Let That Be Your Last Battlefield
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (Memory Alpha; Video) is that episode with the people who are half-white and half-black that’s all allegorical.
I don’t really know what to say about this episode. The allegory is so naked, so unsubtle, so ham-fisted that what could be an interesting way to tell a story you couldn’t otherwise tell instead becomes a monotonous slog through an hour.
But I hesitate because I don’t know how much my being fifty years removed from the situation is coloring my perception. How daring a gambit was this when it aired? How far did this push the envelope?
Y’see, these aliens hate each other because they’re black on opposite sides. And their hate is repulsive: they have been chasing each other for 50,000 years to settle old scores. The crew thinks it’s ridiculous, and they want to get back to doing what they’re supposed to do. All that is fine. The little twist ending is fine. Even the silly use godlike powers is fine.
But it’s our old enemy pacing that gets us. This is a ten minute idea played out in a one hour show. There’s nothing interesting that happens after the opening gambit, and the crew literally spends the last ten minutes sitting in the bridge watching monitors as the climax happens to other people. Then they just fly away.
Perhaps that’s the most disturbing part: the crew flat out says that prejudice is a thing of the past, that they have no idea what it’s like, and that the human race has overcome it. Despite being a flat out lie, this inculcates them from learning anything from the experience. The crew is our stand-in as an audience; they represent us in the story. Letting them rise above these petty squabbles without effort allows us to pretend to be able to do likewise. It allows us to enjoy our bigotry while pretending that it doesn’t exist, and that’s all the more poisonous.
How much does our fifty years removal allow us to poisonously pretend the same?
Grade
C-
