Bitchy History - Warp Speed Woke： How Star Trek Took on Society

00:00:00.000 All right, so obviously, most of you who are joining for this particular one already know

00:00:06.020 me, so I don't need to do a huge big introduction. But we are going to be talking about Star

00:00:12.040 Trek today, specifically the original series and how it has impacted society, how it reflected

00:00:17.980 on society at the time, and kind of what the purpose of the show was. Of course, this is

00:00:23.020 just the beginning of the series. I've got a five-part series in total that's coming

00:00:27.960 out on this. So yeah, let's get started. Now, here's the introduction, of course, that you guys

00:00:35.620 already know me a little bit. But my name is Meredith. I have a master's degree in global and

00:00:42.900 colonial history. And somehow I managed to scam an entire elite education system into allowing me

00:00:50.700 to write a master's on Star Trek, which was terrifying. I still don't understand how they

00:00:55.640 how they got away with that um but my my thesis advisor really is really into it so it was very

00:01:01.800 nice which is why i am of course uh qualified to talk about this particular subject

00:01:09.800 uh so how the hell did i get a master's degree talking about star trek is that actually it's

00:01:15.800 it's pretty easy to do because if you're using critical theory oh no critical race theory

00:01:21.160 uh or any of the other critical theories it's very easy to analyze a tv show and then connect

00:01:26.680 it to the historical events that it was made around the time of it's actually very easy to

00:01:31.080 do that with a lot of tv shows uh you know think about law and order right they rip everything

00:01:35.800 directly from the headlines this was basically the same analysis right i'm looking at what they

00:01:41.400 were ripping from the headlines in order to make this particular series and one second i just forgot

00:01:46.920 to close my door and my dog's trying to come in. So that's easier. Okay. So yes. All right.

00:02:00.200 Well, let's get started. So for those of you who don't know a whole lot about Star Trek,

00:02:04.920 that might not be any of you actually in this, in this group, I know most of us know quite a bit

00:02:09.800 about it. But the original series was supposed to be a wagon train to the stars. Gene Rodden

00:02:16.900 Barry had previously made a lot more westerns a lot more uh you know the kind of classic tv shows

00:02:23.740 he had not done sci-fi before and so we're gonna get he's gonna head into sci-fi and as luck would

00:02:30.280 have it uh Lucy uh Lucille Ball decides she really likes the show and manages to keep it on the air

00:02:36.280 for three whole seasons which is quite shocking uh had three seasons 79 episodes as the Futurama

00:02:42.400 joke says about 30 of them were really quality episodes the other ones are well there's there's

00:02:49.040 Spock's brain and that's all we have to say about that that episode is just terrifying.

00:02:57.040 Okay so Roddenberry had a vision he had a concept of the future that he wanted to push which was

00:03:02.880 this kind of utopian future a very multicultural future in which you know diversity was the

00:03:11.120 standard right so you look at this cast of characters from the original series you can see

00:03:17.280 that we have a very multicultural cast not only are two of the main actors William Shatner and

00:03:23.360 Leonard Nimoy Jewish but we also of course have Nichelle Nichols we have we have George Takei 0.72

00:03:29.920 and of course we have Walter Koenig playing a extremely over-the-top Russian who thinks that

00:03:36.160 everything was invented in Russia and I do not have to tell most of you guys who know history 0.89

00:03:40.960 how insane it was to have a Russian on the bridge of a starship during the 60s, right? 0.72

00:03:50.920 We are still actively, not maybe the height of the Cold War because the McCarthy era had kind of calmed down by this point, 0.84

00:03:59.180 but this is still a pretty big ask for most people to think that in the future, 0.81

00:04:03.760 we're going to be so okay with the Russians that we have a Russian on the bridge of our starship.

00:04:10.960 I'm going to play you guys a little clip here from an interview that was, I believe, done in the 80s with Roddenberry on this topic. 0.85

00:04:20.020 Now, with all the success of Star Trek, but the original series that ran on TV was not that big a hit.

00:04:26.540 No, it was only with young-minded people.

00:04:30.020 But we were quite a different United States then.

00:04:34.020 One can over-intellectualize what we did on Star Trek, but we always told stories of action, adventure.

00:04:39.400 there was always a want a need a goal feelings and we were the only show for example during all

00:04:47.160 of the dreadful vietnam affair that every only dramatic show that ever talked against vietnam

00:04:52.840 but as in the case of jonathan swift we set it on another planet if this planet is to develop

00:04:59.400 the way it should we must equalize both sides again jim that means you're condemning this whole

00:05:06.760 planet to a war sorry is it not playing for you guys that's weird

00:05:20.680 now with all the six not sure it's not playing that's weird marcus welby had come out and said

00:05:26.760 something against vietnam my aunts would have carried placards do you remember the 20th century

00:05:32.040 brush wars on the asian continent it went on bloody year after bloody year but what would

00:05:36.840 you have suggested the only solution okay so it's not is the video not showing that's gonna make

00:05:44.040 cause some problems uh oh it's showing up for you guys okay so it's not showing up for some people

00:05:49.960 but i don't know why it's what happened back then balance of power mass communications is our

00:05:57.320 language today between one another and we can't say well let's not really talk about anything

00:06:03.400 serious on television that that is a criminal statement and a criminal intention in my opinion

00:06:10.680 the audience is way ahead of our government leaders i think the government leaders should

00:06:15.160 catch up with the audience and then we'd have 21st century dreams right now right so we have

00:06:20.600 this idea that he wanted to show a better future and create that better future. I will spare you

00:06:30.440 some of the more boring stuff that I covered in my thesis, but that is the idea of science fiction,

00:06:35.800 the idea that we are not just, we are not talking about the future, we are shaping our present to

00:06:42.600 create the future that we want. And that is exactly what Roddenberry was trying to do.

00:06:46.840 too. Whether it was truly effective or not, we know that Star Trek had plenty of impact

00:06:52.260 on technology and society going forward. So the show is made in the 1960s. Again, you

00:06:58.460 guys are all historians, more or less, who are in this chat, so I don't have to belabor

00:07:02.520 the point. But the 60s was a decade of significant societal upheaval, right? We have the civil

00:07:08.020 rights movement, we're beginning to really challenge things like racial inequality and

00:07:12.680 discrimination in America. The Vietnam War is ongoing. There's growing anti-war sentiment in

00:07:19.000 the U.S. which is only going to get more and more clear throughout the 60s and 70s and of course the

00:07:25.380 Cold War is still ongoing. So there's still a lot of tensions about democracy, about authoritarianism

00:07:30.500 overseas and a lot of that is going to shape our storytelling in this in the series as well.

00:07:36.680 We also are dealing with a lot of things like gender equality and things like that in the 60s

00:07:40.900 which are going to sort of come up a little bit here and there in the show.

00:07:45.520 One of my favorite examples of something, a plot device that seems to be created to really comment on America's increasing impact overseas during the Cold War is, of course, the Prime Directive.

00:07:59.880 So the Prime Directive is kind of the number one thing that all of Starfleet is supposed to follow.

00:08:06.300 I know those of you who've watched Star Trek are laughing right now because there is nothing that

00:08:11.120 you know uh Starfleet likes better than not following the prime directive as a plot point

00:08:16.760 but the idea is that the Starfleet crew will not mess with civilizations that are still developing

00:08:23.800 if they have not reached the commensurate level of technological and or societal development

00:08:29.200 of the actual society that they are involved, that is influencing them, which is of course

00:08:36.580 the Federation in this case. So you're not supposed to identify yourself or your mission,

00:08:40.660 not interfere with the society, culture, or technological development of the planet,

00:08:44.440 and you shouldn't let them know about space or other worlds or aliens or anything like that.

00:08:49.960 So this is Roddenberry's way of imagining a future where advanced civilizations, first world

00:08:55.380 countries like the United Federation of Planets or the United States would respect that other

00:09:01.180 countries should have autonomy, that we should not be interfering in their development or kind of

00:09:06.480 trying to control what's going on there. When you think of the Cold War, it's a time of extreme

00:09:12.140 imperialism. We are seeing, you know, newly decolonized nations all over the place that are

00:09:17.560 being impacted by different superpowers, nominally the U.S. and of course the USSR, who are trying to

00:09:24.100 spread their own ideals, their own social concepts and government into those cultures.

00:09:31.900 And so we really wanted to, Roddenberry really wanted to push this idea that that is not a good

00:09:37.240 idea. We shouldn't be meddling in these societies. Of course, that sometimes gets lost in the plot

00:09:43.560 considering that, like I said, Kirk's favorite thing, Picard's favorite thing, is to kind of

00:09:49.920 play with that and push the edges of it as much as possible, which is one of my favorite

00:09:57.500 cuts from a comic strip, from a comic book for Star Trek is this particular one.

00:10:03.920 I've never violated the Prime Directive. Oh, certainly not. Ignored, perhaps. Circumvented.

00:10:08.740 Finesse. Broadly interpreted. Forgotten. But never violated, right? You're not going to

00:10:13.420 violate it completely. The Prime Directive had a lot to do with the idea that cultures that 0.95

00:10:18.800 were not advanced enough, could not deal with the technology that they would be given. They

00:10:25.320 would end up destroying themselves with it, which if you guys watch the Orville, they did a great

00:10:29.480 episode on that in the last season where they showed what happens if a country or a planet

00:10:35.520 gets access to something they're not ready for. So a big part of the Prime Directive ties into

00:10:40.280 this mutually assured destruction doctrine that we had in the Cold War, which we were scared. We

00:10:46.040 were scared of people getting access to nuclear weapons or anything like that that might cause

00:10:52.580 a massive war to break out. It was already bad enough when America had it and the USSR had it 0.90

00:11:00.440 and then France had them and everybody kept trying to add to the stockpile during this period.

00:11:06.340 So a lot of these episodes in the first and second season even to the third season of the show kind

00:11:12.580 of deal with that. We see things like A Private Little War, where we have kind of explicit

00:11:17.380 allegory for Vietnam going on, showing the dangers of arming factions with advanced technology that

00:11:23.760 they are not ready for. The Apple in season two, which explores the dangers of disrupting a

00:11:29.500 society's way of life, even if you have good intentions to do it. And of course, Patterns of

00:11:34.440 Force, which is a great episode from season two, which shows how interference can really develop

00:11:39.900 into authoritarianism or Nazism very easily. If you are, if you go into it with bad intent,

00:11:46.060 it's very easy to influence these other cultures and change them.

00:11:53.500 So we had a huge commentary on race in this show. It's groundbreaking casting. We have

00:11:59.100 Nichelle Nichols playing a strong non-stereotypical African-American character.

00:12:05.340 I always loved the interview that Whoopi Goldberg gave once talking about the first

00:12:09.340 time she saw Star Trek as a kid and went running out of the room saying mama there's a black lady

00:12:15.260 on the television she's not a maid right and that really impacted her as a young black woman

00:12:21.100 encouraging her to get into acting and eventually be a character in Star Trek as well she was very

00:12:26.460 very dedicated to getting that role apparently uh she harassed Gene Roddenberry for weeks trying to

00:12:31.980 get that to get in the show because she really wanted to be in there uh it also was an inspiration

00:12:36.860 to martin luther king jr surprisingly enough you might not think that uh that a show like star

00:12:42.060 trek could have that much impact on someone who is a you know historic world leader but he loved

00:12:48.980 the show i'm gonna play you guys a little clip here of nichelle nichols talking about meeting him

00:12:53.340 i was pleased that in those days when you couldn't get even blacks on television that i not only had

00:13:04.840 a black with a black woman and a black officer you are away from your postmaster 0.98

00:13:10.740 that'll show him I told Jean after the end of the first season that I would not 0.98

00:13:19.480 be returning to the show that I wanted to return to my first love which is

00:13:27.460 musical theater. But I didn't know that meeting a Star Trek fan would change my

00:13:36.540 life. I was told that a fan wanted to meet me and I turned and looked into the

00:13:42.400 face of Dr. Martin Luther King. I was breathless. He says, yes, I'm the Trekker.

00:13:47.440 I'm a Star Trek fan. And he told me that Star Trek was one of the only shows that

00:13:53.560 his wife Coretta and he would allow their little children to stay up and

00:13:59.260 watch and thanked him and I told him that I was leaving the show all the

00:14:05.820 smile came off his face and he said you can't do that he said don't you

00:14:10.600 understand that for the first time we are seen as we should be seen you don't

00:14:17.980 have a black role you have an equal role and then I went back to work on Monday

00:14:27.580 morning I went to Jean's office and I told him what had happened over the

00:14:33.820 weekend and he says welcome home we got a lot of work to do so he was I mean

00:14:42.240 Martin Luther King jr. tells you that you can't quit your job you kind of can't

00:14:46.460 quit your job. You're kind of stuck at that point. And she came right back and continued on for the

00:14:52.820 next two seasons of the show. And we see a lot of these commentaries on race throughout different

00:14:59.140 episodes. Obviously, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is probably one of the most over

00:15:04.360 the top episodes. We'll watch a little clip from that in a little bit. And we're talking more about

00:15:08.440 this. But as far as the futility of racism, where we have two characters, one is black on one side,

00:15:15.600 white on the other and the other is white on one side black on the other and they hate each other

00:15:20.660 because of that which is crazy right but it is of course uh just what racism is uh the omega glory 0.75

00:15:27.620 which also critiques selective application of equality and american values to different groups

00:15:33.280 of people it's another one of those very ham-fisted very over-the-top episodes but i'm also going to

00:15:38.720 play a clip from it later and of course famously plato's stepchildren everyone says it's a bad

00:15:45.240 episode, go back and rewatch it with a kind of more of a analytical framing on it. But it's a

00:15:52.440 much better episode than we maybe remember from initial viewing when we were younger. I mean,

00:15:58.160 I'm not saying it's great, but it's got more commentary in it than you're maybe expecting

00:16:02.360 to find in the episode. And Plato's Stepchildren is, of course, the first interracial kiss on

00:16:08.440 American TV broadcast across the country. And this was in 1968. The episode came out in November of

00:16:15.620 1968. This is only just a year and change after Loving v. Virginia had been handed down by the

00:16:23.720 Supreme Court. So this was a major thing to represent in television. And of course, we have

00:16:29.780 some great quotes, great quotes from the show. One of my favorites is Sulu saying, yes, but it

00:16:34.520 happened way back in the 20th century there's no such primitive thinking today and I'm like

00:16:38.700 sci-fi authors had such high hopes for the 21st 23rd century we we really have not held up have we

00:16:45.540 so we've got that famous picture of the kiss there uh and yes there is some problems with

00:16:54.040 that given that the kiss is forced on them but uh spoilers but it's still an interracial kiss

00:17:00.320 that's shown on TV, which was, they knew, they figured they were going to get death threats

00:17:05.200 from a lot of people. They figured they were going to get death threats, especially from

00:17:08.780 broadcasting it in the South. And in fact, they probably did get those death threats.

00:17:16.120 I don't know why I have the same quotes on this page. Oh, well.

00:17:20.440 Now let's talk about gender in this show, right? We have some very progressive elements. We have 0.99

00:17:27.200 Uhura as a communications officer and a high-ranking female character. Of course, we don't actually see 0.79

00:17:31.920 her take the bridge at all until the movies, which aren't until the 80s. But it's also got

00:17:38.080 some great episodes that express issues on gender, that address issues on gender. One of my favorites

00:17:42.900 is it's the second episode of the first season, so they come out strong out of the gate with Charlie

00:17:48.820 X. They have a young man. He has these godlike powers. He's never met women before, and he is

00:17:55.540 not understanding consent. He does not get it. He is obsessed with Yeoman Rand. His lack of

00:18:02.260 socialization leads to him. Well, he's an incel. Charlie X is an incel. That's what the episode 0.99

00:18:07.200 is about. And so it's big issues of entitlement for men and consent. And as much as everybody

00:18:13.440 likes to say that Kirk is some sort of, you know, horndog, he's the guy who sits him down and says,

00:18:18.480 you can't have everything you want. That's not how this works. Women are not your property. You

00:18:24.340 can't just take what you want. Of course, Charlie doesn't really listen. He's a teenager with godlike

00:18:30.360 powers and an incel. So what do you think that would happen with actual incels today? It would

00:18:35.380 be very bad. The Enemy Within has a transporter accident where Kirk gets split into two versions

00:18:41.540 of himself, basically an evil twin and a good twin. And we see a lot of discussions about the

00:18:47.380 issue of power and consent in this episode when his evil side is obsessed with Yulam and Rand

00:18:53.520 again. Yuman Rand gets a lot of crap in the show. She really does. She is kind of the target for a 0.98

00:18:59.280 lot of episodes that have this in it. There are some, that's one of the more regressive points 0.93

00:19:04.000 of the show, which carries through into TNG as well, where a lot of female characters end up 0.57

00:19:09.240 being assaulted for the sake of the plot, which is not, not ideal. But the general message is that

00:19:16.340 it's bad. At least we have that going for it. And of course, In A Muck Time, which is nominally

00:19:21.860 about Spock's experiences here. But we're also seeing an alien race that gives women agency

00:19:31.640 over who they marry. So Tupring is able to choose her future partner and, you know, and decide who 0.99

00:19:38.880 she is going to be involved with in that situation, which is a challenge to patriarchal norms of that

00:19:44.520 era so we do see a lot of that going on and I'm gonna show you a little clip

00:19:52.760 here from yeah from charlie x on earth today it's Thanksgiving the crew has to

00:19:58.340 eat synthetic meatloaf I wanted to look like turkey

00:20:01.740 Charlie captain I'm supposed to ask you something why shouldn't I explain well

00:20:10.040 say it right now charlie that usually works well in the corridor i saw when janice when human rand

00:20:17.000 was i did that to her she didn't like it she said you'd explain it to me me i see well um

00:20:29.240 uh there are things you can do with a lady uh charlie that you 1.00

00:20:34.280 Well, there's no right way to hit a woman. 1.00

00:20:41.680 I mean, man to man is one thing. 1.00

00:20:44.800 But man and woman, it's... 0.99

00:20:48.280 Well, it's another thing.

00:20:57.540 Do you understand?

00:20:59.380 I don't know.

00:21:01.040 Yeah, I wouldn't have understood it either, given that he...

00:21:03.560 But you have to give Kirk some credit here.

00:21:06.260 He doesn't have a kid.

00:21:07.340 He's never expected to have to give this talk to anybody in his life, right?

00:21:11.020 He's like, I wasn't expecting to have to do this today.

00:21:14.100 And he does pull it out a little bit better later in the episode with this.

00:21:18.520 Charlie, there are a million things in this universe you can have,

00:21:21.280 and there are a million things you can't have.

00:21:23.220 It's no fun facing that, but that's the way things are.

00:21:29.240 Then what am I going to do?

00:21:31.500 Hang on tight.

00:21:32.500 and survive everybody does you don't everybody charlie me too so he's saying like i've got

00:21:41.900 there's people that i'm attracted to in fact human rand in this particular case where he's saying

00:21:46.020 yeah that's a that's fine you can be attracted to somebody that doesn't mean you get to have

00:21:50.360 them there's a lot of reasons why you can't have them if they're not interested in you

00:21:53.780 you can't have them if you are uh you know in charge of them the way he is of human ran like

00:21:59.460 he doesn't get that option. He doesn't get to do that. So he does a better job here than he does

00:22:04.000 in the first instance of him being like, well, there are things that you can't do if you, you

00:22:10.820 know. But I'm giving him credit for that. Now, one of the best things to come out of Star Trek

00:22:17.640 when it came to gender was, of course, DC Fontana's work. Dorothy Fontana was just hugely 0.88

00:22:25.920 important to the history of Star Trek, even into Star Trek, the animated series, which we are not

00:22:32.040 going to talk about in this lecture, simply because I haven't had time to watch it or get

00:22:37.960 enough research done on it. But DC Fontana plays a pivotal role in creating the universe of Star

00:22:44.760 Trek that we know today. And she wrote some very strong female characters into episodes that she

00:22:51.500 was responsible for writing. So she was one of the main female writers on Star Trek, and she is

00:22:58.480 going to inspire future generations of women into screenwriting and to science fiction as well.

00:23:03.420 She is, you know, a big part of writing the character of Lieutenant Uhura, of making Christine

00:23:09.960 Chappell a little bit more of a fleshed out character, giving her some more depth instead

00:23:14.220 of just being this typical female supporting role. I'm not going to say that maybe her, I don't

00:23:19.200 necessarily like her character. There's a lot of problems with Nurse Chapel, but at least she's

00:23:23.600 got some depth to it. And of course, she is responsible for writing a couple of great

00:23:28.500 episodes like Journey to Babel and the Enterprise incident. Journey to Babel, she is introducing

00:23:34.920 Spock's parents. So you see this character of Amanda Grayson. She's kind of a human who has

00:23:40.580 to navigate living in Vulcan culture by being married to a Vulcan and dealing with just the

00:23:45.640 incredible emotional repression of both her son and her and her husband, who just refused to 0.95

00:23:51.860 listen to anything she says, even though she's clearly right. She's clearly right about everything

00:23:55.880 as women tend to be. And they just won't listen to her, right. And of course, in the Enterprise 1.00

00:24:01.760 incident, she is going to introduce the first female Romulan commander, who is very strategic,

00:24:08.240 very commanding and is a direct challenge to the male leaders in the show with Kirk and Spock.

00:24:14.040 It's a very groundbreaking moment for women in sci-fi at that point.

00:24:21.220 And now let's talk about the big critique.

00:24:24.540 The big thing that everybody always comes up to when we talk about gender in Star Trek. 0.77

00:24:29.800 They're always like, yeah, but they made all the women wear miniskirts.

00:24:33.940 And it's like, yeah, but do you know what miniskirts meant in the 1960s?

00:24:39.500 This is the era of the miniskirt, right?

00:24:42.220 The miniskirt isn't invented until kind of the late 50s, early 60s in England. 1.00

00:24:48.620 And it's invented by a woman named Mary Quant. 0.77

00:24:51.140 She is, you know, she's very much wanting to make clothing that women want to wear. 0.99

00:24:56.060 She wants to liberate women.

00:24:58.740 And obviously the miniskirt was not actually well loved by a lot of people because the

00:25:05.980 more conservative elements hated the miniskirt.

00:25:08.160 They were absolutely incensed by it. And women wanted to wear it. I mean, Gloria Steinem is a fashion icon of the 60s as well as being a feminist icon. And she was pictured many times wearing miniskirts. Women protested for the miniskirt during this period of time. 1.00

00:25:26.740 So putting women in a miniskirt in the uniform of Starfleet was, it can be seen more as a feminist moment than people today tend to read it as.

00:25:39.520 We also have to address the very real possibility that as much as it was a revolutionary item of clothing for the 60s, Gene Roddenberry may have just picked it because he was Gene Roddenberry and he had some problematic things when it came to his relationships and treatment of women.

00:25:54.600 um but it also it also fits with the more feminist aspect of of women being in positions of power in

00:26:02.960 the star trek universe as well uh so i we don't need to hate on the miniskirts so much now the

00:26:09.400 miniskirts and the weird jumpsuits that they put on deanna troy and seven of nine in later shows

00:26:16.000 we will talk about that because there's a problem with that certainly in the 90s

00:26:20.720 but we'll get to that in later lectures. So now let's talk about Star Trek and how they dealt

00:26:27.920 with the Cold War specifically. Oh, sorry. That's the wrong show. The temporal Cold War is not what

00:26:33.820 we're talking about today. We will get around to Enterprise later, but that was a weird plot

00:26:38.920 line from Star Trek Enterprise. So let's just talk about the original series. So when we look

00:26:45.660 at Star Trek and how they dealt with the Cold War, we can see that Roddenberry starts to make clear

00:26:51.180 parallels between the races in the show and the nations that are involved in the Cold War. So of

00:26:57.200 course the United States is the Federation. It's this ideal democratic world where they, you know,

00:27:05.760 have equality and freedom and all of that. Basically he is playing off the idea of the most

00:27:11.520 ideal version of the United States, right? He's saying this is what we should be. We may not be

00:27:15.700 this yet, but this is what we should be. Then we get over to the Klingon Empire, and they are a 0.86

00:27:21.960 pretty clear allegory for the USSR. There's a little bit of combined allegory as well for 0.73

00:27:29.320 communist China in there as well. But for the most part, they are meant to represent the USSR,

00:27:35.160 especially with this long, long conflict that they have with the Federation that they have been in

00:27:40.360 for a very, very long time. Sometimes it's shooting war, but more often than not, it's being

00:27:46.700 carried out covertly. And we see that in several episodes. And then of course, the Romulans were

00:27:53.860 in their original concept that Roddenberry created for them, very obviously meant to represent the

00:27:59.400 1960s Chinese Communist Party, or more broadly, just Communist Asia. And as a result, one of the

00:28:07.060 episodes that we see that most clearly in is the Enterprise incident, which was written by DC

00:28:10.980 Fontana. I just mentioned it a couple slides ago. In the second season, that is based specifically

00:28:16.680 on the capture of an American patrol boat, the Pueblo, by communist North Korea during the Vietnam

00:28:22.000 War. So that episode is based, it's ripped from the headlines. It was based on an actual event

00:28:26.540 that occurred. So Taste of Armageddon is one of the most aggressive of the post of the Cold War

00:28:35.900 episodes. And this episode is a, they're on a diplomatic mission to a, to a planet. The crew

00:28:41.120 visits and they find out they are waging a destructive war with another planet in their

00:28:46.320 solar system. But the war is being conducted entirely by computer simulation. They kind of

00:28:52.680 decide where the casualties would be based on, you know, it's like playing civilization. Basically

00:28:58.340 you're playing a Civ game, but real people die. People, instead of having their, their buildings

00:29:05.160 destroyed. People just walk themselves into dematerialization chambers and die as a result

00:29:11.580 of, oh, you were supposed to be a victim of this latest bombing, right? And this episode was really

00:29:18.120 a very key look at the proxy war situation that we had going on with the Soviet Union during this

00:29:24.820 period of time, because we are fighting wars in which there is no loss to us, right? No Americans

00:29:33.160 for the most part are not dying. Korea and Vietnam accepted, right? We have, we do see a lot of 1.00

00:29:39.020 anger towards those wars because Americans are dying in them. But for the most part, most of

00:29:44.520 this proxy war stuff that we are doing during the Cold War does not affect American citizens or

00:29:49.840 Soviet citizens. They are not the ones dying. And it really divorces the violence from the situation

00:29:56.860 and people just don't care. They don't care about the war. They don't care about trying to stop it

00:30:01.340 because of that lack of violence. One of the characters in the show says that millions of

00:30:05.680 people were dying horribly when they were actually having, you know, real shooting wars,

00:30:10.300 complete destruction of our culture here and on this other planet, disaster, disease, starvation,

00:30:15.600 it was horrible, lingering death. And Kirk ends up pointing out that those horrors of war

00:30:21.180 are what's make us avoid war, right? Those things that are happening are, it's meant to weigh on us

00:30:29.540 because we shouldn't just treat war as a simulation it should not be something where

00:30:33.620 we say well it's it's other people in other countries dying so it doesn't matter right

00:30:38.660 it doesn't affect us with whom are you at war the third planet in our system called vendicar

00:30:47.620 originally settled by our people and now a ruthless enemy highly advanced technologically 0.98

00:30:53.140 please excuse me bendikar is attacking 0.96

00:31:00.900 strange to say the least it will not last long don't you take shelter

00:31:12.200 there is no shelter captain are these attacks frequent oh yes and we will retaliate immediately

00:31:19.700 oh what is it a hit right here in the city

00:31:29.380 do you hear any explosions mrs none captain

00:31:37.860 so people are just gonna walk themselves in to the demon they're gonna call it out and say 0.90

00:31:42.500 everybody in this neighborhood needs to go to their local dematerialization chamber and die

00:31:46.780 now because your area was hit in a you know a simulation uh but you know kirk does his his

00:31:53.900 famous his most famous thing which is uh logicing the computer to death uh in this episode it's one

00:32:00.740 of his favorite things to do is just destroy computer systems uh and he destroys it destroys

00:32:05.740 this simulation and says hey if you want to keep having a war you're going to either have to accept

00:32:11.220 the costs of that war personally you're going to have to put your money where your mouth is

00:32:15.060 or you're going to have to end the war, find a way to end it.

00:32:19.320 And so this is really quite a nice look at the proxy war situation that we had ongoing

00:32:24.720 because nobody in America really cared about,

00:32:28.560 oh, we overthrew a government in Guatemala over bananas.

00:32:31.680 Well, it didn't hurt us.

00:32:33.020 We're not the ones dying in this. 0.96

00:32:36.100 Hundreds of people, thousands of people are going to die in Guatemala

00:32:39.780 because of the overthrow of their government and a dictator being put in place.

00:32:44.040 but it's not us. They don't look like us so we don't really care.

00:32:51.480 Balance of Terror is another great episode that really deals with this very well. I know that

00:32:57.560 they remade this episode in one of the new shows in Strange New Worlds. I have never been more

00:33:04.360 angry about a recreation of an episode because it missed the point entirely. The episode just

00:33:09.480 didn't work because of the way they did it. But in this episode, it is the first time that they

00:33:15.300 are encountering the Romulans for a very, very long time. Nobody really knows much about the

00:33:20.180 Romulans, what they look like, anything like that. And when they first finally see them,

00:33:25.280 they realize that the Romulans look exactly like the Vulcans. They've got the same pointed ears, 0.71

00:33:31.460 the same weird bowl cuts. It's very obvious that they are offshoots of the same civilization.

00:33:38.260 And this starts to kind of create this fear that is going to be focused towards Spock because of this idea that, well, he might actually be a Romulan or he might be sympathetic to the Romulans, which has a very much the same vibe as the McCarthy era America, which is, which was pushing this idea that anyone could be a communist.

00:33:59.180 And if you were a communist, you were obviously an enemy of America and going to cause problems. It also gives a great scene with Captain Kirk in this episode.

00:34:08.260 you're coming cryptography is working on it sir kirit and spark didn't quite get that mr

00:34:29.920 nothing sir repeat it i was suggesting that mr spock could probably translate it for you sir

00:34:37.040 i assume you're complimenting mr spock on his ability to decode i'm not sure sir

00:34:42.160 well here's one thing you can be sure of mister leave any bigotry in your quarters there's no

00:34:51.160 room for it on the bridge do i make myself clear you do so all right it's a great line i admit i

00:34:59.660 would rather he not leave his bigotry in his quarters either. I'd rather he just get rid of

00:35:03.060 it entirely. But, you know, I can see where Kirk's coming from on this particular issue.

00:35:08.320 So we see some really great discussion of the fear of the other or fear of xenophobia in just

00:35:13.840 general that we also had going on a lot during the 50s and 60s. Obviously, even though the

00:35:20.100 McCarthy era is over, the 60s is rife with going after people who are seen to have communist

00:35:24.760 leanings. J. Edgar Hoover is just going after anyone who's involved in the civil rights movement,

00:35:31.120 the women's live movement, because he believes that they are all just communists who are causing

00:35:35.880 problems, right? And so we see a lot of that happening in the 60s as well. And of course,

00:35:41.440 one of the episodes that I like as well is Errand of Mercy. Now, this is an episode where Kirk and

00:35:47.180 Spock go to a planet, they are trying to protect this planet of Organia from the Klingons. But the 0.98

00:35:53.460 natives don't want the Federation's help. It's very much, look, like we can handle this ourselves.

00:35:58.680 Now it comes out eventually that the Organians are basically higher beings that are not going

00:36:04.740 to get hurt by any of this anyway. But not only that, they are going to basically use their

00:36:11.020 space god powers to force a detente between the Soviets and America, right, is what they're going 0.84

00:36:19.940 to end up doing here as i stand here i also stand upon the home planet of the klingon empire

00:36:27.720 and the home planet of your federation captain i'm going to put a stop to this insane war

00:36:33.980 you're what you're talking nonsense it is being done you can't just stop the fleet

00:36:41.720 what gives you the right you can't interfere what happens in space is not your business

00:36:48.340 Unless both sides agree to an immediate cessation of hostilities, all your armed forces, wherever they may be, will be immediately immobilized. 0.99

00:36:57.340 We have legitimate grievances against the Klingons. They've invaded our territory, killed our citizens. 1.00

00:37:02.340 They're openly aggressive. They've boasted that they'll take over half the galaxy.

00:37:06.340 And why not? We're the stronger.

00:37:08.340 You've tried to hem us in, cut off my little supplies, strangle our trade. You've been asking for a war.

00:37:13.340 You're the ones who issued the ultimatum to withdraw from the disputed area.

00:37:16.340 They are not disputed. They're clearly ours.

00:37:18.340 And now you step in with some kind of trick?

00:37:21.340 It is no trick, Commander.

00:37:23.340 We have simply put an end to your war.

00:37:25.340 All your military forces, wherever they are, are now completely paralyzed.

00:37:30.340 We find interference in other people's affairs most disgusting.

00:37:36.340 But you gentlemen have given us no choice. 0.96

00:37:39.340 You should be the first to be an arser. 0.84

00:37:41.340 Two hundred hostages killed. 0.90

00:37:43.340 No one has been killed, Captain. 0.97

00:37:45.340 No one has died here in uncounted thousands of years, you liars.

00:37:52.260 So, obviously, I just love the idea of, like, interferences.

00:37:56.440 You can't interfere with the way we're doing things.

00:37:58.560 I'm like, irony, irony.

00:38:00.820 You guys are not getting it.

00:38:02.140 Like, yes, they're interfering with you to force you to stop a war the same way you guys have been interfering with everybody else around the galaxy while trying to deal with these particular, with your hatred of each other.

00:38:15.340 And I will say one of there, there are a lot of different readings of this episode.

00:38:22.300 Not all of them are good, good readings of the episode.

00:38:24.760 And I will say this is probably one of the most over the top pro America episodes of

00:38:29.620 the series.

00:38:30.940 But it is a very nice look at the idea of enforcing the idea that equality and the Constitution

00:38:38.660 were supposed to apply to everybody, right?

00:38:40.540 They weren't just supposed to apply to American citizens or who the people that you liked.

00:38:46.040 So this particular episode where you have Kirk come across a planet with two warring 0.93

00:38:53.200 factions, they are the Yangs and the comms, which Kirk and Spock quickly figure out, oh, 0.98

00:38:58.920 that's the Yankees and the communists, like with, it's clear, they aren't even trying

00:39:03.580 to be subtle about this.

00:39:04.700 They literally are like, oh, it's the Yankees and the communists.

00:39:08.140 Yang's most sacred text is a copy of the U.S. Constitution that has been found on

00:39:14.280 their planet. There's a whole plot line around how this happens but I won't get

00:39:18.280 into it here. Kirk gives a speech at the end of this episode on the principles

00:39:22.880 of this document. I'm gonna play you a little bit of that. It is so over-the-top

00:39:26.560 top but no no only the eyes of a chief they see the eve plebnista this was not written for chiefs

00:39:37.900 among my people we carry many such words as this from many lands many worlds many are equally good

00:39:53.060 and are as well respected but wherever we have gone no words have said this thing of importance

00:40:00.660 in quite this way look at these three words written larger than the rest with a special

00:40:08.340 pride never written before or since tall words proudly saying we the people that what you call

00:40:17.120 eid plebnista was not written for the chiefs or the kings or the warriors or the rich or the

00:40:23.360 powerful but for all the people down the centuries you have slurred the meaning out of the words

00:40:31.200 we the people of the united states in order to form a more perfect union establish justice

00:40:39.820 ensure domestic tranquility provide for the common defense promote the general welfare

00:40:45.520 and secure the blessings of liberty

00:40:48.340 to ourselves and our posterity

00:40:52.700 to ordain and establish this constitution.

00:40:57.760 These words and the words that follow 0.71

00:41:00.120 were not written only for the Yangs

00:41:04.560 but for the Kams as well. 0.76

00:41:06.200 The Kams.

00:41:06.920 They must apply to everyone 1.00

00:41:08.600 or they mean nothing.

00:41:09.840 Do you understand?

00:41:11.360 So this is one of the most aggressively pro-America propaganda

00:41:15.380 episodes probably of the whole series. But we're not so removed in the 1960s from the Red Scare

00:41:22.660 and McCarthyism that declaring the idea that the Constitution applied to communists too

00:41:29.640 wasn't a non-risky proposition for them to be pulling, right? This is a very, very clear sign

00:41:38.120 of like, yeah, you can't just say the Constitution only applies to the people you like or the people

00:41:41.900 that agree with you, they have to apply to everybody or they don't mean anything. He says

00:41:47.680 there's some really good quotes in here. Liberty and freedom have to be more than just words.

00:41:52.660 This is something that applies to everyone. And so this is actually as obnoxious as the episode

00:41:59.020 is, as heavy handed as the episode is, it really was a very good look at the issues of the Cold

00:42:05.120 War, but also issues of race, right, that we were looking at in America at the same time,

00:42:11.700 which was the idea that these things need to be applied equally. Everyone needs to have access

00:42:16.080 to these freedoms or they don't mean anything at all. Now let's talk about the Vietnam War

00:42:23.120 specifically. As Roddenberry said in that clip I played at the beginning, they were one of the

00:42:28.100 first shows to really address the Vietnam War in an even slightly critical way. There was not a

00:42:35.060 lot of television on air that was going to go after this directly during this time period.

00:42:40.740 And so he has this idea that it seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex,

00:42:45.220 religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam, and so on, that if I had similar

00:42:50.020 situations involving these subjects happening on other planets to little green people, 0.98

00:42:54.340 indeed it might get by. And it did. So the censors, the television studio was okay with them saying 1.00

00:43:00.180 this as long as they removed it from the America from from current events so many television shows

00:43:06.020 have been very fearful about alienating viewers or losing advertisers or facing censure from networks

00:43:12.740 and so they really just didn't address these issues head on but because of the sci-fi element

00:43:18.180 of this show we end up being able to do that in a way that that no one else had been able to do

00:43:24.260 now i will say it's wildly wrecked he's really rewriting the history of the show a little bit

00:43:29.780 when he's talking about it being critical of the Vietnam War. Because when you start looking at

00:43:34.500 episodes that deal with war, you can see that the show didn't start out necessarily against

00:43:40.740 the idea of war. They spend a lot of time justifying these interventions at the beginning

00:43:47.140 of the show. They tend to, they start getting a little more aggressively anti-Vietnam War

00:43:51.780 as we get further into the show. But when you look at a show like The City on the Edge of Forever,

00:43:56.980 this is a season one episode 28 episode uh Kirk and Spock have to go back in time to save McCoy

00:44:04.260 and stop him from destroying the universe that they as they know it uh he goes back in time he

00:44:09.700 wants to save the life of a woman named Edith Keeler who's going to die in a car accident it's

00:44:14.500 very tragic she's a very good person she is doing good things but unfortunately her good things will

00:44:22.260 lead to other problems this is how history went after mccoy changed it here in the late 1930s a

00:44:31.380 growing pacifist movement whose influence delayed the united states entry into the second world war

00:44:38.180 while peace negotiations dragged on germany had time to complete its heavy water experiments

00:44:43.460 Germany. Fascism. Hitler. 0.77

00:44:51.460 One. Second World War.

00:44:53.460 Because all this lets them develop the A-bomb first. 0.99

00:44:59.460 There's no mistake, Captain. Let me run it again. 0.99

00:45:08.460 Edith Keeler, founder of the peace movement. 0.67

00:45:12.460 movement but she was right peace was the way she was right but at the wrong time with the a-bomb

00:45:19.280 and with their v2 rockets to carry them germany captured the world no all this because mccoy came 0.94

00:45:26.820 back and somehow kept her from dying in a street accident so of course kirk is he's in love with

00:45:35.280 edith keeler because you know what she's a good person there's really no reason not to be in love

00:45:40.180 with Edith Keillor, but Spock is like, look, she's got to die. This is how it happens. If she doesn't

00:45:45.920 die, we don't win the war, or America doesn't win the war, and eventually, and the Federation is

00:45:51.600 never created, right? So our future rests on this one person's death. So with this episode, really,

00:45:59.100 there is an anti-war movement that's growing at the time of this episode coming out, but when we

00:46:06.320 take a look at this episode, they are really saying sometimes war is necessary. Sometimes we

00:46:11.840 have to do the bad thing in order to get to the good place. So this episode is not strictly speaking

00:46:18.000 anti-war or anti-Vietnam in this context because they are justifying the idea that war is necessary,

00:46:25.760 that peace at the wrong time is not good. And then we move on to a private little war. This

00:46:33.200 This is in season two.

00:46:35.200 They are on a planet with a very primitive civilization. 1.00

00:46:38.000 The Enterprise discovers that the Klingons have provided basically a Stone Age society 0.95

00:46:44.080 with increasingly advanced weapons. 0.99

00:46:45.760 They are up to flintlock pistol, flintlocks at this point.

00:46:49.620 And it's just not, you know, it's not a good situation that they're in.

00:46:52.900 So one side is getting the weapons and Kirk is like, okay, we're going to supply the same

00:46:59.420 weapons to the other side because it's the only way to balance this out.

00:47:29.420 All right. All right. Say I'm wrong. Say I'm drugged. Say the woman who drugged me.

00:47:39.980 What is your sober, sensible solution to all this?

00:47:45.600 I don't have a solution.

00:47:47.900 But furnishing them firearms is certainly not the answer. 0.97

00:47:51.940 Bones, do you remember the 20th century brush wars on the Asian continent? 0.94

00:47:56.380 two giant powers involved much like the klingons and ourselves neither side felt that they could 0.54

00:48:01.920 pull out yes i remember it went on bloody year after bloody year but what would you have suggested 0.53

00:48:06.820 that one side arm its friends with an overpowering weapon mankind would never have lived to travel

00:48:14.040 space if they had no the only solution is what happened back then

00:48:20.400 balance of power.

00:48:24.920 Right. So again, this is not the most anti-Vietnam sentiment that you could possibly have in this

00:48:30.420 situation. Obviously, they are to a degree saying that these wars were bad. He's saying they went

00:48:36.220 on for bloody year after bloody year. We have a specific reference to the brush wars on the Asian 0.99

00:48:41.240 continent. So they are talking about Vietnam very clearly here. But at the same time, they are

00:48:48.140 justifying America's involvement in this particular war to some degree because look they're saying hey

00:48:54.380 what are we supposed to do just let one side arm their friends and us not arm ours like that

00:48:59.740 doesn't make any sense we have to we have to bring a balance of power to this situation

00:49:05.260 and so this is going to be a very important episode for this idea and the timing of this

00:49:10.940 episode couldn't have been more perfect if they had planned it they did not obviously but it aired

00:49:16.540 less than a month after the beginning of the Tet Offensive, January 31st, 1968. So this was

00:49:22.700 at the just right moment for it to really hit people with the obviousness of the allegory that

00:49:28.540 they were putting here, made it a very powerful message for the American public.

00:49:34.380 So they are somewhat justifying the involvement in the Vietnam War, but we are going to get some

00:49:39.260 much more anti-war episodes obviously later on. One of those being, let that be your last

00:49:45.260 battlefield, right? So we've already talked about that being a particularly big discussion of race

00:49:51.180 as well. But one of the things about this episode that is sometimes lost is the fact that they are

00:49:56.020 really talking about the Cold War as well and Vietnam War as well. So one of the major issues

00:50:02.720 that happened in the Vietnam War is that we saw a lot more African American soldiers die during

00:50:07.440 this war actually than in mass. So we saw a lot of this. There was a high number of deaths being

00:50:13.660 suffered by military men of color. And Kirk warns that you both must end up dead if you don't stop 1.00

00:50:22.020 hating, which potentially works for racism. It does, but it also works for this idea of war,

00:50:29.180 the destruction of this, especially when you see that their planet has been destroyed.

00:50:33.360 There is no evidence of natural disaster, yet there are vast numbers of unburied corpses in all cities.

00:50:39.300 all the people are dead all dead captain they have annihilated each other totally

00:50:50.660 my people all dead yes commissioner all of them no one alive none at all sir 1.00

00:51:03.540 You're a band of murderers! 1.00

00:51:11.540 Stop it! 1.00

00:51:12.540 What's the matter what you do?

00:51:14.540 You hear Spock?

00:51:15.540 Your planet is dead!

00:51:17.540 There's nobody alive on Sharon because of hate!

00:51:20.540 The cause you fought about no longer exists!

00:51:23.540 Give yourselves time to breathe!

00:51:25.540 Give up your hate!

00:51:27.540 You're welcome to live with us!

00:51:30.540 us listen to me you so they are not going to listen they are going to fight it out and in the

00:51:38.700 course of this fight we see these these horrible scenes of the burning of cities and things like

00:51:44.140 that that are ongoing that that went on in the destruction of their world and they very much

00:51:48.860 evoke the destruction of things like world war ii the destruction of the vietnam war things like

00:51:55.160 that. And so we're seeing this very hatred, war, it doesn't serve a purpose. Like you are just

00:52:01.700 hating each other and destroying everything. Everyone will die if you don't learn to stop

00:52:07.460 hating each other. This is probably one of the most anti-war of the episodes in that sequence

00:52:14.000 of episodes about war. Obviously, of course, we already talked about the Cold War episode

00:52:20.260 that earlier on, and that one's also very anti-war, this idea that war is dehumanizing.

00:52:27.760 And then, of course, this has taken longer than I thought it would. I thought this was only going

00:52:31.560 to be an hour, but here you go. There's so much to cover. This is why I had trouble making my

00:52:35.820 thesis fit within the confines of the word limit. So let's talk about expanding the universe onto

00:52:41.960 the big screen. So we're getting close to the end of this lecture. They began to expand this

00:52:48.120 in the 80s, they started making films. So we start with Star Trek, the motion picture. We'll

00:52:53.220 talk about that one in a second. But the first major one that is widely considered to be the

00:52:58.820 best of the six movies is The Wrath of Khans, Star Trek II. This is a very, very over the top

00:53:07.140 allegory for Cold War things as well. The Genesis device specifically that is the main core of the

00:53:14.820 plot of this film is a scientific breakthrough that has a amazing potential for good. As we were

00:53:21.940 finding in the 80s that nuclear power had had certain benefits, like nuclear power was clean

00:53:27.520 energy, Chernobyl accepted. And, you know, that we had that it was being used for medicine and

00:53:34.680 things like that as well. There is a benefit, there is a use for nuclear power that is a good

00:53:40.760 thing, but it also can create horrific destruction. So that kind of dual use of the nuclear power is

00:53:48.660 really a main focus of what the Genesis device is in this film. Very ethical debate over its uses

00:53:55.760 in real world concerns. And of course, Carol Marcus has the perspective that the device is

00:54:01.340 good. It's for creation. She is a proponent of nuclear power in this case. She's a proponent

00:54:07.760 of the genesis device uh but khan's misuse of this device his wish to use it as a destructive force

00:54:14.240 demonstrates how this technology can easily be turned into a weapon even if the intent is not

00:54:19.200 for it to be a weapon when it's created and the ideological divide between khan and kirk is as

00:54:26.720 much as it is a allegory for moby dick which it is it definitely is i talked to nicholas meyer the

00:54:32.560 writer of this movie. And he says, it's a Moby Dick, everything's a Moby Dick reference. But it

00:54:38.080 also fits very well into the current, the 1980s tensions of the Cold War. So the Cold War was

00:54:45.840 still ongoing in the 80s. In fact, the 80s was kind of where Reagan is ramping up some of the

00:54:52.320 rhetoric and we're seeing a lot of problems at that point as well. So we have kind of an unchecked

00:54:57.840 tension between these two people who refuse to give up on this. Kirk is supposed to represent

00:55:06.320 again the best of American ideals, rationality, diplomacy, and Khan represents this thirst for

00:55:13.600 power, this very authoritarian kind of view of things where he's perfectly willing to just, 0.97

00:55:19.280 anyone who questions him, kill them. He's not going to put up with anything. He's a very 0.94

00:55:23.440 dictatorial person. I'm gonna play just a real quick clip here from the trailer.

00:55:53.440 so we've got this very you know he is a very very over-the-top character but he is also

00:56:13.580 uh we see a lot of quotes from Moby Dick in this exact though they've been updated for the space

00:56:18.860 space age uh but in that uh one of my favorite debates that occurs in this episode in this film

00:56:25.660 is uh the debate over the ethics of the genesis uh the genesis device as well i also wanted to

00:56:33.000 point out the similarities to the nuclear to nuclear bombs and the the delivery systems that

00:56:39.060 we were using uh between the 1980s and as well uh the the genesis device so down here on the bottom

00:56:47.520 we have a depiction of what the Genesis device looks like. Up top, that is one of the most

00:56:53.760 common bombs used to deliver nuclear or otherwise payloads in the 1980s.

00:57:00.320 And so you can see they really, they're really aiming for this. It looks like a nuclear,

00:57:04.880 it looks like a missile is what the Genesis device looks like. So you can kind of see that

00:57:09.840 the parallels they're trying to make there. But I'm going to show you this clip of the debate

00:57:14.480 about the use of this uh of this device experiments was generating results

00:57:25.040 fascinating the reformed moon simulated here represents the merest fraction of the genesis

00:57:30.480 potential should the federation wish to fund these experiments to their logical conclusion

00:57:36.640 when we consider the cosmic problems of population and food supply

00:57:41.120 the usefulness of this process becomes clear this concludes our proposal thank you for

00:57:46.960 your attention it literally is genesis power creation

00:57:56.560 have they proceeded with their experiments well the tape was made about a year ago so

00:58:00.160 i can only assume they've reached stage two by now dear lord do you think we're intelligent enough to

00:58:07.120 to suppose what if this thing we use where life already exists it would destroy such life

00:58:15.340 in favor of its new matrix its new matrix do you have any idea what you're saying i was not

00:58:23.720 attempting to evaluate its moral implications doctor as a matter of cosmic history it has

00:58:29.560 always been easier to destroy than to create not anymore now we can do both at the same time

00:58:35.580 according to myth the earth was created in six days now watch out here comes genesis we'll do

00:58:42.060 it for you in six minutes really dr mccoy you must learn to govern your passions they will be your

00:58:48.800 undoing i always love the debates between the three of them where you have this you know the

00:58:55.040 compassion of uh the kind of the heart and the brain between uh between spock and mccoy and

00:59:01.500 they're always at each other's throats over this, right? So yeah, we see a very clear idea of this

00:59:06.880 is going to be used in bad ways. Then, of course, there is my favorite movie. Look, I get it. Wrath

00:59:13.320 of Khan is the better movie. That does not mean I can't have my own favorite, and that is Star Trek

00:59:18.860 4, The Journey Home, or as more popularly referred to as The One with the Whales. This is a great

00:59:27.480 film with just 1980s time travel hijinks, which is always going to be one of my favorite things to

00:59:33.380 see. I'm going to play you a little bit here of the preview, the trailer.

00:59:39.640 Emergency, red alert. Earth is on the edge of destruction. We cannot survive, but the way

00:59:45.700 can be found to respond to the problem. The key to saving the future. Spock, you're talking about

00:59:51.060 the end of every life on Earth. Can be found only in the past. We're going to attempt time travel.

00:59:57.480 Sulu, take us home.

01:00:01.520 These are the voyages of the crew of the Starship Enterprise.

01:00:05.880 Oh, the crew of the Starship Enterprise, because the Starship Enterprise does not appear at any point in this movie.

01:00:11.660 They are on a Klingon warbird, so that's always fun.

01:00:15.200 But yes, the Star Trek Voyage Home is a very optimistic film.

01:00:19.400 It's got a lot of humor.

01:00:20.740 It's probably one of the funniest of the movies, at least intentionally.

01:00:24.380 Certainly, Star Trek 5 is also funny for how bad it is, but that's not what the intent

01:00:28.340 was for the film.

01:00:30.260 But it really has some commentary on Cold War anxieties, but for the most part, it is

01:00:34.880 focused on another thing that's going on in the 80s, which is growing environmentalism

01:00:40.080 of the era.

01:00:41.080 So the 1980s is a big time for Save the Whales, right?

01:00:44.380 It's a big, big era of this idea that we need to stop overfishing, we need to stop doing

01:00:49.780 bad things to our planet.

01:00:51.940 the whale is a whale but it's also a metaphor for environmentalism in general so they have to go to

01:00:57.700 the 1980s to grab some whales and bring them back so they can save the world which is crazy i will

01:01:03.540 admit the entire plot line is absurd in this movie uh but i will not i as i i told uh call me steve

01:01:10.260 the other day when he was interviewing me about this i will not stand for slander of george and

01:01:14.420 gracie i won't stand for it i love george and gracie so much uh so they find out of course

01:01:21.300 this probe is coming to coming to earth it's causing mass destruction it's sending out a

01:01:25.620 message it wants to it wants an answer we don't know what the answer what the question is or what

01:01:30.340 the answer is they're looking for we never know we don't even know by the end of the movie but

01:01:34.580 they do figure out very quickly that it is whale song that they are that the probe is sending out

01:01:38.980 It wants an answer from the whales, and there are no whales to be found on Earth.

01:02:00.100 Spock, as suspected, the probe's transmissions are the songs sung by whales.

01:02:05.140 whales specifically humpback whales that's crazy who would send a probe hundreds of light years to

01:02:15.060 talk to a whale it's possible so the whales have been on kirk goes on to say well whales have been

01:02:20.360 around for a long time before before humans who knows i just like the idea that whales are like

01:02:25.340 aliens that were transported here at some point i don't know i i still don't know why the probe

01:02:30.020 been wanting to talk to the whales but i get it i i get the i get where they're going with it

01:02:35.620 uh so they go back to the 1980s because there's no whales around they got to go back and get some

01:02:40.020 stuff uh so we go back to uh the cetacean institute in sausalito california uh to grab us up some

01:02:48.820 whales and of course using hand-thrown harpoons man did plenty of damage but that is nothing

01:02:55.220 compared to what he has achieved in this century.

01:02:58.240 This is mankind's legacy. 0.89

01:03:00.800 Whales hunted to the brink of extinction.

01:03:03.540 Virtually gone is the blue whale,

01:03:05.460 the largest creature ever to inhabit the earth.

01:03:08.560 Despite all attempts at banning whaling,

01:03:10.860 there are still countries and pirates

01:03:12.740 currently engaged in the slaughter

01:03:14.540 of these inoffensive creatures.

01:03:16.940 Where the humpback whale once numbered

01:03:18.760 in the hundreds of thousands,

01:03:20.600 today there are less than 10,000 specimens alive,

01:03:22.980 and those that are taken in are no longer fully grown in addition many of the female whales are

01:03:28.880 killed while still bearing unborn calves to hunter species to extinction is not logical

01:03:35.320 whoever said the human race was logical she's got a point also i love her hair it's very 80s but i

01:03:42.480 absolutely love it uh so we kind of see this idea of mutual of this this idea that we need to do

01:03:49.600 better. We need to do better because we don't know if 200 years in the future, one of these

01:03:54.400 extinct animals is going to be necessary to stop aliens from destroying us. I mean, okay,

01:03:59.660 the logic's not great, but I get it, you know. And I want to show you guys some clips of the

01:04:05.420 reason why this is my favorite movie and it will never stop being my favorite Star Trek movie.

01:04:11.200 This is hilarious. There is nothing that can beat the idea of which way to the nuclear vessels.

01:04:16.180 I love the Cold War commentary here because this is the 1980s where we're seeing things like the

01:04:22.180 evil empire, right? The idea of Russia as the evil empire. And they decided to send the Russian dude

01:04:28.560 down to San Francisco to ask about where to find the nuclear vessels. It's not their smartest 0.97

01:04:36.020 choice, but they clearly didn't understand the concept, right? But yes, it's one of my favorite

01:04:41.760 parts of it. And I also just love the, you know, well, double dumbass on you, which is great. And 0.98

01:04:47.200 knocking out the punk, always, always great. This film really does not depict conflict as the

01:04:55.180 primary mode of resolution. There's almost no, like, there's certainly no shooting. There's no

01:05:00.120 fight scenes really, except for Chekhov trying to get away from the soldiers that are, you know,

01:05:06.220 after him because they think he's a risky spy, right? Which, look, obviously they were going to

01:05:13.480 think that. That's completely reasonable. But they don't really deal with this threat through any

01:05:18.060 military use. They can't. It's such an overwhelming threat to Earth that the military, the Federation

01:05:23.900 can't do anything to stop it. It requires creativity and communication and preservation

01:05:30.720 of life to allow them to prevent the destruction of earth by this probe. So we're really emphasizing

01:05:38.460 diplomacy and ecological harmony during this period, which is completely counter to the very

01:05:45.040 militaristic rhetoric that was coming out of America in the 80s towards the end of the Cold

01:05:50.180 War. So we're kind of critiquing technology and military progress that these things are going to

01:05:56.080 be what save us. No, maybe it's going to be just not treating the world like a dumpster might be

01:06:02.580 a better option. At least it's a good start. And then of course, there is the most obvious

01:06:08.640 of the Cold War analogies for this series, which is the sixth movie, which is the Undiscovered

01:06:15.200 Country. Leonard Nimoy actually discussed creating this movie with Nicholas Meyer,

01:06:20.980 the director, and basically said, what about a story where the Berlin Wall comes down in space?

01:06:25.720 What is the United States without the Soviet Union? Who am I if I have no enemy to define me?

01:06:31.960 And so this is a big part of this. This movie comes out in 1991. This is not too long after

01:06:38.280 the fall of the Berlin Wall, also not too long after the Chernobyl incident as well. Both of

01:06:43.640 those play a part in the discussion of the changes with the Klingon Empire. So by 1991,

01:06:50.120 the Soviet Union is on the brink of dissolution. It's kind of the end of five decades of tensions

01:06:56.200 between these two superpowers. Gorbachev has put down policies of glasnost,

01:07:03.720 openness, and perestroika, the restructuring, and that's beginning to thaw relations in the

01:07:08.840 West in the late 1980s. And of course, we see a lot of arms reduction, treaties, and then the

01:07:14.520 the very symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall. So the undiscovered country is the same story. It is the

01:07:21.200 crumbling of the Klingon Empire where they are falling apart. They have a catastrophic explosion

01:07:27.160 of the Klingon moon of Praxis, which is a vital energy resource. It's very clearly a reference to

01:07:33.680 the destruction of Chernobyl in 1986, which exposes how fragile the Soviet system is and how quickly 0.72

01:07:41.620 it will decline without outside help within federation space is suicide they're animals 0.89

01:07:49.300 jim they are dying you captain kurt would be our first olive branch me the galaxy

01:07:58.580 stands at a crossroads this is the starship enterprise we've been ordered to escort you

01:08:05.380 to your meeting on earth guess who's coming to dinner i have so wanted to meet you captain one

01:08:13.620 so also i want to point out that there's also a lot of discussion of race in this film as well

01:08:18.260 uh having checkoff specifically say guess who's coming to dinner is a very pointed reference to

01:08:24.340 the sydney poitier film right uh so we also have a lot of racial discussions going on here and we'll

01:08:30.100 see more of that in another clip i'm going to play for you in a second like i said the uh nuclear

01:08:34.980 disaster of chernobyl is what starts all of this discussion

01:08:45.780 what are we doing here maybe they're throwing us a retirement

01:08:51.140 this briefing is classified ladies and gentlemen the cnc

01:09:02.020 as you were

01:09:04.980 To break this information down succinctly, the Klingon Empire has roughly 50 years of

01:09:12.620 life left to it.

01:09:14.860 For full details, I'm turning this briefing over to the Federation's Special Envoy.

01:09:24.860 Good morning.

01:09:34.100 Two months ago, a Federation starship monitored an explosion on the Klingon moon Praxis.

01:09:40.940 They believe it was caused by overmining and insufficient safety precautions.

01:09:46.000 The moon's decimation means deadly pollution of their ozone.

01:09:49.940 They will have depleted their supply of oxygen in approximately 50 Earth years.

01:09:54.860 Due to their enormous military budget, the Klingon economy does not have the resources

01:10:00.040 with which to combat this catastrophe.

01:10:04.400 Last month, at the behest of the Vulcan ambassador, I opened a dialogue with Gorkin, Chancellor

01:10:11.680 of the Klingon High Council.

01:10:14.060 He proposes to commence negotiations at once.

01:10:17.860 Negotiations for what?

01:10:20.980 dismantling of our space stations and star bases along the neutral zone, an end to almost 0.86

01:10:26.060 70 years of unremitting hostility which the Klingons can no longer afford. 0.92

01:10:31.300 Boo, are we talking about mothballing the Starfleet? 0.63

01:10:35.500 Well, I'm sure that our exploration and scientific programs would be unaffected, Captain, but...

01:10:40.500 I must protest. 0.99

01:10:42.300 To offer Klingons safe haven within Federation space is suicide. 1.00

01:10:46.780 Klingons would become the alien trash of the galaxy. 0.99

01:10:50.100 we dismantle the fleet we'd be defenseless before an aggressive species with a foothold on our 1.00

01:10:55.220 territory the opportunity here is to bring them to their knees uh so one of the main things here

01:11:01.860 is admiral cartwright the actor who played admiral cartwright said he had to redo this speech so many

01:11:08.420 times because the things that he is saying about klingons are so pointedly racial uh that he really

01:11:14.900 had trouble delivering these lines they were so painful to him to say but they are really going 0.94

01:11:20.740 into the the racial aspect of like we can't work with these people they're violent they're you know

01:11:25.780 there's this trash of space it's very very aggressively racist uh statements that are being

01:11:31.780 made here but also just this idea that we have uh that you know gorkin which i love as a shorthand

01:11:37.860 for gorbachev like i mean it's obviously supposed to be gorbachev um is you know trying to do what's

01:11:44.660 best for his country which is or his planet which is to end hostilities because they can't deal with

01:11:51.460 it anymore with the chernobyl disaster and or the praxis disaster happening they need help and they

01:11:58.660 can't they can't do this on their own uh so of course a lot of this uh story revolves around

01:12:06.980 the journey that captain kirk has to go through uh we haven't talked about star trek uh star star

01:12:13.300 Trek, the search for Spock yet in this, but in the search for Spock, Kirk's son is killed by the

01:12:20.660 Klingons, which has created a very, he is extremely angry at the Klingons. He has no reason to want

01:12:27.440 to create any sort of peace with them. And they still decide that he's the guy they're going to

01:12:33.520 send to deal with this. And of course, one of my favorite lines in the film is Spock saying,

01:12:39.700 There's an old Vulcan proverb, only Nixon can go to China, which was this idea that, you know, Kirk is the one who hates them the most.

01:12:47.880 So he's the one who's got to make the show of saying we need to make peace.

01:12:53.160 He's the one who's going to have the most impact there.

01:12:55.740 And so we have to have that willingness to work towards peace.

01:12:58.220 And he is eventually going to come to that towards the end of the film, obviously.

01:13:02.880 it would be a pretty crappy movie if it ended with uh kirk still being like well okay we made

01:13:08.600 peace but i still hate you guys like it just wouldn't it wouldn't have the same effect uh

01:13:14.320 it's a great scene at the end what's happened what's the meaning of all of this it's about

01:13:21.320 the future madam chancellor some people think the future means the end of history well

01:13:27.260 we haven't run out of history quite yet

01:13:30.920 your father called the future the undiscovered country

01:13:39.280 people can be very frightened of change

01:13:45.360 you've restored my father's faith and you've restored my sons

01:13:56.220 sorry that always chokes me up a little bit i get i get very invested in these characters um

01:14:03.400 we're going to talk a lot more about this concept of the end of history in the next lecture where

01:14:07.760 we're talking about tng as a big part of my thesis was that was the corollary between francis

01:14:13.420 fukuyama's end of history essay and the creation of next generation but i love how obvious they

01:14:19.320 are in this where they talk about the end of history uh which the end of history for those

01:14:24.040 if you don't know, was a 1989 essay written by Francis Fukuyama. He later releases it as a book

01:14:31.520 in 1992, but that's obviously after the creation of this film, which was in 91. He was a foreign 0.99

01:14:39.080 policy expert who published this essay that he argued that the Cold War was more than just a

01:14:44.000 rivalry between two superpowers. It was an argument or an experiment to find the most efficient way to

01:14:49.680 organize an economy, to organize society. And he thought that this was the final chapter at the

01:14:55.660 end of the Cold War was the end of this long struggle to figure out what was the, you know,

01:15:00.580 the best way to run a country. And that everything after this was the end of history that it was just

01:15:05.800 going to get dull. Well, we don't have anything more to fight about during this period. I love

01:15:11.000 how, you know, extremely positive he was about the idea of the future. But yes, the essay comes out

01:15:18.420 in 89 so it was just just out it was on in the minds of the people who were thinking about the

01:15:24.540 future thinking about what will we look like after the end of the cold war uh so it really fits into

01:15:30.560 this dialogue of this film that what happens what happens to us when we're no longer at war uh and

01:15:37.320 you know we know what happens if you're a fan of star trek which is that wharf shows up i mean

01:15:42.960 we get a little bit of, we get more Klingon episodes in TNG and Deep Space Nine. That's

01:15:48.700 what we really end up with. I know at least one person who is in this call right now who hates

01:15:53.060 the Klingon episodes. So that's not a positive for him. But at the same time,

01:15:59.260 Worf is fun. He's a fun character. And then, of course, we're going to talk about the odd

01:16:05.760 numbered ones really quickly. Just really quick. Okay, so there are six Star Trek movies. It is

01:16:11.120 vastly agreed upon by the fandom uh that only the odd number only the even numbered ones are good 0.83

01:16:17.680 all the odd numbered ones are uh absolute crap and so these are the three that we're not really

01:16:22.800 talking about in this lecture because i would love to be able to tell you that upon re-watching 0.87

01:16:27.920 i rediscovered some real depth and social commentary political commentary in these

01:16:32.720 films that would like go along with my general overall thesis i i can't tell you that because

01:16:39.600 there's not. Like I will say that there is a general kind of concept running through all three

01:16:45.000 of these films that is a search for the spirit, for God, for the meaning of life. There is a bit

01:16:51.680 of that going on in these films, but I can't say that they were really going for it. Like the motion

01:16:58.980 picture has some great lines in it. I particularly, I pulled my favorite quotes from all three films,

01:17:05.360 which is Spock's moment of understanding feeling. So the first movie, especially if you rewatch it

01:17:11.500 in the director's cut, which I highly recommend, the pacing is still terrible in the film. But it

01:17:16.720 really makes a lot more sense as a kind of discussion and exploration of Spock's struggle

01:17:22.720 to deal with his humanity and his emotional connection to his friends and to the world,

01:17:28.480 which I really appreciate. I really like. Nothing can save Star Trek III. It can't. It's just not

01:17:35.040 good. It's, there's not much there as far as depth. I can't give you anything. I can't even

01:17:39.560 make something up for you. It would have worked as an episode, but it's far too long. And it just,

01:17:44.760 it's just a bridge piece essentially to get you from Wrath of Khan to the, uh, the long,

01:17:49.800 the voyage home and Star Trek five. It could have been something. It could have been something

01:17:56.820 based upon what we know about William, what William Shatner's original plans for this movie

01:18:01.000 was. Unfortunately, the studio destroyed it because they didn't want to give him the funding

01:18:06.920 for the things that he wanted to do. They didn't, they made him change bits of the plot until it

01:18:11.120 was unrecognizable from the original idea. So Star Trek V could have been something. It is sadly

01:18:16.420 very much not, but it did give us one of the best lines in any of the movies, which is what does God

01:18:21.480 need with a starship? I love that line. It's the best. I mean, obviously it makes no sense out of

01:18:26.280 context, but I love it. So real quickly, we're going to talk about Star Trek's legacy, right?

01:18:31.700 So the legacy of Star Trek is that it created an open door for science fiction on the small screen

01:18:37.420 to ask the hard questions, to be very smart science fiction that wasn't just about explosions

01:18:44.140 or saving the girl or any of that. They were really bringing that history of science fiction

01:18:51.380 literature to the to the small screen the idea that this is about asking hard questions and we

01:18:57.700 see that and of course the rest of Star Trek then the other series that are going to come out after

01:19:02.660 the original series but we also see that impact on modern television shows that came after it

01:19:08.580 like Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica which was created by a writer who got his start the the

01:19:15.140 reboot of Battlestar Galactica was done by a writer who got his start on Star Trek TNG and

01:19:20.500 Deep Space Nine, Ronald Moore. Also things like the Orville which is the best Star Trek that's

01:19:26.180 not Star Trek to be honest and of course shows like The Expanse. All of them are kind of asking

01:19:31.300 these big questions dealing with social issues, dealing with political issues that are contemporary

01:19:36.900 to the to the world around them and that's where we came from like Star Trek was the

01:19:42.340 was the impetus for that on the small screen in many ways. Okay does anybody have any questions?

Bitchy History - January 12, 2025

Warp Speed Woke： How Star Trek Took on Society

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