Sorry, Trekkies, Gene Roddenberry's final frontier isn't really the utopia that it might
seem.
For all of Star Trek's progressive ideologies, there's plenty just below the surface that
remains completely messed up, even hundreds of years in the fictional future.
When time is of the essence, and you're not too far away from your destination, most technologically-advanced
humanoid species use their ship's handy transporter to get them from point A to point B. But there's
a reason that characters like Bones and Barclay were fans of the less-convenient Shuttlecraft:
they were adamantly opposed to being destroyed and reassembled at an atomic level.
The use of the transporter system is an existential nightmare.
The ship's computer scans your molecular makeup, stores the pattern of your entire existence
in what's basically a flash drive, then converts your mass into energy which moves you from
one place to another.
The energy is then reconstituted into matter into the shape of you…when it actually works.
The person that steps into a transporter is vaporized and then a near-perfect facsimile
comes out the other end.
And sometimes, it just creates a duplicate of you that turns evil and you kinda just
have to deal.
And then, you might also just happen to run into some terrifying subspace monsters.
All in all, not cool.
Gene Roddenberry had a bright vision of humanity's future: disease would be nearly eradicated,
money wouldn't matter, and racism would be a thing of the past.
Which still didn't stop Bones from calling out Spock's alien heritage almost constantly.
Aliens were apparently fair game.
"You're out of your Vulcan mind!"
The end of all human racism was a pretty progressive thought.
But exactly what "no more racism" looks like isn't always handled with the most tact when
it comes to making a weekly science fiction television program.
"We were warned about the Farengi at the academy."
"Warned about Farengi, were you?"
"That's right."
"Slurs about my people."
That's why it's super jarring when the world of Star Trek accidentally bumps into race
issues more complex than just accepting people who have different foreheads.
In the Next Generation episode "Code of Honor," the crew meets a society of people seemingly
pulled out of a 1930s-era cartoon about African tribes, complete with actual spears.
Just about every Next Generation actor cites this episode as the worst thing they've ever
done, and it's really no mystery why.
Or how about the Voyager episode "Caretaker" where Tom Paris, caught in a pickle with a
Native American first officer, asks a pretty racially insensitive question.
"Isn't there some Indian trick where you can turn yourself into a bird and fly us outta
here?"
In a utopian society where equality is second nature, it's amazing how much of early Star
Trek misses the mark.
In the episode "Elaan of Troyius", the titular alien woman decides that she'd like herself
a sweet new Enterprise to take over, to which Kirk responds by threatening to, uh…
"If I touch you again, Your Glory, it will be to administer an ancient Earth custom called
a spanking."
Luckily that never comes up again.
Just kidding.
"Captain, that ancient Earth custom called 'spanking,' what is t?"
"It's um…."
Or how about "A Wolf in the Fold", in which Bones thinks that Scotty is going to become
a violent misogynist because a woman accidentally caused an explosion in Engineering?
The only natural solution is to bring him to a planet where he can get some action from
the local concubines.
That'll fix everything.
This sort of oblivious take on gender happens again and again, mentally stuck in the 1960s
while attempting to also portray a future utopia.
Kirk meets a woman in the second season episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion" who's so mentally
stunted that he has to explain what "freedom" means to her.
And yes, they hook up.
In the last episode of the series, it's made explicitly clear that women can't be Starfleet
captains since they're too emotional.
And if you think it gets any better in The Next Generation, watch "Angel One."
The crew visits a planet run by women, and the place is a full-on disaster.
Nice try, Star Trek.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, was a complicated guy.
He was passionate about his work, an epic boozehound, and a known womanizer.
He womanized so hard that Star Trek was almost cancelled when he snuck his mistress into
the cast, under a fake name and a wig, after she'd already been kicked out of an earlier
pilot.
That's some next level shenanigans.
True to the Roddenberry spirit, everyone on the original Enterprise was down to clown
with whoever they ran into.
For the obsessively curious, there's also that LP that Roddenberry produced in the 70s
where he interviews Spock's dad on some pretty intimate subjects, like Vulcan mating.
"Ordinarily, an Earth woman could not endure that.
If she survived, she might be severely injured, both physically and emotionally."
As such, Roddenberry may have been the first content creator to write and publish adult
fan fiction about his own creations.
Next Generation wasn't free from space-lust, either.
It took all of two episodes to get to an infectious space-horniness story with "The Naked Now".
And you think Deep Space Nine was safe?
Nope; the whole station went nuts and started touching up on each other because of Zanthi
Fever, during the episode "Fascination".
Coincidentally, patient zero for the disease was the character Lwaxana Troi, played by
Gene Roddenberry's original series-threatening mistress, now his wife, back again in a third
Star Trek role.
One of the most exciting concepts in Star Trek is the idea that, in a post-scarcity
society, one of the highest goals is no longer getting rich, but adding new art or knowledge
to society.
That's what seeking out new worlds and boldly going is all about, but sometimes, information
is uncovered which could fundamentally change the way existence is perceived.
And on those rare occasions, mind-blowing news about the nature of humanity is just
kind of shrugged off and it never comes up again.
In the Next Generation episode "The Chase," we finally get an answer to the question "why
does every sentient race look like humans, but with weird foreheads?"
It turns out that all humanoid life in the Alpha quadrant was created eons ago from the
genetic material of a shared ancestor.
In this single revelation, all of history, philosophy, and religion are changed forever.
And what happens next?
"That's all?
If she were not dead, I would kill her!"
Nothing.
The existence of every known alien species is summarized in one convenient, quadrant-unifying
package…and nobody really cares except Picard and one lone Romulan.
Who the Federation just goes to war with later.
Oh well.
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