Warped Speed: “Star Trek”'s Alien Pandemic -- Foreword

A Preface

In 1997, when I wrote the first chapter of my analysis of Star Trek’s role in modern alienation, I had no idea how rapidly the mindset of Heaven’s Gate — the suicidal sect that borrowed Star Trek’s worldview, which is the topic of that chapter — would engulf the rest of the world (see “Warped Speed, Chapter 1 — Stardate: Armageddon”). Now, just twenty-five years later, a pandemic of technologically enhanced madness has turned humanity into a global death cult.

My first goal in sharing this collection of cultural analyses is to disclose how Star Trek’s currency facilitated this alienation of the popular imagination, a transition from sanity to illness that I initially traced in the Heaven’s Gate suicides.

My second goal is to direct this disclosure toward some remediation of our collective insanity. Without a deeper understanding of the estrangement that defines our present crisis — an alienation that Star Trek literalizes every week — the rest of the planet may be doomed to the same fate that met the deceased members of Heaven’s Gate.

Certainly Star Trek’s messaging power was harnessed for publicity purposes from the outset of the pandemic, since the Trump administration branded its Covid vaccine initiative “Operation Warp Speed.” But the government’s transformation of Star Trek’s sensibility into widespread madness is by no means limited to the agitprop of Operation Warp Speed.¹

By invoking Star Trek’s can-do futurism, the administration assured Americans that an impossibly quick fix was within the country’s grasp, implicitly inviting us to imagine Engineers Scotty and LaForge ingeniously inventing a miracle solution just in time to save the planet from an insidious swarm of foreign invaders. That is to say, reality would imitate fantasy and deliver us from peril according to a precisely timed narrative.

But Star Trek’s reassuring forgone conclusions — its vaunted optimism — comprise only the more familiar side of its winning formula. The series actually attracts fans by discarding the humanity exemplified by the show’s heroes, so that menacing aliens usurp the heroes’ character — their sanity — for the duration of a given episode.

It is not enough, in other words, to explain Star Trek’s appeal by pointing to the strength and integrity of the humans, or to emphasize the drama’s predictable happy endings. To do so is to ignore the fact that the heroes invariably drop their likable, robust humanity and adopt traits of the shadowy aliens that their mission is to discover.

Given this fluid interaction between human and alien, it is fair to ask just who the threatening extraterrestrials really are. If these formidable beings are so readily interchangeable with our idealized future selves — the Enterprise crew — then they must not be so alien after all. In fact, they are so close to us that the human characters, with whom we identify, undergo an alien metamorphosis at every encounter.

In this light, it’s not surprising that Star Trek’s aliens ultimately represent viewers’ most disturbing desires and fears — namely love, violence and death. At the same time, magical technology corrupts the respectable humans into alien caricatures.

In the years after the Heaven’s Gate cult took Star Trek’s vision of alien life to the extreme, I drafted a book that surveyed the series’ most prevalent human-alien interference patterns. This repertory of apocalyptic narratives refers to the Cold War, for example, where the alien Klingon Empire represents Soviet Russia, while the elusive Romulan characters hail from communist China.

Another typical kind of alien-human interaction draws on the history of European colonial figures’ arrival in America, Africa and the South Pacific. In this category of episodes, Star Trek models aliens on the indigenous peoples inhabiting these areas. Notably, the show superimposes this frontier scenario onto its Cold War confrontations, thereby compounding the meaning of the human-alien exchanges.

I found yet another source of favored Star Trek plots in ancient material like Greek myth and the Bible, where aliens play the part of divinities and demons. These traditional elements also appear in the show’s Cold War and colonial allegories, overdetermining the sense we assign to the concept of “alien.”

Finally, there’s a recurring type of human-alien equivalence in Star Trek that you could call psychodrama, where the heroes and aliens swap child-parent roles. This genre also nests within the other patterns I found, including the Cold War setting, as well as the colonial frontier arena and the religious parables.

With so much cultural baggage on board, it’s no wonder that Star Trek is still headlining our ideas about human destiny, right up through Heaven’s Gate and the Covid pandemic.

Since my purpose is to understand and mitigate our collective alienation, as illustrated by Star Trek, I want to show in coming posts what the story models I’ve just listed have in common. After all, these various narratives often coexist within single episodes, which suggests there’s an underlying identity.

The common element, in fact, is that Star Trek’s equation of human and alien addresses issues about which we are extremely ambivalent, and this equation is an effort to overcome our alienated, conflicted condition.

That explanation may be fine in theory, but it’s useless without specific evidence. Hence I’d like to survey each dramatic context — the Cold War, the Frontier Myth (as historian Richard Slotkin calls it), classic religion and family psychology — as Star Trek presents it, in order to document how our fundamentally mixed feelings produce alienation in each case.

For the sake of concision, I’ll limit my inquiry to the franchise’s first two series: the original show and The Next Generation (aired between 1966 and 1994), which were both created and supervised by Gene Roddenberry, rather than trying to include the entire Star Trek canon, which is still in production even as I write these words.

After posting the book’s first chapters, which inventory Star Trek’s four preferred episode-types, I will present another chapter (“God in the Machine”), which asks how faith in science and technology affects our management of urgent social crises.

Then I’ll share a seventh post (“Free Enterprise”) that appraises how scientism in Star Trek informs current political and economic trends. The concluding chapter (“Discontent Civilizations”) summarizes our present madness, as exhibited by Star Trek and actualized first by Heaven’s Gate and later by the pandemic, together with some ideas for healing our alienation and for creating a healthier future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the many people who helped me to research and write this book, including my entire family, Scott Collura, Jordan Corngold, Maureen Corrigan, Elizabeth A. Davis, Nathaniel Drake, Paul Higgins, Richard Maranda, Gregory Rodriguez, Joseph Stebbins, Doris Stevenson and Elizabeth Udwin.

1. For full documentation of the Covid shots’ mortality and morbidity, see “Warped Speed, Chapter 8.”