Lance Mannion writes:
And that was Rodenberry's most progressive idea. In the future he envisioned, everybody mattered. Everybody had an important job. Nobody was redundant. Nobody was a mere cog in the machine. What were all those people doing on the Enterprise, anyway? By the mid 1960s it was possible to see how computers would come to be able to do many jobs that people then did but do those jobs faster and more reliably and with fewer errors, with the bonus that the computers would not need to be paid.
But that's not true, is it? I mean, what of all those ensigns who, every time they were thrown in with the landing party, quickly got phaser'd out of existence? They were human plot fodder, getting mulched up so viewers at home understood the gravity of the situation. I guess in that sense, they mattered, but it seems a rather crummy purpose in life. Hell, if meaning means I gotta get blasted by a Klingon, I'm all for giving my job to HAL.
