Justice delayed is justice denied.
H. G. Wells’ reason for writing The Time Machine was in part to propagandize the present, his contemporaries. It was a cautionary tale about what could happen unless people in the real world, readers of his fiction, took actions in their real lives. It was reportedly inspired by someone else’s earlier story idea. Ultimately it ended within a frame of someone else, a narrative character, telling the story, while the protagonist disappeared somewhere into time.
Since the time of its publication, many more stories about time travel have been conceived and published. Two movies I know of have been made based on Wells’ novella. Fast forward to the sixties. Nineteen-sixties, twentieth century, and science fiction has reached maturity. Well, almost.
The original Star Trek is still considered by many to be a great TV show with innovative ideas about human relations, socially and technically advanced, racially cool, even aliens get an even break. I have written elsewhere about some cracks in the aging façade of those claims.
Even as a child I identified the adherence to hierarchy, chains of command, and the importance of some characters over others. One of the most interesting aspects of the priorities of some persons over others, and how rank plays out on the show, has more to do with the techniques and values of fiction. Some characters are more central to a story and thus more important than others. In the show, it reveals itself in the time onscreen, who the camera follows, whose point of view the audience is most aligned with.
In the real world, what actual service would the top echelon of officers perform? A story could focus on a bunch of generals but would the generals be the tip of the spear? Would the top officers be the guys (yes, and they are mostly men) be the ones to go first? On Star Trek, the captain and his first officer are almost always the in the party that lands somewhere new and gets into trouble.
But the lower status of everyone but the top officers is reinforced and elevated further in a way exactly parallel to ancient storytelling rife with class distinctions.
An observer looking at the show from an anthropological point of view or through sociological analysis might conclude that the hundreds of other crewmembers were more akin to slaves and servants; in terms of story, they can be considered props for the handful of regular heroes and the guest characters important to the drama to call upon for their prop purposes, including the depth of humanity these central figures have and the others as mere props, like the audience itself, lack.
As an example of how this devaluing of some characters is not unique to the original series, an episode of The Next Generation I watched last night had two parallel plot lines. The Enterprise was engaged in a mission to save a planet from climate change. Details do not matter. The whole scenario was a gobbledygook device to distract, a little bauble for the baby’s mind to find fascination with.
The central story was about a time traveler who claimed to be a historian from the future there to study Picard. Already you’ll no doubt note the values even of the future beyond the baseline present future of the show are distorted by interest in personalities of individuals which is a feature of fiction, not necessarily of history. Even histories of the past sometimes focus on a larger problem of the populace as being central to a story.
Not so with this episode. The future guy shows up and focuses immediately on Picard and the top echelon of the ship. Meanwhile, the mission to save a planet and millions of people goes on in the background and has its complications but no one outside the story really cares about those prop people on the planet who show up as a few figures in the background of scenes and have but one spokesperson, the headman on the planet (hierarchy again) to speak for them.
Even in the crucial moment of crisis when Picard has to make a decision and implores history-future man for help, it is Picard who engages our sympathies for the prop people on the planet below with the flashing points of volcanic activity and earthquakes, and rumors of imminent annihilation.
The only reason I stayed up to watch to the end was to see the denouement of the real plot of interest. Who is this man from the future? Who is he really in the fictional frames of this silly show? What trick are these writers playing on the audience, like some borderline abusive adult almost molesting a child but not quite? These tricks and suspense elements are on this show almost always a letdown.
Which brings up another point. The screenplays have often been commended for creativity and cleverness. That’s good TV you’re watching, there. As a child I watched as a child and was duly engaged as a child, but when I became an adult, I have more informed, examined and, yes, even adult responses, thinking about those short skirts and what have you.
I have become critical of the way in which sexuality and sexual relations are portrayed on the original Star Trek. I consider the apologists for it in terms of time and place and what was acceptable similarly to those who defend the genocidal practices of European “explorers” as simply a matter of time and place, or the expected atrocities carried out by the victors in war. “That’s just what they did in those days, rape all the women in the conquered town.”
I remember clearly that concept being explained to me and other youngsters in elementary school by the mother of a friend in the context of Shakespeare’s Henry V. She did a great job, actually. No one ever thought to explain why the principal cast members of my favorite sci fi show were always hooking up with the guest characters. The female cast members were not excluded but definitely Captain Kirk got the lion’s share of romance.
Similarly, “the prime directive” of not interfering with the locals just stinks of colonialist superiority. The intention of certain acts matters more in these cases than the actual “interference.” Interspecies, humans often do things to help other creatures, albeit for selfish reasons. We have been late to understand the complexities of ecosystems and interdependence.
Similarly, this notion that different peoples, even non-humans, need to be left alone to do their own thing is in fact another distortion in time. What if their own thing involves our interference? Isn’t the fact we show up an indication of our involvement?
For example, there is an assumption because Europeans had gunpowder and steel they were somehow superior to native Americans, who only had agricultural techniques and knowledge of plant foods the Europeans did not have in their hemisphere, foods which subsequently improved the lives of the whole world. On which side was there interference?
In all of the Star Trek’s universes, there is this notion that those showing up in starships with weapons and technology are always the superior ones who should not interfere with the primitives. No sense in giving Amazon tribes things to make their lives better. No sense in asking them if they might like an easier way to make fire and collect food. We need to preserve those old ways, even though we ourselves gladly adopt more efficient ways of doing things and, within our own society at least, the progressive people argue everyone should have more creative free time and spend less time working at tasks that only make other people wealthy and more important on the stage of our own silly show.
Star Trek has more than its share of episodes dealing with time travel and timing in several of its aspects. There are the basic deadlines for getting somewhere or getting something done with dire consequences if not accomplished timely. There are more than a few episodes in which the principals and even the whole ship and crew travel anomalously through time, counter to the usual one direction we know in our experience.
Off the top of my head, I can recall four episodes in which time travel is a central feature of the story: The one with the library and Mr. Atos (All Our Yesterdays); the one with the US pilot who gets on board The Enterprise (Tomorrow is Yesterday); the one with Terri Garr and the black cat woman (Assignment: Earth). And then there’s The City on the Edge of Forever.
This last one is what inspired me to write this. That and a few cocktails. People really love this episode. It won awards. It had Joan Collins as a guest star. To this day everyone who knows it and wants to bring it up seems to remember it like a really good dessert you maybe wish there’d been more of.
I saw a bunch of things, other than not getting enough of a good thing, the two most recent times I watched it. But only this last time did I decide to break apart those elements and explain why this is actually a very bad piece of fiction and a worse piece of propaganda.
Wait for it. It’s not what you’re expecting. To be continued.
I Dwell In Possibility 