On Mon, 26 Oct 2026 16:52:52 -0400, Tony Nance <
tnusenet17@gmail.com>
wrote:
On 10/26/26 2:40 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/walter-koenig-dead-chekov-star-trek-russian-1236740088/
Hope he found his nuclear wessels!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdSJFrhb-HM
Bummer. He also did a wonderful job playing Bester on Babylon 5. RIP Walter.
I am saddened by the death of the actor Walter Koenig. I certainly
bore the man no ill will.
But I have to admit that I never liked his character, Pavel Chekov, in
the original series. I had thought that putting this character in the
show was the stupidest thing they ever did.
Why?
Well, there are little things.
Chekhov's "Russian" accent. One thing he did often was replace "v" by
"w" in English words. But W isn't even a letter in the Russian
alphabet! In Belarus, they do have a letter for W, oo kratkoye, but
the sound doesn't even exist in Russian.
But there's the one big thing. The one thing that makes the character colossally stupid.
The television show is set in the far future.
What should that mean?
The first-season episode "The Squire of Gothos" contains an incident
that illustrates exactly what's wrong with Chekhov. Yes, it's a
first-season episode, so Chekhov isn't in it. But that's fine; another character, a very minor character, illustrates what Chekhov should
have been.
Trelane encounters a crewman whose name is Jaeger. A German! So
Trelane automatically assumes that he is an admirer of the sort of
militarism that Trelane affects. But instead Jaeger does a
double-take. Because, as we all know, in between the time on Earth
with which Trelane, so fallible of him, thought was current, and the
time of Star Trek... some unpleasantness took place, related to
Germany, which meant that no one in their right mind in the era of
Star Trek would look upon historical German militarism as anything but
utterly wicked and depraved.
So the notion that Chekhov, in the far-future of Star Trek, would
admire Soviet Communism, and display the kind of ignorance about the
Western world - or, rather, the Western portion of Earth - that people
living under Soviet Communism at the time might have... is ludicrous.
It would be like Crewman Jaeger being a Nazi in the age of Star Trek.
So the issue here is with the politics of Star Trek.
The message of peace and tolerance, of opposition to bigotry, is a
good one. My problem isn't with the intent, it's with the execution.
Which, in TOS, and, often, even in later series, went badly. Sometimes hilariously badly.
We can all agree that, say, "The Omega Glory" was a terrible episode.
But it being terrible doesn't say anything important about my concern
here. They were pulled between network standards, which they wanted to
placate by making an episode that seemed patriotic - by highlighting
the value of the U.S. Constitution - while sending a message of
universalism; the "Kohms" had to be included instead of being fought.
The time to stop them from being victims of discrimination would be
after they were defeated, it would seem, in practical terms.
Instead, let's look at a flaw in a good episode. "Errand of Mercy".
This episode is presumably intending to suck the viewer in by showing
how cruel, ruthless, and evil the Klingons are towards the apparently
helpless people of a humble planet. But at the end... Kirk is unable
to make a moral defense against the Organians' charge of moral
equivalence laid against him.
Well, I guess we're supposed to become enlightened and start seeing
things from a cosmic perspective instead of a narrow one that focuses
on the sufferings of mere individuals.
And let's take what is arguably the best episode of TOS ever made. The
one that's a classical Greek tragedy. Yes: "City on the Edge of
Forever".
In this magnificent episode... Spock says perhaps one of the stupidest
things anyone had ever said in the entire run of that series.
"She was right... but at the wrong time."
That sounds sensible. Peace is a noble and desirable ideal. Edith
Keeler stood for peace and the hope of a bright future thanks to
scientific and technical progress. But in the particular historical
moment in which she lived, failing to respond militarily to the threat
posed by Hitler's Germany would be disastrous.
But what would demonstrate the problem with that remark?
Let us say that, like the crewperson Mary Sue, I were able to project
myself into the Star Trek universe as an omnipotent entity.
And I took pity on Kirk.
Like Norman in the episode "I, Mudd", I infiltrate the Enterprise, and
then take control of it. I use the "slingshot effect" to send the
Enterprise back to 1930 (or, perhaps more correctly, 1931, given when
the song "Out of Nowhere" first appeared as well as Clark Gable's
first notable movie appearance) and then change history only
slightly... instead of being hit by a truck, like Judge Crater or
Ambrose Bierce, Edith Keeler simply mysteriously disappeared.
Because now she's in the transporter room of the Enterprise, which is
heading towards the Sun in order to return to the present of Star
Trek.
So Kirk's heart can be healed.
But it would serve Spock right, for making that silly remark, if Edith
Keeler, now, supposedly, living in the "right" time instead of the
wrong time, convinced the Federation that peace was the way... leading
to the Klingons, prior to Worf, prior to the events of "The
Undiscovered Country"... conquering the galaxy.
1930 was the wrong time for Edith Keeler's message, but the era of the Federation is the right time, Mr. Spock? I fear your logic has failed
you.
Of course, though, the failings of Star Trek that I'm decrying are...
very understandable.
While on the one hand, one can pick up Solzhenitsyn's _Gulag
Archipelago_, or look at the news today of Putin's forces raging
through Ukraine, and conclude that Soviet Communism or whatever
ideology is afflicting Russia today is evil, in the same sense as
Nazism in Germany was evil, and saying that we should try to
understand the one, even when opposing the other was entirely right
makes absolutely no sense... this "senseless" view becomes all too understandable given another piece of historical context.
The fact that Nazism _was_ evil was not used in the United States as a
pretext to persecute anyone and everyone of slightly conservative
views.
The United States waited until Pearl Harbor to take up arms against
Nazism. But they fought in Korea and Vietnam. That's like intervening
in the Spanish Civil War - or defending Ethiopia against Mussolini.
(Which, incidentally, are things I think the United States _should_
have done, so I don't begrudge the people of South Korea their lives
as free people today, far from it.)
McCarthyism. The "Red Scare" of the 1920s.
The obvious cause of this... disparity... in responses to
non-democratic political ideologies which threatened liberty was, of
course, this:
Businessmen, who had wealth, and therefore power, viewed Communism as
a direct existential threat, while Fascism was just a natural phase
that countries went through until they reached that peak of
civilization which was American-style democracy.
So action is taken against a right-wing dictatorship only if events
force the country to do so, while Communism is a plague that needs to
be stamped out in a very proactive fashion. Hence, such tragedies -
no, such crimes - as the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala.
It is... difficult... for the human mind, which has evolved to survive
by taking sides, to hunt wooly mammoths in packs, to survive through
loyalty to the other members of its tribe, to hold in its
consciousness at the same time two seemingly contradictory ideas...
That Stalin was genuinely evil, and so were Lenin, Andropov, Brezhnev
and others as well, *and*
that, none the less, the American response to Communism was flawed.
But if you don't hold those two ideas in your mind at the same time in
their full power and clarity, you will end up making... mistakes that
other people who had nothing to do with Star Trek, like people like
Jane Fonda or even Barbra Streisand often made... the mistake of
thinking that to fight the evil of McCarthyism, you have to claim that
Soviet Communism isn't "all that bad".
The enemy is sometimes on the left, just as the enemy is sometimes on
the right. Look both ways when fighting for freedom, just as you would
look both ways when crossing the street.
John Savard
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