Primitive Culture: A Star Trek History and Culture Podcast

Half a Decade of Primitive Culture

Star Trek’s original five-year mission was brought to a premature end in 1969. But over the ensuing half-century and more, the franchise has continued boldly going to new frontiers. By the 1980s, when a second generation of fans came to seek out fresh adventures, the voyage had become a continuing mission … with no end in sight.

In this episode of Primitive Culture, recorded earlier this year on o...

Cardassian war crimes and The Man in the Glass Booth

For many fans of Deep Space Nine, the penultimate installment of Season 1, “Duet,” is also the show’s first classic episode. A bleak exploration of guilt, responsibility, and forgiveness in the aftermath of war, it’s a story that could scarcely have been told on any other Star Trek series. One of Trek’s most popular bottle episodes, “Duet” is built on intense two-hander scenes be...

Autistic representation in Star Trek

“Perhaps you’re just different,” Tam Elbrun tells Data in the Next Generation episode “Tin Man.” “Not a sin, you know, though you may have heard otherwise.” Both characters—the emotionally sensitive Betazoid and the supposedly emotionless android—have been seen by fans as allegories of a particular kind of difference, standing in for those on the broad spectrum of neurodiversity.

In this episode...

Star Trek’s Double Troubles

Don’t they say you die if you meet yourself? Our intrepid Starfleet officers had better hope the answer is no, since encounters with doubles, doppelgängers, and duplicates appear to be just part of the job. From the two Kirks in “The Enemy Within” to Lower Decks’s twinned Boimlers, Star Trek has offered up a host of alt versions of our regular characters over the years.

In this episode of Primitive Cultu...

Trans representation in Star Trek.

In 2022, trans characters in Star Trek have become part of the fabric of humanity’s shared future in space. In addition to Adira and Gray Tal in Discovery, we’ve been treated to the villainess Captain Angel in Strange New Worlds and even an explicitly non-binary character, the Medusan Zero, in Prodigy. But a few decades ago, Star Trek’s most direct engagement with trans culture was the truly toe-c...

The Alien franchise and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

In space, no one can hear you scream. But for unlucky Starfleet landing parties, meeting a nightmarish alien menace can prove as traumatic as deadly. For La'an Noonien-Singh, who carries the burden of having survived captivity in a Gorn breeding colony during childhood, another encounter with the monstrous lizards proves both physically and mentally challenging. And to make sur...

How Star Trek’s leaders reflect our own.

Young, charismatic, and a bit of a ladies’ man, Captain James T. Kirk was cast in the mould of President John F. Kennedy, the beloved US leader who had been killed just three years before Star Trek debuted. But over the course of more than half a century, Star Trek’s captains have often echoed the great politicians of the day; and sometimes they may even have paved the way for political care...

Star Trek’s backdoor pilots.

The year is 1968. As Star Trek goes off the air for good, a new show—Assignment: Earth—debuts from some of the same creative team. For dedicated Trekkies, the premise is already familiar and the two leads, Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, have a head start garnering fans of their own. That, at least, is what might have been had Star Trek not been renewed for a third season. As things turned out, the epis...

… it wasn’t the Vulcans who made first contact?

April 5, 2063. In Star Trek’s imagined history, it was on this date that humanity made first contact with an alien race. The event led to societal transformation on a global scale and ushered in a bright future. But what if it wasn’t the Vulcans who happened to be passing by that day? What if first contact had been made with the Klingons or Romulans instead?

In this episode of Primiti...

Captain Picard and Indiana Jones.

Wise, measured, and distinctly unromantic, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was conceived from the start as very different from his predecessor, James T. Kirk. But for Patrick Stewart, the lack of physical drama felt creatively unsatisfying. In October 1988, he wrote a letter to Gene Roddenberry outlining his desire for Picard to get some “action”—in more ways than one.

It would be over a year before Stewar...

Lisa Klink on Writing for Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

Starting with a short-term position as a writing intern on Deep Space Nine, Lisa Klink rose rapidly through the Star Trek ranks, penning more than a dozen episodes over the course of just three years. In episodes such as “Resistance” and “Sacred Ground,” she proved her skill at handling character-based drama, while “Blood Fever,” “Message in a Bottle” and “The Omega Directive” ...

How Star Trek tackled the Vietnam War.

Every Star Trek series has engaged with the issues of the time, and perhaps none more so than *The Original Series*. Episodes touching on the hippy counterculture and NASA's bold Apollo program grounded the show as much in the 1960s as the 2260s. But perhaps no contemporary subject loomed over TOS more so than the Vietnam War. Sometimes quite bluntly and at other times more obliquely, over the...

Jack Bauer and Jonathan Archer.

Premiering just after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Enterprise took another two seasons to fully engage with the radically changed real world in its storytelling. When the show did reveal its own 9/11 story in the third season, it followed in the wake of another intensely serialized, monster-hit TV show: 24. Jack Bauer might seem an unlikely model for a Starflee...

Naren Shankar on a life in science fiction.

While Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga took the Star Trek: Next Generation cast to the big screen—not to mention reinventing classic space shows Battlestar Galactica and Cosmos—it was another young writer from the TNG stable, Naren Shankar, who would contribute to the most science-fiction TV in his post-Trek career. Over three decades as a screenwriter and showrunner, Shankar has worked ...

Live from Destination Star Trek London 2021.

After the cancellation of last year’s Destination Star Trek (DST) in London, anticipation for 2021 event, billed as Europe’s largest Trek convention, was greater than ever. A slew of last-minute guest dropouts—combined with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—didn’t stop thousands of Trekkies from descending on ExCel London exhibition and convention center for the three-day celebration.

In...

James Bond and Julian Bashir.

Not many film franchises can boast 25 installments over the course of more than half a century, so for sheer longevity the James Bond cinematic franchise certainly gives Star Trek a run for its money. In some ways, the old-fashioned brutal masculine ethos of Bond feels very much out of place in the utopian Trek future, and yet both are properties forged in the cultural crucible of the 1960s that have ...

Tony Black’s new book: *Star Trek, History and Us* 
  
From 1960s hippies in “The Way to Eden” to the War on Terror in Enterprise Season 3, Star Trek has always reflected the cultural moment from which it springs. In his new book, Star Trek, History and Us, Tony Black brings the Primitive Culture approach to print, taking a long view of the past half-century through the prism of Star Trek's 800 episodes and films.

In this episode o...

Robert Duncan McNeill on Star Trek's Directors' School.

To Star Trek fans, he is Tom Paris, the cocksure pilot of the USS Voyager. But in Hollywood, Robert Duncan McNeill is better known as a different kind of helmsman. From his first day of filming on the Voyager pilot "Caretaker," McNeill declared his intention to take a shot at the director's chair, following in the footsteps of fellow Trek such as stars Jonathan Frakes, Levar B...

Twenty Thousand Leagues across the Delta Quadrant. 

Throughout Star Trek: Voyager’s seven seasons, Tom Paris repeatedly proved his credentials as a mid-20th-century history buff, with his replicated TV set, black-and-white B-movie holonovels, and even his own 3D cinema. But in the fifth-season episode “Thirty Days,” he reveals a boyhood fascination with a much earlier period of history and literature: the age of great nautical expl...