Is There In Trek No Truth?

A Review of Star Trek (The Original Series) (1966-1969)

Dr. Miranda Jones: "The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity."
Mr. Spock: "And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty."
From "Is There In Truth No Beauty?"

I first experienced Star Trek through the original films: Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: The Voyage Home, and Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. My brother Mike was a huge fan. As a child, I quietly observed him sharpen his considerable drawing skills on a Crayola marker portrait of Klingon phaser fire and photon torpedoes blasting through the U.S.S. Enterprise A. But at that time Star Trek was an unknown quantity to me, something violent and loud, and even slightly scary, to my seven-year-old mind.


But Mike and I dove into Star Trek: The Next Generation together; I watched nearly every episode of Star Trek: Voyager on UPN from my bedroom at my parents' house. My best friend Chris and I rewatched Voyager episodes every night over dinner in college. I idolized Jean-Luc Picard and Kathryn Janeway, admired Beverly Crusher and the Doctor, grew up with Wesley Crusher and Seven of Nine. I never got into Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Star Trek: Enterprise, despite trying both series. And although my love of the films (to Star Trek: Insurrection, at least) extended to the originals, I avoided Star Trek: The Original Series. It was so...old. Cardboard panels and giant switchboards, green alien women and recycled planet backgrounds, William Shatner's stuttered delivery and Uhura's nonexistent pants. Part of why I loved Star Trek was its idealistic portrayal of the future, not its stifling reminders of the past's failed promises.

It took a new mindset for me to even consider watching The Original Series. As it turned out, being a historian helped. I watched TOS with an eye to political and social context, to how the events of the day clearly affected the scripts. I also needed exercise. TOS (via Netflix on an iPad) motivated me to get up at 6:15am and ride the stationary bike for fifty minutes before heading to work. And I think entering early-middle-aged-ness made me appreciate the classic nature of the show. Novelty it isn't, but novelty isn't necessarily what drives my taste anymore.

Whatever the context, I am thrilled that I finally gave the dark, campy wonder that is TOS a go. The series's three seasons don't follow a strict narrative arc, although some episodes briefly reference previous events and characters. In terms of the story's "shape," to paraphrase Vonnegut, you generally can note a shift from the dark, atheistic cautionary tales of the first episodes toward whimsical, optimistic displays of patriotism (and at times jingoism) in the latter installments. To consider TOS beyond anything other than sheer silliness, it's important to view its roots deep in the traditions of pulp scifi and Campbellian short stories: psychological drama, often supplemented with chilling or grotesque elements, that leaned toward libertarian and idealistic visions of the future. (At least one person dies rather horrifically in every episode. But don't worry--the self-made hero always survives.) The writers of these episodes were as at home with the Twilight Zone or Bonanza as they were with Star Trek, and it shows. In its later adventures, though, TOS became something like the Disney films of the Second World War: a conscious vehicle for national pride and progress--a Whiggish argument for the superiority of white, male, American hegemony in the face of the nation's greatest cultural crisis of modern times. At its worst--see "The Omega Glory," "Bread and Circuses," or "Plato's Stepchildren"--the show lionizes Western Civilization or the United States at their most offensive: associating good governance with white characters and bad with those of color; oddly, given Roddenberry's freethought, praising the salutary (and overlooking the acidic) influence of Christianity; and operating on flagrantly erroneous readings of classical philosophy.

Given TOS's broadcast during a crucial moment in the American phase of the Vietnam War, this narrative transition is somewhat understandable, if ultimately disappointing. My expectations were set unduly high by the later Star Trek series, which brim precipitously with liberal sentimentality. (I welcomed this pluralistic future as a kid as much as I do now, despite my thirtysomething realness.) Through this lens I viewed TOS as, well, less than progressive. I may seem like a cheap shot to criticize TOS on this score. After all, this was the show in which black characters were ostensibly fully equal to white ones, where Kirk and Uhura could kiss (more on this kiss later) only two years after Loving v. Virginia. And in no way do I want to discount the power of representation, especially on television in the 1960s; Martin Luther King, Jr. and Whoopi Goldberg, among many other influential black figures, justly have cited Uhura's sheer presence on the bridge as a marked sign of racial progress. But I think TOS's legacies as a progressive force are ultimately more a production of our collective, revisionist memory than anything genuinely apparent in the show.

The easiest way to see this fact is through the lens of gender, for which TOS has a sore, sore record. Despite the show's reputation for racial harmony, racial attitudes in TOS also were much more behind the curve than the times should have allowed. Forget the Bechdel Test--name more than one or a small handful of episodes in which women appear at all as distinct beings with full personalities. Uhura--whose first name, Nyota, apparently only became public with the release of the 2009 film reboot--is perhaps the most visible woman recurring character, followed rather closely by Christine Chapel. How many episodes show them speaking to one another at all, let alone about anything other than men or their problems? Neither Uhura nor Chapel exhibit very strong personalities; the writers supplied Nichelle Nichols, in particular, with often sophomoric lines that made me question how we could possibly believe that Uhura ever graduated from Starfleet Academy, let alone land an important posting on the Enterprise. Both of these women were clearly the production of American (white, straight) men of the period, whose stock image of femininity featured such traits as submissiveness, emotionalism, lack of discipline, and ignorance.

Take the famous (or, in the South, infamous) kiss between Kirk and Uhura in "Plato's Stepchildren." In the episode (one of the worst), a group of supposedly Platonic (but not really) aliens use their telekinetic powers to control other beings, directing the Enterprise crew to entertain them against their will. The "Platonians" pair up Kirk and Uhura opposite Spock and Chapel and force each couple to kiss. For her part, Chapel doesn't protest; a running subsubplot in TOS is Chapel's unrequited love for the icy Spock. So the writers seem to want us to understand that Chapel wants Spock, and that therefore this act of sexual assault is consensual. Uh, no. Gross. For Kirk and Uhura, though, this forbidden love is not as apparent, even if in some other episodes Uhura hints at her profound admiration for her captain. The Platonians proceed to force a Kirk upon Uhura. This glorious moment of television history--the first interracial kiss aired--is thus categorically an act of sexual violence. But Kirk is a horndog, you may remind us all, and Uhura just secretly wanted it. That's what the writers probably want us to think. But men use sort of "logic" all the time to justify rape. To make matters worse, writers and producers feared not that audiences would object to this egregious display of sexual power, but that the two were of different races. Whereas race clearly was on the minds of the production staff, then--and not in the most progressive of ways, either--gender was conspicuously absent. This incident clearly is commentary both on their mindset as well as that of American society as a whole, to be sure. Minor woman characters are no less illustrative of progressive views on gender. Take Carolyn Palamas, who in "Who Mourns for Adonais?" is the reason why our brave (male) heroes fall into trouble. She falls quickly in love with Adonais, but mostly because of the pretty dress he provides for her. Because all women love men who give them dresses--no matter how mad they are. Um-hmm.

I'm harsh in my criticism. Perhaps too much so. I did find at least one woman character in that possessed real dimension: Dr. Miranda Jones, played by Diana Muldaur in "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" (On a side note, I always loathed Muldaur's Dr. Katherine Pulaski in The Next Generation, foremost because she ripped me away from one of my teenage crushes, Beverly Crusher. But I'm interested to know whether Muldaur's nuanced portrayal of Jones makes me view Pulaski in a new light.) In the best scene of the episode, and one of my favorites in all of TOS, the Enterprise men fawn characteristically over Jones while they dine and drink. Gender egalitarian aspects are of note: they sit as equals at a round table, sparring philosophically about the nature of truth and its relationship to beauty. In this context, Bones comes off as vapid, Scotty utters very little, and Kirk merely conducts the intellectual electricity that jumps between Jones and Spock. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is also the scene in which Roddenberry unveiled the signature philosophy of Star Trek, "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" and its IDIC symbol, which prompted the dialogue that I quoted at the top. Taken aback by her wit and strength of personality, Bones has little more to say than "Now, where I come from, that's what we call a lady." Patriarchal as it sounds, his comment was in fact a true compliment: by "lady," he begrudgingly meant "human being" rather than the object of sexual predation that was the standard TOS woman. Most of all, at the end of the episode, we learn that Jones is actually blind--one of the most shocking twists in the series. This blindness fueled her envy of Spock, her very career, and her very humanity. If only the writers had cast all TOS women in Jones's likeness.

It's a compliment to Jones's character, too, that her foil was one of the greatest of all science fiction characters: not the roguish Kirk, who I concluded was more complex than pop culture seems to remember him; but the cultural icon that is Spock. It struck me initially as ironic that Spock is the most emotionally intelligent of the Enterprise crew. After all, his defining characteristic is his lack of emotion. But Leonard Nimoy and the writers leverage this trait well and frequently throughout the series to show that, to be truly stoic, one must deeply comprehend the power of emotion. The characters in fiction to whom I'm most drawn tend to be those most like myself. And, at one level, I hardly see myself as Spock at all. I'm one of the most emotionally volatile people I know, and a true humanist with a skeptical view to some of what passes for science. But Spock's depth of emotional awareness is much more compelling than his simple, Data-like geekitude; it's more often than not the source of the wisdom that he provides Kirk. Some of my favorite scenes are those in which Kirk is sidelined and Spock instead is in command of the Enterprise, as in "The Tholian Web." Spock seems to wrestle with the obligations of leadership more than Kirk, whose confidence was inherently unshakable. True leadership, I find, though, requires self-doubt and reflection: traits expressed more faithfully by Spock than his captain. It is through characters like Spock and Jones that TOS lives up to its reputation as a progressive cultural statement--if only just. It's sad to conclude that the series's race and gender attitudes, by dint of their flagrant backwardness, are simply more--to quote Spock--fascinating.

I enjoyed TOS immensely, and not only because it, like the Guardian of Forever from the classic (if overrated) "The City on the Edge of Forever," is a fantastic window into the past. It's a solid mix of camp, creepiness, suspense, drama, humor, and social commentary. Given that TOS encompassed eighty episodes (if you count "The Cage," as I do), I won't review each one individually. Instead, I'll rank order my top ten favorites and bottom ten most disliked, with some honorable and dishonorable mentions.

Top Ten Best Star Trek Episodes:
1. "A Taste of Armageddon"
2. "The Corbomite Maneuver"
3. "The Return of the Archons"
4. "Space Seed"
5. "Journey to Babel"
6. "The Devil in the Dark"
7. "The Tholian Web"
8. "Is There In Truth No Beauty?"
9. "Patterns of Force"
10. "Amok Time"

Honorable Mentions:
"The Trouble with Tribbles"

"The City on the Edge of Forever"

"Return to Tomorrow"
"Mirror, Mirror"
"Where No Man Has Gone Before"
"I, Mudd"
"By Any Other Name"
"The Doomsday Machine"
"Balance of Terror"
"Court Martial"

Bottom Ten Worst Star Trek Episodes:

(Starting at 71, to include "The Cage" as an episode)

71. "The Paradise Syndrome"

72. "The Alternative Factor"

73. "Miri"

74. "Spock's Brain"

75. "Mudd's Women"

76. "Catspaw"

77. "The Way to Eden"

78. "Plato's Stepchildren"

79. "Bread and Circuses"

80. "The Omega Glory"

Dishonorable Mentions:

"Assignment: Earth"

"Private Little War"
"Who Mourns for Adonais?"
"Shore Leave"
"The Apple"

My Rating: Great, 7 out of 10
My IMDb Rating: 7 out of 10