Star Trek, the Original Series: Go nuts, young man, go nuts! [Media Notes 69]

I decided to take a look at the original Star Trek series, the one that started in 1966, though I’m not sure that I saw it then. I was in college at the time and didn’t have a TV, though I might have watched the show during summer reruns. In any event, I’ve certainly seen the whole series, though not in years.

I’ve only watched four episodes, the original pilot, The Cage, which wasn’t aired until the late 1980s, and then the first three episodes that actually aired. I note, first of all, and rather obviously, that special effects have changed a lot since then. You don’t have to watch the show to know this, but still, it’s rather striking to see it. Second, we haven’t really seen the fabled Star Trek computer, the one that Spock asks to do this that or the other and, shazam! it coughs up the answer a few seconds later. Computers weren’t nearly as prominent in people’s lives back then as they are now. Few people had ever seen one, though of course many had seen those (blasted) punch cards. In one or another of these episodes that was a passing reference to tapes, the major form of external memory storage in those days. Perhaps that computer doesn't really show up until The Next Generation?

What caught my attention is that both the second and third episodes were about someone who goes nuts because they’ve acquired superpowers. The second episode, Charlie X, is about a 17-year-old boy they take on board. It turns out that out that he’d acquired super mental powers that allow him to read minds, control minds, and take over the ship. Fortunately the aliens who’d endowed him with those powers come by before he destroys everything. Just why and how is secondary. What matters is super powers and goes nuts.

In the third episode, Where No Man Has Gone Before, it’s an adult crewman that acquires the superpowers. Different superpowers than the boy in the second episode, going nuts in a different way as well. Different escape as well. No deus ex machina to save The USS Enterprise. Kirk manages to do it in hand-to-hand combat.

Why does this interest me? Because I’ve been thinking about the fears prevalent in certain high-tech quarters that once human-level artificial intelligence emerges – as inevitably it must do (so these folks believe) – these super-smart computers will go nuts and threaten human existence. Of course, an out-of-control computer is different from an out-of-control adolescent or an out-of-control man, but still, out-of-control is out-of-control. I’m wondering if this anxiety about out-of-control computers isn’t a kissing cousin to anxiety about super-powered humans.

Addendum, 3.29.22: The computer showed up in episodes 11 and 12, The Menagerie. But it wasn’t asked to do anything very complicated. But the communication was in natural language.

And, I should note more generally, Shatner over-acts, as I remember, but so do others.