One and only one person can give steering and engine orders at any one time....The commanding officer may take over the deck or the conn...In taking the conn from the officer of the deck, the captain should do so in such a manner that all personnel of the bridge watch will be notified of the fact.Watch Officer's Guide, A Handbook for all Deck Watch Officers, Revised by K.C. Jacobsen, Commander, U.S. Navy, 11th Edition [Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 1981, pp. 68-69]
I have always liked Star Trek. I watched the original show in the 60's, waited eagerly for the first movie in the 70's, and then later in the 80's got hooked all over again on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It has been good television, good science fiction, and occasionally even good film. Some things, nevertheless, have driven me crazy: (1) Picard and Riker both giving commands, in tandem, on the bridge is absurd. One person has the conn or has the deck on a ship, and it is dangerous to have any confusion about that (see quote above). As Executive Officer, Riker wouldn't even be on the bridge in ordinary circumstances. (2) There doesn't seem to be anything like a regular watch on the bridge. In one show a big point is made that only a full commander can have bridge command, but nothing is more common on the show than to have scenes where all the senior officers of the ship are in some conference or other, leaving who knows who directing the ship on the bridge -- unless there are full commanders who aren't part of the regular cast. The writers don't seem to know what naval lieutenants are for -- to be the officers of the deck. And (3) Star Trek has never known what admirals are for. The first Star Trek movie has a farcical conflict over whether Admiral Kirk or the newly assigned captain will assume command of the Enterprise. One wonders what Horatio Nelson and Captain Hardy were both doing on the HMS Victory. Later, Star Trek: The Next Generation refers to the Enterprise as the "flag ship" of Star Fleet, without apparently realizing that a flag ship is a ship with a "flag," i.e. a flag officer, an admiral. A Star Trek admiral seems to be some kind of shore officer.
These absurdities, however, can be easily forgiven. Less easily forgiven or forgotten are the more troubling messages about the nature of the future, the nature of society, and even the nature of reality. Star Trek typically reflects certain political, social, and metaphysical views, and on close examination they are not worthy of the kind of tribute that is often paid to Star Trek as representing an edifying vision of things.
In a 1996 newspaper column, James P. Pinkerton, discussing the new Star Trek movie (the eighth), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), quotes Captain Picard saying how things have changed in his day, "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force; we work to better humanity." Perhaps Picard never stopped to reflect that greater wealth means greater material well being, which is to the betterment of humanity much more than any empty rhetoric. But this is typical of Star Trek. A first season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called "The Neutral Zone," has Picard getting up on his high horse with a three hundred year old businessman who is revived from suspended animation: The businessman, naturally, wants to get in touch with his agents to find out what has happened to his investments. Picard loftily informs him that such things don't exist anymore. Indeed, poverty and want have been abolished, but how this was accomplished is never explained. All we know is, that however it is that people make a living, it isn't through capitalism as we know it. Stocks, corporations, banking, bonds, letters of credit -- all these things seem to have disappeared. We never see Picard, or anyone else, reviewing his investment portfolio. And those who still have a lowly interest in buying and selling, like the Ferengi, are not only essentially thieves, but ultimately only accept payment in precious commodities. In the bold new future of cosmic civilization, galactic trade is carried on in little better than a Phoenician style of barter, despite the possibilities of pan-galactic banking and super-light speed money transfers made possible by "sub-space" communications.
Too much of Star Trek has always reflected trendy leftist political sentiments. It was appropriate that John Lennon's "Imagine" should have been sung at the 30th Anniversary television special: Capitalism and religion get little more respect from Star Trek than they do from Lennon. Profit simply cannot be mentioned without a sneer. The champions of profit, the Ferengi, not only perceive no difference between honest business, piracy, and swindle, but their very name, the Hindi word for "European" (from Persian Farangi), seems to be a covert rebuke to European civilization. At the same time, one can find little in the way of acknowledgement of the role of religion in life that, whether in India or in Europe, would be essential. Although exotic extraterrestrials, like the Klingons and Bajorans, have quaint religious beliefs and practices, absolutely nothing seems to be left of the historic religions of Earth: There are no Jews, no Christians, no Moslems, no Buddhists, no Hindus, no Jains, no Confucians, and no Sikhs, or anything else, on any starship or settlement in the Federation. (Star Trek is, not to put too fine a point on it, what the Nazis called "Judenfrei," free of Jews [note], a condition that Marx also anticipated with the death of Capitalism -- though Leonard Nimoy did introduce, subversively, the hand sign of the Hebrew letter "shin" to signify the Trek benediction, "Live long and prosper.") With no practitioners, there are no chaplains for the crew -- no ministers, no priests, no rabbis, no mullas, no brahmins, no monks, no nuns. The closest thing to religious advice is the tedious psycho-babble of counselor Troi. The absence of traditional human religions stands in stark contrast to the more recent, shortlived science ficiton series, Firefly.
Why there is this conspicuous absence of religion is made plain in a third season Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called "Who Watches the Watchers?" It concerns a planet of people who are still at only a pre-industrial level of development but who are related to the Vulcans and, presumably because of this, are so intellectually advanced that they long ago ceased to believe in anything so absurd as a God (so some races are just smarter than others?(!?) -- sounds like some kind of racism). Because a Federation observing post and its advanced technology is inadvertently revealed, one of the natives mistakenly takes Captain Picard to himself be the God of ancient belief. He spreads the word among his people. The rest of the episode is then taken up with how this folly can be undone without otherwise distorting the natural development of the natives. In the end, they realize that Picard is not God, and they continue on their previous path of atheistic wisdom.
Such a story is so blatantly hostile to theistic religion, that it is astonishing that it provoked neither comment nor protest. Perhaps the messages contained in science fiction television are simply not noticed. Movies have a somewhat higher profile and, indeed, the futile quest for God in the fifth Star Trek movie, The Final Frontier, provoked the comment from Michael Medved, a political conservative and devout Jew, that it was the same old "secular humanism." Even the aforementioned religious beliefs and practices of the Klingons and Bajorans seem to consist of little more than ritual and mythology, and one is left with the impression that respect for such things is motivated more by cultural relativism than by a sense that they might contain religious truths of interest to others. The Star Trek universe is one without religious truths -- where the occasional disembodied spirit can be explained away with talk about "energy" or "subspace."
If daily life is not concerned with familiar economic activities and the whole of life is not informed with religious purposes, then what is life all about in Star Trek? Well, the story is about a military establishment, Star Fleet, and one ship in particular in the fleet, the Enterprise. One might not expect this to provide much of a picture of ordinary civilian life; and it doesn't. One never sees much on Earth apart from the Star Fleet Academy and Picard's family farm in France -- unless of course we include Earth's past, where the Enterprise spends much more time than on the contemporaneous Earth. Since economic life as we know it is presumed not to exist in the future, it would certainly pose a challenge to try and represent how life is conducted and how, for instance, artifacts like the Enterprise get ordered, financed, and constructed. And if it is to be represented that things like "finance" don't exist, one wonders if any of the Trek writers or producers know little details about Earth history like when 
Lenin wanted to get along without money and accounting and discovered that Russia's economy was collapsing on him. Marx's prescription for an economy without the cash nexus was quickly abandoned and never revived. Nevertheless, Marx's dream and Lenin's disastrous experiment is presented as the noble and glorious future in Star Trek: First Contact, where Jean Luc Picard actually says, "Money doesn't exist in the Twenty-Fourth Century."
So what one is left with in Star Trek is military life. Trying to soften this by including families and recreation on the Enterprise in fact makes the impression worse, since to the extent that such a life is ordinary and permanent for its members, it is all the easier to imagine that all life in the Federation is of this sort. Not just a military, but a militarism. In the show, this actually didn't work out very well. In the beginning, Star Trek: The Next Generation wanted to remind us of the daily life, children in school, etc. on board; and more than once the "battle hull" of the ship was separated from the "saucer" so that the civilian component of the crew would be safe from hostile action. This cumbersome expedient, however, was soon enough forgotten; and we later forget, as the Enterprise finds itself in desperate exchanges with hostile forces, that small children are undergoing the same battle damage that we see inflicted on the bridge -- unless of course it is brought to our attention because there is a story with a special focus on a child, as with Lieutenant Worf's son. In Star Trek: First Contact, crew members are being captured and turned into Borg. Does that include the children? We never see any. Do Picard's orders to shoot any Borg include Borg who were human children? This disturbing situation is completely ignored by the movie. Star Trek, therefore, cannot maintain its fiction that military life on a major warship will be friendly to families and children.
In the 20th Century there has been a conspicuous political ideology that combines militarism, the subordination of private economic activity to collective social purposes, and often the disparagement of traditional religious beliefs and scruples: Fascism, and not the conservative Fascism of Mussolini and Franco, who made their peace with the Church and drew some limits about some things (Franco even helped Jews escape from occupied France), but the unlimited "revolutionary," Nihilistic Fascism of Hitler, which recoiled from no crime and recognized no demands of conscience or God above the gods of the Führer and the Volk. Certainly the participants in all the forms of Star Trek, writers, staff, producers, actors, fans, etc., would be horrified, insulted, and outraged to be associated with a murderous and discredited ideology like Fascism; but I have already noted in these pages how naive philosophers and critics have thoughtlessly adopted the philosophical foundations of Fascism from people like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger to what they think are "progressive" causes in the present day.
This danger has come with the corruption of the idea of "progress" away from individualism, the rule of law, private property, and voluntary exchanges -- in short the characteristics of capitalism and the free market -- into collectivist, politicized, and ultimately totalitarian directions. Star Trek well illustrates the confusion, ignorance, and self-deception that are inherent in this process. Dreams of Utopia have turned to horror in this century so often, but the same dreams continue to be promoted just because they continue to sound good to the uninformed. As Thomas Sowell recent wrote about the determination of many to find Alger Hiss innocent of espionage, regardless of the evidence:
Hiss is dead but the lies surrounding his case linger on. So do the attitudes that seek a cheap sense of superiority by denigrating this country and picturing some foreign hell hole as a Utopia.
Star Trek has a Utopia to picture, or at least a world free of many of the ills perceived in the present, but it doesn't have to deal with anything so inconvenient as the experience of history. Star Trek is free to disparage business and profit without the need to explain what would replace them. Star Trek is free to disparage religious belief and ignore traditional religions without the need to address the existential mysteries and tragedies of real life in ways that have actually meant something to the vast majority of human beings. And it is particularly interesting that Star Trek is free to do all this with the convenience of assimilating everything to the forms of military life, where collective purpose and authority are taken for granted. Captain Picard does indeed end up rather like God, come to think of it.
Note that this discussion is based on aired episodes and movies, mainly those of the original series and of Star Trek: the Next Generation. Other materials that have been published or posted for Star Trek enthusiasts may address some issues, like whether there are always children on the Enterprise, but it is the message presented on the screen, whether on television or in the theater, seen by most casually interested viewers, that I am addressing.
Several correspondents have pointed out how the Enterprise of Star Trek: the Next Generation was destroyed in one of the movies and that the next ship was not built to contain families and children. Two points about that: (1) the movie was made after the entire series was over, so the idea of removing the families and children comes a little late to be taken too seriously; and (2) the idea that the next Enterprise to be constructed doesn't contain families or children isn't actually stated in subsequent movies but has been added in the external lore that has accumulated around the series. This can hardly be taken too seriously either. It is certainly a half-hearted response to criticisms like those voiced here. Other correspondents simply don't like capitalism and write, not to defend Star Trek against charges of being anti-capitalist, but to defend it for admittedly being anti-capitalist.
To be fair, science fiction historically has really never portrayed familiar religious practices as surviving into the future. Isaac Asimov treated the situation of the Jews only indirectly by transforming all of the inhabitants of Earth into Jew-like pariahs in Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun.
Star Trek, however, has special problems. A big point is made in the original series, with Scotty and Chekov, that ethnic identities, even ethnic accents, survive into the future. One "oy vay" from a character wouldn't have cost them much. Perhaps this would have been regarded as too ethnic -- reminiscent of the kinds of stereotypes and hostilities that are supposed to be absent in the future. The hostility to religion implicit in traditional science fiction, furthermore, Star Trek ends up making explicit, at least in Star Trek the Next Generation, as detailed in the text. Thus, Star Trek has a little more explaining to do for the people who are missing than most other science fiction.
All of the disturbing characteristics of the Star Trek shows, the militarism, collectivism, anti-capitalism, and atheism, are notably missing from the excellent but shortlived series Firefly.
Firefly only aired on the Fox network for three months at the end of 2002. Fourteen episodes were filmed, including the two hour pilot. Three of the episodes were never aired, and the others were shown out of sequence, even though they contained elements from previous episodes. This must have been confusing as the show was trying to find an audience. The pilot, which introduced all the characters, was shown last, after the series had been cancelled. Despite the cancellation, the shows had found an audience, which rallied in defense of the series. Although it was too late for Fox, the creator of the show, Joss Whedon, used the enthusiasm of the fans to persuade Universal to continue the series as a movie, Unlike the starship Enterprise, a powerful warship of the United Federation of Planets, the ship Serenity is a small, private "Firefly" class transport with no weapons -- except the hand weapons of the crew. The captain and first officer, Malcolm (Nathan Fillion) and Zoe (Gina Torres, the statuesque, sexually smoking, and real life wife of Laurence Fishborne, "Morpheus" of The Matrix), are veterans of the attempt to prevent the vast Alliance of planets from taking over their own worlds. They were fighting with the "Independents," and the ship is named after the battle of Serenity Valley, where the Independents all but lost the war against the Alliance. Now, Malcolm, Zoe, and the rest of crew eek out a living with small shipping jobs, smuggling, and theft under the unwelcome eye of Alliance cruisers and "fed" policemen. In the pilot, they also take aboard two fugitives from the law, a brother and sister, Simon (Sean Maher) and River (Summer Glau). Simon is a physican who rescued River from an Alliance "academy" where sinister police-state men with "hands of blue" were modifying her brain to turn her into a psychic and a "Manchurian candidate"-like assassin. This initially left her in a state of psychosis, from which she gradually emerges and becomes aware of her psychic abilities and powers of combat -- in the movie she all but becomes Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon's previous TV series).
None of this makes the Alliance look very good. Whedon wants to make it clear, however, that he doesn't think of the Alliance as evil (although the men with "hands of blue" are evil enough for the Third Reich, and the Alliance soldiers wear German-looking helmets, while the helmets of Independants look like WWII American ones), but rather as something perhaps too big for its own good, or the good of its citizens. Indeed, while the Alliance countenances slavery and indentured servitude, Serenity and the crew are as often saved by the inefficiency, indifference, or corruption of the authorities as by any official benevolence or justice. This in itself is all a rebuke to the statist complacency of Star Trek.
In the pilot, Serenity takes on, not only Simon and River, but the Shepherd, i.e. Minister, Book (played by the kind and noble Ron Glass, perhaps best remembered from the Barney Miller TV series). Although the Shepherd expresses his religious views in, usually, a low key way, and the details given of his beliefs are spare, he does have an actual Bible, and once he even seems to make a reference to Jesus, as a carpenter. In the movie, the word "Christian" is even uttered -- though most viewers may not have noticed that the words "Jesus" ( There is frequent use of Chinese in the series, although actual Chinese actors were only, so far, in the background. The name Serenity is written in Chinese characters on the ship as Much of the appeal of Firefly is the ensemble cast. Yes, there is actual money -- the familiar science fiction "credits" -- in Firefly, and bank accounts. There also seems to be hard commodity coinage, in platinum, for the gold bugs out there. The hard money seems to go with the Wild West feel of the newly settled "outer planets."
The very best thing about Firefly, in comparison to Star Trek, is probably that it doesn't try for the slightest bit of Utopianism. It does not assume that a single galactic government would be best, as it does not assume that present religion and capitalist economics are undesirable. This is refreshing, to say the least, but it is also done very well.
The science in Firefly consists of some basic science fiction conceits that generally do not need to be, and are not, explained. Serenity has an artificial gravity that Kaylee references once (in "The Message") and that we only see turned off once, at the beginning of the pilot, when Mal, Zoe, and Jayne float into the airlock and we see the gravity turn on. Otherwise, the artificial gravity still seems to be working even when the ship has lost all power, as in "Out of Gas." Nobody gets "beamed" up here, and while there are energy weapons, these seem to be familiar lasers rather than "phasers." The food is often tasteless synthetic stuff, not everyone's favorite right out of the replicator. What it takes a while to gather is the scale of the universe in which Firefly is set. Despite references to the "'verse" and the galaxy, all the action takes place in one solar system -- and not that of the Earth. This is not completely clarified until the beginning of the movie, where it is stated explicitly. Otherwise it must be inferred, given that there is no "warp drive" or any other reference to faster-than-light travel.
And space is pretty crowded in Firefly. Twice, in the pilot and in "Bushwacked," Serenity is caught in the act at a derelict ship by an Alliance cruiser. This would seem unlikely even in interplanetary space, and certainly impossible in interstellar. Similarly, in "Safe" we discover that an Alliance cruiser is only a few hours away. Nevertheless, Joss Whedon has not paid sufficient attention to how solar systems work. Characters often speak of the "quadrant," a term that is really only meaningful in galactic terms. In a solar system, planets move, and at different rates. The relationship of the planets to each other thus changes constantly, and a trip that might at one time might take a few days under high power might otherwise take weeks or months (all depending on the energy budget of space ships like Serenity, about which we are only vaguely informed). The geometry of space, where it is even shown, usually doesn't make much sense. Thus, in the movie, the Reavers, in a tight mass, block the route to the planet Miranda, even though there would be countless ways, in a very large sky, to just go around them. With "dozens" of planets and "hundreds" of moons, the implication is that this new solar system is much larger than that of "Earth that was." With a "blue sun," i.e. a brighter star, the solar system could be effectively larger, and we certainly have no sense that the "outer" planets are colder or darker than the "central" ones. Whether there can be solar systems with so many terrestrial bodies, in comparison to what we are familiar with, is an open question. A fair number of extra-solar planets have now been identified, but the overall makeup, or frequency, of other solar systems is still a mystery.
An unfortunate notion in the series is that space is dark. We do not see strong sunlight in the ship unless Serenity is visiting a planet (both in the shows and in the movie). However, it should be readily obvious on reflection that planets do not generate sunlight. Stars do. And the "blue sun" is going to be shining on Serenity whether the ship is near a planet or in deep (interplanetary) space. Interstellar space will be dark, but this is not the domain of Firely. Another problem with the science of Firefly is communication. We have no hint of "subspace" communication here, and in interplanetary space there would be no need for that. However, the velocity of light does impose some limits on communication even within a solar system. At almost any extra-planetary distance there will be delays of seconds in transmission (it is a light second from the Earth to the Moon), and more commonly of minutes or hours. This would make real time dialogue from Serenity to system planets awkward to impossible. We get no hint of this. On the other hand, we don't get much in the way of real time dialogue anyway. Malcolm talks to Patience on Whitefall in the pilot, and Malcolm talks to Inara at her "training house" in the movie. There should at least be short delays, if not long ones, in reponses in both cases. Allowing for them, of course, would be bad, for wasting time, both on television and in movies. So perhaps it should be chalked up to poetic license.
The "science" in the "fiction" of Firefly is not very daring and is not intended to be. More so even than in Star Wars, where George Lucas made a point of it, the science tends to be invisible, and we get nothing of the deadly exposition that used to be the bane of science fiction -- and sometimes still is. Instead, as in the best of Star Wars and in the Alien movies, the universe is presented as one lived in and familiar, even if things don't get explained that perhaps should. In Firefly, there is even a bit of joke about this. In "Objects in Space," when Mal suggests that River reads minds, Wash says that this "sounds like science fiction." Zoe responds, "Dear, we live in a space ship."
Firefly,
the anti-Trek
)
Serenity, which was released in 2005. The movie didn't have the greatest box office, but together with the series it lives, of course, on video, where sales have continued to be strong, better than some recent pretigious movies. Hopefully, the continued support of old fans, and the acquisition of new fans, like myself, will allow the story to return to some medium in some form -- just like Star Trek.
) and "Buddha" (
, literally "Buddha Founder") have both been spoken in Chinese during the shows. This is startling stuff in comparison to Star Trek. Captain Malcolm himself has lost his faith, but the Shepherd seems to the working on that. As the shows went along, it began to look as though the Shepherd himself had a military, police, or intelligence background. Unfortunately, one of the decisions made in the movie was to have him be killed, before we had learned all his secrets. He was such a good character, this is disappointing, but it is always possible that, if the story is continued in some form, his history could emerge anyway. That was pretty standard stuff on The X-Files.
, though the Chinese pronunciation is never used. This is the version of the word in the new "simplified" characters. An older form in traditional characters would look like 
, while even more traditional characters would look like 
. Joss Whedon evidently likes the idea that future human culture features both English and Chinese as the universal languages -- though in Firely we also see some evidence of other languages and other cultures surviving as well.
Besides Malcolm, Zoe, Simon, River, and Shepherd, we also have the engineer Kaylee (Jewel Staite), whose own sweetness embodies the persona of Serenity herself as a home for the crew, Jayne (Adam Baldwin), whom Malcolm has picked up as a bit of mercenary muscle, but who isn't always faithful to his crewmates, Wash (Alan Tudyk, recently seen as "Steve the Pirate" in Dodgeball, a True Underdog Story, but who also did the motion capture performance for the robot Sonny in I, Robot), the pilot and unlikely husband of Zoe, and finally Inara (the lovely Morena Baccarin). Again, the decision was made to have Wash be killed in the movie, which is a grave loss if the story is to continue. Inara is actually a courtesan, a "registered Companion," who isn't really a crew member, but who rents one of Serenity's small shuttles to use as her detachable place of business. This seems very un-Trek-like also. Even in the pilot, it is already obvious that Malcolm and Inara have fallen in love with each other, but neither one is quite up to admitting it, and their feelings are often expressed in apparently hostile banter. This a familiar approach in many TV series and movies. It is not a relationship that is likely to be soon resolved, should the story continue, since Malcolm is already uncomfortable with Inara's profession, and she would be unlikely to continue it were they to actually become involved with each other. We get some hints that Inara has some secrets in her own background. At the end of the TV shows, Inara and Malcolm have problems enough that Inara leaves Serenity. By the end of the movie, however, she returns, but matters are not otherwise resolved. On the other hand, the unrequited love category is kept in bounds when Simon and Kaylee, after some false starts, have become lovers at the end of the movie.
Copyright (c) 2006 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved