Hank Parnell doesn’t think very highly of the original Star Trek.
Reason and logic were almost always ridiculed on Star Trek. Almost always. Ever notice that? Emotion, passion, “faith” were always extolled; reason and logic shown to be empty, inadequate, and worthy only of derision and mockery.
I found that offensive then, as a boy, and I find it even more so now, as a man. We humans need not fear losing our emotions. Show me an animal that doesn’t feel, and I’ll show you a dead animal. It’s logic and reason we have in very short and apparently extremely limited supply; hence this exhortation to passion over reason always seems to me perverse, and self-flagellant, to say nothing of supremely delusional and suicidal.
But I’ll confess, there are a couple of episodes I like.
One is called “A Taste of Armageddon,” by writer Robert Hamner. This is a very clever show about two planets locked in a 500-year war which they fight “virtually,” using computers? and march their casualties off to suicide stations! This is a wonderfully novel idea, and just the sort of stupid, delusional thing you could actually see human beings convincing themselves to do at some future date, for the very reasons expounded in the show: to “preserve” civilization, to deal with our “killer instincts” rationally. (Rationally, you would think that if you had killer instincts, and you found them appalling and self-destructive, you would try to thwart them somehow, not exercise them in a vain and pointless manner; but then, I often wonder if what I mean by “rationality” is a completely different thing from what others mean. Others seem to think rationality means only the ability to rationalize?that is, to use “reason” in the service, or rather self-service, of the emotions, which is hardly the “superior” position!)
Kirk, of course, puts an end to this nonsense, and in a fashion I approve of? by blowing up their suicide stations and their computers, leaving them open to the real thing. And there is also that truly wonderful business of “General Order 24,” which Kirk gives Scotty at one point, and which essentially means, “Wipe the bastards out!” I often wonder how that little apocalyptic directive “fit in” with the later almighty and sacrosanct “Prime Directive”, which Kirk’s gutless, emasculated successor, Little Man Picard, the Cosmic Social-Worker, couldn’t bring himself to violate on a technicality.
And there is in this episode a genuine message, which is that war is a serious business that should never be undertaken lightly; effete, bloodless civilized guys should leave it to savage hot-blooded barbarians like James Tiberius Kirk?who nonetheless always managed to be enough of a man to avoid making it, whenever and wherever he could. Kirk may’ve been a jerk, as I called him in those youthful parodies; but he was at least a man, not a bloodless corpse like Jean-Luc Picard, who was stuffed so full of his own phony self-righteousness that the rotten reek would’ve gagged the viewer, had we been able to smell him.