The late American author Sam Levenson summarized the beauty of commitment with his insightful quote: “Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.” Unfortunately, movies and television must make due with much shorter runtimes, and thus we have become accustomed to couples who instantly fall in love because they are perfect for each other. Even before modern entertainment, people have grappled with the wisdom of what makes a good match at least since Shakespeare.
“Elaan of Troyius” is a troubling episode, but it endeavours to tackle the age-old perils of choosing a partner. Although it includes a heaping pile of sexism, the overall storyline isn’t horrendous, probably because Shakespeare already wrote it. In this version of Taming of the Shrew with Klingons, Elaan of the planet Elas is promised in marriage to the king of Troyius to end the war between the two planets. She is outraged and ungrateful from the moment she steps aboard the Enterprise. An ambassador of Troyius is there to teach her the customs of his planet and help her adjust, but she is having none of it. Kirk steps in and tries to negotiate with her, but with Elaan’s hot temper, negotiations break down. She’s upset that no one likes her, which is surprising since she treats everyone like crap and thinks she is above them. It is odd that she would even want people to like her. Nonetheless, Kirk wipes her tears as he tries soothing her.
The story departs from Shakespeare quite abruptly. There is the odd throw away line about women not being logical, and then Kirk actually hits Elaan. Since this is TV, they fall in love shortly after. She wants to be with him, despite being promised to another man. It turns out that Elaan’s species secretes a powerful love potion in her tears, and now Kirk is hooked. Meanwhile, the Enterprise‘s dilithium crystals are sabotaged by Elaan’s former lover. Klingons are attacking the ship because Elaan’s planet is a rich source of dilithium. She even wears a necklace of dilithium crystals, thinking they were simply ‘common stones’. Spock takes the crystals to engineering and fixes the ship just in time. Upon arrival to Troyius, Elaan is reformed and ready to accept her new role.
On the surface, the story of Elaan could be seen as a simple Shakespeare rip off. Taming of the Shrew is a comedy which endured because of its deeper commentary on the traditions of marriage. Marriages in Shakespeare’s time were hardly ‘romantic’. They weren’t about finding love at first sight and being with someone because you care about them, but more about finances and convenience. Acting on ‘love at first sight’ in any society at any time wasn’t necessarily a guarantee of a good relationship, compared to marrying someone you don’t really know, and then slowly building the relationship over time. This is what we see in Shakespeare’s original story. Bianca, the young woman, is deeply in love with her romantic partner, but she cannot be married until her older ‘shrew’ of a sister, Katherina, is married. The Hollywood ‘love at first sight’ marriage is shown in the younger sister, and the imperfect, but more realistic, match is depicted through the older sister. The play tries to argue that a marriage between two seemingly ‘imperfect’ people can be just as valid as they learn to work through their difficulties.
This profound comparison is lost with Kirk and Elaan, as the episode didn’t have an older sister who needed to be married first. Elaan was the only woman, and the ‘shrew’ of the story. She is spoiled and better than everyone in the beginning, but through her love of Kirk, she appreciates her duty and responsibility more and becomes completely transformed by the end of the episode. By removing the comparison between the romanticized and the realistic view on relationships, Star Trek turns Shakespeare’s pithy social commentary into a more simplistic argument that ‘out of control’ women simply need a man to put them in their place.
People are capable of change, but it just seems weird that someone who went her whole life thinking she was better than everyone else would change her tune so drastically in such a short amount of time. Elaan sincerely believed that she was better than others, so anyone who opposes this view is either insolent or out of line. There would be no reason to listen to them. Perhaps she was shocked when Kirk stood up to her and that challenged her worldview in the same way that Petruchio challenged Kate. The way this was portrayed aged poorly, but it may have been interpreted differently in the long gone days of the 1960s.
Marriage functions as a death to the self, as we learn to operate as a whole along with another person who complements and challenges the different features of ourselves. Any other person would bring out different traits, whether these clash, complement, reinforce, or redirect. Sure, some people have more traits which clash with us than other people might, but any pairing is going to create a unique unification of the greater whole: the body of consciousness to which we all belong.
Hopeless Trekkie 