“The Jihad”
Written by Stephen Kandel
Directed by Hal Sutherland
Animated Season 1, Episode 16
Production episode 22014
Original air date: January 12, 1974
Stardate: 5683.1
Captain’s log. The Enterprise arrives at Vedala, along with representatives from several other species, summoned by the ancient space-faring race for a special mission. Kirk and Spock are specifically summoned, along with Tchar, hereditary prince of the birdlike Skorr, Sord, from a lizardlike species, M3 Green, an insectlike lockpick, and Lara, a humanoid hunter.
The mission comes from Tchar: the soul of Alar, the spiritual leader of the Skorr, was archived in a sculpture, which has been stolen. The Skorr government has kept the theft secret from their people, but they won’t be able to keep that secret forever, and when they learn that the soul of Alar has been stolen, the Skorr will launch a holy war against the entire galaxy.
To avoid that, this team of specialists must find the sculpture. It’s been located on a mad planet, one that is geologically unstable with massive temperature variations. The team is sent there, with a little dune buggy, by the Vedala. (The Vedala themselves claim they could not survive on that world.) This group is the fourth expedition to be sent—the previous three all failed.
The dune buggy tracking equipment doesn’t work on this world, but Lara is an expert tracker, and she can trace the direction to go in, and after a time, Tchar can sense the soul. They drive through rain and sun and earthquakes. A volcano erupts nearby, and they’re endangered by lava. Tchar finds a ravine that Sord, Kirk, and Lara throw rocks into in order to divert the lava, while Spock and M3 Green have to work quickly to rewire the dune buggy for greater speed and power in order to outrun the lava flow. They eventually attain higher ground, but the dune buggy is burned out. They continue on foot, now through snow. At one point, M3 Green falls through a crack in the ice, and Kirk, Spock, and Tchar have to rescue him. M3 Green tries to give up, but Sord simply carries him.
They make camp for a bit, while Tchar, Kirk, and Lara all scout ahead. Kirk and Lara find a replica of a Skorr temple. M3 Green works to pick the lock, while winged mechanical sentinels attack them. They blow up most of them, but Tchar is taken away. M3 Green opens the door and they go in to find the soul of Alar—but it’s high up. Tchar is the only one who could reach it, and he’s still missing. All save Sord climb up the wall to try to reach them—but then Tchar reveals himself to be the one responsible for all the other expeditions failing. He’s the one who stole the soul, because he wants to restore the Skorr to their rightful place as the conquerors of the galaxy.
Tchar turns off the gravity in the temple so they can all die like Skorr: in the air. Kirk and Spock manage to engage him while Kirk hooks his foot into the sculpture, and then Lara sends the recall signal that brings them all back to Vedala.
In order to preserve peace, all knowledge of the theft of the soul must remain secret. The Vedala return everyone to their ships only a few minutes after they left, and their memory of the mission will soon fade as well.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Spock and M3 Green are able to hotwire the dune buggy so it can outrun the lava flow. Because they’re just that awesome.
Fascinating. Spock is supposed to be on the mission for his scientific expertise, which comes into play solely when it comes to hotwiring the dune buggy, which seems like a waste…
I cannot change the laws of physics! Scotty gets to silently beam Kirk and Spock down.
Ahead warp one, aye. Sulu expresses surprise that Kirk and Spock beam back so soon, which is when they realize that some manner of time-travel shenanigans have been engaged in by the Vedala.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Lara hits all over Kirk, but he rebuffs her, putting the mission first, though he doesn’t reject the possibility of future nookie out of hand.
Channel open.
“You ever quote anything besides statistics, Vulcan?”
“Yes. But philosophy and poetry are not appropriate here.”
–Lara asking a snotty question, and Spock providing a snotty answer.
Welcome aboard. Veteran radio actor Jane Webb provides the voices of Lara and Vedala, a rare case of a female voice not provided by Majel Barrett or Nichelle Nichols (who get this episode off). David Gerrold, writer of the two tribble episodes, and more besides, does the voice of M3 Green, James Doohan does the voice of Tchar, and George Takei does Sulu, while one of Filmation’s regular voiceover actors does Sord.
Trivial matters: M3 Green’s species is established in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series as being the Nasat, with P8 Blue, a member of the buglike species, serving on that series’ ship the U.S.S. da Vinci. The Nasat culture and homeworld are explored in depth, building on both the S.C.E. series and this episode, by Heather Jarman in the novella Balance of Nature (collected in the Breakdowns trade paperback). Other Nasats are seen in various bits of tie-in fiction, including some as staff in the Federation government in your humble rewatcher’s Articles of the Federation.
A member of the Skorr species named desYog was established as being a shuttle pilot on the U.S.S. Titan under Captain William Riker in the novel The Red King by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin.
The Vedala are seen again in Christopher L. Bennett’s Department of Temporal Investigations novel Forgotten History.
David Gerrold lobbied to do the voice of M3 Green so he could get a Screen Actors Guild card, which Hal Sutherland agreed to even though he couldn’t pay him much.
To boldly go. “We’ll all die here!” I’ve always loved this episode. It’s not great by any stretch, it’s fairly easy to figure out who the bad guy is (my fiancée figured it out pretty much instantly), and that particular revelation doesn’t actually make much sense. If Tchar was the one who stole it, why is he involved in the coverup to keep the theft out of the public eye? It’s possible he’s going along with it in order to appease the Vedala, but the script doesn’t make that at all clear.
Plus, the “mad planet” is pretty much impossible, scientifically speaking. (Although it does kind of remind you of the Genesis planet in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, doesn’t it?)
And yeah, all that’s a problem, but I don’t care that much, because I enjoy the heck out of this episode. Stephen Kandel worked on Mission: Impossible, and this has a similar structure to that show, with specialists brought in to do an off-the-books mission that is damn near impossible. We get a collection of truly alien aliens, three of whom are of a type that would be difficult to pull off in live action (Tchar and M3 Green in particular). I like the basic heroism of everyone involved—even the self-professed coward M3 Green comes through when it’s important to the mission—I like Lara’s up-front flirting with Kirk (nice to see the shoe on the other foot there), and yes, I even like the fact that the most advanced species in the galaxy is feline (for all that they mostly just reused and recolored the character design for the Kzinti to save money). With the peculiar exception of Spock (who mostly just plays Captain Obvious in this one), everyone has something important to do, and it’s a fun little adventure.
Sigh. Now that I’m actually writing all this down, I’m realizing that this episode really isn’t all that and a bag of chips, but dammit, I enjoy it anyhow. David Gerrold’s whiny voice as M3 Green, Lara flirting, Sord’s obnoxiousness, the MacGyvering of the dune buggy—it’s just fun. And I like it. So there.
Warp factor rating: 7
Next week: “The Pirates of Orion”
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be a guest at (Re)Generation Who 3 this weekend in Baltimore, Maryland, alongside Doctor Who actors Sylvester McCoy, Ingrid Oliver, Katy Manning, Neve McIntosh, Catrin Stewart, Peter Purves, Terry Molloy, and Richard Franklin; fellow writers Andrew Cartmel, George Mann, John Peel, and Paul Magrs; and tons more cool folks. Keith will have a table, where he will be selling and signing books, and will also be doing a one-hour presentation Saturday at 4pm and a panel on writing science fiction with Peel and Mann Saturday at 7pm.
I really enjoyed this one too. It’s great fun and one of my favourite TAS episodes.
So there. That’s the spirit.
Wait….I think I heard this one… “A Human, a Vulcan and a Birdman walk into a bar….”
It’s been several years since I’ve watched TAS but I remember several of them, (and this rewatch is filling in the rest), and I’m glad Mission Impossible was mentioned because in regards to this one, I do remember thinking “Since when are Kirk and Spock part of the IMF team!” But I do agree, the “fun” aspect does overwhelm any barbs one might toss at it.
Yeah, I remember this one fondly as well. (Am I the only one who finds it reminiscent of the Piers Anthony novel Thousandstar? Although I find it hard to believe that the episode could have had any direct influence on the novel.)
Is it just me, or does Lara look like a hot version of Zora from The Savage Curtain?
I revisited the Vedala in my novel Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History, fleshing out what the episode hinted at and explaining why this important, ancient race never appeared again. It’s been speculated that Sord may belong to the Gnalish species from Michael Jan Friedman’s novels about Captain Picard’s Stargazer crew, and though Friedman has said it’s possible, it wasn’t his original intention and has never been confirmed.
Keith, what’s your source for the attribution of Jane Webb as Lara and the Vedala? I knew her voice pretty well in my childhood, and I got reacquainted with it when I saw Filmation’s Journey to the Center of the Earth rerun on El Rey Network last year, but I didn’t recognize these characters as sounding like her. Mainly I remember her doing more high-pitched, girlish voices, and doing Ginger on The New Adventures of Gilligan as a Marilyn Monroe impression. I suppose these characters could be Webb pitching her voice lower than usual, though.
Anyway, I agree this one is a lot of fun, one of the best episodes at taking advantage of the potential of animation and giving us lots of lively environments and aliens. It’s interesting how much personality the characters have even though we only get to know them for a few minutes each. I wish their species names had been established, though. I’m particularly curious about Lara. She’s described as human, but she seems to be from a culture of hunters and trackers, and she swears by “the Seven Gods.” Not to mention having those weird trifurcated eyebrows giving her an “alien” look. So I wonder what the deal is there.
The other interesting thing about Lara is that she’s the closest Kirk comes to having a love interest in TAS. I don’t think the Taurean women in “The Lorelei Signal” really count. Kirk’s putting the mission before seduction seems to clash with the popular caricature of Kirk’s personality, but it’s a very good fit with how he was written in the first season of TOS, married to his duty with no time for romance. Much the same happened in Kandel’s “Mudd’s Women,” with Kirk being the only human male in the crew who wasn’t gaga over the women, and resisting Eve’s seduction attempts.
As for the plausibility of the planet, that bothered me for years, but eventually I decided that it could kind of make sense if one assumed it was a very young planet, still cooling and with a very turbulent climate. Also if one assumed that the time scale of the episode was compressed and that the quest covered a day or more. The main problem is that an uninhabited planet shouldn’t normally have an oxygen atmosphere with no plants to create it, but there is a way that could happen — if most of its original supply of water had been broken down into hydrogen and oxygen by stellar radiation and the lighter hydrogen had outgassed into space.
I do have a quibble with the title, because it’s kind of a misunderstanding of what jihad means. Despite how the term has been corrupted and illegitimately used by militant groups, its strict definition refers to a purely defensive action, fighting to protect the Islamic community from outside invaders or oppressors. (Indeed, that’s the lesser jihad. The greater jihad is the individual’s inner struggle against the things that get in the way of being a good Muslim, like anger, self-doubt, temptation, etc.) Kandel was following the Western tendency to assume that jihad was synonymous with Crusade, an aggressive holy war to conquer nonbelievers or expunge heretics. Really, “The Crusade” might’ve been a more accurate title for the episode.
The climax in the temple also bothers me, because the animation is screwed up — the dialogue indicates that the Soul is way up high and impossible to reach on foot, but the animation shows it right there at ground level, where they could just walk right over to it. We also get an error of the lava flow animation appearing in front of the cart too early in the volcano sequence. Plus it’s weird that acts 2 & 3 both open with establishing shots of the Enterprise in orbit of the Vedala planetoid even though the action is taking place who knows how many parsecs away.
Speaking of that establishing shot, I wonder which of the four alien ships belongs to which character. I’m guessing the one on the left, which has a similar look to Starfleet/human tech (and which I think was also seen in “The Time Trap”), is Lara’s ship. If I guessed based on color alone, I’d suspect that the yellow ship is Tchar’s, the green ship is Em’s, and the gray ship is Sord’s.
Production-wise, I also have a problem with Shatner’s performance, which is very lackadaisical. Too bad, because I’d thought a few weeks ago that he was getting better. On the other hand, we get new guest voices, and a number of music cues that are used nowhere else in TAS (though I think several are lifts from Lassie’s Rescue Rangers). We also get a lot less stock animation than usual, due to all the new characters — although the Swooper/Maravel dragon animation is reused again. I wonder if any of this has to do with it being the first-season finale.
Christopher: Thanks! I’ve edited the Trivial Matters section accordingly. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Perhaps Tchar feels threatened by the influences of other cultures upon his people, making them peaceful, and sees his plan to shock them into angrily returning to their warrior heritage as a defensive move; conquer all those nasty, peaceful outside cultures that threaten his way of life. The Vedala do say Tchar is mad and will give him treatment rather than punishment.
@9/Lisa: Well, that wouldn’t be so different from how so-called “jihadists” today twist the idea to justify attacks on women, children, and non-combatants (all strictly prohibited by the Qur’an) as a “defense” of the Islamic community. They don’t really see it as defensive, but they have to spin it that way to the public, pretend that their aggression is actually a defense of their way of life. That’s what Tchar did — he despised the peace that Alar had brought, but he stole the Soul of Alar in order to use it as the excuse for the war he wanted, pretending that it was to avenge Alar rather than to reject his teachings. So I guess it does reflect the abuse of the term “jihad” pretty well — but that’s not at all clear to non-Muslim audience members who’ve been misled to think it’s just a synonym for “crusade” or “holy war.”
Of course, I didn’t understand this myself until college. This episode was almost certainly my first exposure to the word “jihad” in my childhood. I’m not sure if I even knew it was a real-world term instead of a Skorr word or something.
@3 Bob Ahrens
“Meanwhile, the crafty Ferengi ducks under it!”
It strikes me that an interesting connection could be made between the soul of Alar in its sculpture, and the Katric arks used by the Vulcans –or, for that matter, between Alar the peacemaker and Surak.
That might actually explain why Spock was brought along, as the closest thing available to an expert in that technology.
Words often change their meaning over time. And most of us, if we are honest, will admit to fighting some changes while pushing others. On the plus side, it’s one of the ways we can wage war without swords. (Hey, just noticed that to change ‘sword’ to ‘words’, you only have to move one letter from front to back.)
As for Jihad, I’ve always felt that its main meaning is pretty much synonymous with crusade. The enemy are always the aggressor, after all! One of Gene Wolfe’s books had a line in which Mars was referred to as the god of defence. The secondary meaning of jihad seems to be a bit more personal compared to crusade, though – a ‘crusade against drugs’ is intended to mean a societal war against drugs, rather than an individual battle, which I think a jihad would be.
@13/Gerry: Yes, Westerners have long assumed that jihad is synonymous with their concept of a crusade, but that’s because it’s a common ethnocentric myth to assume that other cultures’ ideas similar to your own are actually identical. But the differences between them are often crucial, and being blinded by one’s own societal preconceptions can keep one from really understanding those differences. Crusades are aggressive — kill the heretics, conquer their lands. Jihad is sometimes misapplied that way, but as defined in the Qur’an, it’s explicitly and solely defensive and forbids the killing of noncombatants. People who use the word jihad to justify acts of aggression like 9/11 are liars. Only Islamic jurists have the authority to issue a jihad, and Osama bin Laden’s claims of being an Islamic jurist were fraudulent. What al-Qaida waged was not a legitimate jihad, no matter what they claimed.
Words mean what is understood when they are spoken.
@15/Gerry: The point is that the misuse of the term jihad is not a neutral thing, because of the way it’s deliberately distorted and misrepresented by fanatics (in both the Islamic world and the American right wing) with violent and oppressive agendas. If you were talking about, say, the word “decimate” or “literally,” then I wouldn’t argue. But this particular word is far more charged.
Besides… the problem with the statement “Words mean what is understood when they are spoken” is, understood by whom? Two people from different cultural backgrounds can understand the same word to mean two entirely different things, and that will create misunderstanding and conflict between them unless they’re able to look beyond their own assumptions about what the word means and understand how different people mean it differently. For instance, to turn it around, sometime after 9/11, President George W. Bush did a very stupid thing by using the word “crusade” as a metaphor for the fight against terrorism. To him, to his US audience, “crusade” was a word with positive implications, a quest to do something righteous. But the Islamic world experienced the Crusades as a devastating attack on their civilization by violent barbarians who tried to steal their lands and destroy their community — much the way the West now perceives the attacks of al-Qaeda and ISIL. So they heard it as a threat of invasion, and it played right into al-Qaeda’s propaganda that they were engaged in a defensive jihad against a West that intended to destroy Islam. It was a major diplomatic gaffe that arose from Bush’s failure to realize that there was a difference between how he understood the word and how a different culture understood it. That’s why recognizing such differences is so important.
And look at how many sports teams still use the Crusaders name. The Cleveland Crusaders WHA hockey team even used a knight with a shield adorned with a stylized cross on it. Imagine how people would react to a team called the Jacksonville Jihadists. If you can find it, check out Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) series The Crusades. There’s some humour in it but for the most part, it’s a very interesting look at how Christianity committed numerous atrocities, including the sacking of Constantinople, at the time, the largest Christian city in the world.
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That said, this is an interesting episode. We get some cool aliens and a Saturday morning cartoon about religious extremism. Scooby Doo, this isn’t. It would have been interesting to see the Skorr show up on Enterprise but they really weren’t that much into TOS continuity until the final season. Pity that.
Sure, the planet is totally unscientific but that’s never stopped Trek from telling a story before. From the asteroid (!) Runa Penthe being totally ice covered yet possessing both Earth normal gravity and atmosphere to Vulcan apparently being almost entirely desert yet still having a thin but breathable oxygen atmosphere, the planetary sciences have always been a weak point for the series. These are the folks that had the Kazon unable to find water and a planet that had a surface temperature below absolute zero. So the whole “mad planet” didn’t bother me.
I wonder what the population of Skorr is. We’re told that they can breed an army of two billion warriors in just a couple of years. How would a race handle such a huge increase in population? How would you feed and train two billion in such a short time? What’s their gestation period? Are we talking about the Skorr having the ability to suddenly increase the number of multiple births or do the females become able to become pregnant very shortly after giving birth (or laying eggs or whatever they do)? And how do you build enough starships to carry an army that numbers two billion in such a short time? So many unanswered questions about them. Background information from TMP gives us a somewhat similar race in the Arcturians. “Provide infantry for Federation. Planet is enormous and population enormous, subject to any amount of expansion; 100 billion population, army of 20 billion ready overnight. ” Arcturian
M3 Green is amusing but a bit too whiney for my tastes. David Gerrold has said that he came up with a better voice shortly after the episode was completed. It would be interesting to find out how he changed it.
Sord and Lara are less interesting, he being the fairly typical strong guy and her being the token woman. There’s a bit more to them than that but not much.
It would be nice to see how the Vedala have interacted with the Klingons, Romulans and the others. How would they react to being on the short end of the technological balance?
All in all, an entertaining tale that leaves us with all sorts of unanswered questions.
7/10
p.s. – Christopher – You’re giving Bush too much credit. He knew EXACTLY what he was saying when he used crusade, same as when he said “Bring ’em on!” and “If you’re not with us, you’re against us”.
“a planet that had a surface temperature below absolute zero.”
I always heard that was Levar mistakenly saying Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, and it wasn’t caught until the episode was aired; is that not the case?
Words mean what is understood by those who hear them? We had a long talk about chorizos and sausages, not that long ago.
The episode didn’t remind me of Mission Impossible because I’ve never watched it, but it reminded me of a fantasy roleplaying campaign: A group of beings of different species and with different abilities, including fighting, tracking, and picking locks, are hired to retrieve a powerful artifact. But of course, in 1974 fantasy roleplaying games had only just been invented.
It made me a bit uncomfortable that the Vedala talked about Tchar’s madness. He didn’t seem mad to me. Classing someone as mad because you despise his views and his actions is a bit dubious.
@7/Christopher: “Kirk’s putting the mission before seduction [is] a very good fit with how he was written in the first season of TOS, married to his duty with no time for romance.” – He still put his duty first in “Elaan of Troyius”. And the first season also established that he had at least three or four former girlfriends, was attracted to his yeoman, and fell deeply in love on 20th century Earth. I’d say he was portrayed throughout the show as someone who likes women and who longs for a romantic relationship, but who considers his duty more important and can’t have both. So I agree that his focusing on the mission in this episode was perfectly in character.
@17/kkozoriz: “Sord and Lara are less interesting, […] her being the token woman.” – There’s no accounting for taste. Lara is what I like best about the episode. TOS had a lot of cool female guest characters, and so far TAS only had Anne Nored and Devna. It’s amazing that Lara was created by Stephen Kandel, of all people. I also enjoy that she seems to be a tribal hunter with a spaceship of her own. I imagine that she comes from a technologically advanced nomadic people, similar to the Sivoans in Uhura’s Song. I love the idea of a spacefaring civilisation who have always been hunter-gatherers and never built cities or settled down in one place.
20. JanaJansen – The thing that I didn’t like about Lara is the fact that right from the start, she’s hitting on Kirk. One woman and her first instinct is to find a boyfriend. The time spent on that would have been better showing why she’s so valuable to the party. A wasted opportunity. It’s like when Uhura was bumped up to Big Three status in the reboot and he primary reason for being there is to be Spock’s girlfriend instead of concentrating on her abilities. Sure, we got a bit of that but for the most part, she’s there forSpock to react to instead of being important for her professional qualities. Imagine this episode if the characters were introduced as “Kirk, for his leadership abilities, Spock, for his scientific knowledge and Uhura because she’s in love with Spock.” Sure, they wouldn’t phrase it like that but as they say, actions speak louder than words. Wasted opportunity.
@21/kkozoriz: But she wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, she was looking for a fling. I found that quite refreshing.
@22/Jana: Also, Lara was the aggressor, which at the time was seen as the conventionally male role in a romantic interaction. She was pursuing him rather than waiting for him to pursue her. So that was a progressive portrayal for its day. Classic Sexual Revolution stuff — women asserting their right to seek their own sexual pleasure on their own terms rather than being passive targets for male libido.
I agree with both Christopher and Jana but it’s the timing of her advances I have trouble with. They’re on a mission where time is of the essence and the price of failure is war and a fling is the first thing on her mind? Imagine if Kirk acted like that. Perhaps if there had been another woman in the group, it wouldn’t bother me so much. But we’ve got five men with their eyes on the mission and the only woman is thinking about sex
@24/kkozoriz: “Imagine if Kirk acted like that.” – You mean, like Kelvin Kirk in the first two films? Yeah, I didn’t like that at all.
Okay, I get your point. It didn’t bother me because I tend to look at all the female TOS characters collectively, and while many of them have been quite dutiful, and others have put love before their work, Lara is unique in putting sex first. Also, she isn’t one of our Starfleet crew – it would have bothered me to see Uhura portrayed like that.
Something else I like about Lara is that she’s a hunter, which is traditionally a very male occupation, and that her special ability is her infallible sense of direction. After all the jokes about women having no sense of direction I’ve heard, I really enjoy that.
25. JanaJansen – Exactly. She had lots of interesting hooks to her character and they chose to concentrate on her knocking boots with Kirk. If they had met in a less drastic situation, it would have been interesting to see Kirk interacting with, what for the time, was an unconventional portrayal of a woman. Instead, we just get him giving her the brush off.
@26/kkozoriz: I don’t think the half-hour format would have allowed for that. Anyway, I like the Kirk-Lara scenes. It’s the kind of character interaction that makes the stories and the people feel real. And “green memories” is a cute term.
Hey folks — “The Pirates of Orion” won’t go up until tomorrow, as I’m still recovering from (Re)Generation Who 3….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
27. JanaJansen – Yeah, it would have been nice to see more of the Kirk/Lara interaction. The format really worked against it, especially with so many new characters. Lara and Sord came out of the short end in this one. It would have made an interesting hour long episode.
My wife was rather amused at Kirk turning down the lady – “I’ve never known him to refuse before!”
@30/MeredithP: That’s because we’ve never seen him in a comparable situation before.
@30/MeredithP: Early first-season Kirk was all about turning down the ladies. He was the only human male on the ship immune to Mudd’s Women, and he spent half the season bravely resisting his attraction to Yeoman Rand, only expressing it under personality alteration. In “The Man Trap,” he was the only man on the landing party who saw Nancy Crater as an ordinary, mature woman rather than a younger, idealized fantasy. He also politely brushed off Miri when she went after him, although of course her (apparent) youth was a factor there. And even when he was brainwashed to think he was madly in love with Helen Noel, it took him maybe ten seconds to shake it off and coldly order her to risk electrocution in the maintenance shaft.
Of course, early first-season Kirk was written indistinguishably from Pike. They were basically the same character. Many would argue that the looser, funnier, two-fisted lover and fighter that he became later was the result of Shatner’s performance influencing how the role was written, but I’m not so sure, because that characterization was pretty much the default for ’60s TV action heroes anyway — cf. Jim West on The Wild Wild West or Napoleon Solo on The Man from UNCLE, both of whose womanizing made Kirk look like a monk by comparison. So I think it was at least partly the result of network pressure to make Kirk a more conventional action hero.
I’ve just formulated a hypothesis as I wrote that and thought about it — I wonder if maybe Roddenberry was uncomfortable with his own womanizing. He tried to write Pike/Kirk as coolly professional and resisting the temptations of women, in contrast to the standard TV preference for two-fisted womanizer heroes. His writers’ bible said that Spock had an overpowering hypnotic effect on women (implicitly the reason Chapel and Leila Kalomi were so obsessed with him) that made him uncomfortable and that he tried to keep under control. And in later Roddenberry movie scripts like Roger Vadim’s Pretty Maids All in a Row and his own TV pilot Spectre, he portrayed charismatic, sexually libertine men not unlike himself as the films’ villains. I always used to see him as just a guy who attracted a ton of women without even trying and had no compunctions about making the most of it. But lately I’ve begun to wonder, based on cues like this in his writing, if maybe he wasn’t as comfortable with his promiscuity as he seemed. Although that could be reading too much into it; the writings are not the writer.
I’ll never understand why people see Kirk as a womanizer, and I still think that he is portrayed consistently as the same person throughout the show. He had quite a few serious romantic relationships in his past, but no more than some people I know in real life (men and women both). He seduces female enemies because he uses every nonviolent method at his disposal to achieve his aims, save his crew or get out of trouble. But he doesn’t make “conquests”, and McCoy flirts just as much as he does.
@33/Jana: Yup. Also, it’s more common for women to chase or seduce Kirk than the other way around — Eve, Miri, Helen (she was the one who committed a gross breach of therapist ethics by implanting a sexual fantasy in Kirk’s mind when he was under her care), Lenore (albeit with intent to murder him eventually), Sylvia, Marlena, Nona, Elaan, Deela, Marta, Lara. Or for women to be thrown at him/assigned to him to serve the agenda of others (Shahna, Drusilla, Odona, Rayna). And when he did get involved with women for purely personal reasons rather than as a means to an end, he fell extremely hard, as with Edith, Miramanee, and Rayna. “Womanizer” implies someone who has only shallow, casual relations with women and avoids commitment.
It’s just that there are a lot of scenes of Kirk with beautiful women, and while we, the fans, know the plots and understand what happened in each instance; people who are not actually interested in Star Trek just see Kirk with a woman, and assume he’s the standard 1960s TV action hero who always gets the girl. That is what got perpetuated in popular culture about Kirk and women.
But Kirk is one who is more than willing to take advantage of women throwing themselves at him. At least most of the time. He may not always be seeing out the hot, space babe but he’s rarely going to turn down an offer, even though it would be what Christopher calls a casual relation.
In the case of Miramanee, Kirk was not in his right mind. He was an amnesiac and could hardly be representative of how he’d actually feel in different situations. Rayna was simply absurd. He was willing to fight over a woman whom he’d only met a few hours ago. Imagine how you would feel if you went out on a blind date and after dinner he started acting like Kirk did. The vast majority of women would probably want to get as far away from him as they could.
Miri was an adolescent, at least in body, but also quite emotionally immature. Even Kirk would be hard pressed to bed someone who most people would see as half his age and under the age of consent as well.
Ruth has always been a bit of a blank spot in his past. Someone that he feels strongly about and that’s about it. In my mind, she was one of his instructors at the Academy who he fell in love with, had a brief affair before she broke it off for whatever reason. Perhaps she realized it was unethical or perhaps it was pressure from above that she do so. In either case, I imagine she was the one that ended it and he never fully got over her. Seeing as Kirk was thinking of his Academy days, what with Finnigan showing up, the timing would make sense.
@35/MaGnUs: Yes, people just look at the pictures and don’t pay attention to the stories.
@36/kkozoriz: “But Kirk is one who is more than willing to take advantage of women throwing themselves at him. At least most of the time.” – Any examples besides “Bread and Circuses”? Because I think there aren’t any.
As for Miramanee, Kirk was very much himself in that episode. He didn’t remember his former life, but he didn’t act any differently.
37. JanaJansen – So you see nothing wrong with taking advantage of someone with amnesia? After all, even if you know that they;re involved with someone else, they would be “very much themselves” if you got involved? Sorry, but I must disagree. Parts of Kirk were there but like the good/evil Kirk from The Enemy Within, he’s not all Kirk. Not saying that Miramanee knew any of this or that she took advantage, just that Kirk was not, literally, all there.
Okay episode of Saturday Morning cartoons. Felt very one-off. With the all-powerful organian-like species, the weird car they drive, and Kirk and Spock being part of a special forces-type team. The overall story feels kind of high-concept, but then the other things make it feel strange and childish. Kinda weird.
Jumping in to very mildly object to the discussion of Jihad versus Crusade in this thread. While the legal concept of “jihad” is broadly defensive, both the Persians and the Byzantines would be quite surprised to hear jihads being defined tout court as defensive wars. In fact, while they were juridically defined as a war in defense of the Islamic community, the initial Islamic conquests of the 7th century represent one of the most aggressive and rapid territorial expansions in history, leading to the rapid takeover of the Persian Empire and putting the Byzantine Empire into a state of siege for roughly the next eight hundred years.
The modern (esp. post 9/11) idea of Islamic civilization (as a backward horde of nomadic barbarians and therefore jihad as a mindless horde of rapacious savages overwhelming civilization is a very silly way to portray the wars of an extraordinarily wealthy, powerful, and technologically advanced set of historical civilizations–as is the modern use of the wars of these civilizations as justification for itinerant terrorist attacks by non-state actors against noncombatants. It’s equally silly, though, to ignore the expansionist nature of (some, though not all of) those civilizations and accompanying conflicts. The Romans frequently used defensive justifications for their own wars of expansion, but that doesn’t prevent us from recognizing that, by and large, few of those wars were properly defensive, nor does it prevent us from characterizing the Roman Empire (correctly) as a broadly expansionist power.
Even sillier from a historical perspective is the very modern Western ideas that the Crusades represented generic “holy wars” with the explicit goal of destroying all heretics/unbelievers and that there exists some kind of profound Muslim cultural trauma lingering to the present day from the Crusades themselves.
In the literal sense, a “Crusade” was just a term for the (uncommon/extraordinary) practice of granting indulgences to soldiers fighting in military campaigns. The wars in which this practice was used were very different wars with very different goals, but in theory it was supposed to be granted only for just wars in defense of Christendom as a whole. The first crusade was launched with the explicitly defensive goal of bolstering the defenses of the Byzantine Empire, and even the (later) goal of conquering Jerusalem was conceived of in theory as a reconquest of Byzantine territory and a means to protect Christian pilgrims from recent mistreatment (which produced so much rage because of how unprecedented it was–Muslim authorities in the Holy Land had generally been quite happy to protect Christian pilgrims).
Obviously, though, in practice,with a very few exceptions (such as the crusades declared to bolster Byzantine defenses right before the conquest of Constantinople), most crusades were not defensive wars, but attempts to take foreign territories that had previously belonged to the Byzantine Empire. However, they were also not “holy wars” in the modern sense of campaigns of total ethnic/religious cleansing, as the Crusader Kingdoms, during their brief existence, were actually rather religiously tolerant, out of practical necessity if nothing else.
The more important point, though, is that the Crusades can’t be characterized as expansionist wars mostly because of how absurdly unsuccessful they were. Apart from the brief time after the first crusade, Christian kingdoms never succeeded in taking or holding any significant amount of Muslim territory. Ironically the Crusades ended up helping Muslim expansion overall because of their weakening/destabilizing effect on the Byzantine Empire.
Which is why, incidentally, virtually every pre-modern Muslim source treats them, not as unprecedented horrifying atrocities, but as relatively minor events in a long series of wars with Christian states, remembered in retrospect, if at all, as glorious victories for Islam and embarrassing defeats for their enemies.
Ironically, it was modern colonialism that introduced the idea of the Crusades back into Muslim consciousness–as positive or negative comparisons for modern colonialism. So on the one hand the French likened their own colonial rule over Muslims as analogous to the Crusades, reimagined as glorious campaigns to civilize backwards peoples. And on the other hand, the (extraordinarily anti-Catholic) English at times used the Crusades, reimagined as brutal rapacious “holy wars” aimed at total annihilation, as a negative comparison for their own allegedly benevolent conquest and rule over Muslims; hey, at least we’re not Crusaders!
The very real cultural trauma associated with “Crusader” terminology (which Bush and other neo-cons were indeed very stupid to bring up) is not that of the Crusades themselves, but the brutal, rapacious, and much more recent series of colonial European conquests and occupations of Muslim territories throughout the 19th and 20th (and now 21st) centuries. They, along with modern colonialism and Imperialism as a whole, involve any number of historically-unprecedented atrocities whose impact has been mostly swept under the rug in Western dealings with the rest of the world.
In both cases, then, there are three levels at work: (1) the actual legal concept of jihad or crusade (a juridically-declared war in defense of the Islamic community/the extraordinary granting of indulgences for participation in a just military campaign in defense of Christendom), (2) the historical reality of jihads and crusades (which varied vastly), and (3) how those concepts have been used and interpreted in modern times. Each level is valid on its own terms and needs to be taken into account, but they also need to be kept separate enough that they don’t destroy all historical understanding.
All that being said, this is a fun episode, and obviously it’s 100% plausible that these birdmen will declare a random, genocidal holy war against the rest of the galaxy if the soul of their religious icon is stolen.
@40/Captain Peabody: Well, yes, of course, the concept of jihad has been abused for aggressive purposes many times throughout history, just as people with political or economic agendas have always exploited and twisted religious teachings. That doesn’t mean the core concept says what they pretend it says. When I talked about how the meaning of jihad has been corrupted by militant groups, I meant the early conquering states as much as modern terrorists.
There is, of course, a major difference between the religion of Islam itself and the states that have built their politics and ideologies around it. After all, in pure Islamic teaching, there should be no state, no rulers, no intermediates between the individual and God. The existence of political bodies and rulers has always been seen as a compromise of the faith and a topic for extensive ethical debate among Islamic scholars, and there have been many different ways the debate has been settled by different Islamic communities and polities over a millennium and a half. So the actual letter of the holy text is one thing, the way it’s finessed or corrupted to serve various different agendas is another thing (or things).
Your points about the Crusades and their latter-day reinterpretations are well-taken, though. I guess the core ideas behind the two words aren’t as different as I thought, and they have both been corrupted and misinterpreted in similar ways, including by me, apparently. It stands to reason that a modern culture is more likely to be aware of how distant historical events have been propagandized and reinterpreted by modern actors to serve their agendas than to be nursing a grudge that’s been unchanged for centuries (which is why DS9’s idea that the Federation outlawed genetic engineering because of the Eugenics Wars 400 years earlier was so utterly ridiculous).
Yes, I don’t think we’re disagreeing about the importance of the basic distinctions between theoretical/legal/theological concept, historical application, and later interpretation. Or about the silliness of most modern treatments of Islam and Islamic civilization (silliness which is unfortunately leading to the shedding of real blood as we speak in both the Middle East and India under Modi). Though ultimately I would say that it’s good to preserve a certain degree of restraint as an outsider in declaring which manifestations of a tradition are “pure” and which are abuses. I’m a historian, not a theologian.
I could not agree more, though, that as a general rule it’s good to retain a healthy skepticism about claims that derive modern conflicts from events that happened many hundreds of years ago. With a very few exceptions (in events that still have immediate, tangible everyday effects), such explanations function as covers for much more recent (or contemporary) realities.
It’s always struck me as particularly absurd to see Americans declaring that “they” (all Muslims everywhere?) don’t like “us” (the 21st century American state) because of the crusades, a series of unsuccessful wars launched by Catholic Franks and Italians nearly a thousand years ago–while ignoring all the much more recent and contemporary events in which we’ve played and continue to play a much more active part.
In general, the historical innocence of Americans and Europeans about Imperialism and colonialism–with the scramble for Africa taking place barely one hundred and fifty years ago, the conquest of the Ottoman Empire, abolition of the Caliphate, and consequent total redrawing of Muslim states barely a hundred, most European colonial regimes being abolished only post-WW2, and the last European colony in Asia surrendering only in 1974–always staggers me. And that’s not to mention America’s adventures and conflicts military and political and cultural in the last three decades.
It’s precisely because of all that, though, that it strikes me as absolutely plausible that UFP officials of the 2370s would appeal to the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s to justify their ban on genetic engineering–if, that is, we assume that they’re being used as a rhetorical cover for some much more recent and catastrophic debacle(s) involving 24th century genetic technology. Could make for an interesting story, maybe?
@42/Captain Peabody: “It’s always struck me as particularly absurd to see Americans declaring that “they” (all Muslims everywhere?) don’t like “us” (the 21st century American state) because of the crusades, a series of unsuccessful wars launched by Catholic Franks and Italians nearly a thousand years ago–while ignoring all the much more recent and contemporary events in which we’ve played and continue to play a much more active part.”
Well, as I learned it studying Mideast History in college, it’s a mix of both — when Europeans from Napoleon onward started coming in, meddling in Mideast affairs, and insisting that we knew better, the reaction of the Islamic world was basically “Remember the Crusades? This is more of the same.” Our history didn’t give them much reason to trust the West’s good intentions, and two centuries of the West screwing things up for the Mideast have only confirmed and reinforced that mistrust.
As for your last point, as a rule, never suggest a story idea to a professional author; for legal reasons we can’t allow ourselves to listen, or to use any concept resembling an unsolicited suggestion, even if the resemblance is coincidental. However, I have conjectured in past novels that the 22nd-century Augment Crisis depicted in Enterprise was the real reason for the Federation’s genetic engineering ban, and that it was largely created under pressure from the Klingon Empire, since they saw the Augments as an attack against them and held a grudge over the whole de-ridging mutation business. So if they saw us pursuing genetic engineering again, they would’ve gone to war with us, thereby giving the fledgling UFP an incentive to outlaw it. And as you say, blaming it on the Eugenics Wars would be a handy fiction to divert from the messier reality.
As you point out CLB, Islam won the Crusades so it’s kind of hard to see why they’d hold a grudge over that. And what about the moorish conquest of Spain? Okay that ended in 1492 but the ottomans controlled the Balkans up to the 19th century. So it’s really not like the Islamic world has just been minding its own business all these millenia!
@44 – “Islam won the Crusades so it’s kind of hard to see why they’d hold a grudge over that.”
Well, other than being invaded, slaughtered to the point where the blood in the mosques was ankle deep and the fact that it happened over and over and over again, sure.
Add in the fact that the western powers have continued to meddle in the affairs of the Islamic nations. For example, Americans always point to the 1979 Revolution in Iran as a source of outrage, conveniently ignoring the fact that it overthrew the Shah, who was just as bad, if not worse than any of the Islamic countries today. The Shah was installed by the US and UK after they created a coup that overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 because they had the gall to want to control their oil fields instead of American and British companies.
And then Iran signs an agreement to allow their nuclear program to be monitored by an international coalition and then the Americans pulled out, even though Iran was in compliance. And the the US imposed crippling sanctions and even now, the US demands more than simply returning to compliance in return for removing the sanctions.
I mean, the Muslims are just being so darn unreasonable in all this, aren’t they?
There is no such thing as a society that has never done anything bad. We all have evil in our heritage. History should not be about playing gotcha games or looking for excuses to say “My culture’s better than yours.” It should be about understanding and striving to outgrow the wrongs everyone has committed, most of all our own ancestors so that we can take responsibility for their misdeeds and dedicate ourselves to doing better in the future. Blaming others is just dodging responsibility.
CLB, exactly! Placing blame is a futile exercise. Let the past bury it’s dead.
KK, don’t forget the centuries Islamic states controlled slices of Europe. What goes around comes around. And remember that the levant and north Africa were part of the Christian Roman Empire before the Islamic Jihad.
@47/roxana: Wow. Way to pretend to agree and then immediately prove you’ve completely missed the point.
Hi everyone, in the interest of keeping this discussion civil and on-topic, let’s move away from analyzing the historical relationship between major religions and get back to discussing Star Trek. Thanks!
@43- I admit I your version would be more easily delivered with a straight face than my own pet theory, that the Federation’s taboo on genetic engineering arises from an understanding of evolution as an orthogenetic process that will inevitably (unless interfered with) lead humanity to their glorious destiny as a species of mustachioed newts.