Not that showbiz ever needs much of an excuse for that stuff.
It’s exploitative, but they sure think it sells. They might even be right. But they seem afraid to try the necessary experiments to see if they’re right.
If the producers wanted to at least pretend Seven’s catsuit wasn’t exploitative, they could have had her wear a uniform, or at least some sensible civilian clothes. And have her start to go by Annika. But no, they not only kept her sexed up for the entire run, they doubled down with T’Pol and the sexytime decon.
And seeing Jeri R on Leverage, she really is a great actress. And she could still be hot. Elliot: “She has this whole “sexy librarian” thing going on.”
Oh, I’m sure they are right. Sex appeal sells, and always has. One thing Enterprise had going for it is that it seemed to have almost as much beefcake as cheesecake. For that matter, the producers of TOS managed to tear Kirk’s shirt or get it off of him at every opportunity. And lots of young Star Trek fans swooned all over that.
I don’t really know what to think about all that. I think trying to remove sex appeal from shows will never work. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with appealing to people sexually or at oeast esthetically. The problem comes in when they start hiring people simply for being sexy, and putting them in situations only designed to highlight their sexuality, story be damned. But if the sexiness is either just because of the natural gifts ofman otherwise talented actor, or it’s done in service to the plot, or the whole point of the show is to be sexy, I don’t really have a problem with it as long as everyone consents.
A bigger problem is when powerful people in Hollywood push actresses and actors into revealing and/or sexual scenes they are not comfortable with but are too afraid to complain in fear of getting the Mira Sorvino treatment.
An even bigger problem is when sexy scenes are staged not for the audience, but so the people in the production can ogle the actors. Roddenberry was famous for that. He insisted that the guest starring women on TOS be A) attractive, B) dressed in as little as they could get past standards and practices, and C) that Roddenberry himself be present at costume fittings of the hot women. He made up some nonsense about having to give final approval or whatever, but he’d be there while they changed in and out of those flimsy garments. Totally creepy.
Yeah, I mean, really…
DS9 clip, cued to relevant spot, next 15 seconds:
It’s good to be the king Creator/Executive Producer. Yeah, he did have a reputation.
“Drinking frequencies always open, Captain.”
Just realized that ‘Morn’ (the regular @ Quarks) is, well, Norm.
I think I knew that before - but I just looked at it again and went - hey, waitaminute…
Yes, we saw quite a bit of Dr. Helen Noel… that was the episode where she disabled the power by crawling through the ventilation shafts and dispatched a guard by a well-placed kick. Unusual at the time to see a female on the show actually do something like that, instead of cowering and watching from the sidelines.
The episode where Spock was being repeatedly struck by an expert on Vulcans to ‘bring him back’ to full consciousness - that actor (Booker Bradshaw) was black.
“They call me MISTER Spock!”
I’ve seen a retcon that says Janice Lester is an unreliable narrator. It’s not that women can’t be captains, it’s that she failed the psych test and she interpreted the refusal to make her a captain as no woman could be a captain.
The other possibility is that it was not a written rule but like we see today with the lack of women in the highest positions of business viz few female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies or Chairs of the Board that it was an unwritten rule and so rare as to be non-existent.
Or as Dr. Lazarus said
I see you managed to get your shirt off.
I wonder if it’s at least minimally plausible that Lester was in effect saying, Kirk, you decided to be a starship captain; and, so long as you are a starship captain, there’s simply not enough room in your world for a woman in general — or me in particular — to be your wife; to captain one of these top-of-the-line ships means you can’t have a spouse; the ship and its crew and its mission, that’s everything; no marriage allowed.
I have heard this before and was coming to the thread to say the same. She was basically saying that being a starship captain doesn’t allow for committed romantic relationships (which I believe has largely been shown to be true across the franchise, happily married couples where one is a Captain are few and far between) but she used women as shorthand for this and totally sent the wrong message.
The franchise has shown us at least a few Starfleet Captains who would predate this episode so regardless of whether or not Roddenberry intended for Starfleet Captaincy to be a boys-only club, it’s been paved over since.
Plus, the alternative makes The Menagerie super weird: a raygun-toting woman in command of the Enterprise, telling her male subordinates what to do? Kirk doesn’t raise an eyebrow; she’s Pike’s first choice, is all.
But no restrictions on banging alien space babes.
We can retcon this episode all day ( I do) but I think the intent of the episode was that it was canon women can’t command starships. It was a different time. They couldn’t even have Number One be a woman. (instead they made her Nurse Mooneyes who had one job: to have unrequited love for Spock. Ugh.)
As we often speak of tech forgotten, this is one I am glad got lost. Can you imagine an episode where everyone gets their personality shifted into another body? And one is a duck? Hilarity ensues! Sounds like an animated episode.
It’s right there in the mission statement - ‘Boldly go where no man has gone before’
Kirk has a speech in an early episode, “Conscience of a King,” I think, saying exactly this. That was before he started banging space babes.
Given the reaction of the network to a female Number One in the first pilot, I suspect there was a restriction on female captains, but you can’t blame Gene for it.
Woody: Quadri what??
Diane: Quadri…quadri…tri…qua
Sam: The grain, Woody…the grain.
To be fair, the actual banging space babes in TOS was grossly exaggerated after the fact. More TV Tropes.
Boldly Coming: Kirk is the Trope Codifier. That said, Kirk’s reputation for sleeping his way across the galaxy has been greatly exaggerated in the public mind; out of 79 aired episodes, he kisses another character in only 19 of them, and of those, thirteen are while he’s under duress or doing it specifically to manipulate them. In fact, Kirk makes out with a woman purely for pleasure, with no other motive or emotional attachment, exactly once in the entire original series. Sex is likewise only implied in a few rare instances
Despite the commentary in that TV Tropes entry, doing the math:
- Kirk kisses a woman in one out of four (24%) TOS episodes
- That kissing (or implied sex) is likely a significant plot point (the “under duress or doing it specifically to manipulate them”) in one out of six (16%) episodes
It happened frequently enough that it is, IMO, justifiably seen as a trope of the series. I’d be curious to see if some of the other tropes (Bones and Spock sniping at each other, dying redshirts, etc.) happened as often.