Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics and Star Trek: Does Data need the Zeroth Law, and what happens when machines decide what’s best for us?

[Ricky Spanish]

I personally think Star Trek was traditionally a sci-fi action adventure show whose writers and producers were just trying to make good television, but which its creator later tried to retcon into being some deep philosophical disputation. YMMV.

Drugs and the college lecture circuit of the 70's definitely seemed to warp Roddenberry's mind. Where he went from practical to really "out there".

 

[Cicero]

I personally think Star Trek was traditionally a sci-fi action adventure show whose writers and producers were just trying to make good television, but which its creator later tried to retcon into being some deep philosophical disputation. YMMV.

I'm not really thinking of Roddenberry or his later opinions so much as the thematic structure of the actual material (particularly TOS and the original films).

For example, Khan resonates so strongly as an antagonist for the franchise in part because he's a reworking of Satan from Milton's Paradise Lost (as is Ahab, who inspired his turn in TWOK). As an opponent of Heaven/Nirvana, he is directly opposed to Star Trek's ideology.

(Meyer made the parallel explicit by framing Kirk as God in the Kobayashi Maru sequence. Appropriately, the film goes on to remind him that he's a mortal who nonetheless must overcome the Devil to live and reach further enlightenment.)

I understand why some viewers want to frame it as purely an adventure series (and it functions on that level), but TOS does have a point of view in addition to that.