Star Trek: What Is a Person?
I have recently come round to the opinion that the original 1967 Star Trek TV series is one of the best things ever produced in the 20th century. I have been going through the old original series one episode at a time, to refamiliarize myself with it and to recapture a portion of the experience of having watched it as a boy.
When I was a boy, most of what was going on in the episode ran past me. I mainly just wanted to see Kirk and Spock get into pickles that they had to get themselves out of, and to see them shoot lasers at aliens. I’m much older now, and the euphoria of special effects and monster costumes has mostly worn off. But what I am seeing now is so much more rich and interesting than mere action sequences could offer. Star Trek is brimming with questions of ontology, epistemology, ethics, and even theology and psychology. To be fair, in a 48-minute episode where they have to pack in as much drama and visual spectacle as possible, there’s very little time to explore deep questions. Still, attempt them they did – and sometimes with surprising subtlety.