I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was a boy in the 1980s, but I learned more about Jim Kirk in the July 20 episode of Strange New Worlds (“Lost in Translation”) than I did in all three seasons of the original series. I shouldn’t be surprised about this. Like most hack television series in the 1960s, the creators valued weekly episode plots over characterization details. Such deliberate vagueness about who exactly constituted the Enterprise’s bridge crew that we watched week after week made possible massive revelations in the follow-on Star Trek movies of the 1980s, like the existence of Kirk’s son and Spock’s brother, neither of which had ever been hinted at in the earlier series.
But here, 57 years after the character first appeared in the universe, I was learning what Lt. James Tiberius Kirk (originally portrayed by William Shatner and now brought to life by Paul Wesley) thought of his father and brother (the latter of which only appeared briefly as a corpse in an original series episode), and why he felt the need to join Starfleet. They were extraordinary moments, made possible by outstanding writing, acting and directing—three qualities that, to be honest, were only simultaneously present in the original Star Trek series on rare occasions.
The episode was also fun to watch. Star Trek should be fun! At its core is a heart of optimism and humanity, but it’s also set in space in the future and, in its earliest days, involved attaching pipe cleaners to a dog and calling it an alien.
Strange New Worlds—a prequel series to the original Star Trek series that’s now in its second season—is especially fun because it has actors like Jess Bush and Rebecca Romijn bringing characters to life (Christine Chapel and Number One, respectively) that were basically mannequins in the original series (both characters were originally played by Majel Barrett, who was probably a very nice person but could not act to save her life).
What isn’t fun, and it’s weird that I find myself writing this, is attempting to watch an entire episode of the original Star Trek series. I just can’t get more than halfway in before shutting it off. And it’s not because I already know how the episodes end—many episodes I barely remember, and have no idea how they end up resolved.
No, I can’t finish original series episodes because they’re no longer enjoyable to me. I can’t watch them without noticing the poor treatment of women in dialogue, characterization and storylines, or ridiculous plot requirements that were grounded in misogyny. Yes, Star Trek stood for optimism and the necessity of racial tolerance and diversity, but it was created and largely controlled by Gene Roddenberry, a man who treated women as sex objects.
For instance, the other day I decided to rewatch the two-part episode “The Menagerie,” long considered one of the finest original series stories and certainly one of the most creative efforts at recycling a rejected pilot episode. Even today, the plot is subversive—an alien race destroyed itself by becoming addicted to the telepathic viewing of others’ feelings and experiences. Of course television executives originally hated the story—they make their livings by getting audiences addicted to viewing others’ feelings and experiences!
But as I watched the episode, I found reality constantly intruded on the episode, especially when the character of Yeoman Colt appeared. Colt was such a minor character that, as far as I can tell, she doesn’t even have a first name.
Actress Laurel Goodwin, who portrayed Colt in the original Star Trek pilot episode “The Cage” (which was repackaged into “The Menagerie”) spoke at length about the role in the 2003 book Drive-In Dream Girls: A Galaxy of B-Movie Starlets of the Sixties by Tom Lisanti. In fact, the role was so thin, Goodwin told Lisanti, that the only requirement Roddenberry made was that she had to have long legs.
This isn’t surprising—Roddenberry was a notorious horndog who made repeated use of the “casting couch” (click here for a previous post on the considerable sexism of Star Trek’s second pilot episode). When Goodwin showed Roddenberry a publicity still that emphasized her legs, he was pleased, according to Lisanti’s book.
“Gene looked at the photo and said, ‘Yes, I guess those qualify. Can I see the real thing?’” Goodwin said in the book. “I said, ‘Sure!’ So I stood back away from the desk a little bit and I hiked up my skirt. He said, ‘They’re real—that’s for sure. Great.’”
Goodwin seemed okay with Roddenberry here, but clearly had a problem with Majel Barrett. Put simply, she couldn’t act, Goodwin told Lisanti, and she didn’t have to speculate much on why Roddenberry insisted she be there anyway:
At that time, Majel lived in Gene Roddenberry’s guesthouse on his estate and babysat his children. I met her on the set and I was not the least bit impressed with her. I thought, ‘My god! Why did they cast her in this? There are so many more handsome, talented, intelligent actresses out there.’ Majel had her nose in Roddenbery’s ear and her hand on his butt all the time we were there. She had no time for the rest of us and obviously had a great deal to say. We all sort of assumed and figured there was more going on than met the eye–she was not just the babysitter.
NBC executives rejected “The Cage,” partly because they hated the character of “Number One.” But not because of Barrett’s poor acting—they felt “the audience would not accept a woman as second in command,” Lisanti wrote.
Roddenberry quickly rolled over on “Number One” and eliminated the role from the series. But Barrett was safe, he simply recast her as “Nurse Christine Chapel,” a traditionally female-coded job that was far more acceptable to the male network execs. But when those same suits went after the character of Spock, Roddenberry fought successfully to keep him (in his defense, Leonard Nimoy was an outstanding actor).
This is why the whole “appreciate the art and not the artist” line is such bullshit. Roddenberry’s intellect, humor, loves, biases, experiences and sexism all contributed to his art. Yes, some of the Original Series episodes remain genuinely enjoyable to watch, but even there is a problem. Classic episodes like “The Corbonite Maneuver,” “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Balance of Terror” are solid adventures, but feature little to no women in the action. “The City on the Edge of Forever,” perhaps the greatest of all Star Trek episodes, does feature a stand-out performance from a woman (Joan Collins!) but it remains a rare gem in the series.
None of this is surprising. Like most television from the period, Star Trek was produced by men for men. Sure, many Star Trek fans were women (I think Leonard Nimoy played a large role in that), but photographing virtually every non-Uhura woman in the series in soft focus is silly, even condescending.
“[P]atriarchy begets patriarchal art,” Anne Helen Petersen wrote recently. “Men’s self-regard (and concern) is the narrative gravity; the idea that other audiences would also be interested in such a narrative goes unquestioned.”
And those are the solid episodes. Most are a slog now because the show’s treatment of women was so poor.
Four examples:
- “Space Seed” — Long considered a classic Trek episode because it introduces the 20th century genetically altered superman Khan Noonien Singh, the episode is grotesquely sexist in that Khan almost instantly convinces Lt. Marla McGivers (the ship’s “historian” because whatever) to help him take over the Enterprise after very briefly seducing her. She eventually betrays Khan, but not before Kirk and the rest of the crew are nearly killed.
- “A Private Little War” — Kirk and the Enterprise crew gives military assistance and weapons to a tribe on a once peaceful planet to counter similar Klingon assistance to another tribe. The episode, already loathsome because it both violates the show’s own rules against interference in alien cultures and seeks to rationalize the then-bloody and pointless war in Vietnam, also has just one prominent woman in the episode, and she’s portrayed as treacherous and selfish.
- “Spock’s Brain” — An alien race led by a woman who seems astonishingly stupid boards the Enterprise and steals Spock’s brain, which they then use to run their society. This might have worked as a comedy, but it certainly wasn’t filmed as one.
- “Turnabout Intruder” — The last original series episode, a woman who was once romantically involved with Kirk takes over his body because Starfleet’s sexist rule forbidding women from becoming starship captains (!) apparently drove her mad enough to attempt to murder Kirk (!!). Seriously, what the hell.
There are of course many other examples of hot sexist garbage in Star Trek, but it also has to be said that follow-on series weren’t immune from it either. The first season Next Generation episode “Code of Honor” is horribly racist and sexist, and actress Terry Farrell says Deep Space Nine producers ordered her beloved character Jadzia Dax killed off in that show’s seventh season because she refused to agree to their contract demands.
Hopefully, nonsense like that is no longer part of the latest Star Trek shows like Strange New Worlds, Discovery and even the animated comedy Lower Decks (which was part of a crossover episode with SNW on July 22). I’d like to think more diverse production crews, combined with generally superior writing across all television in the last decade, relegates future sexism to Star Trek’s distant past.
Anthony Pignataro 