February 11, 2020

Welcome back to the Dead Fictional Girlfriends Report, your one-stop shopping for analysis of deceased female love interests. Today we will discuss Contestant #2 for the title of "Protagonist with Most Dead Girlfriends": Captain James Kirk of Star Trek.

If you're at all familiar with the franchise, you're probably already picturing the scantily-clad ladies that it's famous for. Unlike the Bond movies, however, Star Trek had women involved in the show from the very beginning. And Captain Kirk is capable of interacting with women in non-sexual ways, unlike 007, who is never all-business unless he's with a Dame or a Queen. So I'd like to begin by providing some light analysis of Star Trek's life and times, before I delve into Kirk's specific stats. And we can start with...

The Context

To understand the phenomenon of Star Trek, I invite you to cast your mind back to 1965. In 1965, the top-rated shows on TV were Bonanza, Gomer Pyle USMC, and The Lucy Show. By that point, second-wave feminism had seen a few early successes: the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission was 1 year old; the Supreme Court declared in June that married couples should legally be allowed to purchase contraception; and the word "sexism" was coined that November. Nonetheless, employment ads were still separated into gender categories, as were many universities, and it would be another decade before women could open bank accounts without the permission of a male relative. 

It was in 1965 that Lucille Ball, the first woman to run a major TV studio, green-lit a certain pilot episode from Gene Roddenberry. This pilot was set aboard a spaceship called the Enterprise, which had a female first officer. When that pilot flopped, Lucy took the unprecedented step of proposing a second pilot, which cut the female officer and recast most of the bridge crew. That second pilot was picked up by NBC for the 1966 season, and became Star Trek.

The Franchise

Star Trek was a low-budget sci-fi series that only lasted for 3 seasons, and yet has had a major impact on literally every aspect of American culture, including our language, our space program, and our telecommunications science. It basically invented the concept of a TV show getting made into a movie - or rather, a movie series - and has launched no fewer than 7 spin-offs.

Part of this impact came from the extremely efficient way in which it established its world. For example, have a look at Episode 1, Scene 1 of the original series (TOS), which aired at 8:30 PM on September 8, 1966:

To sum up, in the first 45 seconds of airtime, this show establishes:

1. The main characters live on a spaceship.
2. Their bridge crew is not only racially integrated and coed, but also includes multiple sentient species.
3. There are inhabited alien worlds.
4. People can materialize (beam) from place to place.
5. This spaceship's missions include medical examinations of alien archaeologists, one of whom is the ex-girlfriend of ship's surgeon Dr. McCoy.

And you'd better hope you caught all of that, because most of it will not get any further explanation.

If, like me, you first saw this show in reruns, you probably weren't too surprised by some of those revelations. But you have to remember that this aired 5 years before the launch of the first manned space station; 10 years before the first female sailors served on US ships; and 26 years before we confirmed the existence of exoplanets. Star Trek wanted its viewers to accept not only that all of these things would happen, but also that they'd become routine occurrences. 

Do try to keep up, 1966 TV audience.

The showrunners used Trek's futuristic setting as a safe space to comment on contemporary issues, such as decolonization, integration, women's liberation, the Vietnam War, and communism. They also made a point of featuring women and people of color as characters, with results that were groundbreaking at the time but sometimes seem dated now. And of course, they inspired the coining of the term "redshirt," meaning "minor character who dies shortly after being introduced." Considerable numbers of redshirts were female.

The Women

Behind the Scenes

In addition to the support of Lucille Ball, the original series benefited from the screenwriting genius of D.C. Fontana. Her gender-blind nom de plume had helped Dorothy Catherine Fontana break into the writer's room for Gene Roddenberry's 1963 show The Lieutenant. Although Fontana wasn't interested in sci-fi at first, Roddenberry brought her with him when he set out to create Star Trek. She wrote such classic episodes as "Charlie X" (from whence I took the title of this post), "Journey to Babel," and "Tomorrow is Yesterday," and her world-building is responsible for large portions of the Trek universe.

While Fontana was the only female staff writer, other women contributed one-off screenplays. One notable contributor was Shari Lewis, whom you may recognize from Lamb Chop's Play-along. Lewis wrote "The Lights of Zetar," an episode in which the Enterprise crew visits the Federation's official library on the planet Memory Alpha. I mention this tidbit because this means my main research hub for this entry, Memory-Alpha.fandom.com, was named by the same woman who taught me the song that never ends (which is now stuck in your head.)

At any rate, Star Trek has had much more feminine involvement than the James Bond universe does, although the producers, directors, and writers of the series were mostly men.

On-Screen

The main characters of Star Trek were three white men: Iowa-born Captain James Kirk, Vulcan-born first officer Mr. Spock, and Georgia-born Dr. Leonard McCoy. Other series regulars included helmsman Sulu, Chief Engineer Scotty, and ship's navigator Chekov. But the original series was not a completely male universe. In fact, it had three recurring women characters.

Uhura

The first and most visible was communications officer Lt. Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols. The studio infamously refused to add Nichols to the regular cast, because she was black. Technically, therefore, she was a guest star...in 69 out of the 73 episodes of TOS. That's twice as many episodes as series-regular Chekov had. Later on, Uhura returned for the animated sequel series (TAS), and as a major player in the first 6 feature films.

Uhura's character made a huge impression on contemporary audiences. Whoopi Goldberg has said she was inspired to go into acting because of Uhura, and Mae Jemison became an astronaut for the same reason. Martin Luther King, Jr. personally asked Nichols not to leave the show, even though she was a "guest star," because Uhura's intelligence and command role were inspirational for young black women.

In retrospect, some 21st-century viewers think that Uhura was put in a stereotypical role, as a black woman simply supporting all the schemes and orders of the white male captain. The Big Bang Theory famously referred to her as "a black lady [who] answered the space phone." She never took command of the Enterprise, even though she was in its chain of command, until TAS had an episode in which all the men were enchanted by space-sirens. (Yes, really.)

In defense of Uhura, however, I'd like to note that she was never subservient to the male characters, even though she was under their command. As the following compilation video demonstrates, she is not afraid to correct Kirk, or tell Spock to be more patient while she solves the crisis of the week. She's actually introduced in the act of playfully teasing Spock for his lack of small-talk skills. And, while she was mostly kept out of action scenes, she could kick some ass if the circumstances demanded: the final clip in this reel shows her efficiently disarming another woman who is holding a phaser to Captain Kirk's chest, and then casually reaching back to take away that woman's knife, too.

Furthermore, the audience sees her indulging in certain feminine hobbies - shopping, singing, going on dates with men - outside of her duties as a communications expert. In an era when some people were asking the question "can women be manly enough to serve as soldiers/sailors/astronauts," Uhura existed to demonstrate that that was the wrong question. In the future, women will serve like women.

Chapel

Nurse Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett) was the second-most visible female character on Star Trek, appearing in 35 episodes of TOS and all 22 of TAS. This was partly due to the fact that the actress and Gene Roddenberry were dating during the show's run, and indeed got married just 6 months after its cancellation. Barrett was originally going to play the Enterprise's first officer. After that character was written out for the second pilot, she re-joined the cast as a nurse who had joined Starfleet specifically in hopes of finding her long-lost fiance who disappeared doing deep-space research. After discovering that he was dead and had been replaced by an evil android, she stayed in Starfleet and fell in love with Mr. Spock.

In short, the character is on the ship because she's looking for a man, and the actress is in the show because she's engaged to the boss.

(eye roll courtesy of GIPHY)

I hate to sound so cynical, because truthfully I like Chapel. She's touchingly dedicated to caring for the crew, even if that means intimidating a depressed man into eating or getting flung around by a hormonal Vulcan. Please see the below video for proof I'm not making up either of those situations.

Nevertheless, with her pink-collar job and pursuit of unavailable men, Chapel falls into 1960s stereotypes about professional women a lot harder than Uhura does. Her characterization is less "Starfleet crewmember" and more "typical 1960s woman who happens to live on a spaceship." Which is fine, but not groundbreaking.

Rand

Finally, there was Yeoman Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney). Early in the first season, she and Captain Kirk had a mild will-they-or-won't-they dynamic. The tension was complicated by the fact that taking care of him was literally her job, while he was mildly uncomfortable having a woman wait on him. When Dr. McCoy suggests he's only annoyed because he's attracted to her, Kirk takes the cringe-worthy stance that he's not that kind of bothered, it's just that "I've already got a female to worry about. Her name's the Enterprise."

So you see, he's not feeling sexually frustrated, he just doesn't like having responsibility for women under his command. Everything's good here, let's move on!

Rand's character was dropped after 8 appearances. Explanations for this differ: Gene Roddenberry said budget cuts; William Shatner has claimed that Whitney was an alcoholic; and Leonard Nimoy's autobiography suggests that it was just narratively unworkable for Kirk to have a regular girlfriend. Whitney herself, however, wrote in The Longest Trek that she had been sexually assaulted by a producer days before she got fired, and the events may have been connected.

In a dark example of art imitating life, Janice Rand was also sexually assaulted . . . by Captain Kirk['s "evil half"].

The attack scene from "The Enemy Within" was intended to be disturbing, of course, because the audience has no idea why a heroic character like Kirk is suddenly violent. But this episode has aged into a deeply, deeply uncomfortable episode for 21st-century viewers, because Kirk is meant to be the victim. I'm serious: this episode is all about saving Kirk by re-integrating his personality so that he won't have to suffer any consequences. The impact of his crime on Rand, who has just had her boss attempt to rape her, is almost completely ignored. She's shown tearfully telling Spock and McCoy "I don't want to get him in trouble." Then she disappears for the rest of the episode, and is back to normal by the following week. There's no apology by or reconciliation with the captain. They both just forget about it.

Say what you will about "the good old days," but at least modern TV shows don't usually let the heroes get away with rape.

Girls in Space

While Rand, Chapel, and Uhura are the most popular, the Enterprise has other female crewmen who crop up from time to time - the personnel officer, the ship's anthropologist, assorted redshirts, etc. Nearly all of them are in miniskirts, which at the time was meant to be a sign that the future would be sexually liberated. There would be no need for a woman to cover up in the future, the argument went, because the men in her life won't objectify her. In fact, when a 1960s pilot accidentally finds himself aboard a time-traveling Enterprise in "Tomorrow is Yesterday," he leers at a woman, and Kirk emphatically redirects his attention.

The audience watching this show was not from the future, though, so they were free to objectify away. The extent to which the showrunners were courting the male-gaze audience is debatable, but it definitely wasn't pure coincidence that every attractive woman was underdressed. It would be hard to argue, for instance, that any of the slaves who appear are supposed to be empowered by their outfits:

Pictured: Drusilla of planet 892-IV. Not pictured: pants, or a shirt.

All in all, though, Star Trek does deserve some credit for its efforts to show that the future is [partially] female. Of course, we are not here to discuss all futuristic women - we're mostly interested in the dead ones, dead girlfriends in particular. And boy oh boy, do we have a few of those to discuss. Tune in next month for part 2 of our analysis.