Star Trek and History
Page 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Timeline of Stardates
Star Trek Series and Movie Titles
Introduction
Part One: Characters [Are] Welcome: Backstories
Chapter 1: Riding Posse on the Final Frontier
Western Culture Lassos Eastern Hearts?
Noble Savages in the Neutral Zone
The Federation’s Manifest Destiny
JFK, JTK, and the Final New Frontier
Chapter 2: More Than “Just Uhura”
“Changing the Way People See Us”
“The Next Einstein Might Have a Black Face”
“Be Careful What You Wish For”
“Was I Not One of Your Top Students?”
Chapter 3: The Compassionate Country Doctor and Cold-Blooded Biomedicine
The Country Doctor and Biomedical Science at the Crossroads
Dr. Bones McCoy: Marcus Welby in Space
Bones and Spock at the Heart of the Matter
Chapter 4: Who Is Q?
Testing Humanity and the Frankenstein Complex
The Shifting Faces of Q
It’s a Hell of a Life, Jean-Luc
The Coyote Parallel
Part Two: Kirk and Spock Take on Earth History
Chapter 5: The Final Reflection?
“We Need No Urging to Hate Humans”
Too Klingon to Be Human
Hell Hath No Fury . . .
Foreign Engagements
“What Hope Is There for the Empire?”
Chapter 6: Vietnam, Star Trek, and the Real Future
Vietnam Genesis, Cosmic Exodus
Wars for Peace?
The Enterprise Changes Course!
Chapter 7: You’re Doing It Wrong
Gangsters in Space
The Accidental Time Travelers
The Historian’s Folly
The Rise of the Nazis
Explaining the Holocaust
The Rome That Never Fell
Back from the Future
Doing It Wrong
Chapter 8: If This Is the (Final) Frontier, Where Are the Natives?
No One Here but Us Noble Savages
A Cartoon but Not a Caricature
You Can Tell by Their Outfits
Boldly Going . . . a Step Backward
Does Out of Sight Mean Out of Mind?
Who Mourns for Chakotay and His Imaginary Tribe?
A Mixed Grade for a Mixed Legacy
Chapter 9: Terrorizing Space
One Man’s Terrorist Is Another Man’s George Washington
“They’re Terrorists, Dammit”: So Let’s Negotiate with Them
The Terrorists among Us
The Xindi as al-Qaeda
Chapter 10: To Boldly Go When No One Has Gone Before (or After)
The Directive
Time Travel: Possibilities and Paradoxes
The Observation Effect, Butterflies, and Further Causality Paradoxes
Violating the Temporal Prime Directive versus Preserving the Timeline
Conclusions and Continuums
Part Three: Future Culture
Chapter 11: Shakespeare (and the Rest of the Great Books) in the Original Klingon
A Fondness for Antiques
“You Do Have Books in the Twenty-fourth Century?”
I Wrote It Again Yesterday
“Actually, I Never Read It”
Dammit Jim, I’m a Doctor, Not a Literary Historian!
Chapter 12: Information Technology in Star Trek
I Can Has Internet?
Techies for Trekkies
The Android with a Billion Apps (or: Why Don’t I Have Cool Stuff Like That?)
Jean-Luc Picard Has Joined Faceborg
Chapter 13: History on the Holodeck
The Big Goodbye
A Fistful of Datas
Elementary, My Dear Data
A New Life-Form Rides the Orient Express
Behaving Badly on the Holodeck
Edutainment of the Future
Chapter 14: Why Star Trek’s Cartography Is So Stellar, or How the Borg Mapped/Changed Everything
Lines, Logs, and a Frenchman Named Picard
A History of Star Trek’s Cartography
Über-mapping the Unimatrix: The Borg Shift
It’s All Over: The Map
Chapter 15: Who’s the Devil?
Live and Let Live
What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us
Intervening to Right Past Wrongs
The Enterprise’s Evolving Environmental Mission
Part Four: Other Races Have Histories Too, You Know
Chapter 16: Nothing Unreal Exists
“Vulcan Is Not My Idea of Fun”: Life on a Desert Planet
Is Biology Destiny?: The Nature of Vulcan Difference
“Vulcans. Deep Down, You’re All Just a Bunch of Hypochondriacs”: The Dreaded Vulcan Sex Drive
“My Mind to Your Mind . . . My Thoughts to Your Thoughts . . .”
The Animalistic Past: Ancient Vulcan and the Rise of Surak
The Time of Awakening
Relationships with the Galactic Community
Reformation
The Federation and Beyond
Logic Is the Cement of Our Civilization: Vulcan “Humanism”
Logic Is the Beginning of Wisdom, Not the End
Chapter 17: Alien Babes and Alternate Universes
I Am the Goddess of Empathy: The Women of The Next Generation
Warrior Women
A Commanding Woman
To Boldly Go . . . or Not
New Civilizations, Old Patterns
Chapter 18: Klingons
The Savage Race of Klingons
The Medieval Mirror
Kahless the Unforgettable and Karolus Magnus
“Even Half Drunk, Klingons Are among the Best Warriors in the Galaxy”
Chapter 19: Nazis, Cardassians, and Other Villains in the Final Frontier
Nazis in the Star Trek Canon
The History of the Cardassian Empire
The Nazis of Star Trek
Cardassians Aren’t Always Nazis; Sometimes They’re Soviets
The Place of Cardassians in Star Trek History
Negotiating the Legacy of Star Trek and Its Fans
Starfleet Academy Instructors
Index: Databanks
Wiley Pop Culture and History Series
Series Editor: Nancy R. Reagin
Twilight and History
Edited by Nancy R. Reagin
Harry Potter and History
Edited by Nancy R. Reagin
Star Trek and History
Edited by Nancy R. Reagin
Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved
Cover Design: Wendy Mount
Cover Photograph: © Stocktrek images/Getty Images
Chapter opener design by Forty-five Degree Design LLC
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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For Anne,
Beth, Camille, Claire, KC, and Viki: sisters under the skin
Acknowledgments
A Piece of the Action: The Pleasures of Sharing Star Trek
Spock: One man cannot summon the future.
Kirk: But one man can change the present. . . . In every revolution, there’s one man with a vision.
—TOS, “Mirror, Mirror”
The “man with a vision” who first imagined the Enterprise and her crew was Gene Roddenberry, and any book about Star Trek must begin by acknowledging the man’s profound drive and creativity. The Star Trek films, series, novels, and other spin-offs created since the original show aired have attracted a universe of talented writers, actors, producers, technicians, and others who bring them to life. But Roddenberry was the one who began it all, and like all Star Trek enthusiasts, I am in his debt. The first television series I was a fan of was Star Trek, and without Gene Roddenberry’s creation I would not have become a fan of imagined worlds and universes in the same way; and, of course, this book would not exist.
My fellow fans have inspired me, too. Part of the joy in being a fan of any imagined world lies in sharing it with others, discussing and analyzing the characters and the series that you find so compelling. I am fortunate that some of these fans are also scholars who contributed to this book. They’ve created chapters for this volume that offer clever insights and interesting research for any discussion of the Enterprise and its crew and the universe and franchise that Roddenberry created. I’d like to thank all of them for bringing their passion for Star Trek to the job of writing about it.
I also thank Ruth Abrams, who helped me and some of the authors to say what we wanted to say more clearly. She always had great suggestions for how to improve the chapters that she read and helped edit, and her comments improved the volume substantially. Janice Liedl was my coconspirator and collaborator on other popular history projects during the months I was working on this book, and I am grateful for her constant encouragement, wonderfully pragmatic judgment, and rock-solid reliability, as well as her intricate knowledge of many canons. Connie Santisteban, Eric Nelson, and Lisa Burstiner at Wiley make the publishing process seem easy; they’re experienced at understanding the ways of academics (and fans), and they are a joy to work with.
Star Trek—its many characters, cultures, plots, and incarnations—is endlessly absorbing. I found it that way as a child, watching the original broadcasts, and I’m still as excited by the appearance of new Star Trek movies today. A series is especially compelling when you have good friends to explore, discuss, and debate it with, and the friends I have made through Star Trek fandom (my first fandom, although not my last one) have enriched my life. In return, I offer them this book, which I hope will give everyone who enjoys reading about the Enterprise and her crew new ways of seeing Star Trek’s fascinating universe.
A Timeline of Stardates
Alan Kistler
Star Trek Series and Movie Titles
A Universal Translator
The Star Trek franchise includes five television series, an animated series, and (with the premiere of the 2013 movie) twelve films. Star Trek films are discussed using their full titles, but this book abbreviates the television series names as follows:
TOS: The original series (1966–1969)
TNG: Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994)
DS9: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999)
VOY: Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001)
ENT: Star Trek: Enterprise (2001–2005)
Introduction
Time Warps and Future Histories
Nancy R. Reagin
Spock: Captain, I never will understand humans. How could a [historian] as brilliant, a mind as logical as John Gill’s, have made such a fatal error?
Kirk: He drew the wrong conclusion from history.
—TOS, “Patterns of Force”
James T. Kirk certainly knows his history—even better than his former history instructor at Starfleet Academy, Professor John Gill. In the original series episode “Patterns of Force,” Gill was rather naive about the consequences of introducing Nazi ideology into an alien culture. His re-creation of Nazi Germany on another planet almost leads to a new Holocaust, before Kirk and the Enterprise crew intervene and head off disaster.
For a film and TV franchise that ranges across many futures, Star Trek is very interested in the past. The captains and crews of the Enterprise use a variety of methods to revisit the past: time warps, the Guardian of Forever, atavachrons, black holes, temporal disruptors, and—if they’re looking for a less risky method of experiencing the past—holodeck simulations. Later Star Trek series even featured a Temporal Prime Directive (enforced by a time police organization, the Federation’s Department of Temporal Investigations) to protect the integrity of the “real” timeline, since apparently monkeying around with it is irresistible. Kirk, of course, has the biggest file in the department’s database, since his records contain the details of seventeen different occasions when Kirk intervened in the past.
Kirk, Spock, and other Starfleet personnel visit many times and places from our own past, including Nazi Germany, the Roman Empire, the American Old West, the United States during the Great Depression and the Cold War, and Sherlock Holmes’s London. Kirk and others usually want to make the “right” use of history: preserving the timeline as it “should” be and learning from it so that they don’t repeat the mistakes of past cultures. In fact, many Starfleet officers seem fascinated with the past: Kirk collects antiques and Jean-Luc Picard dabbles in archaeology, while Benjamin Sisko loves the ancient sport of baseball, which has almost disappeared by the twenty-fourth century.
In using historical settings and people, Star Trek helped shape popular understandings of the past. The series also reflected the social changes that were under way at the time when each show was being written and produced. Successive episodes in the original series mirrored Gene Roddenberry’s own coming to terms with the Vietnam War, and other episodes were commentaries on race relations, feminism, and the hippies of the 1960s. Later Star Trek series and movies were shaped by the concerns of their own decades, and they grappled with species extinctions and ecological disaster, the end of the Cold War, HIV, and terrorism. Since each series was a product of its own time, we can find many events in recent history that help us understand the concerns driving the plots and characters in Star Trek.
Kirk and his companions weren’t concerned only with Earth’s past, however. Star Trek offers us a fascinating array of alien cultures and histories, too. The Vulcans, the Romulans, the Klingons, the Cardassians, and the Bajorans all have their own c
omplex and ancient histories—which are often clearly modeled on human historical cultures, as some of the chapters in this book explore in detail. The Klingon Empire’s rivalry with the Federation in the original Star Trek series paralleled Cold War relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, for example, although Klingon culture also seems to have some medieval features. Cardassian culture, which is heavily militarized and emphasizes the importance of serving the state, was created by Deep Space Nine’s writers to mirror Prussian and Nazi history; one of the show’s producers and writers acknowledged later that he had the German Gestapo in mind when he wrote about the Cardassian Obsidian Order.
Knowing more about our own history helps us to see Star Trek’s people and cultures in a new light. But it’s also true that Star Trek helped us to envision our own future. Star Trek created a vocabulary for the future that was absorbed into everyday life—almost everyone knows what “warp speed” is nowadays, or “beaming up.” Indeed, it’s hard for us to envision a future that doesn’t incorporate some of the assumptions, technologies, and settings that originated in Star Trek. As one of this book’s chapters demonstrates, from plasma screens to Bluetooth, we often saw it on Star Trek first. Star Trek thus showed us a bit of the future even decades ago, while projecting our past onto future centuries and cultures. It is the once and future science fiction series: its own timeline still carries us forward along with the Enterprise and her crew, boldly going into both the past and the future.
Part One
Characters [Are] Welcome: Backstories
“I signed aboard this ship to practice medicine, not to have my atoms scattered back and forth across space by this gadget.”
—McCoy, TOS, “Space Seed”
Spock: In any case, were I to invoke logic, logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Kirk: Or the one.
—Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Chapter 1
Riding Posse on the Final Frontier
James T. Kirk, Hero of the Old West