Four Score and Seven Lightyears Ago: Historic Figures in Star Trek
By Ames
Between escapades on the holodeck, visits to the past, and general sci-fi shenanigans, Star Trek has been able to present many historic figures to its crews, to varying effects. They’ve been doing it from the very beginning, though newer Trek series somehow haven’t seemed to have picked up on the game yet. Perhaps mentioning Elon Musk in an episode of Discovery soured them on the idea of bringing real people out into the universe: they’ll only find a way to let you down.
So what do the great minds of history have to offer to the weird and advanced worlds of the future? How frequently is the episode awkward, uncomfortable, or just plain annoying? Whose portrayal doesn’t stand up to the test of time? Check out all the ones we here at A Star to Steer Her By could think of below and listen to our chatter on this week’s podcast episode (discussion starts at 1:11:33). Watch out for falling apples!
[Images © CBS / Paramount]
Jack the Ripper - “Wolf in the Fold”
We forgot to bring this one up on the podcast, but here we remembered to include the alien lifeform that inhabited people throughout history to harvest fear from its victims, at one point using the body of Jack the Ripper. This is absolutely nothing new. The list of Jack the Ripper appearances in modern media is longer than my arm and it’s so overdone that I just gloss over this episode entirely. Redjac is an alien now? Meh. Add it to the Ripper fanfic list.
Wyatt, Morgan, and Virgil Earp and Doc Holliday - “Spectre of the Gun”
By season 3 The Original Series writers had a history book constantly open to look up a whole bunch of figures from the past, starting with an incredibly erroneous telling of the gunfight at the OK Corral. The whole ordeal is through the lens of an alien reading Kirk’s inaccurate memories, so perhaps any falsehoods are to be forgiven. Given the budget for season three, the sets were pretty much plywood, but the actors playing the Earps and Doc Holliday actually looked pretty good!
Flint - “Requiem for Methuselah”
This one’s kind of a strange one, since the character Flint purportedly lived long enough to live out the lives of many famous figures, some actual and some fictional for some reason. The list he gives includes Methuselah, King Solomon, Alexander the Great, Lazarus, Merlin, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Brahms. You’re a strange dude, Flint. I really don’t know what to make of this guy since it’s almost an interesting idea to have such a long-lived character, but once you start throwing wizards into the mix, I’m taken entirely out of it.
Abraham Lincoln - “The Savage Curtain”
When Abe Lincoln appears floating in space, it’s laugh-out-loud funny. The Original Series could get away with campy hijinks the way no other Trek series can anymore, even including Lower Decks. The rest of “The Savage Curtain” is convoluted and pointless as hell (there’s a reason it’s on some of our Bottom Five lists from the whole series), but the parts featuring playing gladiator with Lincoln were a harmless enough romp.
Genghis Khan - “The Savage Curtain”
Also featured alongside Lincoln was Genghis Khan, and let’s just say it was a good thing the character had absolutely no lines or it might have gotten cringey. His inclusion in the first place was borderline as it was, but it wasn’t a good episode in the first place, so what were we really hoping for out of season three of TOS? Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure did all of this better, I’ll leave it at that.
Albert Einstein - “The Nth Degree”
Jump to TNG and a lot of our guest figures from the slate of history appear to us on the holodeck, which is probably a decent venue for them. Better than most, when you think about it, since our Starfleet friends are usually visiting them for a purpose that is substantive to the episode, and also everyone accepts that hologram depictions are going to be fairly superficial. So it goes that Barclay seeking out the program of Albert Einstein makes perfect sense in the episode. This isn’t the last we’ll see of the Einstein holo either, as we’ll see…
Jack London - “Time’s Arrow”
Oh boy, this is one of my least favorite TNG episodes and it’s mostly down to our two guest figures being so caricaturey and plot convenient. The first we come across in our time travel adventure is the young valet Jack, who just seems like a miscreant throughout the two-parter and who rubs your SSHB hosts particularly the wrong way immediately. Then the very very buttony “Remember the name Jack London” happens and everyone watching rolls their eyes so hard that we all topple over from the sheer inanity of it. Ugh!
Samuel Clemens - “Time’s Arrow”
In these two episodes, is Jack London better or worse than Sam Clemens? That may be a matter of how well you can stand the intense overacting and obnoxiousness of the portrayal. In my write up for season 6 of TNG, I screamed “What the hell is Mark Twain doing here” into the void for what felt like days because his character had no motivation for doing any of the things the writers needed him to do in order to stick around. And boy did he ever stick around! He stuck around so much while not contributing anything except someone to deliver exposition at, which could have been some fictional person! So what the hell was Mark Twain doing here!?!?
Stephen Hawking - “Descent”
As we move through TNG episodes, we go from one of my least favorite portrayals to one of my favorites. The late Stephen Hawking remains the only actual person to play themself on Star Trek, and if that ever changes, I’ll feel disappointed because I can’t think of anyone else who is anywhere as deserving. The little joke that Hawking added himself is quite cute, and it just sounds like it was a delightful day to have Einstein, Newton (whom we’ll see again in a second), and Hawking playing poker on the holodeck with Data.
Sigmund Freud - “Phantasms”
Having Data go to a recreation of Freud’s couch when he’s looking for someone to interpret his dreams is a bit of a goofy premise, but it seems in character enough. When holo-Freud starts spewing all the normal Oedipal psychosexual claptrap at him, it’s a bit humorous, if a bit on the nose, but we accept this one because Data’s innocence and naivete are such a good counterbalance. The scene plays a little on the obvious side, but what can you do? The cigar is a penis.
Amelia Earhart - “The 37s”
If you’ve been following along with our watch through Voyager, you’ll know this one struck a rather bad chord with us. Earhart is the only female figure on this list, which is saying enough in and of itself, but for the whole of “The 37s” it felt like her name was getting dragged around through history. It’s not as bad as the Jack the Ripper fanfic parade, but it just strikes me as bad taste to use Earhart’s legacy for a pretty cheap alien abduction gag and to have her navigator Fred Noonan canonically be in love with her. Vom.
Isaac Newton - “Death Wish”
Quinn claims that he’s the one that shook the apple tree that brought about Newton’s gravity epiphany. It’s another bit of an eye-rolling joke, made all the more groanworthy since it was already made clear in Newton’s appearance in “Descent” that the apple story was entirely apocryphal. Sigh. Other than that, Newton’s testimony is part of a very fascinating discussion of what will become of Quinn if he leaves the Q Continuum by killing himself, and who ever knows when the Qs are overembellishing stories for dramatic effect anyway (hint: it’s all the time)?
Socrates, Lord Byron, and Gandhi - “Darkling”
We had pretty mixed feelings of the Doctor going all Mr. Hyde during “Darking” but it does stand to reason that he’d look to various historic figures for personality traits to give himself. Byron and Gandhi’s shallow conversation about men cavorting with women was on the silly side, but this is the holodeck after all, where all the people are pretty much one-note.
The pièce de résistance of the holodeck scenes in this episode is when the characters are all glitching out randomly, Gandhi’s head is spinning, Byron is getting experimented upon, and Socrates is left a hollow hologram. Now that’s a new philosophy.
Leonardo da Vinci - “Concerning Flight” et al
We come to the end of our list with one of the most established minds in history… mostly taking up space. The most his character really gets to do on his number of appearances is allow Janeway to talk exposition at someone other than Seven for a change, and then make a lot of jokes about how the hologram doesn’t understand the real world. I was frankly tired by it. Later on, Lower Decks makes some references to the da Vinci hologram, because of course it does.
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Computer, end program! Did you spot any other historical figures from our Trek watch? Well, put them in cryo and send them our way because we’re moving on to more blogtivities next week. Keep watching this spot for more, keep up with our voyage through Voyager on SoundCloud or wherever you get your podcasts, say hi on Facebook and Twitter, and in the words of Honest Abe: be excellent to each other.
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The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of
The New York Times Book Review.
NYT Article.
*************
Q: How many of the 100 have you read?
Q: Which ones did you love/hate?
Q: What's missing?
Here's the full list.
100. Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson
99. How to Be Both, Ali Smith
98. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
97. Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward
96. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman
95. Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel
94. On Beauty, Zadie Smith
93. Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
92. The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante
91. The Human Stain, Philip Roth
90. The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
89. The Return, Hisham Matar
88. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
87. Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters
86. Frederick Douglass, David W. Blight
85. Pastoralia, George Saunders
84. The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
83. When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labutat
82. Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor
81. Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan
80. The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante
79. A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin
78. Septology, Jon Fosse
77. An American Marriage, Tayari Jones
76. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
75. Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
74. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
73. The Passage of Power, Robert Caro
72. Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich
71. The Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen
70. All Aunt Hagar's Children, Edward P. Jones
69. The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
68. The Friend, Sigrid Nunez
67. Far From the Tree, Andrew Solomon
66. We the Animals, Justin Torres
65. The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
64. The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai
63. Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
62. 10:04, Ben Lerner
61. Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
60. Heavy, Kiese Laymon
59. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
58. Stay True, Hua Hsu
57. Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich
56. The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner
55. The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
54. Tenth of December, George Saunders
53. Runaway, Alice Munro
52. Train Dreams, Denis Johnson
51. Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
50. Trust, Hernan Diaz
49. The Vegetarian, Han Kang
48. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
47. A Mercy, Toni Morrison
46. The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
45. The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
44. The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin
43. Postwar, Tony Judt
42. A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James
41. Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan
40. H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald
39. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
38. The Savage Detectives, Roberto Balano
37. The Years, Annie Ernaux
36. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
35. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
34. Citizen, Claudia Rankine
33. Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward
32. The Lines of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
31. White Teeth, Zadie Smith
30. Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
29. The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt
28. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
27. Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
26. Atonement, Ian McEwan
25. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
24. The Overstory, Richard Powers
23. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro
22. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo
21. Evicted, Matthew Desmond
20. Erasure, Percival Everett
19. Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe
18. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders
17. The Sellout, Paul Beatty
16. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
15. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
14. Outline, Rachel Cusk
13. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
12. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
11. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
10. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
9. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
8. Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald
7. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
6. 2666, Roberto Bolano
5. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
4. The Known World, Edward P. Jones
3. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
2. The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson
1. My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
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