Star Trek and History (3 page)

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 complex 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.

“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

Alice L. George

Like the Iowa homesteaders who were his forefathers, Captain James T. Kirk is a pioneer, pushing the boundaries of his civilization ever outward. As his opening prologue to the original
Star Trek
indicates, space is the final frontier, the last new territory to be explored or claimed. Confronting the mysteries that exist on the edges of known space is a key part of Kirk's mission, but as we try to understand his connection to the American frontier, we find that he is not so much tethered to the real history of the West as he is hog-tied to the mythical Old West. Hiding behind the mask of the proper twenty-third-century starship captain is a Kirk who is part cavalry officer, part riverboat gambler, part lawman, part gunfighter, and part frontier preacher. He has earned a reputation as a man who takes chances and almost always wins. Whether he is sitting in the captain's chair or exploring the wilderness of an alien planet, Kirk is a “white hat,” roaming the range with the best of intentions and the worst of suspicions.

Among white Americans, the Western is the only myth truly born from seeds planted on this continent. Its defining elements are an emphasis on the movement of peoples; the isolation of individuals or small groups, far from “civilization”; and the slow development of cultural order across a territory.
Star Trek
made its debut at a time when Western TV series and movies were quite popular. During the series' first season,
Bonanza
(a Western) was the nation's most-watched series for a third year in a row. What
Star Trek
's producers found was that Western tales' simple depictions of good versus evil adapted easily to science fiction. Both genres examine life on the edge of settled territory, and at the hearts of both genres are the quests for survival.

Thanks to the Beadle & Adams dime novels, the first Westerns became widely available in the United States around 1860. Thus, the West's mythic existence began before its history had fully unfolded, since the settlement of the Western territories by white Americans continued into the late nineteenth century. A growing popular culture focused on celebrities made Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and George Armstrong Custer larger than life. Before most Americans had a chance to learn the facts about Western settlement, Cody was traveling the country with the Wild West Show, which featured Sitting Bull, the chief of the Sioux. The West thus became performance art at the same time that it was becoming history. Three years after the superintendent of the U.S. Census declared the frontier closed in 1890, historian Frederick Jackson Turner put forth his thesis that the unique experience of settling the frontier had played a pivotal role in molding the character and values of Americans. Although the frontier no longer existed, Owen Wister and Zane Grey furthered the Western narrative with their popular novels published during the early twentieth century, and Louis L'Amour and other writers created hundreds of new Western tales later in the century. James T. Kirk is just one of many fictional characters shaped by the patterns that emerge from the Western mythos.

Star Trek
's creator, Gene Roddenberry, jokingly characterized the concept as “
Wagon Train
to the stars,” and Kirk seems to be cut from the same cloth as the hero of Wister's
Virginian
and Bret Maverick of TV and film.
1
Kirk's capacity for innovation is an essential skill as he patrols the galactic frontier, exploring uncharted paths, defending isolated outposts, and attempting to bring order to untamed sectors of space. In the traditions of the Western hero, Kirk does not shy away from trouble: he gallops toward it, eager for the exploits that await him. Like Western heroes, Kirk fights for freedom from domination and for the rights of the individual. As viewers see Kirk's startled look when he becomes the first human captain to confront a huge alien spaceship, they are witnessing the same wonder found in the eyes of a frontier farmer who looks into the sky and sees a swarm of locusts bearing down on his little piece of the planet Earth. The sudden intrusion of the unknown is an integral part of the frontier experience.

It is probably no coincidence that one of the synonyms for adventure is
enterprise
, the name of Kirk's indomitable steed. The ship's sensors and the universal translator are Kirk's scouts, telling him what lies ahead and helping him to communicate with the natives of distant worlds. Two episodes explicitly occur in settings intended to mimic the Old West. “Spectre of the Gun” is blatantly a Western, with Kirk and his colleagues being forced to replay the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. “The Paradise Syndrome” approaches another side of the Western myth—the portrayal of Indians as noble savages. In this episode, Kirk loses his memory and joins Native Americans transplanted from Earth to a distant planet by a Preserver race. Over the course of a few months, Kirk marries and impregnates an Indian priestess named Miramanee. He revels in the simplicity of his primitive life. Eventually, of course, his colleagues relocate him. Because Kirk's memory has been restored and because Miramanee has been killed, he is free to return to his life on the
Enterprise.
Media studies scholar Daniel Bernardi characterizes the decision to kill Miramanee as part of a standard Euro-Indian miscegenation narrative. “The native girl dies so that Kirk, the white male hero, isn't shown unheroically and immorally leaving her and their unborn baby behind.” Bernardi believes that this episode, apparently intended to celebrate Native American culture, actually reveals racism among the show's producers, who stereotyped the Indians as noble savages, showing no progress among them during the centuries since they had been moved to the planet.
2
In this episode, the amnesiac Kirk crosses a line between meeting a new civilization and becoming a part of it. Like some white drifters who found a home among Native Americans, he experiences a totally different frontier culture.

Barely disguised Western motifs surface in other episodes as well. For instance, in “Mudd's Women,” the beautiful ladies are stand-ins for the mail-order brides of yore, and they are on their way to provide companionship for dusty dilithium miners who look very much like the eighty thousand ragged-but-hopeful forty-niners who swept westward in the California gold rush of 1849. The bar on Deep Space Station K-7 in “The Trouble with Tribbles” seems more like a Western saloon than an intergalactic way station. And in “Charlie X,” when the adolescent raised by aliens cannot fit into human culture, he is like the freed Indian captives who had trouble finding a place for themselves among whites after spending years in Native American cultures.

In his book,
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America
, Richard Slotkin argues that the popular Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s provided the perfect backdrop for the Cold War era, in which all of the issues were presented in terms of black versus white, with little middle ground for shades of gray. Slotkin notes that
Star Trek
is particularly reminiscent of “empire” Western films of the 1930s and 1940s, where individual action is decisive in solving a cosmic struggle. He finds particularly strong parallels in the film
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
, which follows an established format in which an evil chieftain, “half-savage, half aristocrat,” attacks, tortures, and massacres innocent beings, leading the forces of good to make a suicidal “charge” to save civilization. In the film, Khan Noonien Singh is a product of late-twentieth-century genetic engineering, marooned by Kirk years ago on a planet with other genetically enhanced humans. A change in the planet's orbit and attacks by deadly indigenous creatures give Khan great motivation to plot his revenge against Kirk. When Khan escapes and gains control of a Federation starship, he almost glows with an obsessive need to defeat Kirk.

In their initial engagement, now Admiral Kirk fails to follow protocol and raise his ship's shields when another Federation ship approaches without any communication. With the
Enterprise
's shields down, Khan is able to cripple the ship, but Kirk's riverboat-gambler persona outwits Khan and the
Enterprise
is able to escape, only to find that Khan has tortured and killed members of a scientific team working on Project Genesis, which is intended to turn a lifeless planet into a lush paradise. Kirk goes to the center of an asteroid where the actual Genesis experiment is under way, and again, he fools Khan, making him believe that there is no escape from the asteroid. As the film progresses, Kirk's desire for revenge against Khan comes to equal Khan's vengeful sentiments toward him. In the end, Khan dies, but in a final desperate act, he sets off the Genesis device, which will destroy all life within its range. The loyal Spock makes the ultimate sacrifice, exposing himself to lethal radiation to save the
Enterprise
and his friend Kirk. The film ends with the famous Kirk/Spock farewell that includes Spock's declaration that “I have been, and ever shall be, your friend,” and the axiom that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” Kirk, who has cheated death many times through cleverness, is paralyzed by his closest friend's willing surrender to the Grim Reaper.