indefinite articles

Episodes viewed: “The Enemy Within,” “Mudd’s Women,” “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, “Miri,” “Dagger of the Mind,” “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “The Menagerie (Parts 1 and 2)”

Gene Roddenberry was a man on a utopian quest. The Trek patriarch saw the blood of men during WWII’s Guadalcanal campaign and climbed to the level of sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department – experiences that gave him an unclouded look at the human spirit’s darker side. When he established himself as a writer and conceived his masterpiece, he built upon this theme, envisioning a world in which the peoples of Earth had achieved balance, using space exploration to better themselves as well as those they encounter.

But for some reason, even in stardate 2712.4, women’s rights were still firmly grounded in the 1960’s.

Tasked with going where none of them have gone before, the men of Trek are the men of legends. But over the course of five series comprising more than 700 episodes, the franchise never mustered a truly memorable female character. Their representation on the original series is flimsy at best, with the USS Enterprise’s three primary female crew members confined to peripheral roles in the ship’s operational structure.

Yeoman Janice Rand is the biggest “Who?” of the triad, serving as Captain James T. Kirk’s personal assistant for eight episodes. She serves the primary function of bringing coffee to Kirk, consoling him during rough situations, and being captured.

Lt. Uhura’s tenure with the Enterprise manages to last all the way into the sixth feature film. During her time on the ship, she presses various flashing buttons, performs secretarial duties for crew members who leave the bridge on critical matters, and masters the phrase “Hailing frequencies open, sir.”

Nurse Christine Chapel, maternal figure and treasured assistant of Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, fills what is possibly the meatiest female role on the vessel. This might be attributed to the fact that she is played by Roddenberry’s wife.

An alpha male of the finest Starfleet caliber, Captain James T. Kirk’s role in his ship’s five-year mission is to seduce and impregnate each and every woman his sensors detect.

Star Trek was not a series championed for its variety, and the show basically follows three stock plots. The first type involves a hostile, or confused, alien life form infiltrating the Enterprise, often taking the shape of a key member of the crew. The second plot is exactly the same, except it plays out on an unknown planet. The third, and the only one that hasn’t been adopted and refined by Trek’s later iterations, involves the crew discovering a mad outcast who manufactures and/or controls women.

A duo of first-season episodes explore this theme from different yet similar perspectives. “Mudd’s Women” involves the Enterprise coming into contact with a huckster named Harry Mudd who deals in drug-enhanced mail-order brides. In “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Kirk manages to track down Nurse Chapel’s long-lost husband – only to find that he has become a recluse who has built an artificial woman to serve as his submissive sex toy. To the American viewer, the cumulative result of these plot lines was: babes.

Harry Mudd’s dream; Gene Roddenberry’s utopia.

Roddenberry reportedly strongly opposed the idea of the Enterprise crew grappling with race or getting into personal squabbles, claiming that humanity would have moved beyond such issues by the time it achieved his utopian vision. For that reason, it seems likely that the show’s propensity for short skirts was the result of a mandate from the network rather than sexism on the creator’s part. Either way, drenched in testosterone as the original Trek may be, it shows that, even in the distant future, humanity still has room left to grow.

Side note: This installment’s stretch also included the two-parter “The Menagerie,” which uses footage from the scrapped pilot “The Cage” to flesh out the series’ internal history, presenting Captain Christopher Pike’s tale as evidence in a trial against a mutinous Mr. Spock. This was an impressively forward-thinking move on the producers’ part; they took what could have been a clip show and transformed it into a key element in Trek’s canon. How Spock managed to obtain footage from visions that take place entirely in Pike’s brain is up for question, but hey - it’s the future.

Notable upcoming episodes: “Balance of Terror,” “Arena,” “Space Seed.”