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Star Trek Alan, Coren Last night television's most poignant masterpiece returned to confirm the sensitive eye's conviction that what is watches in Star Trek is nympholepsy of a truly spectacular order. For what is the Starship Enterprise but America's unflawed vision of herself ? There, in the far and unspecific future, she hurtled hither and yon (if Einstein will forgive me) sorting out the problems of dissident plants, saving them-. from their own weaknesses, - civilizing their rough and threatening edges, gently imposing her vision of what is good and right and just and decent, -lik. some interga- -lactic Mary Poppins; Of course, she - notionally represents - Earth; yet as her captain *. is American and her crew polyglot, but not poly- archic, we must assume that the peaceful and rati'onal planet whose embassy they hold was made so by her final accep- trance of the American wav. In Star Trdk we never see Earth: but we are left to imagine it as a place of white picket fe.nces, where people with clean .hair eat hamburgers and take lunar vacations in Bermuda shorts. The poignancy comes because it all woyks: Star Trek, week by heart-rending week, shows US diplomacv in infallibly triumphant action. Out there-, over the rainbow, all the efforts and techniques that come to nothing in south-east Asia or Europe or the Middle East. all the. interventions in foreign affairs, all the complex diplo- matic stunts, all the American jugglings of alien statesmen, all the nods and becks and wreathed smiles, all wvork! Captain Kirk is the presi- dency, built like a quarter- back, with a huge heart pump- ing the milk of human kind- ness around his wholesorne body, and wvith *an instinctive understanding of all manner of men; Mr Spock. is his Kissin- ger, cold reason and propor suspicion wrapped up in pointed ears and a funny accent. Together they repre- sent the twinned American dream, love and intelliuence combining in superstrengih. They leave us in wondering grief over why, if these guys are so good at bringing talking rocks into line, at stopping Sirius wiping out Beetlejuice, at keeping the Milky Wav safe from totalitarianism, at br-inR- ing American ideals to the nastiest asteroid that spins, it all goes wvrong down here. Star Trek BBC 1
