The Original Star Trek Was Actually Sending Coded Messages To Viewers

Before he created Star Trek, Roddenberry was a military pilot who served in World War II. He won two medals for his service: the Air Medal and the Distinguished Flying Cross. You can see how this feeds into Star Trek, a show in which every single character is essentially “flying” through space, albeit in the safety of the Starship Enterprise.

And Roddenberry very much knew the dangers of flying, because before he wrote Star Trek he was in a major plane crash that he was lucky to survive. Following the war, he’d become a commercial pilot, and in 1947 he was working on board Pan Am Flight 121 when it suffered a malfunction and began plummeting to the ground. Thirty-six souls were on board.

We can only ever guess at what was going through Roddenberry’s head as the plane smashed into the unforgiving ground. But we do know that as soon as he crawled out of the wreckage, he and other survivors set about pulling people from the burning plane. Against all odds, Roddenberry was able to save many, though the last person he tried to rescue passed away while he was carrying them to safety.

It’s easy to see how such a traumatic life experience could have inspired aspects of Star Trek. Though the story of the Pan Am crash is a tragic one, it’s also a tale of heroism, as Roddenberry and others risked their lives to bring people out of the blazing aircraft.

Roddenberry was also inspired by the pilots he met during the course of his war service. One of these had a name that Star Trek diehards will find very familiar: Kim Noonien Singh. He was a Chinese pilot whom Roddenberry befriended during his time in the South Pacific, and the name of Star Trek character Khan Noonien Singh is a deliberate tribute to him.

Gene Roddenberry put Singh’s name in the show with a very specific hope in mind — more on that later. And hope was in fact the driving force of everything that he put into Star Trek. He wanted to present a sci-fi utopia, a better world, because the one he was living in was fraught with problems and danger.

During the 1960s Roddenberry himself was doing fine. He had one successful TV show, a Western called Have Gun — Will Travel, already under his belt. But the decade was a very tumultuous time not just for the United States but for the world in general, and those developments were impossible to ignore.

Multiple cataclysmic events occurred during the 1960s, of course — incidents that are still part of cultural consciousness today. In 1962 there was the Cuban Missile Crisis and then President Kennedy’s assassination a year later. Every American had the Cold War — the ongoing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union — as the background noise to their lives.

It was the Cold War that led to the Space Race, the battle between the United States and the Soviet Union to put a man in space and on the Moon. And it would definitely have been a man, not a woman. Sexism was still rife, and women in the U.S. weren’t granted equal opportunities under the law until 1963. Knowing that makes Star Trek’s strong female characters all the more remarkable.

It was in fact the Soviets who first got a man into space. In April 1961, five years before Star Trek debuted on our screens, Yuri Gagarin was sent into space on the Vostok 1, in the process becoming the first human being to orbit our planet. American scientists working for the newly created NASA had to hurry to catch up.

A few weeks after Gagarin’s landmark flight, the U.S. president announced that America would have an astronaut on the Moon before 1970. To many people it might have sounded like an outrageous statement, but we here in the modern day know that he was absolutely right. Throughout the 1960s more and more resources were assigned to NASA, and public interest in space exploration grew.

It was in the middle of all this that Gene Roddenberry began shopping Star Trek around to television studios. And a particular executive, one of the very few women who held a powerful role in the television industry at the time, expressed an interest in it. You’ll no doubt recognize her name: Lucille Ball.

Ball had taken her success from the show I Love Lucy and used it to create a million-dollar TV empire. She and her husband Desi Arnaz created Desilu productions in the mid-1950s, and it thrived. The couple split up during 1960, and she acquired his half of the company two years later, thus becoming a major player in the world of TV.

The story goes that when Ball first heard the title Star Trek, she thought it was a show about a group of actors. Thankfully, Ball still lobbied for the series after she found out its true subject matter and actually overruled reluctant executives to get the pilot episode produced for NBC.

Unfortunately, though, that pilot was turned down by NBC as they thought it was too intellectual. Roddenberry actually agreed with them, believe it or not. “I wrote and produced what I thought was a highly imaginative idea, and I realized I had gone too far,” he revealed in The Star Trek Interview Book, published 1988.

“I should actually have ended it with a fistfight between the hero and the villain if I wanted it on television” Roddenberry added. “Because that’s the way shows were being made at the time. The great mass audience would say, ‘Well, if you don’t have a fistfight when it’s ended, how do we know that’s the finish?’ and things like that.”

It’s often been written that NBC rejected the pilot partly because the first officer of the Enterprise was a woman, portrayed by Roddenberry’s girlfriend and later wife Majel Barrett. But subsequent interviews suggest that NBC didn’t mind having a female lead character — it just didn’t want Barrett.

Either way, it was back to the drawing board for Roddenberry. He wrote a new pilot episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” that featured some of the main characters whom audiences would grow to know and love, including Kirk and Sulu. Others such as Uhura — one of the first-ever black female characters in television sci-fi — debuted in the following episode.

This was another episode that Lucille Ball fought for. Once again she went up before her own board of directors and advocated for the show — even though second pilots were extremely uncommon in the 1960s. And it’s clear now that without her efforts, there never would’ve been a Star Trek franchise at all.

“Where No Man Has Gone Before” was much better received. Allan Asherman, who wrote 1983’s The Star Trek Compendium, was there for the first showing, and he later recalled in the book, “There must have been 500 people in that audience. When the Enterprise hit the galactic barrier, 1,000 eyes opened wide.”

“Here was a future it did not hurt to imagine,” Asherman continued. “Here was a constructive tomorrow for mankind, emphasizing exploration and expansion. This was a science fiction television series we all wanted to see. We were extremely impressed.” Roddenberry himself was there, and he received a standing ovation.

The sky — well, space, actually — was suddenly the limit. And when man finally stepped on the Moon in 1969, suddenly everyone wanted to be in space and learn what the future held for humanity in the universe. Roddenberry had his own ideas about mankind’s future, and he was going to put them in Star Trek even if the standards of the day meant he had to hide them.

The aforementioned character of Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols, was one of the most important aspects of Roddenberry’s vision. She was a black woman on television portraying an astronaut at a time when black women were usually stuck playing servants. During the 1960s, in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, this was huge.

None other than Whoopi Goldberg, who herself went on to be in a Star Trek series, credits Uhura and Nichols with influencing her. At the age of 11, Goldberg watched Star Trek and immediately ran to her mom to inform her that there was finally a black woman on television who wasn’t a maid.

The message was clear: in a utopian future, there’d be many more opportunities for marginalized groups and things like racism would be consigned to the past. Such was Uhura’s importance that when Nichols considered quitting the show, none other than Martin Luther King asked her to remain because she was a role model for so many young black girls.

There was even an interracial kiss on the show between Uhura and Kirk. It’s hard to think about a time when that would’ve been controversial, but in America during the 1960s it still was. So the smooch had to occur under duress — psychic extra-terrestrials make the characters kiss — yet it remained a landmark scene.

Roddenberry’s decision to put a Japanese character in the show, George Takei’s Mr. Sulu, was also a message. Sulu was presented as a competent and capable hero in a time where there was still prejudice against Japanese-Americans — and Takei himself had lived out some of his childhood years in a U.S. internment camp during World War II.

Takei spoke to Entertainment Weekly magazine in 2015 about the messages Roddenberry tried to send out with Star Trek. The writer had given Sulu a significant name, he explained: “[Roddenberry] had a map of Asia pinned on the wall, and he was staring at it, trying to get some inspiration for the Asian character. He thought, ‘Ah, the waters of the sea touch all shores, embracing all of Asia.’” The body of water that Roddenberry was referring to was the Sulu Sea.

But despite the progressiveness of the show, one thing could never happen. Though Takei was gay, Sulu wasn’t allowed to be. Takei remembered that after the interracial kiss episode, “Our ratings plummeted. It was the lowest-rated episode that we had. And [Roddenberry] said, ‘I’m treading a fine tight wire here.’”

Takei added that Roddenberry had told him, “I’m dealing with issues of the time. I’m dealing with the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and I need to be able to make that statement by staying on the air. If I dealt with [the LGBT] issue, I wouldn’t be able to deal with any issue because I would be canceled.”

And Vietnam was indeed a contentious topic at the time. But Roddenberry still used subtext to express his thoughts on the war. The episode “A Private Little War,” in which Kirk must decide whether or not to give weapons to the victims of an assault, is considered to be a critique of the situation in Vietnam.

There was further social commentary as the series went on. The second season featured an episode called “The Omega Glory” about two warring tribes, the Yangs and the Kohms. And the hidden message there is clear once you pay attention to the names — the Yangs are Yanks and the Kohms are Communists.

And speaking of names, Roddenberry had a very good reason for naming a character after his old friend Kim Noonien Singh as well. It wasn’t just a tribute — Roddenberry simply had no way of getting in touch with his wartime pal once the conflict was over and wanted to reach out to him.

By giving Khan Noonien Singh that name, Roddenberry hoped that his friend might see it one day and get back in touch with him. When he failed to do so, Roddenberry simply tried again. His sequel show Star Trek: The Next Generation featured a character called Doctor Noonien Soong. But again, no response ever came.

Star Trek fans have occasionally tried to track down the original Kim Noonien Singh themselves, but have never come up with anything concrete. A thread posted on Reddit suggests that maybe Singh was never the man’s name at all, and that had Roddenberry simply got it wrong. Maybe that’s why he was never found.

It’s a shame that Roddenberry never found his friend despite all that trying. But when he passed away in 1991 at the age of 70, he left a tremendous legacy behind. At that point, a sixth Star Trek film was about to come out and the franchise had touched millions of lives.

Roddenberry actually did an interview for The Humanist magazine in the months before he died, and in it he talked at length about the messages he’d sent out with Star Trek. Television was a vital medium for doing such things, he believed, because “its imagery can affect us with such power.”

The interviewer observed how Roddenberry never “beat us over the head with [his] message.” Roddenberry replied, “I think that everybody who is capable of understanding my points understands them,” but also remembered how constant censorship had often gotten in the way of him saying what he really wanted to.

At the end of the interview, Roddenberry was asked, “How would you like to be remembered?” And his answer got right to the core of Star Trek. He said, “What we humans are is really a remarkable thing. How can you doubt that we will survive and mature? There may be a lot of wisdom in the old statement about looking on the world lovingly. If we can, perhaps the world will have time to resolve itself.” But not all of the hidden messages in Star Trek are commenting on society. Some are a lot less complex, but they’re still being missed by fans. Here are 40 hidden details even the most eagle-eyed among you may have missed...