“Captain’s log, stardate 53896.” The Star Trek: Voyager episode “The Muse” (season 6, episode 22) starts with the same words that so many episodes of the Star Trek franchise do, the beginning of a dated log entry. However, this is not the usual voiceover by a familiar character of the series. Here, the words are recited in unison by what looks very much like a choir from Ancient Greek theatre. The actors are dressed in robes, carrying masks on sticks, and perform, lit by torchlight, in a circular space quite reminiscent of the ancient amphitheater. A wealthy patron holds a central seat in the audience, enjoying the show.

But this is not Earth in ancient times. This is, in fact, the future on an alien planet, somewhere in the Delta Quadrant, the far side of the Milky Way galaxy, where the starship Voyager is trying to make its way back to Earth. In “The Muse,” Voyager’s chief engineer B’Elanna Torres has crashed on this planet, and while she’s been down with a fever, the resident Kelis the Poet has found inspiration for a play in her shuttlecraft’s logs. As his patron, on whose charity the actors depend, has very much enjoyed the resulting play, “The Away Mission of B’Elanna Torres,” Kelis the Poet is desperate to learn more about what he believes are gods, the “Voyager Eternals,” in order to write a subsequent play about them. In fact, his patron demands it in just one week.

This episode is a clear example of how layered Star Trek: Voyager is with time. Past, present, and future are intertwined. Through the futuristic visions of Star Trek, the imagined future and past can exist concurrently. Starfleet’s present, out imagined future, can encounter another civilization, quite similar to our own past, which is thereby also their past. In the Voyager episode “The Muse,” the ancient Greek-like actors perform their own version of the well-known science fiction story, struggling with the demand of creating new adventures every week, as well as with trying to understand the alien characters and their actions, in a joyful play with the actual series’ real-life audience and their demand for weekly new space adventures.

In this chapter, I mean to show how Star Trek: Voyager makes use of history, focusing on this metaphorical way of making the past concurrent with the present and future.

The Future Is Televised

The Star Trek franchise is frequently described as utopian, the bright future of humanity, Earth, and the universe. Various series and movies of the franchise are set mainly in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries, but venture from the twenty-second century (Star Trek: Enterprise, 2001–2005) and into the thirty-second (Star Trek: Discovery, 2017–). The timeline of the original Star Trek (1966–1969) has been expanded with both prequels and sequels, spanning a multimedia franchise of TV series, movies, animation, comics, books, games, and toys.

The time and society of the Starfleet explorers and the United Federation of Planets, which enlists them, is said to have overcome issues of inequality, racism, sexism, hunger, war, capitalism, greed, and environmental problems. (How all these pressing issues have been resolved is not always made clear, but throughout the franchise, bits and pieces of this development are given.) This is at the same time a radical fantasy of the future and an artistic and commercial product of our own time. In their travels across the galaxy, the Starfleet explorers also encounter different civilizations, often depicted or even described as reminiscent of various time periods of Earth’s history.

In Star Trek: Voyager, history is present in occasional time-travel episodes where the viewer is actually taken back to our own time, our past, or that past of the series that would simultaneously be our own future. The past is also well represented in what in Voyager are referred to as holo-novels: interactive, holographic projections used for entertainment, training, or education. The third use of the past might, as exemplified above, be described as metaphorical. This is where the present of an encountered civilization bears a striking resemblance to something in the protagonists’ past, which may be our own past or present. In this way, past, present, and future exist concurrently, and the past is made both vivid, close and alien.

Popular Culture as Historical Culture

The Popular culture theorist John Fiske claims that a writer of popular culture “does not put meaning into the text, but rather assembles a multitude of voices inside it,” where

different readers can “listen” more or less attentively to different voices. The reader makes his or her text out of this “weaving of voices” by a process that is fundamentally similar to that of the writer when s/he created the work out of the voices available in the culture. (Fiske 2001, 96)

In other words, a popular work of fiction is never just one thing, never unambiguous. In order to be popular, it needs to speak with many voices, enabling different audience members to hold their own interpretations of the text.

Historical culture, too, is an incongruent, changing thing. It is often described as both the physical products and the collective ideas of, most notably, a national notion of history. However, even in authoritarian societies, where the official version of the past is made very clear, there are bound to be conflicting notions, counter-narratives, oppositional historical sub-cultures. As George Orwell put it, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past” (Orwell 1949, 44). The narration of history is bound to be a struggle for power and meaning.

What does that mean for the use of history in popular culture? Perhaps that the elements of history referred to in works of popular culture need to be easily recognizable to many. More than just past, they need to be History. The amount of conflict, of counter-narrative, is thereby restricted. In this way, popular imagination might be limited by historical culture, the way Fiske refers to the “voices available in the culture” to both writer and reader in the creation and interpretation of a text. With Star Trek, this might explain why the interstellar Starfleet adventures reference almost exclusively American/Western historical events and phenomena; a different take would not make it recognizable as History.

A Future Stuck in the Past?

Previous scholars writing on Star Trek and history have focused mainly on how the franchise, in particular what is now known as The Original Series (Star Trek, 1966–1969), reflects the issues and values of its production time, the late 1960s. As just one example, Mike O’Connor concludes, in his article “Liberals in Space: The 1960s Politics of Star Trek,” that The Original Series “brought into relief both the most noble and the most contradictory aspects of late 1960s liberalism” (2012, 199).

In The Voyages of Star Trek: A Mirror of American Society Through Time, K. M. Heath and A. S. Carlisle describe how the Star Trek franchise, from The Original Series up to the second season of Star Trek: Discovery, mirrors the eras in which it is produced. Using quantitative methods, they measure representation of gender, race, and age and conclude that despite Star Trek’s ideals of equality, it is not until Star Trek: Voyager that women come close to the same amount of screen time—and authority—as men. They connect this to the advances made by women in the late 1990s, mainly professional advances in fields like politics, the military, the space industry, law, and science. Heath and Carlisle also describe the “enemies” of the Voyager crew in terms of environmental issues, healthcare issues, and hopes and fears regarding rapid technological development, especially in AI and holograms (Heath and Carlisle 2020).

The same kind of limitations in screen time and considerations regarding the depiction of women in Star Trek are discussed in “‘Fashion’s Final Frontier’: The Correlation of Gender Roles in Star Trek” by Katharina Andres (2013). In The Original Series, Andres point out, the women’s dresses—“mini-dresses, with an asymmetrical plunging neckline and go-go boots”—separate them as “‘less’ functional uniforms than the shirt and pants of the men, which implies that women are ‘less’ functional as well.” Even in the Star Trek series up to and including Enterprise (2001–2005), she points out, where uniforms are generally unisex, there is always one recurrent female character who “stand[s] out because of their skintight jumpsuit, which they wear opposed to the official uniform.” She concludes: “The sole purpose for the attire seems to be Star Trek’s continuing effort to please a stereotypical male audience, proving that in the end, gender equality has not been achieved, not even in the utopian future that Star Trek wants to present” (Andres 2013, 648).

On a similar note, Brian L. Ott and Eric Aoki question Star Trek’s politics on race and identity in “Popular Imagination and Identity Politics: Reading the Future in Star Trek: The Next Generation” (2001). Unlike what I emphasize in this chapter, Ott and Aoki see alien species in The Next Generation as Others. They point out how the Enterprise crew is “coded principally as White” and interpret the recurring alien species of Klingons as “an amalgamation of the coarsest Black stereotypes” and Ferengi as “an amalgam of grotesque anti-Semitic stereotypes” (Ott and Aoki 2001). Although this is certainly a possible interpretation, and although such destructive stereotypes should be taken very seriously, I find Ott and Aoki’s reading slightly problematic. If any sign of anger from a Black person is interpreted as stereotypically Black, will it ever be possible to depict Black anger? If greedy characters are automatically perceived as Jewish, does that not just reinforce the stereotype (and make it impossible to have a constructive discussion of greed)? Going back to Fiske’s “multitude of voices,” though, these stereotypes are inevitably present, available in our culture.

A different take on Star Trek and history can be found in Victor Grech’s article “The Banality of Evil in the Occupation of Star Trek’s Bajor” (2020). Grech approaches war crimes committed by Cardassian officials in their occupation of the planet Bajor by comparing several portraits of these Star Trek perpetrators with Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the high-ranking Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele. Grech studies two story-lines centering these Cardassians, one in Deep Space 9 and one in Voyager. On the Deep Space 9 space station, located near Bajor and the Cardassian border, a former forced labor camp commander is captured and interrogated. On Voyager, the Doctor, in a medical predicament, turns to a holographic version of a Cardassian researcher for help, but is soon made aware that the exobiologist has made his medical advancements through cruel experiments on Bajoran prisoners of war (Grech 2020). In Grech’s article, the Cardassian evils become a metaphor of human evils, not simply by mirroring the epoch in which the series was produced but by choosing important themes from human history. This, as I have already stated, I find to be a constructive mode of interpretation for many of the themes depicted on Star Trek: Voyager.

Voyages into the Unknown (Yet Familiar)

In the rest of this chapter, I focus on aspects of Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001). This series starts with Captain Kathryn Janeway being given command of the starship Voyager, a new, state-of-the-art Starfleet vessel. She recruits, among others, the pilot Tom Paris, and the crew goes on Voyager’s first mission: to capture a Maquis vessel, where Janeway’s security officer, a Vulcan named Tuvok, is working undercover with the rebel group. As Voyager approaches the Maquis ship, they are both swept away to the Delta Quadrant, a faraway part of the galaxy, by an alien entity called the Caretaker.

As both crews take heavy casualties, and the Maquis ship is damaged beyond repair, they reluctantly decide to join forces on Voyager. The Maquis leader Chakotay becomes Janeway’s second-in-command, and half-human, half-Klingon Maquis B’Elanna Torres is made Chief Engineer. The crew is also joined by a couple of aliens indigenous to the Delta Quadrant, an Ocampa called Kes and a Talaxian called Neelix. As the ship’s doctor is killed, the emergency medical hologram, an AI holographic projection known only as the Doctor, becomes a permanent member of the crew.

In the beginning of the fourth season of the series, the crew is joined by Seven of Nine, a human assimilated as a child into the Borg, a cybernetic collective composed from different assimilated species linked together into a single hive mind. As Seven of Nine is severed from the Borg collective, Captain Janeway takes her in, set on helping the somewhat reluctant Seven to regain her humanity.

The journey from the Delta Quadrant back to Earth is estimated to take 75 years. As the crew embarks on this long journey, they encounter various kinds of civilizations and alien species. A few of them are familiar to the crew (and the regular Star Trek viewer), but since the Delta Quadrant is unknown territory to Starfleet, many encountered species are never before seen or heard of. In this chapter, both some new and some familiar alien acquaintances will have important roles to play. First, however, we shall take a look at the actual concept of historical change and development.

Time Templates

In the end of one of the first Voyager episodes, “Time and again” (season 1, episode 3), Voyager comes across an “M-Class planet”. (In fact, the crew spent the entire episode on the planet, preventing a catastrophe they were actually the cause of, then time warped back to when they need not set foot there, but all that is beside the point for this chapter.) Throughout the Star Trek franchise, an M-Class planet is a planet with conditions similar to Earth. The fact that the planetary type most familiar to humans is not designated “A-Class” indicates that this scale was not created with Earth as its norm. The diegetically earlier (but from a later television production) human space travelers of Star Trek: Enterprise instead use “Mishara-Class planet,” indicating that the concept originates from a Vulcan word. This would make sense, diegetically, since the Starfleet founding member planet Vulcan traveled between solar systems before humans did.

In the Voyager episode “Time and again,” however, the concept M-Class planet is not the only Star Trek or Starfleet notion referred to. When the planet shows up on Voyager’s sensors, Tactical Officer Tuvok describes it like this: “Sensors do show humanoid life. There is no satellite system, and no indications of spacecraft in the vicinity. It appears to be a pre-warp civilization.” At this, Captain Janeway turns to Neelix, a Delta Quadrant native who just joined the Voyager crew, and explains: “Which means, as a policy, we don’t involve ourselves in their affairs,” to which Neelix responds: “Of course. A most enlightened philosophy.”

This policy is known as the Prime Directive and is well established in the Star Trek franchise (both in in-world Starfleet regulations and in series plot writing). According to the Prime Directive, Starfleet is not to interfere with alien cultures who lack the technological development of the interplanetary Federation. A “pre-warp civilization,” as cited above, is specifically a civilization that lacks the ability to travel at warp speed, the kind of speed that makes the relatively quick interplanetary travel of Star Trek possible. The moral implications of the Prime Directive, and the reasons for occasionally breaking it, can be discussed at length, but what is interesting in the context of this chapter is what this indicates with regard to historical development.

First, the focus on technological development might not come as a great surprise in a science fiction series. However, Star Trek is a franchise mainly, if not solely, based on liberal, humanitarian values, a series that more often than not points to the value of diplomacy, of learning, meeting, investigating, and understanding the Other, even when they choose to live their lives differently than We do. When speaking of their own progress, Starfleet officials emphasize how humans in their time have eradicated things like war, poverty, and injustice. Captain Janeway makes this clear, for example, when the Voyager crew encounters a group of humans in the Delta Quadrant who are the descendants of individuals secretly abducted by aliens in 1937. She muses on their “thriving, sophisticated culture” and concludes:

The remarkable thing about the humans on this planet, is that they evolved very much like the people of Earth. Tens of thousands of light-years apart, both civilizations managed to create a world they could be proud of, one where war and poverty simply don’t exist.

She does call it remarkable, not in any way inevitable. Yet, the impression of the viewer might be that of human beings as exceptionally destined for good things. The catch of this particular science fiction brand of self-congratulatory ethnocentrism, however, is that these great achievements of humankind have, in fact, not yet happened.

Second, one must ask what the Prime Directive’s and the series’ distinction between “pre-warp” and “warp” civilizations means when it comes to the predetermination of historical development and change. Are all civilizations, left to their own affairs, destined to steadily evolve into that of Starfleet and the Federation? Are these to be understood as the pinnacle of creation?

An especially well-suited example of the development of civilizations in Star Trek: Voyager is given in the episode “The Blink of an Eye” (season 6, episode 12). Here, the starship gets stuck in the atmosphere of a planet where time passes exceptionally fast. “For each second that passes on Voyager, nearly a day goes by on the planet,” we are informed. First officer Chakotay is excited by the unique possibilities of studies this entails, while his colleague, chief engineer and half-Klingon, half-human B’Elanna Torres, is jaded:

Chakotay: This could be the greatest anthropological find of my career. If there’s an intelligent species down there, we’ll be able to track their development not just for days or weeks, but for centuries.

Torres: Watch them discover new and better ways of beating each other over the head.

Chakotay: They won’t necessarily follow the Klingon model.

Torres: As opposed to the human model?! It will take a few hours to make the adjustments [to the ship’s equipment].

Chakotay: A few hours. We might miss the rise and fall of a civilization.

Torres: So we’ll watch the next one.

As their banter indicates, if there is actually a human and a Klingon model of development, both species have a violent history (although Klingons are even in the series’ present well-known for their honor-based culture’s emphasis on physical strength, fighting, and drinking). The ship’s involuntary position, stuck in the discovered planet’s atmosphere, does however let its crew follow the development of a civilization, and it is a rather familiar development.

As an audience, we are treated to a few glimpses of this development, from ancient times, when Voyager’s presence as a light in the sky, causing earthquakes on the planet, is interpreted as a godly presence; to a space-age civilization. This development is tracked by Chakotay and Torres and seems to hold no great surprises, although it is starting to become clear to them that the presence of their own ship is somehow affecting the culture they are watching.

Torres: The next series of scans are coming through. I’m downloading them into the display buffer.

Chakotay: No doubt about it. There’s a city down there.

Torres: Elevated levels of carbon monoxide, ammonium—that’s progress, alright.

Chakotay: They’ve developed internal combustion technology since the last few scans. Look at these radial lines. It looks like a system of roads.

[---]

Chakotay: Look at the amount of iron being used in that city. That’s ten times what you’d expect in a culture at this stage of development.

Torres: If you lived on a planet that wouldn’t stop shaking, you might be doing the same thing. If they reached this stage of development, they must be observing us.

Here, it is clear that the development on the planet follows a predictable path where cities and cars and steel-reinforced buildings lead to space observation and space travel—underlined by a cut after the last quoted line to precisely a space observatory on the planet, where scientists are indeed observing Voyager. The catch is, the presence of the alien spaceship, causing constant earthquakes, causes the planet’s inhabitants to focus on developing weapons technology to blow the disturbance out of the sky. It actually takes a violation of the Prime Directive, since the planet’s population is not yet warp-capable, to meet them and persuade them not to blow the ship up, but instead to help Voyager leave the planet’s atmosphere. Without the presence of Voyager, the impression is that the planet in “Blink of an Eye” might have completely followed the same developmental curve as Earth, supporting the impression of Earth’s development as something of a norm in Star Trek: Voyager.

There are, however, plenty of civilizations that might or might not have developed warp-technology according to this curve, but still give a somewhat different impression than the people of Starfleet and the Federation. I have already mentioned the Klingons, often a subject of cultural and physical clashes with humans in the Star Trek franchise, but alien encounters are frequent. Since Star Trek: Voyager takes place in a different part of space from the other series, we are introduced to plenty of new species, as well as some familiar ones. In the upcoming parts of this chapter, I will argue these encountered alien species are not only to be perceived as Others but can actually be read as a metaphor of the human past of Star Trek—our own past or even present. As opposed to the apparent Othering of the alien species encountered by Voyager, I argue they can in fact be seen as representations of ourselves and our past. We were Ferengi, we were Malon, and we were even a little bit Hirogen.

We Were Ferengi

The Ferengi are an alien species who appear throughout the Star Trek franchise, from The Next Generation on. They are depicted as greedy, scheming, and untrustworthy, and at the same time audacious and comically cowardly, often causing trouble for the Federation main characters. When given more recurring roles, like bar owner Quark and his family on the space station Deep Space Nine in the Star Trek series of that name, even Ferengi are shown to have more complex personalities.

In Star Trek: Voyager, Ferengi appear in only one episode, called “False Profits” (season 3, episode 5). In the beginning of this episode, the Voyager crew discovers the planet Takar. Their instruments are “picking up an M-Class planet. Humanoid life signs. However, metallurgical analysis indicates a pre-industrial civilization, a Bronze age level of technology.” At the same time, they are “detecting evidence that these people have had contact with the Alpha Quadrant,” specifically “a modulated energy discharge that appears to be consistent with the use of a replicator,” a Federation piece of technology that produces food or objects seemingly out of thin air.

After Tovuk and Chakotay go down to the planet to investigate, they discover that a couple of Ferengi have made their way to the Delta Quadrant through an unstable wormhole in space. On Takar, they have completely taken control of the population, appearing to them as gods or prophets known as “the Holy Sages.” The two Ferengi are accumulating great wealth, while devastating the planets population. Simultaneously, they are feeding them their own values, the capitalist wisdom of the Ferengi scripture The Rules of Acquisition, with catch phrases such as “Greed is eternal” and “Exploitation begins at home.”

When Chakotay and Tuvok return to Voyager, their condemnation of the Ferengi is quite strong.

Chakotay: It seems the people have a myth, an epic poem called “Song of the Sages,” which predicts the arrival of two demigods from the sky, the Sages, who would rule over the people as benevolent protectors.

Tuvok: But these Ferengi are anything but benevolent.

Chakotay: What they have done is co-opt the local mythology by using advanced technology like the replicator to convince the people that they’re the two Sages spoken of in the poem.

Tuvok: Of course, being Ferengi, they haven’t just co-opted the mythology. They’ve cornered the market. On everything.

Chakotay: It’s disgusting, Captain. The two Ferengi live in a palatial temple, while the people are lucky to have a roof over their heads.

Tuvok: Apparently, it wasn’t always like that. According to the people that we met, before the Ferengi came, the society may have been primitive, but it was flourishing.

Although the Federation principle is to not interfere with other cultures, Captain Janeway finds a loophole in the fact that the Federation can be seen as partially responsible for the Ferengi making their way through the wormhole and decides to intervene and send the Ferengi back where they came from. “I certainly don’t intend to leave them here to continue exploiting an innocent society,” she states. In the end, the Voyager crew manages to send the Ferengi away in a way that harmonizes with the local myths of the Sages, leaving the people of Takar satisfied and free of exploitation.

The behavior of the Ferengi in this episode is depicted and described as completely despicable. It is quite clear that the Voyager crew would never sink to such behavior. However, to the viewer, the actions of the Ferengi might just as likely seem familiar. A great deal of their behavior is strongly reminiscent of the colonial era in Earth’s history. The Ferengi have arrived in a new land, where they learn only enough about the natives’ way of life to exploit the local beliefs to their own benefit. They ruthlessly gather riches, relying on their superior technology and enforcing their own belief system on the local population.

The lifestyle of the Ferengi is that of extreme capitalism. Greed is their culture and religion, but theirs is also a society of great inequality. In the episode “False Profits,” no female Ferengi are depicted, but the male pair of them interact mainly with other men, while keeping young, beautiful, and scantily clad local women around for massaging their lobes (the preferred erotic pleasure of the big-eared Ferengi). The Ferengi male is a patriarch, and, as we’ve learned, “Exploitation begins at home.”

Neither greed nor capitalism nor gender inequality are strangers to human history (or for that matter, to the present). With the Ferengi, we are free to despise and laugh at these qualities as something other to our own characteristics, as Otherness. At a closer look, however, might the creature in the distorting mirror of science fiction appear familiar? One could argue that the profit- and status-seeking Ferengi, constantly counting their gold-pressed latinum, are more similar to today’s human beings than the idealized, non-capitalist citizens of the Federation. Imagining a humankind of the future, free from greed, might be the most radical of all of Star Trek’s futuristic visions.

We Were Malon

The Ferengi are far from the only profit-hungry aliens in the Star Trek universe. In the episode “Night” (season 5, episode 1), Voyager reaches a starless void, heavy with theta radiation. Before they know it, they are under attack, but another vessel chases the attackers away. When the captain of this other vessel greets them, it is with the words “I had to fire thirteen spatial charges to drive those ships off. I expect to be compensated.”

If somewhat brusque, the alien captain, a Malon named Emck, first appears friendly. Then, the Voyager crew encounters one of the beings that attacked them in the first place. This creature is indigenous to the Void and dying of radiation poisoning. So are, in fact, all of his species. The Malon are dumping their toxic waste in their habitat. “They are poisoning our space. We don’t know why,” the alien explains. “We tell them they are killing us. They won’t listen. We tried to stop them. They are too strong.”

With this insight, Captain Janeway and Chakotay confront the Malon captain:

Janeway: You’re using their space as a dumping ground for your anti-matter waste. Why?

Emck: My civilization produces six billion isotons of industrial by-product every day. This region is the perfect disposal site.

Chakotay: How convenient. For you. A spacial vortex in the middle of nowhere, far away from your own system. Out of sight, out of mind. The problem is, somebody lives here.

Emck: One species.

Janeway: One’s enough. We didn’t come here to debate the issue. We came here to offer a peaceful solution.

Emck: What kind of solution?

Janeway: My people use anti-matter as well, but we’ve found ways to purify the reactant so there’s no toxic waste. We’ll show you.

The Malon is shown the technology to purify and recycle his toxic waste. He is impressed. But he turns the offer down, saying: “This would solve a lot of problems on my world. Unfortunately, it would also put me out of business.”

The Starfleet crew cannot believe what they are hearing, and Chakotay tries to argue against the Malon’s fear of being made obsolete and throwing “the waste export industry into chaos.”

Chakotay: We’re proposing changes, some of them difficult. But progress can also bring new opportunities. Given time, this could turn to your advantage.

Emck: I already have the advantage—the vortex. No one knows about it, except me and my crew. By ejecting my cargo here, I cut expenses in half. I won’t sacrifice that.

Torres: I guess mass murder doesn’t factor into your profit margin?!

Not being able to persuade the Malon to stop dumping his toxic waste, Voyager manages to destroy the vortex, and thereby close off the waste hauler’s profitable shortcut into the Void.

Despite technical advancements similar to that of the Federation, the Malon choose a different path than them. Rather than dealing with their waste problems, they chose to dump them on other, defenseless creatures, far away from their own home planet. “Out of sight, out of mind.” This strategy is, of course, not unlike those of Earth’s industrial era, dumping toxic waste in the ground, the ocean, in the wilderness, or simply shipping it off to be dealt with by less fortunate people in other parts of the world. This analogy may not be explicitly pronounced, but it is certainly there for interpretation. We were, and are still, Malon.

We Were Hirogen

The Voyager crew’s first encounter with the alien species Hirogen occurs in an episode called “Message in a Bottle” (season 4, episode 14). In this, Voyager establishes contact with Starfleet for the first time since arriving in the Delta Quadrant. They do so using alien technology; a network of relays they believe to be abandoned. However, the network is claimed by a Hirogen, who will not let them use it any further. Without the captain clearing her approach, Seven of Nine sedates the uncooperative Hirogen by using the network connection to give him an electric shock. She justifies this strategy simply with “He wasn’t responding to diplomacy.”

This description returns as Voyager continues to cross paths with the Hirogen. In the episode “Prey” (season 4, episode 16), Chakotay concludes: “From what I’ve found in their database, diplomacy isn’t a part of their lifestyle. They don’t see us as equals. To them, we are simply game.” Even though Captain Janeway is determined to prove them wrong by showing them compassion, the Hirogen respond at best with doubt and contempt. The Voyager senior staff is also skeptical, with Seven of Nine openly defying the captain’s orders, and the usually logical Tuvok passing judgment on the Hirogen with the assessment “I believe we should consider them extremely dangerous. They seem to lack any moral center.”

Tuvok and Seven could be excused. In the episode “Hunters” (season 4, episode 15), they are attacked in their space shuttle and taken captive by a pair of Hirogen, credited only as Alpha-Hirogen and Beta-Hirogen. The prisoners wake up in what looks a bit like a torture chamber, filled with instruments and trophies like skeletons and skulls. The Hirogen even complain about what an easy catch they were: “You were pathetic prey. Easily taken. The hunt was not satisfying.” Still, they are happy with their rare find, since their parts will make original trophies. “Unusual relics are prized,” one of them explains to their prey. “Yours will make me envied by men and pursued by women.”

In the following episode, “Prey,” Voyager takes in a wounded Hirogen, and thereby gets access to his ship and its database. This allows them to analyze the Hirogen more carefully.

Chakotay: The entire culture seems to be based on the hunt. Social rituals, art, religious beliefs. They’re nomadic. Their existence is driven by the pursuit of prey, and it’s carried them across huge distances.

Tuvok: There is no evidence of a home planet. Their ships travel alone or in small groups. On occasion, several will join forces in a multi-pronged attack.

Chakotay: Like wolves.

To the Voyager crew, this lifestyle is quite strange. They even exchange a look of curious disgust at the fact that the Hirogen seem to, in part, use their victims for food. This is something the species of the Federation have put long past them, gaining their nutrition from replicators or, when the opportunity presents itself, from the vegetable kingdom.

Unlike the Federation, having put hunting and meat eating behind them with technological (and moral) development, the Hirogen, despite having made obviously similar technical advancement, have not. Below, we will return to their ability to “evolve,” but first, I wish to point to our similar origins. Humans were, and are, of course, hunters. But this is not the only dark side of humanity’s past (and perhaps, present) the Hirogen episodes explore: as we shall see, this also includes fascism.

Klingons Versus Nazis

The Hirogen are soon to return to Voyager. In the two-part episode “The Killing Game” (season 4, episodes 18 and 19), they have taken over the ship, and, with the help of neural implants, reduced the crew to characters in a great and deadly holodeck game. They base these games on information from Voyager’s database on Federation history. As the Hirogen leader, the Alpha, states: “These people have a violent history.” As the Doctor is one of few Voyager crewmen to maintain his memories, being left to patch up all who are wounded in the holodeck simulation, he is able to inform Seven of Nine about the situation: “This has been going on for nineteen days. Dozens of battle scenarios, one more brutal than the next. You should see what a mess you were after the Crusades …”

The episodes do not, however, start with human history, but in media res with Captain Janeway as a Klingon, fighting a Hirogen. The Hirogen is pleased with this “resilient prey,” deals her life-threatening wound, and then has her sent to sickbay to be patched up and reprogrammed to join the majority of the crew in a simulation of Second World War France. The smaller simulation of the Klingons warriors, drinking before a battle, is, however, kept running, with a new Voyager crew member being tested as a Klingon.

While his Hirogen subordinates are anxious to get to the kill, the Alpha who has taken over Voyager has a specific purpose—to learn from his prey, and thereby evolve his species:

Alpha: Each prey exposes us to another way of life and makes us re-evaluate our own. Have you considered our future? What will become of us when we have hunted this territory to exhaustion?

Beta: We will travel to another part of space, search for new prey, as we have always done.

Alpha: A way of life that hasn’t changed for a thousand years.

Beta: Why should it?

Alpha: Species that don’t change—die. We’ve lost our way. We’ve allowed our predatory instincts to dominate us. We disperse ourselves throughout the quadrant, sending ships in all directions. We’ve become a solitary race, isolated. We’ve spread ourselves too thin. We’re no longer a culture. We have no identity. In another thousand years, no one will remember the name Hirogen. Our people must come back together, combine forces, rebuild our civilization.

Beta: What of the hunt?

Alpha: The hunt will always continue. But in a new way. I intend to transform this ship into a vast simulation, populated with a varied and endless supply of prey. In time, this technology can be duplicated for other Hirogen. These holodecks will allow us to hold on to our past, while we face the future.

This conversation takes place with the pair of Hirogen dressed in full Nazi uniforms, since the simulation they are currently playing is that of World War II. The holodeck scene is that of a small town in France, occupied by Nazi Germany, but on the verge of being liberated by the Americans. In this simulation, Voyager crew members play the part of the French resistance movement, with Captain Janeway as its leader, while Chakotay is the Captain leading the American troops. The reasons for the Hirogen to choose the losing side of the war are never made clear, although they seem to slip in and out of their Nazi characters with a natural ease. There are degrees to this, however. The Beta is clearly drawn to the Nazi ideal of strength, blood, and superiority. The more visionary Alpha, on the other hand, seems to find the rhetoric quite tiresome and unfounded. At one point, he snaps at a subordinate human Nazi officer, telling him: “You yourself, are you stronger than these degenerate races? More cunning? And if you were alone, without an army supporting you, would you continue the hunt? If your prey were armed instead of defenseless, what then? You are superior to no one!”

There is of course a certain comical effect to the Nazis going on about being a superior race, while failing to notice that their leader is actually a bumpy headed, redish-skinned alien. The Nazis seem, in fact, to lack the ability to learn and change that the Hirogen Alpha calls for. He finds these qualities in the Allied Forces from the World War II simulations, a resistance soon intertwined with the resistance of the Voyager crew against the Hirogen take-over of their ship. In negotiations with Captain Janeway, the Hirogen Alpha credits humanity with being resilient and cunning. “You seem,” he says, “to recognize the need for change.”

These ambitions will, however, be the death of the Alpha, as his subordinate Beta turns against him, inspired by the Nazi rhetoric. His reign does not last long, however, and a third Hirogen leader can call a ceasefire and leave Voyager. As the Hirogen withdraw, Captain Janeway bestows them with the technology needed to create their own holodeck. The new Alpha will make no promises of using it, saying how he is not as “unconventional” as his predecessor.

In my opinion, the conflict between, in part, what the original Hirogen Alpha describes in “The Killing Game” and what is represented by his assassin, the Beta, and the Nazi occupational force with which he is so closely linked, constitutes something essential in the Star Trek universe. Starfleet, though not perfect, is portrayed as striving toward change, openness, exploration, and learning. The Hirogen Alpha’s ideas of learning from other people touches on this ideal, but distorts it somewhat by still referring to those encountered as “prey.” The cyborg enemies of the Federation, the Borg, have a similar unscrupulous approach, as they accumulate knowledge from everyone they meet, but do this by “assimilating” them, thereby effectively killing or brainwashing them. In the final battle against the Hirogen occupying Voyager, the ship’s crew (both in their capacity as themselves and as World War II resistance and the Allied Forces) is joined by the Klingons from the other holodeck simulation. The Hirogen and Nazis are therefore defeated by interstellar diversity, very much in contrast to the inflexible, hierarchical Nazi/Hirogen way of thinking. In fact, one can argue, they are beaten by the multicultural diversity that is Starfleet—and Star Trek.

“And Now, for the Conclusion”

At first glance, science fiction may appear as the opposite of history. It is fantasy, imagination, freed from the ties of the present and past. But is it, really? Can we think about the future without taking some sort of guidance from the past? The frequent use of historical references in Stark Trek: Voyager certainly seems to imply that we cannot.

In this chapter, I combine John Fiske’s concept “multitude of voices” with that of historical culture. A popular text does not speak in one, conclusive voice. The text can never be taken to mean only one thing—if it did, it could not be popular. The voices put together in the text, Fiske claims, come from those available in the surrounding culture. This is true, also, of the historical culture. When, for example, grasping for a historical image of evil arrogance and cruelty, Nazi German is an easily recognizable point of reference. Had the Hirogen episodes of Voyager instead chosen for example those of the Rwandan genocide, the images would risk failing to carry meaning to a wider (primarily Western) audience. As a TV series is not only a product of historical culture but also produces historical meaning it does, however, also risk reproducing the same commonly known images of history, never really challenging the status quo.

This is true not only of iconic historical events, persons, and phenomenon but of ideas of historical change and development. In several examples discussed in this chapter, Voyager perpetuates strong ideas of human (or alien) development as a forward, teleological movement, one of progress toward ever greater technical and moral achievements. At the same time, these ideas are rather vaguely phrased. The openness of the text makes it more prone to evoke questions than to give unambiguous answers.

In this chapter, I have focused mainly on what might be called a metaphorical use of history in Star Trek: Voyager. While it is completely possible to interpret alien species in Stark Trek as Others, as opposed to the mainly white and Western, Earth-centered Starfleet, I argue for the possibility of another interpretation, that of them as an othering of ourselves. We were (to the future), we are (in the present) the greedy Ferengi, exploiting those less fortunate than us. We are the unimaginative Malon captain, dumping toxic waste where it does not immediately affect his own environment, uninterested in a solution unless it gives direct profits to himself. We even were, and perhaps still are, the Nazi Hirogen, too comfortable at the top of the food chain to want to rethink and change his ways. By representing our own past or present as Other, concurrently putting our past, present, and future alongside each other, we can see them from a distance that might prove illustrative and constructive. If the future Starfleet could put these problems behind them, then maybe so can we?