Kirk’s first line to Janice effectively silences her, “Janice, you must remain absolutely quiet. The teaser sets the tone for the awfulness that will follow. Turnabout Intruder starts very much as it means to go on. For a franchise that took such pride in its liberal progressivism, the original show could make some incredibly ill-judged decisions in its handling of issues like sexism and racism. It might not be the culmination that many fans would want or expect, but it is a grim reminder of just how blind Star Trek could be. In its own offensive and insulting way, Turnabout Intruder is the perfect encapsulation of the third season’s anxiety about women in positions of authority. Natrina’s authority is undermined by her irrational attraction to McCoy in For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.Īs such, Turnabout Intruder feels like a culmination of all these ideas. In The Enterprise Incident, Spock is able to outwit the female Romulan Commander simply by flirting with her it falls to her male subordinate to catch Spock in the act of espionage. Repeatedly over the course of the third season, it is suggested that women are inherently irrational and that their inability to keep their emotions in check render them unfit for command. Women in authority have a particularly hard time during the third season. However, they provide a sharp contrast to the dismissive endings of those other episodes.) Episodes like Wink of an Eye or The Mark of Gideon or even All Our Yesterdays manage to write their female characters out in a manner that feels appropriate, even tragic. However, it is the casualness with which the third season disposes of these characters. After all, the demands of episodic television make long-term romance impossible. (To be clear, the issue is not so much that the women are written out at the end of the episode. Lieutenant Romaine is the love of Scotty’s life, but somehow disappears between The Lights of Zetar and The Cloud Minders. Although McCoy has the courtesy to break up with Natrina at the end of For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky, he neglects to mention that he is cured of his fatal illness. Miramanee and her unborn child are stoned to death at the end of The Paradise Syndrome, so that Kirk can return to the Enterprise. The third season is packed with disposable women. This was particularly true during the third season. Generally speaking, Star Trek was not kind to its female guest characters. Lieutenant Helen Noel allows her attraction to Captain Kirk foil her judgement in Dagger of the Mind, using an incredibly sinister mind-altering device to play with Kirk’s emotions. Lieutenant Marla McGivers would fall head-over-heels for Khan Noonien Singh in Space Seed, committing mutiny in service of a man whom she had only met a few days earlier. One-off guest stars seldom fared any better. Uhura was frequently overlooked by the narrative, most glaringly in the casual way that her entire identity is wiping by Nomad in The Changeling. Nurse Chapel was frequently cast as a love interest, whether as a fiancée to Donald Korby in What Are Little Girls Made Of? or pining over Mister Spock in stories like The Naked Time or Amok Time.
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Just look at how the show treated Janice Rand in The Enemy Within and how the series treated actor Grace Lee Whitney during that first season. Star Trek had never been too kind to its female characters or its female performers. William Shatner did not react well to news of cancellation.
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