I have to admit when I watched the very first episode of Star Trek ever shown on television, there were lots of things I never noticed. First of all, I was six in September 1966. Second, my parents, though hardly perfect, were not racist or sexist, and didn’t mention certain defining features of the show that some today are in denial about.
Even before the opening credits, we see a Black woman officer sitting at the station we later learn is navigation. This of course is Lieutenant Uhura, who is more usually found at communications, where she will appear later in the episode.
Also before the opening credits, we see a non-human with pointed ears sitting in the captain’s chair in command of the ship while the captain is visiting the planet below. This is Lieutenant-Commander Spock, the ship’s first officer and chief science officer.
An alien man and a black woman, officers on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, a name packed with meaning a little more than twenty years after the end of the Second World War in the Pacific, a war whose bloody history was exacerbated by racial hatred on both sides, some of it prejudice, some of it arising because it is very easy to dehumanize an enemy who looks so different. The American aircraft carrier Enterprise had played a leading role throughout that war, even taking part in an attack on Tokyo in in February 1945.
Speaking of the war (sorry, Basil), another character debuts later in the episode, Lieutenant Sulu, who seems to work as a botanist. Although his ethnic background is not mentioned any more than Uhura’s or Spock’s, there would have been many in the audience that night who would have looked at him and immediately assumed him to be Japanese (as the character is later revealed to be). That would have raised a fair number of eyebrows. Even more surprising, Sulu is next seen on the bridge running security on the ship. In the final scene, Sulu is seen again on the bridge sitting at the helm, the station he will become most well known for.
In 1966, as I said, I was six years old. My parents and the parents of everyone in my generation had lived through the Second World War. So many had fought and suffered, lost friends and family. There was still great and widespread bitterness about the war. To put a Japanese officer in so prominent a position of authority on a television show was bold, just as it was bold to put a Black woman officer. By comparison, making an alien the second in command was minor.
One of the great ironies, of course, is that the actor who played Sulu, George Takei, is a Japanese-American. As a child he had been unjustly imprisoned along with thousands of other Japanese-Americans in concentration camps just because they were of Japanese descent. I don’t know how my parents felt about this in 1942, but in the 1960s they were teaching me what a disgraceful wrong our country had done to them. Over and over my father spoke of the extraordinary courage Japanese-American soldiers displayed when the government allowed them to enlist and fight in their own units in Europe. They were done wrong by their country, and did their country only right in return. And they were not the only ones. Nichelle Nichols could have told some stories, too.
When you look at this or other episodes of Star Trek (No bloody TOS, TNG, DS9, VGR — to paraphrase Mr. Scott), there are plenty of opportunities to shake our heads at things that wouldn’t fly today. The ridiculously short completely impractical uniform skirts worn by the women in Starfleet, and the insanely skimpy attire worn by the non-human yet still very enticingly human-passing alien women, costumes designed to look like they just might fall off, are only the beginning of things we could mention. The 1960s were poised between two worlds. Some were holding desperately onto the way things had been, and some had let go to reach out for what could be.
Finally, what is in some ways the most challenging and the most relevant aspect of that episode, is the interaction between Captain Kirk and Professor Crater. Crater is trying to protect “a creature,” which is the last of its kind, sentient, intelligent, and capable of love, but whose extreme need for salt to survive drives it to kill some of Kirk’s crew. The professor likens it to the American buffalo, of which there had been 50,000,000 or more circa 1800, but only a few thousand remained in North America by 1900. When Crater argues that the creature is just trying to survive, Kirk, who is just as desperate to protect his crew, replies:
“You bleed too much, Crater. You’re too pure and noble.”
In effect, Kirk has just called him “woke.”
Even so, after the creature has been killed attempting to kill Kirk, Spock sees Kirk looking pensive and sad. Approaching him, Spock says:
“Something wrong, Captain?”
With a rueful smile, Kirk replies:
“I was thinking about the buffalo, Mr. Spock.”
He, Spock, and McCoy exchange thoughtful looks, and the episode ends with Kirk ordering Sulu, now at the helm, to resume their journey, while Uhura works at communications in the background.
We’ll see this dynamic over and over again throughout the history of Star Trek in all its incarnations. The characters, who have already put certain attitudes behind them, are confronted by their need to do the same again in another context. This is what boldly going is all about.
