5. "Amok Time"
In the imagination of some Trekkies, it's not too far from this:
to this:
But even without homoerotic overtones "Amok Time" is pretty sexy! Once every seven years Vulcans are have to return to their home planet to get it on! So great is the desire that Vulcans will die if they don't score. In this episode Spock goes so mad with passion that he doesn't balk at a fight to the death with his best friend Kirk when his beloved's machinations cast Kirk in the role of Spock's rival.
4. "The Perfect Mate"
This episode proves it is possible to be startlingly hot without showing much skin! Famke Janssen (who later played Bond girl Xenia Onatopp and Jean Grey in X-Men) plays an alien woman who has been born and raised to be the perfect male fantasy. Aboard the Enterprise as a gift meant to end a war, her pheromones arouse everyone around her and her telepathy allows her to become exactly what they want -- the perfect flirt. But things go wrong when she forsakes the man she's supposed to marry and falls in love with Captain Picard!
3. "The Cage"
The official story is that this first attempt at a Star Trek pilot was rejected by the network because it was "too cerebral" for your average TV viewer. Somehow I doubt that was the real reason.
In this episode aliens kidnap the captain of the Enterprise (played by Jeffrey Hunter in those pre-Shatner days) and use their power of illusion to try to get him to mate and breed a race of slaves. The aliens run the gambit of our hero's sexual fantasies to do it, culminating with one of the most famous scenes in Star Trek -- a strip tease by a green Orion slave girl who "actually likes being taken advantage of." Too cerebral, my ass! There's no way this would ever be shown on 1960s television!
2. "Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places"
Groups for young BDSM enthusiasts are often called "The Next Generation" or "TNG." Is the link to Star Trek a coincidence? Definitely not.
Klingons like pain. They jab each other with cattle prods for fun. So when Worf tries to teach the Ferengi bartender Quark how to put the moves on a Klingon woman some kinky sex is definitely on the menu. But while Worf is playing wingman, his bombshell friend Jadzia Dax decides to seduce him! The episode ends with both couples happily in the hospital... and "the next generation" of kinky teens was born!
1. "The Outcast"
In its later years Star Trek rightly got a lot of criticism for never having a gay character. But in 1992 it took what, at the time, was a pretty courageous stand for gay rights.
The Enterprise visits a planet of asexual aliens, a small minority of whom identify as male or female. One of the female-identified aliens falls in love with Commander Riker but when their relationship is discovered her people threaten to subject her to ex-gay brainwashing. The episode also contains one of the only pop culture examples of a polyamory negotiation I can think of, as Will Riker tells his sometimes-lover Deanna Troi about his new love.
Using the asexual allegory, Star Trek made the heterosexual love its viewers regarded as normal into the forbidden love. Even a homophobic viewer had to support the alien Soren in this impassioned scene, and examine their assumptions about homosexuality in the process:
No comments:
Post a Comment