Recall the following experience, which I’m confident that you, dear reader, have had. You are hanging out with your friends and some turn in the conversion moves you to describe in detail an episode of Star Trek. Maybe you are in the den, or the school yard, or the cafeteria. Invariably someone in the group replies quite matter-of-factly, not intending to be rude at all:  “You know it’s not real, right?” 

At first blush, you are offended, maybe a bit embarrassed. Of course I know it’s not real! I’m not delusional. What’s your point? 

Many of us have had this experience. But let us consider it from our non-Trekkie friend’s point of view. What did they see in us, in the way we talked about Star Trek, that made them think we believed what we were describing was real?

In fact, psychologically speaking, the Star Trek universe is a profoundly real place to Trekkies. Yes, it is just a TV show. Condeeded. And yet, we were there! 

We were there with Kirk fighting the Gorn on Cestus III (and also the unnamed Metron planet). We’ve been in the storage compartments of K-7 (first with Captain Kirk and again with Captain Sisko). We’ve visited the aftermath of the Battle of Wolf 359 and the Battle of the Binary Stars. We spent countless hours bathed in the soft, colorful light and gentle warble of the Enterprise bridge (the NX, the 1701, the A, B, C, D and E). We can tell the speed she’s warping across the galaxy by the thrum of her engine room. We were there for all of it.  

What happens when we are presented with new experiences that conflict with these very real memories? In fandom, these are fighting words. But why? 

Your Brain on Star Trek

The writer and religious scholar Diana Pasulka has written extensively about how story and technology can have profound effects on belief and perceptions of reality. Check out her book American Cosmic, and an earlier essay The Fairy Tale is True. One chapter of American Cosmic, which in part explores how Star Wars inspired a religion with real-world followers called Jedism, compiles research that shows how the human brain creates cognitive models of events in the same way regardless of whether that event was experienced in the real world or witnessed visually such as in a piece of film or from a VR headset. She quotes neuroscientist Jeffrey Zacks: “It’s not the case that you have one bucket into which you drop all the real-life events, another for movie events, and a third for events in novels.” Memories are all built the same way, with neurons and dendrites; the more we revisit those memories the stronger the dendrite bonds become, and the more real those memories become for us. Of course, encoded in the memory of the event is its context, whether you saw it on the street or in the theater. No one really believes they were on the Death Star when it blew up, no matter how many times they’ve seen A New Hope (and all the other movies where the Death Star blew up.) 

But this is not always the case. There are many examples of people who come to think they actually experienced something they had in fact watched on TV or heard a story about. This is because, as scholars at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab wrote in their study, “the brain often fails to differentiate between virtual experiences and real ones.”

In Pasulka’s American Cosmic, she analyzes a sci-fi web series that reimagines World War I as an alien invasion. Extraterrestrials were digitally inserted into historical footage and vintage uniforms. She writes, “We know it is not real, but Zack’s research shows our brains process the information and then categorize these productions as equally realistic.” Pasulka writes that it is difficult for our brains to draw sharp distinctions between what is real and what is virtually real. 

This chapter of her book cites Alison Landsberg’s idea of prosthetic memory, which she coined in an essay about the films Total Recall and Blade Runner. Lansdberg writes: “Cinema, in particular [has] the ability to generate experiences and to install memories of them–memories which become experiences that film consumers both possess and feel possessed by.”

I suppose that this is why genre fandom is so much fun, and becomes such a life-long hobby for many of us. It’s why the escapism of genre TV and film is so pleasurable. Because we perceive the visuals to be so real, we are literally escaping, swapping out one mundane reality for a fantastic one, at least for an hour or so. 

Pasulka sums it up this way: “Exposure to films and media that mimic real life fosters belief and can impact memory. … fictional characters… exist as realities that inhabit our childhood and adult memories and inform our future behaviors. They are cultural realities, infused with meaning and emotion.”

Is there a better explanation for why we Trek fans love–really love–these characters, their ships and homeworlds as much as we do?  

These two concepts–the brain perceiving Star Trek experiences as virtually real, and the emotional charge of those memories, particularly how they are tethered to childhood–are the reason Star Trek fandom is saddled with “the canon wars.” It’s why terms like reboot, Prime vs. Kelvin, visual vs. conceptual canon, and canon agnosticism are fighting words in online conversations. Now that Star Trek is closing out its fifth decade with a tsunami of brand new shows and movies, this has implications for how we integrate our old memories with new ones, and how we enjoy new shows like Strange New Worlds, or whether some of us even can.  

“Not My Star Trek”

Let’s come out with it. There is a minority of fans who recoil in disgust or gloomy disappointment when they are faced with a new version of Star Trek. Here we are talking about a particular type of hardcore Trekkie, the one who says, whether in anger or sorrow, “this is just not my Star Trek. It’s not the way I remember it.” But many more long-time fans find themselves in intermittent conflict with new Trek. Breaks in canon can make any of us feel alienated from new versions. We raise all manner of arguments about betrayals of trust, and lazy writing. It is perfectly legitimate to have these feelings, and many of us have at one time or another. And we have a point, because we were there. 

This is not just a problem of the loudest voices arguing on the internet. But even if it were, those that do not care much about canon wars must admit that those voices have a lot of power. The engines of the modern film industry have been geared to run on internet buzz. Success or failure depends a lot on the voices in social media. Fear of incurring the wrath of those voices is the reason J.J. Abrams invented the Kelvin Universe. It is the reason that Discovery did a mid-series course correction that put over 900 years between the creative team and any potential canon dispute. And yet, that same creative team decided to jump back in the lion’s mouth with a spinoff show–Strange New Worlds–set on the classic 1701 Enterprise just a handful of years before Kirk is to assume command.

The online fan community may well be the reason Strange New Worlds was even greenlit. Anson Mount’s Captain Pike, introduced in Discovery’s second season, was universally beloved by fandom, even the fans who liked to grouse about Discovery. Credit due to Mount’s skill and charm. But also this: it is as easy as falling off Pike’s horse for fans to accept that Jeffery Hunter’s Pike and Mount’s Pike are the same person.

SNW will be far more entangled with TOS than DSC ever could have been. Spock–THE Spock, not alternate-timeline Spock but Nimoy’s Spock–is a central character. We also know that Uhura, Nurse Chapel, and even Kirk himself–Shatner’s Kirk–will be reprised as their slightly younger selves played by new actors. At this point it’s pretty clear that the showrunners intend to depict how the original crew came together. A lot is riding on whether fandom can accept these characters and their ship as the same beloved versions from half a century ago.      

The emotional and imaginative barriers that our past Trek experiences erect against new Trek are very real, and they are hard to break through. For many of us, our shields are up. But it is important that we try to lower them. At the end of this essay I offer ways to do that. But first: what are we fighting about when we fight about canon?  

A Short History of Visual Canon 

A lot of this boils down to what Larry Nemecek calls visual canon, which is the idea that the physical, visual, and aesthetic depiction of the Star Trek universe needs to remain aligned across the various iterations of the franchise. If a ship or a planet looks a certain way in one series, it needs to look similar if not exactly the same in the next series, or else the viewer–who, after all, has virtually been there before, will suffer cognitive dissonance. The negative emotions stirred by this dissonance not only block the fan from entering the story world of the new version, it makes them feel the previous show, and their connection to it, is being denigrated. 

Let me give what is by now a non-controversial example. When CBS re-edited all the effects shots from The Original Series with new CGI effects, I recall being mildly repulsed when I first saw the new CGI Enterprise. Every line of it was exactly the same as the original shooting model, but because it was clearly not that model–not what I remember–it seemed less real. The color was off a bit. It wasn’t grainy! 

But now, I only watch the updated versions of those episodes on my Blu-rays. I appreciate all the new angles and perspectives of that beautiful ship. The tiny CGI characters you occasionally see walking past the windows from outside the ship have wandered into my imagination. I’m building new memories with those old episodes. 

For much of Trek’s history, visual canon was never a problem fans had to deal with because as the production of the franchise moved from the 1960s to the 1990s the Star Trek universe moved into its own future. In the late 1970s there was a need to update the 60s sets with cutting edge, movie-budget designs, which was explained away “in universe” as an eighteen-month refit of the 1701. (If you think about it, such massive structural changes to a spaceship seems pretty inefficient, like it might have been easier to build a new ship from scratch; in any case, such a “refit” by Starfleet was never depicted again.–agh I wrote this before Star Trek: Picard’s ‘Stargazer’ episode, which is a whole other canon debate!) 

The budgets for the initial movies helped update and upgrade Star Trek’s set and production design, which carried over into the Berman era of the late 80s to early 2000s (TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT). Many TNG sets were redresses of TOS movie sets. Still, these shows never saw the need to erase or update the beloved 60s designs. Three out of four Berman-era series revisited the 1960s-era bridge set exactly as it was–exactly as we all remember it. The fact that Picard, Sisko and Archer were on Kirk’s bridge was not discordant at all. They were just visiting a place we ourselves had been many times, and we got to experience the thrill of going back there vicariously through them.

It must be noted that those episodes were all one-off, nostalgia-driven specials. If Berman and his team had needed to set all or part of their contemporary series on those classic sets, appealing to contemporary audiences week after week–which is the case for Discovery and Strange New Worlds–those creative teams would have made different decisions about how much to match the style of TV sets dating to the Johnson Administration.    

The real debate over visual canon came with the advent of Enterprise in 2001, the first Star Trek prequel. Here we have starship technology set a century before Kirk’s Enterprise that is obviously smoother, sleaker, less clunky, animatronic and grainy than what we know Starfleet will look like in one hundred years. It’s telling that the design of that series’ ship was not based on retrograde notions of what early Starfleet vessels might look like (as if you could go back and ask Matt Jeffries what his ship’s predecessors would have looked like…). Instead, the NX-01 was based on a sleek, modern ship designed for the recent and popular movie Star Trek: First Contact (which was itself a visual upgrade on the TNG-look of Starfleet fueled by movie budgets). Berman’s team at least tried to strike a balance by adding retrograde flourishes. The sleek ship design was merged with structures from WWII airplanes, and the interior sets were modeled on 21st Century submarines and the International Space Station. 

Some props were made to look similar to TOS but sleeker. I admit I found myself insulted when Berman told us that audiences would only accept fliptop communicators on a modern show if they were tiny, because they would look ridiculous compared to (at the time) modern flip phones. Today our phones are larger than the 1960s communicators. 

This brings us to the current CBS/Kurtzman-era of Trek. Because Discovery was set ten years before The Original Series, the showrunners had to update the visual look of the 23rd Century. If they had slavishly recreated the 60s design aesthetic, many viewers would have been confused as to what they were watching. As the flagship series of CBS’s new streaming service, it was imperative that viewers of all stripes, especially non Trekies, feel like they were having an exciting experience watching a cutting edge TV show. Also, design teams are creative people who want to create something new, not make museum replicas of other artists’ work.   

An interesting creative decision that the DSC production team made was to base its visual style for Starfleet on the original TOS movies from the 70s and 80s, even though the timeframe was before the iconic 60s era designs. There are numerous visual call backs to graphics, models, and props from those movies. The shuttlecraft and communicators are nearly identical. While some fans chafed at the dissonance with TOS, it’s actually easy to imagine the USS Discovery being a 10 to 20 year predecessor of the movie era-Enterprise.

Just like in 1979, when Roddenberry advised fans to imagine that the Klingons always looked the way they do in the new movie, it’s possible to adjust our head canon to imagine that Starfleet always looked like it did in those movies as well. 

This was, of course, controversial among fans. As we know now that the DSC producers decided that the debates over canon, and the resulting negative internet buzz, was producing too much of a distraction for the show. The mid-series time travel jump silenced those debates. But at the same time, the producers launched a new show–Strange New Worlds–set so much closer to TOS than early viewers of DSC could have imagined. Now, we’re right on the bridge!

The trick of pretending that TOS looked more like the movies than we remember still may be helpful, but SNW producers have promised fans that there will be many callbacks to 60’s design elements. The shuttlecraft, communicators and tricorders now look nearly identical to TOS.    

Conceptual Canon–It’s not Just Visuals

The sensation of realness also rests on consistency in concepts, historical facts, and even a character’s attitude and tone of voice. The problem we are all faced with is that the historical record of the Star Trek universe is strewn across at least 41 distinct seasons of television, usually in bits of dialogue that only a handful of fans remember. Some of those bits were written as long ago as 1964.  

One line of dialogue in one long-ago episode implied that the Romulans gave the Klingons cloaking technology at a certain date. If that fact is ingrained in your head canon, and a later episode (DSC’s The Battle of the Binary Stars) shows cloaked Klingon ships prior to that date, you are pulled right out of the story. 

For some, the Federation-Klingon war depicted in DSC’s first season did not fit with their conception of the recent past of TOS. Some felt that the devastation was just too widespread and brutal to match the society we saw in the 60s episodes. I’ve heard fans comment that the war depicted in DSC’s first season was also discordant with how Kirk described the events that happen in the episode that introduced the Klingons, The Errand of Mercy, in TOS’s first season. During peace negotiations, a Klingon ship attacks the Enterprise, Uhura announces that Starfleet has issued a Code One order, and Kirk says: “Well, there it is. War. We didn’t want it, but we’ve got it.” Mind you, ‘in universe’ these events were ten years apart, and there is no canonical reason there could not have been a brutal war with the Klingons in DSC’s time period. The dissonance for some fans was that if the war we watched on DSC actually happened in Kirk’s past, when he got to that moment in Errand of Mercy, he would have had a less laid back reaction. An entire concept of canon is conveyed by the actor’s tone of one line of dialogue. 

I had a similar reaction to Enterprise. That show premiered when I was in college. When I was a boy I watched an episode of The Next Generation called First Contact. In it Picard has to explain to a new species why his crew was spying on them. Doing his dramatic-Picard voice, Patrick Stewart spoke these lines: 

“Chancellor, there is no starship mission more dangerous than that of first contact. We never know what we will face when we open the door on a new world, how we will be greeted, what exactly the dangers will be. Centuries ago, a disastrous contact with the Klingon Empire led to decades of war. It was decided then we would do surveillance before making contact. It was a controversial decision. I believe it prevented more problems than it created.”

The very first contact between Humans and Klingons had never even been mentioned before. That one line conveyed how cool it would be to know that story, and also how epically tragic that encounter must have been–the stuff of legends with consequences that reverberated through the centuries. But when I saw the famous encounter finally depicted, in the premier of Enterprise, it did not live up to what was in my imagination at all. As a result, the realness of Enterprise was lessened for me. All because of how Patrick Stewart delivered one line of dialogue in one episode that had nothing to do with Klingons. 

Thankfully, the reverse of this phenomenon is more common, and it creates a wonderful sensation. If you watch DSC’s The Battle of the Binary Stars and TOS’s Arena together, then Kirk’s almost irrational fear of a Gorn invasion begins to make sense. Now we know he is thinking about Michael Burnham and the start of the Klingon war ten years earlier. In destroying the Gorn ship, he is faced with the same dilemma she was, and he makes the same choice she did. Also, the Pike storyline in DSC synchronizes perfectly with the original character arc introduction in The Menagerie. When canon is used in this way, it creates beautiful harmonies across the generations. It is arguably the entire point of doing prequels in the first place.    

This dissonance or harmony also occurs every time an old character is recast by a new actor. There are now so many of these that CBS producers have coined the term “legacy characters.” With SNW, another prequel, we are entering a phase of the franchise where some characters–like Pike, Kirk, and Spock–are on their third iteration. Whether it is Sarek, or young Guinan, or Harry Mudd, fans chaffe if the new actor doesn’t look, sound, or feel like the original. (The less said about the great but pasty-white Benedict Cumberbatch replacing Kahn’s Ricardo Montalban the better.) 

DSC faced the unique challenge of having to replace a TOS character for the first time without the fig leaf of a parallel timeline. Ethan Peck’s new version of Nimoy’s Spock will be at Pike’s side on Strange New Worlds. Because Nimoy’s Spock is so ingrained in the fan imagination, the DSC creative team knew they had to gingerly hold our hands through the acceptance process. They put Peck’s Spock in a beard and compromised mental state to blunt the “That’s not Spock!” reflex until the writing and the actor had a chance to put us at ease and work his new Spock into our imaginations. It worked. And I for one appreciate the effort.    

Afterall, we know these people. We have spent an unknown number of hours in their presence. We are intimately familiar with their faces, their verbal tics, their posture, their attitude, their essence–all things an actor brings to the role. New actors don’t want to be mimics. They find a new essence for the character, I might add, based on the needs of the script they were paid to act, not the script written long ago.  

It goes without saying that all of this is a matter of taste. Every fan reacts differently to canon. But since Star Trek lives so vividly in the imagination, and since the franchise does not reset like a comic book universe (a point the current producers keep insisting upon), the experience of canon cognitive dissonance, as well as canon harmonies, is very real and isn’t going away. It will be a dominant feature of the franchise for as long as we are lucky enough to be able to watch new Star Trek.  

A Way Forward

So if you are a fan suffering from canon dissonance sensitivity syndrome (CDSS), I have a prescription for you. 

Before treatment begins, you must first decide if you are ready to be cured. This means you are open to making new Star Trek memories that will lay alongside the cherished ones that have been long ingrained in your imagination. If you are too focused on your old experiences in the Star Trek universe, you will block yourself from having new experiences that are happening right now. 

It might help to channel the Vulcan principle of infinite diversity in infinite combinations. That idea is not just about being tolerant of others who are different. It is a mental practice that helps you eschew false dualities. Can you hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time, or an infinite number of them? If you can, at a certain point you begin to realize that they are not as contradictory as they first seemed. All is part of the fabric of your imagination. If you can accept that, then you are ready. Here is what to do.   

Step 1: A few minutes before the new episode begins, sit quietly and clear your mind. Try plexing, if that helps. Prepare your brain to enter the story world no matter what. No negotiations with the creative team. No play-by-play nitpicking. Take the chips off your shoulder for just that one hour each week.

Step 2: When the episode starts, let it come to you on its own terms as a story and as a unique, contained viewing experience. Instead of seeking out canon red flags, seek out the storyteller’s cues about what the story wants you to think and feel about what is happening on screen. Follow their breadcrumbs. Go along for the journey they have laid out for you.    

That’s it. It sounds simple. But what happens next is the most important part, and it is no longer in your hands. If the creative team honored their source material, if they worked hard to tell the best story they possibly could, then a new and lasting Star Trek memory will have been implanted in your brain. And that memory will integrate with all the older ones all by itself. Even if there was a canon flub or discontinuity. None of that will matter if the story is good enough, because your head canon (your imagination) will be a richer place for having the new memory. 

And what if the creative team did not work hard enough to meet you, to honor your fan commitment and your openness? What if they told the story poorly? Or made canon decisions that served their immediate personal and professional needs and not those of the collective fan community? No need to get mad. Their penance is that their story will be forgotten and seldom revisited. On its own accord it will fail to connect with its intended audience, and it will leave no trace in our brains or our hearts. That story will fade and die. 

There is no need for us to dance on its grave. No need, for hate’s sake, to spit our last breath at thee. We just walk away. Practicing emotional openness to new Trek will help let go of any bitterness about canon, but more times than not, it will help form yet more pleasurable memories. 

This is especially true now, because, thankfully, the current leadership of the franchise are not hacks. Star Trek’s current crop of storytellers are committed to telling rip-roaring, meaningful Star Trek stories, and also honoring all of the old ones that replay in our heads. There is more room in there than you think. Keep it open. 

The remaining 5 themes explore individual issues that are common debates in literature, science-fiction in particular. In these Star Trek expresses its views on tolerance, war, and technology. Of course a few episodes are just for fun and have no theme at all.   

Theme: Embrace “the Other”

Percent of Season One: 21% 

6 of 28 episodes: 

• The Corbomite Maneuver  
• The Man Trap
• Balance of Terror
• The Galileo Seven
• Arena
• The Devil in the Dark

Disgust is a powerful human emotion that probably evolved to protect us from harmful or disease-bearing substances. But as we began to divide societies by caste, race, and class, the emotion was used to manufacture fear of those deemed different. The dominant group is clean and pure, while the subordinate group is polluted. This enables segregation and dehumanization, which allows the gears of the dominant group’s project to turn.

Star Trek attacked this social evil from the very beginning. In season one, episodes depict characters who exhibit this disgust for the Other who are then contrasted with characters who model the act of embracing the Other. Sometimes the audience itself is tricked into succumbing to our own biases and fears, only to be corrected in the end by a more enlightened character. 

Turning the sci-fi monster trope on its head had been one of Rodenberry’s earliest goals for his show, and The Corbomite Maneuver was his first effort. Balock’s puppet was designed to instill fear in both the Enterprise crew and the audience. When Balock reveals himself as a child-like imp, he even admits that he used the puppet to play on the primitive Human fear of difference. 

The Man Trap is a more traditional sci-fi monster story, but there are attempts to empathize with the creature as the last of its kind. The producers also later admitted that they regretted how the episode killed off the monster in the end, which they considered an off-note in how Star Trek addresses this theme. 

The Devil in the Dark is where the producers distilled this theme into its purest form, probably of the entire series if not the franchise. Roddenberry even felt that this episode crystallized “what our point of view on other races would be” and was a statement of “what the series was.” Writer David Gerrold said that after the interactions with the Horta, the characters “end up learning more about appropriate behavior for ourselves out of learning to be compassionate, tolerant, understanding.” The point is hit home by the human miners who form a mob not different from the torch-bearing villagers coming after Frankenstein’s monster, or a racist lynch mob, and after Kirk and Spock shift their perspective they end up becoming the Horta’s co-workers.       

Balance of Terror, Arena, and The Galileo Seven all have Others wherein the monster stand-ins are human equivalents. The Romulans are the only case where the Other is not depicted in monster makeup. But in these episodes the dividing line is not disgust over physical differences, it is bigotry against an enemy at war. In The Galileo Seven, the giant ape-like aliens are  stand-ins for North Vietnamese, but not as stereotypes or crude caricatures of America’s then enemies. Spock gives some monologues about the distasteful human habit of warlike aggression that he sees in his stranded team. McCoy has to remind him that the aliens are not going to react logically to their “superior weapons” but “emotionally, with anger.” This humanizes them.  

The Gorn are shown to be mirror images of Starfleet, simply protecting their outpost from invasion no different than Kirk was in fact behaving in the same episode. 

Finally, the Romulans are humanized as they are depicted from their own perspective with their own voice. The audience is hunkered down with them as they are attacked by the Enterprise, and we overhear their hopes and longings to “see the stars of home.” Kirk is explicit with his crew: “Leave your bigotry in your quarters.” As with the Gorn, Kirk sees himself in the Romulan Commander.   

In all of these cases the Enterprise crew must learn how to recognize the common drives, emotions and motivations that explain the alien enemy’s behavior. And in the end of each episode, the crew expresses a newfound respect, empathy and compassion for that enemy. They do so in a way that establishes at least the possibility for peace and coexistence. With the one exception of the poor Salt Creature, peace and coexistence is how all of these episodes end.  

Theme: Anti-War

Percent of Season: 17% 

5 of 28 episodes: 

• Balance of Terror
• The Galileo Seven
• Arena
• A Taste of Armageddon
• Errand of Mercy

A Taste of Armageddon is the episode that deals most explicitly with war–the policy, politics, techniques, and costs of a government’s decision to engage in warfare. It is about the how and why of war. The message is not overtly anti-war–in fact Kirk arranges for the two planets to escalate their war. Yes, the climactic Kirk speech equates human tendency to kill to an addiction that can be overcome. But the more clear message is that if you are going to wage war, do so honestly in a way that does not hide the costs–something a military hawk can agree with. By all means, go to war if you must, but do not try to trick the public into thinking it will be cheap, easy and clean. Of course this is an anti-war activist tactic based on the logic that if the public knew the true costs of war there would be fewer wars.  

Perhaps unexpectedly, Kirk is often presented as a military hawk in these episodes. In both Arena and Errand of Mercy he is chomping at the bit to go to war, but other more enlightened beings get to Kirk-Speech him out of it.   

The writers were clearly sympathetic to anti-Vietnam War ideas. Gene Coon projected a Vietnam analogy onto the Organians, have their primitive, idyllic society overrun by two warring superpowers. Coon’s Vietnam analogy becomes less abstract when you imagine a Vietnamese peasant rising up and saying to the American and North Vietnamese soldier alike: The differences you are killing everyone over are really not that significant–not even apparent from my perspective.

This was also a minor theme with the cavemen aliens in The Galileo Seven, in which Spock made a lot of snide judgments about Human bloodlust for war.  

In all of these episodes, war is either ended or averted, which cements Trek’s opinion that war is in fact bad. But nowhere in these episodes is there a reflexive “war is bad” message. The anti-war themes are more nuanced: war is sometimes necessary or unavoidable (recall that Keeler had to die precisely because she thought otherwise), but we must strive to avoid it. And avoiding it is no mere policy decision–it requires a new moral perspective, a change in the heart. The fact that 23rd Century peoples are shown still struggling to bring about the change, failing some but winning more often, is another example of Trek’s optimism.  

Theme: Ecological Harmony 

Percent of Season One: 7%

2 of 28 episodes:

• The Devil in the Dark  
• The Man Trap 

The Devil in the Dark has the most prominent environmental message of the season: the danger of human industry destroying an ecosystem that they are barely aware even exists; the Horta as endangered species. The Man Trap has a few lines lamenting how sad it is when a species does go extinct, equating the salt creature to Earth’s buffalo.   

One wonders why this theme is so slight, only two episodes and really just a minor theme in both of them. Perhaps the environmental movement was not yet culturally prominent in the mid-60s as it would later become in the 70s? Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962, and political pressure was building in the 60s that led to the passage of the Environmental Protection Act in 1970. So environmentalism was “in the water”–no pun intended. 

Maybe this: the writers and producers were much more interested in universal human themes that would be familiar on the pages of ageless literature–with a particular future focus on the ascent of man and technological society.  Environmentalism is literally Earth-bound, and a bit too topical and tied to current headlines. Same with the small number of anti-war episodes, of which Vietnam was shoehorned into only two, and in the most oblique way that a viewer might not even think of the war in South Asia.

It is invariably said in every Star Trek retrospective and documentary that the episodes took controversial issues of the day and recast them as science fiction. But as we can see here, it’s not that simple–at least in season one.  The show did speak to the issues and anxieties of its day, but those issues are much more ageless and universal than just plucking hot topics from the newspapers of 1965 and 66. This is why the show still resonates half a century later, and why it still has something to say about the hot topics in our current “homogenized, pasteurized synthesized” newsfeeds.      

Theme: Anti-technocracy

Percent of Season One: 28%

8 of 28 Episodes:

• What are Little Girls Made of?
• Dagger of the Mind
• Miri
• The Conscience of the King
• The Galileo Seven
• Court Martial
• The Return of the Archons
• Space Seed

Technocracy is a term that has been variously used across the 20th century. For our purposes let’s define it as the primacy of technology over people, a tendency to put power in the hands of scientists and technocrats who promise to strip away or minimize messy human nature from the ways a society functions. There was an actual Technocracy movement during the Great Depression that proposed to reorganize the entire economy and system of work and production as a pure engineering project with “no place for Politics or Politicians.” Let’s leave aside questions about whether this idea is undemocratic or unworkable. Star Trek, at least in its original series, always came down on the side of people over technology, and messiness over efficiency.  

In his book Who Owns the Future–about how our economy and personal lives and being hijacked by tech companies and their algorithms–Jaron Lanier includes a brief aside about how Star Trek tackled this theme in the 1960s. 

Lainer writes that the dominant narrative of our age will be about how so much of our lives are becoming “more software-mediated, physicality is becoming more mutable by technology, and reality is being optimized.” The problem he foresees is “that the humans aren’t the heroes” of this new reality; humans are obsolete, unimportant, slow and in the way of real progress. He argues that this narrative needs to be opposed, and that the importance of actual people must be reinserted into the utopian visions about the role of future technology. He writes, “Drawing a line between what we forfeit to calculation and what we reserve for the heroics of free will is the story of our time.”

He points out that a backdrop theme of the original Star Trek is the idea that advanced technology does not ruin humanity, which stands in stark contrast with so much other science-fiction. According to Lanier, technology on Trek results in a “more moral, fun, adventurous, sexy, and meaningful world.” The prime reason that “a more instrumented world” does not lead to the kind of dystopian vision of so much sci-fi is because “a recognizable human remains at the center of the adventure” and not only succeeds but thrives due to factors—human factors—that have nothing to do with technology.

Star Trek is never ashamed to point out that technology is a positive benefit—the Enterprise is run on amoral algorithms too. But that technology is the necessary-but-not-sufficient element of human progress. As Lanier puts it, “At the center of the high-tech circular bridge of the starship Enterprise is seated a Kirk or a Picard, a person.” And that person makes all the difference.

In its first season Star Trek depicted advanced technology as no threat to humanity; it was not a threat because real people were always in control, Kirk in particular. And yes, there was also a lot of smashing of computers by Kirk in particular. 

There are three broad categories of this theme, though each episode has some elements of all three: Bad Scientists, Bad Computers, Bad Technocratic Thinking. 

Bad Scientists

In true sci-fi style, the writers train their most cutting rhetorical firepower on misguided and hubristic ‘bad scientists.’ And the Nobel Prize for worst scientists goes to the people who spawned Kahn Singh. In Space Seed McCoy is adamant about who is responsible for Kahn and the Eugenics Wars: 

SPOCK: Of course. Your attempt to improve the race through selective breeding.

MCCOY: Now, wait a minute. Not our attempt, Mister Spock. A group of ambitious scientists. I’m sure you know the type. Devoted to logic, completely unemotional.

The episode’s message about the Eugenics Wars and genetic manipulation was not that you might create people with Terminator-like powers who will turn on you. It is a similar sci-fi theme as expressed in the Terminator movies, but with a different emphasis: not on the created product, but on the creators. The real villains are the scientists who designed them. Shortcuts of hard problems of human nature only cause more problems than you solve. Using science and technology as a cureall *really* causes problems. 

Kahn’s most significant attribute is not his strength, but his ambition and lust for power over others. After he makes the Enterprise crew his hostages, he lectures them: “Nothing ever changes, except man. Your technical accomplishments? Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity but improve man and you gain a thousandfold. I am such a man.” This is pure technocratic thinking that almost certainly parrots the misguided notions of his creators.  

Kahn is not an android, but he does resemble his creators. Khan speaks with great arrogance that they must have had. He is exactly the type of person you would expect from ambitious scientists trying to design the perfect person: arrogant and self-assured; entitled to take what he wants; utter lack of empathy; sociopathic. A great humanist scientist who studies Michelangelo can create an android like Data. Scientists who are only interested in doubling productivity can only create a Kahn. 

There are several other bad scientist culprits in season one. In What are Little Girls Made of? the Old Ones destroyed themselves by creating a race of servant androids. One of the archeologists describes Korby’s analysis of Exo III this way: “You must have often heard Dr. Korby remark how freedom of movement and choice produced the Human spirit. The culture of Exo III proved his theory. When they moved [underground] from light to darkness, they replaced freedom with a mechanistic culture.” What is interesting about this history is that it places blame for the downfall squarely on the people, not the androids who actually finished them off. Giving up their human freedom for technocracy is what sealed their fate. The androids just put them out of their misery. In the episode, these machines–personified by Ruk–are almost sympathetic, hapless figures. But the Old Ones–men like Korby–who chose technology over humanity are both the victims and perpetrators of a piteous madness.     

The Earth-like planet in Miri was almost entirely depopulated due to the work of scientists who thought they could stop the aging process. In Dagger of the Mind, Dr. Adams eschews a more humanistic approach to therapy, opting to use a machine to cure mental illness. He is not unlike Silicon Valley tech geniuses who run their rat race to invent apps that will solve the world’s thorniest problems. Adams ends up using his tech to control and destroy.

In all the above cases it is not the technology itself that is the root problem, but the misguided people of science who think they can wield it to short circuit immutable laws of nature and the human condition. 

Bad Technocratic Thinking 

Next are the examples of technocratic thinking gone horribly wrong. 

We have already seen how the promise and peril of technocratic efficiency and control trapped the Earth eugenicists, Miri’s people, and Dr. Adam’s mental ward.  

In The Galileo Seven, we have a gentler, more personal version of the theme. Spock’s reliance on logic leads him to fail to assess his enemy or lead his crew successfully. One striking example of Spock’s misstep is objecting to the superfluous act of a burial ceremony for fallen crewmembers. He sacrificed morale for the chance to optimize efficiency, but because morale was low his team could not be efficient. 

In The Conscience of the King, Kodos uses a tehcnocratic approach to an ecological crisis that leads him to commit genocide. Kodos was a human, and not a Hitler-type megalomaniac. He became a monster because he made life and death decisions that only a computer would make.   

In these examples, Spock learns the error of his pure-logic approach to command just in time to save the mission. Dr. Adams, Kodos, and the Miri planet end up dead as a result of their abundant trust in the benefits of efficiency. 

Bad Computers

Finally we come to the cases of bad computers. 

Court Martial is Star Trek’s thesis statement against an over-computerized society. It is about the necessity of maintaining man’s rights, dignity, and reason over a computer’s indomitable facts. Originally the ship’s computer was written to be malicious, but upon rewrites it was reduced to being merely unreliable and unworthy. This downgrade is an understandable rewrite from the Star Trek producers–the Enterprise cannot be evil after all–but Court Martial hammers this theme all the more powerfully because it is not about some misbegotten alien society. It is about the struggle of the Federation and Starfleet to resist becoming servants to its own miraculously advanced technology.    

Samuel T. Cogley calls the computer a “homogenized, pasteurized synthesizer.” Today we are even more tethered to that synthesizer than was imagined in the 1960s. Many of us never stop our scrolling to consider that we are losing something valuable in that interface. It’s not the user–the person–who is making the decisions about how to read the information, it’s the algorithm. For what purpose was that algorithm calculated? It does not need to be for a nefarious purpose for us to admit that it might not fit the user’s precise needs in the moment, or that it might channel the user into certain pathways of information, associations to other sources that–whatever they are–we did not choose to be exposed to. This canned response can block us from certain insights. Instead, we come to trust and rely on the algorithm’s insights.  

This is what Cogley is worried about, piling stacks of books around him as a protective barrier. It is what we should all be worried about, knowing what we know now about how the modern internet is configured and how it affects democracy. Star Trek is optimistic in many ways, and this is one of them: that we will have figured out how to coexist with advanced computer networks without surrendering our autonomy to them. Kirk is put on trial against the word of a computer. During trial the Starfleet prosecutor uses a PADD, but Cogley has five heavy books and a yellow legal pad. He wins the case! 

The script revision process for Court Martial illustrates how Trek’s producers constantly beat back the implication that the Enterprise’s high technology was crowding out the human element of the crew. They weeded out of the scripts even the smallest detail that suggested an over-computerized society.  

The original script was premised on pitting a old-school country lawyer against a computer in a courtroom drama. The conflict was based on who to trust: the impervious computer or the flawed human hero, Kirk? But the producers balked at even this level of technocracy being permitted in their Starfleet. 

Here is how Justman put it in one of his memos to John D.F. Black: “In Act I, on Page 3, we are told that ‘almost all legal questions–and certainly all questions of fact–are now determined electronically.’ This bothers me because I felt that we were attempting to maintain our fight for humanity and against complete computerization within our show.”  

Roddenberry even wrote to the script writer that “the implied assumption that computers are constantly photographing and recording all aspects of life” should be taken out of the script. 

In a letter to Gene Coon about a different episode later in the year, Roddenberry wrote: “There seems to be a compulsion among writers to picture the future as totally computerized, inhumanly authoritarian, and coldly big-brotherish. I know none of us want to go in that direction, but God help Star Trek, if our writers push us that-a-way.” The final script did de-emphasize the role of the Enterprise computer, but Cogley still got to let rip some great bromides “in the name of a humanity fading in the age of the machine.”       

In The Return of the Archons we see a world that exemplifies Cogley’s fears but appeases the producer’s fears by moving the theme away from Starfleet and onto an alien planet. 

Spock describes the society on Beta III this way: “This is a soulless society, Captain. It has no spirit, no spark. All is indeed peace and tranquility – the peace of the factory; the tranquility of the machine; all parts working in unison.” Landru, the ultimate bad computer, over programs the population to the point that they are mindless automatons. Kirk destroys it. It would not be his last.  

Theme: None

Percent of Season One: 10%

3 of 28 Episodes:

• Shore Leave
• Tomorrow is Yesterday 
• Operation: Annihilate!

Themes happen when the writer has a germ of an idea that answers the big questions: What is the episode about? Why does the story matter? Usually this message is the first thing the writer thinks about and it propels the writing process through the development of the plot and characters. Sometimes the themes are layered in through the writing process. Other times the theme does not fully gel or fades in significance due to rewrites or the want of better rewrites.   

But not every episode needs a big moral message wrapped up in a Kirk speech. Some episodes have no theme at all. They are just there for pure fun, or to deliver a certain kind of plot.

Shore Leave is the first such episode of season one, and it’s almost like the writers were winking to the audience by showing Kirk and his crew fatigued from their year in space, in need of a break. The viewers had just sat through half a season of very great but very heavy stories about life and death, the fate of man and the universe. Shore Leave was there to remind us that we are still having fun, a week in which we did not need to think too much.

Tomorrow is Yesterday was Trek’s first time travel story, and also emphasized fun and humor. It’s purpose was to tell a light-hearted time travel romp, and it succeeded since its tropes were repeated in nearly every time travel story that came after it in the franchise.

Conversely, Operation: Annihilate! is about space parasites invading entire solar systems and driving people mad, but the episode did not have anything to say about the nature of insanity, invasive species, or colonization. It was intended to be Star Trek’s attempt at suspense and horror, nothing more.  

There are two honorable mentions in this category. The Naked Time was also not intended to be a message show. It seems that the intention was to tell a suspense story that reveals new character details by putting them under pressure in out-of-character conditions. But because the character development became so strong, that became its theme. Finally, The Alternative Factor is so muddled by an unfinished script it’s hard to tell even what the plot is let alone the theme. Both of these episodes in their way were able to powerfully convey the theme of human connection, as discussed in that section of this essay. 

—

In the next and final essay in this series, we will explore an important Star Trek theme that runs under the surface of many episodes already discussed: dualities are false.

The original Star Trek is known for its themes, how each adventure comes wrapped in its own unique and thought-provoking message. In over fifty years of cast interviews, documentaries, and retrospectives these themes have been reduced to shorthand: optimism; tolerance; peace; the human adventure. As we teach students in English class, words like that are topics, not a description of the actual theme. I’ve rarely seen or read much discussion about what Star Trek’s messages are in full. What did all of those themes add up to? What did the series have to say about the topics so often ascribed to it? 

This series of essays attempts to answer those questions. It is the product of a rewatch of all 28 episodes of Star Trek’s season one. Each essay analyzes a distinct theme and how it is conveyed through plot, character, and dialogue. Two things become apparent. First, the original series was written by serious writers who had a lot to say, and it shows. The themes are complex, nuanced, and richly dramatized by story elements. I’m convinced that this aspect of the show is why it made such a strong impression on the first wave of viewers in the 1960s and 70s, and why nearly a dozen franchise iterations have been able to ride its coattails ever since. 

Second, there are not 28 themes, one for each episode. Instead there are 10 distinct themes that are expressed in different ways across those first 28 episodes. Most episodes express multiple themes. The impact of this–when Where No Man Has Gone Before and Space Seed, The Corbomite Maneuver and The Devil in the Dark each look at the same idea from different angles–not only enriches the theme but also the show itself. Because they are repeated with variations, the individual themes synthesize into a kind of uber thesis for the entire show, which is usually what people refer to when they say Star Trek is about optimism, tolerance, peace, and the human adventure. The themes collectively give the show a unique perspective. This in turn entices fans because we relate to that universal perspective and adopt it as our own.  

One more observation. It’s become a cliche to say that the original Star Trek took the most controversial issues of the day and used science-fiction tropes to sneak them into American living rooms. This is only half true. The Gorn and the Horta are so much more than puppets in a parable about whatever thuggery Bull Connor was inflicting in the early 60s. Like all great literature, the season one themes are universal and timeless. 

In fact, the themes are attempted answers to the biggest of Big Questions that would have been on the minds of anyone who had lived through the Twentieth Century up to that point (or Twenty-First Century)–about social control, the proper uses of technology, the utility of war, the importance of fellowship, human flourishing, and the future prospects of humanity.

Here is a list of the season one themes: 

Theme: No Shortcuts

Theme: All parts of human nature are essential

Theme: Fallen Nature vs. Internal Discipline

Theme: Moral Progress

Theme: Importance of Human Connection

Theme: Embrace “the Other”

Theme: Anti-technocracy

Theme: Anti-War

Theme: Ecological Harmony

Theme: None

Theme: Dualities are False

Human Condition: the Struggle

The most dominant set are themes about human nature. All but 10 episodes, about two-thirds of season one, use specific themes to explore aspects of the human condition. These fall into two broad categories. The first suite of human nature themes dwell on the struggles of the human condition; the second reveals the rewards. First we will look at the Struggle.  

Theme: No Shortcuts

Percent of Season One: 53% 

15 of 28 episodes: 

• Where No Man Has Gone Before 
• Mudd’s Women
• The Man Trap
• Charlie X
• What are Little Girls Made of?
• Dagger of the Mind
• Miri
• The Menagerie 
• The Squire of Gothos
• The Alternative Factor
• The Return of the Archons 
• Space Seed 
• A Taste of Armageddon
• This Side of Paradise
• The City on the Edge of Forever

The theme of no shortcuts is often expressed in episodes that are critical of characters who try to skip the difficult steps of a process only to find that those steps were essential for success, wisdom or true fulfillment. More than half of the episodes expressed this theme–by far the most prevalent theme of the season. 

In each of these episodes, the shortcut is trying to overleap a different challenge, so the theme is universal rather than particular. The theme is dramatized when the characters are punished with failure or worse for trying their shortcut. Charlie Evans fails by trying to skip over the natural wisdom and empathy that comes with adulthood; Gary Mitchel and Khan fail by trying to skip over the wisdom and empathy derived from generational human evolution. The Talosians fail by trying to supplant life’s pain and challenges with illusion and fantasy. Dr. Korby and the people of Miri’s planet fail by trying to subtract mortality from the human equation. Dr. Adams fails by trying to use technology to shortcut psychological recovery and true behavioral corrective therapy. Mudd’s women are slaves to their drugs rather than choosing the harder path of self-love and inner beauty. The Eminians fail by trying to have war without the messiness of war. The people of Beta III try to form a perfect, orderly society, only to have mayhem bubble to the surface during carnivals, not to mention being slaves to a computer. The Omicron Ceti III colonists fail by giving up the struggles and pressures of pioneer life for the simulated bliss of the spores. 

The quintessential episode for this theme is Where No Man Has Gone Before, the series’s second pilot. The very first Kirk Speech is about the dangers of acquiring power too precipitously. 

Dehner: “Before long we’ll be where it would have taken millions of years of learning to reach—“

Kirk: “And what will Mitchel learn in getting there? Will he know what to do with his power? Will he acquire the wisdom? … Did you hear him joke about compassion? Of all else, a God needs compassion.”

In other episodes we see the folly of people trying to jump over social evolution to fabricate utopian paradises. The Return of the Archons ends with this exchange: 

Spock: “How often mankind has wished for a world as peaceful and secure as the one Landru provided.”

Kirk: “Yes. And we never got it. Just lucky, I guess.”

The exact sentiment is expressed at the end of This Side of Paradise: 

McCoy: “Well, that’s the second time man’s been thrown out of Paradise.”

Kirk: “No, no, Bones, this time we walked out on our own. Maybe we weren’t meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can’t stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.”

Edith Keeler begins her famous sermon about an optimistic future with these words: “If you’re a bum… then get out. Now I don’t pretend to tell you how to find happiness and love when everyday is just a struggle to survive. But I do insist that you do survive.” And then Kirk learns (not for the last time) that sometimes the only way to survive is to sacrifice what you love. 

In all of these episodes, Star Trek is preaching that the hard path is the only true path, the only way to live long and prosper.

Theme: All parts of human nature are essential

Percent of Season One: 35% 

10 of 28 episodes:

• Where No Man Has Gone Before 
• The Enemy Within 
• Charlie X
• What are Little Girls Made of?
• Dagger of the Mind
• Miri
• The Menagerie 
• The Return of the Archons 
• Space Seed 
• This Side of Paradise

In over half of the No Shortcut episodes, the shortcut is around some immutable aspect of human nature, and this conveys a similar but more pointed theme: All parts of human nature–good, bad, and ugly–are essential. 

The idea that all parts of human nature are essential is conveyed by the many characters who try to circumvent or skip over unpleasant or inefficient aspects of human nature, always with negative consequences.  Oftentimes these misguided characters are trying to efface or re-edit what they deem to be inconvenient or weak aspects of human nature: pain, fear, ignorance, weakness, loneliness, death. And in each episode Kirk or some other wise member of the Enterprise crew steps up to remind us that while those things may be inconvenient they are nonetheless essential to the human condition, and without them we would cease to function. The Season One creative team was so interested in this theme that they wrote an episode that was exclusively devoted to it–The Enemy Within. By subtracting out the bad parts of human nature–wickedness, selfishness–Kirk is reduced to an indecisive shell of himself. 

Gary Mitchel, Charlie Evans and Kahn also have important elements their humanity pulled out of them, though it is subtraction by addition. By becoming all powerful they lose individual perspective, compassion, and desires for anything less than acquiring more power. Their new strength does not make them better people, it makes them broken people. Their superhuman powers refracted through their brokenness makes them monsters.    

In What Are Little Girls Made Of?, Kirk has this exchange with the android Dr. Korby: 

Korby: “In android form, a Human being can have practical immortality. Can you see what I’m offering mankind?”

Kirk: “Programming – different word, but the same old promises made by Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Hitler…”

Korby: “Can you imagine how life could be improved if we could do away with jealousy, greed, hate?”

Kirk: “It can also be improved by eliminating love, tenderness, sentiment. The other side of the coin, doctor.”

Pain and happiness. Love and hate. Outer weakness and inner strength. Death and Life. Kirk keeps pointing out across all of these episodes that you cannot have one without the other. His predecessor Captain Pike learned the same lesson from his captivity by the Talosians: “You either live life – bruises, skinned knees and all – or you turn your back on it and start dying.” As Vina explained to him about the Talosian escape into the blissful comfort of illusion: “But they found it’s a trap. Like a narcotic. Because when dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating.”

Similar to the Talosians, when Kirk and crew get high on the spores in This Side of Paradise, they begin to lose their sense of duty to the ship and their mission, just as the colonists lost the will to farm and build their new home. 

When the Earth eugenics scientists, the scientists of Miri’s planet, and Dr. Adams of the Tantalus penal colony each use technology to reprogram the human condition in their respective episodes, disastrous consequences follow. Instead, all of these episodes suggest that what we consider the darker angels of our nature must actually be respected, even admired, but always kept in check. The bloodthirsty ambition of Kahn is a vital human drive, so long as they are tempered by the wisdom and compassion of people like Kirk.    

You can’t have the good without the bad, and it is a fool’s errand–an impossibility no matter what powers you bring to the task–to try to save oneself from the bad, which can only be managed. And there is something essential in this struggle, this constant vigilance and internal negotiation that makes us human.   

Theme: Fallen Nature vs. Internal Discipline 

Percent of Season: 32%

9 of 28 Episodes: 

• Where No Man Has Gone Before 
• The Enemy Within 
• The Man Trap
• The Naked Time
• Charlie X
• The Menagerie 
• The Return of the Archons 
• A Taste of Armageddon
• This Side of Paradise

A thread that runs through some of these episodes is that there is a lot of bad in that nature, that Humans are a fallen people. Humans as inherently sinful, while a Judeo-Christian concept, is nonetheless present in Star Trek in a secular guise. The demon inside all of us that makes evil possible is emphatically not defeated by the 23rd Century, and nowhere in these episodes is such a defeat ever promised to be at hand.

“Let’s talk about humans, our frailties,” Kirk says to Dehner in the very first Kirk Speech. “As powerful as [Mitchel] gets, he’ll have all that inside of him. You know all the ugly, savage things that we all keep buried, that no one dare expose. But he’ll dare. Who’s to stop him? He doesn’t need to care.”

In A Taste of Armageddon, Anan 7 explains his people’s justification for their war this way: “A killer first, a builder second. A hunter, a warrior. And let’s be honest, a murderer. That is our joint heritage, is it not?” Later, when Kirk is proposing peace, he provides the counterpoint: “All right, it’s instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We’re human beings, with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it! We can admit that we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes.”

Hearing this speech, it is hard not to think about the 12 step program for drug addiction. The addict does not say to himself, ‘I will never do drugs again, I’m cured.’ He tells himself ‘just stay sober today. Worry about tomorrow tomorrow.’

Star Trek could have been a typical sci-fi show where the problems are all caused by monsters and alien bad guys. There is plenty of that, but just as many of the antagonists are humans who are flawed and broken, who have lost their way (Mitchel, Mudd, Kirk himself after his transporter accident, Charlie, Dr. Crater, Dr. Korby, Dr. Adams, Kodos, Lieutenant Finney, Khan…). When confronted by Kirk and his crew, these people and their demons never win, but they serve as a reminder that any of us could become like them if we are not careful.  

The emphasis is that Human evil is very real and not going anywhere, but that it can be kept in check through internal discipline and strong character. Kirk spends most of the season showing how this is done–whether it is lecturing Dr. Crater on his immoral choices regarding the Salt Creature:

“This thing becomes wife, lover, best friend, wise man, fool, idol, slave. It isn’t a bad life to have everyone in the universe at your beck and call! And you win all the arguments!”

Or coaching Charlie how to grow up: 

“There are a million things in this universe you can have and there are a million things you can’t have. It’s no fun facing that, but that’s the way things are.”

In many of these episodes, the solution is to foster internal discipline and act on it. 

Dr. Crater, the Talosians, and the Omicron Ceti III spore victims all succumb to the temptations of selfish apathy, the ease of a hollow existence. They all lack the internal discipline to overcome this descent. In The Naked Time, when Kirk’s rigid self-discipline is sapped by the Psi 2000 virus he is powerfully seduced by the temptation to throw his career away, to go walk on the beach with “no more braid” on his shoulder. 

The Naked Time and The Return of the Archons are explorations of two opposite ends of internal discipline. When the Psi 2000 virus hits, we see what happens when the discipline falls away. The crew becomes dysfunctional, they contemplate not only throwing their careers and cherished beliefs away, but some of them seem content to sit back and let themselves burn up in the atmosphere. On Beta III there is too much discipline, and the people lash out in madness. The computer Landru did not trust the people to find the right mix of discipline and freedom for themselves. So their freedoms were taken away. By destroying Landru, Kirk restores their freedom but it comes with the challenge of self-discipline.  

One important manifestation of internal discipline is the intellect, which is depicted as the more evolved part of human nature that can mediate or override the baser elements of that nature. 

The primacy of the intellect is an explicit theme in The Enemy Within. 

McCoy: “You have your intellect, Jim, you can fight with that…. The intelligence and logic, your half appears to have most of that. Perhaps that’s where Man’s essential courage comes from. He was afraid, and you weren’t.” 

Spock: “I have a human half, as well as an alien half, submerged, constantly at war with each other. I survive it because my intelligence wins out over both, makes them live together.” 

This idea is also in Charlie X. Charlie becomes so dangerous because, as a child, he has not acquired the wisdom of experience.

While Spock is often depicted as having encyclopedic knowledge, Kirk also knows much about not just the workings of a starship, but history, literature, and human nature. Everyone on the Enterprise is exceedingly smart. But book smarts are not the powerhouse of the intellect, nor are they the key to discipline. It is the ability to reason, analyze, judge, and apply logic to the swirl of emotions. Star Trek values emotions over logic as we will see in the next segment, but when it comes to maintaining discipline over our inner demons, the intellect is an important tool.   

Human Condition: the Reward

In the first suite of themes Star Trek is teaching that life as a human is hard, and there is great value and beauty in those struggles. But in other episodes–and often layered over top of the same episodes–there is a different message, one of pure uplift and optimism. The original Star Trek never put on a big smile and told its audience “Be optimistic.” It made an argument. It demonstrated concrete reasons why one should have an optimistic outlook. These reasons are the vital gift of human connection, and the demonstrated fact of moral and ethical progress in both individuals and society.  

Theme: Moral Progress

Percent of Season: 25%

7 of 28 Episodes: 

• Where No Man Has Gone Before
• Miri
• The Squire of Gothos
• Arena
• Space Seed
• A Taste of Armageddon
• The City on the Edge of Forever

Implicit in Kirk’s speech to Dehner in Where No Man Has Gone Before is that humanity has thrived in spite of “the ugly, savage things that we all keep buried.” Those things are a part of us, but they do not determine our fate. 

Kirk explains something similar to the next god-like creature he encounters–Trelane–who accuses the crew of being primitive savages. As Marc Cushman explains in his analysis of that episode: “Kirk demonstrates that mankind is capable of greater things than our detractors would believe. This is the magic of Star Trek. In the turbulent 1960s, Americans, especially America’s youth, were desperate for a sign that we could survive and, more so, that there was reason for us to do so.” 

Cushman also notes that in the same week production on The Squire of Gothos began there was a slew of reporting that could have proved Trelane’s point: the Vietnam war, as well as nuclear testing from both China and the USSR. Also Miri aired that week, an episode which depicted “the end of Western civilization as we knew it.” Miri was not explicitly about Human progress, but it did depict a literal parallel Earth, one that did not make it–unlike the Earth Kirk and his crew came from.

In Arena, we have the story of a bloody war that is averted. Kirk first choses aggression and is prepared to launch a war against the Gorn. But when forced to choose between cold-blooded murder and mercy, he choses the more enlightened path. 

In Space Seed, Kirk is faced with yet another supposedly superior lifeform who argues that Humans are a debased species. In this case the antagonist turns out to be a genetically modified Human–Kahn. Kirk must once again vouch for progress that has been made and argue that humanity is not the brutes Khan takes them for. The audience is also reminded that sometime in their future (ahem, the 1990s) Humanity will nearly destroy itself, but that we will survive our mistakes and continue to improve our condition, paving the way to the future we see in Kirk’s 23rd Century.    

In A Taste of Armageddon we visit a planet that has tried to have a sanitized version of war. When the Eminiarians justify their way of life by saying “There can be no peace… We’re a killer species” the ensuing Kirk Speech adds to the theme: “All right, it’s instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We’re human beings, with the blood of a million savage years on our hands. But we can stop it! We can admit we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes–knowing that you’re not going to kill today.”

The Eminiarians apparently believe that war is inevitable so we might as well make it as civilized as possible. Kirk is saying that war is in our nature but it is not inevitable, it can be overcome. This Kirk speech is Star Trek’s thesis of the optimistic human future: it’s not that people will evolve beyond our flaws and brutality, but that we will learn how to better manage them.     

Finally–and again to The City on the Edge of Forever–we are reminded that war on Earth once had its place, was even a necessary evil, but that we were able to move past that. When Kirk declares “Peace was the way” and Spock agrees by adding “She was right. But at the wrong time” both are reflecting on a time in Earth’s history when Keeler’s argument did win the day, when the war protesters and the peacekeepers finally succeeded in changing the course of Human history.    

Keeler’s “One day, soon” speech is a perfect distillation of this theme, but she makes the same case just about any time she opens her mouth. On their romantic stroll she and Kirk have this exchange:  

Keeler: I just know that’s all. I feel it. And more. I think that one day they’re going to take all the money that they spend on war and death-

Kirk: and make them spend it on life.

Kirk, stuck in the 1930s, knows that humanity has to at least make it past World War II before this great moral progress can occur. But the people who watched this episode when it first aired, in the 1960s and 70s, as the Vietnam War raged–were left to wonder–to hope–that maybe this decade, this very year, might be when change will finally come. It must have been a tantalizing idea to fantasize about. 

Those of us who watched Star Trek after that, or are watching it now, know the shift has not yet happened and appears unlikely any time soon. But Star Trek allows us to hope that it will happen eventually, and perhaps sooner than we think. 

Theme: Importance of Human Connection 

Percent of Season: 25%

7 of 28 Episodes: 

• Where No Man Has Gone Before
• The Man Trap
• The Naked Time
• Charlie X
• The Menagerie
• The Alternative Factor
• The City on the Edge of Forever

Star Trek is always reminding us of how important it is for people to bond with one another. The purpose of these bonds is nothing more or less than happiness, companionship, community. But the episodes also show that human connection is a powerful force that can have deep ramifications on not just an individual life but the fate of the universe. Accordingly, hard choices must sometimes be made about when and how to forge these connections, and when to sever them.   

The importance of human connection is a major element in both pilot episodes. In The Cage, the Talosians whole mission is to get a companion for Vina so that she has someone real to share her life with. Spock does the same for Pike in The Menagerie. Gary Mitchel choses Dehner so he will not have to be alone. Kirk wrestles with what to do about Mitchel because he finds it too difficult to break the bond of friendship he has with him. 

In The Man Trap, Crater is traumatized by the loss of his wife. While he longs to become an isolated hermit living alone on a deserted planet, he still indulges the need for companionship by making the salt creature take the form of his wife. Crater maintains throughout the episode that he wants to be left alone. And he literally means it. He desires to be alone, but with the creature as an occasional companion. This is shown to be unworkable. Kirk tries to convince him not to give in to self-delusion, and that he cannot supplement real human connection with artificial connection. 

Charlie X is also a mediation on how terrible it is to be denied human connection. First Charlie was alone for years, raised by computers on the crashed ship. Then he is exiled with the non-corporeal aliens. His haunting parting words to the Enterprise crew: “Don’t let them take me. I can’t even touch them… they can’t feel… they don’t love.” This loss makes him a tragic character in the end. 

Lazarus is similarly tragic. While The Alternative Factor barely registers as having a theme because of its script problems, it is still an exploration of the theme of human connection, and would have been moreso if it could have had a few more rewrites. Lazarus is pained by the separation from his people. He tries to find love with an Enterprise crewwoman, but in an act of supreme sacrifice and tragedy, he traps himself for all eternity with his own mad double.  

The Naked Time shows how great a sacrifice both Kirk and Spock are making by intentionally limiting their connections with others. Spock does so because of the Vulcan way of suppressing emotions. Kirk does so because of the burden of command. While the other intoxicated characters are played for laughs, both of these are profoundly sad.  

Spock’s portrayal of spiraling out of control is poignant. It is clear that to him losing control is the one thing he cannot allow, or allow to be seen. (Nimoy pushed the director to move his weeping scene into the briefing room; it was originally written as a public act in the corridor played for laughs). 

Nimoy said he learned from this episode that he was not playing “a man with no emotions, but a man who had great pride, who had learned to control his emotions and who would deny that he knew what emotions were.” The character is interesting because he is always operating on two levels; all his lines and reactions must be parsed by the viewer. Spock is an emotionless Vulcan but is also projecting the façade of an emotionless Vulcan to cover his actual emotions—both at the same time.

The key moment is when Spock admits, “Jim, when I feel friendship for you, I’m ashamed.” Taken at face value, this is heartbreaking (it is also very queer–not that he is being romantic.) We see the toll that his supreme control has taken on his psyche. We want him to let us in, and he never does. But because the scripts and the actor himself give the audience enough winks–hints of Spock’s rich inner life–we feel as though we are in the know anyway, and a connection if formed. No wonder he became a fan favorite. Nimoy claimed that after the episode aired, his mail increased from a few hundred letters a week to 10,000 a week. 

It’s also pretty obvious that the rest of the crew is in on it too, especially Kirk and McCoy. All the scenes of friendly ribbing and tender concern show that they know exactly who Spock is. The fact that they adopt Spock’s facade that this doesn’t mean anything is another way of showing they care about him deeply. 

Kirk’s revelation in this episode is more straightforward, but even more tragic: 

“Love. You’re better off without it, and I’m better off without mine. This vessel–I give, she takes. She won’t permit me my life. I have to live hers… Now I know why it’s called ‘she.’ A flesh woman—to touch; to hold; a beach to walk on; a few days, no braid on my shoulder.” 

At the end of this scene, alone, he looks up and says to his ship: “I’ll never lose you. Never.” 

And after McCoy gives him the antidote, he looks at Yeoman Rand, almost reaches to touch her hair, and says, “No beach to walk on.” It’s a moment of sobriety where he decides—not for the first time, but with a sense of finality—that he has chosen a life where his purpose is his duty and his companion is his ship. It’s not that he is in love with Rand; she represents a longing for a normal life with romantic commitments—the possibility that he is rejecting.  

The ultimate expression of the power of human connection in season one is the love between Keeler and Kirk. Kirk genuinely falls in love with Keeler in a way that’s much more profound than the typical Kirk dalliance, and then he has to let that connection be smashed for the good of humanity. 

The famous future poem Kirk quotes–where “I love you” is replaced with the more egalitarian universal affirmation “Let me help”–is yet more evidence of the themes of human connection and moral progress.  The lonely, seemingly sisyphean work of helping people that Keeler is engaged in during the Great Depression will one day become everyone’s purpose. As Keeler points out, she and Kirk speak the same language. They are soul mates.  

It is telling that all of these examples showcase the importance of human connection by depicting the terrible consequences and tragedies associated with its absence. We are meant to be together, to share our lives. We are meant to love and help one another. It is something that everyone strives for even and especially in the face of it being taken away. We need it. 

Despite the above examples, the human connection on the show that always endures is that of the crew. Spock clearly gets over his shame over loving Kirk as a friend, and he almost certainly has just as strong an attachment to McCoy. And both Kirk and McCoy feel the same toward him and one another. Same for Uhura, Sulu, Scotty, Rand and Chapel. They all care about and enjoy one another. This is obvious from the many moments of humor and camaraderie between them, especially when they are all gathered together on the bridge after a mission. They are a family. 

This fact is an essential ingredient to Star Trek’s optimistic vision of the future. The moral progress of their culture, their faith in the future, would all be beside the point if they did not have each other to share in it. The implication is that this is a value that has spread across the entire 23rd Century Federation culture: we’re in this together, we treat one another as friends. Exploring the frontier, building a utopia–that’s the job but doing it with other people is the reason we’re out here. 

The message to the audience is no matter where you go or what you do: find other people, know them, share your life. This is never easy, but it is worth it.  

Continued in Part 2

When Star Trek’s first regular episode after the pilot was in pre-production, the director Joseph Sargent noticed a glaring problem. All of the seats that ringed the futuristic bridge of the Enterprise, including the communications chair, were to be filled with white, male actors. Sargent reflexively felt it was wrong that Black people should not be represented in the show’s vision of the future. 

Sargent later recalled: “We had a good representation–a good diversity in virtually all ethnic areas–except Black people. There wasn’t a Black actor in the group and I gingerly, and obsessively, approached Gene.” 

When filming began on The Corbomite Maneuver, Nichelle Nichols’s Uhura was seated at her iconic and historic place on the bridge. Sargent and Roddenberry’s idea–whites and people of color inhabiting the same space as equals–was a radical, and risky, departure from most Americans’ lived experience in 1966. 

They were also following precedent established in the pilot Where No Man Has Gone Before, which was filmed a year earlier. When we first enter the bridge in that episode, there are two Black officers present. When the department heads arrive one is an Asian man, George Takei; one is a Scotsman, James Doohan; one is a woman, Sally Kellerman’s Dr. Dehner. One of the Black actors, Lloyd Haynes, has a piece of dialogue, and he remains on the bridge throughout the episode. He was seated at the communications console, and identified in the script as Communications Officer Lt. Alden.

According to Marc Cushman’s These Are The Voyages, Roddenberry expected Haynes might have a larger presence if the series was picked up. That did not work out, and in the next script a white man was called for to become the Enterprise’s comms officer. Instead, thanks to Sargent, a Black woman–Nichols–was chosen to fill the seat.    

Uhura and Sulu were able to explore, argue, tease, flirt, sing, and swashbuckle with their white peers. But their inclusion is only part of the story of Star Trek’s racial diversity. People of color were chosen as background extras, small speaking roles, and guest stars. Every week of the 1966-67 television season except for one, you would have tuned in to see Black and brown people in uniform on board a starship. The white writers, directors and producers of the show, in ways big and small, made sure that the Enterprise was not a whites-only space.

Sociologist Elijah Anderson coined the term white space to describe “settings in which black people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present.” Black people “typically approach that space with care… they can feel uneasy and consider it to be informally ‘off limits.’” Meanwhile white people are scarcely aware these spaces exist or of how uncomfortable Black people become when in them. Think of it as a dimensional realm of subspace. To the people who live there, it’s home sweet home. But for trans-dimensional beings, you get noticed, and it can be a chilly, hostile place to visit. Anderson explains: “When the anonymous black person enters the white space, others there immediately try to make sense of him or her—to figure out ‘who that is,’ or to gain a sense of the nature of the person’s business and whether they need to be concerned.” 

Anderson wrote this paper in 2014, trying to explain the peculiar ways our modern society still segregates by race, and the conflicts–sometimes deadly–that arise when Black people enter white spaces. But the reason we have white and Black spaces today is because of the entrenched segregation of Jim Crow. Star Trek’s first viewers lived in a society where laws enforced racial separation just about anywhere you could think of.  

In 1937 Oklahoma required telephone companies to install whites-only phone booths. In 1955 Tennessee passed a law that required mine operators to install separate bathrooms for white and Black miners. In 1956 Kentucky passed a slew of Jim Crow laws: separate waiting rooms and bathrooms; separate tuberculosis hospitals; separate public transit; facilities that served food had to have separate dining rooms and provide separate sets of eating utensils. In that state and many others it was illegal for a Black person to dance with a white person or walk together through a public park or playground. Spock and Uhura’s musical performances in the rec room would have been punishable by jail time in some of these places.         

Well into the 1960s in Seattle, and many other American cities, realtors were barred from  “introducing into a neighborhood… members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” In Texas in 1960 it was a crime for a Black and white person to live in the same house, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Interracial marriage was illegal until June 1967. The 1950s saw a raft of laws prohibiting mixed race adoptions, which Amanda Grayson and Sarek would have found quite illogical. In 1967 Sarasota, Florida passed this law:  “Whenever members of two or more races shall be upon any public…bathing beach within the corporate limits of the City of Sarasota, it shall be the duty of the Chief of police or another officer… to clear the area involved of all members of all races present.”

The service branches that Starfleet was modeled after had only recently been desegregated. Truman’s executive order desegregating the military was signed in 1948, but it was ignored or slow walked for years. The last racially segregated unit of Black soldiers was not abolished until 1954. None of the former service members who worked on Star Trek–men like Roddenberry, Robert Justman, and James Doohan–would have ever had the experience of serving equally with any African American.  

During the two decades preceding Star Trek’s debut, America had been–and was still–engaged in a fit of declaring itself a white space.

1960s Hollywood was not immune from this racism, and so the prime-time lineup was also a white space. Roddenberry’s show prior to Star Trek, The Lieutenant (1963-64), was set in a contemporary Marine Corps training camp. One episode depicted a Black Marine taking abuse from a racist white Marine. The network refused to air it, and soon after the series was canceled. In Riverboat (1959-61), there was a network edict that warned script writers “no Negros were ever to be seen” on the series, which was set in 1860 Mississippi, a time when the population of that state was 55% Black. If the networks could berate progressive-leaning writers and directors into pretending that all the Black people were simply “below decks” on Riverboat, it would have been just as easy to pretend they were out of sight on the Enterprise too. But Star Trek refused to play along.  

Consider these numbers for season one:

• 75% of episodes had people of color as background extras 

• 39% of episodes featured people of color with guest speaking roles 

• 5 episodes featured people of color in the main guest star role

Background Extras

The presence of diversity in background extras may sound trivial, but it was a subtle yet powerful way that Star Trek demonstrated inclusivity. The Enterprise crew was filled with people of color working and socializing alongside their white crew members as equals. In the first few moments of Balance of Terror, we see a Black man, Black woman, and Asian woman attending the wedding ceremony, and on the bridge a Filipino man takes over the helm.

In Court Martial, at least two Black officers are seen in the starbase club, and an Indian man named Captain Chandra was seated with Commodore Stone on the judges panel. In The Conscience of the King we see in the background an Asian and Indian man, and the same Filipino man, who had an important part as the security guard who confronted Kodos. Many extras reappeared throughout the series. The Filipino actor, Ron Veto, was in ten episodes.

One of the wedding guests was played by an unknown Black extra who appeared in two other episodes, including on the security detail that went after the Horta in The Devil in the Dark. In Memory Alpha his name is listed as Lewis.

If you watch the background extras on the bridge and hustling past our regulars in the corridor, you are also struck by the near parity between men and women, and many of them are women of color. In Operation: Annihilate!, of the four female officers seen on the bridge one is Latina or hispanic and one is Yeoman Zarah played by Moroccan actress Maurishka Tagliaferro. She also got in on some away team action.

It would have been easy to have all the extras look like this guy:

And in many shows and movies, especially in science-fiction, that’s how it was for decades: a monochrome pallet of square-jawed white faces. Star Trek’s directors and producers chose diversity.   

You might say diverse background extras are fine, but can you give them some lines? That was done too.   

Speaking Extras 

We’ve already mentioned how Lloyd Haynes was given a few lines and some reaction shots in the series pilot, teasing the possibility that he could become a recurring character. At least 9 episodes in season one had actors of color with small but noticeable speaking roles.  

In The Enemy Within, Black actor Garland Thompson played a transporter technician who was prominent throughout the episode and had more lines than Uhura. Thompson was also a background extra in Charlie X. In Shore Leave, Lieutenant Esteban Rodriguez was one of the non-regular characters who had adventures on the pleasure planet. He was played by Julios Caesar Lopez, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, and was billed as a co-star for this episode. In Space Seed, Lieutenant Spinelli, played by native Hawaiian actor Blaisdell Makee, had some scenes bravely resisting Kahn. 

In Court Martial, the Enterprise’s Personnel Officer is played by Asian actress Nancy Wong. In A Taste of Armageddon, Yeoman Tamura is played by Japanese-American actress Miko Mayama. In early scripts, both of these roles were to be portrayed by Yeoman Janice Rand and had to be rewritten after Grace Lee Whitney left the show. The producers and directors could have recast the roles with white, blond actresses who looked like Whitney, but instead they chose these two Asian women.       

One of the most significant and interesting cases in this category is Janet MacLachlan as Lieutenant Charlene Masters in The Alternative Factor. Gerd Oswald, the episode director, and Joe D’Agosta, head of casting, wanted to hire a Black actress to play Lazarus’s love interest. It would have been TV’s first interracial romance, complete with passionate kissing and ending with the two of them joined together for eternity in the inter-dimensional corridor. Unfortunately NBC balked. As Marc Cushman put it, there was concern about “how affiliates in the South might react.” There were many other script problems, including the fact that Masters sabotages the ship over a man she just met, and so Gene Coon kept the character and the actress but jettisoned the love affair. While the role was much smaller than intended, MacLachlan got to play a competent and heroic officer whose quick action saves the ship. 

MacLachlan’s presence is important not just for her skin color but also her hair. Someone decided that MacLachlan should not wear a wig, that Masters would wear her hair natural. Cushman quotes from an interview he did with Coon’s secretary Ande Richardson-Kindryd, who was deeply moved by this choice: 

“My mother had made me swear that I would always wear a wig to work because I should not ever let them see my natural hair. It was just too radical. It was very courageous that she wore her hair in an Afro at that time… But the people at Star Trek thought in those terms–individual rights; personal choices. It was a very freeing environment, and a very positive message. So now I knew I was finally at a place where I felt that we had a chance to be–we, being Black people. I took off my wig and stuck my head under a water tap and combed out my Afro and went back to work. I sat down at my desk and no one ever said a word to me and I knew I was at a place where I belonged, that this was home and I was with good people.”          

In 1966-67, for many Black women and girls, and Black men and boys, it must have felt that Star Trek was a place they belonged too. 

Guest Stars 

Full-fledged guest stars had to carry the weight of at least half of the episode, going toe-to-toe with the series’s regular heroes. The actors got top billing after Shatner and Nimoy, and would have been familiar faces to much of the TV audience. In five episodes of season one, this coveted spot was filled by people of color, all men.  

In The Galileo Seven, the bad guys were the cavemen aliens of Taurus II, but since the real conflict was Spock’s internal struggle for the command of his crew, the true antagonist was Lieutenant Boma, an astro-physicist, played by Don Marshall. From the first time we see him in the shuttle, Marshall gives Boma a gravitas unusual for a lieutenant-of-the-week. His stance in the seat behind Spock is relaxed and confident. He looks like a man who knows he belongs there. Boma assertively pushes back on Spock’s command decisions, and McCoy ends up convincing Spock that Boma’s criticisms are justified and correct. Boma gets Spock to the right place and the script never turns him meek or apologetic. 

Marshall later said about the role:  “There was no shyness or hold back because of race. You didn’t get that a lot on TV at that time, where a Black man could speak his mind to a white man without being regarded as out-of-line. Gene Roddenberry and the other people on the show, like Leonard Nimoy, were greatly concerned about the show and about the people on it, and how it depicted the future. There’s so much beauty in that.”    

In Court Martial we have another no-nonsense, commanding Black guest star, Percy Rodriguez as Commodore Stone, the commanding officer of Starbase 11. This was the first time audiences had visited a Starbase or met a commodore. Stone not only put Kirk on trial but said this famous quote: “Not one man in a million could do what you and I have done. Command a starship. A hundred decisions a day, hundreds of lives staked on you making every one of them right.” When those lines were written, the U.S. Navy had no African American captains. Samuel Lee Gravely Jr. became the first Black officer to reach the rank of captain in 1967.  

Two episodes had major guest star roles played by Jewish actors. In The Menagerie we meet Commodore Jose Mendez, another commanding officer of Starbase 11. Even though the actor, Malachi Throne, was born to Austro Hungarian Jews before World War II, we might be able to infer based on his name that the character is Hispanic. In A Taste of Armageddon, the alien Anan 7 is played by David Opatovsky. Born in New York City, his father was a Yiddish novelist from Poland. Opatovsky had semetic features that landed him both Jewsish and Arabic roles. Both characters are devoid of any ethnic stereotypes whatsoever.   

Finally, the most significant guest role of the season, if not the entire franchise, was Ricardo Montalban’s Kahn Singh in Space Seed. Mondalban was born in Mexico City, moving to Los Angeles to have a film career. While Khan was most likely of Indian descent, not Hispanic, he was a person of color portraying the ultimate villain who nonetheless earned the respect, even grudging admiration, of the Enterprise crew. There is also an anti-colonialism aspect to the character. For a hundred years the native peoples of European or American colonies, whether Indian or Hispanic or Asian, had been depicted in popular culture as obedient, slovenly, lazy, and stupid. Khan is the opposite of those things. In fact the writers gave him the courage, cunning, and ruthlessness typical of white colonizers. “I’ve gotten something else I wanted,” he tells Kirk before beaming down to Ceti Alpha V. “A world to win, an empire to build.” By reversing these roles, the episode makes a mockery of colonial racism.  

To show how Star Trek’s message of inclusivity was noticed at the time, I will close with two quotes from fan letters Roddenberry received after some of the episodes mentioned above.     

“The ethnic backgrounds represented within the cast are exactly as they should be, for it will require the best of all Earth to achieve in fact what you are presenting as today’s fiction” (1967)

“The crew of the Enterprise, comprised of all the nations and races of Earth working together in a joint effort, provides hope for the future of mankind. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be alive when these ‘fiction’ stories of today becomes tomorrow’s truths. (1966)