Warped Speed: “Star Trek”'s Alien Pandemic, Chapter Four

TO SEEK OUT ANCIENT -- NOT NEW -- CIVILIZATIONS

"You’re a Roman, Kirk!”

— Claudius Marcus, “Bread and Circuses”

(Kirk, Spock and Parmen enjoy a Platonic dialogue in “Plato’s Stepchildren”)

Before returning to “Warped Speed”’s concern with the danger posed by the medical-military-industrial complex — the threat of billions of toxic injections, for example — I want to fully document how Star Trek conditions our alienated or dehumanized thinking, since this warped mindset enables an elite class to control consumer culture.

The series warps our thinking — and our feelings — by linking alien characters to the show’s human heroes. After I’ve described the predominant ways that Star Trek connects humans and aliens (Chapters 2-5), the conclusion of “Warped Speed” (Chapters 6-8) will demonstrate how corporately administered government exploits the show’s popularity to propagate its agenda of mass alienation and transhumanism.

The second and third chapters in “Warped Speed” explored how the identity of Star Trek’s heroes and aliens is related to America's political climate (e.g., the Cold War) and to the country's colonial history of interracial strife. The show’s audience has contradictory feelings about these topics, resulting in a sense of guilt tied to the violence of war and to the racist aftermath of colonialism. The series appeals to viewers by compressing these mixed feelings into a single confrontation: human versus alien. Finally, Star Trek resolves our incompatible emotions by uniting the humans with their enemies.

Strictly speaking, this drama of antagonism and reconciliation is nothing new. As a matter of fact, many of Star Trek's aliens hail directly from Greek, Roman and Biblical sources, traditions that engage the oldest, most volatile problems on Earth: sex and death. Love and death arouse deep ambivalence in us, so the show stages this conflict in the form of threatening aliens who are opposed to — yet affiliated with — our human heroes.

Often, for instance, an alien being appears as a classical goddess who is seductive but deadly. Remarkably, the series updates these archaic aliens by inserting them into the modern crises of colonialism and the Cold War that I described in the second and third chapters of “Warped Speed.”

The Greek poet Homer is the best place to start because the series writ large is identical to a synopsis of his Odyssey: a veteran ship captain wanders through the unknown universe, encountering superhuman beings and monsters who attack him and his crew; the captain relies on quick thinking and resourcefulness to overcome these beings; along the way, the captain meets divine women who charm him with their beauty and power and who offer him a life of ease, even immortality — all of which the captain refuses; as a result, he is a lonely man who yearns for a home and family but keeps traveling onward, ultimately acquiring great prestige and wealth as a result of his exploits.

This space odyssey appears already in Star Trek's pilot episode "The Cage." The captain on this voyage is actually Kirk's predecessor Christopher Pike, but his character is essentially the same as Kirk's. The episode opens as the Enterprise makes its way to a Starbase for repairs following a harrowing battle with denizens of the planet Rigel VII, where Captain Pike has killed an alien giant with a spear, the same way Odysseus attacked Polyphemus, the huge Cyclops. ¹

On route, the Enterprise receives a distress call from an Earth ship which had crashed on the nearby planet Talos IV eighteen years earlier. Arriving on this world, the captain encounters one of the crash survivors, a beautiful woman named Vina, and he follows her to a cave entrance. There, the Talosians — a race of aliens so advanced that they use telepathy to deceive humans with elaborate illusions — capture Pike and take him underground.

Imprisoned together in the Talosians' subterranean city, Vina informs Pike that the Talosians want to retain the two humans as specimens in a cosmic zoo, where they will be used as breeding stock to create an entire class of slaves. In order to secure the captain's cooperation in this appalling scheme, the Talosians subject Pike to several ordeals lifted from the Odyssey. Vina, for instance, is a Siren, one of those nymphs who lure sailors to their deaths with their singing ("vina" is the name of a musical instrument from India). Naturally, Captain Pike — like Odysseus — resists the woman's temptation.

Later, as Pike struggles with one of the Talosians, the alien transforms itself into a fanged beast as the captain tightens his grip around the extraterrestrial’s throat. This refers to a passage in the Odyssey describing the confrontation between Menelaus — Odysseus' comrade in the Trojan War (see Homer’s Iliad, the Odyssey‘s prequel) whose wanderings parallel Odysseus' own — and Proteus, the old man of the sea:

"We leapt upon him and flung our arms round his back ... [Proteus] began by turning into a bearded lion and then into a snake, and after that a panther and a giant boar ... But we set our teeth and held him like a vise." ²

(Captain Pike grapples with an alien divinity’s inner beast in “The Cage”)

The alien planet, Talos, also belongs to the Odyssey: it's a title of the spirit Tantalus, whom Odysseus sees when he visits the land of the dead. But what else is the underground prison where Pike is tortured with fire by the Talosians if not the world of the dead? Even the eighteen-year period that the old Earth ship was lost is the same amount of time that Odysseus was absent from home.

The correspondences between the episode and the Odyssey are too consistent to be coincidence. This isn’t surprising, considering that it's a writer's business to know literature and to look to it for guidance. To discover why Star Trek is channeling the Odyssey, we only need to remember that aliens in the series tell us something about our deep-seated anxieties. By replacing Greek divinities like Sirens with extraterrestrials, the show makes a new equation: the aliens embody male ambivalence toward women.

The Talosians in "The Cage," for example, are a god-like race who wear gowns and who are all played by female actors. The women of Talos are cruel and unusual, capable of terrorizing a brave man like Pike with a mere thought. These feminine beings are a threat to the captain's very existence.

This may seem like an uncharitable view of women for Star Trek, given that the series has always been conspicuously liberal and feminist. It was one of the first television shows to give positions of authority to female characters, roles that called for serious brains and professionalism, like Pike's own second-in-command, for instance. Indeed, the visibility of Nichelle Nichols' famous Uhura character even inspired greater recruitment of women in NASA, not to mention Whoopi Goldberg's show business career — including her regular appearances as the character Guinan on The Next Generation. ³

It seems, however, that the show's idealism has forced a more conventionally masculine view of women to assume alien shape, namely the frightening Talosians. Suppose that Star Trek's audience really thinks of women as Talosians, but that such a dehumanizing thought is inadmissible under the show's strict moral code. The actual belief persists, but is only acceptable in alien form.

As a matter fact, "The Cage" makes an explicit connection between what’s considered human (the Enterprise women) and what isn't (the monstrous Talosians): the mysterious Vina. Born of human parents but surgically reconstructed — and artificially enhanced — by the aliens, she acts as the Talosians' agent. Part human and part alien, she is a middle term between the opposed parties. This voluptuous intermediate being, enlisted by the Talosians to manipulate Pike, is a shadow of the women on the Enterprise, who are capable, cool and reliable.

Indeed, "The Cage" makes a direct link between Vina and her Enterprise counterparts in a sequence near the end of the episode, as the Talosians bring two women — including the captain's second-in-command — down from the ship to replace Vina after her efforts to entrap Pike fail. In other words, the show interchanges the Earth women with Vina, so that we can have it both ways: women get respect aboard the Enterprise, but once off the ship they become alien threats. The episode thus unifies our incompatible views of women by offering Pike mutually exclusive females who are nevertheless drawn together.

The ambiguous character of Vina, to be exact, is part Siren and part Calypso, one of Star Trek's favorite Homeric women. Calypso's story begins after a storm destroys Odysseus' ship and crew. The captain drifts to the remote island (all the weird islands in Greek myth are remote, like the planets in Star Trek) of Ogygia, where he finds the goddess in her vaulted cave. After restoring him to health, she seduces him. She then detains him for seven years, promising him "immortality and ageless youth," and tries to make him forget about returning home to Ithaca.

But Odysseus declines to stay forever — though he is willing to father two or three of Calypso’s children — since the goddess' offer of immortality is for him a kind of death, excluding him forever from the world of his fellow mortals. At last, Zeus commands Calypso to free Odysseus to resume his voyage. ⁴

Calypso also appears in The Next Generation's "Liaisons." When Captain Picard's shuttlecraft crashes on a distant planet, his shipmate — an alien called Loval — is lost. A beautiful woman named Anna miraculously appears, drags the injured captain into her cavernous lair and nurses his injuries. She falls in love with the castaway and refuses to let the captain leave, doing everything in her power — from deceit to actively restraining him — to prevent him from abandoning her.

Eventually, Picard realizes that Anna is really the alien who was riding with him in the shuttlecraft and he forces the being to reveal itself. Loval explains that the deception was necessary for its study of human love. The alien had created the scenario after coming across an Earth woman's crash site and reading her strange record: she had lived alone for seven years until by chance a man also became marooned on her planet. The two fell in love and spent the rest of their lives together.

As in "The Cage," an alien takes on female form in order to imprison the captain, who overpowers her. And like "The Cage," the alien exaggeration is based on a human female — the stranded woman who piqued Loval's curiosity. In these episodes, feminine aliens complement the show’s more familiar Earth women.

These women — one exotic, the other domestic — are objects of simultaneous adoration and contempt. Star Trek reconciles contradictory ideas by representing the unacceptable ones as alien. With its two species of females — human and alien — the show offers an extreme point of view for men who despise women and a diametrically opposed view for men who idealize women or who simply can't make up their minds. Star Trek's famous feminism, then, doesn't apply to alien space.

The most famous Greek female in the series is Helen of Troy, which takes us from the Odyssey back to Homer’s Iliad. The show gives Helen the same treatment as the Odyssean goddesses: she's a caricature of terrestrial women.

The original series' "Elaan of Troyius," for instance, is an obvious case of deliberate paraphrase, for those wondering what the writers knew and when they knew it. The episode gives us two warring planets called Elas (Hellas, or ancient Greece) and Troyius. The planetary dispute lasts not ten years — as in Homer — but a hundred years, as if to outdo Homer in epic scale. And instead of Helen ensnaring Paris with an aphrodisiac, a special chemical in Elaan’s tears now has the same effect on Captain Kirk.

However, this alien Helen is not the cause of war, like in the Iliad, but a peaceful solution. The Enterprise's mission is to chaperone the wedding of Elaan, the royal representative of Elas, to the Troyian head of state, a political marriage arranged to unite the opposed worlds. Through sheer force of will, Kirk manages to resist the desirable bride and accomplish his diplomatic mission to see her marriage to another man through.

Significantly, Elaan's character is wildly obnoxious and Kirk's main challenge is to domesticate her in time for the wedding. One author describes this episode as "Helen of Troy and a plot borrowed from [Shakespeare’s] ‘The Taming of the Shrew.’" This is not the most flattering picture of women — unless you just ignore the aliens. ⁵

Helen returns in The Next Generation's "The Perfect Mate." As in "Elaan of Troyius," the Enterprise supervises a marriage between the delegates of two planets in order to end their centuries-old conflict. The Enterprise's engineers construct a marriage temple called Akadar (Arcadia is an idyllic area of ancient Greece) and the bride, Kamala, emerges from a shining, ovoid container (Helen of Troy was born from a silver egg). Kamala is from the planet Krios (Homer‘s birthplace is the Greek island of Khios); with the help of her government's ambassador Briam (Priam is the king of Troy), Kamala explains the origin of the war:

Kamala: In our history, there is a woman known as Garuth, who was loved by the brothers Krios and Valt with such passion that an empire fell.

Briam: And the wars began when Krios kidnapped Garuth and took her to our planet.

The character of Krios is presumably Priam's son Paris, who steals Helen away from Sparta. The Kriosians now offer Kamala to the people of Valt as a token of restitution. For Kamala is no ordinary humanoid but a "metamorph," a woman who is genetically predisposed toward pleasing men. She does this in three ways: she's empathic, which means that she can sense what any particular man wants; she's capable of dramatically changing her personality to conform to these masculine desires; and she exudes pheromones, the modern equivalent of aphrodisia.

Captain Picard is almost irresistibly drawn to Kamala, like Kirk to Elaan, and the woman's presence aboard the ship begins to disrupt the entire crew. The captain barely retains control of himself until the ceremony finally takes place as planned.

(The face that launched a thousand space ships — “The Perfect Mate”)

This episode's alien Helen therefore amounts to a politically-incorrect stereotype of women. Actually, there’s an even more political aspect of Star Trek's Helens. For example, "Elaan of Troyius" is a Cold War episode (see “Warped Speed, Chapter 2” for a discussion of the series’ Cold War parables), which explains why Elaan concludes a spectacular war rather than incites one. The Cold War mood is set immediately when Kirk complains about what he calls his "cloak-and-dagger" orders in supervising Elaan's political marriage. It seems that the worlds of Elas and Troyius are both under Federation (the humans’ government) control, but the hostile Klingons, who claim jurisdiction over the two planets, would love to see the marriage fail, since unstable societies are easy pickings for them.

As if the Cold War backdrop were not clear enough — that is, the contest between the Federation and the Klingon empire for control of the shakily aligned governments of Elaas and Troyius — the Troyian ambassador Petri tells Kirk that peace is imperative: "Our two warring planets now possess the capability of mutual destruction. Some method of coexistence must be found." Finally, Kirk nervously remarks that Elaan and her guards are armed with personal nuclear weapons as they board the Enterprise.

True to form, the Klingons disrupt the proceedings by planting a spy among Elaan's retinue who sabotages the Enterprise's engines and commits suicide to avoid interrogation. A Klingon ship arrives to finish off the disabled Enterprise, but fortunately Spock discovers that Elaan's necklace is made of dilithium crystals, the very substance Engineer Scott needs to repair the ship's energy supply.

The heroes soon defeat the aggressors and reveal the secret of the Klingons' avid interest in the two planets: dilithium deposits are plentiful in the area, so that the Homeric courage and wits of the Enterprise crew keep the precious mineral at the Federation's disposal.

Turning the Cold War into a Homeric saga has several consequences. Homer’s story is a powerful precedent: like the Cold War, the Trojan War was a prolonged, demoralizing deadlock with increasingly heavy casualties, and was finally won by a combination of economic ruin, espionage and subterfuge. Like the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Trojan War was fought on Asian soil, was compromised by bitter internal dissent (Agamemnon versus Achilles, for instance) and pitted closely related nations against each other. Furthermore, the show's tendency to view women and Asians with suspicion comes straight from Homer.

In fact, according to classical scholar Robert Graves, Helen of Troy personifies a lucrative area between Europe and Asia called the Hellespont:

“The Trojan War … was a trade war. When once Troy had fallen, the Greeks were able to plant colonies all along the eastern trade route … the constant negotiations between Agamemnon and Priam did not concern the return of Helen so much as the restoration of the Greeks’ rights to the Hellespont … Agamemnon had engaged in a war of attrition, the success of which [the Trojan warrior] Hector confesses … when he speaks of the drain on Trojan resources caused by the drying up of trade, and the need to subsidize allies.” ⁶

The original Helen was thus a political metaphor, and so is Elaan of Troyius. That is, the vital importance of Elaan and her territory come down to dilithium. Dilithium is Star Trek's version of nuclear fuel: the chemical element lithium is essential "in thermonuclear weapons.” ⁷

With her atomic body armor, dilithium jewelry and global peace riding on her shoulders, Elaan IS the Bomb, or you might say, a real bombshell. Since Elaan keeps this war from ending in "mutual destruction," she symbolizes the nuclear threat that deterred the superpowers from open warfare during the Cold War. Star Trek's atomic epic is therefore a love story, so when Elaan tempts Kirk, nuclear power becomes sexual energy. In fact, the show makes the Bomb into an alien woman in order to control her, just as the Hellespont became a rogue Helen in Homer’s tale.

Kamala's case is less militaristic. Given that "The Perfect Mate" (1992) was produced during the recession that followed the end of the Cold War, the alien woman still represents power, but now it's economic power. As I mentioned earlier (“Warped Speed, Chapter 2”), the Soviet Union's fall in 1991 meant that America's greatest economic threat subsequently came from Asia, whose population Star Trek symbolizes as the alien Ferengi race.

Accordingly, a pair of marauding Ferengi initially cause Kamala to appear on board the Enterprise in an attempt to buy and sell her, which throws the captain and Kamala together. At the same time, Kamala's bridegroom is a dry technocrat more interested in trade agreements and exchanges of property than his own wedding. In other words, mercantile interests precipitate all the action.

The Next Generation actually installs Helen as a main character: the ship's beautiful staff psychologist is bluntly named "Troi." An empath, like Kamala and the telepathic Talosians, Counselor Troi is half human and half alien, making her Star Trek's Helen-in-residence.

In "Who Watches the Watchers," for instance, the Mintakans, who are alien Indians, abduct Troi, and Picard must win her back with his Odyssean ingenuity. Since this episode is also a Western frontier narrative (an episode I described in “Warped Speed, Chapter 3”), the show presents colonial America as a Greek crusade, just as it transformed the Cold War.

Indeed, Star Trek turns the entire New World into an alien woman — the virgin land — as a property to be claimed. The explosive Elaan, for example, is "an uncivilized savage," as Kirk calls her after she stabs ambassador Petri and throws a few other sharp things around. In fact, as everyone who's read Hesse’s Siddhartha knows, Kamala is an Indian name, like Vina. ⁸

Even the name "Ferengi" is an East Indian word referring to European colonists who have gone native — the term was popularized by Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes books happen to be the source for three episodes of The Next Generation. ⁹ Our historical anxieties about contacting “aliens” in colonial cultures, in other words, are fused with our ambivalent feelings about controlling women.

Aliens also turn Star Trek’s “new worlds” into classical Rome. The show names two major alien races after Roman creative heroes: the Vulcans, who are members of the Federation, and the Romulans, who are the Federation's implacable enemies. Vulcan is the Roman god of technology, while the legendary Romulus killed his twin Remus and founded the city of Rome. These two races are the only closely related alien fixtures in the series, since the Vulcans and Romulans evolved from a common ancestor. The show might as well call this common ancestor Rome.

Despite their identical Roman heritage, the Vulcans are much more civilized than their belligerent Romulan cousins. To put it another way, Vulcans are good Romans and Romulans are bad Romans. One reason for imagining aliens as good and evil Romans is the Cold War. Since Rome begins with a twin named Romulus, maybe it will help to start with the Romulans.

Star Trek introduces its first enemy alien race in the original series' Cold War conflict, "Balance of Terror," an episode from 1966 in which Kirk tracks and destroys a Romulan ship after it attacks an Earth outpost (see “Warped Speed, Chapter 2” for the Cold War context of this episode).

The aliens are unquestionably modeled on Imperial Rome: they inhabit twin planets called Romulus and Remus; one of the Romulan ship’s deputies, Decius, is named after a Roman emperor; another has the title of Centurion (an officer in the Roman army); and their ship's captain owes his allegiance to a Praetor (a magistrate of the Roman Republic). Even the Romulans' hair is cut in bangs (Vulcan-style), while their costumes and salutes are stock cinematic depictions of ancient Rome.

In my Cold War reading of this episode, I equated the humans' tactics with those of the aliens. As "Balance of Terror" tells us, the treaty between the humans and the Romulans has kept the peace between the two powers for a hundred years, though it's a guarded truce marked by a Neutral Zone, military outposts and deep mutual distrust.

This uneasy impasse between the forces of civilization and barbarism is the same tense stability that the Romans achieved for nearly half a millennium. Indeed, the universal peace that Rome brought to the West is so famous that its Latin name is still with us: the Pax Romana. This Roman Peace was Peace by the Sword, which is exactly what Star Trek has created in its updated Romanesque setting. To put it bluntly, the Cold War is a Pax Romana. The balance of terror which characterized the Roman Empire is the balance of power that Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan called Peace through Strength.

Indeed, the simmering battlefield of the Cold War came to be known as the Pax Atomica. Because outright use of the Bomb was unthinkable, war between the superpowers was never even declared, thus confining the conflict to subversion and covert action in outlying regions. This psychology of deterrence — the balance of nuclear warheads — prevented large-scale fighting between the West and its communist enemies.

If we think of the Cold War as a Roman Peace, then all the parallels between the alien Romans — the Romulans — and the Enterprise crew in "Balance of Terror" take on a new sense. In Star Trek's terms, the wartime challenge is, "Can we defend civilization against barbarism without becoming as uncivilized as the Romans became?"

The series answers this question by creating a pair of aliens in our image — Vulcan and Romulan — who define the limits of our humanity: our Vulcan allies are noble, cultivated and dignified while our Romulan shadows are ruthless, cunning and tyrannical. The heroes' encounters with these alien twins play out the chronic ethical subtext of the Cold War: does the end of peace justify the means of war?

Of course, the aliens' Roman character doesn't negate the Romulans' role as violent Asians — it compounds it — and they're still typecast as Indians too. Indeed, these multiple meanings give the show's "alien" conceit its power.

Take another Roman Cold War episode, "Mirror, Mirror," where Kirk is trapped on a parallel Enterprise populated by Romulan-esque duplicates of his crew, and where the captain assumes the role of a dictator whose mistress calls him "a Caesar" (for a Cold War reading of this episode, see “Warped Speed, Chapter 2”). When the parallel Spock advises Kirk to destroy the rebellious Halkans unless they surrender their dilithium — that is, their nuclear capability — he argues that "Terror must be maintained or the Empire is doomed."

At the episode's end, Kirk asks the normal Spock how he was able to distinguish between his familiar human shipmates and their Romulan-like twins. Spock points out that it was "far easier for you as civilized men to behave like barbarians than it was for them as barbarians to behave like civilized men."

The series translates our regrets about Cold War dirty tricks into Roman terms because keeping the universe safe for civilization entails the risk of becoming as "warlike, cruel and treacherous" as the barbarians. This danger would compromise the entire idea of civilization — or as British secret service agent and author John le Carré puts it, this is the point where "democracy is no longer worth defending." ¹⁰

The flexibility of the Rome metaphor, whose extremes define civilization and savagery, raises the same specter of violence that the Captain Cook frontier narrative does (see “Warped Speed, Chapter 3”). In fact Star Trek views British colonialism — which in the eighteenth century was called the Pax Britannica — as Roman imperialism.

We see this modern-colonial/ancient-imperial metaphor, in all its ambiguity, firsthand in the original series' "Bread and Circuses," where the heroes literally do as the Romans do. Searching for the crew of a missing Federation ship, the Enterprise comes to a planet that can only be described as Kirk does: "a twentieth-century Rome ... a heavily industrialized twentieth-century type planet very much like Earth — an amazing example … of parallel planet development. But on this Earth, Rome never fell."

This twentieth-century Rome televises gladiator tournaments and labels consumer products with the names of pagan gods — "Mars Toothpaste," for example, and the "Jupiter 8 automobile" — something that is no different from our Mercury or Saturn cars, or Vulcanized rubber, so that it's clear we’re really watching our own planet.

This updated Rome also showcases the "Romulan" insignia mentioned in "Balance of Terror": there's a Praetorian Guard and a Proconsul, and even an incipient Christian movement opposed to the Empire. Naturally, this world is secured by a Pax Romana, as a stranded Federation character tells Kirk, "This is an ordered world, Jim — a conservative world ... there's been no war here for over four hundred years" (the Roman Peace lasted over four centuries).

While looking for the lost Federation crewmen, the Enterprise's landing party affiliates itself with a group of Christianized runaway slaves living in caves near a city. There, Kirk learns that Merik, the captain and sole survivor of the abandoned Earth ship, has violated the Federation's non-interference directive and reinvented himself as "First Citizen Merikus."

A patrol unit soon captures Kirk, Spock and McCoy and drives them into the city. The police bring the foreigners before Merik and his Proconsul, Claudius Marcus (pick a Roman emperor, any emperor), who orders Kirk to bring the rest of his crew down to the planet to fight in the coliseum for the amusement of the people. Kirk refuses, so the Imperial guards throw Spock and McCoy into the arena to battle to the death unless Captain Kirk surrenders.

Fortunately, the Enterprise's engineer Scotty causes a power failure on the planet, and a repentant Merik helps the threesome escape. The Proconsul then executes Merik, but our heroes safely return to their ship.

The problem for Kirk in this episode is a first-contact/Prime Directive one: what to do about his friend Merik, who, like Captain Cook in Hawaii, has changed his name and dress to become "Lord of the Games," contaminating the Romans' primitive culture with his superior Federation know-how.

Merik, like Tracey in "The Omega Glory" (see “Warped Speed, Chapter 3” for a discussion of this episode), is a wayward Federation ship captain who functions as the corrupted double of James Kirk. In fact, "Bread and Circuses" opens with an Enterprise officer wishing he could play God: as Kirk, Spock and Dr. McCoy first arrive on the Roman planet, the doctor announces, "Once — just once — I'd like to be able to land some place and say, 'Behold! I am the archangel Gabriel.'" The Rome syndrome suggests that we think of Captain Cook — and by extension Captain Kirk — as a modern Augustus, the deified emperor, a defender of civilization who goes too far. ¹¹

Consider the fact that Captain Kirk’s middle name is "Tiberius," the emperor who succeeded Augustus. As it turns out, the historical Tiberius' middle name was … Claudius. Kirk and his alien enemy in "Bread and Circuses" therefore share an identity — they're Roman twins, like Romulus and Remus.

In fact, once Claudius Marcus learns to respect Kirk's manhood, he declares, "You're a Roman, Kirk — or you should have been!" This valedictory remark echoes the Romulan Captain's last words to Kirk in "Balance of Terror" ("You and I are of a kind"), and the alien Proconsul is right: when in Rome, Kirk easily does as the Romans do.

(There’s no space like Rome — James “Emperor” Tiberius Kirk)

For the original series, the Roman empire and the Cook syndrome dovetail with a Cold War context because all three narratives depend on the distinction between civilized human and violent alien. The same is true for The Next Generation. In "The Best of Both Worlds," for instance, the Enterprise must defend the Federation against an invasion of remorseless, cybernetic aliens known as the Borg.

As Captain Picard watches hordes of Borg ships closing in to destroy Earth, he laments, "I wonder if the Emperor Honorius, watching the Visigoths coming over the Via Salaria, truly realized that the Roman Empire was about to fall."

The robotic aliens take Picard prisoner, surgically transform him into a half-human/half-machine being like themselves, and then install the captain as their humanoid spokesperson, giving him the official title of "Locutus," which is Latin for "speaker." Hence Picard is both an honorable Roman emperor (Honorius) and a demonic alien (Locutus). Picard makes this transition by going native, like Captain Cook, which means he descends from civilization into alien violence, brought to the Federation by the Borg armada.

Jonathan Frakes, the actor who plays the Enterprise's Commander Riker in The Next Generation, remarks that the Borg army smells like vintage Cold War Eastern Bloc, and that these cyber-organic Visigoths are simultaneously Commie drones fighting for their "collective" government.¹²

Star Trek's third great reservoir of antiquarian history and myth is the Bible. Nowhere is Biblical allegory more systematic than in Captain Kirk's confrontations with a malevolent, eugenically bred figure named Khan.

In the original series' "Space Seed," the Enterprise's treacherous historian Marla McGivers abets Khan's rise to power because she’s in love with him. The episode closes with Khan's recitation of Lucifer's line from Milton ("it is better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven"), as Kirk casts Khan out on a hellish planet. The script thus gives McGivers the role of Eve, who betrays an innocent Adam (Kirk) by succumbing to the diabolic Khan.

These Biblical references have the advantage of further idealizing Khan's rival Kirk when they meet again in the feature film “The Wrath of Khan.” Kirk first appears in the movie starkly backlit, so that a halo forms around his head, a halo that returns at the end of the film in a shot of a giant explosion that dissolves to Kirk's face framed in the blast's corona.

This explosion is caused by a device known as the "Genesis project," whose detonation rapidly renders planet surfaces suitable for colonization. Hence Kirk becomes God Himself presiding over Creation in the film's opening. When Kirk emerges from the darkness and smoke of a Starfleet Academy simulation — the chaos preceding Creation — his first word is "Prayer." Ending the Academy simulation, Kirk then shouts "Lights!" — God's first words in the Bible are "Let there be light." And next thing you know, Kirk's off celebrating his own birthday.¹³

The movie’s serious action begins after Khan frees himself from his God-forsaken planet and learns of the Federation's Genesis project, whose tremendous power he needs for his plan to wreak vengeance on Kirk for his long banishment. Using a stolen ship, Khan attacks the Genesis station, torturing and killing the station’s brave scientists when they refuse to surrender the dangerous machine.

Kirk, commanding the Enterprise, answers a call for help from the project's supervisor, Dr. Carol Marcus, a former lover of his. The captain finds Dr. Marcus with her son David hiding underneath the surface of a planetoid near the science station, where the early Genesis experiments have been carried out. There, in the dark, bare cavern that the “Genesis effect” has transformed into a lush, shining paradise, Kirk learns that Marcus' son is his own illegitimate child.

The devious Khan locates the subterranean group, steals the Genesis machine and withdraws, but Kirk gives chase and disables Khan's ship. Rather than surrender, Khan arms the Genesis device, knowing that his adversary, whose nearby ship is also damaged, will be consumed by the exploding “Genesis wave.’

Just before the Genesis device ignites, Khan — who has a fiendish predilection for calling attention to his mastery of great literature — hisses the mad Captain Ahab's final lines from Moby Dick, "To the last I grapple with thee; from Hell's heart I stab at thee."

Fortunately, Spock repairs the Enterprise in the nick of time and the ship speeds out of the Genesis inferno. But Spock's heroism comes at the ultimate personal cost: he has knowingly exposed himself to a fatal amount of radiation. Spock's self-sacrifice for the sake of saving others thus makes him a Christ figure.

Kirk is horrified when he realizes that his closest friend is dying as a result of his own salvation. Finally Kirk moralizes that "if Genesis is truly life from death, I must return to this place," as he contemplates the brave new world created by the Genesis effect, where Spock's casket is laid to rest.

The film's sequel, “The Search for Spock,” expands the Christ analogy when the generative power of the Genesis planet miraculously resurrects Spock. Kirk does indeed return to rescue his friend but first he has to defeat Kruge, a murderous Klingon who, like Khan, is after "the Genesis torpedo."

As the misbegotten Genesis world begins to break apart in a series of eruptions, the film extends the Christ role to David Marcus: born out of wedlock, Kirk's only son gives his life to keep Kruge from killing the revived Spock.

Now it's Kirk's turn for revenge, so he and the Klingon fight hand to hand, until Kirk throws his foe into a fiery chasm even as the unstable planet disintegrates around them. The pool of molten lava into which Kruge disappears with a little puff of smoke fulfills the book of Revelation's last chapters: "And the Devil ... was cast into the lake of fire." “The Search for Spock” zooms from the paradise of Genesis to the hell of Apocalypse, from the beginning of the world to its consummation.¹⁴

The allusions in this epic are so rich that they telescope every pattern of alienation I've outlined so far, encapsulating an ambivalent attitude toward women, America’s colonial past and the Cold War. First, Star Trek equates women with death. Whenever the nefarious Khan, for example, makes an appearance, an Eve is nearby whose interests he exploits: in "Space Seed," it's the ambitious Marla McGivers; in “The Wrath of Khan,” it's Carol Marcus, whose personal Eden lures Khan — and Kirk — to a sad fate.

But Marcus is also Homer’s Calypso. Kirk finds his lover in a cave and she rejuvenates him — "I feel young!" he tells her at the movie's end, as he gazes at the brand new planet which will soon rejuvenate Spock too. Her idyllic world promises veritable immortality, though it will never entice the independent Kirk/Odysseus for long.

Notice also that Marcus is a Roman name, as in Claudius Marcus. In fact, Marcus is used by Khan — who speaks of his lost empire as "Rome under Caesar" — to bring death into Kirk's universe.

Khan is also a European colonial figure. "Space Seed" and “The Wrath of Khan” make much of the fact that Khan's ship is called the Botany Bay. Botany Bay's claim to fame is that it was the first British settlement — penal colony actually — on the continent of Australia, near what is now the city of Sydney. The colony was charted and named during James Cook’s voyages, and his officers lobbied the British parliament to send surplus convicts there a few years later.¹⁵

Kirk (that is, Star Trek's writers) is quite conscious of the historical precedent for sending criminals to colonize an inhospitable wasteland, as the captain makes plain in “Space Seed,” in his speech sentencing Khan to exile on a planet "no more [savage] than Australia's Botany Bay colony was at the beginning. Those men went on to tame a continent, Mr. Khan — can you tame a world?"

Furthermore, the role of Khan — who is of Indian extraction, played by Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán — is really a projected aspect of Kirk, since each is a Roman emperor: Caesar and Tiberius. Khan even impersonates Kirk in order to trick Marcus into handing over the Genesis device. It's almost as if the violent, imperial James Cook had returned to do battle with his cleaned-up double James Kirk, but now in the Biblical terms of retribution. Indeed, the myth of Captain Cook as a god who endures sacrifice is based on what anthropologists call the "Christological model." ¹⁶

Finally, “The Wrath of Khan” ties colonial violence and suspicion of women to Cold War guilt. The top secret Genesis project is unmistakably a latter-day Bomb: although Dr. Marcus promotes its power to expand Federation colonies, it never creates viable worlds, it only destroys them. A Starfleet captain explicitly compares the Genesis device to the Bomb. ¹⁷

Plus, the optical effects Star Trek uses for the Genesis device's detonation are identical with the Klingons' nuclear disaster on Praxis in “The Undiscovered Country” — with a circle of light streaking ahead of the actual blast, these cataclysms are inspired by camera footage of nuclear explosions.

Indeed, “The Search for Spock” pivots on the question of who deserves control of the new weapon, the Federation or the Klingons. The Bomb appears with Eden, thanks to that bombshell Carol Marcus, and finally brings about Armageddon.

The Next Generation follows the same human-alien formulas that inform the show’s vision of nuclear war, colonialism and lethal goddesses. The episode "Devil's Due," for instance, is so closely patterned after Revelation that The Next Generation has created a classic "parallel Earth" alien culture. Dr. Clark, a Federation scientist assigned to monitor the planet Ventax II, tells Picard that the Ventaxians believe their world is coming to an end in earthquakes and violence due to the return of the demon Ardra:

"For all intents and purposes, she [Ardra] is the Devil ... These people actually believe they've sold their souls to the Devil ... In the distant past, the Ventaxian culture achieved an extremely advanced scientific level, but a millennium ago they turned their backs on technology."

As a result, the Luddite Ventaxians eliminated starvation, war and pollution — all of which they ascribe to a Faustian bargain they made with Ardra. Commander Data summarizes the myth behind this contract:

"[Ardra] is a cornerstone of Ventaxian theology. It seems that Ardra came to Ventax II and promised one thousand years of peace and prosperity for a price: upon her return, she would enslave the entire population."

This is a slight modification of Revelation 20, where an angel of God casts the Devil into the bottomless pit for a thousand years: "when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations." ¹⁸

Deceiving the nations is exactly what Picard accuses the alien masquerading as Ardra of doing. The captain deplores her exploitation of the Ventaxian leader Jared (the name of a Patriarch in the biblical book of Genesis) and compares her to P. T. Barnum ("there's a sucker born every minute"). The captain also considers her claim on the Enterprise fraudulent and vows to "out-con the con artist.”

The Ventaxians convene an arbitration hearing according to local law, so that Picard can settle his grievance with Ardra. The alien woman's transformation into three different apparitions during this scene refers to Revelation's "three unclean spirits ... [which] come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world." ¹⁹

(The Devil is a woman — one of Ardra’s clever disguises in “Devil’s Due.”)

Using the Enterprise's computers, Picard duplicates Ardra's earthquakes, shape-shifting and invisibility, then takes her into custody, thus convincing Jared that the alien is a fraud. Having taught the Ventaxians a valuable lesson (technology is always the answer), Picard remands the disenfranchised phony over to the planetary authorities — as Satan is bound down forever — and Ventax becomes a paradise once more.²⁰

"Devil's Due" is actually more than an updated Apocalypse. It's also a contest between Odysseus and an bewitching nymph, since Ardra tries to seduce the captain by changing into various irresistible women — including Troi, the series' Helen-in-residence (the counselor’s first name is Deanna, that is to say Diana, the Roman moon goddess). Accordingly, Picard appropriates Ardra’s magic act and imprisons her instead, just as Odysseus overpowers the sorceress Circe. The name "Ventax” also suggests the Roman love goddess Venus.

Biblical scholars usually interpret Revelation as Saint John the Divine's prophecy against Rome, which God will overthrow at Christ's second coming. Saint John characterizes the Eternal City as a woman — "MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH" — who, like Ardra, is dressed in "scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls." ²¹

Since Ardra demands the captain's own soul in exchange for the Enterprise, she is finally death, just as Eve and Calypso are. Her name also points to India (the primeval deity Indra) as well as to pre-Christian Germany (the earth goddess Erda).

Star Trek's layering of cultural references like these occurs already in its pilot episode "The Cage," with its Homeric Talosians who abduct Captain Pike for a sacred marriage with the Calypso-like Vina. Why do the Talosians bother to do this? It seems their world was destroyed by a catastrophic war, so the aliens want Pike and Vina to be fruitful and multiply, bringing Talos back to the life it once enjoyed. "We're like Adam and Eve," Vina urges the captain hopefully.

When "The Cage" was incorporated into the original series’ episode "The Menagerie" as flashbacks, Captain Pike's character is confined to a prosthetic body as a result of a self-sacrificial effort to save his comrades — that is, he's the mutilated Christ. Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, carefully chose “Christopher” ("bearer of Christ") for Pike’s first name, just as he was thinking of the Apostles when he named his later leading men James and John-Luke, while "Kirk" is the Scottish word for "church."

In addition, the gruesome scene in "The Cage" where the underworld Talosians torture Pike with a vision of hellfire is fully Christian in its imagination of death. At the same time, the captain remains a death-defying Greek who battles the Cyclops and Proteus, while paired with a Roman Venus (Vina’s name is pronounced "Vee-nuh") who, as an illusory human nudges Pike, is "worth a man's soul," like Ardra.

We may well ask why the Devil — the agent of death, temptation and violence — is a woman. Ever since antiquity, "woman" has meant both eroticism and death — hence her mysteriousness. In fact, the etymological root of the words Apocalypse and Calypso ("calyps") means "concealed" or "hidden."

The eternal feminine is thus a crypt, and Star Trek elides this ancient mystery with our modern colonial and atomic crises. If the show links political and racial violence to the alienation that men associate with sex and death, then the series finally joins these arenas together by tracing alienation to the most universal condition of all: the human family.

1. “The Cage” was never aired as such but extensive footage was salvaged as backstory scenes in an episode from the series’ first season, “The Menagerie.” For the sake of clarity, I’ll refer to the recycled show-within-a-show — the flashbacks to the original pilot — as “The Cage,” rather than speaking of the surrounding plot of “The Menagerie.”

2. Homer, Odyssey, Book Four, 438-513 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1946), trans. Rieu, p. 76.

3. Larry Nemecek, The “Star Trek”: The Next Generation Companion (New York: Pocket, 1992), p. 64.

4. Odyssey, Book Five, 72-149, p. 91.

5. Allan Asherman, The “Star Trek” Compendium (New York: Pocket, 1986), p. 106.

6. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, vol. 2, 162.2, 162.5 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1955), pp. 302-3.

7. American Heritage Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969/1978), p. 762.

8. I am indebted to my brother-in-law Steve Wagner for this reference.

9. See Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventure, The Sign of Four, “The Strange Story of Jonathan Small.” I owe this reference to José-Luis Benítez III of Paramus, NJ.

10. John le Carré, interview on the Charlie Rose television program, July 1, 1993, Public Broadcasting Service.

11. Cook biographer Bernard Smith writes, “Cook … grew in stature as an imperial hero because his life story was better fitted to the ideological belief — however distant from the true state of affairs — in a world-wide empire dedicated to the arts of peace (a Pax Brittanica), not one based upon war … in 1790 at the height of the [French] Revolution, French sculptor Lucien le Vieux … model[ed] a bust of Cook in the idealised image of the young Augustus Caesar, the creator of the Pax Romana … Cook must have been the first European to practise successfully on a global scale the use of tolerance for purposes of domination.” B. Smith, Imagining the Pacific (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 236, italics in original.

12. Michel Marriott, “A Starship Chief Goes Bravely into Directing,” The New York Times, December 18, 1996, p. C12.

13. Genesis 1:3, King James translation.

14. Revelation 20:10.

15. Lynne Withey, Voyages of Discovery (Berkeley: UC Berkeley Press, 1987), p. 420.

16. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 57.

17. Captain Janeway, in “Star Trek”: Voyager’s “Omega Directive” episode.

18. Revelation 20:3, 20:7-8.

19. Revelation 16:13-14.

20. Revelation 6:12, 11:13, 11:19, 16:18.

21. Revelation 17:4-5.