TV Review: Star Trek (1966-1969)

Today we do our first television review. And while we will focus largely on current shows, we couldn’t pass up the chance to start with the greatest science fiction show of all time: Star Trek.

Star Trek is the fulfillment of science fiction’s potential. No show before or after, with the exception of The Twilight Zone, has come anywhere near repeating its achievement. It is a cultural icon that you all should know.

What Is Star Trek?

Set in the 23rd century, Star Trek follows the adventures of the Starship Enterprise and her crew, in a series of unconnected episodes, as they battle aliens, rescue colonists, and boldly go where no man has gone before. But that’s only on the surface. In reality, Star Trek is a highly nuanced character study that plays out week after week in the midst of a series of morality tales.

Indeed, while Star Trek was originally pitched to the networks as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” a description that detractors repeat to tar the series as “just a western set in space” (as if that were a bad thing **cough cough**. . . Firefly), creator Gene Roddenberry privately told the Star Trek team that the show would be modeled on Gulliver’s Travels, with each episode working on two levels: as a suspenseful adventure story and as a morality tale. And that is exactly what Star Trek became, a morality tale disguised as science fiction.

The character that we study is Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner). Each week, Kirk is faced with a series of moral dilemmas, and the show centers around his handling and resolution of those dilemmas. I say handling, because the show is as much about how Kirk makes his decisions as it is the decisions he makes.

To aid the viewer in seeing Kirk’s decision-making process, the audience is given two other characters, First Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and Chief Medical Officer Leonard “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley), who act as the dual aspects of Kirk’s mind. Spock represents the part of Kirk’s (and our) mind that is logical and ordered. His advice to Kirk always follows the strictest guidelines of cold, hard logic (real logic, not faulty modern Hollywood logic). McCoy, on the other hand, represents the portion of Kirk’s mind that is beset by emotions. His advice to Kirk is often rash or irrational, but it always accurately represents the types of conflicted feelings that pull us away from logic.

Together, Spock and McCoy act out and speak out the thought process that is going on in Kirk’s mind, and thereby illustrate our own thinking. It is illogical to risk the ship to save the life of one man, Spock will tell us. But dammit Jim, he’s been your friend since you were young. . . you can’t just abandon him, McCoy counters. And so on. And thus, we are taught the moral implications of each of the actions Kirk may or may not take.

What Kinds Of Moral Issues Should Viewers Expect?

So what types of moral dilemmas does Kirk face? All kinds. He must decide issues of life and death, issues of friendship versus duty, justice versus vengeance. He must deal with obsession, regret and hate. He must face the unwinnable scenario, the loss of friends, the death of heroes. He is framed for a crime by a former friend. He must discover whether a man can survive as two halves, one half entirely good and the other half entirely evil. Can he strand a man for all eternity in a timeless gateway with a murderous enemy. These are the sorts of issues Kirk faces each week.

Consider for example, the fan favorite City on the Edge of Forever, in which Kirk and Spock must go back in time to repair the past, which has been changed by Dr. McCoy, who accidentally traveled back in time himself. Upon returning to the past, Kirk learns that McCoy will save the life of a woman that Kirk has fallen in love with, and that by saving her life, history will be changed. So Kirk must decide, can he sacrifice the woman he loves to set the timeline right.

Interestingly, by hiding the morality tale inside a science fiction format, Roddenberry was able to present controversial and complex philosophical, ethical and political issues in ways that people could easily understand without feeling like they were sitting through a class on ethics. Indeed, that is the promise of science fiction, that the story teller can use the fantastic setting of a world, in which the viewer doesn’t have a stake, to play out issues without running afoul of the preconceived expectations and prejudices of the viewer. In other words, because the viewer does not initially see this as a discussion of current issues, the viewer does not immediately fall back upon well-established thought patterns and defensive mechanisms which keep the viewer from reconsidering such issues with an open mind.

For example, it is clear that all humans have preconceived notions about race. When a viewer sees a story about a black person and a white person, those preconceived notions will prejudice the viewer to see the story from a particular standpoint. Thus, it will be difficult to get the viewer to consider the issues presented with an open mind. But if you change the characters to a man who is white on the left side and black on the right, and make his opponent black on the left side and white on the right, the writer can address the issue of race without the viewer picking a side based on prejudices. This, in turn, allows the viewer to consider issues of race more honestly, which consideration can later be applied to re-evaluate their one beliefs on the subject.

Few science fiction shows manage to achieve this. Star Trek did it weekly. Indeed, Star Trek addressed issues of racism and civil rights, eugenics and selective breeding, nuclear war, the turning over of weapons to machines, the de-humanization inherent in mechanizing our culture, the Vietnam War, slavery, hippie culture and cultists, and whether fascism could be used as a force for good by a benign dictator, among others.

In Conscience of the King, for example, Kirk must deal with the struggle between his own desire for vengeance and justice in deciding how to handle a man that he suspects of being a dictator who killed half his population to save the other half from starvation. In Balance of Terror, he must make decisions that could lead to war, while dealing with questions of whether persons of different species (i.e. races) should be viewed as potentially disloyal because of their lineage.

None of these issues could have been presented on television at that time in any other format. But by hiding them within science fiction stories, Star Trek did them all.

But Isn’t The Acting Bad?

Contrary to the detractors, Shatner’s acting as Kirk is neither as over-the-top as people like to claim, nor is it inappropriate. These tales are meant as dramatic vignettes of an almost Shakespearian nature. They are stylized, and Kirk is called upon to emote heavily to allow the audience to witness his thought processes. As such, Shatner does an excellent job.

Similarly, Nimoy and Kelly do wonderful jobs of acting out their roles as well. Nimoy in particular does an excellent job of playing the logical Vulcan, with occasional emotional outbursts from his half-human lineage -- he is especially convincing compared to later actors in the spin-offs who tended to play Vulcans as annoyed. Spock also gives us an interesting insight into the human condition, which he alone can observe being an outsider and yet also part human. This would become a common element in science fiction, though it has rarely been done as well.

Most importantly, the characters are so believable that you come to know the actors by the character names, not the other way around.

Star Trek’s Politics Are Key

Finally, one cannot review Star Trek without mentioning the importance of its politics. Star Trek is based entirely on classical liberal philosophy, and this was critical to its success and its uniqueness. Why? Because it gave Star Trek a set of values that made it possible to carry out the morality tales.

Classical liberalism believes that individual rights are natural, inherent and inalienable, and exist independent of government. And it is within this set of principles that Kirk must act. Classical liberalism believes in protection of civil liberties, freedom from restraint, non-intrusive government, and equality under the law. It subscribes to a strong moral code, and it values intellectual and spiritual freedom. It also sees humans as flawed, but striving to attain perfection.

Thus, in one of my favorite episodes, A Taste of Armageddon, Kirk tells a planetary leader who despairs that “we’re a killer species”:

“All right. It’s instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes. Knowing that we won’t kill today.”

By comparison, Captain Picard of the new series, who lives in a universe constructed around modern liberal thinking, can only babble on how humans are no longer violent.

Indeed, one of the problems with the later series was their attempt to maintain a modern liberal (i.e. unrealistic) world view. This prevented the show from dealing realistically with the types of issues that Star Trek addressed regularly, because the solutions needed to solve such crises would have been inconsistent with the range of solutions available to the liberal-world-view bound characters. Thus, deus ex machina was often called upon to solve such crises, and many endings only worked if the conflict was not real in the first place.

Kirk, on the other hand, was called upon regularly to make the difficult decisions and to bear the consequences of his actions. And this often led to hard places. For example, in City on the Edge of Forever, mentioned above, we are fascinated to discover that the woman who must die is a pacifist. And the reason she must die is that she will convince Roosevelt to stay out of World War II, thereby allowing the Nazis to win. Thus, Kirk must realize that sometimes war is a good thing and sometimes people must die for the greater good.

In A Taste of Armageddon, Kirk must bring two planets to the brink of real war, and thereby risk the destruction of both planets, to stop a sanitized computerized war that was killing millions of people each year. He must realize that when war becomes clean and sanitary, it becomes too easy. And in A Private Little War, Kirk must supply weapons to a peaceful people, knowing that many will die, because the Klingons have begun arming an opposing village. (This is a direct analogy to Vietnam, something verboten on television at the time.)

But this is what made the show great. Unlike much of science fiction, this show had depth and wisdom. It was more than just phasers, monsters and uniforms. It had characters you came to know deeply, because you’d seen them go through some of the hardest moments of their lives. And unlike the more recent series, which relied heavily on deus ex machina to make sure that virtually every episode ended happily, Star Trek ended honestly. Sometimes it worked out well for Kirk, sometimes it didn’t. But you never felt cheated.

And that is what has given Star Trek its appeal and its longevity. So the next time you watch an episode, don’t just ask yourself what Kirk must decide, but watch how he makes that decision and then ask yourself how you would have made the decision yourself.