1.1.22 Me Sowing/Me Reaping

Space Seed

Time to slay a sacred cow. Or perhaps it might be appropriate to say, time to topple a graven image. Tough on fascism, tough on the causes of fascism.

This could take a while…

“Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings”

“Space Seed” presents me with an unusual problem, as far as writing it up goes. On the one hand, as Vaka Rangi made clear, this isn’t a good episode. The only two things it has going for it are 1) Ricardo Montalban, and 2) bits of it are reused in the franchise’s most popular film – the most obviously really good part of that movie also being Ricardo Montalban. And even that only works because they blow up a planet to give Khan a reason to actually hate Kirk. That’s how badly this episode fails – it gives us a literal fascist dictator and fails to make the show’s hero into his enemy. At the end of “Space Seed”, Khan feels no wrath toward Kirk. He feels gratitude.

On the other hand, Marsfelder does so thorough a job of tearing “Space Seed” to shreds, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere left for me to aim a kick at. It’s that Simpsons meme, only Homer’s beating a barely-conscious fan favourite. What’s left for me to do?

Well, we could try a redemptive reading. There’s not a complete dearth of material to try that with. The most obvious place to start would be the exposition dump in the trailer.

Long-term readers will have no problem understanding why this exchange made me smile. To briefly summarise my previous arguments, the Vulcan philosophy is a reactionary and exclusionary one. It attempts to disentangle rational thought from the experiences and identity of the thinker. The problem is, this is impossible, and believing otherwise means declaring your own position and/or identity as being the default one. As a result, “logic” becomes a measure of similarly. You are logical because you think the same way I do, and I must be logical. I keep saying so.

This is bad enough to start with, but it very frequently leads to the assumption – not always made or even understood explicitly by those that hold it – that the solution to squabbling politicians and democratic gridlock is just to sweep it all aside in favour of some flavour of philosopher-king. Someone wise and noble and able to resist the siren call of power, who could finally get something done, without having to listen to irrational dissenting voices or muddying themselves in the political swamp. Someone who, through sheer coincidence, happens to look and think just like those calling for him (always “him”) to arise.

David Suchet once said that, while playing Poirot, he would press his butt-cheeks together as hard as he could, so that the steps he took would be as small and dainty as those described in Christie’s stories. If you could somehow subject a mid-performance Suchet to a Terratin-like shrinking procedure and it not break his concentration, it would still take just one of his tiny, delicate micro-strides to go from musing on the benefits of a benevolent dictator, and the research that led to Khan and Co. The Vulcans aren’t fascists, but the capacity for their philosophy to end up supporting fascism is much closer than they’d like to believe, and McCoy is right to call Spock on it. Especially when what he’s reacting to amounts to an accusation of collective guilt, spread across an entire species. Into the space-bin with that one, immediately.

Later stories will add further weight to McCoy’s position, and mine. We will eventually learn that Vulcan maintains the concept of royalty, at least until the recent past (The Final Frontier). T’Pau treats Spock’s objections to the inflexibility of Vulcan culture in “Amok Time” as evidence of his “thin” Vulcan blood. This toxic combination of cultural stagnation, concerns over purity, and delusional claims to intellectual superiority, make for fertile soil for fascism to take root.

Scusa, Umberto

All of which makes it a genuinely fascinating choice that, having established that the Augments were born of a philosophy closer to Spock’s than McCoy’s, it’s the former who gets to make the case throughout the episode that Khan is worthy of nothing but contempt. At all points, he boggles at the idea any of his human colleagues can see anything impressive or noble about a ruthless tyrant, and goes about as far as rank allows in criticising Kirk in front of their subordinates regarding the foolishness of the eventual “solution” to Khan’s presence.

Marsfelder is quite right to point out that the end result of this is exceedingly ugly, with Spock treated as a clueless outsider who just doesn’t “get it”, the target for good-natured but still racist needling. That’s clearly an issue, and the argument that there’s no reading of “Space Seed” that can redeem it as a result is entirely defensible. The fact that something has failed doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pick through what it was attempting, though.

The point the script is trying to make, I think, is that not all instances of fascism are equivalent. Indeed, one of the reasons 21st century fascists are proving so horribly successful is precisely because they and their allies are able to point to the areas of discontinuity, and claim they prove it can’t be fascism at all. This is annoyingly easy to do, actually, in part because something that links fascist movements is an obsession with aesthetics. Since the specific aesthetics in each case are generally quite different, though, the very prominence of those aesthetics help those attempting to find daylight between specific fascist instances. “They don’t even look like Nazis!”.

This is then compounded by the historical context of any specific fascistic strain. As Umberto Eco points out in his essay on the fundamental nature of fascism, some kind of “Great Betrayal” myth is central to any fascistic movement. This is because it’s the only way to reconcile the otherwise incompatible ideas that the fascists are morally, intellectually and even physically superior, and also represent the majority will of the people, but also somehow unfairly oppressed and held back by their weaker, less intelligent and less numerous foes, who no-one actually supports or believes is right.

As a result, any given fascist movement has an aesthetic and cultural context that doesn’t automatically translate to other such movements. The shiny uniforms have different cuts, the symbolism looks very different, the myth of how they’ve been betrayed is bound up in different historical contexts. Most critically, there’s no guarantee the two movements can agree on the specific nature of the enemy they set themselves in opposition to.

Or claim to set themselves up in opposition to, anyway. Trotsky considered fascism as first and foremost a counter-revolutionary philosophy, meaning every fascist movement does share a common enemy. Unsurprisingly, I have a lot of sympathy for this definition. Whether this is actually true in term of political philosophy, though, it’s clear that a lot of actual fascists haven’t received the message that they all want the same thing. Inter- and intra-fascist party disputes are common, and it’s hard to explain this away as tactical disagreements over how best to keep the revolutionary left underfoot.

In any case, “Space Seed” seems less concerned with what fascism is, so much as how it seduces. How an otherwise rational, even principled human being can get themselves to the point where they’re arguing zero massacres is a reason to respect a leader. On those terms, the message is clear. The society Spock was brought up in is absolutely primed to tip into fascism, but a fascism of a very different stripe to the one Khan represents. The cultural keys the Augments could and can turn to acquire power simply aren’t made for Vulcan locks. It isn’t the application of logic or intelligence that sets Spock and Spock alone against Khan. It’s a distance from the cultural signifiers.

The New Emperor’s Clothes

Khan himself understands this only too well. It’s interesting to compare him with Kodos in “The Conscience Of The King”. Both are defeated dictators, unwilling to turn themselves in. While Kodos creates a fictional identity for himself and chooses a role that both moves him around the galaxy and helps him train to mask his true self, though, Khan is unwilling to even give himself an alias. Unlike Kodos, but very much like another arrogant military leader appalled that his lessers would question him, Khan wants to be caught. He wants the opportunity to sneer at his accusers over the very idea they believe they can judge him for what he’s done.

As egotistical as this Colonel Jessup impression is, though, it’s not the only reason Khan refuses to deny what he is. Doing so would also be bad for his brand.

And brand is the right term. Everything Khan does in it service of selling himself as Your Next Leader. The Memory Alpha article for this episode points out that Ricardo Montalban holds the curious record for greatest number of costume changes for a male guest actor on the show. This is neither a coincidence, nor simply a comment on the preening self-regard of your average dictator (though that’s surely in the mix). Look at what costumes Khan wears, and when. In McGiver’s quarters, he’s the image of the historical warrior she finds so fascinating – a return to the martial past she’s unaccountably drawn to. When Kirk visits him in his own quarters, Khan is in a Starfleet uniform, a subtle suggestion that the two of them are very similar, and hence that supporting Khan would be eminently reasonable. When back among his own people, he dresses just as they do, reminding the only people he might consider a true threat that they share a common history – and a common destiny.

What we’re seeing here is Khan using aesthetics to paper over the paradoxes at fascism’s heart. A movement cannot simultaneously be a long-lost ethos of martial might and raging machismo finally reborn and a small course change to the current political direction that hardly deserves the suspicion those weirdo peaceniks treat it with. Even in an era where space-travel is quotidian, it’s very rare that something can be a small step and a giant leap.

Having played these tricks before, Khan knows that these contradictions are no real barrier. Plenty of those primed to support him will simply fixate on the argument that makes it easiest for them to be seduced, and completely ignore the rest. Others will simply refuse to see the contradiction, relishing in their doublethink because it keeps them doubly shielded, invulnerable to rhetorical attack from either direction. “Kahn will destroy our political process as we know it!”. Nonsense, he’s basically just an unusually strong, smart and motivated starship-captain-type. Hating him is basically hating heroes like Christopher Pike. “Khan is just one more grifter selling you lies about the past to benefit themselves in the present”. HOW DARE YOU! Khan will usher in nothing less than a golden age not seen for centuries, sweeping away hundreds of years of rot and mould and returning us to what we once were, and dreamed we could be again!

Even pointing out both problems at the same time doesn’t work, because fascism treats intellectualism as inherently suspect. Why think when you could act? Intellectualism is treated as fey and unmanly, evidence of a shirking of the true duty to fight the enemies of the people. Note that intelligence is still valued, but only insofar as it allows for someone to quickly determine the “smartest” (read: most aesthetically pleasing) way to take action.

Which brings us back to Kirk.

The Celestial City

Kirk is a man of action. That’s not all he is, but it’s certainly accurate as thumbnail sketches go. While much has been made of Kirk standing between the two poles of Spock’s detached rationalism and McCoy’s headstrong passion, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact Jim has always stood rather closer to the latter. I mean, they made Spock a literally different species, of course the idea here is that the central triangle be isosceles, rather than equilateral. Spock regularly counsels a more measured approach than the one Kirk wishes to take, and more often than not is proved wrong.

This makes sense, given the action-adventure roots of the show, but that fact doesn’t so much solve the problem as expand it. As others have noted, it takes Trek quite some time to properly distinguish Starfleet from a generic space military. Sometimes they’re a border patrol, sometimes they’re an expeditionary force, sometimes they’re convoy defense. Sometimes they’re more like the space police, too, though a lack of clear line between military and law enforcement is in itself a fascist signifier. A show about the adventures of military-types out in the wilderness is not one primed to push back against the veneration of what Eco calls “action for action’s sake”.

Compounding this is the show’s focus on Kirk’s relationship with his vessel. One expects a captain to value their ship, of course. Indeed one hopes for it, insofar as if the ship goes down, it’s liable to take a lot of people with it (though problems arrive when crew and vessel start to become conflated). But the show frames Kirk as being a ruler of a mobile city-state. It’s far from clear Kodos is the king whose conscience is at issue in the eponymous episode, for instance. Territorial disputes crop up infrequently but at a steady rate, with anyone with different ideas to Kirk about what the Enterprise should be doing invariably cast as an interfering idiot, and often a clueless civilian as well.

As a result, TOS presents itself as being about the right of a military leader to rule unchallenged, as long as he proves himself through tactical cunning and martial prowess. And while it would be reductionist to describe fascists as simply what monarchists have metastasised into in a post-democratic world, there’s plenty of intersection between the two, not least precisely because of the obsession with and claimed links to previous ages that fascism itself contains.

We can go still further. If the Enterprise represents a city state, then the show’s flirtations with the idea ship and captain are all but synonymous become another nod to tyranny. The show goes so far as to give him a uniform colour all to himself – even the aesthetics are flirting with fascism.

I think I’ve made my point. At this point in the franchise’s history, Trek is balanced on a knife-edge. It can embrace the potential of its diverse crew exploring the galaxy in the spirit of mutual cooperation and understanding. Alternatively, it can choose a form of interstellar fascism, in which the existence of aliens can allow the fascists to accept all forms of humanity (so long as they’re physically fit and of the right mindset, of course) as their ubermensch, in comparison to the other inhabitants of the galaxy, who at their best don’t really get it or us, and at worst are implacably hostile to our way of life, and must be opposed at every opportunity.

There’s a reason why “Mirror Mirror” was able to maintain the idea that the Enterprise crew could go full fash without any real change to the power dynamics already present. The idea that a fascist Federation could still see Kirk captaining a starship was always a much more savage indictment of the show than people realise.

"It Would Appear No-one Reads Santayana Anymore"

As a show that risks tumbling backwards into fascism, then, and which was created so soon after a global war initiated by fascism that one of its co-stars lost a finger on the beaches of Normandy, it would make sense to put Trek through a stress test to see how well it could defend itself against the encroachment of such ideas. Nor would it be surprising were this to happen in a script co-written by Gene Coon – the guy who invented the Federation, and who’s last story explicitly linked forgiveness and empathy, even during wartime, as being a mark of enlightenment. For sure, this is a more interesting and subtle approach than the show’s periodic Red bashing, in which civilisations reflecting the West’s propaganda images of Communists are held to be clearly evil, simply by dint of them just not resembling the sort of thing we like. “Space Seed” isn’t creating a problem, so much as highlighting it.

Let’s go back to the fact this episode was broadcast less than eighteen years after the Nazis were defeated. What are we to make of the fact that the show deliberately doesn’t parallel this recent brush with the dangers of fascism, choosing instead to have our heroes reacting to an historical threat?

This is actually two questions in a single trench coat. Why place Khan’s time in power so long before the show is set, and why place it so shortly after the show was filmed? Neither seems an arbitrary choice, but it’s the latter that’s more surprising. Twenty-eight years isn’t a lot of time to squeeze in a successful eugenics program, a series of tyrannical states, and their overthrow. Hitler and Mussolini were both born in the 1880s, sixty-odd years before the end of WW2. We can assume the augments took power more quickly, but Montalban himself was 46 when he filmed “Space Seed” – if Khan is roughly the same age, he would have been a child in 1967. The Augment Programme would have to predate the show itself by years, if not decades.

While this underlines the fact that Trek was always set in an alternate reality, making arguments about how its canon contradicts our actual expanding history fundamentally ridiculous, it does seem like an odd choice. Why choose a story so clearly not in keeping with actual recent history when you don’t need to? Surely it would have made more sense to place the Eugenics Wars a little further ahead of what was then the present day. Even the idea of regular spaceflight using cryogenic suspension seems a stretch here. And yes, the upcoming Moon landing had contributed to a sense of optimism about the future of space exploration in science-fiction of the period. That doesn’t entirely explain things here, though. To state the obvious, it’s hard to pair a sense of hope about the technological possibilities of thirty years hence with the idea the world will be subjugated by fascistic supermen within the same period.

Perhaps this is all a sly dig at those who somehow convinced themselves that fascists are somehow very good at organisation. “At least they made the spaceships run on time, and also exist”? The claim that fascists at least managed to get their infrastructure right was never actually true, because being obsessed with guns and death and who has the shiniest uniform doesn’t actually magically translate into being able to maintain reliable timetables. But somehow it became seen as a fact nonetheless – a way to bemoan the fact that it’s not fair we can’t have the fascists alleged organisational skills without all that awkward business about murdering anyone who opposed them or they happened to dislike.

This brings us back once more to Kirk, and his argument that “we can be against him and admire him all at the same time”. The issue here isn’t just that it’s morally purblind to insist we recognise the good alongside the bad when weighing up fascism’s legacy. It’s that what might even arguably consider “good” in this context is generally nonsense. We’re back at the hideous idea of the benevolent dictator. “If only we could have X without Y, we’d be sorted”. Just two problems. First, X guarantees Y. Second, there’s no reason to believe X itself will do the job its supporters assume it will.

(It’s a shame the show doesn’t recognise that this is true of eugenics itself – the idea you can breed a better human is thunderous nonsense for any sensible definition of “better”. You want longer legs or thicker eyebrows, we can do that. You want stronger and smarter? Homozygosity is going to OWN you, my friend.)

Kirk here is almost certainly indulging in a sanitised, even romanticised view of life under Khan – more specifically, that stunted, sodden form of romanticism for those who declare romance as having no value as a concept [1]. It’s for this reason that the Eugenics Wars needed to take place before he or anyone else on the crew was born; it’s so that’s there’s been enough time for the sediment of history to have settled, for the unprincipled to use that sediment to hide some fairly large and inconvenient truths, and for Kirk to devour the resulting gumbo of distraction, distortion and whataboutery completely.

Let’s talk about Kirk’s attitude to history. His frankly shocking comments to and regarding Lieutenant McGivers suggests a thorough contempt for the topic. But that can’t be true. It’s clear from the discussion of Khan’s reputation that he’s picked up some facts (however inaccurate) along the way, and that he’s happy to at least briefly discuss them (and remember Kirk discussing Kahn’s state is equivalent to you or I discussing how the Russian Empire reached its greatest size in the middle of the 18th century). It’s not the concept of knowing about the past that bothers him, it’s turning it into an academic pursuit, and then having the brass neck to believe that earns you a place on his starship.

To draw from Marsfelder’s essay, In Kirk’s world, history – as with romance for that matter – is feminised. Something which doesn’t belong on his vessel. The problem, of course, is that history (and as Spock points out, romanticism) happens whether you want it to or not. It interacts with us, shapes us, entirely independently of whether we’re minded to take an interest. A rejection of the value of history as an academic discipline doesn’t remove us from the study and assimilation of history. It just denies us the ability to do so with any kind of logical rigour. History becomes a matter for (once again that word) aesthetics, where one picks and chooses which bits matter, which interpretations are “true”. We’ve talked already about how this approach to reality is the province of fascism. And even if thinking this way doesn’t take you all the way there, it still compromises you in terms of recognising fascism in others. The default is still that fascism is bad, after all. Therefore, it should be aesthetically displeasing, and hence in turn anything that is aesthetically pleasing can’t be fascism. Fascism becomes “the thing I most dislike” – something of a problem when that category includes people trying to point out to you the ways in which your attitude is actually helping fascists.

(It’s also the sum total of the case that fascism is a leftist phenomenon)

These category errors become more common once the dust has settled, naturally. An aesthetic-driven misreading of history does still require that the history be there to misread. Plus, once some time has passed, the aesthetics of the age itself (if we can pretend for the sake of simplicity there is any such thing) will drift, making it easier to argue modern group X cannot possibly be fascist because, essentially, they don’t look fascist.

So you need some daylight between New Fascism and Fascism Classic. As “Space Seed” realises, though, you don’t need that much daylight. This is the flipside of placing Khan’s reign as having ended by the mid ’90s, why it’s worth creating a vision of the near-future which is not only horribly pessimistic, but demonstrably impossible in its particulars. It’s the analogy that matters, not the causality. While every other political metaphor in sci-fi was concerned about the Cold War, the writers of “Space Seed” were warning us we needed to keep an eye on the fascists, or they’d be back full force before the century was out.

As it turns out, they weren’t really off by all that much.

Darkest Hour

The sad, brutal truth of the matter is that might be easier for us to recognise Kirk’s attitude in 2021 than it was in 1968. We now have data about what the world looks like half a decade and more after fascism failed in its bid for world domination.

That’s not to say fascism ever completely died out, even immediately after World War II, and not just because no-one on the international stage had any energy left to take out Franco. The framing of the Cold War meant that far-right movements which sprung up anywhere outside the West were more likely to be funded by the capitalist nations that fought Hitler than be opposed by them. So it’s wouldn’t be quite true to suggest that, like Khan, all fascism had to do to keep itself viable was go to sleep until enough people forgot what it really looked like. Fascism has never really slept. In terms of (being deliberately allowed to get away with) skulking in the shadows of the West while it pivoted to new concerns, though, Khan’s plan does feel like a literalisation of a process observable in reality.

Certainly, in global terms, the far right is at its highest point since 1940, an aging star that never quite finished touring but is now enjoying a second wind, the accusations of earlier appalling behaviour somehow having faded along the way. This resurgence has been evident for a while, but it seems worth mentioning that I first wrote this essay in the month the UK government wenr all in on the importance of showing the national flag at all times (one might call this virtue signalling, were one able to find anything virtuous about the Union Flag), while also attempting to make public protest de facto illegal. One can quibble over how fair it is to use “fascism” and “far right” as equivalent terms, I guess (and I’d argue fascism is to the far-right what death is to bubonic plague symptoms – it’s the worst example of a set of unambiguously unpleasant things, any of which can lead into the that worst example in any case). When the UK government is trying to make it impossible for Romani travellers to actually live in the country, though, focussing on taxonomic pedantry rather than an early draft for genocidal policy seems a questionable ordering of priorities.

The rise of the far right in Britain has many causes, and we do ourselves no favours engaging in reductionist readings of the political currents that have washed us up on so cold and inhospitable a shore. A non-trivial part of it, though, stems from precisely the phenomenon “Space Seed” demonstrates. The picking and choosing of which parts of the past matter. The veneration of a rather unhealthy definition of “strength” over that those possessed that strength actually did with it. There’s a reason the far right’s rise in the UK is inextricable from a growing contempt for European political influence, a revanchist assault on the idea the Empire was anything but a force for moral good, and endless references to the “Blitz spirit” in response to everything from the self-inflicted disasters of Brexit to the self-inflicted disasters of Johnson’s COVID policy. The thing people miss about Khan is that the best historical parallel to him isn’t Hitler. It’s Churchill.

Yes, Churchill was swept from power by an election – which he lost by a margin never seen before or since – rather than anyone having to actually take up arms against him directly (though plenty of armed insurrections were attempted against his government, just not – to my knowledge - on British soil). Beyond that, though, there’s an uncomfortable degree of similarity between the respect afforded Khan here, and British culture insisting on painting Churchill as a uniquely heroic individual. If anything, in fact, the admiration Kirk, McCoy and Scott confess to regarding Khan’s legacy pales into insignificance compared to the cult of personality which surrounds Churchill and his actions. No-one can say no massacres occurred under Churchill, and you can only claim he only fought defensive wars if your definition of “defence” includes “murdering people whose land you stole on the very land you stole from them”. The number of civilian deaths one can lay at his door stretches into the millions, mostly in Bengal, but the graves he dug stretch back from South Asia all the way to Ireland, stopping through Palestine, Dresden, and multiple countries in Africa on the way. The only reason you don’t hear more people say they respect Churchill despite all the terrible things he did is the effort that goes into making sure no-one hears about those terrible things in the first place.

Plus, of course, Churchill himself was a fascist sympathiser – his opposition to Hitler was tactical, rather than philosophical. When two wolves fight over an injured sheep, it’s not because either of them has the sheep’s best interests at heart. He also had no problem with the concept of racial superiority. It’s actually pretty hard to believe Winston would have any problem with Khan other than the fact he was Indian, and Churchill hated Indians. “A beastly people with a beastly religion”, as he put it. Seeing people venerate Churchill as some kind of uniquely gifted leader who saved the world from Hitler (itself a lie) and therefore must be considered one of history’s greatest heroes makes me feel an awful lot like Spock, watching in horror as people I thought I knew wax lyrical about how much respect they have for a tyrant, on the grounds that other tyrants were worse.

Since we ain’t gonna find Winston floating asleep in space, though, every far-right British leader of at least the last thirty years has chosen instead to claim stewardship of Churchill’s legacy. They link themselves to a martial history they have no connection to, would never have wanted to partake in, and which never even existed the way they conceive of it in the first place. And somehow, horrifyingly, it keeps working. The people who pick and choose which parts of history matter keeping plumping once more for whatever helps them believe what they were already inclined to. In this case, endless re-ups of the idea that celebrating Britain is in itself anti-fascist, and no further correspondence need be entered into.

So does Kirk’s admiration for Khan make him a bad person? I don’t know it that’s a useful question, any more than it’s useful to ask if telling someone from another country that they just “don’t get” why Churchill was so great makes them a bad person [2]. What I can say is that it reveals thinking so ahistorical as to actively dangerous. Kirk demonstrates here how easy it is for people we could otherwise consider thoughtful and decent to carry unexamined short-cuts around in their mind, routes that bypass that thoughtfulness and decency in ways that, in the wrong place and at the wrong time, can have catastrophic consequences.

“Space Seed” isn’t about how Kirk wasn’t the good man we thought he was. It’s about how little the label of “good man” actually matters.

No McGiver Solution

It all comes so close to working. There are just two problems with holding this to be a viable reading. Both of them, unfortunately, are grievous considered separately. Combined, they prove fatal.

The first is that – if I may be permitted to say so – it’s too clever by half. Constructing an anti-fascist reading from a story that appears on the surface to be fascist apologia is an interesting exercise. It might even be useful, inasmuch as the act of figuring out how the episode engages with how fascism seduces and evokes sympathy might result in a greater awareness of the real-world parallels.

That said, trying to argue “Space Seed” could have been intended as anti-fascist matters very little if the more plausible reading is that it’s pro-fascist, however accidentally. I’m all for attempting to divine authorial intent – though I’m also all for pretending authorial intent was the exact opposite of what it actually was, so long as gets us somewhere interesting. When you’re making a political statement, though, what people take from it matters more than what you thought you were saying. The pathos overwhelms the ethos. That’s neither to say intent is completely irrelevant, nor that you won’t always have some people deliberately misinterpret what you’re saying no matter how clear you try to be. Fundamentally, though, if people in good faith mistake your position as being the opposite of what you believe, and if in doing so the position you intended to condemn ends up being defended, then wow. You have Messed This Up. And on an issue as critical as this one, mistakes like this can cause an awful lot of damage.

That’s an issue about whether this redemptive reading would make any material difference. The bigger problem stems from whether the redemptive reading can even stick. Here we come at last to Lieutenant McGivers, the haunted wasteland where defences of “Space Seed” drag themselves to die.

I talked above about how Kirk’s dismissal of McGivers’ discipline makes perfect sense in the context of his failure to grasp the importance of actually analysing history, rather than just assembling whatever version of it he finds most pleasing. The issue with taking this line isn’t particularly difficult to see, though, McGivers’ really is an absolute liability. She arrives late to transport to the Botany Bay, and once there seems far more interested in appreciating the aesthetics of the cryogenically-frozen passengers than in actually saving them. Once Khan is thawed, it takes all of three conversations with him to throw away a career over a decade long (based on her rank and Madlyn Rhue’s age) and betray every person on the ship she serves on.

And sure. It’s not like it’s impossible to imagine women being seduced by far-right ideology. From the concept of “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” during the Third Reich to the “TradWives” of the alt-right, it’s clear that there are women willing to be thoroughly subjugated in the interests of playing their part in a hyper-patriarchal and macho philosophy. The issue is that we can take it as read that a flaw in Kirk should not be taken to represent a flaw in men in general. The same can’t be said of McGivers. To put it very mildly indeed, this show has not earned itself the benefit of the doubt that the only female character this episode to get more than seven lines isn’t supposed to be a stand-in for her gender in general. Particularly when “women all just want to be taken in hand and told what to do” is an attitude that existed (and still exists) beyond the boundaries of the far right.

This is made all the worse by how little value the episode puts on Uhura, AKA the only recurring female character the show has left. Yes, the moment where she defies Khan is one of the coolest things she’s gotten to do so far (which feels more than a little like damning with faint praise), but the script somehow can’t bring itself to let her speak while she’s doing it. She’s just a silent obstacle to be pushed roughly aside, as though there can only ever be one woman speaking in any given scene. She doesn’t even get to respond when she’s struck – apparently the fact that this upsets the nearest white woman is sufficient to demonstrate the show’s objection to what its characters are doing.

It’s here that the episode commits its true cardinal sin. Not in portraying Kirk as sympathising with Khan’s beliefs. In directly sympathising with his beliefs in terms of how women don’t really matter. As with the idea of the Augments themselves, by framing that possibility of a fascist resurgence in terms of a battle of wills between men, it cedes far too much territory to what it claims to want to stop.

We can relate all this to how easily the episode could have mitigated the problems of having its antagonist hail from South Asia, as well [3], given they cast Blaisdel Makee – an American actor of Polynesian descent – in the episode. Giving him more than four lines in the episode would have gone some way to avoid the issue of this show only reaching for brown stage make-up whenever they’re preparing an antagonist for the sound stage (and we haven’t even gotten to “Errand Of Mercy” yet).

Diverse casting is not some magic talisman against the forces of reaction – again, the nightmare we’re all living through right now is proof enough of that (as is, more specifically, the BBC getting ever more diverse in its casting, while simultaneously becoming ever-more obviously a state propaganda machine/bastion of transphobia). Nevertheless, you can’t put up an effective fight against fascism if you’re convinced it’s only the white dudes who have a role to play in that fight. You can’t stop people sympathising with the enemy if you keep suggesting, whether by word or deed, that the enemy has a point. No-one who starts a sentence with “Sure fascism was bad, but” actually thinks fascism was actually as bad as it so clearly was and is.

“Space Seed” argues that fascism was bad, but. The story may not be celebrating the future that its predicting, but by failing to examine the ways in which supports the message it claims to oppose, it becomes complicit in bringing about the future it claims to fear.

[1] This is not me suddenly deciding to take a swing at aromantics, just to be completely clear. Not experiencing romantic love is a long distance away from considering romance and romanticsm as concepts to be bad.

[2] Though it’s beyond clear that one can express that opinion in a way that does make them awful people.

[3] We”ll just note the problem with putting Montalban in brownface as being self-evident, and move on, I think.