The mystery of Jose's peppers...
- Thread starter Ragitsu
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It was a one-line joke, based on Dominguez' apparent ethnicity, which even at the time of the episode's writing was known to be in questionable taste.
There's not even any such pepper species as a "Mexican red"; it's the name of someone's recipe for chili colorado, and nothing more. Why, more than 50 years after the fact, do you wish to make more of it than it ever was by dedicating an entire thread to the subject?
Kirk finally dropped them off when he met him at Starbase 12 in TOS S1 The Menagerie.
I never felt a Mexican guy stationed far from Earth having a hankering for authentic Mexican food was in questionable taste. I thought it was a nice bit for Kirk, showing he had friends out there who busted his hump to get their personal stuff to them quickly. Like friends do. It's certainly no worse than the ship's Scot getting wasted on Scotch whenever. Or the Russian kid doing his "inwented in Russia" bit.
I do agree this ain't worth a thread, but I'm sure we'll do something with it.
Details that do nothing to advance the plot can be seen as touches of naturalism in the writing. A chat about chili peppers, that comes out of nowhere, would flesh out the scene with stray info, which happens in life all the time, but writers put in on purpose to mimic life. Another example in the same episode: Kirk snacking on the bridge when he tells McCoy to take a sleeping pill.
After the first few episodes, Star Trek dropped its efforts at naturalism, and focused on the moral stature of the characters, and the essential actions in a story. It was a sleek, idealized vision of what people and events could be like if it weren't for all those pesky details that slow us up.
I read somewhere that on Lost in Space, Irwin Allen tended to forbid stray dialogue and character business that did not advance the plot. The actors would have preferred some bits to play here and there.
An insanely good test case: I DVR'd a 1963 Alfred Hitchcock episode on MeTV because it starred Robert Redford, and Barry Morse of Space: 1999 fame. The intricate script threw a hundred little details at you, but every single one of them proved essential to the story! Plus, every character was a bundle of nuance and believable psychology. I was enthralled. Who puts that much thought into a weekly TV episode? It was called "A Tangled Web." If you can stream it somewhere, you should.
After the first few episodes, Star Trek dropped its efforts at naturalism, and focused on the moral stature of the characters, and the essential actions in a story. It was a sleek, idealized vision of what people and events could be like if it weren't for all those pesky details that slow us up.
I read somewhere that on Lost in Space, Irwin Allen tended to forbid stray dialogue and character business that did not advance the plot. The actors would have preferred some bits to play here and there.
An insanely good test case: I DVR'd a 1963 Alfred Hitchcock episode on MeTV because it starred Robert Redford, and Barry Morse of Space: 1999 fame. The intricate script threw a hundred little details at you, but every single one of them proved essential to the story! Plus, every character was a bundle of nuance and believable psychology. I was enthralled. Who puts that much thought into a weekly TV episode? It was called "A Tangled Web." If you can stream it somewhere, you should.
Yeah this episode has some great moments of people doing day to day tasks and acting like people instead of characters in a show filling a plot role. I loved early Star Trek for that and other reasons.
I liked Zap's note about naturalism, but the brief exchange suggests some other things.
Early TOS presented more of a frontier than later episodes, once more "world building" had been established. The rarity of something like chili peppers shows how far out on the edge they are.
But can't they grow chili peppers in the colonies or bases? Perhaps, but some delicacies are known for the water or soil of a given region—or the maple trees. And substitutes can't compare, at least in the estimation of certain connoisseurs.
That must make shipment across the lightyears prohibitively expensive! Maybe, maybe not. Throughout the series the Enterprise rendezvoused with other vessels, or starbases, to exchange passengers or cargo. (Including crazy people bound for Stockholm, or crazy people in a Shakespearean stage troupe.) That must mean starflight is easy enough and economically viable enough to ship even perishables—or does the Federation have stasis technology we don't know about? Either way, the peppers had to make their last leg on a frontier vessel, as the commercial routes do not reach that far yet. Imagine being the dog-robber in that situation. "Radar, you hear something?"
So much stew from one simple line. Naturalism, perhaps, or world building.
Early TOS presented more of a frontier than later episodes, once more "world building" had been established. The rarity of something like chili peppers shows how far out on the edge they are.
But can't they grow chili peppers in the colonies or bases? Perhaps, but some delicacies are known for the water or soil of a given region—or the maple trees. And substitutes can't compare, at least in the estimation of certain connoisseurs.
That must make shipment across the lightyears prohibitively expensive! Maybe, maybe not. Throughout the series the Enterprise rendezvoused with other vessels, or starbases, to exchange passengers or cargo. (Including crazy people bound for Stockholm, or crazy people in a Shakespearean stage troupe.) That must mean starflight is easy enough and economically viable enough to ship even perishables—or does the Federation have stasis technology we don't know about? Either way, the peppers had to make their last leg on a frontier vessel, as the commercial routes do not reach that far yet. Imagine being the dog-robber in that situation. "Radar, you hear something?"
So much stew from one simple line. Naturalism, perhaps, or world building.
Dominguez was stationed on Corinth IV. How about there was some kind of agricultural or botanic prime directive that prohibits the importation of non-native plants. Dominguez was not able to legally grow a pepper plant.
Works for me.
Even at the time... Source?
Works for me.
Even at the time... Source?
You have a point. In 1966, I think you would have had a hard time finding someone who was offended by the "José Dominguez" line. If anything, it was what we now call a gesture of "inclusivity" in the form of a gentle joke.
Also, @Metryq makes a great point: the Enterprise was out past where the supply lines go. So the line doubled as world building on top of naturalism. I missed that angle.
Perhaps being from California by way of Texas, Gene had an affection for Hispanic culture? He has Jose Ortegas in the first draft and Jose Tyler in later versions. and Jose Mendez in the Menagerie. Or he might just have a buddy named Jose.
While there were still plenty of examples of racial stereotypes to be found in contemporary shows--think of Harry Hoo or The Craw in Get Smart!, to name just two--there was already a recognition of the negative aspects of such characterizations and writers of material for film and television were beginning to make a conscious effort to move away from the open use of such. New "Speedy Gonzales" shorts would stop being made in 1968 and the "Frito Bandito" corn chip mascot would follow soon after.
It didn't all go away immediately, of course. It was instead a very long and gradual process -- one which to a certain extent still continues today. But even old-standard ethnic stereotypes like Charlie Chan found themselves updated in both appearance and speaking ability in order to reduce the more negative aspects of earlier characterizations.
Is the example in "Man Trap" an especially egregious one? No. He's not even really a character -- he gets set up with one line of dialogue and quickly dispensed with by the next. That's all for you, Space Commander: name-check and "Bye!"
UHURA: Message, Captain. Starship base on Caran 4 requesting explanation of our delay here, sir. Space Commander Dominguez says we have supplies he urgently needs.
KIRK: Tell Jose he'll get his chili peppers when we get there. Tell him they're prime Mexican reds. I handpicked them myself, but he won't die if he goes a few more days without them. Got it?
UHURA: Got it, Captain.
The Star Trek Transcripts - The Man Trap (chakoteya.net)
KIRK: Tell Jose he'll get his chili peppers when we get there. Tell him they're prime Mexican reds. I handpicked them myself, but he won't die if he goes a few more days without them. Got it?
UHURA: Got it, Captain.
The Star Trek Transcripts - The Man Trap (chakoteya.net)
But the go-to reference when name-checking a character with a Hispanic name was a choice between 1) beans 2) chili peppers? (A decade or two earlier, perhaps, "hot tamales" might have been a third option, but that'd probably been overdone by the mid-1960s.) If they'd genuinely been trying to depict an officer trying to maintain heritage or one at the far end of a supply line, they might have been able to do better than that, even given the near-throwaway nature of the dialogue line.
Maybe @Sir Rhosis has some information concerning what earlier versions of the script contained, and at what point that line first made its appearance. It has the sound, though, of something thrown in without a great deal of thought.
when you see it in print, it does sound a bit harsher than I remember.
There's a lot of stuff I know I watched when it was current, and the ethnic stereotyping seemed rather ordinary because it was literally everywhere at the time. Watching some of it now makes me wince. The instances of shows making the deliberate choice to avoid that were then still quite novel.
This is one of those examples of the reputedly progressive Star Trek missing an opportunity to do better. It may not have been very much then--basically a throwaway line inserted to add a couple of seconds of apparent depth to a scene--but it's a bit jarring now.
Or Funk Punk. There's a genre that I'd love to listen to (ditto for acid house, which does exist); after making the mistake of listening to the latest pop and realizing that it's not any different in tone or autotuned vocals since 19-blech-99 and yet media articles bleat about how the 1980s allegedly stagnated?! Nor did the 80s just take whole stanzas or chorus lines of 1960s tv show themes and regurgitate that into half a song either...
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