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Enterprise Ethics
The original 'Star Trek' series dealt with important issues of the day, while the new film is all explosions and action.
May 6, 2009 | Updated: 6:53 p.m. ET May 6, 2009
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Despite whatever robots and aliens roam the landscapes of science fiction, the genre's real subject has always been people. Since "Star Trek" first hit the airwaves in 1966, the show has worked as part of this tradition, using extraterrestrial settings to ask ethical and philosophical questions about the way people behave. In this way, the TV series commented on most of the big issues of the past 40 years: war, sexism, racism, animal rights, the environment, religion, sexuality. (Story continued below...)
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In an episode titled "Plato's Stepchildren," for instance, Captain Kirk tells a slave who's been treated unfairly because of his appearance, "Where I come from, size, shape or color makes no difference." This was in 1968, when the civil-rights movement was still very much battling for equality, and only seven and a half months after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It was also in this episode that Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, played by the actress Nichelle Nichols, who was black, shared television's first (fictional) black-white interracial kiss.
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"[Star Trek] motivated us to think about things that most people either don't think about or take for granted," says Judith Barad, a professor of philosophy at Indiana State University and coauthor of "The Ethics of Star Trek." "I think—and this is why it's lasted—it gave us a vision of hope for the future, a goal that we could all aspire to."
The latest film version of "Star Trek," however, is more brawn than brain, and it largely jettisons complicated ethical conundrums in favor of action sequences and special effects. The film shows the beginnings of the Enterprise crew, tracing how Kirk, Spock and the others came together. All the character quirks are there, and the Enterprise is rendered more realistically than ever, but what's missing are the typically progressive politics and moral dilemmas that made the original "Trek" more than a space-age adventure show and helped earn it legions of ardent fans. Where the series often condemned conflict and advocated forgiveness, the new film depicts a violent and war-torn future, reveling in big explosions and revenge. In one noteworthy scene, an offer of mercy to the villain by the Enterprise crew becomes an apparently pleasurable opportunity for retribution, leading to a screen full of twisting metal and laser fire.
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