TOS 066 (Season 3, Episode 7): "Day of the Dove"

Something you faithful readers may not know about me, since my chosen style is writing with self-mocking overseriousness about things that really aren't that important (TV, pop music, and the Rockies), is that I am deeply sensitive to prejudice of any kind. It is difficult for me to talk about the life of my hero, Jackie Robinson, without shedding a tear or two. When I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the first time when I was nine or ten, the whole 42 thing made complete sense to me. The thing that makes me most cranky about people discussing how football has supplanted baseball as America's pastime is how to me it marginalizes Robinson. No single person in history has made a stronger argument for the positive effect sports can have on a society.

Likewise, there aren't a lot of scripted programs intended to entertain that have aired on TV with more of a cultural impact than "Star Trek." "Trek" made a guy with a thick Russian accent a hero on U.S. television in the middle of the Cold War. It put a confident and competent (and beautiful) black woman in a position of importance and insouciantly behaved like this was no big deal. The first widely seen interracial and same-sex kisses on network television came on "Trek" series. "Star Trek" at its best has always maintained a confident attitude about the human capacity to overcome while using its stories to teach harsh lessons about how much work we still have left to do.

Yet it's been some time since any "Trek" show really made a brave and relevant statement. The last one I can remember that moved me to any meaningful degree is the magnificent "Far Beyond the Stars," a race-centered "Deep Space Nine" directed by Avery Brooks that way too few people saw. "Enterprise" took a couple shots at domestic terrorism and the AIDS epidemic, but the blatant misogyny of the costumes and plots foisted upon Jolene Blalock's T'Pol rather overwhelmingly undercut any weight they might have carried. As for "Voyager," the show's fortunes took a rather dramatic and unexpected upward swing down the home stretch as seventh-season showrunner Kenneth Biller uncorked a number of really good episodes on contemporary subjects: the health care crisis, designer genetics for unborn children, punishment vs. rehabilitation for prison inmates, creative property rights for holographic novelists. Trouble was after six years of irrelevant and unoriginal lightweight sci-fi (and three years of a wholly undeserved huge role for Jeri Ryan and her impressively gravitational binary system), nobody was watching except for a nonjudgemental mass cult.

The best lesson that "Star Trek" has to offer, presented in microcosm in the classic third-season original series episode "The Day of the Dove," is that ignorance is the root of all fear. "Day of the Dove" is one of the handful of original series episodes like "The Trouble with Tribbles" and "The City on the Edge of Forever" to which even folks who have never watched a single "Star Trek" know the story. A mysterious glimmering entity that looks like a backwards "G" takes control of the Enterprise and influences the crew into a violent conflict with some Klingons led by the noble Kang, memorably played by Michael Ansara. When Kirk and Kang discover they are being manipulated, they famously dimiss the malign entity by laughing it right off the ship. (Less remembered are the unintentionally hilarious fight scene where Sulu dispatches an armed Klingon with a karate chop and a great Nimoy moment where under the spell of the "G"-being Spock breaks character and complains about irritating humans are.)

Of course, the Klingons are the single greatest fictional beneficiaries of Gene Roddenberry's laudable ideals. Because they were the recurring race from the 60's series and the earlier films that came across as the most one-dimensionally violent and prejudiced, Roddenberry insisted that one be front and center on the bridge of the Enterprise-D when "Star Trek: The Next Generation" premiered. Thanks to the imagination and passion of writers like Ron Moore and René Echeverria and the tireless behind-the-scenes work of hundreds of makeup artists, costumers, and set designers, the Klingons have bloomed from stock villains into an imagined culture that rivals many real ones in mythology, art, and language. What's most important about this is that the original image of the Klingons as formed from their handful of appearances on the 60's TV show was in no sense corrected. If you're a "TNG"/"DS9" fan who hasn't seen many of the classic episodes, you'll be surprised by how much of the behavior of the Klingons in "Day of the Dove" is consistent with what we know about the race today. Kang's response when a bluffing Kirk threatens to kill his captured wife is perfectly Klingon. So is his line when he recognizes the presence of the alien being: "It is a fool who fights in a burning house." The Klingons even chant "Victory!" together after driving an Enterprise security team back; today of course they'd say it in their own language ("Kaplaa!") but the sentiment remains the same. The episode, written by Jerome Bixby, isn't shooting for long-term insights into the nature of the Klingons, but rather characterizing them to suit the needs of the plot -- Kang needs to be completely ruthless regarding the death of his wife because otherwise the show would end right there.

Impressively maintained continuity, though, isn't the point. The "Enterprise" writers completely missed this when they cooked up a ludicrous fourth-season story regarding a Klingon epidemic whose cure had the side effect of removing their forehead ridges, finally "explaining" why the Klingons appearing on the original series just looked like regular guys with dark makeup, Fu Manchus, and upward-curving browlines. That sort of pedantic backbending is an indicator of how the "Star Trek" franchise has lost its way.

The trouble is that "Star Trek" has become such a monumental world unto itself, with the entire invented culture of the Klingons only one of dozens of such examples, that the shows long ago stopped commenting on society at large. "Star Trek" nowadays pretty much only comments on other "Star Trek," such is the weight of its accumulated backstory. The powers that be at Paramount were crazy for thinking that "Enterprise" was a concept that was going to be embraced by a mass audience. C'mon, kids, let's gather round and watch the prequel to a forty-year-old show about people in pajamas on a spaceship! The new movie planned with J.J. Abrams directing (and Zachary Quinto from "Heroes" confirmed as Spock) is this same bad idea being repeated only with even higher stakes. What people miss about the way "Star Trek" used to be and isn't now isn't Kirk and Spock. It's the relevance. If the new movie doesn't say something to audiences about who we are as human beings right now, it could be the final nail in the coffin. Good thing not even Rick Berman can tarnish the legacy of Jackie Robinson.