I recently visited Vulcan. The town, not the planet. Vulcan is a small farming community in southern Alberta, and at one time it boasted the Trekcetera Museum, the only Star Trek museum in western Canada.
The museum moved to Drumheller in 2017, then sadly closed eighteen months later. But fans can still visit Vulcan to get a taste of Trek. If you stop at the Vulcan Tourism and Trek Station you can find a small museum, with Captain’s chair and bridge station, and a shop full of Trek memorabilia and t-shirts, not to mention a guide to several Trek sites around town.
By the time I was first aware of Star Trek: The Original Series, the show had already finished and gone to re-runs. The old black and white television was a presence in our house, and I remember scenes from Star Trek, as well as all the other shows my dad would watch. My family would watch together on Sunday evenings—the Walt Disney Hour, The Waltons, and sometimes the Wayne and Shuster specials. But the shows that drew my interest most were anything science fiction or the supernatural—The Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and an episode of Kolchak:The Night Stalker, which scared the hell out of me. I even saw The Lost World in our local theatre, based on the first of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger books.
I lost my sight in a car accident in 1974, which ended my interest in television for a while. Much of my teenage years I spent reading. I discovered fantasy, and authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien opened me to worlds I had never imagined. I also began reading science fiction—Asimov, Le Guin, Clarke, and Heinlein. And at the end of my teens, I re-discovered Star Trek and started watching reruns of the show at the house of my girlfriend.
At this point, I was maybe developing something of an obsession. At twenty-one, I remember climbing through my parents kitchen window one evening in June while they were out. They hadn’t left a spare key, and I wanted to watch Star trek on their TV. My wife and I were living across the alley, and we didn’t have cable.
Seeing The Wrath of Kahn in theatres, then watching Next Generation on television got me thinking differently about the show. I always thought of it as a series that pushed boundaries—it was, after all, “the final frontier.” But for some reason I remember feeling disconcerted by the character of Geordi la Forge, the blind chief engineer. At the time, I never asked myself why the character of Geordi bothered me—perhaps if I had, I would have learned something more about myself as a blind person.
There were, however, things about Geordi that just drove me crazy. Early in Season 2, for example, Dr. Pulaski offers to give Geordi back his normal range of vision with ocular implants. And he refuses. Geordi’s blindness and his visor both define his character—I get it—but I remember thinking a number of times as I rewatched the episode, “Just take the fucking implants!”
I’ve always found the scene poignant for another reason. Diana Muldaur (Dr. Katherine Pulaski) had two roles in the original series. In Season 3, Muldaur plays Dr. Maranda Jones in “Is There in Truth No Beauty?,” a young blind woman who is assistant to a Medusan ambassador. No one, of course, knows Dr. Jones is blind until near the end, and the outcome of the episode suggests she has to come to terms with the limits of her disability. Interestingly, in this episode, Spock must wear a visor whenever he interacts with Kollos, the Medusan ambassador, the sight of whom causes humanoids to go insane. Spock’s visor here seems a rough precursor of Geordi’s visor in Next Generation.
Introducing characters with disabilities is only one thing that has characterized the franchise. Difference of all kinds was central to the show from the beginning: Spock, with his Vulcan control of emotion, is the alien who comments endlessly on human behavior. The show also provided a range of both racial and ethnic perspectives through characters such as Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov. More than this, the show has dealt with the foreign, the alien, and the marginalized in every incarnation since The Original Series.
It’s the relentless attention to difference I’ve always appreciated about the franchise. Apart from Geordi, differently abled characters appear variously throughout the franchise: Riva, the deaf diplomat who speaks through his chorus; and Melora, the gravity challenged ensign on Deep Space Nine. Even Worf is temporarily disabled after an accident in engineering that crushes his spine. The franchise was also early to introduce same-sex relationships to a television audience, most poignantly in the Next Generation episode that introduces the Trill, and the episode in which the Enterprise crew work with a genderless race to recover a lost shuttlecraft.
As campy as the Original series was, it spoke to a vision of the future in which humanity confronts itself by encountering difference. That same vision persists through the newer Star Trek incarnations, including Discovery, Picard, and most recently Strange New worlds. It’s what science fiction does best. It gives us a mirror for all that is good and noble, but it’s even better at showing us everything ugly and evil. It’s able to look straight back and show us what we don’t want to see. Think of Armus from the Next Gen episode “The Skin of Evil”—first Deanna, then Picard forces him to confront his destructive and malignant nature in order to free the crew from a trapped shuttle. Science fiction is like that. It’s a genre that shows us ourselves; it tells us what we fear, what we hate, and what we most need to confront. Star Trek does all of these things, but it also gives us hope, hope in a future, in a better world, and a better humanity that is able to gracefully and thoughtfully “go where no one has gone before.”
![The first image shows some Star Trek costumes from the Trekcetera Museum, and the second shows William Thompson standing beneath the Enterprise, with one hand raised, showing the Vulcan sign, "Live long and prosper."](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fde3267db-e894-4119-a790-35000170306b_4032x2268.jpeg)
Wow I never even thought about how the Star Trek universe explores differences! Great read!