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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature & Teaching English Language and Literature for Secondary Schools Bc. Ondřej Harnušek Another Frontier: The Religion of Star Trek Master‘s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Smith, M.A., Ph. D. 2015 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author‘s signature Acknowledgements There are many people, who would deserve my thanks for this work being completed, but I am bound to omit someone unintentionally, for which I deeply apologise in advance. My thanks naturally goes to my family, with whom I used to watch Star Trek every day, for their eternal support and understanding; to my friends, namely and especially to Vítězslav Mareš for proofreading and immense help with the historical background, Miroslav Pilař for proofreading, Viktor Dvořák for suggestions, all the classmates and friends for support and/or suggestions, especially Lenka Pokorná, Kristina Alešová, Petra Grünwaldová, Melanie King, Tereza Pavlíková and Blanka Šustrová for enthusiasm and cheering. I want to thank to all the creators of ―Memory Alpha‖, a wiki-based web-page, which contains truly encyclopaedic information about Star Trek and from which I drew almost all the quantifiable data like numbers of the episodes and their air dates. I also want to thank to Christina M. Luckings for her page of ST transcripts, which was a great help. A huge, sincere thank you goes to Jeff A. Smith, my supervisor, and an endless source of useful materials, suggestions and ideas, which shaped this thesis, and were the primary cause that it was written at all. A big thank you goes to everybody involved in Star Trek – creators, actors, the crews and many more – but especially to those, who cannot hear my thanks anymore. These are James Doohan (goodbye, Scotty, now you‘ve hopefully got all the Scotch you can drink!), DeForest Kelley (yes, Bones, I know you are a doctor, not an academic), and to the quite recently deceased Leonard Nimoy (whom I expect to be searched for, found and revived by William Shatner in a few years, so that he can live long and prosper again). And there is one person I could not omit, even if I tried really hard, and that is Gene Roddenberry, the founder of and the mastermind behind Star Trek. So thanks, Gene, even if it is also in memoriam; you believed in a better future for humanity, may your faith not be misinterpreted or forgotten, and may your dreams come true one day. Table of Contents Acknowledgements .....................................................................................................................3 1. Introduction .............................................................................................................................6 1.1 Referencing to the Episodes ..............................................................................................9 1.2 The Story of Star Trek, a Brief Summary .........................................................................9 2. Cultural-historical Background .............................................................................................15 2.1 The 1960s ........................................................................................................................15 2.2 The 1980s and The Next Generation ...............................................................................19 2.3 The 1990s and Onwards – Deep Space Nine and Voyager .............................................20 2.4 Star Trek as a Religion ....................................................................................................22 3. Exploration of the Episodes ..................................................................................................25 3.1 Apotheosis of Humankind ...............................................................................................28 3.1.1 Demiurges and Creators ...........................................................................................28 3.1.2 Genetic Manipulation ...............................................................................................32 3.1.3 The Prime Directive – Law and Order in Starfleet ...................................................35 3.2 The ―New‖ Religion ........................................................................................................36 3.3 Human Rituals .................................................................................................................49 3.4 False Gods .......................................................................................................................52 3.4.1 Old Earth Mythology ................................................................................................53 3.4.2 Self-Proclaimed Gods ...............................................................................................60 3.4.3 Q ...............................................................................................................................70 4. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................79 1. Introduction 6 serials counting 715 episodes – not taking the pilot ―The Cage‖ into consideration – in 30 series, 12 films, dozens of books, comic books, plethora of fan art and fan fiction, millions of official and unofficial merchandise items, video games, all the material ―artefacts‖ and much, much more together constitutes the widespread phenomenon called Star Trek that – without any hyperbole – became the meaning of life to not an insignificant group of people. According to Dwayne A. Day, many astronauts pursued their careers in NASA because they watched Star Trek, and that in today‘s world of various global media, there ―never will again be, a single powerful entertainment or event that will positively inspire the young in large numbers‖ (Day). Originally a single TV show created by the late Gene Roddenberry, it has grown into a gargantuan genre of its own, which inspired many people. Its main focus and perpetual, continuous idea and theme is the basic, relentless human need to explore, discover, and gain new knowledge. Since its birth, viewers could follow every week the space voyages of the starship Enterprise, and accompany it on its mission ―to explore strange new worlds, […] to seek out new life and new civilisations‖ as could be heard in the opening credits of every episode of the first three series (TOS, TAS, and TNG). But far from being an obscure TV serial to fit only the tastes of impractical geeks, lazy lowbrow lowlifes and other outsiders and weirdoes, it provides a multifaceted range of themes and problems that allegorically mirror real problems of our everyday lives, and address political, cultural, and legal issues which, stripped off of the sci-fi universe camouflage, are serious and topical dilemmas that are anything but simple. ST‘s appeal is not, therefore, exclusively for the weak-minded and desperate geeks and sci-fi fans, just because it is a vast fantasy, which takes place in outer space, because the setting is not the point of the serials. The aim of this thesis is to explore how Star Trek deals with the question of religion, and to trace a singular, particular religious message that would weave all the series and films 6 together. It would be an overstatement to claim that this thesis boldly goes where no work has gone before, but even though it does not deal with an entirely new topic, it wishes to offer a different perspective and ask the question whether the cultural phenomenon known as Star Trek projects a single (or multiple) religious message(s) and what the message(s) is(are). Star Trek is teeming with religions and religious themes, but not always are they the central topics of various episodes; they are usually a part of the background of various Star Trek races or they work as the defining features of the races – the Vulcan Logic, the Klingon belief in the ancient warrior qeyliS (Kahless), the Ferengi devotion to acquisition of wealth and the afterlife in the presence of the Divine Treasury, and the like. However, humans do not seem to subscribe to any particular religion and their viewpoint can be seen when looking at their reactions towards other religions and their practitioners. What the religion of Star Trek can be defined as, is not an inclusive definition – saying what it is – as it is rather an exclusive definition – making sure everybody sees what it is not by showing what views it rejects. The approach itself is an analysis of various episodes of all of Star Trek‘s series and exploring how religion is portrayed there, what reaction the main protagonists have to religions and all the various self-proclaimed ―gods‖, and looking for a religion, which humans in Star Trek do follow. Some of the individual episodes are sometimes extreme in their polar-opposite comments on religion which makes it particularly difficult to decipher any unified ―belief‖ Star Trek manages to project and give to the viewers. It is also that some series seem to project slightly different religious views than others, or that some deal with religion more than others, but this is to be expected – the differences in when the individual series were made, the cultural background and the then current state of affairs had significant impact on this, as well as the fact that various series