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.