Seems a lot of his sons’s wives and girlfriends died as well. Hmmmmmm.Pa was a serial killer!
Kirk drift—misremembering a character…
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Needs must for the series. Any character writers don't want to be tied to one spouse (for future episode plot reasons) has to either travel away, die, or break up (or any combo of those).
Unlike starships, the Cartwrights's ranch isn't going anywhere, so the girl has to.
Unlike starships, the Cartwrights's ranch isn't going anywhere, so the girl has to.
That is to say, were any other Trek characters remembered wrong?
Good question. I mean, the supporting cast are remembered as being far more integral to the stories than they were. I'm not saying they were UN-important by any stretch. But they didn't have the "costar" status that they did from III onwards, and nothing like the cast of later Treks had.
That is fantastic.
I've just discovered that "Can women be captains in Star Trek" is one of the things in Star Trek I don't care even a little bit about arguing about. Vulcania's moon is far more interesting.
It was Hop Sing with the rolling pin in the dining room.Fits neatly into Pa Cartwright being a serial killer!
I'm not saying it was a publicly expressed policy that women couldn't be starship captains, just that no woman happened to ever get promoted to that position.
And we're not talking about the rest of the franchise. We're talking about TOS.
In The Cage, Pike can't get used to women on his bridge because it is so new.
In Who Mourns For Adonais we have Kirk and McCoy talking about what a fine officer Lt. Palamas is, and how it's too bad that someday she'll find a man and leave Starfleet. Because apparently that's what happens in this fleet. Women get married and then retire to be housewives.
So Janice in Turnabout Intruder complaining about how there are no female starship captains fits with what we see in the rest of the series. I don't know why we need to twist ourselves into pretzels to pretend that what's clearly being said isn't clearly being said.
The quote is, "''One day she'll find the right man and off she'll go, out of the service.''" I suppose getting married makes you want a safer career with less upheaval, less danger, more opportunities to put down roots. Because it's not just all about you anymore. She need not become a housewife; just become something with less peril, travel, and distance between you and your spouse.
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That's true. We don't know that she would become a housewife. We do know that if women leave Starfleet when they get married, then they don't become starship captains.
TOS might take place during an era when Earth women are at liberty to raise children, because their husbands can support a family on a singe paycheck.
When the economy allows for it, and their husbands can afford it, many women in real life want to have children and stay home to raise them. As the spouse who can get pregnant and then produce their own milk, it doesn't take a genius to see why it is the child-wanting wife who would be the one to stay home when one paycheck can support a family.
Except when we actually saw a female commanding a starship.
The only time we saw that happen was in "The Cage"/"The Menagerie", when Number One took over after Pike got captured. She wasn't posted as captain. The first time we saw a female posted as captain was in TVH. The only other time was when Uhura took over in "The Lorelei Signal." No female was ever shown above the rank of commander in TOS, until TVH. Given the bad braid system in the first pilot, it's unclear if Number One even had that rank. No other female had at least the rank of commander, again until TVH.
* in Starfleet
But she was posted as second in command.
And...?
And its ridiculous to pretend like there's some kind of magical dividing line between the captain and the first officer.
Any society in which a woman can be a first officer is a society in which she can be a captain. Even if there didn't happen to be any specific female captain for a few years on account of there only being a handful of posts available, it would still be non-sensical for someone in that society to claim that women can't be captains.
Any society in which a woman can be a first officer is a society in which she can be a captain. Even if there didn't happen to be any specific female captain for a few years on account of there only being a handful of posts available, it would still be non-sensical for someone in that society to claim that women can't be captains.
Uh-huh.
My point was that the examples in TOS are sparse, too sparse, to show anything but systemic bias on the part of the showrunners. I've defended this mathematically before on the board. I'll not bore people in this thread with that or push it that far off topic, but interested parties can search it out and look it up.
And my point is that we don't need tons of examples from TOS to be able to say that logically the line is just plain stupid.
I've never disagreed that the writers meant it to say that, but that doesn't make the line any less stupid. As such there's no reason why we shouldn't just ignore it entirely (or deliberately recontextualize it for those who want an 'explanation' for every inconsistency). Especially because it does fly in the face of literally every other piece of the franchise and that absolutely is also relevant to how we view it now, regardless of the fact that those other things didn't exist in 1969.
Agreed completely and utterly. I never said otherwise, by the way.
Let us recontextualize and retcon away. We really should.
It was a blind spot in the reasoning of the show runners, and one easily corrected. Even so I was truly pissed when decades later Star Trek Continues (in their episode “Embrace The Winds”) rationalized the apparent sexism by claiming women couldn’t command ships in Starfleet because the Tellerites, as founding members of the Federation, objected to females in command. WTF! And even though they had Erin Gray depict a starbase Commodore.
The entire story was an exercise in frustration rather than just stand on the simple notion Janice Lester was fucking nuts.
The entire story was an exercise in frustration rather than just stand on the simple notion Janice Lester was fucking nuts.
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