“State. The. Purpose.”
“Justice” isn’t particularly successful as a piece of drama but it’s a bracingly open shot across the bow on three of Roddenberry’s core beliefs – sexual libertarianism, atheism, and the evils of capital punishment. On the first point, at least, “Justice” is probably as far as Star Trek: The Next Generation (and likely, all incarnations of Star Trek before or since) have visibly pushed it; for a series that eventually became relatively sexless, Next Gen was comparatively filthy for many of its inaugural episodes. In “Justice,” the Enterprise arrives at a goofy garden-like world populated by barely-clothed Aryans with childlike intellects who do nothing all day besides jog, play sports, and most importantly, “make love at the drop of a hat – any hat,” as Geordi and Tasha express after their first visit to the planet. (One is called upon to wonder about what actually happened to Geordi and Tasha on that first away mission, given how the team members who later return to the planet are greeted by its inhabitants. One is also called upon to wonder what happens in the middle of the second act, when all the adult away team members are led off into various Edo antechambers to take part in pleasures unknown. There’s a detectable “what happens on the away missions stays on the away missions” knowingness amongst the Starfleet crew in this episode and elsewhere.)
Rivan, the blonde-ringlet 80s babe who is one of two main Edo characters, sports so lasciviously visible a camel toe at one point (an advantage of blu-ray?) that she makes a perfect pinup for the core midpubescent male Star Trek audience, to say nothing of the teenage playmate who is quite noticeably not wearing a bra – or, to keep things equitable, Liator, the adult male Edo whose moose knuckle is nearly a work of pansexual art. And the adult Starfleet officers, confronted by this landscape, display a telling lack of shame or modesty, up to and including a casual conversation between Riker and Worf on the dangerous vigour of Klingon-on-human sex. Everything’s staunchly hetero and devoutly sensualist in nature, of course – on Next Gen and later Deep Space Nine, an appreciable amount of sexual transference is sunk into the act of applying massage oil as an offhand entry into a scene – but it remains riskily matter-of-fact. What makes it all the more unnerving and even potentially transgressive is that, when confronted with a species who have sex openly and frequently, Captain Picard assigns Wesley to go down with the away team and investigate the planet’s viability as a shore leave location for the Enterprise’s children. What? On two separate occasions in the episode, Wesley seems to be on the verge of being initiated into a variation on Brave New World’s “erotic play.”
But no, apparently children just play baseball and get into serious, serious heaps of trouble on Edo. It’s the adult behaviour that directly models the Roddenberry idyll: the notion that absent any larger considerations of capitalism, providence, or higher intellectual pursuits, any mammal species worth its salt would, as the song said, “lay and learn what each other’s bodies were for.” Likewise, there is absolutely no beating around the bush on the fact that in Star Trek’s view, religion and spirituality are silly, outdated notions subscribed to by primitives, even when the crew is confronted with such a point-for-point gloss on the Judeo-Christian concept of Eden – or rather, what Eden would have been like had we never been kicked out. Picard and crew represent a refreshingly hard line: getting over silly superstitions is part of growing up. Given the rising tide of fundamentalism in the United States and elsewhere, it’s amazing that Trek has so successfully hung on to this core belief; though, of course, there hasn’t been a Star Trek series on the air in quite some time, and Deep Space Nine did ultimately end up dabbling in a conversation between science and spirituality that would do most secular humanists proud. Here, though, the big floating space station in orbit of the Edo planet, which the natives call “God,” is never remotely considered as such by the crew of the Enterprise, who simply know better. The show will write more successful essays on the subject later on, but as a first shot, “Justice” ain’t bad.
Update: I’m awarding “Justice” three and a half Enterprises out of five.
