Star Trek: The Original Series Season 1

 

My sister and I talk about season 1 of Star Trek: The Original Series. We are currently watching all of Star Trek and are going to make a video for each season as we watch. The video talks about all of this but here are some key points:

Rampant Sexism: Women are consistently talked down to, interrupted, or otherwise dismissed as not as smart or important as men. Women are usually Yeomen, basically glorified secretaries. And if they're not Yeomen they're psychiatrists because of the stereotype that women are overly emotional. The worst offender is actually The Cage: Pike can't handle having women on the bridge despite his first officer being a woman. Apparently his first officer is secretly into him. And the whole focus of the episode is how Pike needs to pick a woman to mate with. In the cage there's also a trope that women's value is in them being beautiful. There's a dramatic "twist" that the woman was actually UGLY all along, GASP! This is repeated in a couple other episodes: Mudd's Womej and The Man Trap. The miniskirts and the "Where no 'MAN' has gone before" are merely symptoms of the disease here. And the miniskirts are part of the immature sexuality Trek has traditionally had towards women. After this every show, except ds9, has a woman in a skin tight suit too. Obviously sexism is absolutely rampant in the 60s when this was made, but that's not really an excuse when you're trying to make an egalitarian utopian future society and also:

Avoiding being racist: The show tries very hard to avoid being racist, despite the abaolhtely rampant racism of the 60s. Which is a fantastic contrast to the sexism. Presumably Roddenberry didn't even realize he was being sexist as he was consciously trying to avoid racism. Nobody is sexist towards Uhura, surprisingly. She's treated as another man would be treated. Because they didn't want to show prejudice towards black people. There's even a scene where someone is being speciest towards Spock and Kirk says there's no room for that bigotry on his ship.

Pull Yourself up by Your Bootstraps: This show has a very American conservative ideology in that it says that freedom is at odds with having your wants and needs fulfilled. You have to work to be free. Working is freedom. Freedom requires evil consequences. Very Orwellian. Very much capitalist propaganda. Of course in reality, having your needs fulfilled is the ultimate freedom. The freedom to not die needlessly from homelessness, starvation, or lack of access to healthcare. This is kind of a whole genre of episode, it's done a few times throughout the show. The one that is probably the grossest form of this trope is when Kirk is torn into two people. The evil half sexually assaults Rand and the episode tries to say that you need the evil half to make choices. It just makes me feel gross. It's all very much at odds with the utilitarian, fully automated luxury space communism from tng on. If you want to go be a painter, go for it. If you want to join Starfleet, awesome whatever. If you want to bake food and give it to people, go for it. There's no money, there's no class, there's no requirement to work or you die. You can do whatever you want, it's fine. The Original Series doesn't have that. There is money in this society and you do need it to survive. Here work is freedom and without it you're a lesser human. The ability to chose is evil, and without your evil side you are lesser. Gross. Examples of this ideology include: The Enemy Within, Dagger of the Mind, The Return of the Archons, and This Side of Paradise. Which is particularly gross when Spock said it was the one time he truly happy. Which Kirk takes away from him. In the context of the episode it makes sense because of the radiation on the planet, but ideologically it's gross.

Yeoman Rand: Rand had a very sad story. She was meant to be a main character who was going to be in a romance with Kirk. A "having a romance with your secretary" story is kind of sexist, but at least we would have had another main female character. However, she was sexually assaulted by a desilu executive, leading to her being ousted from the show. This is according to her memory alpha page.

Best Episodes:

Court Marial- The episode starts out with the admiralty wanting to cover up Kirk's alleged crimes which is fantastic. It never even occurred to me that this show would bring this kind of thing up. The leadership of the army or any organization trying to cover something up to cover themselves. The episode itself is very engaging though and the twist is surprisingly good. The backstory of an ensign telling on his superior officer and then getting promoted over them is something that absolutely can and has happened many times in the real world I'm sure.

The City on the Edge of Forever- We all know why this episode is one of the best Star Trek episodes ever made. This story is gripping about this fantastic woman. Weirdly for tos, a woman is given a character of her own that isn't just serving as a tool for a man. And she's a fantastic person. Ahead of her time as a peace activist who believes in the true ideals of the next generation federation: peaceful cooperation, freedom, and lack of want. She runs a soup kitchen for the homeless in the middle of the great depression in New York. Kirk isn't even sexist towards her. She had agency as a human being too. It's so tragic that she has to die to keep the Nazis from winning. The US had a big peace movement in reality at the time, but a lot of it was because people actually supported the Nazis. A lot of Nazi ideas came from America after all. Eugenics was an American idea and Hitler loved American segregation. But Edith isn't a pro-Nazi America First type. She believes in peace for the right reasons. But unfortunately, WW2 was the only time in American history where the US were the good guys. Killing fascists was the only time a war was justified. And even then, the US still did the unthinkable evil of destroying two cities with the atomic bombs. Edith would have been right for any other time of American history, but Im sure the writers were thinking of Vietnam since that's what was the major issue at the time.

Worst Episodes:

The Cage- The Cage is someone's, presumably Roddenberry's sexual fantasy. And it's just as disgusting as that implies. It's a man being pulled down into this zoo to act as the progenitor of a new human race. With a woman who is super into him. As are all women in this episode, super into him. Even his woman first officer. Even though once he "rejects" the first woman, there was no reason to keep using him. Because he was the ideal for the first woman. And he's super concerned with the woman's age and beauty when it's revealed she's actually ugly. It's just a shitshow of an episode.

The Galileo Seven- This one has a crashed shuttle in which Spock tries to get the shuttle going and rescue everyone off the asteroid. Only everyone, except Scotty, is constantly at his throat for no reason. He's used here as a strawman of logic, something they can tear down to be pro-emotion. They even want to hold a funeral for someone who died while there's a time sensitive mission going on. It's very dumb. Starfleet officers don't act like this. Not even Janeway or Archer's crews would have acted like this. When they're trapped on an asteroid that's when they need to fall in line and obey their commanding officer to get them off the asteroid. Like Scotty, who just does the job. Not constantly drag him at every opportunity.

Overall, it's definitely not very good. It's ideologically opposed to everything I know and love about Star Trek and is just unpleasantly, blatantly sexist. There's two more seasons left, though. And the movies to get through. So I will report back for those later.