"Scotty, I need warp speed in three minutes or we're all dead!"

(Originally published Sunday at the American Street, but without the pictures!)

When I heard that James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek, had died, I wasn't inspired with any profound thoughts about Star Trek, Scotty, science fiction, or the importance of great character actors.  I felt a little sad for his family, and a little sad for all of us.  Doohan was 85!  How did he get to be so old?  By living 40 years more after Star Trek premiered, that's how!  Tempus fugit, I thought with a sigh, because I often think in Latin.  Sic transit gloria mundi.  Momento mori.  Carpe diem.

 Dominus vobiscum.

 Et cum spiritu tuo.

Doohan was from all accounts a nice guy.  (See this post by Domoni at Temple of Me for a story illustrating his nice guyness.)  The world needs all the nice guys it can get.  But I still I didn't think much about his passing until the other night when the Mannion family gathered around the old pizza box to watch Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan for family movie night.  Then it occured to me just how important Scotty was to Star Trek.

I don't mean just to the plots, where he was always a mechanic ex machina.

I mean to the Star Trek dream of the future.

Everybody knows that Star Trek was the last great Liberal TV show.  By the time MASH aired, just a few years later, Liberalism had gone into a defensive crouch.  But when Star Trek was on the air, it was possible to dream of a future in which Earth would be at peace, international cooperation would be the norm, progress was a given, and---this is where Scotty came in---all problems could be solved.

Not long before the show went on the air President Kennedy had said, "Our problems are man-made---therefore, they can be solved by man." He went on:

And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable--and we believe they can do it again.

Star Trek seemed designed as an illustration of what a future based on JFK's hopeful speech would look like.

Three things occur in The Wrath of Khan that provide lessons that all children need to learn and all adults need to re-learn everyday.  The first thing is that Kirk defeats Khan because he listens to Spock.  Khan loses because he won't listen to his first officer.  Kirk accepts advice.  He understands that he needs help, that he can't do it all himself, and that he is not ever the smartest person in the room.  Khan puts all of his faith in his own superiority.

The second thing is that Kirk learns from his mistakes.  Kirk wins because he listens, in the end, after he almost lets the Enterprise be destroyed because he did not listen.  When the Enterprise encounters the Reliant, the starship Khan has stolen, they approach it unwarily, thinking the reason the Reliant isn't repsonding to messages is their communications equipment has failed.  Lt Saavik tries to warn Kirk to put the shields up.  He doesn't listen and the Enterprise is almost fatally wounded.   The first thing Kirk does after they escape is tell Saavik he was wrong and in the future she should make sure he pays attention to her suggestions.

Khan, on the other hand, makes one mistake after another and never learns from them.  When we first met him in the original TV show, in the episode Space Seed,  he hadn't learned anything from his defeat back on Earth.  He'd lost then because he'd overestimated his own abilities and underestimated his enemies'.  When he tries to take over the Enterprise, he makes exactly the same mistake.   When we meet up with him again in the movie, he sets off to revenge himself on Kirk, and right from the start overestimates himself and underestimates Kirk.  Kirk escapes and in doing so manages to inflict serious damage on Khan's ship.  But Khan comes back and does the same thing all over again.  Then he does it again!  And this time his own arrogance finally destroys him.

If you want to see any parallels between Khan and George W. Bush I won't object.  Just as long as you realize that, sadly, the Democrats are not Kirk and the Enterprise.

Another way Khan is like Bush is that, as Spock points out, he thinks two-dimensionally.  Khan sees all conflict as being between him and an enemy who is his mirror image.  In his mind the fight is always between himself and Kirk.  His own crew and Kirk's don't matter to him.  The presence of Spock, and Scotty, aboard the Enterprise doesn't register on him and he never takes them into account when he plans his revenge.

This is one of the ways he underestimates Kirk.  He sees Kirk as a solitary man.  He doesn't see Kirk as being not a one, but a many.  Kirk is stronger than Khan because he has allies.   Khan, even though in his own person he is in fact superior to Kirk---he is smarter, he is stronger--- is weak because he insists on going it alone.

But the third important thing that happens in Wrath of Khan I don't mean to have any partisan, political implications.  The third thing is that every problem has a solution.  Not every solution is easy, and the final one is made at a great cost.  Spock dies solving it.  But the problems are solved.  There is no such thing as a no win situation.

And this is what made Scotty so important to Star Trek.

Scotty was a great one for doubting his own abilities.  "She kinna take any more, Captain."  "If I give her inny more she'll blow!"  But he managed to fix things despite himself.

And this wasn't just a matter of convenient plotting, of the cavalry arriving in the nick of time to save the day.  Scotty's ability to solve problems was a result of Gene Roddenberry's building into his creation the idea that solving problems and fixing things are what people do and that problems are a part of life so we need to be prepared to deal with them.  Roddenberry believed in Murphy's Law.  And he created a future in which everybody believed in it too and ordered their lives and designed their machines accordingly.

In episode after episode, the Enterprise would seem to be damaged beyoned all saving, and yet Scotty, or Spock, or Kirk, would come up with a fix, seemingly out of thin air.  But Roddenberry's Enterprise had been designed with the idea that it would break down.  That everything that could go wrong, would go wrong at some point.  So every piece of equipment on the Enterprise had a back-up system or a manual override.  The back-ups had back-ups, and those back-ups had back-ups.  And when all the back-ups had failed, everything could still be operated by hand.

In Roddenberry's future, technology was a wonderful thing, but he was no technocrat.  Technology was unreliable.  But people...

People could always be counted on. And that was Roddenberry's most progressive idea.  In the future he envisioned, everybody mattered.  Everybody had an important job.  Nobody was redundant.  Nobody was a mere cog in the machine.  What were all those people doing on the Enterprise, anyway?  By the mid 1960s it was possible to see how computers would come to be able to do many jobs that people then did but do those jobs faster and more reliably and with fewer errors, with the bonus that the computers would not need to be paid.

Roddenberry saw such a future as a nightmare.

But it's his nightmare that is becoming the world we live in.

Our homes are full of technology that we need but we can't rely on and which cannot be fixed when it fails.  We are more and more dependent on the corporations that make the devices and less and less dependent on the devices themselves, and certainly less and less dependent on our own abilities and skills.

And our economy is more and more based on the notion that people aren't just redundant, they are a nuisance.

It's not just that we are building a world in which Scotty would have no job to do.  What's the need for a repairman in an economy in which nothing is meant to be repaired?

It's that we're building a world in which Scotty would be an actual threat to the economy.  First, by fixing things that were designed to be thrown away and replaced at increased cost.  Second, by requiring to be paid well for his talent and skill.  Third, by simply knowing things that the corporations running the show don't want anybody to know because it would undermine their monopolies.

In the Star Trek future, everybody has a talent and a skill.  Everybody is necessary.  Everybody contributes.

In the future we seem to be building, everybody is useful in so far as they can buy things.  Otherwise, they're pretty much just in the way.

Comments

[Viscount LaCarte]

Fantastic.

I've been fan of TOS since it was still a network show, and I believe you nailed it. Indeed, the Viscountess bought me (us!) the entire series on DVD and he have been watching the episodes in their original broadcast order. Every word you say about the optimistic vision of the future rings true, never mind the bits about the "new guy" who gets it to advance the plot.

The "doomed new guy" bit reminds me of "Galaxy Quest" by the way, which I think is brilliant.

Keep up the good work. I will be back often.

[Lance]

Galaxy Quest is terrific. Thanks for reminding me. Suddenly, I hav tonight's post!

[Anne Laurie]

Ah, GALAXY QUEST... James Doohan was a genuinely nice man, a more-than-competent character actor who was the first Trek-star to realize just how that underbudgeted, critically unloved, short-run piece of pop culture had somehow assumed an importance to people out of all proportion to its artistic virtues. And it wasn't the scenario ("Wagon Train to the Stars" being a not unreasonable description), or the writing, or the acting. It wasn't what was explicitly said or done in the show... it was the possibilities inherent in what wasn't written or shown. The original Star Trek helped a lot of people believe that there was a place for human virtues in the universe, be it never so vast. It assumed that every individual, be they a scenery-chewing ham in cheap velour or a silicon-based f/x lump, was entitled to their own dignity. And that's why GALAXY QUEST was not only a great satire but a good movie as well. Remember the scene where the Alan Rickman character, holding a dying alien, realizes that none of his vaunted "Shakespeare at the Royal Vic" turns will ever mean as much to another individual as his self-despised latex-for-the-paycheck stint on that crappy serial? That's the kind of moment I look for in the movies I love -- something where an actor shows that kind of self-awareness, or dignity, or individuality. I'm not describing this well; it's a sort of "I know it when I see it" quality. If it were easy to describe, I suppose, it wouldn't be Acting -- possibly this is part of the difference between a good book and a good movie. "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and I have not Charity, I shall be as a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal"... There are a lot of sounding brass & tinkling symbols available on film, but that Charity thing is rare & precious.