I've been enjoying renting Star Trek (Original Series) DVDs from Netflix recently, and getting reacquainted with the old ST world. What i've been discovering is that it is more nuanced than i remembered it. Often it gets a bad rap for its pre-PC sensibility. Jokes about Kirk and his "flying leg kicks" and his use-phaser-first, ask-questions-later policy. But it's soooo much more complex than that.
I recently watched "The Devil in the Dark," where Kirk and Spock have to deal with an alien life form, a "Horta," that has killed dozens of Federation-protected miners on a resource-rich planet. The Horta even kills an Enterprise security officer. But Spock refuses to kill the Horta, and convinces Kirk not to kill it. In a twist, Kirk then has to convince Spock not to kill it. They discover that the Horta killed only to defend its eggs, which the miners were unwittingly destroying. Kirk makes peace between the Horta and the miners. All the more remarkable perhaps since Kirk is, as he says in a different episode, "a soldier, not a diplomat," and the Horta has killed a man under his command who was doing no more than standing watch. We could point to Kirk's "humanism" here, but the Horta is not human, and not even a carbon-based life form (it's silicon based). This is an episode that would surely please even PETA. Amazing. Kirk is hardly portrayed as a phaser-toting imperialist.
- PRIME DIRECTIVE FOLLOWED?
- Sort of. Kirk reaches a compromise between the Federation's need for vital minerals and the Horta's right, as an indigenous species, to thrive on its home planet.
I also recently watched "Errand of Mercy," where Kirk and Spock attempt to turn a seemingly simple, agrarian planet, into a Federation-protected outpost. Why? Because owing to its location the planet is of strategic importance to both the Federation and its enemy the Klingons, who show up not long after Kirk and Spock. The whole set up is obviously the Cold War and the competition of the US and the Soviets over any number of strategically important and pre-industrial societies from the Middle East to Vietnam. As it turns out, the inhabitants of the planet are super-powerful beings who are, as Spock observes at the end of the episode, "pure intellect." The beings render the armaments of both the Federation and the Klingon Empire unusable, and scold them for their warmongering. In a comic scene, Kirk and the Klingon commander take turns mirroring each other in their puerile protests to the beings: "It's not fair!" "You have no right to interfere!" Of course this is sublime irony since both Kirk and the Klingon commander have themselves come to the planet to do just that--to interfere! This episode, as clearly as anything I have seen, soundly critiques the cold war reasoning that justified Vietnam.
- PRIME DIRECTIVE FOLLOWED?
- Hard to say, but the episode clearly suggests it should have been. Kirk wants very much to modernize the culture of the planet (if only to make it a Federation outpost), and he's hard pressed to take "no" for an answer from its inhabitants, but the Klingon arrival renders the argument moot. The whole ethos of the episode, as revealed in the final scenes, is that there is little difference between the Federation and the Klingon Empire when it comes to respecting the self-determination of other cultures, and that that is a BAD thing.
The third episode I'll mention is "The Return of the Archons." This if you'll recall is the episode where the Enterprise team beams down to a planet that seems like a Puritan community in its uniformity and rigidity. Until "Festival" that is, when everyone abandons, for several hours, all sense of civility. Kirk and company try to discover the shadowy leader behind this society which is clearly based on a highly organized religious cult. "Are you one with the body?" the inhabitants ask them. Turns out the leader, who is seen as omnipotent and omniscient, is a computer programmed by a long-dead ruler to preserve social order in a society that almost destroyed itself through war and barbarism centuries before. When Kirk decides to destroy the computer, Spock reminds him of the prime directive. Kirk dismisses its relevance. The "culture", Kirk claims, arrested as it has been by the rule of the totalitarian computer, is not really a culture at all.
- PRIME DIRECTIVE FOLLOWED?
- Depends on whether you buy Kirk's sophistry, though the episode is certainly sympathetic to Kirk. Perhaps we could get from this episode to a justification for deposing Saddam Hussein. But "Errand of Mercy" leaves us with a caution. Would be interesting to discuss the similarities and differences between these episodes.
Okay, so i just wanted to point out the nuance with which ST Original Series handles these questions.
Live long and prosper my friends!
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