German TV boldly shows 'Nazi' Star Trek episode
- Thread starter Vulagr
- Start date
Criticism of the episode often feels like it's coming from people so detached from the TOS era, not in touch with the challenges the series faced and how it could never be as "polished" as a TNG production. And actually, that grittiness gives it part of its unique charm. This was a great episode, touching on a fascinating concept.
Heck, TNG needed to save money by reusing existing stuff too. They just did it with holodeck episodes rather than parallel Earths.
It didn't.
In my opinion, the biggest problem with "Patterns of Force" is the character of Gill. I am an historian myself, and I find it difficult to believe that any well-informed scholar could imagine that National Socialism could serve as a model for anyone. Let alone a scholar who was qualified to teach at one of the most prestigious higher-educational institutions in the Federation, i.e. Starfleet Academy.
The episode would have been better and more believable if Gill had been less innocent--if he had been a David Irving figure, a "Mad Historian" who was determined to exonerate Nazism from the Holocaust libel. Every historian would love to be able to test their conclusions by rewinding time and changing a few things, to see if and how events would turn out differently. The fact that they turned out much the same on Ekos would have underlined the point the show was making about the nature of such political systems, along with the fatal attraction that power and powerful men have held for many intellectuals.
Ugh! Patterns of Force was like watching every World War II Hollywood propaganda film, one after the other. This episode was almost as bad as watching Tom Cruise play a one-eyed German officer.
Cruise looks just as much as Stauffenberg as Quinto looks like Nimoy.
That's a valid point. Then again, we are talking about a historian who lives 250 years in the future in a culture that's (theoretically) been influenced by alien ideas and perspectives. Maybe at that greater distance, there could be more revisionist thinking about the Nazis, or some of the facts might have become obscured. (After all, a lot of historical records were supposedly lost in the Eugenics Wars/WWIII.)
Many people think a strong centralized government is more efficient and effective. Like all the Russians polled who prefer a strong man who can make the trains run on time, to chaotic quasi-democracy and free-market economy. So, if you're Gill, you try to remove the anti-semitism and arrive at a strong one-party state. He missed that day in class about absolute power corrupting, but whatever, nobody's prefect. Yes, intentional pun, leading to . . .
"Bread and Circuses" and "Piece of the Action." Dead horse of mine, but "the gang goes to the ______ planet and escapes trouble" gets monotonous in S2 and is why I rate S3 higher, now.
"Bread and Circuses" and "Piece of the Action." Dead horse of mine, but "the gang goes to the ______ planet and escapes trouble" gets monotonous in S2 and is why I rate S3 higher, now.
I never meant to say that 60s TV didn't use Nazis frequently. I'm speaking as someone who didn't watch war shows as a kid in the 60s, keep that in mind.... My impression is that it took decades for TV Nazis to become a cheap device for hacks writing supposed SF. When "Enterprise" did their big Nazi cliffhanger, I groaned, but wasn't surprised. I don't know how good "Combat" was, and there was "The Rat Patrol" and other such shows. Were Nazis used just for light action/adventure, without solid drama to it? If so, I stand corrected. Hogan's Heroes was a weird special case.
I've never seen any of the wartime dramas from the '60s, just read a bit about them. But the Mission: Impossible episodes where the mission was to prevent a new Nazi resurgence were usually just light spy adventure without any real confrontation of the Nazis' atrocities. They were just the Bad Guys of the Week, and their plans to rebuild the Reich were just the McGuffin of the week, with the story focus being on the IMF team's caper to obtain some vital piece of information or manipulate circumstances to arrange a character's downfall or the usual stuff like that. The closest thing to an exception was "Echo of Yesterday," where the plan hinged on awakening a sense of moral outrage in a misguided ally of the Neo-Nazi villains. Except they did so by forcing him to relive Hitler's murder of his wife rather than addressing the Holocaust or anything like that. (Although the previous Neo-Nazi episode, "The Bank," did vaguely imply that the people the villain was murdering and robbing were all Jewish.)
See, '60s TV was all about escapism, and the sponsors were uneasy with any sort of controversy or deep issues. So you'd constantly see the Nazis used as stock villains, but they'd just be painted as rather generic militarists, authoritarians, conquerors, murderers, etc., largely interchangeable with other bad guys. Matters like the Holocaust and the deep racial and religious hatreds driving it were not overtly addressed. You could use Nazis as villains all you wanted, but you couldn't easily make a statement about racism or concentration camps unless you cloaked it as fantasy to slip it past the sponsors and censors. So Rod Serling did several Twilight Zone episodes about the evils of Nazism coming back to haunt people through supernatural means or whatever, and Star Trek gave us alien Nazis oppressing people from another planet. (Though I don't wish to understate how far Serling took it. "Death's-head Revisited" was about a Nazi war criminal returning to the concentration camp he'd run and being punished by the ghosts of all his victims. It was a pretty stark acknowledgment of the horrors that most Nazi-related TV stories stayed well away from.)
Would "Patterns of Force" be the first time the Holocaust was dealt with within the context of a dramatic tv show?
In 1953, the TV show "This Is Your life" featured a woman who was a survivor of the Holocaust.
And you might want to take a look at this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/31/a...aust-an-odd-couple.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
And you might want to take a look at this article:
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/31/a...aust-an-odd-couple.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
number6
Vice Admiral
I think it should be pointed out that Star Trek used Nazis or Space Nazis in only three shows in the entire franchise, so I don't get the eye rolling about this as if it were an overused thing like time travel.
Of course for Germany to finally show this episode is kind of a big deal, as Star Trek was considered kid's stuff in the Fatherland.
Of course for Germany to finally show this episode is kind of a big deal, as Star Trek was considered kid's stuff in the Fatherland.
I think in some sense the Holocaust was only indirectly dealt with in POF. One big difference is that Zeon was an independent state which Ekos was at war with, and more representative of Britain maybe. In that sense Zeons on Ekos were as analogous to British citizens being caught behind the lines when war broke out, as to Jewish German citizens making up a religious subset of Nazi society. The Holocaust was a unique atrocity of WWII in and of itself, and in many ways an entirely separate/additional horror to Germany invading Europe/Britain. The rationale Ekos invokes for waging war on Zeon is similar and genocide is genocide no matter how you cut it, but the analogy to the Holocaust itself is only partial in that sense, and so the episode doesn't deal with it head-on exactly. I think everyone knows that's what the episode was driving at, but technically the Ekosian treatment of Zeons could be compared to the Nazi's treatment of Russian & Polish citizens or POW's, as much as to the German Jewish population, and in that sense doesn't really do the subject justice.
It's been a while since I watched the episode, so if I'm misrepresenting anything please let me know.
Mark
Not even close. An episode I already mentioned, The Twilight Zone's "Deaths-head Revisited" (written by Rod Serling), confronted it much more directly in November 1961. That's the earliest American TV production I can find under the IMDb keywords "Concentration Camp" or "Holocaust."
I watched "Patterns of Force" on BD this afternoon, and I was wondering why the Zeon/Ekosian resistance leaders don't recognize John Gill's name. Surely he was known as something besides just "the Führer"--perhaps an Ekosian name.
Secondly, Daras says something to the effect that she grew up admiring the Führer. Yet it is stated that John Gill had been on Ekos only a few years. How young was Daras, anyway?
JL
Secondly, Daras says something to the effect that she grew up admiring the Führer. Yet it is stated that John Gill had been on Ekos only a few years. How young was Daras, anyway?
JL
Around 1966, the BBC's Wednesday Play slot did a one-off called Fable, set in a Britain with an apartheid regime run by the black minority.
Predictably, but depressingly, the Beeb got letters from white racists praising it for ''a timely warning of what will happen if we don't keep the immigrants in their place."
Well, viewers had 2 1/2 seasons of Hogan's Heroes exposing them to Nazis week in week out, and the war show Combat!, not to mention a bunch of movies. But earlier posters are right, sponsors liked to steer clear of controversy and with the tight control sponsors had over shows in the '50s and some of the '60s, it is what watered down the range of topics on television. Serling could only due it under the veil of sci-fi. Only from the late '60s on was tv more free to approach controversy and make potentially controversial series like All in the Family, Sanford and Son (*gasp* a show headed up by a black man!), and controversial episodes* because networks took direct control and removed sponsors from the equation, it becoming the ad-time system we have now (though if something is too controversial, the show can be hurt through the advertisers). Twilight Zone was cancelled after 3 seasons because it was late in finding a sponsor (which is why Season 4 is so weird).
*: There were controversial episodes earlier. The Defenders had some (abortion episode), a show created to try and get on the good side of FCC curmudgeon Minnow after his "tv rots yer brains!" speech. Perry Mason too (but they didn't go into that one intending to provoke such controversy).