Hollywood Utopia

158 Hollywood Utopia
the command of the ‘waspish’ Captain Kirk. Sitting in his control chair, it is
ultimately Kirk who determines the course of action, in spite of apparently paying
lip service to a progressive form of consensual leadership. 14
Furthermore, Captain Kirk and his original crew from the first 1960s television
series seldom had any self-doubts that they were ethically correct, whereas Jean
Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart, an experienced Shakespearean actor) in a
later 1980s version The Next Generation (TNG) and the rest of his crew are full of
ethical and ideological doubts. TNG is set 78 years after the original mission which
ran for seven series before transmuting into a series of big budget films from 1994
onwards (Fulton 1995: 453). This new series even elevated psychology ‘to the status
of a hard science by bringing a counsellor to the bridge to join other specialists’
(Harrison et al. 1996: 1) and moved a long way away from the cosy liberal
individualism of its roots.
In one television episode, which correlated with the back story for First Contact,
which is discussed later, Picard was captured and made part of the archenemy, the
Borg. While his capture helps him understand their tactics, its effects also
compromise his objectivity. This is particularly significant for human ethics, as
Leslie Felperin suggests in a review in Sight and Sound: ‘Piece by piece the
difference between the Borg, whose drones are dispensable, and the federation
fighters who will sacrifice their lives for their own philosophy of self-determination
become less distinct’ (Felperin 1997: 49). This continuous preoccupation with the
opposition between human and non-human nature becomes the focus for an
ecological reading of this very influential series, which has remained popular since
the 1960s.
Post-Human Othernes
The central embodiments of (post)modernist ‘otherness’ in Star Trek include
Spock in the original and Data in TNG. Both characters must continually struggle
against human prejudice and the dismissal of their ‘exotic’ nature. They are
quintessential representatives of the other 15 whose lack of human emotion is a
cause of alienation (Harrison et al. 1996: 96). While they remain the most logical
and overtly rational characters in the series, they also pose the most contradictory,
yet pertinent philosophical questions concerning the nature of the universe and the
human role within such a system (Richards 1997: 184).
Roddenberry’s vision of the United Federation of Planets remains a vision of
rational social progress based on a western model - even if overtly racist, as
suggested by Daniel Leonard Bernardi in his book Star Trek and History: Race-ing
towards a White Future (1998). In the mythic future world view of Star Trek 16 ,
‘humanity has straightened itself out and created a functioning galactic democracy’