Apollo and "the one"

Discussion in 'Star Trek - The Original & Animated Series' started by KelisThePoet, Dec 6, 2018.

  1. alchemist

    alchemist Captain Captain

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    Here's the scene in the 5/23/67 version. Note that they hadn't yet added the bits of Kirk and company antagonizing Apollo and Carolyn "rescuing" them.

    MED. ANGLE IN TEMPLE
    Apollo beckons for Carolyn to come closer, extending
    his hand. She hesitates. Kirk gives an almost
    imperceptible nod. She moves forward to Apollo's side,
    takes his hand. He eyes her very warmly. Then he
    looks at Kirk, and his expression becomes stern.

    APOLLO
    I know you are trying to escape me.
    It is useless. I know all you
    do. I have not punished you
    for it because of my compassion
    for your kind.

    KIRK
    You know nothing about our kind. You know
    only our remote ancestors... who trembled
    before your tricks. Those tricks don't
    frighten us. Neither do you. We've come
    a long way in five thousand years.

    APOLLO
    But you are still of the same nature. I
    could sweep you out of existence with a
    wave of my hand... and bring you back. I
    can give life or death. What else does
    mankind demand of its gods?

    KIRK
    Mankind has no use for gods. We find
    the One quite adequate.

    APOLLO
    We will not debate, mortal. I offer you
    eternal rest and happiness, according
    to the ancient ways. I ask little in
    return... but what I ask I insist upon!
    I will release your transporter
    beam. You will immediately
    start beaming down the rest of your
    crew. They may bring with
    them such personal effects as
    they desire. Be sure your
    artisans bring tools and other
    supplies. You will need homes
    and shelter.

    KIRK
    And you will supply the herds of sheep,
    and the pipes we'll play? And the simple
    furs we'll wear?

    Apollo boils, scowls, rises, points imperiously.

    APOLLO
    You will dismantle your ship for the supplies
    you need... and seven days from now I shall
    crush its empty hull.
    (angrily)
    I have been too patient. I shall be
    patient no longer.
    (at Carolyn)
    Come.

    With that, both he and Carolyn dissolve,
    fade out again. Kirk takes an angry step forward,
    but by that time they are gone.

    That's quite interesting!
     
    Last edited: Dec 26, 2018
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  2. Kor

    Kor Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    It's just interesting that Roddenberry seemed to be so against organized religion, especially in his later years and as evident in Trek that he had more creative control over (i.e. TNG). It was rather broad-minded of him to have his protagonists in TOS express belief that he himself didn't care much for.

    If Kirk was speaking for humanity in general by saying "we" when expressing his own personal belief, then it was kind of presumptuous, unless humanity comes to some kind of consensus on religious belief in the next few centuries.

    Kor
     
    Last edited: Dec 26, 2018
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  3. Harvey

    Harvey Admiral Admiral

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    Interesting — the whole exchange is already there in that version, which supports the notion that "We find the One quite adequate" was not added at the behest of Broadcast Standards.

    This presumes that Roddenberry's religious beliefs were the same in 1967 as they were two decades later. What we know about Roddenberry's religious beliefs largely comes from interviews with him that were conducted near the end of his life — as well as David Alexander's authorized biography — when Roddenberry was a full-on humanist. Alexander, of course, was introduced to Roddenberry when he interviewed him for The Humanist in 1991. His Roddenberry book, which is the source of a lot of Wikipedia citations about Roddenberry's religious beliefs, is often a work of hagiography rather than honest biography, and as a result can be a problematic source.

    Incidentally, I ran a few searches on ProQuest for "Roddenberry" and "religion" prior to 1975 and found almost nothing. What you do find are vague quotes like this (from The Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1968): "We did shows last year about sex, bigotry, unionism, racism and religion. We even did one on Vietnam—disguised, of course."

    It would be interesting to take a deep dive into Roddenberry's letters and other correspondence to see what he has to say about religious belief during and before the production of Star Trek.
     
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  4. mb22

    mb22 Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    "Unionism" -- when?
     
  5. Harvey

    Harvey Admiral Admiral

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    Beats me. Maybe Roddenberry was thinking of "The Cloud Minders," which was in story development at that time? Or maybe he was just over-hyping the show to a friendly journalist as part of an interview to promote the series?
     
  6. TREK_GOD_1

    TREK_GOD_1 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    He was against it later in life, contrary to the fantasized line repeated by those militant atheists I referred to, who tried to paint 1960s Roddenberry and TOS as some model of anti-religious belief. More on that later...

    Notice how casual and assured Kirk is in delivering that statement; he's not bluffing or playing mind games with Apollo, but merely stating a fat about humankind in that period.

    ...as I believed. By now,someone would have unearthed and presented some Desilu and/or NBC documents about forcing religion into TOS, if such a thing happened, but its clear that was not the case, leaving Kirk as a character who is expressing a belief that was intended to be a part of the character.



    Several years ago, I posted one of the best sources of evidence about Roddenberry's mind regarding religion as far back as the production years of Filmation's animated Star Trek series, which is always missed or ignored by the advocates of the "Roddenberry was always an atheist" idea: on page 99 of the book Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation, Scheimer recalled something telling:

    Gene got to be close to us all at Filmation. I remember when he and Majel Barret had their little baby, Eugene Wesley Roddenberry jr., they invited us to the christening. He had a rabbi there, and a Catholic priest, and a Protestant reverend. He said, "There is no way that this kid is not going to go to heaven."

    That was not a joke or stunt. Even if one argues that GR's invitation to the reverend, rabbi and priest implied he was not sure--he still moved in a conscious direction of faith the hardcore atheist some argue Roddenberry was all along would not even entertain.

    With EWR, jr. born in 1974--long after TOS and nearing the end of TAS' production. Roddenberry's statement--at one of the most important moments of his life--paints a clear picture that he was not the atheism cheerleader of latter day revisionist accounts, and certainly not during TOS' production. This explains the direction of the closing lines in "Bread and Circuses," which never read like the mere offering of opinion on a parallel event (in the way one would say, "oh, they just invented the car--cool!"), but some kind of deeper recognition/connection.

    GR clearly did not like the false god types (Apollo, Gary Mitchell, et al), but TOS was not anti-God / anti-Christian or had all series characters having no belief in God (ex. Kirk's line "We find the One quite adequate").
     
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  7. thribs

    thribs Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I thought you meant "the one" from Star Trek V and the Q Continuum novels.
    Yeah, he was referring to Chuck. Christianity is still a thing then but it isn't as big. Especially within the Federation where there are multiple religions from many cultures.
     
  8. David cgc

    David cgc Admiral Premium Member

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    The most interesting/perplexing thing I've seen is his "Letter from a Network Censor" talk that was included on the "Inside Star Trek" album, recorded in 1976. This was another example of his "I'm the bold truth-teller, and these milquetoast boneheads at the network are obstructing my vision" schtick. So, the premise is, to demonstrate the kind of changes the network would request on Star Trek, he wrote a satirical network note describing changes that would be requested if someone were making a TV adaptation of the Bible. Stuff like "Too much nudity in the Garden of Eden, Jesus's invective against hoarding wealth and banking must be shown to be reprehensible, God must marry Mary before getting her pregnant, and remove his demands for praise so he seems less insecure."

    And he's laughing at it, the audience is laughing at it, it's clearly supposed to be a big joke on the clowns at the network not seeing the forest for the trees; and then around the same time, he writes a script for "The God Thing," which has the Vulcan masters make one of the same critiques of Christian religion in ernest (the "God seems insecure" one. I've obviously never read the script, so I don't know if any others popped up, but that's the one that kept coming up in interviews).

    Until double-checking things for this post, I hadn't realized how close these two were in time. "Letter From a Network Censor" was recorded in May of 1976, and Roddenberry discussed "The God Thing" and that the line about God not having BDE probably irritating the studio in a Starlog interview published in November that same year. I'd assumed he'd reused the critique as a legitimate one as his views evolved, but I guess he was just a bit two-faced about the whole thing. The same line can either be a superficial point raised by a bureaucrat that's worthy of ridicule, or an incisive critique from a race of wise space-elves, and the audience will take it either way based on context.
     
  9. Harvey

    Harvey Admiral Admiral

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    Roddenberry's shtick amused me when I was younger, but the truth is that "Letter From A Network Censor" has little resemblance to the actual memos Roddenberry regularly dealt with from Broadcast Standards. I hadn't thought about how close "The God Thing" was to all of this, though. I'd like to read that story treatment someday.

    Reading this passage in the Scheimer memoir, it sure seems like an awfully good yarn. Scheimer claims that "booze was flying everywhere" at the christening, with (Governor) Ronald Reagan and an "already drunk" Nancy Reagan among those who attended. Since he doesn't give us any insight into how the event was arranged — presumably, Majel Barrett had a say in all this, and I have no idea what her beliefs were — I have a hard time drawing the same firm conclusions that you do from it. But it is an interesting data point, assuming the tale is true.
     
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  10. thribs

    thribs Vice Admiral Admiral

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    She was supposed to be pregnant at the end but the network thought that was too risqué for television as she wasn’t married to him.
    Gotta love how traditional they were back then. :)
     
  11. Harvey

    Harvey Admiral Admiral

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    It's a bit unclear who nixed the pregnancy tag, which contrary to some sources, was actually filmed (you can see a little bit of what was filmed on The Roddenberry Vault). Justman suggests a possible objection from NBC in a couple of memos, but unfortunately the Broadcast Standards memos from this one are largely missing at UCLA.

    It may have been cut for time.
     
  12. Maurice

    Maurice Snagglepussed Admiral

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    My guess is he's objecting to the idea that Apollo can bring them back from the dead. I guess Nomad bringing Scotty back is different because not-Gods.
     
  13. Maurice

    Maurice Snagglepussed Admiral

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    Yeah, lots of claims about the network forcing this or that, but many of these turn out to be untrue, i.e. Lt. Masters and Lazarus.
     
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  14. TREK_GOD_1

    TREK_GOD_1 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Being a christening/gathering, Roddenberry must have invited all of the religious representatives well in advance of the event--and the drinking, so we can assume that he was clear-minded about wanting the participation of faith representatives there from the start. No matter what he did once the drinks flowed, one can conclude that having a reverend, priest & Rabbi there meant early 70s Roddenberry was not the hardline, lifelong atheist mindset some ST fans (and former Berman-era people like Braga) want him--and TOS by association--to be.
     
  15. mb22

    mb22 Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    I recall that in the final chapter of the original edition of Gerrold's World of Star Trek, Roddenberry muses about a new Trek series having an episode dealing with unions. I haven't seen much of TNG, but I don't think he ever dealt with that particular issue in any Trek venue.
     
  16. Marsden

    Marsden Commodore Commodore

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    Marsden is very sad.
    Every time I see the this thread title I keep thinking it's a new band.

    Not that it's not a good thread.
     
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  17. ZapBrannigan

    ZapBrannigan Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    On the question of unionism, I would guess GR was thinking of the lithium miners in "Mudd's Women" as an allegory for a troublesome labor union.
     
  18. cgervasi

    cgervasi Commander Red Shirt

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    When I first saw it as a child I came away thinking this planet was weird in that "the next step" after Rome hadn't happened yet. I figured Christianity must be the next historical thing. I thought the Kirk and crew were fascinated by that because it was an opportunity to see the Rome-to-Christian revolution (something that existed only in my mind from this episode) happen in an industrialized society. They clearly thought this was a positive development, but I wasn't sure if there would be further progress overshadowing or replacing Christianity.

    Watching it now, it still seems like the writers have this simplistic idea that Rome was cruel and decadent and Christianity did away with those things. This seems absurd to me now. I wonder if it was intended to be suitable as a Christmas episode or something.
     
  19. JonnyQuest037

    JonnyQuest037 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    He did? Kirk's uniform has scorch marks on both the front and the back in TFF. If he dodged, he did a pretty poor job of it.
    I remember an interview with Leonard Nimoy in Sci-Fi Universe in the mid-90s where the interviewer quoted from a Roddenberry interview to Nimoy. The quote was something along the lines of "Some Jews have a habit of declaring the features of Judaism that they like to be Jewish, and declaring the ones they don't to be non-Jewish." Nimoy responded that Gene was anti-Semitic, clearly.
    Yeah, it's much more about Roddenberry's dislike for religion in general, and the Christian God in particular. I understand that some of the stuff about God blaming humans for his own mistakes were recycled from The God Thing.
     
  20. TREK_GOD_1

    TREK_GOD_1 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    This is a detail not really reported anywhere, at least not in "official" sources i've seen.