In the “reboot” timeline, all Vulcans may have to grapple with similar challenges. Can Vulcans maintain both their collective and individual identities if they have lost the planet where those originated? The most recent Star Trek movie takes place in an alternate “parallel” universe that resulted when Spock and the Romulan Nero were sucked into the black hole. In this new universe, Vulcan has been destroyed by a black hole, and the Vulcans are an endangered species.
What would Star Trek’s universe be without Vulcans? In the reboot timeline, the original Spock, or “Spock Prime,” found a planet where a new Vulcan colony could be established, and the younger Spock was able to evacuate some of the Vulcan elders before the destruction of the planet in order to preserve the essence and culture of Vulcan. Spock was able to rescue his father, but the katras of many important Vulcans were surely lost, and we have no information about the fate of others who were living on Vulcan at the time of the Romulan attack. In this new reality, all bets are off. The reboot series has thus created a Vulcan diaspora, which may have to use time travel and the existence of parallel universes to reestablish Vulcan culture and to maintain its philosophy and culture of logic within the Star Trek universe.
In creating the Vulcans, Gene Rodenberry offered speculations about a culture in which God-centered religions were replaced by a veneration of science and knowledge. The Star Trek creators, including both writers and some of the actors who created Vulcan characters, developed this idea even further. Vulcans have rituals like those attached to religions, the practice of meditation, and disciplines that look monastic. The Vulcans’ view of their own history contains the same conviction that some human religions are based on: that people are flawed beings overcoming their own violence and uncontrollable passion through grace—but their grace is the grace of science and logic, not of anything spiritual or irrational. It is no wonder that many fans want to adopt the Vulcan way of life.
Notes
1. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volume 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 773.
2. We are introduced to Sela, the blond-haired character whose mother was human and whose father was Romulan, in TNG, which suggests that a blond-haired Vulcan might be possible.
3. Nimoy describes the origin of the hand salute in an interview on the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/21/leonard-nimoy-describes-h_n_864911.html.
Chapter 17
Alien Babes and Alternate Universes
The Women of Star Trek
M. G. DuPree
In 1966, a test audience in Los Angeles sat down to watch a pilot, titled “The Cage,” for a new science fiction show called Star Trek. Its creator, Gene Roddenberry, awaited their verdict anxiously. The show starred a handsome, impetuous, born-to-command captain, backed up by his able first officer, who was dedicated, brilliant, and utterly emotionless. No, it wasn’t Kirk and Spock: it was Captain Pike (played by Jeffrey Hunter) and Number One (played by Majel Barrett). This first officer, with many of the same character traits that would make Spock such a fascinating figure to decades of fans, was a woman, and the audience hated it—and her.1
Roddenberry later recalled being particularly disappointed with the reaction of the women in the test audience. Expecting that they would cheer upon seeing a woman on-screen in a command role, he was surprised that the overall reaction was not “Go sister, go!” but “Who does she think she is?” Both men and women in the test audience were uncomfortable with what appeared to be the upending of traditional gender roles.2 However, in an unexpected move, NBC was not willing to give up on the idea of a science fiction series, and they sent Roddenberry (in whom network executives apparently still had faith) back to the drawing board. This time, Kirk and Spock emerged, and the woman a heartbeat from command on the bridge had been replaced by a woman at the communications station—Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols, whose role in the beginning was essentially that of a glorified cosmic receptionist. Throughout the original Star Trek, women would serve as foils, as temptresses, as paths not taken, as threats, or as subordinates, while Kirk romped his way across the galaxy. It would be twenty-nine years before TV audiences had another chance to see, in Voyager’s Captain Janeway, a lead female character in a Star Trek series, much less a woman in command.3
It was as though in making his pilot episode, Roddenberry had forgotten the essential structure of myth, which of course is what science fiction is. Myth, in any culture, is the working out of present anxieties against a backdrop of a time (and sometimes place) removed from one’s own—as though the fanciful setting allows one to see the dilemma of what needs working out more clearly, like a microbe in a petri dish. Myths—whether ancient Greek, Aztec, or Chinese—are remarkable not for how different from the audience their heroes are, but for how similar.
Hera and Zeus hurl thunderbolts and mountains, defy the boundaries of time and space, and arbitrate wars, and yet they are as recognizable to us in their manipulations and marital squabbles as they were to the ancient Greeks. In order to be powerful storytelling, myth must partake of present reality in its social constructs and behaviors, even as it plays make-believe with the settings of present reality—a sort of “let’s pretend” in which the audience is transported to a fanciful past (or future) but travels as their essential selves. By using Number One to turn traditional gender roles upside down, Roddenberry had deeply upset his audience’s understanding of myth, and he had troubled the network executives who needed a financial success.
In terms of gender issues, this would be the consistent story of the forty-five-year franchise. Even as women made strides in the workplace, in civil rights, and in gender equity across the globe, Star Trek would remain mired in a reassuring narrative of male empowerment and female subservience. At the same time, the language and window dressing shifted to accommodate more modern sensibilities: in Next Generation’s famous shift in the opening credits away from the gender specificity of “to boldly go where no man has gone before” to what a 1990s drinking game (circulated in e-mails among fans) wryly referred to as “boldly splitting infinitives in a nonsexist manner.”4
I Am the Goddess of Empathy: The Women of The Next Generation
With that single word shift from “man” to “one,” The Next Generation seemed to be announcing a new frontier of gender relations. Women would have a much more prominent role in this series—both Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) and Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) would be central figures in this series.
And yet once again, the command structure on the bridge was males only. Lt. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby), as phaser-toting chief security officer, came the closest to stepping outside traditional female roles, but her death at the end of the first season of what would be an unprecedented seven-year run meant she quickly faded from view. Troi and Crusher became the dominant female stars, and they both inhabited roles that were easy to assign to the realm of the feminine—Troi’s entire raison d’etre as the ship’s counselor (and one is hard-pressed to imagine Kirk’s Enterprise in need of such a thing) was to help the crew to get in touch with their feelings, feelings to which Troi herself, as an empath, was preternaturally attuned.
Troi was the archetype of femininity writ large, from her form-fitting unisuits that no one else on the crew seemed to be wearing to her nymphlike waterfall of hair, her childishly enlarged irises (Sirtis wore contacts for that), and her heightened emotional sensitivity. True, women were no longer largely invisible, as they had been in the original series. The Next Generation seemed to be affirming and embracing the presence of women, but it did so only in roles that would not have challenged the gender stereotypes of 1966, let alone those of 1987, when the show premiered. As medical officer and ship’s counselor, these women were the caretakers, the healers of body and soul and the support system for the other officers.
Even Guinan, Whoopi Goldberg’s unflappable bartender in Ten Forward who enjoys the implic
it trust of Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart), might be a transplant from the set of Bonanza—the wise and utterly desexed older woman who is a font of sterling advice. In Guinan’s case, she is literally older, since “Time’s Arrow” and “Rascals” reveal her to be somewhere between five hundred and seven hundred years old. Guinan, whose species is described as “listeners,” is frequently able to make Picard consider a different point of view, just as Troi is able to induce him to get in touch with his deeper emotions and Crusher is able to patch him back together and send him off again to the bridge. Women here are visible as they were not in the original series, but they are there to buttress and support the men, not to tell them what to do or to assume command roles.
However, in two instances in season 6, Dr. Crusher does assume command when there is no one else to do the job. Here her assumption of command is something like a Rosie the Riveter scenario: she takes over a man’s job only as an extension of her feminine duty, and she relinquishes any pretensions to authority once the menfolk return. Troi experiments with command as well: in “Thine Own Self,” Troi has returned from a reunion of her Starfleet class, chagrined to have discovered that she is the only one of her class not to have qualified for commander. Determined to rectify this, she enters training for the Bridge Officer’s Test with Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes), most of which involves a holodeck simulation of a no-win command scenario.
Troi keeps getting it wrong: she tries solution after solution, when in fact the only solution is to send a crewmember to his death in order to save the ship. Being an empath, this is naturally difficult for her to do. It is as though Troi, as the über-feminine, cannot quite wrap herself around the emotional (or rather, emotionless) demands of command, and although she eventually passes the test, she expresses diffidence at the end, telling Riker that he may have been right about her unfitness for command. Riker reassures her—and his assessment of her fitness for command is right—but the viewer is left with the impression of her uncertainty and self-doubt, emotions rare to any of the male senior staff. In this episode, as in the series as a whole, female value is affirmed, but only as traditionally understood females.
These episodes were aired in the late 1980s and early 1990s: getting in touch with one’s feminine side was de rigueur in the popular culture of this period. In one of the series’ most famous and moving episodes, “The Inner Light,” Picard is controlled by an alien probe that erases his memory of life as Picard and causes him to experience a lifetime as a man from the long-destroyed planet Kataan. While Picard lapses into a coma on the Enterprise, he lives the life of the craftsman Kamin, from middle age to death, all in the space of twenty-five minutes. In this agrarian society, Picard/Kamin is a doting father and grandfather, a humble musician, an undistinguished community member—he is immersed, in other words, in what in the paradigm of The Next Generation is the world of the traditional female. At the episode’s end, he is restored to himself as Picard, but Riker brings him a box from the alien probe that had disabled him. The box contains the flute he played as Kamin, and the episode’s final shots are of Picard playing the tune he played at his son’s naming ceremony: the idea being, of course, that Picard’s life as a warrior-prince continues, albeit deepened and enriched by his experiences as Kamin, in much the same way that feminine presence and viewpoints serve as an enriching point for the men of the Enterprise—useful and occasional foils, but there it ends.
Warrior Women
If there is one race immune to getting in touch with their feminine side, it is the Klingons. In the original series as well as in The Next Generation, the Klingons are the ultimate example of a warrior society: patriarchal and violent, Klingons value physical combat and prowess above strategy and education, and their Warrior Code makes them fearsome enemies—humans’ encounters with Klingons, in The Next Generation, are like collisions between conflicted characters from nineteenth-century Gothic romances (the humans) with characters from the Iliad (the Klingons). In giving the audience the Klingon sisters Lursa and B’Etor, The Next Generation shook up the paradigm of male warrior versus female supporter a little. As a contrast to the fantasy creation of Troi’s hyperestrogened healer-empath female figure, the show played out its fantasy of the woman who so rejects her womanhood as to become utterly masculinized: the Klingon female warrior.
Lursa and B’Etor appear three times in The Next Generation—in “Redemption,” “Redemption II,” and “Firstborn.” With their appalling dental work and masculinized features, the first lesson seems to be that warrior women are naturally unattractive—their protruding teeth (unlike, say, Lt. Commander Worf’s) are unmistakably canine in appearance. These warriors, in other words, look like she-wolves. In “Redemption,” in which the audience first meets them, Lursa and B’Etor scheme to place their candidate on the High Council and thus to consolidate the control of their corrupt House of Duras over the Klingon Empire. Their plot means that they must ensure that the fiction that Worf’s father was a traitor to the Empire continues to be upheld. At Picard’s urging, Worf challenges this judgment and, through the course of the episode, arrives at a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Klingon.
In the original Star Trek series, what it meant to be Klingon was simple enough: a nihilistic embrace of violence and the warrior code at the expense of everything else. But The Next Generation approaches Klingon culture with 1990s sensitivity and impartiality. Picard respects Klingon customs and law to an almost slavish degree, even speaking enough of the Klingon language to get by and clearly regarding Klingons as just another fascinating manifestation of the universe’s many diverse cultures.
Lursa and B’Etor’s machinations are foiled, naturally, but not before Picard tells the sisters that “they have manipulated the circumstances with the skill of a Romulan” (TNG, “Redemption”). The viewer begins to see that these women are not, of course, ordinary warriors; since women, as Chancellor Gowron reminds Picard, are not allowed to hold seats on the High Council, they have been relegated to back-room manipulation and scheming. In other words, they are just as much a nineteenth-century projection of female nature as the ever-sympathetic Troi.
Picard’s taunt is a pointed one; he knows, as does the audience, that Lursa and B’Etor have indeed been plotting with the Romulan general Movar, as well as a shadowy female figure, to seize control of the Council with threats and potential assassinations. By the episode’s end, the audience sees this unknown Romulan—it is Commander Sela, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the deceased Tasha Yar. It is the patriarchal conundrum: women must be denied power, but how can you trust what you are oppressing? In classic myths and popular culture, women’s loyalty must often be suspect, and nowhere is that primal male fear played out more clearly than in the shifting stratagems of the Duras sisters—comfortingly alien, rather than human, and thus potentially removed from what human women might be suspected of, but they symbolize a shadow play that reflects a fear of powerful women.
A Commanding Woman
“There are three things to remember about being a starship captain: keep your shirt tucked in, go down with the ship, and never abandon a member of your crew.”
—Captain Kathryn Janeway, VOY, “Dark Frontier”
When Voyager premiered in 1995, for the first time Star Trek fans saw a female captain as the lead character—Captain Kathryn Janeway, played by Kate Mulgrew. The Voyager ship is stranded seven decades’ travel away from Earth, making the premise of the show a fascinating one—what of Starfleet and its directives when a ship truly is on its own? Voyager provided an interesting contrast to the highly regulated world of The Next Generation. If The Next Generation focused on the values of community and civilization, Voyager was Star Trek’s answer to the Western: freewheeling, lost in lawless space, and with a frequently lawless crew.
The pilot episode, “Caretaker,” shows Voyager in its first mission under its new captain, out to find a rebel Maquis ship. But of course, what was meant to be a simple mission, like Gillig
an’s cruise, turns into a seven-year odyssey, as the mysterious alien known as the Caretaker transports both Voyager and the Maquis ship seventy thousand light-years away from Federation territory, with significant casualties on both sides. Janeway is forced to consolidate the Starfleet and Maquis crews, with mixed results that require her to assert her authority and, at times, reconsider the meaning of a captain’s authority.
So what does it mean to say that Voyager is in part a meditation on the limits and significance of authority, when that authority happens to be wielded by a woman? Perhaps that the show’s writers (Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor) and the network executives thought audiences would find such meditation easier if it was divorced from an often-instinctive link between maleness and authority—or perhaps they saw that keeping women out of command was beginning to look, well, as odd and dated as the old-fashioned bridge. But while appearing to be progressive (if the idea of a woman in authority in 1995 can somehow be called progressive), Star Trek was once again imposing an almost Victorian morality on the future. Janeway has to be the most undersexed command figure in the whole franchise, and she is a kind of rewriting of ancient Rome’s Vestal Virgins.
The Vestals enjoyed unique power and authority in classical Rome: chosen from among the best families, they served for thirty years as guardians of Rome’s sacred hearth fire, the fire of the goddess Vesta. They were not secluded nuns, and they enjoyed high social prominence, received the best seats at the theater and the games, entertained in their luxurious residence, and safeguarded the wills and legal documents—and frequently the treasures—of the city’s elite, but they remained virgins. Rome’s Vestals are just one example among hundreds of a basic human equation well known in Western civilization, from mitred abbesses to Queen Elizabeth I: if women want power, they must give up any public expression of sexuality. So what does all of this social anthropology have to do with Captain Janeway?
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