Episode 6: My Son Is Not a Jerk Jock

The Red Pen

Amanda Jean(-Luc Picard) talks about the myth of Kirk vs Picard and Star Trek's very impactful, if flawed, ethos. (Seriously, she will fight you about James T. Kirk.) She gets real tl;dr about how both captains were shaped by the eras they were written in, how Gene Roddenberry was more complex than his legacy suggests, and how positing Kirk as the jock to Picard's nerd is reductive and sloppy. Also, tune in to find out the answers to burning questions like: When did queer folks actually appear in Trek canon? Why is internal conflict equally as important as external? And why did Trek writer Ronald D. Moore go on to pen the Battlestar Galatica reboot and the worst man ever, Gaius Baltar?

Content warnings: Mentions of racism, colonialism, and misogyny.

Works Cited:

Star Trek - 1x28 "The City on the Edge of Forever"
Star Trek: The Next Generation - 4x21 "The Drumhead"
"Star Trek: The Next Generation Writer/Director's Guide" (show bible) by Gene Roddenberry
"Gene Roddenberry" on Wikipedia
"The Philosophy of Gene Roddenberry" on YouTube
"The Entropy Effect" by Vonda N. McIntyre
"Prime Directive" on Wikipedia
"How Jackie Kennedy Invented Camelot Just One Week after JFK's Assassination" by Tierney McAfee and Liz McNeil
"Freshly Remember'd: Kirk Drift" by Erin Horáková
"How many alien women has Capt/Admiral Kirk slept with?" on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange
"Exclusive: David Gerrold Talks Frankly About TNG Conflicts With Roddenberry & Berman + JJ-Trek & more" by Brian Drew
"An Oral History of Star Trek" by Smithsonian Magazine
"Kirk and Uhura's kiss" on Wikipedia
"William Shatner Discusses Chaos on the Bridge - Exclusive" by Iain Alexander
"A New Documentary Shows How Gene Roddenberry Almost Killed Star Trek TNG" by Charlie Jane Anders
"VIDEO: Patrick Stewart On Expecting TNG To Fail, Roddenberry v Berman, Star Trek ‘Albatross’ + more" by Trekmovie.com
"Star Trek on TV and Internal Conflict within the Crew" by Chris St Martin
"James T. Kirk - Notes" from the Daystrom Institute Technical Library
"Engage! Captain Picard, Federationism and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Emerging Post–Cold War World" by Alex Burston-Chorowicz
"'It's Kirk vs. Picard!' Changing Notions of Heroism from the 1960s to the 1990s" by Katharina Thalmann
"Episode 40: Thanks for Coming to our TED Talk" by The Hopeless Romantic (Amanda's William Shatner story)

Special thanks to Magali Ferare.

The Red Pen is produced by Amanda Jean.

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