TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO COUPLE HAS GONE BEFORE
A First Kiss That Was Out of This World
In the future, men will wear skirts—well, that is if Star Trek is predictive of the future. In the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, male background characters can occasionally be seen wearing one-piece dresses with skirts that end above the knee. In one episode (“Liaisons,” season seven, episode two), an officer is even admonished for complaining about having to wear “ridiculous uniforms” that “look like dresses.” His commanding officer chastises him for having an “incredibly outmoded and sexist attitude.”
For Star Trek fans, this exchange likely didn’t feel out of place; it was hardly the first time the franchise made an effort to represent certain ideals. The most famous? A kiss—one that only happened due to a mutiny.
The original Star Trek series starred William Shatner, a Caucasian man, as Captain James T. Kirk. Among Kirk’s officers was Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, portrayed by African-American actress Nichelle Nichols. In season three, episode ten (“Plato’s Stepchildren”), the crew finds themselves being held hostage on an alien planet whose inhabitants have psychokinetic powers that allow them to make people do whatever they want.
For reasons only clear to their captors, four members of the Enterprise crew are coupled off. Both couples, Kirk and Uhura being one of them, are forced to kiss against their will. Today, few viewers would care, but at the time the episode aired, this event was a big deal. Few interracial kisses had been portrayed on TV before, and this was almost certainly the first time a Caucasian man and an African-American woman had kissed on TV.
And network executives weren’t happy about it. Given the cultural backdrop of the time, executives at NBC, the company that aired Star Trek, feared backlash. They tried to convince the showrunners to come up with a less controversial solution. One idea was to have Spock, Kirk’s half-alien second-in-command, be the one to embrace Uhura; the theory was that viewers wouldn’t be as upset because while Spock was also Caucasian, he was also seen as a nonhuman. Shatner refused, wanting to stick to the original script. The executives came up with a new idea: Film two versions, one with a kiss, and one with a hug. Later, they would decide which one to use.
Shatner and Nichols had no choice; while the promise to decide later was likely an empty one, there wasn’t room for argument. So the cast and crew shot takes of both versions. It looked like the kiss wouldn’t make it to the screen after all.
But it did, as time would tell. Why? Because when the editors reviewed the footage, they realized that in the nonkiss versions, Shatner and Nichols were working against the will of the network executives: They had intentionally flubbed every shot. For example, as Nichols wrote in her autobiography, “the last shot, which looked okay on the set, actually had Bill wildly crossing his eyes. It was so corny and just plain bad it was unusable.” NBC had a choice: Cut the scene entirely (and ruin the episode) or go with the kiss version and take the risk. They chose the latter.
And the anticipated backlash? It never came. Per Nichols’s book, there was only one letter complaining, and it was arguably more supportive than not. It stated, “I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain’t gonna fight it.”