First of all, once again the mystery of what’s going on drives the first Act. There’s an erratic Starfleet shuttlecraft that has been missing with a life form on board who is suffocating. They bring it in with a tractor beam and the alien is revived by the doctor is sick bay. Here’s the alien that @Navaronegun has been showing us repeatedly in this thread and others with half face white and half a face black! So this is going to be an allegory on racism right?
Hmmmm, maybe. We’ll see. This alien is accused by Kirk of stealing a Starfleet shuttle and immediately gets his hackles up. He doesn’t like these kinds of accusations, he was permitted use of the craft by its owner, he claims. He’s not very forthcoming on who he is or what’s going on.
The next part is really mysterious. A ship shows up on sensors, but only on sensors. They can’t see anything out of there. I’ll skip this whole part, suffice it to say a new alien ends up on bridge and his ship disintegrates. This one has the opposite side of his face black and white. He’s been in pursuit of the other fellow for 50,000 years.
Ok, so let’s talk about this conflict between these two. The whites have been enslaved by the blacks for a long time. But are no longer slaves. But the white one claims that they are still treated poorly and is a revolutionary fighting in the name of equality and overthrowing the oppressors. The black one says they’ve been freed as slaves are ungrateful for this wonderful magnanimous gesture and don’t know how to behave properly in a free society and instead are bitter and troublemakers and revolutionaries.
So translate that into our world at the time of this episode, this is a black man saying, yeah, we’re free, but you still treat us terribly, and I’m going to continue to fight for my rights, even taking up arms and starting something like the Black Panthers. And the white guy in pursuit is saying know your place black man, you’re acting like the uncivilized brute you are. And what does Kirk say in all this? He doesn’t want to take sides. He wants to be a neutral arbiter. He wants to say, can’t we all just get along? Live and let live? The black man rightly calls him a naive idealist. He preaches his case to crew members. There’s a really great scene where Spock listens in through the door as the guy preaches his ideas about freedom from oppression to Chekov and Sulu and Uhura and others. And we just sit there as the audience, outside the door, eavesdropping.
At the end of the episode we reach their world. They haven’t been back in 50,000 years. Let me put that number in perspective. The farthest back in human history we can go back is maybe 4000 years? These two men have been gone for 50,000 years! A lot could have happened. We’ve almost annihilated ourselves here through nuclear war with the Soviets, probably fried ourselves through Climate change in much less time than that. But no, Kirk and even the two aliens think it’s the war between the whites and blacks that must be responsible. Kirk gets all houlier-than-thou about how they should have embraced peace.
So essentially this episode is telling the Black Panther-wanna be revolutionary, cool your heels son. Hate leads to nowhere good. Sure, you were a slave, and you’re not being treated well, but that doesn’t mean being upset and fermenting revolution is the answer. Maybe you should just calm down.
It’s quite the message. I’m not sure I can get behind it, and it would be fairly controversial today, I’d think. And I’m kind of surprised that Star Trek did an episode like this only 5 years after the civil rights act was passed. They’re telling black people, hey, you’re no longer slaves, and you got your rights, now cool your jets and embrace peace or we’ll all die in a fiery hellscape as shown in a hilarious montage of burning buildings.
I kind of love this episode you guys. It’s very ballsy and cheesy and it’s got a point of view. This was awesome.
