The Good, The Bad, and The Trekkie
I would like to thank Wipf and Stock Publishers for my review copy of James McGrath’s latest book, Religion and Science Fiction.
Elizabeth Danna’s Looking Out for Number. 1: Concepts of Good and Evil in Star Trek and The Prisoner is an interpretation of Star Trek: The Original Series and the UK series during that time (late 1960s) of these program’s takes on what is evil and good. Danna claims that TOS has more of a privatized, Freudian take on evil, where being evil comes with being a human being with free will, and the best possible way to cope with this personal evil is to integrate it into the human personality, ala Gene Roddenberry’s humanism. On the other hand, The Prisoner, with a devout Catholic Patrick McGoohan who both was the actor who portrayed the main character as well as the executive producer, was a British spy/secret agent/prison escape sci fi show. Evil is viewed as systematic, and therefore as something that must be overcome rather than accepted.
I, like Amanda Mac and Charles, was not convinced by Danna’s interpretation of the name James Tiberius Kirk as something associated with THE CHURCH. GR probably wanted to have someone who sounded really cool and memorable, and that is what he came up with. A name is just a name. Also, I found Danna’s arguments unconvincing, how The Prisoner bests supplies an answer to the question of good and evil. Managing personal evil is not the same as dealing with systemic evil. Yes, system oppression needs to be eliminated in all of its forms, but to cope with with what is inside of us will not require an authoritarian THE CHURCH to discipline our bodies, but rather the Crucified life of Christ living within us, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
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