With Apologies to Trekkies
I stopped last night at a bar to meet with some friends. There were a bunch of big plasma screens scattered around the room. Usually they show sports and news. For some reason, one was airing an episode from Star Trek: Whatever It's Called Now.
I would occasionally glance at it. It struck me that in the original series, the bad guys were always aliens. Romulans and that other species that I can't ever remember, that invented the cloaking device? Hah, remembered, Klingons. Romulans had bumps on their heads. The Klingons had distorted faces. Vulcans had pointy ears..Then I remembered that Spock was half Vulcan, half human. Nice guy, torn by his mixed planet heritage. Pure bred Vulcans were good people, if a little rigid. So too when Michael Dorn became a character. Good guy. So it can't be that alien equals bad.
Alien does equal lack of variation among a species. One facial type per as evidenced by the aforementioned Romulans, Klingons and Vulcans Having gone to Wikipedia, I've confirmed this: Ferengi, all one type. Cardassian and Borg, same. I assume this is budget. Squiggly, tentacled creatures cost money.
But how come all aliens breath air? They do, except for some I remember on the original series that were a sort of low budget Northern Lights. They are always on the bridge on the Enterprise. No helmets. If you want squiggly and methane breathers, you have to go to Mars Attacks. There they had long necks with little bubbles over their little heads. But again, this is big budget movie versus smaller budget TV.
But then there are Tribbles. Easy on the budget, with lots of colors. They may not need air. As I recall they spent most of their time in overhead compartments and utility ducts. Maybe they were anaerobic.
All this is in contrast to the humans on the shows. United Nations. Rainbows. You have your Uhuras, Scotties, Chekovs and Sulus (though we didn't know it back then, your straights and gays). Then came Whoopies (and a little person Whoopie, if I remember correctly), Geordis and Data (I don't want hear about android v. human). The episode last night had some people with wires around their heads. Human or alien? Over the years all of these characters had an episode or two when they were out of character. Good and bad. Maybe, just human.
I guess all you can really conclude from all this is that Gene Roddenberry's future and maybe our present have enough problems without complicating them with racial divisions.
3 comments:
The only time I can remember seeing different races of aliens is from the original series.
There were only two of their species left: one was black/white, the other was white/black, and in the final scene they killed each other.
But we all learned an Important Lesson.
A few shows have tackled aliens with more realism than the Trek franchise. On Babylon 5, the space station had at least one section with a different atmosphere, where humans had to wear breathing gear to enter (through an airlock). There were also sections with different "gravity", depending on their position within the spinning space station.
Farscape covered some grittier details such as how the aliens cleaned their teeth, and how all these different species could understand each other's speech.
The lack of aliens in Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity was a refreshing idea. Humans colonized space, where there were no aliens at all. Just people being all too human.
Heinlein, as I remember, did the same thing, as did Asimov. Both had their share of robots, but they were there as, what, foils, for the human drama. When I read SF years ago, their stories had more resonance for me than someone like Herbert in Dune (if I'm right with the match of author and book).
Post a Comment