Concocting Character in Television: The Case of Star Trek’s Annoying Old Men — and the Beautiful Young Women Who Love Them

“The arrival of Kirk on the scene precipitates a kind of crisis in the equilibrium of this pair of older, controlling-male and young subordinate-woman. What happens is that the woman is somehow awakened by the arrival of the Enterprise crew — awakened sexually, but also in a much broader sense.”

The way character is created in film and television is different from the way it is created in print media. When images and sounds tell the story, character is a function of images and sounds, not just words, important as words are. The audience must respond to the people on the screen; the director must make the audience connect with the people on the screen, if the show is to work. The audience must recognize the personality of screen people and identify with them, even the ones who are strange and impossible to like. There has to be a connection between audience and screen.

One of the most successful examples of audience response/connection to a TV show is the first Star Trek series, where the characters, especially of Spock and Kirk, have become a universal part of pop culture. The techniques involved repay study. The originalStar Trek is profoundly Minimalist in terms of its style and approach, unlike its successor series and movies.1 The look of the series depends on lighting and color more than on elaborate (read expensive) sets. Compared to the successor series, the original show is bare — it would be austere if it weren’t for the creative use of color and sound. As an approach, Minimalism affects more than the style — the look of the show, its use of color, its cinematography: it affects the music and other features, including the ideas of this extraordinarily influential series. But Minimalism also affects the way character is created — the construction and deployment of character types, the way character is generated and used in plot construction. For film and television, the character logic of Star Trek, so to speak, is revealing and interesting to explore. In fact, it is the characters of the original series that, in large measure, have propelled the whole Star Trek phenomenon. It is, in particular, the star of that show, James Kirk, played by William Shatner, and Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, who stimulated continuing interest — and, arguably, the figure of Spock most of all.2

Character in a popular TV series such as Star Trek is more vivid than it is complex, more memorable than realistic. For a character to have impact, it must be larger than life, so to speak, at least in the case of a major character. Technically, the people in the original Star Trek are what is known as “humor characters.” That is, they are essentially characters of one emotion or one dominant trait; the term “humor” here has its old meaning and does not refer to hahaha but to the ancient theory of humors. In this sense a humor is a fluid in the body, and each of the major fluids possessed a distinct trait that influenced personality. There were believed to be four of these basic fluids or humors and that the mixture of the fluids determined one’s personality. An excess of one humor over the others shifts the balance in the direction of the traits of that fluid. This mixing — this “temperament” — is the basis of one’s personality. For instance, Hamlet had an excess of the fluid black bile, otherwise known as “melancholy” (Greek for “black bile”). Given this excess, he was depressed and sad, which is what you get when you have too much melancholy or black bile in your body.

The characters of Star Trek are humor characters in that they have essentially one emotion, one dominant trait: some trait or emotion that they then repeat in every show they appear in. They are humor characters, as if they are dominated by one type of fluid. What we are looking at here is an ancient and simple means of creating character — primitive, but like many simple and primitive techniques, effective. Thus, in Star Trek, Dr. McCoy always gets angry — anger is his humor (he is “choleric,” to use the old terminology). By contrast, Mr. Spock is always cool and rational. (There are episodes when Spock is emotional, as in “Naked Time,” but he is emotional because something is interfering with his basic temperament. In other words the exception is an exception.) The same principles apply to the other main characters. Thus the ship’s engineer, Scotty, always gets anxious. In most of the episodes in which Scotty appears, he displays fear; he is forever getting worried about his engines. His humor is fear, and the corresponding symbol of that fear is his engines, which he worries about in episode after episode.

Kirk has a different humor from the others: he always displays passionate devotion to his ship. Love — love for his ship, above all — is his humor, though he often actually falls in love or attracts love. He also has the loving loyalty of others. This is an essential reason why he is such an appealing figure in the whole development of the Star Trek phenomenon: his humor is love, a popular and attractive trait, and one that goes with a vitality, a confidence and spontaneity, that make him irresistible. William Shatner was a good casting choice: his complexion is noticeably warm, not cool; his eyes are brown, not blue.3 His warmth and emotional vitality gave his character Kirk its powerful appeal — “Shatner,” in Eric Greene’s words, “was a very charismatic performer” and “remarkably effective as Kirk” (62). In the technical language of humor psychology, his dominant fluid is blood: the “sanguine” fluid that expresses optimism, energy, and strength.

Humor characterization does not rule out functioning in complex ways or showing a variety of impulses and behaviors.4 There is more to the character than the dominating humor, but nevertheless that humor is like the basic anatomy of the body. It furnishes the framework for everything in the character’s actions and emotional life.5 The four major characters, Kirk, McCoy, Spock, Scotty, correspond to four major emotions or attitudes: love, anger, rationality, fear. They cannot be reduced to these states, nor do they project these states of mind in a mechanical or simplistic manner. But they would not be the same characters at all without their correspondent humor. The characterization of the second-tier figures (Uhura, Sulu, Chekhov, Nurse Chapel) is less defined. It is less defined, because they do whatever the plot requires of them; their function is in fact as much visual as it is anything else. Their sheer identity (African, Russian, East Asian, Caucasian) — even physical appearance — makes a dramatic point that in itself serves the plot. Each of these characters is distinctive visually more than he or she is in terms of personality.6 Since they do whatever the plot requires of them, the plot determines their personality — their reactions, feelings, speech. Nevertheless, even in the case of these figures, humor characterization is noticeable. Thus Lieutenant Uhura, defined by her expertise in communication, is musical; Chekhov is always the appealing neophyte; Nurse Chapel is always dutiful. The characterization of Star Trekrecalls that of a comic book. As with the comic books of that time, the complement of character is dominated by male figures; Gene Roddenberry’s conception of females in the show was a matter of “short skirts and lots of cleavage.”7

Real people are complicated, not simple. They have complicated motivations and feelings and changing moods — they are not humor characters, however much individuals may seem at times to be just that, and to make predictable caricatures of themselves. So often it is not character that creates plot, but the reverse: the kind of characters that appear in a story are determined by what the plot requires them to do. Realistic fictions tend to view character as originating the plot action (in Gerald Mead’s words, “Characters are seen here as cause-and-effect factors in plot events” [97]), but it is arguably the other way around, especially in fictions with no pretense at realism. This subordination of character to plot construction is especially prominent in popular entertainment, as is evident from important television programs, where humor characterization is so common. The nature of characterization is determined by the form, the genre, so to speak, even in film and television. On this important point, Pearson and Messenger-Davies cite David Gerrold, the screen writer of one of the most famous Star Trek episodes, “The Trouble with Tribles”: “David Gerrold . . . explains that the need to maintain a character over tens of episodes means that the average episode of television series does not deal with the most important events in a character’s life. . . . By contrast, films often centre precisely on the most important events” (Pearson and Messenger-Davies 114). The technique of humor characterization does not make for realism: it is a simple but powerful technique, but, however inadequate as far as psychology is concerned, it has the advantage of enabling gripping plots. It is extremely useful in making plot constructions that work, and that is one thing about Star Trek: it has a strong batting average when it comes to good plots.

Star Trek has a specific “look” or style, which I referred to as “Minimalist,” but it also has an approach to plot construction appropriate to that look. The plot is a means of presenting individual scenes linked to one another, and in this respect what is primary is creating scenes that are memorable, that have dramatic and visual force: a tableau that remains in the imagination of the viewer. In Star Trek, one expects a fight in every episode of the series, of course — there are always at least two — and a fight is visually magnetic, a natural center or stimulus of attention, often signaled by presto musical accompaniment. Another obvious visually magnetic center of attention is a beautiful woman, preferably with the incredibly elaborate hair style that the 1960s seemed to find irresistible in women. D. C. Fontana, who had an important role to play in working on and writing for Star Trek, notes: “Sometimes the women’s hairdos — wigs or their natural hair enhanced with artificial braids and extensions — looked like wedding cakes on steroids. I occasionally wondered why the hair of supposedly professional military women on a starship of the future should look like it took ten hours and three stylists to turn out” (37).

But what is really needed is an offset or contrast to the beautiful woman with the awesome hairdo, and that is, naturally, an older (and not very attractive) man. But an older man, that is, who has a claim on the woman. The older man offers a natural context for heightening the allure of the woman — and also marking her off with a paternal “keep out” sign, making her at once forbidden and attractive: inaccessible — and at the same time tantalizing. In a surprising number of episodes of Star Trek, this combination turns up: an older man, always in some position of authority, accompanied by a young woman — a woman who is visibly younger than the man is — a young woman in some subordinate position in relation to the man. Typically, this man is her father, as in “The Conscience of the King,” for example, though not always. The father-daughter relationship is an obvious model or paradigm for this pairing of characters, the implication being that any romantic connection between the two is immoral. But the main point is that this combination contrasts the older man with the young woman, thus highlighting her attractiveness together with her remoteness. It is a powerful combination, dramatically speaking, especially in the Star Trek period, when the women’s movement was, as it were, on the march, when issues of female emancipation were on everyone’s mind, and the theme of a woman being controlled, if not actually owned, by a patriarchal figure was practically explosive.

A combination of this type has the same kind of function for the plot as humor characterization has for the main figures. There is a power to this combination for a different reason, too, simply its rich dramatic possibilities. No wonder it turns up so often — it is a winner for plot construction, in all sorts of ways.8 The dramatic possibilities are heightened by making the older man a figure of power and authority, so as to authorize him to do some dramatically magnetic snarling and ranting. Boasting and bullying are only two of the possibilities, and few roles grab audience attention more than a bullying and boasting tyrannical father figure. This figure has a long history in drama, going back to ancient Roman and Greek theater: a type sometimes referred to as the senex iratus (“angry old man”), a type very common in comedy to this day, sometimes in the form of a curmudgeon rather than an angry old man in the pure sense.

My favorite example in Star Trek is Plasus in “The Cloud Minders.” Plasus is surely a candidate for Most Annoying Person in the galaxy. Every time he opens his mouth, he is soon denouncing something, and getting angry and angrier. And more and more annoying. The scenes of Kirk patiently trying to work with Plasus are truly amusing. Each time he tries to talk to Plasus, Kirk begins calmly and in a diplomatic, respectful manner. But within minutes — or rather seconds — he is arguing, denouncing, and even shouting, exactly like Plasus. Plasus drives everybody crazy, even a man as respectful as Kirk. Nobody can push Kirk’s buttons like the superbly annoying Plasus. He has attained a level of annoyingness that is practically unparalleled in the series. And his annoyingness is contagious. By the time Kirk confronts Plasus in the cavern scene near the end, Kirk also is shouting and obnoxious. He has picked up Plasus’s irritability and is becoming a Plasus himself.

Meanwhile, Plasus is annoying in another way in that he is accompanied by one of the most delectable women in the series, his beautiful daughter Droxene. Plasus irritatingly introduces her to Kirk and Spock as “one of our planet’s most incomparable works of art,” gleefully objectifying his daughter as his “creation.” Droxene meanwhile is arrayed in what may be the most astounding dress ever seen on television. One memorable scene in “Cloud Minders” is the erotically charged exchange between Droxene and Spock, who is suddenly altered, suddenly attentive and aroused. One expects erotic scenes between Captain Kirk and the beautiful young women of outer space, but it is unusual to find Spock in this role, indicating how charged the erotic energy is.9 The charge is sufficient to thaw Spock out and draw him into the erotic orbit of the Lady in the Very Far-Out Dress. What she in turn wants to find out about is Spock’s sex life.

Usually, this type of scenario — overbearing older man somehow in control of a gorgeous young woman — is a natural invitation to Kirk to exercise his varied talents, but not so in “The Cloud Minders.” While Spock is responding to Droxene’s nosy questions about his sex life (Spock explains that “extreme feminine beauty” poses a definite disturbance to the fixed biological rhythm of male Vulcans), Kirk has other engagements. With Droxene and Spock cooing to each other in one room, Kirk is in an adjoining room wresting with another young woman, Vanna, in bed no less — the use of contrast and parallel is skilful. They are literally next door. Kirk has three wrestling bouts in this episode with this particular young woman (four, depending on how you count them): a record for wrestling with women for Kirk, and perhaps a record for any episode in a TV series. There is no doubt that, thanks to Plasus, this is an extremely angry episode; and it is also, thanks to Droxene, intensely charged erotically. The combination of crabby older man and provocative young woman has a lot to do with this energized conception. Anger is a hot emotion, and it often has erotic significance. The same principle was long ago explained to Susan Vance in Bringing Up Baby by the goofy psychiatrist: “The love instinct in man very frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.” In the standard plot construction of romantic comedy, the pair that we know will eventually pair off practically hate each other, with hot displays of anger, before they do indeed pair off.

In “The Cloud Minders,” Plasus, the “High Advisor” of the planet, is the most important man in his society. He is never at a loss for words, relishes aggressive arguing, and has plenty of verbal nasties on hand to fire off when he wants to. His violent proclivities are not just verbal, either: he is eagerly complicit in torturing people who defy him (back in the backward 1960s, torture was regarded as an unforgivable crime). For instance, he personally tortures the attractive young woman Kirk periodically wrestles with. Plasus also orders the death of Captain Kirk for interfering with the slave society he commands. Later he assaults Kirk with vicious-looking knife-like weapons in a fit of uncontrolled rage. Another annoying thing about him is that, apart from his verbal facility in insulting and irritating everybody, Kirk most of all, he has an unpleasant trick of raising his voice to the point of shouting, while his “delightful” (Spock’s word) daughter Droxene chimes in sweetly to agree with his disgusting political ideas. Plasus also hangs up on people when he gets sufficiently irritated, as he does when he abruptly ends the communication in which Kirk has patiently explained to him that he has found a solution to the difficulties they are dealing with, a solution Plasus rejects out of hand, and with brusque contempt, loudly declaring Kirk’s wise solution “preposterous.”

The title “The Cloud Minders” is a pun. It means not just people who attend to clouds (they “mind” clouds, as shepherds “mind” sheep) — clouds where the city floats in a superb feat of engineering — but also people whose minds are lost in irrelevancies, “cloudy,” and separated from reality, their head “in the clouds,” as they say: out of it, in short. For down on the ground, back here on earth, so to speak, the “troglytes” do all the work, like slaves, to maintain the cloud minders. The Stratos dwellers thus live in luxury, spending their time floating through art galleries and thinking deep thoughts, like irresponsible academics in the proverbial ivory tower. This pair, father and daughter, articulate an offensive ideology that appears to have come directly out of the slave-owner’s manual of the antebellum South. Thus, their group lives a life of leisure and pleasure, in the clouds, while the “troglytes” toil in barely livable conditions, doing all the work, including producing economically critical resources for export (compare cotton in the South), while being constantly exposed to a harmful gas in the mines, exposure that causes mental “retardation” and emotional confusion. Droxene explains the benefits of this elegant arrangement to Kirk and Spock with naïve enthusiasm: “‘The Troglytes are workers. . . . That is their function in our society. . . . How can they share what they do not understand? . . . The complete separation of toil and leisure has given Ardana this perfectly balanced social system . . . Why should we change it?'” Why, indeed?10

“The Cloud Minders” is a particularly vivid example of the annoying older man paired with an attractive young woman, and the plot that unfolds out of this configuration. But it is far from unique in Star Trek. The configuration turns up again and again.

In the basic scenario, an older man controls a young woman, who is sometimes his wife, sometimes his daughter, or sometimes simply a beautiful young woman in a subordinate social position connected to him (as in “A Taste of Armageddon” and “By Any Other Name”). The arrival of Kirk on the scene precipitates a kind of crisis in the equilibrium of this pair of older, controlling-male and young subordinate-woman. What happens is that the woman is somehow awakened by the arrival of the Enterprise crew — awakened sexually, but also in a much broader sense. For example, Droxene not only becomes infatuated with Spock (those cute ears!), she also begins to question the social system she has taken for granted as “perfect.” The young woman in this paradigm yearns for release from control by the older male authority figure, and wants to grow and expand emotionally and intellectually. She is thus a figure of desire, but desire in a broad sense, not just an erotic or sexual sense, though it is true that the sexual energies aroused are noticeable. Thus the woman may fall in love with Kirk or be attracted to him, or sometimes she may deliberately attract him, as Lenore does in “The Conscience of the King,” for her own purposes. (Compare Vanna, Droxene’s slave-double in “The Cloud Minders,” who kidnaps Kirk for political reasons — twice — once after he has given her his total trust.)

The young woman in question is not necessarily daughter to the older man in question — the exact nature of the relationship is sometimes non-familial and sometimes ambiguous. In “Requiem for Methuselah” and “What Little Girls Are Made of,” for example, the young woman turns out to be an android, reminding us that Plasus presents his daughter Droxene as a work of art, as if he had constructed her. The theme of the older male actually constructing a young woman is noticeable in “Requiem for Methuselah” and in “What Little Girls Are Made of.” The Pygmalion fantasy of a man constructing the most attractive woman he can imagine is a terrific dramatic scenario, and unlike the original Greek tale of Pygmalion, usually results in disaster. The young woman, Raina, of “Requiem” discovers that she is an android, to the horror of Kirk, who has fallen in love with her, and she dies of the shock of the realization — and the spectacle of her maker-mentor (Flint) and the man who has awakened her sexually (Kirk) fighting over her. In “What Little Girls Are Made of” the android Andrea, the beautiful creation of the genius Dr. Korby, awakens to the emotion of love, and dies as a result of trying to express it. In these cases, the older man is a kind of magician, a man who has acquired superhuman powers — Flint in “Requiem for Methuselah” has lived for thousands of years, like the protagonist of Jerome Bixby’s The Man from Earth (2007).11 But Dr. Korby turns out to be an android of himself — that is, he has downloaded his identity into an artificial body, a process that enables him to create doubles of people. Kirk’s capacity to outwit Korby does, however, free the other beautiful woman in the episode, Christine Chapel (later “Nurse Chapel”) from her “love” for Dr. Korby.

There is an important precedent for this scenario in science fiction movies: Forbidden Planet, where the isolated father-daughter combination is basic to the plot. The daughter has never known any man apart from her father, and the theme of sexual awakening is the backdrop for the unfolding revelations of the father’s supernormal powers. The archetype, so to speak, of this scenario is, as the classic sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet itself makes clear, Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest. In The Tempest, a magician (Prospero) lives on an island with his daughter (Miranda) and a brutish and an angelic servant (Caliban and Ariel). But another precedent closer to the science fiction world is an important tale by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” one of the author’s most original and profound tales. In the scenario of “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the old man is a scientist; he has a beautiful daughter whom he has secluded and who is a kind of construction of his. He uses her, in turn, to lure a young man into his deadly scientific experiment. Ultimately, when Beatrice, the daughter, figures out what her father has done — basically destroyed her life, treated her as simply an object he has created for his own purposes — she commits suicide, trapped between an overbearing older man and an ineffectual lover, whose narcissism makes him a younger version of the older man.12 Themes of using and controlling people are inevitable with this configuration; in “Requiem for Methuselah,” for example, Flint deliberately uses Kirk in order to awaken Raina sexually, by encouraging her to respond to him.

The attempt to rescue the woman from the control of the older male, as Kirk tries to do with Raina, is often disastrous. The action that this configuration unfolds is frequently intended to create conflict between “father” and “daughter” figures. Though I refer to the male figure here as “old,” they are typically not old in the sense of old age: the defining requirement for these figures is that they be older than Kirk is — and visibly older than the young woman in question. The woman is not necessarily a sympathetic character; for example, in “Plato’s Stepchildren,” the woman is not only youthful and beautiful, but completely welded to her unappealing and cruel authority-figure husband, who is visibly older. Likewise, in “The Conscience of the King,” where the pairing appears as a father-daughter relationship, the young woman Lenore quickly attracts and entices Kirk, but turns out to be an insane defender of Karidian her father, a professional actor and former mass murderer. (The name “Lenore” is a good Poe name, well suited to this Gothic tale of madness and revenge, complete with performances of Hamlet and Macbeth.) In “Plato’s Stepchildren,” the older male authority figure, while married to a beautiful and noticeably younger (younger-looking, at any rate) woman, retains complete authority over his woman. For her, class solidarity, symbolized by her obnoxious husband, is more important than any rebellious impulse she might have. Interestingly, Kirk leaves this pair in charge and their relationship untouched. Instead of stimulating the rebellion of the woman, he stimulates the rebellion of the “dwarf,” played by an actor best known, perhaps, for his role in Stanley Kramer’s Ship of Fools, who exits his oppressors and flies off with the Enterprise crew.

Another interesting example is “Wink of an Eye.” In this episode, Deela is younger than her male companion, Rael, who loves her; but Deela wants Kirk, naturally, and the resulting jealousy and conflict by Rael toward Kirk gives Kirk the opening he needs to outwit both Deela and Rael, and so extricate his ship from the deadly trap they have laid for it. In “By Any Other Name,” another older male-young woman combination appears — literally appears, in the sense that they walk together onto the scene at the beginning — and then promptly take Kirk and his ship captive. Again, a significant part of the plot is the driving of a wedge between the older male (Rojan), the authority figure, and the young woman (Kelinda), by means of Kirk’s erotic powers, which awaken the energy of desire in the young woman. The older male becomes viciously jealous of Kirk and tries to kill him with his bare hands — sure indication that his entire project to seize control of the Enterprise will fail.

In “A Taste of Armageddon,” there is an authority figure almost as annoying as Plasus in “The Cloud Minders,” Anan 7 by name. The young woman in this case, a subordinate of Anan 7, is called Mea 3. Mea 3 is decreed to die by the social structure that Anan 7 leads; Kirk forcibly rescues her — forcibly, because she not only does not resist her fate, she goes willingly, in a manner suggesting suicide (the outcome for Beatrice, and, in effect, for the beautiful women of “Requiem” and “What Little Girls Are Made of”). “A Taste of Armageddon” is an interesting episode because it has two annoying older men: Anan 7 and Ambassador Fox, who pigheadedly gets the crew into the terrible trap they find themselves in. Doubling the senex iratus figures has the effect of intensifying the feelings of entrapment and absurdity which are so important in this episode.

Both of these characters (Anan 7 and Ambassador Fox) are bureaucrats: they are figures of self-righteous certainty, they obsess over rules (even as they flagrantly violate them), obedience, and control. For them, following rules is what being “good” means. The comic “The Trouble with Tribles” also has two older bureaucratic males, one of whom is almost as annoying as Plasus the cloud minder; there is no beautiful young woman, though Uhura partly performs this function with what is one of her biggest parts in the entire series. These bureaucratic authority figures are always older than Kirk; in this respect, they differ from another recurring male type in the series — the tyrant; for example Trelayne in “Squire of Gothos,” the monstrous tyrant of “Bread and Circuses,” or the computer genius Dayner of “The Ultimate Computer,” who usurps control of the ship and causes disaster. Unlike the bureaucrat older male, this tyrant figure is close to Kirk in age and more like a rival. Sometimes he is even younger than Kirk — sometimes young enough to be the deadly adolescent boys of “Charlie X,” “The Children Shall Lead Them,” or “Miri,” who are variants.

Older bureaucratic men turn up quite often in Star Trek, and are all negative figures, including Gill in “Patterns of Force,” who is so out of it that he is essentially a prop to a fascist social order. These figures are not always explicitly linked with a younger woman; for example, Commodore Stocker in “The Deadly Years,” whose incompetence and self-centeredness bring him to the point of handing the Enterprise over to the Romulans. There is indeed an attractive young woman in love with Kirk in “The Deadly Years,” but she is not related or connected to Stocker. Note, however, the same combination is present here: older authority-male balanced by beautiful young woman, so that, even when the two are not explicitly connected, the combination is a standard component of many episodes (Gill in “Patterns of Force,” it should be noted, is balanced by a beautiful and important young blonde woman). In “Eleean of Troyius,” Eleean is thus balanced by the bureaucrat older male Petri. In “The Cage” and “The Empath,” groups of apparently old men spend a lot of time watching — one hesitates to call it ogling — beautiful young women. In “All Our Yesterdays” the elderly and mysterious manager figure “Mr. Atoz” is balanced, dramatically speaking, by the beautiful young Zarabeth, though the two are never seen together. The contrast works to enhance the impact of each.

In “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” the relevant male figure is not older, but nevertheless represents authority. In “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” Dr. Miranda Jones is loved by the scientist-authority Marvik — another computer genius; his maddened attempt to control her results in disaster, literally driving the starship to the limits of the galaxy and beyond. But Marvik is somewhat exceptional here. The combination of powerful male and beautiful young woman — where the man is older than she is (and older than the other men, especially Kirk) is a crucial building block of episode construction, even when the two are not connected. But when the two are connected, the configuration gains power, and therefore a useful technique to draw upon in creating memorable scenes.

In “Wolf in the Fold,” there is a father-daughter and a husband-wife pair (in both cases, the woman dies). In an early episode in the show, “The Man Trap,” an older man, Robert Crater, who is as cranky and annoying as any of these male figures, is paired with an apparently much younger woman (she is actually an alien who can manipulate her looks). Between telling Kirk off and shooting at him, Crater prepares the way for his own destruction at the hands of the apparently younger woman, whose desire he has awakened. Garth, the criminal lunatic of “Whom the Gods Destroy,” has as consort the beautiful young (and green) woman Marta. Garth’s “love” for her results in her death — she has shown rather too much interest in Kirk. Even in “Specter of the Gun,” arguably the profoundest episode in the series, the delightful young woman Sylvia is paired with the murderous gunman who shoots the younger man, Chekov.

In “Court Martial,” there are two obviously older men, the judge, another Commodore (“Commodore Stone”), and the lawyer played by the veteran character actor Elisha Cook. One is hostile — the other is an advocate. There is also a father-daughter configuration in “Court-Martial,” with a young girl (Jamie) and a crazed father who frames Kirk and nearly causes his death. “Obsession” has another such older male authority figure, who demands that Kirk follow orders. I suspect that all the senior officers above Kirk in the series are variants: characters who order Kirk around but are wrong-headed and understand less than Kirk himself does. An unnamed superior officer in “The World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” orders Kirk to abandon his concern and obey star fleet commands. In “Court-Martial,” Kirk is tried for causing the death of a crew member; the episode presents the expected configuration (older man, beautiful young woman). A bureaucratic judge named “Stone” (as in “written in” — the embodiment of uncompromising legalism) is associated with a beautiful young woman, who also happens to be the prosecuting lawyer — and, to increase the emotional pressure, Kirk’s love. By winning the case, Kirk frees her from her role as deadly accuser. As I mentioned, there is also another older man / younger female combination in this episode: Finney, the man who framed Kirk, and Finney’s daughter (who hysterically accuses Kirk of murder). Again, by winning the case, Kirk frees the daughter from her delusive trust in her mad father. The father is driven by frustrated ambition, a mania common to the male authority figures in the series.

The characters in film and television — as in prose fiction — are not people — not real people, as we know real people and live with them. They are something else, but the nature of that “something else” is mysterious. In some ways, they are more like forces or energies than individuals, or they symbolize forces or energies in life, so that Spock is not really an individual person, for example; he symbolizes the quality of rationality and humanistic intellect. If he were to appear in a dream, for instance, it is likely that rationality and humanistic intellect are what he would represent. This does not mean that Spock cannot be a character in stories, or even that new stories cannot include him, as of course they can and have. But it does mean that character is not like character in ordinary life.

When we turn to configurations of character, of the type outlined here, we find a sort of “interference pattern” in which the forces that different characters convey interact with one another, in a kind of field of conflict or of reconciliation and harmony. Clearly, TV series draw upon such configurations of character as essential to their plot construction, and are probably much more committed to them (and to humor characterization) than movies are. The functioning of such configurations in popular television is important if little understood.

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