(no subject)

[roseembolism]

My wife Sandy, through incredibly well read, doesn't have much exposure to classic science fiction. Partially in light of recent controversies, I'm exposing Sandy to classic SF, including Star Trek.

I started off with one of my favorite episodes, "The Trouble With Tribbles". In addition to being funny, it put the"rabbits in Australia"problem in a SF context. I followed it up with "Journey to Babble" and "Amock Time".

This week was "The Devil in the Dark", a brilliant look at the whole "murderous alien" cliche. Someone looked at the whole idea of why an alien with a radically different physiology would attack humans, and came up with a logical reason. In found so, the reversed the whole concept- who are the monsters here?

Honestly, this is one of the best purely Science Fictional Star Trek episodes; it takes a concept and sites logical extrapolation from the premise. And in so doing, it turns a critical eye on things we take for granted.

Comments

[mrteufel.livejournal.com]

Agreed with all the above.

[seawasp]

Those are certainly very good episodes. (nit: Babel, not Babble, though the origin of the word "babble" is the Tower of Babel story)

There are some episodes NOT to show people, of course, if you want them to retain a positive impression... :)

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

Gene Roddenberry was also setting out to explicitly deconstruct (or even demolish) a trope that was common in sci-fi of the day: The monster is hostile and destructive, because. Because why? Well... because that's just what monsters do, of course!

Roddenberry found this ridiculous. If the human protagonists need to have clear, understandable motivations, then so do the villains, antagonists, and outright bizarre-looking, not-even-humanoid "monsters".

(Curiously, there were some people then, especially in Hollywood, who thought that the human protagonists didn't need to have clear motivations. Some of them honestly said things like, "It's science fiction, so who knows why anyone does anything in such a story?" Needless to say, these people didn't produce very good SF works.)

There was also some curious idea that SF series had to be anthologies (like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits) and couldn't have recurring characters. I have no idea why anyone would ever think that. But it was another misconception that he wanted to knock down with Star Trek.