Themes
According to Michele and Duncan Barrett, Roddenberry had a decidedly negative view of religion that was reflected in the Star Trek television series episodes; in the episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?", for example, the god Apollo is revealed to be a fraud, an alien rather than a divine being from Earth's past. In comparison religious scholar Ross Kraemer says that Roddenberry "pulled his punches" regarding religion and in the television show religion was not absent but highly private. Barrett suggests that with the Star Trek feature films this attitude of not addressing religious issues shifted.
In the television series little time was spent pondering the fate of the dead. In The Motion Picture, meanwhile, Decker is apparently killed in merging with V'Ger, but Kirk wonders if they have seen the creation of a new life form. Decker and Ilia are listed as "missing in action" rather than deceased, and the lighting and effects created as a result of the merge have been described as "quasimystical" and "pseudo-religious". The discussion of a new birth is framed in a reverential way. While V'Ger is a machine of near omnipotence, according to Robert Asa the film (along with its successor, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier) "implicitly protest against classical theism".
Read more about this topic: Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)