The Audacity of Star Trek

By Savas Abadsidis

I had the pleasure of being one of the first New Yorkers to attend a screening of the new Star Trek movie, the eleventh film in the series and a reboot of the entire franchise.

I thought it was dope.

My mom actually got me into Star Trek at an early age, long before I knew anything about creator Gene Rodenberry’s utopian vision of the future, a “wagon train to the stars” as he put it, Rodenberry “took the old trope of a multi-ethnic military unit and spliced it into the most optimistic science-fiction scenario imaginable.

It was upbeat, not dystopian or cautionary—180 degrees from paranoid scenarios about nuclear Armageddon and cosmic doom, which percolated through the ’50s and came to a high boil in the early ’60s.”

At the tender age of four I loved the spaceships, the aliens (one of the first episodes I remember was Kirk fighting a Gorn, an intelligent reptilian alien species on the episode Arena on what I now recognize as the Paramount back lot). And I always loved Spock.

I thought it was cool that my mom liked this show too, and always thought she was a sci-fi fan, not knowing that she (who had recently emigrated from Poland) had a crush on William Shatner, also not realizing I was watching a show now eight years into syndication (the original series had run from 1966 to 1969) and that she had become bedazzled with this series as a teenager in Communist Poland. It was one of the few shows they got probably because of the inclusion of the character of Russian Lt. Pavel Chekhov; one of many Star Trek firsts for a TV series, which also included the first interracial kiss between Shatner’s Captain Kirk and Nichelle Nichol’s Lt. Uhura.

Star Trek would mean very different things to me at various points in my life and as I learned more about the creation of the series and the trials and tribulations that it went through over the years. It might be of interest on this Beltane weekend to know for example that early on NBC executives objected to the inclusion of Spock, whose Pan-like ears and raised eyebrows they deemed Satanic and inappropriate for a TV show.

I was always drawn to Lt. Spock, portrayed by actor Leonard Nimoy, the half Vulcan/half Human science officer and best friend of Captain Kirk. At ten years old I loved the action and was emotionally moved by Spock’s death at the end of The Wrath of Khan. In The Search for Spock I got to see him as a youth going through a painful and accelerated growth and adolescence helped along by the half-Vulcan, half-Romulan Lt. Saavik. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home dovetailed with my burgeoning interest in the environmental movement and so it’s time traveling “save the whales” story line was particularly intriguing. By the time of 1991’s The Undiscovered Country (Nimoy helped craft the story), and the last movie featuring the original cast, we are faced with the 23rd century’s own version of Perestroika with a peace treaty between the United Federation and the Klingon Empire (often a stand-in for the USSR In the Star Trek canon’s allegorical cold war).

Spock for me, as for many, has always been the linchpin of the show, and ironically (since Vulcan’s practice is that of Logic), also the emotional center (one of the reasons his death at the end of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan is one of the shocking and saddest deaths in movie history). I identified with him for many reasons—one was simply his name—I always hated my foreign sounding name in a class room full of Timothy’s, William’s and Christopher’s; Savas could easily be a Vulcan name. I also identified with his dual identities and attempts to reconcile them. My father was Greek, and my mother was from Poland (and originally Jewish). Both were immigrants and growing up American I often felt awkward and embarrassed by their strange languages, food and traditions; in my neighborhood we might as well have been aliens.

Nimoy often likened the character’s logical nature as representing, in part, a type of normative judgment, observing that the character is “struggling to maintain a Vulcan attitude, a Vulcan philosophical posture and a Vulcan logic, opposing what was fighting him internally, which was human emotion.” Nimoy who himself was a Jew and a spiritualist (long before Kabbalah was all the rage), added many canonical touches to “Vulcan” culture, such as Spock’s split-finger “Live long and prosper” salute, which stems from a sacred hand position used by the ancient Hebrew/Jewish priestly class.

I bring up Nimoy/Spock because he’s pivotal to the plot of the new film and links the old and new in a way that speaks to the timelessness of his character and the compelling and enigmatic effect that Nimoy has had on our culture. The new movie by director J.J. Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, meanwhile, is infused with Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic vision of unity, exploration and technological possibility.

The film has a time-travel plot (hence the presence of Leonard Nimoy as an aged Spock) which is no secret at this point, but until I saw the film I didn’t realize how pivotal that fact is in regard to the long-term health of this revival. As several of the trailers reveal, in this “Star Trek,” Kirk’s father dies just moments after his son is born; Nimoy’s Spock notes in the film that the Kirk he knew didn’t lose his father until he was already a Starfleet captain. This is a way of freeing up the series to be completely new and free of the shackles of its own continuity.

What’s truly great though is that the utopian ideals Rodenberry instilled in the show have survived intact and are as relevant now as they were during the late 1960s. As Nimoy himself has pointed out, “The world was a mess. We had the war in Vietnam several assassinations… the Civil Rights Movement. We were in very troubled times. I think today is quite different as there is more a sense of unity—Although we are in great trouble, I don’t think we are in as quite a dissaray as we were in those days. But the prevailing sense of hope and seeking meaning is as resonant as ever.”

Newsweek magazine recently announced that “We’re all Trekkies now… Because the geeks have inherited the earth and the White House…”

Newsweek’s Steve Daly says, “It’s the Spock plot strands that give the new “Trek” its best shot at once again commanding the zeitgeist. Spock’s cool, analytical nature feels more fascinating and topical than ever now that we’ve put a sort of Vulcan in the White House. All through the election campaign, columnists compared President Obama’s unflappably logical demeanor and prominent ears with Mr. Spock’s.”

He goes on to compare actor Zachary Quinto’s characterization of Spock’s dual nature as evocative of Obama’s dual racial identity, overlooking the notion I now identify with which is Quinto’s sexuality identity (Quinto is gay) being a more apt metaphor than race.

Daly makes an masterful and cogent point however when he identifies, the “more intriguing allegorical overtone to the new “Trek,” are perhaps completely accidental. With the willfully hegemonic Bush administration now gone, the tenets of Roddenberry’s fictional universe feel very much in step with current events. Whether you’re happy about it or not, the Obama foreign policy, at least for now, emphasizes cross-cultural exchange and eschews imperialistic swagger. That sounds very much in sync with the Federation’s Prime Directive, which stipulates that humanity should observe but never interfere with alien cultures (no Iraq-style invasions, in other words).”

After Battlestar Galactica so perfectly captured the Bush years with its dystopian, paranoid and sometimes frightening view of the future, it still managed to end on an uplifting anti-technological note (Producer Ronald Moore, a Star Trek veteran) has even noted about BSG’s ending, “ вЂ?it’s… sort of an uncharacteristically positive and optimistic message because we had labored in the early part of the season to establish this mythology that the reason why the Cylons couldn’t procreate is because love was necessary. They had all the biological equipment but didn’t have the emotional connection. It’s like the Beatles’ song writ large: All you need is love. Love is all you need. And so the idea that we are all partly Cylon sort of reinforces the notion that only through love could human and Cylon procreate, so on some base level love kind of what makes us who we are.”

I can vouch for my own excitement at seeing Star Trek resurrected, and discovering that it speaks directly to our place and time. A movie built to celebrate diversity, understanding and hope is definitely audacious. It’s enough to make anyone feel that right now, here on earth and out in the final frontier, we have liftoff.

May we all live long and prosper.