DOVE TALE

Again and again I find myself sheepishly admitting that Star Trek, as in the original series, is my all-time favorite TV show. It's a little embarrassing to acknowledge that, north of sixty years old, I keep going back for comfort and refreshment to the corny sci-fi show that I loved as a kid.

Worse yet, for all the show's sophomoric heavy-handedness and cultural chauvinism and ludicrous science and inconsistently applied social values, I keep finding relevance, even prescience in it.

For instance, this past weekend I watched the third-season episode, scripted by the redoubtable Jerome Bixby (also author of the story that became the Twilight Zone favorite "It's a Good Life"), called "Day of the Dove..."

You may remember it: Both the Enterprise and a crew of Klingons arrive at a planet, lured there under false pretenses by a powerful incorporeal alien Entity. Through a variety of mind tricks and matter transmutation, the Entity gets the Federation crew and the Klingons trapped together aboard the Enterprise, which is hurtling out of control on course to leave the galaxy.

Onboard, the factions are allowed their own turf, armed with swords--Scotty admires "a Claymore..."

...and psychically aroused to furious hatred toward their adversaries and even toward each other. They soon discover that the conflict between them is self-renewing; their wounds heal miraculously and the Entity allows neither side complete victory.

As a kid, I always thought it was a pretty cool episode. It had plenty of action, including swordfights, and the coolest and most badass of all the original series Klingons, Kang, played by the rumbly-voiced Michael Ansara...

...towering over Shatner...

It was also the only glimpse we ever got, in the original series, of Klingon women, notably Susan Howard as Kang's wife and science officer Mara...

In the course of the show Chekov, under the Entity's evil influence, attempts to violate Mara, although it looks like she could smack his little ass across the corridor with one hand.

Along with Chekov, Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura all get to work themselves up into highly entertaining angry lathers in this one. Shatner's in particularly hilarious, wound-up form here: "Look at me...Look. At. Me." And there's the great moment when the hysterical Scotty, responding to Spock's attempt to calm him, says "Keep your Vulcan hands off me," but it sounds like he said "Keep your f**kin' hands off me."

But watching it the other night, it occurred to me that this episode seems unusually relevant these days. I noticed this a few years ago about the second-season episode "The Omega Glory" as well. The theme, about the dangers of fetishizing and theocratizing America's foundational documents and other objects of patriotic regard like the flag, seems like a pedestrian, basic civics lesson. But it turns out that our society needs to be reminded of it regularly.

Similarly, with "Day of the Dove," the message might seem, at a glance, like the usual honorable but ineffectual Star Trek platitudes about the horrors of war and the bondage of bigotry and the liberating virtue of tolerance. But now, in light of the revelations from the Dominion lawsuit, it has a strikingly specific subtext. Because, of course, the reason the invading Entity is attempting to create this hellish eternal conflict on the Enterprise is that it feeds on violent hatreds, turning from yellowish-white to a happy shade of red...

...when it sucks up some delicious fury.

It creates false narratives in people's minds to stir up their bloodlust--Chekov claims his brother was killed by the Klingons; Sulu later explains that the brother is imaginary, as Chekov is an only child--and feeds both sides with propaganda to gin up enmity. Essentially, the Entity is a farmer, planting outrage so that it can harvest rage. 

In other words, the Entity is Fox News, and the "news" media machine of which Fox News is the most successful and egregious example. I mean, isn't it, kind of?

In this context, some of Bixby's lines take on an extra resonance, as when Kirk speculates "Has a war been staged for us, complete with weapons and ideology and patriotic drum beating? Even...Spock...even race hatred?"

Or, when Kirk says "It exists on the hate of others," and Spock replies "To put it simply. And it has acted as a catalyst, creating this situation in order to satisfy that need."

Or, again, Kirk's desperate appeal to Kang, in the climactic minutes: "...and it goes on, the good old game of war, pawn against pawn! Stopping the bad guys. While somewhere, something sits back, and laughs, and starts it all over again."

In the end, Kang is persuaded, a truce is ordered, and the weakened Entity is chased off the Enterprise to hearty laughter from both sides...

Kang slaps Kirk on the back and for a second it looks like Kirk is going to pass out. A lovely moment; I would highly recommend it for our nation right now. But as the Entity goes flittering off the ship into space, it's all too easy to imagine it scurrying down to some TV "News" Network on some unsuspecting planet.

BACK TO THE GRINDSTAFF

Last week we paid tribute to the late Douglas Grindstaff, the brilliantly imaginative sound effects man whose contribution to the atmosphere of the original Star Trek would be hard to overstate. But I think Grindstaff deserves at least one more monster, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's acknowledge the "neural parasite" that attacks poor Spock in the second-season episode "Operation--Annihilate!"

In one interview I found, Grindstaff claimed that he produced the creature's icky sounds by using samples of kissing.

While we're on the subject of Star Trek, check out...Quentin Tarantino's Star Trek!

SPOCK FEAT

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Leonard Nimoy. In his honor, Your Humble Narrator wrote this short “fan fiction” parody/tribute to Mr. Spock for New Times blogs.

This weekend I also crossed a long-coveted title off of my sci-fi bucket list: Courtesy of the one-of-kind Friday movie nights of a film historian pal, I got to see, projected from an actual celluloid print no less, the 1930 sci-fi musical comedy Just Imagine.

Set in the far-off date of 1980, when people have numbers instead of names and commute in little airplanes instead of cars, this lavish tale of romance and a trip to Mars is probably best known for supplying futuristic stock footage to sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. It’s pretty corny and not exactly crisply paced, but it looks great, has some slightly risqué or otherwise topical pre-Code gags, and a likable cast led by El Brendel as a funny Swede who’s been revived from fifty years earlier. It also has some good songs, the best being “The Drinking Song” and “Never Swat a Fly.”

MOURNING RAND

In honor of the DVD release this week of the submarine thriller Black Sea, check out my list, on Topless Robot, of Nerdy Submarine Adventures.

RIP to the lovely Grace Lee Whitney, passed on at 85.

Whitney was in movies like Some Like it Hot and Irma La Douce, but will almost certainly be most remembered as Yeoman Janice Rand in the first few episodes of Star Trek. I had the good luck to interview her on my KTAR radio show back in 1998, and I’m proud to say that she gave me the copy of her autobiography, The Longest Trek—much of it focused on her struggle with alcoholism—now on my bookshelf (the foreward, by the way, is by her friend Leonard Nimoy).

Anyway, in her honor…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to the “M-113 Creature,” a vampire who sucks the salt out of people instead of the blood, and who can shape-shift into other people’s forms… 

 

…in the first-season episode “The Man Trap” (the first Star Trek episode ever aired). The M-113 Creature, disguised as a previously desalinated crewman, stalks Yeoman Rand as she dawdles along with a tray of food, leering at her salt shaker.

GORN TO BE WILD

OK, one more Star Trek monster (for a while, that is)…

Monster-of-the-Week: …a returning favorite, just because he’s March’s calendar image: the Gorn Captain from the original series episode “Arena.”

I also have this bobblehead on my desk...

…who always provides me, in return for a tap on the head, with plenty of validation.

TRIPLEHEADER

In memory of Leonard Nimoy…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree is the giant three-headed snake that Mr. Spock, with oddly un-Vulcan-like aggression, zaps with his phaser in the 1972 Aurora model—the very first Star Trek “character” kit. The box art was exceedingly cool...

…but the paint job I gave this kit back in the ‘70s ruined it, as my abject manual skills ruined most of my beloved models back in those days.

The Spock kit has been reissued recently, and my pal Stan kindly sent it to me for Christmas, but I’m afraid to attempt it—I doubt my painting skills have significantly improved since I was 11.

SPOCK OUT

A few days ago, when I first heard that Leonard Nimoy had gone to the hospital with heart trouble, I was wearing his face on my t-shirt. The shirt, bright red with Nimoy as a jowlier, heavier-featured late-vintage Mr. Spock—he always reminds me of Jackie Mason in that picture—holding up his split-fingered Vulcan salute next to the inevitable well-wish “LIVE LONG AND PROSPER,” was a gift from The Wife and The Kid. There are days when I suppose I might be a little embarrassed to admit that, at the age of fifty-two, I still sometimes wear Star Trek t-shirts.

This is not one of those days.

I’ve been a Star Trek fan for the vast majority of my life. I can dimly remember the show’s original run, but it was a few years later, when it ran in syndication in the very early ‘70s, that it became one of the fanatical enthusiasms of my childhood. And it appears that the original Star Trek is something I’m not likely to ever outgrow. I still watch it, still notice new aspects of the episodes—often new absurdities and illogicalities—and take comfort and refreshment from it. I recognize the validity of every criticism that could be leveled against Gene Roddenberry’s silly space opera—the cultural chauvinism, the jocularity, the often preposterous science, the inconsistent social values—and I say there’s something about the show, some core of decency and good-will and gallantry, that transcends all of it and makes it mythic.

Spock was one of the main reasons for this. Nimoy, who passed on today at 83, had a fairly rich career as an actor before Spock, and very rich career as an actor and a director after Spock. But it is, of course, as Spock that he’ll be most remembered—a supposedly emotionless native of the planet Vulcan, though plagued by emotional flare-ups from his maternal human half, cool, curious, expansively knowledgeable, quietly ironic. Spock was my childhood role model, and though I have never succeeded in emulating him—I’m far closer, alas, to the irascible and sentimental Dr. McCoy—I’m still extremely grateful for the influence.

We were, of course, always meant to see that Spock’s lack of emotion was a pose—that he was more compassionate, and in his way possibly even more passionate, than any of the other characters. His cerebral rationality, sometimes mistaken for callousness, was really in service of a bottomless, if sometimes bemused, sympathy for the wound-up humans around him.

When I say that Star Trek in general and Spock in particular were major and lifelong influences on me, I mean it without condescension—my gratitude is serious. But one of the reasons that Spock was able to influence so many people of my generation is that Nimoy wasn’t that serious. Like many members of that cast, he was a little sheepish about his identification with the character, to the point that he titled his first memoir I Am Not Spock. He later made enough peace with the role—finally getting some serious financial reward for it probably helped—that the sequel was titled I Am Spock.

All of those actors were essential to the show’s unique alchemy, but the original Star Trek would have been an especially dreary affair without Nimoy’s droll sensibility. I was watching Star Trek just last weekend, before I heard about Nimoy’s illness, and had been thinking how truly good he was, how much wry deadpan comedy he was able to bring to the show (“Sir, there is a multi-legged creature crawling on your shoulder.”).

The actor’s slyness fed into the character’s—I remember hearing Nimoy, in various interviews, explain that he came up with Spock’s handy nerve pinch so that he could avoid the strenuous fight scenes that William Shatner so often had to engage in, and how Spock had borrowed the Vulcan hand gesture from rabbis at the Orthodox services of his Boston youth. In short, like many hero figures, he—and Kirk and McCoy and the rest, each in their own way—made heroism look like fun. Spock’s upraised eyebrow may ultimately prove as iconic as Groucho’s brow-wiggle.

I had hoped to meet or see all the members of the original Star Trek cast before they headed off to the Undiscovered Country, and so far I haven’t done too badly—I saw Shatner in a play in Ohio in the ‘70s, and in the decades that followed I interviewed DeForest Kelley and Walter Koenig and Grace Lee Whitney, and got an autograph from James Doohan. I haven’t yet caught up with George Takei and Nichelle Nichols, and now Nimoy (along with Majel Barrett) has slipped away from me. No doubt Mr. Spock would tell me that it’s highly illogical to feel sad about this, but I do. No matter though—Nimoy lived long, and prospered, and will live on in many of our memories.