A Brief Guide to Star Trek (30 page)

Deep Space Nine
even looked back to the original
Star Trek
series for ideas to develop, hitting upon the mirror universe of ‘Mirror, Mirror’ as ripe for exploitation. That episode saw a transporter malfunction send Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Uhura to an alternate universe where the benign Federation is an evil Terran Empire. Each of the
Enterprise
crew has their Machiavellian counterpart, launching the cliché that alternative universe evil twins sport goatees.

The second season
Deep Space Nine
episode ‘Crossover’ provides a direct sequel to ‘Mirror, Mirror’, revealing that Kirk’s intervention led to the fall of the Terran Empire, with mirror Spock as a reforming leader.
Deep Space Nine
’s series of mirror universe stories (encompassing the episodes ‘Through the Looking Glass’, ‘Shattered Mirror’, ‘Resurrection’ and ‘The Emperor’s New Cloak’) allowed actors to play alternate, more extreme versions of their usual characters. It also allowed for even darker stories to be told, perhaps revealing the kind of show
Deep Space Nine
might have been if Roddenberry’s
Star Trek
restrictions had been thrown off entirely.

This time an accident within the wormhole sends the characters to the mirror universe, around 100 years after Kirk’s intervention. Here a Klingon–Cardassian alliance dominates and the station is still Terok Nor, with Bajor under the control of Bajorians who own human slaves. Terrans are seen by those on Terok Nor as the bad guys, called ruthless barbarians by Kira Nerys’ opposite number, the sultry Intendant. With the help of the displaced inhabitants of
Deep Space Nine
, the human ore miners of Terok Nor are able to form a resistance movement, led by Sisko’s mirror alternate, and free themselves from Bajoran domination.

Deep Space Nine
also rescued the Ferengi from their status as comic relief characters in
The Next Generation
. Originally intended as serious villains, their hobgoblin looks had meant that the capitalistic Ferengi instead became caricatures. It was easy for writers to use them in a comedic way to comment on very human traits – such as greed – that the supposedly enlightened twenty-fourth-century humans had left behind. The Ferengi became more complex in
Deep Space Nine
, with a number of regular characters – especially the bartender Quark (Shimerman) – being well developed. Just as Worf on
The Next Generation
had allowed the writers to explore and elaborate on Klingon culture (and use it to mirror human culture and history), so
Deep Space Nine
gave the Ferengi a depth previously missing, especially in the war-related fate of Quark’s nephew,
Nog. Issues of capitalism’s exploitation and perceived sexual norms were tackled through the depiction of the Ferengi, with Quark often involved in major events on his home world.

Initially, critical reaction to the arrival of
Deep Space Nine
was very positive.
TV Guide
described it as ‘the best acted, written, produced and altogether finest’
Star Trek
series. However, George Takei was one of many who felt that the show had moved too far from Gene Roddenberry’s view of the future. ‘The people that really understand and love
Star Trek
are no longer there’, he told
iF Magazine
in 2007. ‘When Gene Roddenberry passed, that really was the end of
Star Trek
as we knew it. The series that came on immediately after was
Deep Space Nine
, which was the polar opposite of Gene’s philosophy and vision of the future, so
Star Trek
lost its way then.’

Others viewed this controversial
Star Trek
rather differently. Original series story editor and writer D. C. Fontana felt that Roddenberry would appreciate
Deep Space Nine
’s war-based tales, due to his experience of World War II. ‘I think Gene would have liked it ultimately even with the darker themes’, she told TrekMovie.com in 2007. ‘Let’s face it, Gene lived and fought through World War II and those were pretty dark days so he has to know they occur. He was around when we were in the middle of the muck of Vietnam. He would like to think that humanity would be better than that, but we made the same mistakes over and over again and until we learned from history. I suspect we are going to keep on doing it.’

Fan campaigner Bjo Trimble, who’d led the letter-writing campaign to save the original
Star Trek
, agreed with Fontana that Roddenberry would have appreciated the different approach. ‘I feel that Gene might have come to like
Deep Space Nine
, had he lived to see it’, Trimble told trekplace.com. ‘There might have been some changes. The only reason there were not full [space] battles in early
Trek
was lack of funds to pull it off, and lack of technology to show it. Otherwise, [Gene] would certainly have added it; he knew what audiences liked.’

In 2002, writer–producer Ronald D. Moore (who would go on to revamp the 1970s show
Battlestar Galactica
) expressed the view that
Deep Space Nine
had taken the
Star Trek
concept as far as it could go without breaking it. Interviewed for the documentary
Ending an Era
on the season seven
Deep Space Nine
DVD set, he noted: ‘You have
The Original Series
, which is a landmark – it changes everything about the way science fiction is presented on television, at least space-based science fiction. Then you have [
The
]
Next Generation
that, for all of its legitimate achievements, is still a riff on the original. It’s still another starship and another captain . . . Here comes
Deep Space
[
Nine
] and it says “OK, you think you know what
Star Trek
is? Let’s put it on a space station, and let’s make it darker. Let’s make it a continuing story, and let’s continually challenge your assumptions about what this American icon means.” I think it was the ultimate achievement for the franchise. Personally, I think it’s the best of all of them . . . an amazing piece of work.’

One specific area that marked
Deep Space Nine
out from all the other television versions of
Star Trek
was its attempted exploration of sexuality within Gene Roddenberry’s universe. While
The Original Series
had been a pioneer in depicting a mixed-race crew almost without comment (and it boasted that Kirk–Uhura kiss), the various iterations of the franchise had been less successful in dealing with sexuality. The original series had Kirk as the intergalactic ladies’ man and occasionally Spock would melt a woman’s heart, but it was a very traditional, almost macho heterosexuality – very much in the image of Roddenberry, whose attitudes to women and sex seemed more suited to the 1950s than the 1960s.

When the show branched out into its various TV spin-offs, there was a chance to filter the sexuality of these characters from the future through the prism of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, while keeping within the bounds of what was permissible on American television.
Deep Space Nine
was perhaps the most successful of the
Star Trek
series in representing the diversity of human (and alien) sexuality.

One of the notable achievements of early
Star Trek
fandom was the creation of a genre that came to be known as ‘slash fiction’. The name came from the ‘slash’ between the pairing of Kirk/Spock. Many fans took it upon themselves to read more into the Kirk/Spock relationship than had ever been hinted at on screen. In the early days of fanzines, some were dedicated to amateur fan stories that explored various facets of this non-canonical relationship. This was never recognised on screen, and in general
Star Trek
has been heavily criticised for its relative failure – at a time when the television landscape was becoming ever more diverse – to depict lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) characters or to craft stories dealing with the issues of LGBT rights – a hot topic in real-world society, especially in the 1990s when
Deep Space Nine
was on air. Given that
Star Trek
had always been a show that reflected real-world human rights struggles – such as the 1960s racial equality and gender equality battles – why was it shying away from the topic of non-traditional sexuality?

Despite his sometimes reactionary views, Roddenberry was enlightened enough to promise the depiction of gay characters in
The Next Generation
– although his promise was never properly fulfilled. ‘My attitude toward homosexuality has changed’, Roddenberry admitted in an interview in the
Humanist
in 1991. ‘I came to the conclusion that I was wrong. I was never someone who hunted down “fags”, as we used to call them on the street. I would sometimes say something anti-homosexual off the top of my head because it was thought in those days to be funny. I never really deeply believed those comments, but I gave the impression of being thoughtless in these areas. I have, over many years, changed my attitude about gay men and women.’

He went on to add that ‘in the fifth season [of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
] viewers will see more of shipboard life [including] gay crewmembers in day-to-day circumstances’, although this statement came at a time when his actual influence over the show was virtually non-existent and he was entering the final few months of his life.
Star Trek
– the forward-looking,
groundbreaking, taboo-busting show that depicted a ‘perfect’ future – had fallen way behind in television portrayals of diverse sexuality by the 1990s. The majority of pre-1970s negative portrayals of homosexual characters had been eliminated, with shows taking positive steps to depict gay characters as they would any other. Spoof soap opera
Soap
had been more ground-breaking than
Star Trek
, featuring a gay character in 1977, while other similar shows followed suit –
Dynasty
in 1981 and
Melrose Place
in 1992. Prime-time sitcom
Ellen
featured a lesbian main character from 1997, leading to
Will and Grace
and a same-sex kiss in teen show
Dawson’s Creek
. Series that followed often featured gay characters and relationships without comment.

Where was
Star Trek
in all this? The show was stuck in its own past, refighting old battles over racism (a regular theme in
Deep Space Nine
, via Sisko and other characters) and gender equality (through Captain Janeway in
Voyager
, and countless other female characters).
The Next Generation
had made some rather half-hearted attempts at addressing the issue, as if from a sense of duty. In the romance episode ‘Qpid’, omnipotent alien trickster Q realises that Vash has the key to Picard’s heart. He comments that ‘She has found a vulnerability in you . . . a vulnerability I’ve been looking for, for years. If I had known sooner, I would have appeared as female’, making a lame joke of his potential sexual polymorphism. In the episode ‘The Host’, the
Enterprise
doctor (and sometime love interest for Picard) Beverly Crusher strikes up a relationship with an alien ‘male’ who comes from a species (the Trill, later featured as regular characters on
Deep Space Nine
) capable of co-joining with different genders. The Trill symbiont inhabits a willing human-oid host, and so can exist within a male or female body. When the male body is killed (and after a period inhabiting Commander Riker), the Trill Odan is reinstalled in a female body, and Crusher feels unable to continue the relationship she had developed with the male version of Odan. Episode director Marvin Rush rejected the idea that this represented a form of homophobia. ‘Some commented that they were unhappy with the
ending because it left a question. There was, or could have been, a sort of homosexual aspect to it and we chose not to go that route. I felt it was more about the nature of love, why we love and what prevents us from loving. To me the best analogy is if your beloved turned into a cockroach, could you love a cockroach? Rather than deal with the fact it was because of any homosexual bent per se, it’s just that in our culture and our society people who are heterosexual want the companionship of a male because they are female, [and] wouldn’t be able to deal with that opposite situation.’

Another fumbled attempt to tackle the issue in
The Next Generation
concerned the J’Naii, in the episode ‘The Outcast’. This time Riker falls in love with a member of an androgynous race of aliens who has chosen, against custom, to be female. The J’Naii were all played by female actors, a crucial decision that resulted in the episode appearing to be set on a planet of lesbians. ‘We had wanted to do a gay rights story’, said teleplay writer Jeri Taylor of ‘The Outcast’. ‘We’d not been able to figure out how to do it in an interesting science fiction,
Star Trek
-ian way. As a woman, I know what it feels like to be disenfranchised’. Despite that positive intention, Riker actor Jonathan Frakes felt the point would have been strengthened if the role of Soren, his love interest, had been played by a male, not a more televisually acceptable female. ‘I didn’t think they [the producers] were gutsy enough to take it where they should have’, he said. ‘Soren should have been more obviously male.’ Michael Piller thought the episode had finally done the job of addressing the gay issue in
Star Trek
: ‘We decided to tell a story about sexual intolerance.’ However, many fans continued to feel that a previously ground-breaking show had simply continued to sidestep a key issue of the late twentieth century.

Picard faced similar gender cross-dressing trouble in ‘Liaisons’, as he found himself involved with an alien male Lyaaran disguised as a female human who uses Picard to ex -perience the emotion of ‘love’. The episode was more of a spoof of Stephen King’s
Misery
– as Picard is essentially kidnapped by
an obsessed alien – than a serious look at cross-gender relationships. It was further watered down by the introduction of two of the same species, who spend time on the
Enterprise
experiencing other human emotions via the crewmembers.