Star Trek: The Unfolding Text, Part 2

Last time I examined the first thirty seconds of Star Trek’s premiere, placing this extraordinary example of American television in it’s social, philosophical and historical context.

With this entry I will get to the meat of the series with an in depth chronological analysis.

I’m naming this effort Star Trek: The Unfolding Text as an homage to Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado. By assuming no future knowledge and examining the series in chronological order, Tulloch and Alvarado were able to generate keen new insights into the development of the series over the course of it’s long run in Great Britain. I hope to chart similar territory here, though I hope to be quite a bit more expansive and dare I say it, philosophical.

Kirk, McCoy and Darnell on Planet M-113

Picking up where we left off last time, we find Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy and Crewman Darnell on Planet M-113.

“Our mission,” according to the voice over narration of Captain Kirk by way of William Shatner, “Routine medical examination of archeologist Robert Crater and his wife, Nancy.” Space travel, we learn, is routine. The Enterprise might as well have been a wooden sailing ship bringing supplies and medical attention to an archeologist on Easter Island here on Earth. But the narration by Shatner betrays a defect in the series as well, one which plagued the continuity of Star Trek as seriously as it still baffles society today.

Try as they might to see past it, the state of the world in 1966 still blinded the series creators to many of the possibilities of a truly equal and egalitarian future.

Note that the mission of the Enterprise is to assist “archeologist Robert Crater and his wife, Nancy.” In a typical patriarchal fashion the man has the career and the title, the woman is “his” wife. Would a 1960’s audience have tolerated or even understood the implications of a woman archeologist and “her” husband?

When we meet the Craters, they are both white.

Would a mixed race couple have been acceptable?

Not on network television in 1966. Suppose the series had started out with a line like “archeologist Robert Crater and his husband, Ned.” That would have been impossible.

It’s important to remember that as forward thinking as Star Trek was, it was not presenting the future as it could or would be, it was presenting an idea of the future that was as close to the vision of the creators that could be allowed on television at the time.

Often, perhaps too often, Star Trek would tow the line with safe casting and character choices, for what I believe to be two reason.

The first reason is quite simple.

It would never occur to a writer, working in 1960’s television, to seriously submit a script that dealt with a same-sex couple in a meaningful way. There was no way such a writer could hope to be paid. His script would be instantly rejected. Mixed race couples would be problematic as well. Black actors were just starting to make real inroads on American television. If there were to be a mixed race couple presented on series then chances are the episode would be about mixed race couples on some level.

The series might explore the controversy, but it would be a long time before it would be assumed that there was no controversy.

More problematic in some sense is Nancy Crater’s identification as a wife.

Is she also an archeologist? If so, why doesn’t Kirk identify her as such? She and her husband apparently live all alone among the ruins of this ancient and long dead civilization. This can’t be an easy life for someone who isn’t committed to science and thrill of discovery. Though it is quite possible that Nancy Crater is every bit the archeologist and scientist that her husband is, Kirk’s identification of her as merely Crater’s “wife” reduces her in a sense to no more that Crater’s sexual help mate.

Kirk’s next line hardly helps his case: “Routine but for the fact that Nancy Crater is that one woman in Dr. McCoy’s past.”

So not only is she a wife, she’s also a woman from McCoy’s past. Nancy Crater hasn’t even appeared on screen yet, and already she’s so objectified that she’s hardly a character at all, she’s just a prop. This is hardly what one would expect from an idealized post-feminist future, and a far cry from the equal presentation of race, sex and rank observed on the Enterprise bridge only seconds ago. It’s almost as if the episode, having confronted us with so much, so fast, felt it necessary to retreat to the safety and comforts of our preconceived prejudices.

Kirk teases McCoy about his old flame, picking some scrubby brush and telling the Doctor that he should bring his old girlfriend flowers. This is a nice scene that quickly establishes the friendship between the two characters.

Little things that we notice about the characters, now that we’ve had a minute or so to get to know them.

They all wear uniforms, similar in cut, but color coded. The all have the same insignia over their hearts, a golden, broken triangle emblazoned with symbols corresponding to departments onboard the ship. Kirk carries what looks to be a futuristic gun of some kind which will eventually be revealed to be a “phaser.” Kirk also carries a small box that hums and whistles, what will become known as a “tricorder.”

The use of the equipment is casual and utilitarian, these future people regard these technological marvels the same way we might regard a six shooter and a notebook.

Nancy Crater, McCoy’s view

Nancy Crater, Kirk’s view

Nancy Crater, Darnell’s view

When Nancy Crater enters, she’s carrying a piece of archeological rubble, so perhaps she is an archeologist after all, or just an assistant to her husband.

There’s an instant connection established between her and McCoy, she calls McCoy “Leonard,” establishing the character’s first name.  Upon her entry there’s a strain of music heard for a second or so, weird and almost supernatural, indicating that there is something other worldly going on, but we don’t know what it is yet. The music of Star Trek is pretty amazing. Alexander Courage composed music that even today is instantly recognizable as Star Trek. Nancy Crater is a handsome woman with dark hair, and upon seeing her McCoy says, “Nancy, you haven’t aged a day.” When we see her from Kirk’s perspective, however, Nancy Crater is older, with graying hair. Kirk is introduced as “Captain Jim Kirk of the Enterprise,” establishing his first name.

I should point out that when I first saw this episode, as a ten or twelve year old on one of it’s endless repeat airings on local television, I didn’t notice the change in hairstyle. The idea was that McCoy saw her the way he remembered and still loved her. Kirk saw her as he expected to see her, as an older woman.

My ten year old senses weren’t attuned to such subtleties, but fortunately the creators of this episode knew this, because we next see Nancy Crater from Crewman Darnell’s perspective. To Darnell’s eyes Nancy Crater is a voluptuous blonde, twenty something years old. If you didn’t notice the subtle change in appearance before, you couldn’t miss it now.

Darnell’s reaction is priceless.

He stares at her like a yokel staring at a movie star at the State Fair. “Ma’am,” says Darnell, “If I didn’t know any better I’d swear you were someone I left behind on Wriggly’s Pleasure Planet. It’s funny, you’re exactly like a girl that…”

McCoy is of course outraged.

The term “Wriggly’s Pleasure Planet” certainly sounds like some kind of interstellar brothel, and if we can only guess at the meaning, McCoy understands it only too well. He shuts down Crewman Darnell instantly. Kirk seems almost amused at the young Crewman’s conduct, and sends him outside. Embarrassed, Darnell leaves. I read some speculation that Wriggley’s Pleasure Planet derives its name from Wriggley’s chewing gum, which had the slogan “double your pleasure.”

Miss Kitty, from Gunsmoke

Wriggly’s Pleasure Planet is an interesting term to use on an American television series in 1966.

The name certainly suggests a lot, depending on one’s level of prurience. Over on CBS, the television series Gunsmoke actor Amanda Blake portrayed Miss Kitty Russell, beginning her role as a prostitute, but by the time Star Trek was airing she had transitioned to the role of frontier businesswoman. Clearly, seeing Star Trek as some sort of “space western” the creators and the network decided to allow some freedom in dealing with such concepts.

This gets us back to some of the issues I brought up before about the objectification of women.

Nancy is defined only in the minds of the men who view her, literally. The reason for this in the script is because, it will be revealed, she’s a monster, and Nancy Crater is long dead. But if Nancy had been defined as a real person, and not merely the wife of an archeologist and the old girlfriend of Dr. McCoy, perhaps we could have felt something more for her. Nancy Crater is as much of an enigma as the monster who’s defining her.

We get a hint of the monster that’s pretending to be Nancy Crater when “she” touches McCoy’s face.

The episode is expertly directed by Marc Daniels, who would go on to direct over a dozen episodes and write an episode of the Animated Series. What Daniels does here is establish the monster’s peculiar way of interacting with its environment. Over the course of this episode the monster will disguise itself as many different people, and the way it touches the faces of it’s victims is its signature move.

Nancy leaves McCoy and Kirk to retrieve her husband.

When she steps outside, she’s the voluptuous Wriggly’s Pleasure Planet vixen again. Poor Darnell is outside, minding his own business, when Nancy tosses him a piece of cloth and says, “It’s quite warm here, isn’t it?” Then she sashays off, knowing that Darnell is bound to follow, if not out of outright lust, then curiosity at least. Darnell doesn’t have a chance.

The episode’s teaser ends with Darnell chasing after the monster that is Nancy Crater, and he won’t be seen alive again.