I don’t think so. From what I’ve read, it had a slow start. It wasn’t very popular in the beginning.
Yep fair enough. But I kind of meant soon in terms of history. A lot of series found their feet slowly, and Star Trek had to contend with being something totally new for the time, so though it didn’t exactly top the ratings, as you note above it was popular with academics, engineers etc and though the network cancelled it (imagine being the one to have made that decision!) it pretty soon went from strength to strength.
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This is Captain James T. Kirk. I can’t take your call right now. Please listen carefully to the following options and select the one that best describes your call:
If you are stuck in a stagnant society and wish to be liberated by the Federation, press one!
If you are a space babe wishing to learn about kissing, press two!
If you are a space babe wishing to learn about kissing, press three!
If you are a space babe wishing to learn about kissing, press four!
If you need a robot, machine or computer talked to death, press five!
If you require a crash course on how to get around the Prime Directive, press six!
If you are The Gorn looking for a rematch, press seven!
If you would like a long-winded diatribe on why man cannot be kept captive but must struggle for every inch, press eight!
If you are a space babe wishing to learn about kissing, press nine!
If you need help dealing with an evil/alternate/ version of yourself, press ten!
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If you are a Tribble,this service is currently unavailable in your location.
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For a very long time, television, like most arenas, was totally dominated by men. Men played the lead, men did the fighting, men did the figuring out, and invariably, men got the girls at the end. Women were there, if at all, as a kind of window-dressing, what is known today as eye candy; either something to attract the guys in and keep them occupied or, perhaps cynically, to give women some reason to go other than to ogle the male stars. I’m sure many a girl went to movies and sighed that they too one day could be the girl fainting on the arm of the hero, or rescued by the dashing knight. Women were really told they had very limited options, and Hollywood - and later TV - confirmed this by almost literally showing them their place.
Which isn’t to say that there weren’t some strong female characters on the screen - nobody would consider, for instance, Lauren Bacall a shrinking violet, and Mae West was, well, Mae West. Even Marilyn did her limited bit for women in film, confined though she was by the attitudes and beliefs of the times, her true acting ability only uncovered when she was cast in less than “fluff” or “sexy” roles, such as her last few movies. Some women, probably most, accepted this and wondered would it ever be different? Others considered trying to make it different, with varying, at the time, degrees of success.
But then, science fiction came along. This was new. This was the future. Things would be different in the brave new world of silver spaceships, killer robots, aliens and crossing the final frontier. Wouldn’t it?
Well, no.
Sadly, science fiction movies more or less stuck to the tropes set down by other genres - gangster, comedy, drama, western etc - and kept women where Hollywood wanted them: gazing adoringly into the eyes of the rugged space adventurer who would save them from the awful little green men, or execute complicated manoeuvres to save the ship at the last moment, or a dozen other things rugged space adventurers generally were expected to do while the weak silly girl looked on in awe and gratitude. Perhaps, if she was very lucky (or pretty) she might be allowed say a few words, but they would be irrelevant and probably directed to the rugged space adventurer who would do what all rugged space adventures did, laugh contemptuously and continue doing what rugged…. You know what? This is getting boring. You get it, right?
The idea in early (and not so early) science fiction seemed to be the classic nerd one, that “girls did not understand it” and were not interested in it. Women would not be able to handle the complexities of flying space ships, would not have the strength either physically or mentally to fight off aliens, and would be unable to work out the intricate and brain-twisting ideas behind such things as space flight, time travel and suspended animation, among others. Basically, science fiction was the preserve of men, and women, if there at all, were only along for the ride.
With the advent, then, of a brand new science fiction show which was going to reshape the entire genre, and TV drama too, things began to look up, though. Well, not quite. Considering that Star Trek was created by a self-confessed womaniser who seemed to luxuriate in his affairs and have little or no regard for women, holding “casting couch sessions” for bit-part actresses (and we all know what bit he wanted them to act on!) the cause for women was not terribly likely to be helped by this new show. And it wasn’t. Not initially anyway. It would take another twenty years before that would change, and even then only slowly would Gene Roddenberry give up his chauvinistic hold over how he believed women should be in his show. With his passing, the future began to look brighter for women, but it took time, as we will see.
And so I embark on a journey fraught with innuendo, sexual repression, chauvinism and the final cracking of the glass ceiling, as we look into
Part I: Just Stand There and Look Pretty:
1960s and the Original Series
Much has been made of Nichelle Nichols’s role on the show, her not being a maid, her being an active, major or at least major supporting character, but let’s be honest here: Uhura may have been a Lieutenant, but you got the feeling that the rank was almost nominal; she was pretty much the next best thing to a maid. Can you recall any episode in which she featured strongly, any episode that was about her, any episode in which she did anything? I can only think of two, and in one she was menaced and then kissed by Kirk (helpless female) and in the other she was wooed by Sulu. At least in that one she wasn’t helpless and she did hold her own, but then again, that was the mirror universe, and the Uhura there was meant to be the polar opposite of our one.
It has to be accepted that, for all she and the character did to advance the status of black females, and black actors in general on TV - remember “The Big Tall Wish” on The Twilight Zone, where the shock was that almost all the cast was (gasp!) black? And this didn’t stop with the sixties either. Name any major drama from the seventies or even eighties that had a black star? Sure there were some no doubt - though mostly in comedy roles - but they were definitely in the minority, and let’s not forget that even Michael Jackson could not get airplay on MTV until his label threatened to pull all the videos by their other artists. And this was in the late 1980s! So Uhura was no more than a glorified telephone operator, a receptionist taking Kirk’s calls and passing on messages; she had to wear the tiny skirt, she had few speaking lines other than “hailing frequencies open Captain” or something similar, and her contribution to the storylines almost always began and ended with whatever communications were coming into or going out of the ship.
To be depressingly accurate, I think Trelayne summed up the attitude towards women in general, and black women in particular, on television when, in “The Squire of Gothos”, seeing Uhura he grins to Kirk “A Nubian prize! Taken, no doubt, Captain, on one of your raids!”
Indeed. Women had a hard time on the show, but to be totally fair it wasn’t a problem unique to Star Trek. Women actors, writers, directors and producers had to fight to be heard, struggle to be taken seriously, and it was a long fight. We’ve still a long way to go, but thankfully the signs are looking more encouraging.
It’s not just Uhura that had a bad time on Star Trek though. She was, in fact, probably the most, if you like, emancipated woman on the show, which is saying something. In the original rewritten pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, the female members of the crew were allowed to wear trousers. In the 1960s this might have seemed overly progressive, and Roddenberry’s leching aside, it’s not too hard to imagine an NBC executive (male of course, though famously it was Lucille Ball who saved the franchise) musing “I wonder if guys would rather see the girls’ legs?” Well of course they would, and so surely The Great Bird of the Galaxy would have needed little convincing to have wardrobe run up some sexy short dresses and skirts for them to wear, and order in a consignment of high-heeled boots previously worn by the Orion Slave Go-Go Girls!
And so, in pretty much one stroke, women were relegated back to sex objects, and horny teenagers like me salivated every time one walked across the bridge or down the corridor, and strained their eyes every time these ladies bent over, or were involved in a scene that caused them to fall. Pervert. Sure. Guilty as charged. But even leaving aside the mini skirts for a moment, that didn’t have to be the, if you will, emasculating factor for women in Star Trek. Many actresses at the time dressed sexy but were still powerful women. Diana Rigg could make you sit up and take notice (well, make something sit up anyway!) and yet she had command of the screen. Wonder Woman wore a flimsy skirt and bra but nobody was pushing her around! Even Agent 99 in secret agent spoof Get Smart was acknowledged as the clever one. So what was it about Star Trek that put women down so?
Many things, sadly. To be entirely fair, we are talking about the military here, and while the US Navy or the Royal Marines doesn’t exactly force its female members to wear tennis skirts, the attitude towards women in the armed forces has always been one of suspicion, jealousy, anger even. It’s like some woman walking into one of those old Gentleman’s Clubs in the fashionable parts of London in the nineteenth century, or women finally being accepted in golf clubs. Men, feeling this their preserve, their territory, and, probably, one of the few places they could get away from the little woman, were dismayed when she followed them there. Now the same can’t quite be said of the military, but there has been and probably always will be a sense of women horning in on what should be boys’ stuff: the girl getting into the tree house despite the sign, NO GIRLZ ALLOWED!
This isn’t to suggest that women were treated badly on the Enterprise, or any other starship. Far from it. On the surface (I say, on the surface) they’re treated as equals, though with the obvious disparity in ranks; this holds true for male crewmembers as well. But you don’t see any women in top roles. Until TNG there are no female captains (some admirals are introduced in TNG and I think there are female captains in perhaps “Conspiracy”?) and on NCC-1701 the highest rank a woman can be heard to attain appears to be Lieutenant, though these ranks seem to be almost an afterthought, as they usually refer to some sort of scientific posting - botanist, archaeologist, geologist etc - and I have never seen a woman officer armed, or at least draw her weapon.
Similarly, I have never - not in TOS - seen a female member, or a band of female members, go down to a planet alone. There is always a male with them, and almost always it is the fox among the chickens, as Kirk has to go everywhere. If there is trouble, you can bet it will be a case of “behind me Lieutenant!” with an unspoken suggestion she might admire his manly physique while he deals with the alien or other threat. Women, even officers, are there to be protected, and heaven forfend one should try to defend herself! In fairness, there is none of the so-called endearing names used - pet, honey, sweetheart, babe etc - though whether that’s down to personal choice or Starfleet protocol I don’t know. I imagine Starfleet might take a dim view of a captain so addressing his junior officers, although whether or not they would risk reporting him is another matter.
Junior officers. That’s a term to grab hold of, and keep hold of, as, like I said above, this is going to be something of a bumpy ride, as we address the Y word.
Yo, man! I mean, Yeoman! I mean, Yo-woman? Ah I give up!
Firstly, I’m not entirely sure why a man as capable as James T. Kirk needs a personal assistant. All right, the captain can’t do everything but can’t he delegate? Does he need an officer standing by with tricorder (looking very like a handbag) slung over the shoulder, pouting expressively and asking if he would like coffee? Isn’t this the height of male chauvinism in the military? Would any female officer or even cadet stand for this treatment today? Yet if we see a female on the bridge - other than Lieutenant Uhura - they are almost invariably what the show decided to term a Yeoman.
Let’s look at that word. Coined in the 14th century as a description of “the middle class of servant in a royal or noble household”, yeoman has basically died out now, as nobody is anyone’s servant anymore, and if used at all it is used in a strictly historical context. So why did Roddenberry feel it necessary to revive a remnant of an old, originally English, rank? Why call them yeomen? What they are, basically, is a combination secretary, PA, dogsbody, and substitute, it would seem, mother for the officers, especially for the captain, whose own yeoman, the most famous, Janice Rand, seems to follow him around with the attention of a mix of would-be lover and fretting mother, trying to make sure he eats, sleeps properly and exercises.
Does this nonsense not belong in the middle ages, at best in Victorian times? Why is it - despite the assertion there are male ones I’ve never seen a single one - that all yeomen appear to be not only female, but young, pretty and sexy ones too? It’s like Starfleet is saying “hey girls! You can serve on a starship just like a real crew member! You won’t have any status or rights, really, but you may get to serve the captain!” Charming. Though it’s certainly not mentioned, you have to wonder - on those long voyages of exploration, when a man is lonely and in need of female companionship, could a willing yeoman not be summoned to the captain’s cabin? We hear nothing of how he, um, entertains himself while on a mission. He has no girlfriend, no wife, and doesn’t seem to have a relationship with any woman on board the ship (all issues that would be later tackled in further incarnations of the series) so why not? Rand looks up for it. And if she’s not, well, he’s the captain isn’t he? What’s she going to do?
All right, that may be a dark interpretation and taking the duties of a yeoman a little far, and there may never have been any intention on the part of the writers that they would fulfill that role, but it does serve to illustrate that really, as Grace Lee Whitney herself described the role years later, they could be basically “space geishas”. I suppose with the US military (almost all military, to be fair, not just them) so men-only at the time, the idea of women serving on what is essentially a warship disguised as a scientific research and exploration vessel might have grated with many men (and some women) and so had to be justified. They can serve, but look, they’re really the future’s version of the typing pool. Your jobs are not under threat in the 24th century, lads!
It isn’t just the role of yeoman though that keeps women down in the original Trek. Largely, there’s little or nothing for them to do. If a story features a female, she’s either a) causing trouble and needs to be dealt with or b) in trouble because she foolishly blundered into things she should have left to the men. They almost always have to be either rescued or protected (the original pilot, while admittedly presenting a strong - and yet perhaps too strong, so that she seems more a man than a woman - female figure in Majel Barret’s Number One, is largely concerned with the efforts of the Talosians to convince Captain Pike to stay on the planet for the sake of the girl) and often place the Enterprise or the crew in danger by their “silly interfering”. Let’s look at some of those episodes now.
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The women in UFO wore silver catsuits.Although I thought they looked more ridiculous than sexy.
Oh there’s no question this was confined to Star Trek alone. We all remember Erin Gray in Bucks Rogers in the 25th Century don’t we? In fact, one of the few series that treated women with any real kind of respect was Blake’s 7. Also Space: 1999. Dr. Who didn’t necessarily exploit them, but for a long time they were pretty much just passengers, in awe of the Doctor’s intellect and experience. But at least they didn’t have to wear mini skirts.
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Episode title: “The Last Outpost”
Season: 1
Importance: 3 (for the introduction of the Ferengi)
Crisis point(s) if any: Enterprise is without power and everyone on board will die if it’s not restored. That sort of thing can really put a crimp in your day.
Original transmission date: October 19 1987
Writer(s): Richard Krzemien (teleplay by Herbert Wright)
Director: Richard A. Colla
Stardate:* 41386.4
Destination: Delphi Ardu IV (not actually the destination, just where they catch up with the Ferengi ship)
Mission (if any): Recover stolen energy monitor from Ferengi ship
Main character(s) in Plot: Riker
Main character(s) in Subplot (if any):
Not Appearing: O’Brien, Wesley
Villain/Monster (if any): Ferengi and then the Guardian
Deaths: 0
Lives saved (episode): 0
Lives saved (cumulative): 1
Locations:
Shipboard:
Bridge
Observation Lounge
Space:
[u]Other:[/b]
Delphi Ardu IV
Ships/vessels: 1 (unnamed Ferengi ship)
Space battles: 0
Bodycount
Historical
0
Incidental
0
Direct
0
Total: 0
Running total: 83
Make it so: 1
Engage! 0
Combat factor: 0
Mysteries: The force field holding the Enterprise and the Ferengi vessel captive
Patients in sickbay: 0
Meetings: 2
Data v humanity: The Chinese finger puzzle eludes Data. Chortle.
Data 1 - Humanity 2
Character scores:
Picard 10
Riker 190
Troi 10
Bev 10
Geordi 20
Data 20
Worf 20
Wesley 0
O’Brien 0
Yar 10
Earl Grey: 0
Shuttlecraft: 0
Admirals: 0
Starbases: 0
First contact: 2 Ferengi, the Guardian of Forever sorry the T’Kon outpost guy
Humour: 3
Episode rating: 3/10
Episode score: 140
Correct me if I’m wrong - and I may very well be - but doesn’t that Ferengi ship look a lot like the later biological life form Tin Man, in the episode of the same name? Kind of like a shell? Okay, well, from behind anyway. This is the first we actually meet a Ferengi, and while they were still a work in progress - made to seem more cunning and nasty than what we came to know them as - it’s still good to see them, as they will of course form a major part of the entire Star Trek universe, and provide some of the best, or at least funniest episodes in at least two of the series in the franchise. The episode is another bit of a damp squib, but I’ll do what I can to inject a little interest into it.
Why is it that Picard thinks that blue, white and red is a better combination in a flag than red, white and blue? Is it merely because this is how the French flag was arranged? Or was he subtly hinting that there really is no reason for Americans to have red, white and blue on their flag? We know that on the French flag, blue represents the royalty, white peace and red the blood that was spilled to attain that peace, but the USA? Okay that’s wrong, how embarrassing. Apparently blue and red were the colours of Paris. Well that’s no fun. My idea is better. Well, I can still have fun at the Americans’ expense, can’t I? Here goes. While yes you have red states and blue states, why? Not sure if that’s the point he’s making but it could be. Data’s childish petulance, when Picard says that’s enough and he says “It was you who started it” is quite funny in its way.
“Hah! Look how small and puny these hyoo-mans are! I could eat them in one bite!”
This is the first time we get to see the ship’s warp core, and the second time that Picard is ready to surrender! Also the first time he calls Riker by his first name, Will. This doesn’t happen too often of course; usually he’s Riker or more usually Number One, sometimes Commander. Of course, from what we later know of the Ferengi, they would certainly not “fight to the last man”. In fact, in a hopeless situation they would be more than willing to bargain their way out of trouble. Interesting that the first Ferengi we ever see is played by the man who will make us love them, the man who will play Quark, Armin Shimerman, though here he is not Quark but Damon Tar. Okay I’m wrong there: always pays to read ahead before you write, Trollheart. Shimerman plays one of the Ferengi all right, but not the first one we see. Boo.
"Mr. Data, would you please tell Number One that when he is ready to apologise for calling me a bald excuse for Kirk I will be in my ready room? "
“Data, tell the captain please that I’ll eat a plate of fresh ga’akh before I’ll apologise.”
Humour in Data’s getting somehow trapped in a Chinese finger puzzle and seeming quite at a loss, until Picard sorts it for him in irritation. You would certainly have to give Picard points for his diplomacy in dealing with the Ferengi; again you can see he’s really holding his temper back. Look at Riker! Has to be the big man. The other two - including Data - go down with one shot from the Ferengi energy whips, he has to be hit a second time. He’s so hard! I do like that the idea Ferengi have that to “force women to wear clothes” is unethical, as it encourages the males to undress them. I mean, yeah, there’s a certain sick sense about this, and it is something that ends up being perpetuated through the Ferengi culture, where women are all naked.
I think we’re possibly supposed to think these are either the first Ferengi to travel outside their star system (on the face of it, unlikely) or that at least these ones have not travelled before (slightly more likely, though stealing from the Feds as your first off-world action is neither very clever nor in any way representative of the Ferengi) but it’s odd how they classify all the Away Team as “hyoo-mahns”, given that there is a Klingon present. Data they could be forgiven for thinking is just a very pale human, but Worf? Surely they know of the Klingons? And of all the races, are not his the closest in superficial outside resemblance to the Ferengi?
“All together, boys, now: just like we rehearsed it - Oh, Fer-en-gen-ar, the mud and the rain…”
It will be some time before Riker gets that stick removed from his ass, and he is standing ramrod straight and defiant as a good officer should, but my god does he look pompous! Give him his due, he’s had the odd smile break through, but overall the sense of being up themselves was strong with these ones for almost a season, wasn’t it? Again you have to say, Kirk would never take that stance. Yeah but the episode just fizzles out doesn’t it? “Oh, fear is the enemy, is it? Okay then, let’s you and I discuss Tsun Tzu.” Sigh.
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Yup, I was thinking that those model ships must be on a tight budget.
Riker was uptight for sure, but how about Deanna Troi? She had some good parts later in the series but her start wasn’t very good. Same with Kira in DS9. Both started with cardboard characters that took a while to get some humanness in them.
The Ferengi have been a contradiction throughout the series. Avarice and greed, coupled with loyalty and caring. Sometimes a caricature, sometimes all too human.
I think a lot of Deanna’s stiffness comes or came from the fact that she was nervous. She wrote that before she got the part she was broke, without rent money for her apartment, and this was her last chance, so she may really have been bricking it that she wouldn’t be kept on. Also, that tight bun would make anyone tense.
As for the Ferengi, I think they did a great job. When we first meet Quark, he’s greedy, unprincipled, avaricious, a user and only interested in profit. But by the end of DS9 he’s greedy, unprincipled, avaricious, a user and only interested in profit, but we’ve come to love and understand him. I love how he seems to do altruistic deeds and then give a look as if his body has done something his brain was unaware of, or that his heart has taken control and he’s really annoyed about it. I love the Ferengi; they’re the comic relief Star Trek was always missing.
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Interesting about Marina Sirtis.
I love Quark, but he’s a contradiction in terms. A full on greedy person wouldn’t stop himself to help other people. Quark couldn’t help being nice. On the other hand, a really nice person wouldn’t always be looking for the profit angle.
For comedy, some of Data’s parts were good. I liked Bashir and Garak for comedy. Riker and Q were supposed to be funny, but I didn’t like their comedy.
While looking for something, I stumbled on this article that says that Bashir and Quark regretted taking their roles on Star Trek. 
https://screenrant.com/star-trek-deep-space-nine-actors-regretted-adored/
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How does the chart look, then, after now four episodes? Hmm. Well, kinda a lot like this, really.
After all his actions in this episode, Riker is making serious gains on Tasha, and strides to the number two spot, up one place. He is in fact the only riser, with Yar remaining, for now, at the top, everyone else either falls or remains where they are, though there is a slight change at the bottom, as we’ll see.
Q is the biggest drop, not surprisingly, falling to 7 from his last position of 4, making this a drop of three places, while the other ladies on the crew drop one place each, Troi from 5 to 6 and Beverly from 2 to 3. Wesley drops two places from his previous position of 7, which makes him the first to occupy a number 9 slot, while O’Brien goes one better (or worse) dropping two also to make this, finally, an actual top ten, with him at number 10.
Everyone else remains where they are, for now.
Season One: To Boldly Condescend Like No Man Has Condescended Before!
The first episode proper, “The Man Trap”, has the newly-introduced physician Dr. McCoy lured almost to his death by an alien posing as his dead ex-girlfriend, and so the woman is already established as a threatening creature, not to be trusted. We could glean that from the title if nothing else. Following on from this, “Charlie X” - on the face of it a primarily light-hearted and quite silly episode which sort of takes as its central figure the child in the Twilight Zone who can make anything happen just by thinking about it - features a rather unhealthy infatuation by the kid with our Janice Rand, and a typically sixties seen-as-fun smack on her behind, which, while surely nothing much, doesn’t do a lot to elevate the status of women on the ship, especially when Kirk, flustered, can’t actually tell Charlie why such behaviour is not acceptable. Also slightly disturbing is the muzzling of Uhura, when she sings and Charlie doesn’t like the fact that she’s making gentle fun of him. Finally, putting all this power into a young male’s hands is disastrous anyway, but couldn’t it have been a young girl? Maybe that would have sent the wrong signal, or maybe a young girl would have behaved, even at that age, more responsibly.
“Where No Man Has Gone Before”, the original re-written pilot, teams the female doctor up with the insane bad guy, and though she gives her life in the end to save Kirk and the crew, the lasting message is that women are easily led. Worse is to come though, far worse, when, in “The Enemy Within”, an evil Kirk all but rapes Rand. This is powerful stuff for this time, and to be commended in terms of bravery, but for women it does nothing but reinforce the belief, the fact that they, as women, are basically defenceless, and should the male crew turn on them, they are, in the words of South Park, going to have a bad time.
I imagine this might have caused some controversy when first shown, though I don’t honestly find any mention of it. The next one is nearly as bad, with Harry Mudd basically a pimp hawking women around to miners (with an “e”, but still) - ostensibly as their wives, but I don’t see no preacher, so, you know… Following this we have “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” which, while for the first (and possibly only) time allows Nurse Chapel to feature in a story, still kind of relegates her to the position of a damsel in distress who has to be rescued by the menfolk, “Miri”, where Kirk basically gets it on with a little girl (hence the episode being banned for decades) while “Shore Leave” again sees the women crewmembers in danger from which they have to be rescued.
Some of this, admittedly, is perhaps me pushing the panic button a little - not every episode demeans women, probably not many do, going by the standard of the time, but looking back on the show now it’s hard, very hard to pick out a strong female character, or even one who featured more than once in a while. If you were to list the main crew of the Enterprise, you’d have Kirk, Spock, Sulu, Scotty, McCoy and later Chekov. You might add Uhura. You would not find any other female crew to go on the list. You might be gallant and include Rand, but that would be it. Although famous females would guest, they would still play second fiddle to Kirk, and to a lesser extent Spock and McCoy.
Going back to the episodes, you have next “The Squire of Gothos”. It’s a fun episode (though basically a rewrite or update of “Charlie X”, even down to the ending) but the only role for a woman in it - remember his condescending comment earlier? - is for Trelayne to fight over with Kirk. Admittedly, it’s a ploy by the captain to make the alien lose his control, but his jealousy certainly seems real! “Space Seed”, of course, has the helplessly-smitten woman follow the brave eugenics superman Khan into a life of exile, while even the massive presence of the legendary Joan Collins can’t make much of an impact in the fan favourite, “The City on the Edge of Forever”, surely a vehicle for a strong female character if ever there was one. To be totally fair, they do all right with her character but in the end it’s Kirk we focus on, once again, as he agonises over the need to let Collins’ character die, until Spock helps him to forget.
And that’s only season one!
So to recap: do we have any strong female figures? Even in the first season - and all the way through - I tend to discount Uhura. Certainly, she made history as the first “major” black female actress, and for that she should always be proud: breaking out of the mould of playing a maid or some other servant, Nichols - and Roddenberry, to his credit - showed a generation of young black females they could make it on TV, that they didn’t have to accept the menial roles they had historically been offered. But that’s really more about race than gender, and I maintain that once she was there, Nicholls was allowed do very little with her character. Name one episode - other than “Plato’s Stepchildren”, in which, again, she is anyway a damsel in distress - in which Uhura plays even a good supporting role. I certainly can’t, and I’ve tried. It just does not exist. You almost never see her away from the bridge, hardly ever on a planet, and while she does take some credit for her singing in “Charlie X”, ultimately she ends up being punished for it, so is there a message there?
Being romantically linked with, and later married to Gene Roddenberry didn’t guarantee Majel Barret any good storylines for her character, either: Nurse Chapel was seldom onscreen unless assisting the doctor (other than the once mentioned above) and while there was a weak attempt at an attraction between her and Spock, it never went anywhere, except during “Amok Time”, when there was a tender scene between the two. Rand’s contributions add up to standing around gazing at Kirk as she waits with a report pad and being attacked by his evil alter-ego. No other women of note, on or off of the Enterprise, surface, other than Edith Keeler, and I’ve dealt with that above and shown that even Joan Collins could get the just-stand-there-and-look-pretty treatment from the show.
So what about season two? Did it get any better?
Um…
Season Two: Ahead, Repression Factor Five!
“Amok Time” (what an awful title!) shows us that even cold-blooded Vulcan women can be manipulative and untrustworthy, though the episode does give us a strong female character (for one episode) in T’Pau, while it’s soon business as usual with “Who Mourns for Adonais?” in which a - naturally young and pretty - crewwoman falls for the god Apollo. Really, these days the girls’ heads will be turned by the simplest of miracles! “Mirror, Mirror” gives us a strong, uninhibited Uhura (though it’s intrinsic to the episode that his is her “evil” twin) while in “Catspaw” (another very stupid story) we meet a literal conniving witch - even if she turns out to be some sort of blue alien thing that goes whoop on alternate Thursdays, and may or may not be from Alpha Centauri. Sorry. Hilarious episode though it is, things don’t get any better for women with the return of Harry Mudd in “Mudd’s Women”, a whole army of beautiful female androids at the con-man’s command, with a very sharp “beware the wife” male nudge-nudge joke at the end, and then even alien females fall prey to the charms of strong male humans in “Metamorphosis”, though there is at least the idea of a female commissioner who can stop a war, so that’s good. Mind you, at the end she gets taken over by the alien so that Zefram Cochrane can get his end away, and Kirk shrugs, so how important really did the story take her role?
“Friday’s Child” is a decent episode, where the wife of a chieftain stands up to her people, flouting the rules and eventually becoming leader, well, regent until her son comes of age, and then Jack the Ripper makes an appearance in the only real Scotty-centric episode, “Wolf in the Fold”, where Spock makes the rather biased and almost misogynist statement that “women are more easily terrified than men.” Okay. Have you seen Martina Navratilova? Sigourney Weaver? Angelina Jolie? Kirk turns the tables on his female trainer in “The Gamesters of Triskelion”, she proving as powerless against his charms as half a hundred other space babes scattered across the galaxy, then finally, as the season closes, a woman is literally equated with a cat in “Assignment Earth”, while another woman bumbles about and basically just embarrasses herself in a very fifties-female-trying-to-be sixties-female kind of way.
So what has season two shown us? A few strong women, to be fair, though each in their own way - T’Pau excepted - have had their power taken from them: Commissioner Hedford is sacrificed to feed an alien, essentially (though she was dying), Shahna the thrall is lulled into a sense that there might be a chance with Kirk, used and then literally punched out so he can get his hands on her… what? On her key, her key! What did you think I was going to say? And while Teri Garr, who would later show up as Roy Scheider’s long-suffering wife in Close Encounters, was supposed to be slated to co-star in spin-off series “Assignment Earth”, that never happened and to be honest, the way she acted in that I’m not that surprised. Again, a glorified secretary-cum-Girl Friday. Meh. Better, I suppose, than the first season but still nothing to write home about for the ladies.
Really? Doesn’t seem to have done her subsequent long career much harm.
Mind you I only remember her from Young Frankenstein 
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Season Three: Beam Me Up, Mr. Scott: It’s Just Too Embarrassing Now!
And on into season three, the final season before the show was cancelled. This does not start well, with its opening episode accepted universally as one of the worst of the series. Dotty females in sparkly costumes run around trying to escape Scotty, Kirk and McCoy, having half-inched Spock’s grey matter. Oh dear. It’s surely no coincidence that one of the women, when asked about the thieved substance, frowns “What is brain?” Red-blooded males up and down the country must have been hooting in drunken delight. Another society run by a giant computer, the women are again saved by men, and surely Kirk would be delighted to show them just exactly how, as he puts it at the end, “men and women can get on”. Indeed.
“The Enterprise Incident”, while a quantum leap ahead of “Spock’s Brain” (though to be fair, a dead squirrel would be a quantum leap ahead of “Spock’s Brain”) has a woman, this time a Romulan - the first time we see a Romulan female, never mind a Romulan female in command - wooed and manipulated by Spock so that he can get his hands on her… stop that! Really! I was going to say cloaking device! You people have one-track minds! While this is a great episode for Spock, a total redemption from the previous one, something to wash the nasty taste out of the mouth, it isn’t so good for fifty percent of the population, portraying the very beautiful if cold Romulan as another weak female, ready to give in to the male charms, even against her better judgement. Her crushed face (not literally) when she sees she has been used and betrayed by a man she could have loved, is pretty heart-breaking really.
Kirk goes native for the really weird “The Paradise Syndrome”, in which he realises his fondest wish and is worshipped as a god. He also takes the wife of the high priest, gets her pregnant and at the end gets her killed before buggering off back to space. Nice. There’s a whole bunch of triggers there folks. And what about this pesky Prime Directive Kirk has been hearing so much about? No? Not catching on? All right then.
There’s a quartet of episodes following this which do no favours to the ladies. First is the oft-spoken of “Plato’s Stepchildren”, in which not only does Christine Chapel get to go planetside, but she and Uhura get threatened with torture. This being the sixties, there is no actual torture, but for the time it’s pretty graphic enough and what’s inferred is almost as scary as the real thing. Not quite. But then there’s that first interracial kiss too. Both Uhura and Chapel are there for no other reason than to provide amusement to the Platans, as puppets to be used and abused. Up next is the tired old “we need men to continue our race” idea, though cleverly wrapped in the further idea of this race living at so fast a pace that they are invisible to the eye. “The Empath” features this time some pretty graphic actual torture, with what we could say unkindly might be every man’s dream, a pretty woman who can’t speak (this episode, unsurprisingly, was banned along with “Plato’s Stepchildren” for its depictions of torture and abuse) and finally we get to the one most women must, justly, hate, the incredibly chauvinistic “Elaan of Troyius” (anyone notice the clever pun there?) in which Kirk has to deal with a spoiled princess and threatens to give her a spanking. Oh Kirk! You twentieth-century man, you! I wonder if this one got the complaints switchboard lighting up with calls from irate feminists?
And it doesn’t get much better from here. The next few episodes are female-light or even absent, then we have “The Mark of Gideon”, where a father is prepared to use his own daughter as a biological weapon against his own people, homicidal women (admittedly, as it turns out, only computer projections) figure in “That Which Survives”, while one of the few female officers, Lt. Romaine, assigned to the Federation Central Library at Memory Alpha, is used as an intended sort of incubator for alien life-forms, and Kirk rather embarrassingly falls in love with a female android in “Requiem for Methusaleh.” Should have stuck with the blow-up galacti-dolls, captain!
This leaves us with “The Cloud Minders”, in which a haughty, high-born woman and a feisty underground rebel both bow to Kirk’s manliness when he sets them both to work in the mines (no doubt admiring the view), Spock has again a chance to fall in love in “All Our Yesterdays” but has to leave his potential lover behind in the past (don’t we all wish we could do that!) and finally, of course, the farewell pile of dogshit on the welcome mat, Roddenberry’s last “fuck you” to women, and especially those darned feminists, as Kirk and Co bow out in spectacularly awful style in the completely irredeemable and sadly last ever episode, “Turnabout Intruder.”
We can see then that over its three-year original run, Star Trek didn’t exactly fly the flag for women, and to be honest, though there were improvements with its successor, it still took a long time before there was anything even approaching equality on the show. But not to load all the blame on the shoulders of Roddenberry, Shatner and their people, it would be fair to say that, while TV drama in the sixties was hardly women-friendly, with just about every show starred in by a man and often featuring women as incidental, or at best sidekick characters, or love interests, science fiction seems to have been the genre that, if you will, kept women down the most, and being all about the future and changing attitudes, you would not have expected that to be the case. But before I wrap up this first part, I would like to take on and address that.
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Beyond Star Trek: Craven New World - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
In any of the major, or even minor science fiction movies of the 1940s and 1950s, and on into the 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s, there’s still little room for women. Even something like Star Wars has as its only real female character a princess who has lost her planet and is completely subservient, in narrative terms, to the male leads. She even starts the film pleading for help from an old, patriarchal figure and ends up getting rescued by a hot young stud (and Luke). Thereafter, though she takes charge once during her breakout, she’s relegated to a mostly minor role, as the boys drive the story forward. They even have her literally chained up in the second movie, and you can’t get much more misogynist than that! But Star Wars is only one more example of this idea that even in the future women will be second-class citizens. In Soylent Green, women are used and abused with impunity, even called furniture, while in Saturn 3 Kirk Douglas compliments Farrah Fawcett on her body and asks if he may use it?
Planet of the Apes gives Taylor an almost mute, nearly naked slave girl to accompany him on his trip to the Statue of Liberty, while as already mentioned in Close Encounters Terri Garr is unable to share her husband’s vision and follow him to his meeting with ET’s smaller, quieter and more musically-accomplished cousins, and even though both he and Gillian make it to the UFO, it is Roy the aliens select for the “golden ticket” ride into the stars. The movies of the 1950s are rife with such titles as Untamed Women, Captive Women, Cat-women of the Moon and Devil Girl from Mars. Big budget (at the time) epics like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea star the likes of Kirk Douglas and James Mason, while women do little more than stand around screaming, waiting for a man to come to their rescue in movies such as Them! The Beast With a Million Eyes and The Day the World Ended. Classics like This Island Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet have minimal roles for women, and traditional, accepted ones at that.
It’s a woman who annoyingly gives away the protagonist in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when her weakness for animals causes her to cry out when a dog is run over, and Weena in The Time Machine is nothing more than a damsel for Rod Taylor to protect in the future. Raquel Welch is only in Fantastic Voyage for her tit, er, titanic scientific knowledge (!) and more exploitative movies with titles such as Mars Needs Women, Women of the Prehistoric Planet and Nude on the Moon proliferate. There is some light relief in the form of Jane Fonda’s comic book heroine Barbarella, but as the 1970s heave into view we still get movies either with women in very minor or supporting roles, or without women at all. Soylent Green. Silent Running. The Planet of the Apes franchise. Westworld. Dark Star, and of course Star Wars. It’s only near the end of the seventies that we begin seeing movies even about women, with the likes of The Stepford Wives (though this is of course an allegory about suburbia and the women are androids to be defeated), Logan’s Run and finally, the first true action heroine who fights as hard as the boys and in fact outlives them all.
Technically both a horror and a science fiction movie, I think it would be true to say that Ridley Scott’s Alien is the first movie, certainly science fiction movie which gives not only a starring role to a woman (and creates a star in the process) but allows her to fight to outlive her male contemporaries, leaving no doubt that in at least this movie, the female has triumphed over the male. As the alien is, at this stage, taken to be male too, there’s a double victory, one for womankind and one for humanity.
And if this were the history of women in science fiction I would have a lot more to say about that, but it’s not, it’s about the role of the female in Star Trek. I’m just using this closing section to illustrate that, male-dominated as the series was, it was a product of its time and not at all out of step with the whole treatment of women in film, but particularly science fiction. This lasted well into the 1980s, as movies like Mad Max, Blade Runner and Tron would show as well as series such as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and the original Battlestar Galactica.
Humanity may have, in terms of movies and television, conquered the galaxy, but women had still a pretty hard fight on their hands to be recognised as part of it. If gender equality was the real final frontier, it was going to take more than a five-year mission before television actresses would go where no woman had gone before.
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I don’t remember any of them.I must have gone off it by then 
Doesn’t she call it a bitch or perhaps that’s in a later one.
That’s in Aliens. I think - though I’m not sure - though the gender of the original alien was never confirmed it was just assumed to be male, though the exomorph was discovered to be a mother, which led to the line “Get your hands off her you BITCH!” Easy to say of course when you have basically an exoskeleton like a big forklift around you!
Someone more versed in the Alien saga would be able to confirm if the original one was just one of her children, or not, and what sex it was. Let’s put it this way: I don’t think Ripley was getting asked out by it.
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