An anticapitalist Star Trek Episode

Perhaps old Juan Posadas was on to something after all.

Last night I watched part two of a fascinating "Star Trek" episode. This is the Star Trek that has the wonderful Kate Mulgrew as the captain, a black guy playing the Spock role and an American Indian with a tattoo on the right side of his forehead playing her first mate.

It seems that a rocket-ship from the 29th century has crashed accidentally in the 20th century. This Star Trek crew is from the 25th century. They themselves have to go back to the 20th century and intervene in the "historical process" (in almost a Hegelian sense) and eliminate all traces of this 29th century artifact or future humanity is doomed.

This is the problem.

It seems that a Bill Gates type, played to a tee by Ed Begley Jr., has discovered the crashed 29th century spaceship and is using it to discover computer technology from the future and use it in the present to his competitive corporate advantage. (Confused? Remember, this is Star Trek, not House on the Prairie. Is that still on, by the way?)

They've got the Gates character, named Henry Starling, down perfect. In an opening scene, he is dressing down one of his top managers for not "producing" and orders him to go home and lose some sleep over that.

Anyhow, the Star Trek crew discovers that this Starling has run out of technology to appropriate from the crashed space-ship, but has managed to put together a crude replica of it. He plays to fly it into the 29th century and steal some more advanced technology. The problem is that he doesn't quite understand the mechanics of time-space continuum navigation and is destined to destroy the universe of the 29th century by entering it in the improper fashion.

So Kate Mulgrew has a sit-down with Starling and clues him in on the risk of his travel into the future. His response is a classic statement of the bourgeoisie. He says that he has a corporation he is responsible to and that unless he continues to innovate he will be destroyed by his competitors. She asks him even at the risk of destroying all of humanity? That is a risk worth taking, he replies. Isn't this the world- view of the bourgeoisie? Doesn't this explain WWI and WWII?

She tells him that the people of the 25th century, her home century, are much more advanced. They have learned to make progress through cooperation, rather than competition. Sounds vaguely socialist, doesn't it?

To leave no doubts, the 2nd part of the episode has a wonderful bit of a subplot. Two members of the Star Trek crew get captured by militia members in Arizona after their space shuttle crashes. The militia membres see their odd uniforms and the exotic space-shuttle they have emerged from and conclude that they must be part of a secret federal government plot to smash the militias! The space-shuttle, the militia- men are convinced, is another version of black helicopters.

As the two crew members are bound up and surrounded by heavily armed militia members, the leader starts haranguing them. You are for collectivism and we are for individualism. This is a fight to preserve our individualistic way of life. One crew member turns to the other and whispers, "How barbaric the 20th century was."