Guilty Ahabs, Starbuckian Reason, and White Cetacean Contours in Outer Space Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier Stefan Rabitsch The intermedial migration routes of Herman Melville’s magnum opus, Moby- Dick; or, The Whale (1851), are as vast and varied as those of his novel’s eponymous white leviathan. Since the sea, the wonders it holds, and the narrative voyages it has inspired have all served as correlatives for a realm that is vaster than the high seas and as yet largely inaccessible to us—outer space—it is unsurprising that cetaceans, along with the mysteriousness and awe they command, have left an inedible imprint on the imaginarium that fuels space-based science fiction (sf). Melville’s white whale has migrated into the “ocean of space” that is the vast outer space world of a popular cultural behemoth: Star Trek. This article produces a complete chart of all intermedial sightings of Moby- Dick in the Star Trek universe in an effort to document how writers and producers have extracted the same few elements to tell stories about guilt caused by personal trauma. Star Trek’s selective and systematic lifting of elements from the novel amount to an intermedial transpositioning of the character dynamic that governs Ahab’s interactions with Starbuck, the philosophical discussion over whether the whale’s actions are driven by malicious intent or undiscerning instinct, and Moby Dick’s signature whiteness. What is it about whales in outer space, and entities inspired by cetaceans in Star Trek in particular? A first season episode of Star Trek: Discovery (CBS All Access, 2017-) provides a clue; the titular ship and its crew encounter an organic, space-dwelling creature known as a gormagander which is, as science officer Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) reminds them, “on the endangered species list,” due to a combination of overhunting and peculiarly weak reproductive instincts. (“Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad” 1.07, 2017) The creature looks like a cross between a whale and a cephalopod; flappy ventral and dorsal fins extend from its elongated, tubular midsection, which opens in a sizable maw at the front and sports frilled AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 45 (2020) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.2357/ AAA-2020-0021 Stefan Rabitsch 218 tentacles in the rear. Gormaganders are not predators since they feed on particles generated by solar winds. Regulations stipulate that the crew captures and transports the creature, who appears to be injured, to a “xenologic facility” for its own safety. Once transported to the ship’s cargo hold, however, the crew is in for a surprise as the gormagander discharges a human stowaway - reminiscent of the biblical Jonah - who proceeds to wreak havoc on the ship for the remainder of the episode. An example of the science-fictional mode, the episode presents the gormagander as a plausible and thus believable entity along analogical lines. It makes that which is fantastic - an organic species who lives in the frigid, irradiated depths of interstellar space - stand in a discoverable and thus meaningful relationship with the audience’s cultural imaginary and its attendant historical memory. What is more, the ship’s encounter with the gormagander speaks to the fact that Star Trek, as I have comprehensively shown elsewhere (Rabitsch, 2019), models its adventures of future space exploration on ocean-bound voyages of discovery during the heyday of the Enlightenment and the early Industrial Revolution. The gormagander is, however, not an isolated case of the Star Trek universe making use of cetaceans and the mysteriousness, awe, and conservationist concerns television and movie audiences commonly associate with them. For example, even those who are only superficially familiar with Star Trek will have likely encountered the fourth Star Trek motion picture, which has entered the wider popular culture consciousness as “the one with the whales.” A rather lighthearted time-travel romp that allegorically comments on humanity’s unsustainable, ecological practices, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) sees Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew return to Earth’s past to procure a pair of humpback whales which had become extinct by the 22 nd century. An interstellar probe arrived in Earth’s orbit seeking to communicate, not with humans, but with the long-extinct cetacean species, causing severe ecological disruptions in the process. In a third season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Syndicated, 1987- 1994), the crew of the Enterprise makes first contact with a creature called Gomtuu which turns out to be a large, organic spaceship. The sounds reverberating on its interior were drawn from whale songs. Ultimately, a special ambassador assigned to the ship for this mission decides to join with Gomtuu thereby alleviating the respective suffering and loneliness they both feel; a man occupying the bowels of a space whale taps into the same biblical imagery as the gormagander and its human stowaway. (“Tin Man” 3.20, 1990) While never shown on television, the blueprints for TNG’s Enterprise feature a “cetacean ops” facility, which presumably housed sentient, cetacean crew members on board. (Sternbach 1996) Given such an abundance of whales and whale-like creatures in Star Trek, it should not come as a surprise that one cetacean presence towers over all the others - Herman Melville’s white leviathan. Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 219 Over the course of more than fifty years, Star Trek writers and producers have repeatedly accessed Moby-Dick (1851) as a literary repertoire of meaning(s) to craft character-driven stories set in its future of human space exploration. Indeed, Melville’s novel teems with meaning(s), cetacean and otherwise. What exactly has been lifted from the novel and how that has been reconfigured intermedially to repetitive narratological ends is undergirded by a pattern - spanning different permutations of Star Trek - which has yet to be fully mapped, let alone appreciated comparatively in the vein of what Linda Hutcheon has labeled “adaptations as adaptations.” (2006: 4, original emphasis) Consequently, this essay seeks to produce a complete chart of all intermedial sightings of Moby-Dick in the Star Trek universe in an effort to document how writers and producers have extracted the same few elements to tell stories about guilt caused by personal trauma. The character dynamic that governs Ahab’s interactions with Starbuck, the philosophical discussion over whether the whale’s actions are driven by malicious intent or undiscerning instinct, and Moby Dick’s signature whiteness are the principle components that have been transposed into Star Trek’s world. The narratives constructed around them ultimately yield one of two outcomes - driven by excruciating guilt, the characters who embark to seek revenge on those who wronged them either succeed or fail in processing their trauma. Overall, the periodic, intermedial adaptation of Melville’s leviathan of 19 th century fiction resonates with Star Trek’s unquestionably nautical timbre. “Well versed in the classics”: Spacefaring literati There is no shortage of wholesale definitions and labels designed to capture both the scope and essence of Star Trek, a popular culture behemoth more than fifty years in the making. Daniel Bernardi has considered it “a megatext,” (1998: 7, original emphasis); Matthew Kapell has mapped it as “a kind of contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk,” (2010: 2) while Chris Gregory has identified Star Trek as “one of the most valuable ‘cultural properties’ in the world.” (2000: 2) First and foremost, Star Trek is a science-fictional vision of the distant future where humanity has taken its place in a galaxy that teems with life, sentient and otherwise. Taking place roughly between the 22 nd and 24 th century, the Star Trek world has been built and sustained by a total of seven live-action television shows, two animated series, and thirteen motion pictures to date. It has spawned a multi-million-dollar transmedia ecology, which encompasses everything and anything ranging from novelizations, comics, and video games to themed cruises, toys, apparel, and starship-shaped pizza cutters. The brainchild of former pilot-turnedtelevision-writer Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek was conceived as a narrative vehicle to tell allegorical stories and morality tales while avoiding televi- Stefan Rabitsch 220 sion censors in the mid-1960s. Its fantastic world of future space exploration is little more than a reimagined age of exploration at sea which is infused with a large dose of an idealized and romanticized humanism, undergirded by Anglocentric, imperialist structures. Star Trek’s humanist endowment has left an indelible imprint on this science-fictional world’s literariness as the principle characters who populate it are more than mere swashbuckling heroes or unfeeling thinking machines; while they all specialize in various disciplines, Star Trek’s space explorers are explicitly modelled on Enlightenment polymaths. Among other things, they frequently extol the values and benefits of (canonical) literature and the (fine) arts. Mister Spock (Leonard Nimoy) reminding Doctor McCoy (DeForest Kelley) that he is indeed “well versed in the classics,” (Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, 1989) after the latter had misattributed a line from Sea-Fever (1916) to Melville instead of John Masefield, provides a bearing for mapping the intermedial appearances of Moby-Dick. Star Trek’s intertextual affinity for canonical literature amounts to what Larry Kreitzer has identified as a “veneer of cultural sophistication.” (1996: 1) He has catalogued a kaleidoscopic collection of instances where Star Trek: The Original Series (NBC, 1966-69) and its six motion picture spin-offs mined literary sources for episode/ movie titles, plotlines, and pieces of dialog which were quoted either verbatim or transmuted to fit into a world of fantastic space exploration. Kreitzer has concluded that these references and borrowings help “bridge the gap between the modern world [i.e., our empirical reality] and the imaginary 23 rd -century,” giving it “an intellectual credibility.” (27) Elisabeth Baird Hardy has ascertained that Star Trek’s literariness is a valuable teaching apparatus not only for instilling an appreciation for reading, but also for demystifying and dehierarchizing the shroud of elitism that has enveloped the literary canon and other examples of “high culture”; speaking to the intertextual realities of literary production, she reminds us that “both the great works and contemporary texts are part of a network, with one author influencing another, who in turn influences still others.” (2018: 4) For example, Moby-Dick’s intermedial surfacing on the final frontier is eclipsed only by the intertextual footprint of Shakespeare’s oeuvre on Star Trek which is particularly palpable, cutting across a broad range of the adaptation spectrum. Consequently, it has already attracted scholarly attention amounting to multiple chapters, articles, and an entire special issue of Extrapolation. (cf. Kazimierczak, 2010; Houlahan, 1995; Pendergast, 1995) Since intertextual borrowing and processes of adaptation are handmaidens to each other, it only makes sense to briefly lay bare the methodological tools that inform the subsequent charting of the white whale’s course on the final frontier. Questions about adaptation - what it is/ is not, how it works, what it achieves - are, while marred by excessive scholarly debate and terminological inflation, both fairly straightforward and yet still point at complex processes. Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) arguably stands Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 221 as one of the most comprehensive, taxonomically sound, and user-friendliest toolboxes for those traversing the mycelial network of migrating textual meaning(s). Understanding adaptation as “repetition, but repetition without replication,” she offers a “double definition of adaptation as process and product.” (7-9) Hutcheon positions her theory as an interposition to the latent influence of the “highbrow vs. lowbrow culture”-camp in that any adaptation is “a derivation that is not derivative […] It is its own palimpsestic thing.” (9) She instructs us to be attentive to what is adapted (e.g., themes, characters, storylines), how is it adapted (e.g., within the same medium or across media boundaries), and by whom and for what reasons/ to what ends (e.g., economic motivations, corrective criticism, homage). “[A] process of creation,” adaptation translates more often than not into “appropriation and salvaging” substance from one medium to another which amounts to “a different mode of engagement,” since “being shown a story is not the same as being told it.” (8-12, original emphasis) Not only does Star Trek’s selective adaptation of Moby-Dick speak to the “surgical art” (Abbott 2002: 108) of “subtraction or contraction,” (Hutcheon 19), but also to the result yielding in a remediation, i.e., a translation “in the form of intersemiotic transposition from one sign system (for example, words) to another (for example, images).” (16) Consequently, Star Trek’s selective and systematic lifting of elements from the novel amounts to only a fraction of the palate offered by a text which, according to Robert Foulke, “swallows as much of the world as it can, reaching out from cetology and the history of whaling to theology, philosophy, literature, art, and the farthest reaches of human history in meteoric flashes of analogy and metaphor.” (2002: 118) Some of the instances where Star Trek remediates Moby-Dick have, of course, not gone entirely unnoticed. Michèle and Duncan Barrett have asserted that Melville’s magnum opus serves as a “pertinent critical commentary of the modern rationalism of Star Trek,” (2001: 10) as they briefly touch on only three of the six explicit sightings of the white whale on the final frontier. They conclude that Star Trek: First Contact (1996) is “the best place to start to consider the influence of this iconic sea-going novel on the world of Star Trek,” since it draws clearly marked parallels between Captain Ahab and Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) as the latter seeks to avenge his cybernetic violation at the hands of a terrifying foe. While accurate in their assertion that the eighth Star Trek motion picture is significant, they might have been too engrossed by the gravitas of the actor’s performance as he balances Picard on the edge of Ahab’s descent into his self-inflicted, monomaniacal fatalism and rage. What is more, their reading was likely informed by him starring in a critically acclaimed direct-to-television adaptation of Moby-Dick which was released a year and a half after First Contact. In a similar vein, Elizabeth Hinds, focusing on only one instance of Star Trek remediating the novel, has located “an oblique reconfiguration of Moby-Dick,” in that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) “in the same way Stefan Rabitsch 222 as does Melville in Moby-Dick, severely questions Emerson’s Transcedentialism and sounds a warning for the true believer in the infinite progress and goodness of humankind.” (1997: 43, original emphasis) Despite providing pertinent pointers, these critics have failed to fully appreciate the systematicity and regularity of how Star Trek has put forth six intermedial adaptations of Moby-Dick to date. Only if looked in concert can we see a particular pattern emerge; it speaks to how Star Trek writers and producers have reductively extracted a series of repetitively performed character dynamics along with quotable passages and malleable cetacean contours from the novel. Largely eschewing the conspicuous focalizer of Ishmael, Star Trek’s intermedial adaptation of Moby-Dick builds heavily on two characters - Ahab and Starbuck - their motivations, and how they govern their relationship to each other and to the white leviathan. Ahab is reconfigured into a character strain, which is in fact spliced into two guises of the captain. There is the forlorn Ahab who pursues his quest until he meets his inevitable demise in a fatal encounter with the whale. Only characters who are not the principle Star Trek captains assume the role of this ‘original’ Ahab. The similitude between the forlorn Ahabs in Star Trek and the captain in the novel is accentuated by them sharing physical scars and/ or metaphorical equivalents thereof. However, there is also the redemptive Ahab; he echoes the captain in the novel when he revisits and briefly questions his own life and the choices he made in Chapter 132 (The Symphony). The redemptive Ahab is prevailed upon to desist in his quest lest he loses everything he holds dear, chief among which are his ship and his crew. Regardless of which permutation of Ahab appears in Star Trek, he is used to comment on and critically question the idealized humanism and its attendant rationalism that is the baseline of Star Trek’s world. More specifically though, the two permutations of the Ahab character strain are the products of either a Starbuckian failure or success in reasoning with the captain. Whenever Star Trek remediates Moby-Dick, there is one or more characters who re-enact the role of Ahab’s first mate. Starbuck represents the voice of reason, logic, and economically motivated pragmatism. As second-in-command, he is the only one on the Pequod entitled to repeatedly express concerns about his captain’s course of action; ultimately, he, of course, fails to reason with Ahab. However, Starbuck’s intermedial descendants succeed in some of Star Trek’s retellings of the tale. What Michèle and Duncan Barrett have labeled Star Trek’s “Melvillian treatment of revenge,” (23) primarily provides the action-adventure plots for those episodes and movies that remediate the novel. However, the “blind and self-destructive revenge” (20) of Star Trek’s Ahabs - regardless of whether they are forlorn or redeemable - serves as a mere foil for exploring the characters’ guilt and trauma which fuels their illogical need for revenge. They all feel guilty for having failed at something and/ or having failed someone. Whether or not the captains come to terms with their guilt Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 223 ultimately depends on Star Trek’s Starbucks and how successful they are in employing a discourse of reason. Lastly, the whiteness of the whale is not only transmuted and ascribed to the skin tone of the largely symbolic whales that come in humanoid form, but it is also maintained in nonhuman(oid) manifestations of the leviathan. Star Trek’s ocean of outer space is inhabited by creatures and entities whose physiognomy alludes more or less vaguely to cetacean shapes and contours. Thar she blows: Vaguely disguised whales The white whale makes its first intermedial appearance on the final frontier in a second season episode of Star Trek: The Original Series (“The Doomsday Machine” 2.06, 1967). The Enterprise responds to a distress call of her sister ship, the Constellation, only to discover that all the planets along their path have been destroyed. When they discover the badly damaged ship, its entire crew is missing except for the captain, Commodore Matt Decker (William Windom). Suffering from shock, they find him raving in the bowls of his ship; he is beaten, weary, and despondent. He informs Kirk that they were attacked by an enormous entity which destroys entire planets, feeding on the debris. Decker is transported to the Enterprise while Kirk and a small team remain on the Constellation to affect basic repairs. The planet killer then reappears and attacks the Enterprise, stranding Kirk and his team. Seeking revenge, Decker assumes command of the Enterprise and resolves to attack the planet killer, arguing that it must be stopped at all costs lest it destroys more planets. His attack, however, fails and the ship is almost destroyed if it had not been for Kirk who stages a diversion on the Constellation. Decker continues to believe that he can defeat the spaceborne leviathan with conventional weapons as long as he can get close enough. Based on an analysis of its composition, it is clear, however, that they have no chance of defeating it. When Decker orders another attack, Spock relieves him of command and orders him to sickbay. The mad commodore manages to escape in a shuttlecraft. He heads toward the planet killer, convinced that he can destroy it from the inside by blowing up his shuttle. Ignoring Kirk’s attempts to reason with him, his plan fails again and he is devoured in Jonah-like fashion. The Enterprise crew learns that Decker’s plan would have worked if he had detonated a vessel more powerful than a shuttle. Kirk repeats the manoeuvre with the damaged Constellation and succeeds in rendering the planet killer inoperative. Following the pattern outlined earlier, Decker obviously dons the guise of the forlorn Ahab. In Kirk’s absence, he assumes command of the Enterprise because he sees it as a new chance to take revenge on the planet killer. His self-destructive need for revenge stems from an openly articulated feeling of guilt which is revealed early in the episode. Kirk tells Decker about Stefan Rabitsch 224 the destruction of the planet which the latter used as a safe haven for his crew: Kirk: There is no third planet. Decker: Don’t you think I know that? There was, but not anymore. They called me. They begged me for help, four hundred of them. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. Decker then breaks down in tears and shamefully adds, “It’s just that I, I, I never lost a command before.” He reveals the extent of how much the attack has hurt him since there is hardly anything more important for an archetypal Starfleet captain than his ship and the crew under his command. Decker feels guilty for having abandoned them and for failing to protect them. The planet killer is designed to be reminiscent of the white whale. Shaped like a cigar, with a small tail and a cavernous opening in the front, its hull is colored in a silvery gray, interspersed with brighter areas. Melville’s white whale was also not entirely white. Ishmael notes that “his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue.” (152) Melville dedicates an entire chapter (Chapter 42) to the whiteness of the whale where he discusses the whale’s distinct hue vis-à-vis a cultural history of the symbolism of whiteness. The beast’s color is “the monumental white shroud that wraps up all the prospect around him,” (163) which makes the creature ambiguous and unreadable; “an anomalous creature” with “a forehead, pleated with riddles.” (287-288) The planet killer’s visual features are underscored by the way the crew discuss its behavior, especially when they try to ascertain its nature and its intentions. Meeting his rescuers, Decker tells them that, “[t]hey say there’s no devil, Jim, but there is. Right out of hell, I saw it.” Irritated by his cryptic and unscientific statement, Kirk asks for more information. Kirk: What does it look like? Decker: Well, it’s miles long, with a maw that could swallow a dozen starships. It destroys planets, chops them into rubble. Kirk: What is it, an alien ship? Or is it alive, or is it... Decker: Both or neither. I don’t know. They echo one of the central ambiguities in the novel, i.e., the “misperception of the whale as the embodiment of all evil.” (Barrett 22) In other words, this unresolved ambiguity stems from a discussion of whether the whale’s actions are an expression of intent- and, thus perhaps indicative of a higher design and/ or sentience - or, simply a form of natural instinct. The ambiguity Decker initially ascribes to the planet killer echoes Ishmael who contends that “every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent.” (152) He further relates “the unearthly conceit” that Moby Dick was “not only Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 225 ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time).” (151) In the episode, the conceit is addressed and the ambiguities are resolved. Science officer Spock, who is the epitome logic, suggests that the planet killer is an automated weapon used in a war many millennia ago which left no survivors. The self-sustaining doomsday machine simply kept following its original programming - read instincts - with none of the original programmers left alive to change it. Consequently, this space whale is not a malicious devil. Even though a reasonable, scientific explanation for the planet killer is provided, reason cannot be imparted to Decker. Both Spock and later Kirk employ a Starbuckian discourse of reason and logic but to no avail. Decker’s monomaniacal disregard for Spock’s arguments come to the fore on a number of occasions. Decker: That thing must be destroyed. Spock: You tried to destroy it once before, Commodore. The result was a wrecked ship and a dead crew. Decker: I made a mistake then. We were too far away. This time I’m going to hit it with full phasers at point-blank range. Spock: Sensors show the object’s hull is solid neutronium. A single ship cannot combat it. Decker: Mister Spock, that will be all. You have been relieved of command. Don’t force me to relieve you of duty as well. When Decker is approaching the planet killer for a final charge, Kirk implores him to desist on a more emotional level. However, the commodore is plagued by suicidal guilt - “I’ve been prepared for death ever since I, ever since I killed my crew.” - which drives his quest for revenge. Ultimately, it is his guilt as much as the planet killer that consume him. A few episodes later, the series revisits the tale of the white whale (“Obsession” 2.18, 1967). In this case, Kirk assumes the role of a redemptive Ahab, who, though reluctantly, listens to his Starbuckian advisors. The episode opens with the captain, Spock, and a security detachment surveying ore deposits on a planet. When the security team scouts the perimeter, they are attacked by a white, gaseous cloud. Two men are instantly killed and one barely survives; their bodies were drained of all red blood cells. Spock and Doctor McCoy are puzzled by the captain’s knowledge of many details about the attacks. They are even more perplexed when the captain ignores an order to transport much-needed, perishable medicine to a colony in order to investigate the attacks further. He returns to the surface accompanied by a new security team. Once again, the cloud attacks, leaving more crewmen dead. The captain continues to ignore his officers’ reminders about their relief mission and he becomes increasingly agitated. Slowly, details begin to emerge. When Kirk was a lieutenant, he encountered a Stefan Rabitsch 226 similar phenomenon, which killed two hundred crew, including his captain. Young Kirk was manning the ship’s weapons during the encounter and he happened to hesitate for a moment before he fired. Not only does he secretly blame himself for the deaths, he is also convinced that the cloud is an intelligent being. When his senior officers confront him about their medical mission, he asserts that he will pursue the cloud regardless of orders since it is an interstellar threat. The cloud then leaves the planet and the Enterprise pursues it at speeds which it can maintain for only a short time. Following his officers’ urging, Kirk is forced to discontinue the chase. The cloud returns shortly thereafter and attacks the ship, infiltrating its ventilation system. While they succeed in removing it from the ship, Spock is briefly exposed to the cloud. Having telepathic abilities, he sensed the creature’s intentions to find a planet in order to spawn its young. Based on a seemingly legitimate reason, they continue their pursuit, Kirk baits the cloud, and ultimately kills it by destroying half of a planet’s atmosphere. In this episode, Kirk’s obsessive behavior is redeemed once he reluctantly begins to listen to a voice of reason. At the same time, however, he provides a reasonable argument for killing the creature upon having convinced his Starbuckian advisors of its intelligence. In seeing reason, he succeeds in replacing his need for revenge with a more practical course of action. The final vindication of his motives is foreshadowed when he records his doubts in his log. Personal log, Stardate 3620.7: Have I the right to jeopardize my crew, my ship for a feeling I can’t even put into words? No man achieves Starfleet command without relying on intuition, but have I made a rational decision? Am I letting the horrors of the past distort my judgment of the present? This is further exemplified in moments where he blatantly disregards his officers’ concerns. Scott: The medicine for Theta Seven colony is not only needed desperately and has limited... Kirk: I’m aware of the situation, Engineer, and I’m getting a little tired of my senior officers conspiring against me. Forgive me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word conspire. In this scene, Commander Scott (James Doohan) assumes the role of Starbuck, reminding the captain of their mission. When Kirk temporarily loses his composure, he immediately apologizes; this is one way of how the monomaniacal captain of the novel is reconfigured to provide a redemptive permutation of Ahab. Kirk’s obsessive quest for revenge is once again but a foil for ascertaining the depth of his guilt so that he can come to terms with it. Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 227 McCoy: Monsters come in many forms. You know the greatest monster of them all, Jim? Guilt. [...] I was speaking of Lieutenant James T. Kirk of the starship Farragut. Eleven years ago, you were the young officer at the phaser station when something attacked. According to the tapes, this young Lieutenant Kirk insisted upon blaming himself. More Starbuckian discourse of reason makes the captain finally realize that he could have done nothing to prevent the tragedy. Spock: Captain, the creature’s ability to throw itself out of time sync makes it possible for it to be elsewhere in the instant the phaser hits. There is therefore no basis for your self-recrimination. If you had fired on time and on target eleven years ago, it would have made no more difference than it did an hour ago. Captain Garrovick would still be dead. The fault was not yours, Jim. In fact, there was no fault. Armed with an implicit understanding that he is on the road to redemption, he makes sure to alleviate the guilt felt by one of his officers whom he had chastised for having hesitated during their confrontation with the creature. The trope of the white whale is also maintained on both visual and discursive levels. Even though the creature appears to be amorphous most of the time, it resembles a cetacean shape when it is shown on the ship’s main viewer. As it heads towards the Enterprise to attack, its silhouette is reminiscent of a sperm whale charging the ship head on. The mysterious qualities of the whale’s white hue are accentuated by almost literalizing the metaphor of ubiquity; after all, the cloud can easily expand to fill an entire room, contract to occupy the top of a rock, or disappear altogether. The creature’s very existence - out of sync with normal spacetime - also adds to its ambiguous state. When Spock is asked for an assessment of the creature, he surmises that “[i]t seems to be in a borderline state between matter and energy.” The fact that the cloud feeds on hemoglobin recalls Ishmael’s ruminations on “the ignoble monster.” (150) He invokes naturalists who surmised the sperm whale “to be so incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood.” (ibid.) The ambiguity the crew feels over the creature’s intentions also undergirds the episode. Even though Spock believes the creature’s nature to be “[e]xtremely efficient,” he is still doubtful about “[w]hether that indicates intelligence.” Kirk, however, remarks, “I can’t help how I feel. There’s an intelligence about it, Bones. A malevolence. It’s evil. It must be destroyed.” Unlike in the earlier episode, the creature’s intelligence, and thus its sentient intent, is vaguely established by Spock; the creature “turned and attacked, Doctor. Its method was well-considered and intelligent.” The argument provides sufficient reason(ing) for killing it and Kirk-as-Ahab is redeemed. Stefan Rabitsch 228 One-time Star Trek writer, Lawrence V. Conley pitched a story for a fifth season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (“Silicon Avatar” 5.04, 1991) that aimed at bringing back a bizarre alien entity from the first season - the crystalline entity - based on what executive producer Michael Piller recalled to be a Moby Dick premise. (cf. Gross & Altman, 1995: 229) The episode opens with a detachment of the Enterprise crew assisting a group of colonists with establishing their settlement. The skies suddenly darken and they are attacked by an enormous, tree-shaped entity that immediately begins to vaporize all organic matter, including some of the colonists. Under the leadership of Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes), the crew members and the remaining colonists seek shelter in a cavern whose mineral composite shields them from the entity’s energy beam, allowing them to survive until the Enterprise arrives to rescue them. In the meantime, the entity had turned a lush, habitable planet into a barren wasteland. This was not the first encounter the crew had with the entity; four years earlier, they visited the planet where the ship’s android officer, Data (Brent Spiner), was found after the same entity had wiped out that colony. (“Datalore” 1.13, 1988) With the entity returned, Starfleet sends its foremost xenologist, Doctor Kila Marr (Ellen Geer), to assist the Enterprise in tracking it down. Marr used to live on Data’s home planet; she was off-world when the attack that took her son’s life occurred. She has since made it her life’s work to study the crystalline entity, tracking its infrequent sightings across vast distances. She is visibly dismayed when Captain Picard tasks her with finding a way to communicate with the entity instead of simply destroying it. Reluctantly, she begins to work with Data, who happens to hold partial memories, letters, and diaries of the colonists who were killed, including those of her son. Seeking to cope with her sense of loss, which she has yet to adequately process, she repeatedly asks Data to tell her about her son’s activities during her absence, and recite his diary entries in his voice. Together, they develop a means to communicate with the entity which Marr ultimately misuses to shatter its crystalline structure, killing it in the process. Marr as forlorn Ahab diverges slightly from the established pattern in that her monomaniacal need to destroy the crystalline entity does not end in her own death. Her refusal to follow orders and, even more so, her blatant disregard for ethical scientific conduct ensure that her life’s work as one of the most esteemed scientists are all but null and void. This is made clear to the viewer when the captain has Marr escorted off the bridge. What is more, her (re)solution ultimately bars her from processing and overcoming the excruciating guilt she feels as a mother having lost her son. She articulates the true motivations that undergird her all-consuming interest in the entity in a series of private conversations where she confides in Data among other things, “I was wondering. Do you know? Did he blame me? ” When the android tells her that her son did not record any negative feelings toward her, she divulges that, “I chose to pursue my own career. I planned Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 229 to go back, but things kept interfering. I kept thinking, I’ll go next month. And there weren’t any more next months.” Similarly, after the crew failed to thwart another attack by the entity, having to listen to agonizing pleas for help over long-distance communication channels, Marr confesses to Data the nightmarish trauma she has been carrying around with her for years; “I found it hard not to think about my son […] I’ve read stories about soldiers in the battlefield, wounded, dying. They call for their mothers. And I’ve often wondered if my son called for me. If he died wondering why I didn’t come to him.” Once she did her deed, the doctor attempts one more time to seek not only comfort in Data’s memories of her son, but also the latter’s approval, indeed vindication and absolution by way of using the android as a proxy. Marr: Like you did before. Tell me that you understand, Renny. That you know I did it for you, because I love you. Because I wanted to give you peace at last. Data: I do not find such a file in your son’s journals. However, from what I know of him by his memories and his writing, I do not believe he would be happy. He was proud of your career as a scientist, and now you have destroyed that. You say you did it for him, but I do not believe he would have wanted that. Yes, I believe your son would be very sad now. I am sorry, Doctor, but I cannot help you. Instead of finding redemption, her guilt is exacerbated by a plain verdict of condemnation. As was the case in “Obsession,” this episode channels Starbuck’s discourse of reason and pragmatism through more than one character; it is the captain though who articulates ethical pragmatism most clearly. Once Marr, Data, and the ship’s chief engineer (LeVar Burton) have analyzed the clues left by the entity’s attack, the senior officers gather to arrive at a course of action. Marr elaborates that her findings will allow her to reprogram the ship’s weapons so that they will prove effective against the entity. Picard, however, makes it clear that they will destroy it only as a last resort, which engenders the doctor’s bewilderment and ire. In a private conference with her, the captain makes clear not only his rationale for wanting to communicate with the creature, calling into question her motivations, but, in doing so, he also compares it directly with the sperm whale, tentatively arguing that it might merely follow its natural instincts. Marr: I don’t understand. Why are we pursuing the Entity, if not to destroy it? Picard: We’re not hunters, Doctor. Nor is it our role to exact revenge. […] Picard: I want to try to communicate with it. […] Marr: To what end? Picard: If we can determine what its needs are, we might find other sources to supply it. Stefan Rabitsch 230 Marr: Its needs are to slaughter people by the thousands. It is nothing but a giant killing machine. Picard: Doctor, the sperm whale on Earth devours millions of cuttlefish as it roams the oceans. It is not evil. It is feeding. The same may be true of the Crystalline Entity. Marr: That would be small comfort for those who have died to feed it. We’re not talking about cuttlefish. We’re talking about people. Picard: I would argue that the Crystalline Entity has as much right to be here as we do. Commander Riker also approaches the captain, reiterating the doctor’s course of action only for the captain to rebuke him, asking whether he is “influenced by personal feelings,” given that he lost colonists on his watch. In the end, however, the captain’s discourse of reason fails to save the creature’s life. Before Marr enacts her plan to kill it, the viewers learn of a significant shift in the classification of the entity’s nature. The Enterprise’s initial attempts at communicating with it yield promising results, indicating that the creature is likely sentient after all. Marr: It’s working. That’s a response to our signal. Picard: Remarkable. Data: Captain, there is a pattern emerging from the signals. Picard: It’s trying to communicate with us. Data: I believe so, sir, but it will take some time to decipher the patterns. Picard: Then it’s possible. Communication, understanding. What is more, echoing the ambiguity Melville ascribed to his white leviathan, the crystalline entity succeeds in evading easy detection, making its exact whereabouts oblique. While it resembles a colossal tree when seen from close proximity, Picard comparing it to a sperm whale is underscored by visuals that show the entity as a rotund, gleaming white shape from a great distance. An uebermensch and a cyborg queen as whale Moby-Dick also serves as an intermedial building block in two Star Trek motion pictures which, significantly, see the white cetacean contours reconfigured and attributed to white human(noid) bodies. A genetically engineered uebermensch, Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Montalbán), who is the antagonist in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, assumes the role of the forlorn Ahab. He ascribes the role of the white leviathan to Kirk. In the movie, some of the obvious cetacean symbolism found in the television episodes gives way to a small corpus of passages lifted from the novel, which were then rewritten to fit the imagined nautical physicality of outer Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 231 space. The movie is rooted in a first season episode of TOS (“Space Seed” 1.24, 1967) in which Kirk discovers Khan and his compatriots, suspended in stasis, on a sleeper ship. Ignorant of the fact that they were exiled after their rule of eugenic superiority on Earth had been overthrown, Kirk revives them. Khan attempts to gain control of the Enterprise in order to restore his glorious rule. However, his plans are foiled by the captain who gives Khan and his people a second chance to put their superior abilities to the test. They are exiled to a harsh and isolated planet. In the movie, a Starfleet team accidentally (re)discovers them; they mistake Khan’s colony for a neighboring planet since a natural disaster has rendered their planet almost inhabitable. The cataclysm claimed many lives among his followers, including that of his wife. Khan blames Kirk for her death since the captain neglected to check on the colony’s progress. With a ship at his disposal, Khan takes his remaining followers on a quest to find Kirk. In their first encounter, Khan makes his intentions clear. Kirk: What is the meaning of this attack? Where is the crew of the Reliant? Khan: Surely I have made my meaning plain. I mean to avenge myself upon you, Admiral. I’ve deprived your ship of power and when I swing round I mean to deprive you of your life. But I wanted you to know first who it was who had beaten you. However, Khan’s hatred and his desire for revenge are once again but a foil to equip the character with psychological depth rooted in guilt. His guilt is alluded to earlier in the film when he condescendingly tells the Starfleet team who found him, “It was only the fact of my genetically engineered intellect that enabled us to survive.” However, his intellect alone proved to be insufficient to save his wife. Kirk knows that Khan’s quest for revenge belies an outsized ego and excruciating guilt. ‘White Kirk’ on his ‘white starship’ taunts the forlorn Ahab by stabbing right into his sense of guilt upon having escaped yet another attempt on his life. Kirk addresses his adversary over the com channel, “We tried it once your way, Khan. Are you game for a rematch? Khan! I’m laughing at the ‘superior intellect’.” Enraged, Khan sets out to engage Kirk a third time, intent on finally striking the killing blow. Reminiscent of the three-day final chase of Ahab, Khan meets his inevitable demise at the hands of Kirk in this third encounter. Nearly the entire remediation of Moby-Dick is carried by Khan as the forlorn Ahab. Apart from the missing leg, Khan’s physique is designed to recall Ishmael’s first impression of the captain. He looked like a man cut away from the stake [...] made of solid bronze [...] Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. (102) Stefan Rabitsch 232 When Kirk sees Khan for the first time in the movie, he is shown as a tall, brawny man whose chest is half-exposed. He has long gray hair and sports a bronze skin complexion. Khan also bears a distinctive scar; instead of blemishing his face, it marks his chest. Being a forlorn Ahab also means that Khan’s Starbuck, a follower named Joachim (Judson Scott), fails to prevail upon him to cease his quest. Their exchanges give rise to a number of quotes from the novel which are rephrased so as to fit into Star Trek’s re-imagined nautical future in space. For example, upon escaping their exile, Joachim brings a pragmatic consideration to the attention of his leader; since they are free, there is no need to jeopardize their freedom by hunting Kirk. Joachim: Sir. May I speak? We’re all with you, sir, but consider this. We are free. We have a ship and the means to go where we will. We have escaped permanent exile on Ceti Alpha Five. You have proved your superior intellect, and defeated the plans of Admiral Kirk. You do not need to defeat him again. Khan: He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him. Not only does he quote and slightly paraphrase Ahab when the latter talks to Starbuck on the quarterdeck of the Pequod - “He tasks me; he heaps me; ” (136) - but, by rejecting Joachim’s point, he also seals his fate much like Ahab sealed his upon rejecting Starbuck’s last, frantic appeal, “Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him! ” (465) Khan continues, “I’ll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition’s flames before I give him up.” When he lies dying, his physical appearance echoes Ahab’s descent into madness - “his torn body and gashed soul bled into another” (153) - and as he watches the Enterprise recede into the ocean of space, he quotes the monomaniacal captain again, “From hell’s heart, I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” (468) Such extensive quoting was arguably to be expected since Moby-Dick is also quoted visually; a copy rests on Khan’s bookshelf and it is safe to assume that he had enough time to study it during his exile. In the vein of Kirk, Picard also slips into the role of the redemptive Ahab when he is confronted with a nemesis from his past - the Borg - in Star Trek: First Contact. Similar to the relationship between Khan and Kirk, Picard’s interactions with the Borg are introduced in a series of TNG episodes only to come to a climactic confrontation in the eighth motion picture. The Borg Collective are a cybernetic species whose actions are devoid of any individual free will for they are governed by a hive mind. They aggressively expand their territory by assimilating other species, augmenting them with cybernetic implants, and thus integrating them into the Collective. The trauma of having once been assimilated by them comes to haunt Picard when the Borg travel back in time to change humanity’s past. They take Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 233 possession of the Enterprise in the process, leaving the captain and his crew as the last line of defense. As the situation becomes increasingly desperate, self-destructing the ship seems to be the only chance to defeat the Borg. While the crew agrees on this course of action, Picard rejects their suggestion in an uncharacteristic eruption of emotion. He is confronted by Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard), a young woman from Earth’s past, whom the captain has rescued from the Borg. Picard attempts to justify his irrational decisions which opens an avenue for her to glimpse at his rage. Six years ago, they assimilated me into their collective. I had their cybernetic devices implanted throughout my body. I was linked to the hive mind, every trace of individuality erased. […] We’ve made too many compromises already. Too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again! The line must be drawn here? This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they’ve done. However, Lily is onto him and says, “It’s so simple. The Borg hurt you, and now you’re going to hurt them back.” Cornered, he attempts to argue that people in the 24 th century are no longer governed by obsessive revenge. Lily keeps pushing him, “I didn’t mean to interrupt your little quest. Captain Ahab has to go hunt his whale.” Shortly before breaking into a violent outburst, the captain reiterates that “[t]his is not about revenge.” Indeed, like in all the other cases where Moby-Dick is woven into Star Trek’s intertextual veneer, Ahab’s all-consuming need for revenge belies a deep sense of guilt in those who assume the captain’s mantle on the final frontier. Picard articulates his sense guilt in a TNG episode (“Family” 4.02, 1990) which follows in the immediate aftermath of his assimilation and subsequent rescue. He visits his estranged brother in his hometown in France where at one point he drops his signature guise of imperturbability. You don’t know. They took everything I was. They used me to kill and to destroy, and I couldn’t stop them. I should have been able to stop them! I tried. I tried so hard, but I wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t good enough. I should have been able to stop them. I should! I should! While he was a member of the Collective, the Borg not only violated him physically, they also misused him to defeat a large fleet of Starfleet ships; and just like Kirk blamed himself for the deaths presumably caused by him hesitating, Picard blames himself for all the deaths he was forced to cause. Ultimately, Lily’s Starbuckian discourse of reason allows the captain to come to terms with his misguided revenge. However, this happens only after he experiences a cathartic moment; he breaks some of the model ships that adorn the observation lounge, thus “symbolically destroying not only his own ship but the entire culture of rational exploration and enlightened Stefan Rabitsch 234 governance that Starfleet stands for.” (Barrett 21) Shocked by his destructive outburst, he retreats into contemplation and paraphrases Ishmael’s description of Ahab’s relationship with the whale, “And he piled upon the whale’s white hump, a sum of all the rage and hate felt by his own race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.” What is more, just like Ahab’s “subtle demonisms of life and thought” became “practically assailable in Moby Dick,” Picard projected his guilt onto the white, ashen faces of the Borg. (153) The symbolic whiteness is inscribed in those patches of skin which are not pierced by their harpoon-like cybernetic implants. The skin pigment loses its color in the assimilation process; all that remains is a patchwork of gray and white lines and blots. Similarly, by assimilating other races, i.e., by consuming them, the discussion about the whale’s intent and/ or instinct is revisited. Michèle and Duncan Barrett claim that “[t]he Borg, like the whale, are presented as a force in nature, as supernatural.” (20) While a force to be reckoned with, they are not supernatural. Their cybernetic evolution makes them posthuman, superhuman, and perhaps even post-nature. The leviathan that is Borg Collective is driven by the only spark of individualism/ intent that is allowed to remain at its governing center: the Borg Queen. Ultimately, her malicious intent indicts her to be slain by the redemptive Ahab who does not have to sacrifice his ship and crew in the process. A galaxy teeming with Ahabs and white whales The sixth and to date last intermedial sighting of Moby-Dick on the final frontier speaks to the fact that no matter how far one travels in Star Trek’s world, it seems to teem with monomaniacal, guilty ship masters and voracious, spaceborne behemoths. We find it in a fifth season episode of Star Trek: Voyager (UPN, 1995-2001), the fourth Star Trek live-action television series, which sees its titular ship flung to a distant part of the galaxy. The story (“Bliss” 5.14, 1999) features a forlorn Ahab, once again vaguely disguised cetacean contours, and a renewed exploration of the whale’s ambiguous state of being and its malicious deceitfulness. The crew encounters a massive space-dwelling being which, unbeknownst to them, uses its telepathic abilities to create illusions based on its prey’s desires in order to lure it within reach; the creature feeds on starships. Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), young Naomi Wildman (Scarlett Pomers), and the holographic doctor (Robert Picardo) are the only crew members who do not succumb to its illusions because they do not share the crew’s desire to return to Earth; Voyager is their home. They are at first unable to convince the crew of the deception and the ship is swallowed by the space whale. Once inside, the crew falls unconscious. They then discover a small ship, manned by Qatai (W. Morgan Sheppard), inside the belly of the beast. He has been hunting the creature ever since it devoured his family. While Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier 235 he already tricked the creature many times in the past, his obsession has left him stranded to be slowly digested. Together, they devise a plan to upset the being’s digestive system so that it spits out their vessels. Once they have reached a safe distance, Qatai tries to recruit the doctor for his quest. Qatai: I could use a crewmate like you. The beast would have a difficult time manipulating a hologram’s desires. Holodoc: An Ishmael to your Ahab? No thank you. The vessels part company and in the last shots we see Qatai resume his hunt, heading straight for the creature. Since it takes the episode considerable time to dwell on the creature’s telepathic deception, there is little time left for developing the same gravity and psychological depth as in the previous examples. Still, the pattern of remediation remains the same. Qatai’s monomaniacal need for revenge appears rather subdued. In the opening sequence, we see him on his ship, which creaks and sways as if it were beaten about by rough weather, shouting at the creature. Ah! Surprised? What’s wrong? Can’t figure out why I’m still not running, ha, ha? Can’t read my thoughts? Go ahead, attack, take my ship. Damn ship. Hold together, hold. This is only a weak echo of Ahab when he is about to be drawn to the depths of the sea by the whale. (468) Even so, Qatai definitely looks the part; he is a tall, burly figure with gray hair and his forehead is crisscrossed with scars. Once again, his obsessive quest briefly gives rise to a discussion of his real motivation: guilt. It was the same way with the Nokaro. A crew of nearly three thousand, families mostly, mine included, looking for a new world to settle. But they came across our friend here and he showed them what they wanted to see. A glistening green paradise. By the time I responded to their distress call, all that was left of them was some fading engine emissions. He is tormented by the fact that he was too late to save his family as well as a hefty dose of survivor’s guilt. There is only a hint of Starbuckian reasoning in the Doctor’s and Seven’s scientific descriptions of the creature which Qatai are simply brushes aside, “It’s a beast. Cunning, deadly.” A strong link to Moby-Dick is maintained, however, by way of the creature’s shape and them discussing its intent. Though never fully shown against the blackness of space- it is always wrapped in a shroud of clouds which makes it all but invisible - a scan reveals the creature’s contours to Stefan Rabitsch 236 be roughly cetacean. It has two large tail fins and a large body which extends to a sizable maw at its front. At “[o]ver two thousand kilometers in diameter,” it is the largest space-dwelling creature Seven has ever seen. Further, the white whale’s “ubiquity in time,” (151) and his “intelligent malignity,” (152) are echoed in an exchange between Qatai and the doctor. Holodoc: I’d estimate it’s at least two hundred thousand years old. [...] It appears to operate on highly evolved instinct. I haven’t detected any signs of sentience. Qatai: Oh he’s intelligent, all right smart enough to fool your crew into taking you offline. By ascertaining that the creature acts on instinct rather than malicious intent, Voyager’s crew refrains from rendering it harmless once they have escaped from its clutches. Yet, they decide to launch warning buoys for other travelers. Moby-Dick’s six remediated sightings on the final frontier warrant particular attention not only because Star Trek continuum has repeatedly drawn on the text’s symbolism and its characters’ universal appeal to underscore its nautical future, but also because the novel provides an additional anchorage in its transatlantic, maritime imaginarium. Moby-Dick is arguably the most critically celebrated sea novel of 19 th century American literature, occupying a singular, mid-century position between James Fenimore Cooper’s many sea yarns and Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf (1904). While Star Trek’s intermedial borrowing from Melville amounts to little more than a formulaic retelling of the novel’s quest and revenge theme with a view to explore characters’ guilt - including pertinent symbolism and reconfigured quotes from the novel - it nonetheless serves as a transatlantic counterweight to John Masefield’s Sea-Fever (1916), David Garrick’s Heart of Oak (1759/ 60), and Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore (1878) all of which serve as key maritime intertexts in Star Trek’s claim to literary and cultural sophistication. Ultimately, it is the white whale, as “a permanent fixture in literary consciousness,” (Foulke 119) and the cetacean contours it has discharged in Star Trek’s world which furnish physiognomic conceits that allow Star Trek to literalize its ocean of space metaphor. Works cited Abbott, H. Porter (2002). The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: CUP. 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