Free Star Trek and History by Nancy Reagin Page B

beginning was essentially that of a glorified cosmic receptionist. Throughout the original Star Trek , women would serve as foils, as temptresses, as paths not taken, as threats, or as subordinates, while Kirk romped his way across the galaxy. It would be twenty-nine years before TV audiences had another chance to see, in Voyager ’s Captain Janeway, a lead female character in a Star Trek series, much less a woman in command. 3
    It was as though in making his pilot episode, Roddenberry had forgotten the essential structure of myth, which of course is what science fiction is. Myth, in any culture, is the working out of present anxieties against a backdrop of a time (and sometimes place) removed from one’s own—as though the fanciful setting allows one to see the dilemma of what needs working out more clearly, like a microbe in a petri dish. Myths—whether ancient Greek, Aztec, or Chinese—are remarkable not for how different from the audience their heroes are, but for how similar.
    Hera and Zeus hurl thunderbolts and mountains, defy the boundaries of time and space, and arbitrate wars, and yet they are as recognizable to us in their manipulations and marital squabbles as they were to the ancient Greeks. In order to be powerful storytelling, myth must partake of present reality in its social constructs and behaviors, even as it plays make-believe with the settings of present reality—a sort of “let’s pretend” in which the audience is transported to a fanciful past (or future) but travels as their essential selves. By using Number One to turn traditional gender roles upside down, Roddenberry had deeply upset his audience’s understanding of myth, and he had troubled the network executives who needed a financial success.
    In terms of gender issues, this would be the consistent story of the forty-five-year franchise. Even as women made strides in the workplace, in civil rights, and in gender equity across the globe, Star Trek would remain mired in a reassuring narrative of male empowerment and female subservience. At the same time, the language and window dressing shifted to accommodate more modern sensibilities: in Next Generation ’s famous shift in the opening credits away from the gender specificity of “to boldly go where no man has gone before” to what a 1990s drinking game (circulated in e-mails among fans) wryly referred to as “boldly splitting infinitives in a nonsexist manner.” 4
I Am the Goddess of Empathy: The Women of The Next Generation
    With that single word shift from “man” to “one,” The Next Generation seemed to be announcing a new frontier of gender relations. Women would have a much more prominent role in this series—both Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) and Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) would be central figures in this series.
    And yet once again, the command structure on the bridge was males only. Lt. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby), as phaser-toting chief security officer, came the closest to stepping outside traditional female roles, but her death at the end of the first season of what would be an unprecedented seven-year run meant she quickly faded from view. Troi and Crusher became the dominant female stars, and they both inhabited roles that were easy to assign to the realm of the feminine—Troi’s entire raison d’etre as the ship’s counselor (and one is hard-pressed to imagine Kirk’s Enterprise in need of such a thing) was to help the crew to get in touch with their feelings, feelings to which Troi herself, as an empath, was preternaturally attuned.
    Troi was the archetype of femininity writ large, from her form-fitting unisuits that no one else on the crew seemed to be wearing to her nymphlike waterfall of hair, her childishly enlarged irises (Sirtis wore contacts for that), and her heightened emotional sensitivity. True, women were no longer largely invisible, as they had been in the