Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 73

Myth and the Star Trek Franchise

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In this case, references to non-Star Trek sources are layered together and reworked
within a S ta r Trek narrative. Other sources brought into the original series include
the horror genre, a retelling of Jack the Ripper, the gangster genre, the western
genre, and Shakespeare. Further, the original series also engages with various
periods of Earth history, both directly through time travel and through the analogy
of alien cultures. The discovery of a living Apollo in the original series of S ta r Trek
must, therefore, be viewed within the broader context of multiple appropriations
within the series’ various episodes.
As the S ta r Trek franchise has extended, so too has the range of material it
quotes and reworks within its science-fiction setting. While Greek myth is revisited
in the S ta r Trek: Voyager series in an episode I will turn to in depth, new sources of
appropriation in the sequel series of S ta r Trek have included the legends of King
Arthur and Robin Hood, the Medieval epic Beow ulf, the Irish hero Brian Boru, the
Bible, and M oby Dick. Ilsa Bick has argued that the S ta r Trek franchise continually
alludes “to canonical texts such as Dickens, Twain, Doyle, and [. . .] Shakespeare
[. . .] to legitimate and elevate its narrative to immutable niythos'' (206). While
critical of its textual strategies, Bick acknowledges that S ta r Trek holds a prime
place within the history of popular culture, and is able to draw upon that sense of
history in order, paradoxically, to suggest its own timelessness - creating a “cultural
mythology” that aligns itself with the lasting quality of great works of literature
and their esteemed ouevre (Bick 206-7).
Given that the Star Trek franchise is over thirty years old and extends over
many different media, it is particularly well placed to draw upon its own history
and produce a (popular) “mythology” about itself. The S ta r Trek of the 1980s and
beyond is aware of its textual past and place within popular culture, and occasionally
displays this awareness in a heightened, deliberate manner. To coincide with the
thirtieth anniversary of the series, for example, the S ta r Trek: D eep Space N ine
(DS9) episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” (West 1996) has the crew of Deep Space
Nine taken back in time to an incident depicted in the original series episode “The
Trouble With Tribbles” (Pevney 1967). With the benefit of digital technology,
characters from the new series are able to rub shoulders with Captain Kirk and Mr.
Spock of the original series. One of the D S9 characters, an alien called Dax who
has lived over the span of many human lifetimes, articulates the nostalgic aspect of
this journey when she says “I remember this time. I lived in this time and it’s - it’s
hard to not want to be a part of it again.” Dax’s sentiments echo those of many of
the audience who, through rewatching the original episode and its reworking in
“Trials and Tribble-ations” can “remember” the Star Trek of the 1960s, but only
through the mediation of a 1990s perspective. A retrospective understanding of the
original series is filtered through the knowledge of its textual growth as a fictional
realm and the emergence of its cult status in the history of popular culture.