Hollywood Utopia

Trek served to legitimise this otherwise outdated and politically incorrect myth.
Aliens can more easily be accommodated as the other within science fiction culture
and concurrently help to reinvigorate these myths, while not having to conform to
the particularities of the earth’s socio-political systems. Explicit threats to the
earth’s fragile eco-systems as a consequence of alien life-forces remain a constant
thematic preoccupation throughout the series’ history.
The central experience of space travel in Star Trek is dramatised by encounters
between humans and non-humans. This encounter (‘first contact’) is framed by a
liberal egalitarian humanism, which sought to offset the imperialist polarisation
between cultures as evidenced throughout the history of the West in particular.
Driven by a form of countercultural utopianism, Gene Roddenberry, the creator of
the series, invented the key philosophical and narrative device of the ‘Prime
Directive’ because he wanted the (western) Federation to act as a corrective to the
‘bloody history of (imperial) exploration’ (Richards 1997: 13). This Directive is
considered to be the highest moral authority and is defined as the sacred right of
every sentient species to live in accordance with its normal evolutionary pattern.
This Prime Directive 13 can be contrasted with the more altruistic and less homocentric
notion of an ‘Ecological Directive’.
Yet according to Karin Blair, the original television series corresponds with the
national disgust for the old ethics that demanded destruction of the evil alien in
Vietnam and also left America without a viable concept of hero. Star Trek responds
to the need for such an ideal; the character of Kirk overlaps with the dedicated man
of action, the traditional ship’s captain, while at the same time adding something
new. He is at home with his emotions . . . Within the Enterprise we have a new model
for a human garden where work, knowledge and change contribute to the civilisation
of human nature . . . the trajectory of the Enterprise is not towards destruction but
creation, it is not a fall but a flight . . . the sought after garden is no longer ‘out there’
in nature . . . but inside the human mind and its conscious construction. As Gene
Roddenberry, the original creator of the series, asserts, we as travellers need . . . to
fully experience the trip. We are all aliens and as such ‘are part of each other and of
everything that is’
(Roddenberry cited by Blair in Newcombe et al. 1982: 183-97).
Roddenberry’s apparently egotistical evocation of the personal ‘trip’ is signalled in
my reading of Contact but I would argue that Star Trek helped to move beyond this
egotistical fixation by counterbalancing human agency with other forms of sentient
beings. The protagonists in the original Star Trek series with its international cast
and crew always appeared to assert their individuality (and humanity).
Nevertheless, they also endorsed the implicit hierarchical power structure under
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