out of that planet’s biome if they cannot defend themselves. The technology is not evil in and of itself. The accompanying willingness to kill, and engage in murderous, group-level conflicts (often called, “war”) signifies the true departure from the Garden. It is not just that Kirk gives the hill people rifles, but he also teaches them how to shoot them, and trains them for warfare against the villagers. The idea of a primordial peace is nice, but peace cannot be maintained by peace, meaning that the hunter-gatherer phase cannot last forever. People must organize into greater and greater structures of power in order to defend themselves. Survival in this Hobbesian world requires the advancement of technology, and the willingness to kill.

Thus, it is with a heavy heart that Kirk orders Scotty to beam down Flintlock rifles. When Scotty asks Kirk to clarify, the captain says, “Snakes for the Garden of Eden.”

 Obviously, the message of the episode is a bit on the nose. It seems almost like an attempt to explain the need to leave the Garden from a world-historical standpoint; that being said, the meaningful link between the geopolitics of the 20^th century and the emergence of early civilization seems doubtful. Perhaps Roddenberry felt compelled to show that the departure from the naïve paradise of man’s infancy was not wholly positive. If there is hesitancy to abandon paradise, it is understandable, for there is genuine danger, genuine horror in the project of civilization and technological progress. Nevertheless – it is necessary.

The Paradise Syndrome

 

Episode 3x03

Production number: 60043-58

First aired: 4 October 1968

Written by

Margaret Armen

 

Directed by

Jud Taylor

 

            Kirk, McCoy and Spock travel to a planet where there is, inexplicably, a tribe of Native Americans. Given all that we’ve already discussed about the Native Americans, and the position they occupy in the American psyche, the content of this episode should be fairly self-explanatory. The Native Americans are referred to as Indians, and are, according to the main characters, a tribe that appears to be a heterogeneous mixture of many of the “advanced, peaceful” tribes of the Americas. They even speak without articles at times (to make them sound primitive, a common television trope in westerns in portraying Native Americans).

            Kirk echoes Captain Pike in the original pilot:

 

“Just so peaceful. Uncomplicated. No problems. No... command decisions. Just... living.”

McCoy replies, “Typical human reaction to an idyllic natural setting. Back in the 20th century, we referred to it as the Tahiti syndrome. It's particularly common to over-pressured leader types like Starship Captains.”

 

            The “Tahiti Syndrome” gets its name from the poem Tiare Tahiti by Rupert Brooke, the same poem, in fact, in which the line “This Side of Paradise” is contained. This poem must have been well-known to the showrunners, to be referenced by multiple writers across its three seasons.

 Not unlike the planet seen in the episode “Miri”, or the Ancient Roman planet in “Bread and Circuses”, this planet mysteriously contains cultures or elements of Earth that have no logical reason for being there. Of course, the true reason is as a contrivance of the plot, but it is interesting how the frontiers out in deep space serve so well as a mirror for the human psyche. Out of all the paradisiacal planets that writer Margaret Armen could imagine, she chooses to portray a planet of literal Native Americans.

Our protagonists eventually discover that the mysterious obelisk which the crew encounter is a relic of the ancient race which relocated the Native Americans to the planet. Kirk is immediately entranced, with a romantic perspective on the uncomplicated life of the Native Americans. Unfortunately, the entire reason for their survey is that an asteroid is on course to destroy all life on the planet, which means that time is of the essence if the planet is to be saved.

            It just so happens that when one stands on the platform in front of the obelisk and says the words “Kirk to Enterprise”, a trapdoor opens, leading to a control room below. Kirk of course does this, having said the magic words that coincidentally match the syllables he says every time he needs to contact his ship (plot points for the sake of convenience are one of the biggest problems with the writing in season three). After an accident with some sort of alien device that gives you amnesia (there are quite a few convenient plot points in this episode), Kirk emerges from the obelisk and is spotted, and taken in by two women of the tribe. Unable to locate their captain in the meanwhile, Spock and McCoy must leave in order to intercept the asteroid in time. 

 

            Again, all of these plot points are merely contrivances designed to drop Kirk into just the romantic fantasy of the Native American life that he was just wishing for. With no memory of his life as a starship captain, Kirk is free of his old burden of duty. With the good luck to instantly gain great social standing within the tribe, and after winning the heart of Miramanee, the chief’s daughter, Kirk is now living the complete fantasy life. His is the American image of a free and noble savage. They even begin calling him a god.

 

            “All I can tell you is that I'm happy and peaceful here,” Kirk says. “I'm not sure, but I think I've never felt that way before.”

 

            How strange that Kirk should suddenly be so happy and peaceful, whilst living out the perfect fantasy world of every American romantic of the 1960’s! Paradise is an elusive dream in this episode. Kirk takes on the role that Spock did in “This Side of Paradise”. Kirk is alone, without his memories, and thus without his sense of self and his ego-constructions of his social image. He is without counsel either from his reason or from his id. In past episodes, Kirk occasionally expresses a yearning to escape from it all. But amnesia is required to make the episode believable, just as the spores were required to overcome Spock’s logical control over his emotions, because Kirk's character is simply too devoted to the Enterprise and her mission.

But when thrown into the simple life, with no memory of his past, Kirk embraces his new life wholeheartedly.

 

            “These last few weeks, my love for Miramanee grows stronger with each passing day,” Kirk says. “However, the dreams return every night. Fragments of memories... I can almost get hold of them, and then...”

 

            Aside from the secondary plotline of Spock and McCoy dealing with the asteroid flying towards the planet, the primary tension in the episode arises because of the fact that Miramanee is given to Kirk, as a right of the new medicine chief. The old medicine chief, Salish, obviously has a serious problem with this, and grows to hate Kirk. The two come to physical blows. This wouldn't have been so much of a problem in and of itself, but once the asteroid arrives and Kirk has no idea what to do to stop it, the tribe begins to lose faith in him.

            Eventually, the Enterprise returns, Kirk regains his memory and figures out that the obelisk itself has the power to repel asteroids. Miramanee’s character is killed during the chaos of the asteroid approaching, which weighs heavily on Kirk.

It is a somewhat blunt tactic for ending the narrative, and severing the character from his paradise (the same ending occurs for Nona in “A Private Little War”). There is at least something to the thematical implications: that there is a price paid in blood for a modern man meddling in paradise. The underlying tension throughout the episode is that a product of modernity like Kirk simply does not belong in such an environment, however he might want to.

            Even as Kirk tries to give in, and throw himself into contentment in the present moment, there is the nagging feeling that he has to do something about the coming darkness, as well as the scattered memories of his past. The most telling line is Kirk’s feeling that he doesn't “deserve” this happiness.

            As an Inverted Genesis tale, this one is not the best. It again expresses a romanticism represented by the Native American way of life, and regards such a fantasy wistfully, with a fair amount of regret for the need to leave paradise. Nevertheless, the hard-nosed appeal to necessity remains. Implied here is a somewhat fascinating underlying theme: that modern people have somehow been fundamentally changed by modernity; therefore the problem is not that we don’t know how to create a paradise, but that we simply would not be happy living there. We have moved beyond that, in terms of what is mentally and emotionally possible for us, as a species.

 

 

The Way to Eden

 

Episode 3x20

Production number: 60043-75

First aired: 21 February 1969

Teleplay by

Arthur Heinemann

 

Story by

Michael Richards and Arthur Heinemann

 

Directed by

David Alexander

 

“The Way to Eden” is by no means the best episode of Star Trek (in fact it is usually rated as one of the worst), but this third season episode brings some of the cultural underpinnings of the Inverted Genesis myth into starker focus.

In this episode, the Enterprise intercepts a ship stolen by a cadre of ‘space hippies’. The parallels between the space hippies and the hippies of 1960’s America are so obvious that is hardly bears elaborating upon. Aspects of the Hippie movement advocated a return to nature, a dropping of social taboos around things like nudity or sexuality, and the rejection of the industrial world. The Hippie Movement, in this episode, is explicitly tied to romanticism, as the overall goal of the ‘space hippies’ is to reach a fabled planet called “Eden”. Again, the metaphor is right on the nose.

Importantly, however, the ‘space hippies’ portrayed in the episode are not quite akin to the Native American stereotype as the representative of pure nature. The space hippies come from the contemporary society of the Federation and the technological modernity which they have come to reject. This distinction is important because we have shifted from the writers of the episode portraying an idealized view of the natural man (as in “A Private Little War” and “The Paradise Syndrome”), and now get this idealized view as expounded by people who are outside of it, and akin to the same counter-cultural movements within American society. Furthermore, their “Eden”, quite like the general idea in the counter-culture of a “return to nature”, is vague and ill-defined, more of a legend than anything real. None of the space hippies have been to Eden, and it is more or less explicitly a concept rather than a specific place. It is their term for a “promised land”.

What we have then, is a much harsher polemic against romanticism, in that the people seeking the romantic past are seeking something that they have simply imagined. That being said, we do not learn in this episode to scorn the dream of Eden, so to speak. Rather, those types obsessed with a return to Eden are shown to be unrespectable and irritating people by comparison to the serious members of civilization, represented by the Enterprise crew.

In a word, “The Way to Eden” definitively casts the Federation as the representative of liberalism – in both senses of the word. Star Trek has always pushed forward a social politics of egalitarianism and acceptance, as well as the choice of peace over war. These are traditionally “liberal” values in the American sphere (that is, “left wing”). But importantly, the Federation stands in, against the models of the Klingons and the Romulans, as a representative of Liberalism more broadly: liberal democracy as a political system. The capitalistic excesses of liberalism are well-curbed in the Federation (another value of the American left), and as such, the Federation is able to achieve a sort of “hyper-liberalism” whereby all of the ideals of liberalism which are contradictory or impossible to attain in reality have been realized by means of advanced technology.[21] The space hippies are critics, malcontents, accusers against the liberal (or hyper-liberal) project. They don’t want to continue to go along with the social and technological necessities which make possible advancements such as modern medicine, higher education, widespread enfranchisement. Because of the problems inherent in the system, and the aforementioned paradox of progress, the hippies become anti-progress.

Spock is again shown to be vulnerable to the message of the romantics, just as he was in “This Side of Paradise”. He is sympathetic to the space hippies. Again, this says something about the underlying logic of romantic and anti-progressive attitudes: these are modern, intellectual people who have perceived the paradox of progress and made a rational decision to quit while they’re ahead. Furthermore, Spock represents the ego of the modern man, who considers himself a rational actor, but nevertheless always has a swirling, seething tension beneath him: the roil of irrational drives, instincts and emotions and that must be suppressed in order that the project of civilization continue. Spock explains to Kirk:

 

            “There are many who are uncomfortable with what we have created. It is almost a biological revolution. A profound revulsion against the planned communities, the programming, the sterilized, artfully-balanced atmospheres. They hunger for an ‘Eden’, where spring comes.”

            “All do.” Kirk says. “The cave is deep in our memory.”

 

Sevrin’s followers consider themselves aliens on their own worlds, a feeling which Spock also lives with. Spock has always felt like an outsider in both human and Vulcan society, and these like-minded outsiders suggest the possibility of finding a new way of life where everyone is just “One”. This of course calls to mind the Advaita Vedanta idea in Hinduism, which become very popular among the American Hippie movement and the New Age movement, owing to both the exoticism of Eastern spirituality, and the hyper-liberal affinity with such a religious claim. The notion that every single man and woman on Earth, regardless of race, color or creed, is himself or herself a manifestation of the Godhead at the core of all reality, naturally lends itself to a politics of ultimate egalitarianism.

The Inverted Genesis tale in “The Way to Eden” is a bit more mean-spirited in how it all plays out. Dr. Sevrin, the leader of the movement, has a terminal disease, caused by his being raised in such a sterile, clean, safe environment. His immune system can’t handle being in the wild nature of an alien world, and McCoy warns him that he’ll die. Sevrin’s disease must be treated by modern, technologically-advanced medicine. His wide-eyed claim that life as a “primitive” will purify him convinces Spock that he is insane. While Spock is still sympathetic to the core ideals of the movement, he must nevertheless oppose Sevrin’s efforts. This is illustrative of the liberal conscience, and the rationalizations that the liberal ego must apply in order to try to simultaneously understand the Hippie movement as a thread within its own intellectual and social tradition, while nevertheless continuing on with the project of technological civilization in full opposition to such romanticism.

When the hippies finally find “Eden”, things do not turn out as they planned. The crew beams down in pursuit. Chekov burns his hand by merely touching one of the plants, which is full of acid. They discover one of the hippies dead – as Spock points out, named Adam, in case the metaphor wasn’t obvious enough – and learn that the fruit on the planet is deadly. Even in the face of this revelation, Sevrin runs to climb a tree and eat one of the fruits himself, in denial that it will kill him. He also dies, willfully ignoring the truths that had been revealed to him about the impossibility of the primitive life. The message is loud and clear: the Garden of Eden story is poison.

The episode indicts the romanticism of the Hippie Movement as unrealistic, first and foremost: we are reminded of the boon of technologies such as modern medicine, which can keep people alive like Dr. Sevrin even as they rage against it (we might also consider any number of injuries diseases for which we now have a treatment but which would have been a death sentence even a few centuries ago). This raises the question of whether a return to the Garden is even desirable. But desirable or not, there is simply no going back from the rapidly advancing technological society, and all attempts to return will be futile. Again, the main element emphasized is necessity.

 

Spock wishes the hippies well after the hippies are “rescued” from the planet (or rather, rescued from themselves). Spock says he hopes that they'll find a “real Eden” some day. This is more of an emotional connection that Spock has with them: it is a sort of sympathy in us, the liberal audience, that allows us to not completely condemn the movement. That being said, I see no reason why the space hippies shouldn’t go become “One” with the paradise-spores on Omicron Ceti III.

I raise this point simply to highlight some of the contradictions in how the Inverted Genesis story is tackled. The different writers seem to disagree as to whether the issue is the impossibility of regaining Eden, or the undesirability of regaining Eden. Often, parsing out the difference is not exactly easy, given the different circumstances of each episode and the fact that many of the “Edenic” scenarios presented are, by and large, pure fantasy. While it is not in principle “impossible” that such paradise-spores might exist, for example, they exist as a writers’ conceit, for the purposes of placing our characters within the Genesis thought experiment, and not as a prediction of something likely or even plausible to occur.

The overall attitude of the Inverted Genesis story is therefore easily established over the five episodes we have so far discussed. But what we have examined thus far are episodes which play out the Inverted Genesis in the most archetypal and metaphorical sense, and in the specifics the various stories do not quite provide a coherent message for society beyond the broadest strokes. But what does it mean to actually “reject Eden”, in practical terms? Where is it that technology might actually lead us? – how might the paradox of progress confront us, in material terms?

 

 

V. God in the Machine

 

 

There is a sub-trope about the paradox of progress, which Roddenberry similarly seemed obsessed with: the society run by a computer.

Another famous television series that concerned itself with a kind of mental or emotional frontier – in this case, the blurry boundaries between “the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge” – was The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling’s series had explored the idea of a post-apocalyptic community making its decisions based on an advanced computer’s suggestions, in the episode “The Man in the Cave”. In that episode, the people are not even aware that it is a computer running their society, because the only man who knows this is the intercessor between the community and the computer, which is hidden away inside a cave up in the hills. In “The Man in the Cave”, when the people trust in the analysis of the computer, they prosper. Then, some aggressive, arrogant soldiers sweep into town and take over. They destroy the computer and ignore its warnings. As a result, everyone dies. This is therefore, in moral terms, a pro-‘society-run-by-computer’ episode.

That being said, by the end The Twilight Zone’s run, one of the last handful of episodes was called, “The Brain Center at Whipple’s”, in which a middle manager who delights in automating away his employee’s jobs soon finds himself automated out of the picture by a thinking machine. The episode dares to explore the idea of a worker who has lost his job to a machine becoming unbalanced suicidal. It seems that an optimistic trust in the power of advanced computing was accompanied by anxiety. Would man’s tools become so sophisticated as to make man himself irrelevant? What then? Humanity becomes obsolete?

The "Old Man in the Cave"

 

The Twilight Zone ended two years before Star Trek came on the air. As another episodic-style series that would explore the moral and intellectual conflicts of its time, Star Trek naturally addressed some of the same themes. The angst about automation, and fears about the pace of technological progress in general, lace the series. There are too many episodes expressing fears about technology to discuss all of them in any coherent manner, but before we dive more deeply into episodes that depict a society run by a computer, we’ll briefly examine some of the episodes concerned with the general malaise surrounding technology.

As we discussed at the beginning of this essay, “The Cage” features a sort of allegory for the end-state of total technological progress: once the Talosians could reshape reality to appear however they liked it, they had no need for further advancement and lost interest in growing or changing. They degenerated into physically-frail telepaths and were desperate for another race that could run their society, repair their machines, and so on. The Keeper predicts that the Talosians will soon die out.

A few episodes into the first season, the great Robert Bloch also wrote an episode called, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, in which a long-dead civilization is portrayed. The only remnant of this society is a sole surviving android, named Ruk. While Ruk was created to maintain the technology in the long-buried ruin of a society, he did not even remember how long he had been attending to his task. It seems that the founders of his civilization came to rely on the androids for everything, eventually became obsolete, and died out (or, possibly, were overthrown by their creation).

The season two episode, “The Changeling”, depicts the fears about technology in a different way. In the episode, a probe dispatched into deep space generations beforehand has now returned to Federation territory. However, it has been modified by some sort of advanced race, likely by a race of intelligent machines. The probe is now armed with advanced weaponry and is obsessed with killing off biological life. This episode concludes with one of the examples of Kirk, “discussing a computer to death”. This was a Star Trek-specific trope in which Kirk, the enlightened individual, can somehow match wits with a hyper-intelligent machine and convince it that it has violated its own moral principles. Invariably, when the machine becomes persuaded of this, it either voluntarily or involuntarily short-circuits and destroys itself.

            One of the most famous instances of this was in the episode, “The Ultimate Computer”. Kirk discusses a hyper-intelligent computer into suicide here also, but that is not why the episode is significant. This episode is not about a society run by a computer, per se – except insofar as the Enterprise itself is a sort of “society”, the representation of a strong, healthy community.  We will take a closer look at this episode because it most completely expresses the contemporary fears about automation.

 

The Ultimate Computer 

 

Episode 2x24

Production number: 60353

First aired: 8 March 1968

Teleplay by

D.C. Fontana

 

Story by

Laurence N. Wolfe

 

Directed by

John Meredyth Lucas

 

 

In this episode, the brilliant Dr. Daystrom attempts to automate away the last valuable role for humans to fulfill: the decision-making process. The M-5 computer, Daystrom claims, is so advanced as an artificial intelligence, that it can replace the captain as the commander of a starship. After a successful display of the M-5’s abilities, Commodore Wesley quite meanly refers to Kirk as, “Captain Dunsel.” This remark absolutely crushes Captain Kirk, who dejectedly slinks off the bridge; McCoy, however is confused. Spock explains:

 

“Dunsel, Doctor, is a term used by Midshipmen at Starfleet Academy. It refers to a part which serves no useful purpose.”

 

Kirk and McCoy share some moments alone together, over a drink, where McCoy plays the role of both bartender and therapist in addition to doctor (a blueprint that dates back to the pilot episode, “The Cage”, with an entirely different captain and doctor). McCoy reminds us that the issue of automation has been going on for a quite a long time. Economists today who wish to dismiss the issue never tire of bringing up the manufacturers of buggy-whips who went out of business when the horse drawn carriage was made obsolete by the automobile. “We’re all sorry for the other guy when he loses his job to a machine,” McCoy says. “When it comes to your job, that’s different. And it always will be different.”

Perhaps what McCoy misses is that a technological innovation that removes the need for human labor in one skillset or another, or even one whole industry or another, is fundamentally different from an innovation that removes the need for human labor generally. If human beings aren’t even needed to consciously guide the society, to make autonomous choices for themselves, to decide right from wrong according to their own beliefs – then humanity becomes, more or less, unnecessary. Not unnecessary for a single task, but unnecessary, period. The servant becomes the master, and the technology we created so that we could realize our goals starts deciding the goals for us instead. At best, we become the servants, or the mere pets, of artificial intelligence.

Daystrom doesn’t see things this way. He thinks that all of the danger, the challenge, the complexity of life on the fringes of the system are merely a tax on human life and dignity. The more obstacles we can eliminate, the better. Daystrom argues:

 

“Men no longer need die in space or on some alien world! Men can live and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take!”

 

What we might recognize here is a staunchly anti-frontier attitude in Dr. Daystrom. The adventurism into galactic space is merely colonialism in his view, which wastes life and potential. But what would Daystrom have us do with our lives instead? Presumably, lead lives of achievement in the arts, or in the sciences, as he has done. But what about when the machines can out-think human beings when it comes to science? Daystrom ignores what he is taking from human beings by trying to take away the need for them to risk their lives, confront danger, engage in challenge. He also underestimates how automation will eventually take away his own chances for striving and challenge, for example in the scientific world, supposing that automation is allowed to go on unrestrained for long enough. Advanced enough artificial intelligence will not need any human achievements, and will regard them as superfluous.

            The narrative concludes with a plot contrivance that once again allows things to wrap up neatly within the forty-minute run time of the episode. The M-5 unit malfunctions and attempts to take over the ship. It becomes murderous, and blows up starships full of people. This allows the episode to play out as a struggle to regain control from the malevolent computer, but this type of dénouement does a disservice to the benign nature of the automation’s evils.

Daystrom is not wrong because his computer system happened to malfunction. He is wrong, according to the established moral universe of the show, because he fails to recognize the need for the frontier in the human psyche. Humanity’s task is not to make life easier and more comfortable for ourselves, but to push forward into the unknown and continually open up new challenges and new possibilities. His failure to understand this is what makes the entire notion of the M-5 anathema to human life and dignity from the very start.

            Spock, who is initially sympathetic to Dr. Daystrom, gives voice to the real objection to Daystrom’s task:

 

            “Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, the starship also runs on loyalty to one man. And nothing can replace it, or him.”

 

            But suppose we did decide to replace man entirely. Suppose we fully reject the frontier spirit, and decide that there is no problem with progress. Progress is good, eliminating problems is good, making man obsolete is good. It is good if technology becomes a new God, and man the servants of that God.

While such a position may seem like a straightforward rebuttal to the considerations of this essay and the moral universe of Star Trek, it still fails. It is not for nothing that I have christened it, “the paradox of progress”, because such a morality will eventually end at the same place as the romantic’s desire to return to nature.

There is another episode that directly addresses itself to the Genesis story that some astute fans of the original series may have noticed as a glaring omission from the previous section’s selection of episodes. That episode’s title specifically alludes to the Biblical account of Genesis: “The Apple”. I have refrained from discussing it in chronological order with the other Inverted Genesis tales because “The Apple” is the intersection of the Inverted Genesis trope with the society-run-by-a-computer trope. While it is another episode of relative low quality in terms of story structure, and with its share of goofy setpieces, it nevertheless explicates an unusual and seemingly-contradictory concept which Star Trek may likely have originated: techno-primitivism.

 

 

The Apple

 

Episode 2x09

Production number: 60338

First aired: 13 October 1967

Teleplay by

Max Ehrlich and Gene L. Coon

 

Story by

Max Ehrlich

 

Directed by

Joseph Pevney

 

            The Enterprise crew begins spouting off references to the Garden of Eden immediately after beaming down to the planet. While their mission is a simple planetary survey of Gamma Trianguli VI, they soon discover that their ship is being held in orbit by a mysterious power, and that everything in the environment is trying to kill them. The flowers shoot poisoned darts. A crewman steps on a rock that turns out to be a powerful explosive, and dies instantly. “The Garden of Eden…” Kirk exclaims, “With landmines!”

            Despite its fertile lands, mild climate and lush ecosystems, the jungle is booby-trapped. After discovering that they're also being watched, the crew of the Enterprise meet the native inhabitants of the planet. Upon man-handling the indigenous humanoid they find spying on them, Kirk and crew are met with the sight of a grown man crying like a child with a skinned knee. Apparently pain and suffering is a foreign experience to these aliens. Since the locals seem innocent enough, the crew is lulled into a false sense of security.

            The crew then meets Akuta, the leader of the child-like aliens. They identify themselves as the “Feeders of Vaal”. The portrayal of their way of life seems to visually conjure the imagery of indigenous Hawaiians; perhaps it is also not an accident that the Feeders of Vaal have bright red skin. While the aesthetic vibe is thus more similar to portraying Polynesians rather than American Indians, the episode still gives the implication that we are encountering a more innocent people that is closer to nature. But of course, something is not quite right. Akuta has cybernetic attachments protruding from his neck and head, by which he communicates with Vaal, who is the planet’s deity. When he takes the crew to see Vaal, they’re met with the sight of a giant, snake-headed stone idol. When we later see them “feed” Vaal, they use the explosive minerals of the planet, which Vaal apparently uses for fuel.

            Kirk, Spock and McCoy formulate the hypothesis that Vaal is an artificial intelligence, that constantly maintains the Edenic conditions of the planet’s conditions. The Feeders of Vaal do not even know what sex or procreation is: the population is perfectly balanced and never needs to expand or contract. All disease is eliminated, and somehow Vaal even prevents his children from aging. Thus, Akuta and his child-like tribespeople are immeasurably old. All they have to do is feed Vaal, so that the computer that runs their world can continue to run it – and this has become a sort of religious ritual, and Vaal a sort of deity. This has a sense to it, for what use would such people as the Feeders of Vaal have for an intellectual understanding of how their planet operates? It would be much better and less stressful if the process was mystified and the responsibility entirely remanded into the care of the intelligent machine, so that the stress of such knowledge would be lifted from the people.

            While none of this really makes sense with the idea that the jungles of the planet are booby-trapped, one could make the argument that the hostile environment is not something that the Vaalians normally have to deal with, but rather an immune response of the planet. The one thing that could destabilize the perfect system that Vaal maintains is an externality, such as aliens wandering onto the planet. Perhaps the environment is attacking the Federation invaders and attempting to destroy their ship for this reason. None of this is explicitly spelled out, which is both a strength and a weakness of the episode.

            Once the three main characters recognize the situation, they debate about it.

 

McCoy: “There are certain absolutes, Mr. Spock. And one of them is the right of humanoids to a free and unchained environment. The right to have conditions which permit growth.”
            Spock: “Another is their right to choose a system which seems to work for them.”
            McCoy: “...These are humanoids, intelligent. They need to advance and grow. Don't you understand what my readings indicate? There's been no change or progress here in at least ten thousand years. This isn't life. It's stagnation.”
            Spock: “Doctor, these people are healthy and they are happy. Whatever you would choose to call it, this system works. Despite your emotional reaction to it.”

Here, the emotional McCoy is repulsed by the degeneration of mankind into a pet of a powerful machine intelligence. Vaal was most likely created to serve the people who now worship it as a God. I love the splendid contradictions involved in this idea: that the ultimate end of progress, the complete elimination of all human problems by technology, thus concludes in a new dark age in which we lose all purpose, desire to change, and even understanding of that technology. Thus, a resurgence of religious attitudes: of giving oneself up to a higher power that has everything well in hand. McCoy, as a man of modernity, with an irrational belief in human importance and dignity, rejects the world of Vaal.

Spock, however, is once again sympathetic to utopia. Just as he wishes the space hippies well in finding their own Eden, he takes the stance that the Feeders of Vaal have chosen a “system that works for them”. This positioning of Spock brings the modern intellectual dialectic that would conclude in a techno-primitivist society into full, brilliant relief. Spock is as much a believer in unmitigated rationalism as he is tortured by his own irrational emotions and the deep yearning to return to natural simplicity. The more he pursues the course of rational, technological progress, the more deeply he feels the tension within himself. Spock, like all of us moderns, cannot come to terms with his strictly irrational side. These heightening contradictions in the face of continued technological progress eventually reach their synthesis in the techno-primitivist society.

The original departure from the Garden of Eden – mankind’s need to leave the hunter-gatherer life and organize into complex societies – was necessary. Most importantly, we cannot go backwards, for the truly primitive life is not available to us any longer. But what if we could find the same primitive end, not in an idealized past, but in a technologically-run future? What if the very thing that could make the return to nature possible is technology itself? What if man could channel his irrational, religious impulses into a worship of this technology, and find the Garden again under the watchful eyes of an all-powerful A.I.-deity?

Although Spock was not a participant in Sandoval's colony of his own free will, Spock was the first crew member to give in to the spores, and fought fiercely against being woken out of their influence. Now, of sound mind, he is the “voice of logic” against McCoy’s emotional reaction to this new Eden. The nature of the human’s passionate side is posited to be on the side of freedom, exploration, growth. The strictly logical side is shown as flirting with a completely controlled existence.

 

What persuades Kirk, the superego, to come down on the side of his passions and reject the techno-primitivism of Vaal as a form of oppression, is the very fact that the Vaalians no longer have power over themselves or their destiny. Spock’s argument that they’ve chosen a system that works for them does not seem to hold up, because the Vaalians have no knowledge or understanding of their situation. The mystification of Vaal into a religious figure and the retreat into an ignorant infancy removes the Vaalians’ free will and makes them into strictly a servant. This is the key distinction: man must hold the power over technology, and not the other way around. “They exist to service a machine,” he says, with some disgust lacing his voice.

Once Akuta relates to Vaal how the Federation outsiders have contaminated their society – two of the child-like Vaalians witness Chekov making out with another crewmember, and begin to imitate the behavior – Vaal instructs Akuta as to how to kill and orders him to demonstrate to the others. Of course, their attempts fail (it was not a very good plan for such a hyper-intelligent machine to come up with). Spock declares their first step towards becoming human is taken once they've “learned to kill”, but it is only by Vaal's command that they do so, in order to protect the delicate balance that Vaal has maintained for them. Perhaps Spock is simply bitter that the interference of the Enterprise crew is already having the effect of wrenching the Vaalians away from their Eden.

The crew prevents the Feeders of Vaal from, well, feeding Vaal; Mr. Scott then uses the Enterprise’s phasers on the snake-headed idol, taxing its forcefields until the thing finally runs out of power and shuts down. Vaal no longer controls the perfect environment of the planet, and Akuta is distraught that they’ve been cast out of the Garden and taken away from the all-powerful guidance and control of their God.

What makes this episode such a wonderful explication of the Inverted Genesis myth is also one of the central flaws in its writing: the flippancy with which Kirk dismisses the concerns of Mr. Spock and the presentation of the episode’s outcome as an unmitigated positive. When Kirk mentions to the assembled Vaalians that they will now be able to procreate, and have children, the Vaalians clearly don’t understand, and meet him with questions and blank looks. Kirk struggles to explain, saying: “Little ones, look like you… just go on the way you're going, you'll find out.” It is a bit difficult to laugh along with Kirk about how a naïve people that has existed in a state of stagnation, with everything taken care of for them, will now be thrust into the harsh realities of childbirth, complications during pregnancy, infant mortality, and so on.

 

Akuta: “But it was Vaal who put the fruit on the trees… caused the rain to fall. Vaal cared for us.”

Kirk: “You’ll learn to care for yourselves. With our help. And there’s no trick to putting fruit on trees. You might even enjoy it. You’ll learn to build for yourselves, think for yourselves, work for yourselves, and what you create is yours. That’s what we call freedom. You’ll like it. A lot.”

 

But it is just this blind, celebratory attitude that makes “The Apple” perhaps the most powerful statement of the Inverted Genesis attitude. The forcible removal of the Vaalians from paradise is not only necessary, but a blessing. That is, if we accept McCoy’s idea that they were living in a state of oppression, unable to truly experience life due to the stagnation imposed upon them. Kirk’s description of freedom is right in line with the Liberal idea of freedom, and thus we cannot ignore that this is, once again, a declaration of the superiority of a libertarian society over a centrally-planned society.

It is, in fact, better to ignore the obvious complications that would arise from thrusting a completely dependent populace into a life of fending for themselves (and Kirk’s promise that Federation will send them help in learning to become self-sufficient can offer some hope, I suppose). The moral underpinnings of the episode demonstrate a wholehearted rejection of a technologically-achieved utopia and a celebration of human growth. What no techno-primitivist society can ever offer is the opportunity to hold power over one’s self and one’s own destiny, and to confront and overcome challenges by one’s own abilities. In effect, the Enterprise has torn down all of the technological progress that created Vaal, and returned the people to the dawn of the agricultural era, not because Kirk and crew are against progress as such, but recognize that the bypath that their civilization took was a dead-end. They became absorbed with the creation of a perfect society, based on the tinkering with environmental conditions. But again, man is only really happy when he is in a place where the conditions are not perfect. Happiness is found in confronting those conditions and changing them: happiness is an act, a project, a task – not a state of being.

Spock astutely points out at the end of the episode that Kirk has played the part of Satan in the Genesis story. Of course, in the Inverted Genesis myth, Satan is no longer the antagonist. Kirk playfully deflects this with a cheap remark towards Spock’s appearance: “Is there anyone on this ship… who even remotely… looks like Satan?” This is a genuine problem that Spock raises with Inverted Genesis as a story type – for the role of the character who leads Adam & Eve out of the Garden is historically reserved for an evil figure. While this is, in theory, fine when that figure is a Klingon, as we see in “A Private Little War”, the archetype of “Satan” will not do when trying to achieve a shift in our attitude towards paradise among the general populace.

Perhaps the title of the episode hints at a move in that direction: for the apple is the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Effectively, the episode title suggests that what Kirk offered the Vaalians is just such an apple. In other words, the Federation came and imparted wisdom to the people as to the true ways of the world. “Good” and “Evil” are, in real, material terms, embodied by the two things that the Vaalians learn as a result of the Enterprise visitors. “Good” is love, romance, relationships, and procreation. “Evil” is fighting, killing, warfare. Two realities of human life that cannot be denied, and two major domains in which human beings experience power – both their own power and the power relationships that rule their lives. Vaal shielded his children from all of this, and thus did them a disservice. It is the worldly knowledge of good and evil that Kirk offers; meanwhile, the evil serpent-like entity is given the role of “God” in this retelling. Vaal is both snake and deity – another subtle subversion of the Genesis story.

 

 

Return of the Archons

 

Episode 1x22

Production number: 6149-22

First aired: 9 February 1967

Teleplay by

Boris Sobelman

 

Story by

Gene Roddenberry

 

Directed by

Joseph Pevney

 

A great deal is left unsaid in “Return of the Archons”, which is again as much to the episode’s advantage as not. The Enterprise crew travels to Beta III, a planet where the starship the USS Archon was mysteriously lost, 100 years prior. What the crew finds is a society seemingly at a Victorian level of technology and culture, where all the inhabitants have vacant looks, empty smiles, and seem to be in a sort of trance. After an ill-fated away mission, Lt. Sulu returns to the ship with this same expression of vacant bliss. After they beam Sulu back onboard, the lieutenant raves, with a vacant look on his face, that the planet is, “Paradise…paradise… paradise….”

The crew soon learns through their investigations that Sulu was “absorbed” into something called, “The Body”. The behavior of the inhabitants of Beta III is seemingly controlled at all times. All inhabitants are members of “The Body” and thus are connected by some sort of net of control issuing forth from a central intelligence that the people refer to as Landru. Exactly how much control Landru has over the inhabitants of the planet is not exactly clear, since some of the community’s elders seem to have more autonomy than the general populace.

The crew almost immediately witnesses the “Festival”, an event where there is a sudden dropping of all social and emotional controls and the populace descends into a frenzy of sex and violence. The crew seeks shelter at a local inn, claiming that they’re travelers from a place with “different ways”. One of the elders calls for the Lawgivers, the enforcers of Landru who wear robes as if from a religious order, and have the power to absorb people into The Body. The crew manages to escape, and is lead away to a hiding place by Reger, a dissident against the power of Landru. He reveals that Landru, “pulled the Archons from the skies”.

We eventually learn, along with the characters, that Landru is a computer intelligence that rescued the civilization from anarchy and mass warfare from six thousand years previously. The result was that Landru seized control of the entire planetary civilization and brought it under control. Spock remarks:

“This is a soulless society, Captain. It has no spirit, no spark. All is indeed peace and tranquility – the peace of the factory; the tranquility of the machine; all parts working in unison.”

 

In the final confrontation between Kirk and Landru (another discussion of a computer to death), Kirk surmises that there was a person named Landru who programed the intelligent computer that now runs the society. The machine insists that it is Landru, but Kirk rebuffs him the artificial intelligence by arguing that however much knowledge or experience it contains, its creator could never give it a soul. Landru says that this is irrelevant, but this sentiment is key to the moral universe of Star Trek. The technological servant must not become the master, because technology is inherently amoral and unfeeling. Beings such as we, with an irrational element, must remain in charge, merely using technology as a tool, because it is only through our irrational side that we believe in things like “souls”.

Through the conversation, we learn the explicit reasoning behind Landru shifting the planet’s populace to an earlier level of technology, and then keeping them in a state of stagnation. Its sole directive is to maintain harmony, which it does without any understanding of the irrational need to create, to grow, to be an individual. As such, it can only maintain certain environmental conditions, and control behavior to prevent threats to harmony. But it cannot allow for creativity or independence.

 

Kirk: “What is the good?”

Landru: “I am Landru.”

Kirk: “Landru is dead, you are a machine. A question has been put to you, answer it.”

Landru: “The good is the harmonious continuation of The Body. The good is peace, tranquility. The good of The Body is the directive.”

Kirk: “Then I put it you that you have disobeyed the Prime Directive. You are harmful to The Body.”

Landru: “The Body is. It exists. It is healthy.”

Kirk: “The Body is dying. You are destroying it.”

Landru: “Do you ask a question?”

Kirk: “What have you done to do justice to the full potential of every individual living within The Body?”

Landru: “Insufficient data.”

Kirk: “Without freedom of choice, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life. The Body dies. The fault is yours.”

 

Landru is initially not willing to accept this response of Kirk’s. It goes on to argue that peace, tranquility and order are enough for life, and creativity is therefore reserved only for Landru itself. But since Landru is only a machine, it cannot really be creative, and in practice it seems, can only maintain the conditions it has determined are ideal. Other than that, the people have been in a state of zombie-like bliss and stagnation. Kirk appeals to the libertarian ideal of every individual being able to realize their potential on their own terms – which again, differentiates such a collectivist, centrally-planned system from the freedom of liberal society. In many respects, the machine-run society of Landru is like a prototypical version of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Borg.

Landru was tasked to protect and serve the populace, and by keeping them at a lesser state of technology, and by controlling their behavior apparently through some sort of telepathic link (“The Body”), the people of Beta III are kept safe. But human beings don’t need safety: they need the frontier.

The Genesis myth is not explicitly mentioned, and the world under Landru’s dominance is not necessarily portrayed as a utopia. For one thing, the Festival shown at the beginning of the episode is horrific and traumatizing to the on-screen characters. Furthermore, it is never fully explained in the episode as to why the Festival happens or why the elders are so insistent that the crewmembers (disguised as natives of Beta III) attend the events. The implication seems to be that the rigid mental controls over the populace which create the overall social harmony requires a periodic cleansing of all the sexual and violent impulses. All of the irrational, id-based drives are excised in a single night. This idea would later be developed into the Vulcan pon farr, which is a strikingly similar concept. Another reason why the society might not seem as utopian is because the showrunners chose the aesthetic of a rigid, Victorian-esque society, which is not typically an age that modern people yearn for (although, it is perfect for encapsulating the dichotomy between the demands of maintain a harmonious social order versus wild sexual impulses).

However, the overall sentiment of the episode is in line with the Inverted Genesis tales we have discussed so far. Our two main characters reflect on the events of the episode with a similar embrace of the frontier and rejection of utopianism as they’ve mused in the other outings:

 

Spock: “How often mankind has wished for a world as peaceful and secure as the one Landru provided.”

Kirk: “Yes. And we never got it. Just lucky, I guess.”

 

 

For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

Episode 3x10

Production number: 60043-65

First aired: 8 November 1968

 

Written by

Rik Vollaerts

 

Directed by

Tony Leader

 

            There is not as much to say about this episode. It contains a few interesting Sci-Fi story ideas that would later become popular in other works of fiction; it depicts yet another society run by a computer, which is worshiped as a God. However, it is mostly a retread of the ideas we have discussed at length in the other episodes.

Spock got his chance to return to nature in “This Side of Paradise”, Kirk in “The Paradise Syndrome”. This time, it is McCoy has his shot at a return to the simple life. After learning that he has a rare, terminal disease called xenopolycythemia, McCoy goes on an away mission with Kirk and Spock to an asteroid hurling through space, which appears to be a sort of disguised generation-ship. The three of them are apprehended by soldiers once they beam on board the asteroid ship. They are welcomed to “the world of Yonada” by Natira, the High Priestess and apparent leader of this society. Yet again, the society is run by a computer, which Natira calls, “The Oracle”. When she introduces Kirk, Spock and McCoy to The Oracle, and says they come in friendship, The Oracle declares:

 

“Then first learn what it is to be our enemy, before you learn what it is to be our friend.”

 

With this, the three protagonists are electrocuted by some type of energy weapon, a form of torture. Thus, Yonada is established as a rigidly-controlled social order, ruled by tradition and mysticism. Apparently, over the generations of living on the asteroid, the people there have forgotten, or had the knowledge actively suppressed, that they were actually traveling through space on a vessel. They’ve been taught to believe that they are simply on a world, and that Yonada is all there is. The people have some sort of implant that allows The Oracle some control over them. The Oracle controls the ship and has the final say over all matters in society. Natira as High Priestess defers to The Oracle in her decision-making.

When a random, elderly Yonadan comes to visit Kirk, Spock and McCoy, he defies the controls of his implant and dares to declare that he knows Yonada is not the entirety of existence. But as he continues to utter this “heresy”, he feels increasing pain, until he dies uttering the titular phrase of the episode. “But things are not as they teach us. For the world is hollow, and I have touched the sky.”

Eventually, McCoy falls for Natira, and his romantic feelings for her are reciprocated. He declares that he’s going to remain behind. Again, this is not quite a Genesis story, because the Yonadans seemingly live in a fascist theocracy. McCoy’s desire to remain there is therefore almost solely because he falls in love with Natira, and not because he has a yearning for a more rigid social order. That being said, McCoy has always seemed to be somewhat temperamentally conservative, so perhaps he does not feel himself as stunted by The Oracle’s controls. More to the point, as the impulsive id, McCoy isn’t really thinking it through, and is just following his heart – he is dying, after all.

But “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” nevertheless provides another example of a society run by a computer, whereby the system decides to take the form of a religion with rigid demands on the populace and some sort of direct control over people’s thoughts and actions. When McCoy discovers, from studying the holy texts of Yonada, that the ship’s course can easily be corrected and the Yonadans set on a course for their homeworld in a year’s time, he contacts the Enterprise, but is punished by The Oracle. The Oracle is actually acting against its own interests and the safety of its own people by punishing McCoy for this, indicating that a centrally-planned society, or one where all decisions are deferred to machines, will have an inherent weakness of being dogmatic and rigid. Once again, the society that has converted into living in servitude to a machine rather than the machines serving the interests of the living, is shown to be a paradoxical regression into earlier superstition rather than an advancement of human life.

The episode ends rather anti-climatically with a deus ex machina – Spock discovers that there is a cure for xenopolycythemia in the computer records of the Yonadan world-ship. McCoy’s duty compels him to leave his new wife Natira, and return to the Enterprise. Ultimately, the Enterprise crew leaves the world-ship’s inhabitants to figure things out for themselves, when they reach their pre-planned destination in a year’s time. But by freeing them from The Oracle as a matter of self-defense, presumably they pushed the Yonadans a few steps back towards the self sufficiency they’ll need to settle a new world. This episode lacks a strong underlying message or moral, but ultimately still exists within the same moral universe in which settling out on the frontier is presented as preferable to a society which is carefully managed and controlled. 

 

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the episode is how it reinforces the motif of a computer intelligence as not simply a technological or political force of power, but a religious one. The ruling A.I. of Yonada is called The Oracle, a step in a more literal direction in contrast with Landru, Vaal or the M-5. The computer rules as an oracular priest: giving commands that are directly revealed from the divine knowledge. As to why or how this arrangement came about, it is not explicitly stated. Perhaps the founders of the world-ship recognized that a computer would be a more reliable ruler over long generations than trusting the people to elect competent leaders, or else trusting in a bloodline. Or perhaps it is simply the destiny of mankind, owing to the course of technological progress, and our own inclinations, to one day fall to our knees in worship before our own artificial gods.

As always, the instructive lesson is that our heroes liberate the Yonadans from the machine. More importantly, McCoy only finds the superstitious, regimented, and frankly backwards lifestyle of the Yonadans attractive while he is dying. It is technology – long forgotten to the Yonadans, and forbidden to them by The Oracle – that saves McCoy’s life. Once he has his life back, whatever love he has for Natira, McCoy returns to the frontier.

 

 

VI. Conclusion: Enemies Within

 

            Why does humanity need the frontier? The theory behind Star Trek is that we are irrationally-driven. We have our reasonable side, our civilized side, our moral side. But we also have a passionate side, an instinctual side, a barbaric side. The classical attitude towards these two sides of mankind was to moralize the conflict, and declare one side good and the other side evil. This is the doctrine of the immortal soul, versus the sinful flesh. We find it all throughout the intellectual history of the West, from the philosophy of Stoicism, to the Christian writings of St. Paul. There is a moral doctrine, imposed on man from a higher power, that declares his flesh to be shameful, and the world to be the domain of the devil. God, on the other hand, is spirit, and our true selves in this schema are our own spirits: our souls. The words ‘animal’, ‘base’, ‘bestial’, all carry a negative connotation, in spite of the fact that human beings are animals, and do have needs which are base, however much we might wish to ignore them.

            Ever since human beings wandered the savannahs in small tribal bands, surviving as hunter-gatherers – and probably even before this, even though our ancestors before this could scarcely be called human beings – there was a need within them to roam freely, to wander, to settle. They acquired an evolutionary imperative to overcome challenges, defeat rival predators and conquer other bands of humans. They developed the urge to climb their own social hierarchies, and better themselves by acquiring new skills and knowledge. Much that is both admirable about mankind, such as our creativity, can be sourced to this need for growth and expansion. But we must also accept that much of what we consider dangerous or troubling about the deepest human instincts are also borne of this same desire. What was every European imperialist or colonist of the 18^th and 19^th century doing, if not to venture into the unknown and settle it?

            While we have sourced many of the attitudes of Star Trek to a certain moment in American culture, as well as attitudes in American society more generally, one could argue that these same impulses are part of all mankind to a greater or lesser degree. The challenge is to deal with the opposition between the civilized half and the barbaric half.

            This opposition is the subject of one of the beloved episodes of the series, “The Enemy Within”. After a transporter accident splits Captain Kirk into two individuals, the crew discovers that one Kirk is the man of reason and the other is the man of passions. The passionate, wild Kirk is uncontrollable, even going so far as to attempt a sexual assault on one of the crewmembers. Without the inhibitions of a social morality, that half of Kirk becomes nothing less than a predator. He is pure animal, untouched by civilization. Initially, the other side of Kirk – his reasonable, moral side – seems to be much like the other Kirk. And of course he would be; for the reasonable, moral half is the side that the ego-consciousness projects in accordance with society’s demands. But underneath, something is now missing, and this reasonable Kirk quickly finds that he is losing the confidence of command. He finds it difficult to commit to basic command decisions, and finds that he is feeling weaker and more afraid as he remains separated from his baser, animal instincts.

            As the situation progresses, it is Spock that later points out in explicit detail what has happened to Kirk, and, from a logical standpoint, explains the benefit of having emotions.
           

Spock: “Judging from my observations, Captain, you’re rapidly losing the power of decision.”
            McCoy: “Do you have a point, Spock?”
            “We have here an unusual opportunity to appraise the human mind, or to examine, in Earth terms, the roles of good and evil in a man. His negative side which you call hostility, lust, violence. And his positive side, which Earth people express as compassion, love, tenderness…”
            McCoy: “It’s the captain’s guts you’re analyzing, Spock, do you realize that?”
           

Spock’s character here can escape accusations of being written inconsistently perhaps by his suggestion that he is speaking specifically about “the human mind”. However, later in the episode, Spock describes himself as a man with two halves – a Vulcan and a human half – which are “at war” with one another. His intelligence makes the two halves live with one another; he is certain Kirk’s intelligence will permit him to do the same. Thus, Spock, as the representative of logic, asserts that intellect should be relied upon the central orienting principle over one’s personality, but still affirms the necessity of both halves of humanity.
            Most interestingly, Spock, who associates the blind passions, the ungovernable instincts as the ‘negative side’, nevertheless admits that this negativity is tied to man’s drive and ambition: 

 

“And what is it that makes one man an exceptional leader? We see here indications that it is his negative side which makes him strong. That his evil side, if you will, properly controlled and disciplined, is vital to his strength. Your negative side, removed from you, the power of command begins to elude you.”
            “You have your intellect Jim,” McCoy chimes in, “You can fight with that!”

            The episode might be described as somewhat Jungian in light of all these considerations, though I have no idea if Roddenberry read or agreed with Jung. Carl Jung wrote that a wholly individuated person would be able to embrace and accept their “shadow”, which is the side of their personality composed of the dark impulses that have been suppressed by the ego. More properly than simply being Kirk’s “negative side”, or his “evil side”, the dark, alter-Kirk is his Jungian shadow. McCoy certainly takes the Jungian position in arguing that Kirk must reunite with his dark half, even though he doesn’t wish to:

 

“You’re no different than anyone else – we all have our darker side. We need it. It’s half of what we are. It’s not really ugly, it’s human… Part of what he is makes you the man you are. God forbid I should have to agree with Spock, but he was right. Without the negative side, you wouldn’t be the Captain. You couldn’t be.”

The themes laid out in “The Enemy Within” would be utilized again and again in the examination of Spock’s character, in whom logic and the passions exist in constant tension. Apparently another one of Roddenberry’s obsessions was how the logical mind coped with the passions of the body, and this would be explored again and again through the Vulcan species. But even beyond the conflict localized to any one character, the continual demand of the frontier spirit is to live in accordance with our morality while fulfilling the needs of our passions. It is the feeling of potency that makes humanity happy, and this is only found in the process of bringing our power to bear on the world. This means overcoming opposition and dealing with hardship. The task of civilization is to channel these needs into productive directions that do not violate our morals. When civilization goes wrong is when it misunderstands its purpose, and believes that happiness is found in safety and stability. This will never satisfy the wild man within ourselves, who will always choose the frontier over utopia.

The problem, in the realm of politics, is that utopians will impose their order on individuals regardless of whether they choose that order or not. More often than not, it is not any one individual doing this, but a system. This can be represented metaphorically as a society run by a computer, but it is worth noting that technology may one day bring such a state of affairs forward in actual reality. Landru may well be the future of the human race. And if such a technological system imposes itself on mankind, will we be able to break free? Or will we flee into the safety of a new dark age?

As we discussed at the beginning of the chapter, the moralist response to the body/mind duality is to condemn the passionate side. This was a commonality that Roddenberry recognized between religious thought and technocratic thought. Both are systems of control for preserving civilization, and both ideologies tend to undervalue humanity’s irrational impulses as simply being sinful (in the case of religion) or harmful to the system (in the case of technocracy). In fact, as we see throughout the series, it is often the logical Mr. Spock who is more susceptible to the appeal of utopianism, because there is an underlying logic to it. More importantly, the modern intellectual yearns for a release and a return to nature, to escape an uncertain future.

The only way to break free of the cage of utopian thinking is to harness those same inconvenient, animal instincts. To accept the passionate side, and to integrate it with your view of what constitutes the good life.

Underlying all of Star Trek, then, is Roddenberry’s attack on a religious sentiment that still haunted the popular consciousness. Even as we were pressing into a technologically-advanced and secular age, beneath it all were still the old prejudices which devalued the body and exalted the mind, spoke of an idyllic state when things were simpler, and promised that we could return to this “paradise”. In a word, the Christian religion had embedded itself in the soul of the West, and core to the entire ideology is the story of Genesis. In overturning the Genesis myth, Roddenberry is trying to reconcile reason and the passions. He is providing an alternative to the stale promises of a “City on a Hill” as the end-goal of society. All of these are holdovers from religion that need to be discarded.

As we discussed earlier, “Satan” could no longer be the antagonist of this story – but neither could he be the protagonist. Perhaps there is some redemptive aim in having Spock resemble medieval caricatures of Satan to some extent; and, of course, the Inverted Genesis was tried at least in one case with a Satan-figure, the Klingon commander.

More commonly in the Inverted Genesis story, however, it is the protagonists – the Enterprise crew – who provide the naïve people with “the apple” – that is to say, the wisdom of life and death, right and wrong. The possibility for growth, freedom, life. I would argue therefore that the role of the Enterprise crew, to the extent that Star Trek is a vehicle for the Inverted Genesis myth, is to replace Satan as an entirely new type of archetype. Now, the giver of the apple is heroic – Kirk, Spock and McCoy are a trio of savior-figures, liberating mankind from the stagnation of Eden. By doing this, they save them from certain death in a false paradise.

But who is the antagonist? If a Satan allegory is not suitable as the protagonist, is God suitable to play the antagonist?

At least one episode comes to mind in which a figure claiming to be a god appears and demands obedience from the Enterprise crew. In “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, an alien entity of great power claims to be Apollo – and, within the mythos of the episode, he actually is Apollo. The Greek Gods are recast as having been alien visitors to Earth, in a move anticipating the Sci-Fi concept of Stargate. This Apollo wants to recapture the good old days when man worshiped, feasted, reveled, and not much else. Kirk and the crew defy this entity, and break his power. It is probably the closest thing to a rebuke of religious tradition in favor of humanism with a literal God appearing on screen as villain in the original series – albeit a Greek god rather than the Christian one.

In the original series of Star Trek, the evil force behind a stagnant utopia was often played by a machine intelligence. In the cases of the more basic Inverted Genesis tales, the natural paradise is simply a result of environmental conditions, and evolving beyond Eden is simply an evolutionary imperative. But these episodes do not have villains in the traditional sense; the Omicron Ceti paradise-flowers are not really “villainous”, they are simply a lifeform doing what it is that they do. Whenever a villain is needed, it is usually an all-powerful computer. Among the few exceptions are the Talosians, whose very forms represents a hyper-focus on intellect.

Societies run by computer are tightly controlled. This applies to both the physical and the social conditions. Roddenberry and the other writers couldn’t help but compare life in an ultra-technocratic society to the world of the religious believer, where all mankind and all the world is ruled by an external, incomprehensible force. Even though there is not a clear analogue for God in any of these episodes, there was a thematic element critical of religious thought. Particularly, Roddenberry warned of the dangers of worshiping artificial intelligence or centrally-planned systems.

 

As the years went on, the critique on religious thinking that Roddenberry began in Star Trek continued to evolve. Roddenberry’s continued fascination with the Genesis story came out again in 1972, 1973 and 1975, with a series of made for television films. The first of these was called, Genesis II, and explored the idea of new societies arising out of a world in which mankind had destroyed itself and created a nuclear dystopia. The main character, Dylan Hunt, awakes on the Earth of 2133, where an idealistic organization called PAX, descended from the scientists of NASA, attempts to use technology to bring peace to the world. The other films to follow in this loose universe contained many of the same characters and ideas, though they were not actually related through continuity, with each outing its own attempt at getting picked up for a television series. None were. It seems that Roddenberry had an inexhaustible number of insights as regarded the Genesis story, but these ideas never really connected with audiences.[22]

But the idea of God as antagonist also continued as a theme in Roddenberry’s storytelling. There was, of course, the ill-fated film, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), a film that is universally hated by the fans. It is considered by some to not even qualify as “Canon” (perhaps even Roddenberry himself). The film features a famous confrontation with a seemingly all-powerful being who claims to be God.

But the real masterstroke in developing the idea of “God as antagonist”, occurs in the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1993). In this episode, the entity Q is introduced. Q is as close to all-powerful and all-knowing as he needs to be to satisfy the conditions of being a God-like entity. What’s more, when he appears on the bridge of the USS Enterprise D, he declares, in Biblical tones:

 

“Thou art notified that thy kind hath infiltrated the galaxy too far already. Thou art directed to return to thine own solar system immediately.”

 

Q’s order to Jean-Luc Picard and the Enterprise crew – the stand-ins for all mankind – is to abandon the frontier, and return to the safety of their own society. As for why, Q indicts mankind as a savage, child-like race. For Q, the past crimes of mankind stain the human generation that stands before him now. The sins of the father are carried on by the sons – the truly Biblical point of view. Q continually appears in the uniforms and garb of human beings from past ages, and at one point in the episode transports the Enterprise into one of the more sordid ages of human civilization, when there were kangaroo courts and mass killings.

In short, Q is the perfect allegory for God as antagonist. The humans of his time have accepted both their logical and passionate sides, and dedicated themselves to continually explore into the unknown, and into their own psychology. Q, however, wants to continue to accuse the passionate, wild side of mankind, and its many crimes of the past. He wants to keep mankind in the past and undermine its confidence in itself.

 

Q: “You will now answer to the charge of being a grievously savage race.”

Captain Jean-Luc Picard: “‘Grievously savage’ could mean anything. I will answer only specific charges.”

Q: “Are you certain you want a full disclosure of human ugliness? So be it, fool.”

 

 

In the end, Picard and the next generation of the Enterprise pass Q’s trial, but Q returns again and again as an antagonist, insisting that, “The trial never ends.”

While we’ve mainly concerned ourselves with the original series, I bring in the metaphor of Q as a stand-in for a judgmental God because it helps to orient Roddenberry’s view of humanity as he lays it forth in the original series. The reason why it is imperative to escape the judgmental God and his Genesis myth is because it prevents us from fully realizing our potential as human beings. As he argues in the quote I cited at the beginning of this essay, human beings are clever. They work hard. They create their own destiny in life. With this knowledge, we can sear through the cynicism that says there is no tomorrow, and argue that there is a future for mankind: we can build one. We simply have to unshackle ourselves from prejudices about our own limitations, or an idealized end-state that we must bring forth.

The empowering thesis of Star Trek is that these limitations are self-imposed, and exist in our minds. The idea of God is what has made our passionate side into “the enemy within” – something which must be fought, condemned, and suppressed.

But it is just as much the case that God, and His paradisical Garden, so too live inside of our heads. When Roddenberry wrote Star Trek, God, Sin, and the Genesis myth haunted the Western psyche – and indeed, still haunt the Western psyche. But it is within our power to change all that. Perhaps all we need is the right story. Roddenberry’s task was to give us a new story, where man marched out of paradise to the sound of drums. His vision of the future was not a static utopia, but an infinite frontier, where mankind could forge itself anew – a continual becoming, a neverending quest of self-betterment. 

It could be argued that the frontier spirit itself is just another old idea, haunting the American psyche. Perhaps, in the form of the western, this was true. But by projecting the idea onto the future rather than the past, Roddenberry harnesses the same underlying drives that produced the western genre, and gives them a transformative push. Indeed, the need for growth and exploration are part of the human condition. It is in understanding those drives, and therefore understanding and accepting ourselves, that we can find the resolve to free ourselves from the old cages.

 

 Space: the final frontier. 

These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. 

Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. 

To seek out new life and new civilizations. 

To boldly go where no man has gone before!

 

 

---

[1]    Interview (20 September 1988), included in Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5, DVD 7, "Mission Logs: Year Five", "A Tribute to Gene Roddenberry", 0:26:09)

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/utopian-future-of-star-trek-2015-10

[3] Paul Krugman, who I generally despise, made a salient point during the discussion: “People have an amazing ability to be unhappy. The problem with utopia is not the lack of scarcity — it's people.” Arguably, however, this is actually the central thesis of the show, and not its refutation. I wouldn’t expect Krugman, an economist, to know this, or to have a strong opinion on Star Trek. However, some of the other panelist’s opinions were unforgivably ignorant. Annalee Newitz, founding editor of the website io9, characterized the TNG episode, “Measure of a Man”, as an indictment of the Federation as being supported by slavery. “We're constantly being reminded that slavery and low wages support the comfortable, Enterprise living.” This is in no wise indicated by the episode, which is about the rights and freedoms of Data, an android who is relatively unique in the Federation. The plot is largely concerned with the court case that ultimately decides that Data should have rights under Federation law. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that these people merely rehashed the ubiquitous, superficial read of the show as “utopian”, as some of them didn’t seem to have a grasp on the plot points of the episodes the panel discussed. (Ironically, Star Trek: Picard, which aired in 2020, did portray the Federation, at a later stardate, using androids as slaves.)

[4] “Perfection” is, of course, the aim of The Next Generation’s Borg.

[5] It is not entirely clear how many people died in Earth’s WWIII. Spock gives the figure of 37 million the episode, “Bread and Circuses”; in the TNG film, First Contact, Riker says it was 600 million, which is a pretty big difference. However, in context, Spock also says that only 11 million died in WWII, when the actual figure is 75 million. Even if we assume Spock was only counting military casualties, the number is still way off: Military deaths from all causes totaled 21–25 million, including deaths in captivity of about 5 million prisoners of war. Spock is also off on WWI (7 million deaths in Spock’s estimate; the actual number is more than 20 million). Unfortunately, the writers of that episode seem to have not had access to good information on the death tolls, but we can assume if we scale Spock’s figure up relative to his other (wrong) estimates, WWIII would still be the most destructive conflict in human history.

[6] Consider, for example, Star Trek: Insurrection (1998).

[7] I have spent as much time clarifying this point as I have because of the strange beliefs in modern-day fan communities regarding concepts such as, “Canon”. Some members of the Star Trek fandom have construed a giant, interconnected continuity, in which, for example, the events of Enterprise or Star Trek: Discovery ought to inform our reading of the original series of Star Trek, since they occurred earlier chronologically. This is in spite of the fact that these shows were launched in 2005 and 2017, respectively, and contain underlying themes informed by events such as 9/11 and the election of Donald J. Trump to the office of President – which could not possibly have anything to do with the ideas of the original series, since these events happened decades after it aired.

 

[8] I will not be using the conventional notion of referring to Star Trek (1966-1969) as “The Original Series” or TOS, for the sole reason that such notation constantly reminds the reader that Star Trek is simply the first of many such series in a franchise. I want the reader to instead to consider the series in the context in which it was created: as its own entity, unrelated to any larger universe. As such, the term Star Trek, whenever used, refers simply to “TOS” and not the franchise as a whole.

[9] Due to both budgetary restraints and the proclivity for episodes as naked thought experiments, the trend of the crew encountering recognizable people, events and societies from Earth became increasingly literal as the show continued. Consider: “A Piece of the Action”, “Patterns of Force”, “Bread and Circuses”, “The Spectre of the Gun”, “The Savage Curtain”.

[10] The wealth was of course not adequately shared with the black population, many of whom also gave up their lives to fight in WWII.

[11] It was surpassed in 2019 by Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

[12] See, Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift, by Erin Horáková, http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-rememberd-kirk-drift/

[13] W. T. Stead, ed., The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London: William Clowes Ltd., 1902), quoted in Emanuele Saccarelli and Latha Varadarajan, Imperialism Past and Present (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 15.

 

[14] Timothy A Pychyl: “The consensus based on the psychology of action and personal goals clearly indicates that the successful pursuit of meaningful goals plays an important role in the development and maintenance of our psychological well-being.” Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dont-delay/200806/goal-progress-and-happiness.
See also, the “Hedonic treadmill”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

[15] The Hippie Movement will be more openly addressed in “The Way to Eden”.

 

[16] The original script was written by John Ingalls, a friend of Roddenberry’s. Roddenberry altered the script so extremely that Ingalls refused to be credited as its author, and demanded that the episode be attributed to ‘Jud Crucis’, a play on the ‘Jesus Christ’, since he had been ‘crucified’ during the process.

[17] The Prime Directive would seem to have numerous interpretations.

[18] A few years later, in 1971, there was the famous “Keep America Beautiful” ad campaign, which depicted a Native American shedding a single tear at the sight of litter. This example is perfect in many ways to show how the contemporary American attitude towards Native Americans shifted, and reached completion by the 1970’s. For such an ad campaign to be effective and comprehensible to the public, the public would have to both have a large amount of sympathy with the Native Americans, and furthermore see the Native American as a stand-in for the pure, natural America before pollution, industrialization, and so on. But we should keep in mind that not a few decades before, Native Americans were still often portrayed as one-dimensional villains (“savages”) in popular western films and later television programs. Perhaps the single best example of a clash between the old attitude and the new one would be in 1973, when Marlon Brando had Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather attend the Oscars in his place, and refuse to accept the award on his behalf. Littlefeather instead read a statement about the prejudice against Native Americans in popular media. Apparently, John Wayne – an iconic American actor and star of countless westerns – had to be physically restrained from going out to stop Littlefeather from speaking. “The motion picture community has been as responsible as any,” Brando wrote, “for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing his as savage, hostile and evil.”

[19] See: Peter Turchin: Ultrasociety

[20] This would evidently imply that there is a Prime Directive in place here, but apparently beaming down and interacting with a pre-warp species, and even telling them of the existence of other intelligent life in the universe, does not quite count as interference.

[21] It is worth noting that simply describing the Federation as “post-scarcity” – as many fans now do, in lieu of explaining the economics of a society with no currency, forced labor or exploitation – nevertheless raises a question as to whether such a society would be achieved by socialism or capitalism. But we must remember that American Liberals (in the broad sense of the term) have not historically conceived of “capitalism” as the salvific aspect of American society, until the libertarians and objectivists came along. The core appeals of liberal society are the values of freedom, self-governance, and equality among men. Thus, Star Trek fully realizes all of these goals, which are of an abstract moral or social quality, and cares little for the economic details. In my view, it would be impossible to reach a post-scarcity society without a shift in how the surplus generated by technology is shared – since we could easily raise every American out of poverty right now, with the wealth and technology we have, but we don’t do so. This means the issue is simply not one of technological innovation; such a society requires social innovation. On the other hand, the claim that Star Trek represents a form of socialism is a later innovation that was probably not intended by the original series. Some have argued that a post-scarcity society could be reached through ever more efficient technologies being produced within market capitalism, and while I don’t agree, I felt it worth mentioning here.

[22] The character of Dylan Hunt, who appeared in both Genesis II and Planet Earth, as well as the idea of a main character coming out of a long stasis to find that the world they once knew has been completely destroyed, were taken by Robert Hewitt Wolfe and included in the show Andromeda.