Star Trek Buffoons and other Random Thoughts

While I was on the elliptical trainer at the gym a few days ago, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was on Syfy. Always one to take advantage of a distraction while exercising, I decided to watch it as it had been a about a year since I had done so. (Watched it for the podcast The Movies that Weaned Us, available on iTunes)

I don’t know if it was the lack of oxygen and sugar in my blood or what, but I had a new thought about the movie.

In episodes of the original series, like The Galileo Seven, The Deadly Years, and The Doomsday Machine, (maybe even a few others—this is off the top of my head after all, so I hope I am naming the correct episodes), there was a senior officer, like a commodore, who would take command when things go wrong. Invariably, these senior officers make bad decisions and it fell to our band of STTOS regulars to resolve the situation by episode’s end.

As obvious as this should have been, it just occurred to me as I watched, that in this story Admiral Kirk had become the senior officer intruding upon the well-oiled workings of the Starship Enterprise. In the series, the offending senior officers were often the protagonists of the episode. At best they were over the hill buffoons who were less than helpful.

So had Kirk become this character? He was certainly stepping on Captain Decker’s toes, (payback for that whole doomsday machine incident, though, arguably Commodore Decker got the short end of that stick).

Kirk even made mistakes early on, not knowing Enterprise’s systems and ordering a phaser strike that couldn’t work. Decker even put Kirk in his place after that incident. That didn’t happen often to Kirk, Captain or Admiral.

Ultimately, however, Kirk got his act together with the help of the two halves of his personality, Spock and McCoy. Ok mainly Spock, but I always liked the moral grounding McCoy gave Kirk. Like Luke Skywalker, he was the best that ever was, (Starship captain for Kirk, Jedi for Luke), so unlike the cause more problems than solving officers who had preceded him, Kirk prevailed and saved not only the Enterprise, (again), but Earth, (again).

Or did he? Decker sacrificed himself, as did, Ilia.

But it was Kirk, whose decisions kept them alive long enough to be in a position to make the sacrifice. The ship was ordered into a hostile situation with no shields or weapons, tried to reason with the alien being even after it had killed one of his officers, and reasoned what V’ger ultimately needed to be whole. So as much as Kirk started the story as the intruding command, his personal journey took him to a place where he had regained the mojo that made him the leader he had always been, once again proving, the human adventure is just beginning…