An underlying theme/possibility from TOS?

[Wingsley]

I recently re-viewed "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "Who Mourns for Adonais?" on StarTrek.com. These eps, seen just days or weeks apart, got me to thinking about a recurring theme in TOS.

If you throw in "Charlie X" and "Plato's Stepchildren", and also consider themes on human nature in "Bread and Circuses" and "Patterns of Force", it seems that there was an evolving theme, not just on "absolute power corrupts absolutely", but also innate potential for absolute power in human(oid)s.

It would seem that exposure to the Negative Energy Barrier at the Galaxy's Edge served as a kind of psionic enabler for human beings with heightened ESP abilities. (But at the risk of being killed by that exposure... ZAP!) The implication here was that human beings have (at least) the potential to tap into formidable psycho-kinetic powers once exposed to dark energy. "Plato's Stepchildren" seemed to ingest alien substances to arouse these same powers. Apollo seemed to have an organ (implanted?) in his chest that also served to tap in on an external power source. (McCoy's speculation.)

None of this even touches the implications for the TOS Universe as seen in "Return to Tomorrow". Sargon and Co. seemed to have "evolved beyond the need for physical bodies", much like the Organians.

Doesn't it seem that Roddenberry & Co. were implying that humans either had the potential or actually were evolving into some-powerful psycho-kinetic "gods" (or "see people think that makes me a monster") that can tap available energies and channel then in apparently supernatural ways?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I doubt that the writers were trying to imply anything about what human beings might actually be capable of, here. It was just a useful sf trope.

 

[Wingsley]

Weird double-post thing going on.

 

[Wingsley]

But was this something that Roddenberry and Coon, etc., trying to express?

It seems that TNG's "Hide and Q" seemed to continue this concept.

 

[Santa Kang]

Nah the theme is probably about the corrupting nature of power.

 

[Christopher]

It's a pretty common trope throughout plenty of science fiction over the decades that "higher" evolution of humanity (going by the false assumption that evolution is an upward process) would result in psychic powers and eventually lead to the emergence of an "angelic" incorporeal form. It's basically just ancient belief in magic and divinity recast in the semantics of a scientific age. You can see similar such stories in plenty of other shows, like "The Sixth Finger" on The Outer Limits or "The Mutants" on classic Doctor Who. And of course you can see it in just about any movie or TV episode predicated on the bogus "we only use 10% of our brains" myth. So it wasn't a theme specific to TOS, it was just one of the many ways in which TOS repackaged and popularized the well-established tropes of prose and pulp science fiction of the preceding several decades.

 

[Hofner]

One non-TOS example of the theme discussed here that sticks out in my mind is a Twilight Zone ep. In it a kid, played by Billy Mumy, somehow gained absolute god-like power over everything. The adults around him had to be veeery careful how they interacted with him... or else..

Pretty entertaining.

Robert

 

[Wingsley]

And, of course, there was the STARGATE SG-1 dual concept of the powerful Ancients/Alterrans and the "Ascended" ones, with Kalik being a kind of Gary Mitchell-like mutant bridge between them. Curious, but it occurred to me that the most formidable menace in SG-1 turned out to be the Ori/Alterrans, who were essentially distantly related to Earthlings, so in essence "we have met the enemy and they are us".

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

No, I don't think the writers were trying to express something about the capability of human beings to evolve into energy-channeling creatures. That's a story gimmick, not a dramatic theme or a thought-provoking idea in itself.

 

[A beaker full of death]

I believe OP is onto something. SciFi at the time was well grounded in literary philosophical secular humanism, and Roddenberry at the time was well-grounded in SciFi (as were most of the other writers). It was so entrenched in the very fabric of Star Trek that it even made it into TMP and TFF. Our evolution as a society, and by extension as a species, is what that's all about. Societies encountered in Star Trek were all meant to be reflections of our own - either current, past, or potential.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Roddenberry's familiarity with sf was passing and superficial; judging from his own proposed treatments for Trek stories it consisted largely from exposure to other sf TV shows and movies. He relied on his friend Samuel Peeples for the heavy lifting where literary and pulp sf was concerned.

 

[Wingsley]

All of this seems to rest on the notion that this "absolute power"/"super-powers" phenomenon in TOS had to be based on pulp sci fi alone. I'm not so sure.

TNG's "Hide and Q" seemed to provide a hint to another possibility: Hamlet.

Consider this dialogue between Picard and Q in the Ready Room:

Q
"Oh, thank you very much I'm gald you enjoyed it. Perhaps maybe a little... Hamlet?"

PICARD
"No. I know Hamlet. And what he might say with irony I say with conviction. "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty. In form, in moving, how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel. In apprehension, how like a god...' "

Q
"Surely you don't see your species like that do you?!"

PICARD
"I see us one day becoming that, Q. Is that what concerns you?"​

Could it be that Roddenberry was echoing, if not expanding upon, what he started in TOS?

Hmmmm...

 

[Christopher]

Roddenberry didn't start anything. He wasn't an innovator, just a popularizer of pre-existing literary SF tropes. And he wasn't, by a long shot, the exclusive creator of TOS. Samuel A. Peeples wrote "Where No Man Has Gone Before." Paul Schneider wrote "The Squire of Gothos." Gene L. Coon wrote "Errand of Mercy." And as stated, the idea of human evolution into superbeings was around in earlier works of televised as well as prose SF, such as "The Sixth Finger" on The Outer Limits.

Besides, as Picard said, Hamlet was uttering those lines in irony. Or rather, as an expression of his own depressive state where nothing mattered to him anymore -- he had "lost all [his] mirth." After the quoted portion, he went on to say, "And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me." Indeed, if anything, Hamlet (and through him, Shakespeare) was probably mocking through hyperbole, poking fun at the tendency to elevate and glorify humanity as "the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals." Shakespeare certainly made it clear enough in his canon that he had a far more cynical view of human nature than that.

So Roddenberry was taking those lines grossly out of context, as he himself had Picard openly acknowledge. There's certainly no conceptual throughline from Hamlet to stories about godlike superbeings.

 

[A beaker full of death]

^ And yet Picard made clear he was uttering those lines earnestly -- and to a Godlike superbeing, implying that man would not only match Q in stature, but surpass him.
I'm not speaking of literally turning into energy beings; I didn't read OP's post as being so constrained.

And Roddenberry gets short shrift, I think. For all his faults (and there were many), he certainly had an appreciation for the literary side of SF (even if he was trying to hawk IDIC medallions or steal music royalties). He was a decent writer; his Have Gun episodes show that.

 

[Wingsley]

^ And yet Picard made clear he was uttering those lines earnestly -- and to a Godlike superbeing, implying that man would not only match Q in stature, but surpass him.

Agreed.

I'm not speaking of literally turning into energy beings; I didn't read OP's post as being so constrained.

You are correct.

 

[Christopher]

Well, yes, of course Picard was using those lines in earnest; my point is that Picard himself admitted that he was using them in the opposite sense from how Shakespeare had used them. So it's profoundly wrong to suggest that Shakespeare was somehow proposing that humanity would evolve into godlike beings or something -- since of course it was centuries before the theory of evolution was proposed. Rather, he was referencing the pre-existing Elizabethan belief that humanity was already God's privileged creation, created in God's image and thus existing on a higher and more perfected plane than the animals -- and he was questioning it, having Hamlet say that humanity was really nothing but a "quintessence of dust." Elsewhere in the same play, Hamlet spoke of how a king would end up passing through a peasant's guts, for the king's body would be eaten by worms, a worm would be eaten by a fish, and the fish would be eaten by a peasant. And then there's "Alas, poor Yorick," revealing how a man whom Hamlet loved and admired as a child was now reduced merely to a nondescript skull. There's a strong thread of nihilism running through Hamlet. Its theme is not that humanity can rise to a more godlike status, but that humanity and all its airs of superiority will eventually end up decayed into dust and dirt and bone.

 

[skylark14]

I'm not qualified to weigh in on a Shakespearian analysis. Just popped in to say that back in the early 50s there was already a movie out about a child with super-human powers who was totally corrupted by those powers. And before it was a movie, I think it was a Broadway play. The Bad Seed with child star Patty McCormack. I have the feeling there are other examples that I'm not recalling but I remember that the concept was not new to me when I first saw it in Trek and I think it had been around for quite some time even then.

 

[A beaker full of death]

^ As I recall, there was nothing supernatural in The Bad Seed.

 

[skylark14]

^ As I recall, there was nothing supernatural in The Bad Seed.

You're absolutely right! I was getting ready to respond to you with all these examples from the movie and couldn't think of a single one. I guess the child was just so preternaturally evil, that I was remembering her as having supernatural ability. She seemed inhuman. I hadn't seen the movie in many years.

I probably got her mixed up with the children in Village of the Damned, who at least had telepathy going on if I'm even remembering that correctly. Although I think part of the plot there was that the children's mothers may have been impregnated by some alien force, so that wouldn't count as a natural evolutionary flowering of human extrasensory abilities either.

So --- that leaves me with egg on my face and nothing to prove my point that this theme had been around for a good while before Where No Man Has Gone Before. That's still how I remember it though; will have to see if anything else comes to mind to support that memory. Thanks for stopping me from spreading around misinformation.

 

[Christopher]

So --- that leaves me with egg on my face and nothing to prove my point that this theme had been around for a good while before Where No Man Has Gone Before. That's still how I remember it though; will have to see if anything else comes to mind to support that memory.

Other posters in this thread have already cited earlier examples, such as "It's a Good Life" from The Twilight Zone (based on a Jerome Bixby story from 1953) and "The Sixth Finger" from The Outer Limits.