Excerpts

Excerpts from various chapters –

Earthrise
Star Trek is a set of elaborately interwoven stories about space travel; for many people this fictional universe has acquired the status of a modern myth. Paradoxically, although this fiction appears to be about looking outside ourselves – attempting to go beyond human boundaries – it is as much concerned with looking back at ourselves as it is in going elsewhere. This voyage out is, also, a voyage in.

Seeing your own home planet from space is a significant trope in Star Trek , albeit one with a slightly sexist dimension, since it is nearly always played out by young women in the presence of a male authority figure, the captain. Typically, it is an experience that inspires deep reflection, even introspection. In the Enterprise episode ‘North Star’, a human woman who has grown up on a planet where the culture is apparently frozen in the American Wild West, is beamed up to the technologically sophisticated starship. ‘You must think we’re barbaric,’ she tells the captain ruefully as she looks down on her planet. ‘All the things humanity has accomplished. … And we’re still down there shooting each other.’
…When Cochrane [inventor of warp drive] first sees a glimpse of the earth through the window of his rocket, something seems to change in him. Gone is the wise-cracking cynicism of the man who tells Riker he built his engine motivated by ‘dollar signs’ and the hopes of retirement on ‘some tropical island filled with naked women’. In its place is genuine, heartfelt awe: ‘Oh, wow!’ is all Cochrane can say. On the way back from the test flight, he sees earth again, this time from a distance. ‘It’s so small,’ he says reflectively. The strong implication of the movie is that Cochrane’s flight – offering, as it does, a new perspective on planet earth – marks a crucial turning point for the character, as he begins to embrace the unlikely role he must play in the development of humanity – as Picard puts it, ‘taking these first steps into a new frontier’. By the time the Vulcan ship lands on earth, and the music swells to signal the momentous historical moment, Cochrane is ready to play his part in history – he steps forward, extending the hand of friendship to the alien visitors.

The act of seeing the earth from space is important because it represents not merely the fictional technical accomplishment of space travel, but something philosophically more complex – the ability to detach human existence from the planet earth. It was this that severely upset the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger. Towards the end of his life he gave an interview to the magazine Der Spiegel , on the understanding that it was not to be published until after his death. This was because it concerned the question of his collaboration with the Nazis and he was attempting to reduce his notoriety in his own lifetime. Interestingly, he made a comment relating specifi cally to the late 1960s, when the interview was conducted, about the new photographs of the earth coming back from the moon. His response was that he found them ‘frightening’, because the project of men in space was one that reduced humanity to technology. Humanity, in his view, really belonged only on the earth: ‘everything essential and everything great originated from the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition’. This view is typically a conservative one, that fears the intellectual consequences of displacing the pre-eminence of one’s culture – Heidegger seems to be adopting an intellectual stance equivalent to that of pre-Copernican astronomy.
Space travel has the effect of problematising the status of humanity, something exemplified by responses to the image of the earth as seen from space. As we shall see, in Star Trek leaving our home planet does not mean abandoning a central focus on the question of what humanity means. On the contrary, the issue becomes more and more crucial – in fact, we have to travel further and further to find out who we ‘really’ are.

The exploration of space is the contemporary equivalent of the exploration that underpinned what we now call ‘modern’ societies. This was, of course, the foundation of the colonial nature of these societies. But the exploration of the globe, historically paralleling the scientific revolution in understanding the place of the earth in the solar system, was in itself a very important development. When we look at modern and early modern exploration, it is important to emphasise that this was an exploration based on sea-power. Space travel in Star Trek is an imaginative transposition of the period of early modern nautical exploration, and the extent to which the models, assumptions, techniques, culture, aesthetics and principles of sailing have been written into space travel is surprising. One feature of this book is a ‘reading’ of Star Trek in terms of this ‘nautical metaphor’.

Human nature and morality
Star Trek presents a range of concerns with human nature, including human existence and knowledge, but it is centrally focused on the issue of human morality. Originally a product of 1960s America, it is indebted to the political culture of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Famously, Martin Luther King Jr was a fan of the show, and begged Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, not to quit it in pursuit of a career on Broadway. ‘You are marching,’ he told her. ‘You are reflecting what we are fighting for.’

In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that we find issues of race, slavery and discrimination recurring again and again in the history of Star Trek . Particularly significant wars in twentieth-century American history also feature prominently, including the war in Vietnam, as well as the struggle against fascism in the Second World War. The two most appalling moral crimes against humanity in Star Trek ’s world are both connected with ethnic and racial power and its abuse: slavery and the Holocaust.

In the majority of cases, such moral ‘crimes’ are presented as committed by others – Starfleet officers are the ones who encounter and respond to them, rather than initiate them. But in this regard, as in many others, the third Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine , differs from the other series, as it is willing to question the strength of Star Trek ’s own moral foundation. In the episode ‘Past Tense’, Doctor Bashir very clearly lays down the anxieties that underlie this philosophical dilemma:
‘If push came to shove, if something disastrous happened to the Federation, and we got frightened enough, or desperate enough, how would we react? Would we stay true to our ideals, or would we just end up … right back where we started?’
Generally speaking, the morally questionable actions of Starfleet officers are called for by some overriding principle, in the above cases the simple condition of being at war. Crucially, the war depicted in Deep Space Nine is one that the Federation is in danger of losing – in Doctor Bashir’s terms, push has finally come to shove, and they are desperate. The title of one Deep Space Nine episode quotes Cicero: ‘Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges’ (‘for in times of war the laws fall silent’). The shift represented by Deep Space Nine is towards seeing the moral ambiguity of war through the eyes of those we as viewers have identified with, rather than as the ‘fault’ of outsiders of various kinds. …
Generally speaking in Star Trek , when the captain behaves in a less than upstanding manner it is because his or her judgement is impaired. Janeway and Picard, in ‘Equinox’ and the film First Contact respectively, both find themselves consumed by vendettas that override their usual ethical (and indeed pragmatic) constraints. When Sisko crosses the moral rubicon in ‘In the Pale Moonlight’ it is largely because he is deceived by Garak about just how far he might have to go to achieve his goals. In fact, of all the Star Trek captains, it is only really Enterprise series Jonathan Archer who makes his moral compromises with his eyes wide open.

In the third season of Enterprise , conceived in an attempt to revitalise the show after a devastating drop in ratings, Captain Archer finds himself thrown into a situation in which his traditional Starfleet ethics simply aren’t enough to get the job done. A major inspiration at the time was the extremely popular TV show ‘24’, in which the counterterrorist agent Jack Bauer always has to stop some deadly attack (the tension being drawn out throughout an entire season as the clock ticks down) by any means necessary – including, controversially, the frequent use of torture and what the Bush administration called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. In its first two seasons, Enterprise , which premiered just a fortnight after the September 11th attacks, made small gestures towards a consideration of the American-led ‘War on Terror’. The show’s primary antagonists, the Suliban, were clearly named after the Taliban, and their organisational structure – ‘the Cabal’ – was a near homonym of the Afghan capital city. The first-season episode ‘Detained’ seemed to hint at the conditions in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre (established only a few months before the episode aired) in a story that saw ‘good’ Suliban being imprisoned in an internment camp in the middle of the desert. The season one finale, ‘Shockwave’, meanwhile, borrowed some of the iconography of 9/11 (the twisted girders reaching up from a desolate landscape) in its depiction of a devastated thirty-first-century earth, and its central storyline – about an attack that wipes out 3,600 people and turns out to be an attempt to force humans to scale back their programme of space exploration – certainly resonated with the attacks on the World Trade Centre. But while shows like ‘The West Wing’ and ‘24’ tackled 9/11 and its ramifi cations almost immediately and head-on, Star Trek – which had historically operated as a mirror for contemporary events (Vietnam in ‘A Private Little War’, the collapse of the Soviet Union in The Undiscovered Country ) took a couple of years to work out how to handle the War on Terror.

By the time it did, with the Xindi attack on earth in the season two finale ‘The Expanse’, which ‘cut a swathe four thousand kilometres long from Florida to Venezuela’, the allegory was unmistakable – from the rapidly rising death toll (first one million, then three million, and finally seven million people) to the perplexed reaction of the human crew (‘Did they say why?’; ‘Why would someone do this?’), to the rather hawkish rhetoric of the response: ‘Tell me we won’t be tiptoeing around,’ says Chief Engineer Trip Tucker, who lost a sister in the attack. ‘None of that non-interference crap T’Pol’s always shoving down our throats.’ The ‘non-interference crap’ is the Vulcan principle designed to protect alien cultures that will later become enshrined as the Federation’s Prime Directive – so on one level what Trip is demanding sounds rather like a request to ignore international law. But rather than arguing, Captain Archer reassures him: ‘We’ll do what we have to do, Trip. Whatever it takes.’ ‘Whatever it takes’ becomes something of a mantra in Enterprise ’s third season…
Later [Archer] says ‘I lost something out there, and I don’t know how to get it back.’ Hernandez, in a slight modification of the mantra of the Expanse, tries to reassure him: ‘You did what any captain would have done.’

Of course, as long-time Star Trek viewers we know that in a sense this isn’t true. It’s impossible to imagine Picard or Janeway taking the actions that Archer took, and even for Kirk or Sisko it would be a real stretch. But on one level the difference here is not really a matter of character. The reason those captains would never have taken Archer’s actions is because the writers of their series would never have placed them in his position. The second Star Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan , presents a Starfleet training exercise called the Kobayashi Maru – it is an unwinnable scenario which inevitably results in the cadet who attempts it losing their ship with all hands. The point is to test their character more than their professional skills. In the movie, Kirk reveals that as a cadet he actually passed the test, but only by cheating, a scene which is played out rather amusingly in the 2009 reboot movie – ‘I don’t believe in the no-win scenario,’ he tells a junior officer.

Star Trek ’s subsequent captains haven’t had to believe in it either, because when things got sufficiently bad there would always be a way out that didn’t involve a fundamental sacrifice of their most dearly held principles – this guarantee was, in a sense, part of the promise of Star Trek . In the end, they would find a solution that a moment ago didn’t appear to exist and be clutched from the jaws of the Kobayashi Maru, whether through an inspired bluff , or a last-minute deus ex machina , or whatever. As Neelix puts it in the Voyager episode ‘Author, Author’, ‘There’s an old Talaxian saying: “When the road before you splits in two, take the third path.” ’ This, in fact, is precisely what Captain Kirk insists upon in ‘Operation: Annhihilate!’ His most trusted advisers, Spock and McCoy, have told him there are only two courses open to him: either exterminate the million-odd inhabitants of a Federation colony, or do nothing and allow a deadly alien parasite to spread throughout the galaxy. ‘I will accept neither of those alternatives, gentlemen,’ Kirk tells them. ‘I want another answer. … I want that third alternative.’

Becoming human
We have suggested that one of Star Trek ’s most central concerns is the question of how to define humanity. This is a double-edged project: on the one hand it is staged through the use of non -human species who are designed to function as a foil against which human qualities become more apparent. On the other hand, these non-human species themselves end up being progressively ‘humanised’. It is really only on Deep Space Nine that we see non-human species being left alone to get on with their lives as if they were different, yet perfectly plausible in their own right.

The tradition of what we might call a form of human expansionism – within Star Trek ’s own value system – tends to take it for granted that it is better to be human. One strategy here is for the alien beings to become progressively humanised – they are introduced as ‘the other’ and become steadily incorporated within a human value system. This can be seen, first, in the long-term transformation of Mr Spock. Although half-human, in The Original Series he appears to value only his Vulcan heritage, where intelligence and logic prevail. At the beginning of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home he is puzzled when asked in a computer test: ‘How do you feel?’ Spock’s (human) mother has to explain to him that this is a relevant question to put to a being who is half-human. By the end of the film, though, Spock has learnt to deal in the currency of feeling. When asked by his father whether he has a message for his mother, he says: ‘Yes, tell her I feel fine.’ By the sixth film, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country , Spock is saying such things as, ‘Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.’ In fact, he and Kirk are even able to joke about it:

KIRK: Human beings…
SPOCK: But captain, we both know I am not human.
KIRK: Do you want to know something? Everybody’s human.
SPOCK: I find that remark… insulting.

By ‘human’ Captain Kirk does not, of course, mean that everyone is from the planet earth – or that everybody is of the species Homo sapiens . Kirk uses the word ‘human’ in relation to an evaluative concept of humanity, the essential qualities of compassion, respect, imagination and curiosity found in many of the species in Star Trek – the same sense, in fact, that he invokes at Spock’s funeral in The Wrath of Khan , when he says: ‘Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.’ But Spock, of course, finds the association of these noble traits with human beings to be human-centric arrogance, and objects to such sloppy use of language.
At the very least, we can say that Kirk’s humanism is essentially inclusive….
Although Spock, in the cinema anyway, followed a clear path of humanisation, it was nothing to that charted by his Next Generation equivalent Data (another brilliant scientist with a highly organised mind). From the start, Data made it clear that his goal was to become human, and over the course of seven seasons of television and four motion pictures, he certainly came a long way: developing the capacity for emotion, experiencing physical touch through artificial skin, and ultimately sacrificing himself (just as Spock had done before him) to save the lives of his captain and crewmates. In a sense, though, Data was recognisably human from the start – although he couldn’t whistle or (supposedly) use contractions, he did his best to embody the core values associated with humanity, if anything more thoroughly than any other member of the Enterprise-D crew, with the possible exception of the ship’s almost saintly captain. One reading of Data throughout The Next Generation , indeed, sees him as a character who effectively is human – who possesses emotions, for example – but is somehow in denial about it.

A more dramatic – and certainly more conflicted – example of humanisation in Star Trek is the case of Seven of Nine . Seven is a Borg ‘drone’ who ends up on Voyager as a result of a temporary alliance between Starfleet and their most hated Enemy…. In Seven of Nine, Voyager shows the development of a character who has progressed from what, in the Star Trek universe, is the very antithesis of humanity to become a convincing human being herself, if one endowed with some superhuman remnants of her previous life.
By the time of the episode ‘Relativity’, which takes place in a time travel context, the project of rehumanisation is apparently complete: Seven has been selected for a commission that requires her to pass as a junior ensign at the launch of Voyager some years earlier. For this she appears in Starfleet uniform rather than her usual catsuit and the facial remnant of her Borg implants is ‘occluded’; in appearance, she is utterly human at last. The rehumanisation of Seven of Nine sums up exactly what Star Trek has always been about. The story of her development was so popular at the time of broadcast that the episodes focusing on her transformation were made available in a special collector’s edition VHS box set – a privilege not lightly accorded – and a book of scripts relating to her character was also published

The questions of what it means to be human and how human individuality can be protected are themes around which Star Trek has revolved from its inception.