Star Trek and Faster-Than-Light Speed (The Meaning of Star Trek) by Shapiro Alan

Author:Shapiro, Alan [Shapiro, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2013-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

An alternative feminist reading of this Original Series episode is that it is a story of sacrifice and Metamorphosis as positive principles. A sacrifice of the woman, Assistant Commissioner Hedford, occurs. The alien entity, the Companion, sacrifices herself. A Metamorphosis of becoming-other (Deleuze and Guattari), becoming-woman, and crossing the line of demarcation between species, takes place. The story presents the possibility of a sacrifice that requires the courage of transformation and disappearance, but is not death. After the Christian myth of work, sex, and death, there is suffering positively revaluated in relation to creativity and creative transformation. Both Hedford (who was dying) and the Companion sacrifice their individuality to merge into or become a new being. Each loses her constituted self but not her life. The narrative is beyond the "unresolvable" dichotomy between the "modern" worldview of sacrifice as murder and the "primitive" worldview of sacrifice as culturally and spiritually valued. Like birth, death, or a passage of initiation, the cloud creature's transmutation into a "posthuman" female is a decisive moment of disappearance and reappearance, an "impossible exchange" or recognition of radical otherness. The gifts of a second chance at life and reversal of linear temporal fate are transacted.

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