"Lieutenant Uhura, raise John Gill
on Starfleet communications..."
Uhura: "Aye, aye, sir."
McCoy: "Starfleet's been trying for six months. If he's alive, isn't it unlikely that he'd receive us now?"
Kirk: "I don't know, Bones. We're here to find out what's happened because I don't know."
Spock: "I never met John Gill, but I studied Earth history from the text he prepared."
Kirk: "I knew him very well. He was my instructor at the Academy."
Spock: "What impressed me most was his treatment of Earth history as causes and motivations rather than dates and events."
Uhura: "Captain, no response on any Starfleet channel."
Thus runs an introductory piece of dialogue in the early (1968) Star Trek episode, ‘Patterns of Force’, recently discovered lurking on the net at the Fliiby website’s Star Trek: The Original Series - Patterns of Force (flv video) wherein my namesake, a 23rd century Starfleet historian, was (or, perhaps more accurately, will be) dispatched to a distant planet, Ekos, as a Federation Cultural Observer, a kind of anthropologist. It’s actually rather sweet to think that at a time when I was still a pre-teen and certainly unaware of the series, its scriptwriters had plucked my name from the ether to identify a character who might in some ways be seen as the Federation’s very own Michel Foucault (at least circa ‘Les Mots et les choses’, or ‘The Order of Things’), perhaps their Lyotard, Derrida, possibly Michel de Certeau, or even the famou
Gill, seen at right portrayed by actor David Brian, disobeys the Federation’s Prime Directive of non-intervention and turns the planet into a fascist state with him as its ruler. Worse, Gill does something I would never do and suggests that the Ekosians model themselves on the most ruthlessly effective culture ever known to Earthlings - Nazi Germany. Personally, I could have proferred equally ruthless models in the form of fifth century BCE Sparta, Tamburlaine’s Mongolia, Vlad the Impaler’s Wallachia or Stalin’s USSR, none of which would have got the episode banned in Germany for its ambiguous representation of Nazism, which is what happened to ‘Patterns of Force’ (in theory, the ban remains in force today). Luckily for me, Gill has in fa
Meanwhile, some other John Gills who also aren’t me: rock climber, footballer, dead theologian, Victorian gent, another policeman for Jesus, man with very large salmon...
