The Enterprise could be the mirror opposite of the Pequod. And that’s awesome.
I don’t know if Roddenberry intended to make a reverse Moby Dick when he created Star Trek. Roddenberry and several others are credited with writing the screenplay for The Wrath of Khan, but the film came out 16 years after the original series aired on TV. Nicholas Meyer and the writers certainly made it a point to add the Moby Dick references into the 1982 feature film, but I can’t be certain about Roddenberry’s intentions back in 1966 when he created the original series. And it turns out that the addition of the torpedo coffin at the end of Wrath of Khan, which mirrors the end of Moby Dick, was added in well after principal shooting was over and the film was screened to test audiences. So let’s dive in!
Star Trek loves mirror universes. It’s been a staple of the series dating back to the original series (TOS for short), when, in season 2, the Enterprise meets an alternate evil version of itself with an alternate evil crew (an Evil petting zoo?). Mirror Kirk is a mass murderer, and discipline on board the ship is enforced through nasty punishments. The Mirror Universe was then visited by in five episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, a two-part episode of Star Trek: Enterprise,and is [SPOILER ALERT] the main storyline for season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery. Like, the whole first season. It’s fair to say that the mirror universes are a thing in Star Trek. So maybe the Enterprise was mean to mirror the Pequod in some subconscious level.
Moby Dick has also been a prevailing narrative tool in Star Trek feature films. Notably, genetically enhanced superhuman Khan read Moby Dick while stranded on Ceti Alpha 5 (or was it Alpha 6?) and memorized most of the book. I wish I had that kind of memory! He then quotes it during his own mad quest to kill Kirk, mirroring Ahab’s quest to kill the white whale. Moby Dick is then directly referenced again in Star Trek: First Contact, but this time Picard is Ahab, and the Borg is the white whale. But Picard is smart enough to remember how Moby Dick ends, and literature actually helps him come to his senses. Hurrah for reading. Another reason to keep tax dollars flowing to schools. A book could save a starship!
So how is the Enterprise a doppelganger of the Pequod? Let’s first talk about how the two are alike. They are both microcosms. Academics have long pointed out that Melville envisioned the Pequod to be a microcosm of humankind. Well, mankind at least, as there are no women on the ship. But Melville saw the Pequod, surrounded by a vast ocean as a vehicle for understanding humanity writ large. There’s no need, in Melville’s mind, to expand the scope of the investigation of the human soul – all the raw material needed is right there on a whaling ship. His one ship offers enough character, enough emotion, enough metaphorical ammunition, to encompass the entirely of the human condition. There’s a great passage in chapter 74, where observes the whale’s eye and wonders why a creature so huge would have an eye so small. Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare’s? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel’s great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it. Bigger is not better. More is not more. And on that same note, looking at a larger sample of humanity would not help us understand it better. In fact, it might even make things more confusing! There’s no need to look at thousands of examples of people and their actions from across time and continents and cultures. The tiny crew of the Pequod will do.
Roddenberry’s Star Trek was equally conscious of the fact that he was crafting a ship that is a metaphor for the human enterprise. And this ship itself was a human envoy to an alien world, a world of the future which was akin to human kind stepping into the future. I mean, the ship is called THE ENTERPRISE! But on top of that, each character on the ship has one core function and one core trait. The ship is only functional when all parts work as a whole, making a complete human being. The engines and engineer are the legs. The weapons officer and the phasers and torpedoes are the weapon arm, while the tractor beam is the empty hand. The communications officer is the mouth, the computer or human computer/ logical officer is the left side of the brain, while the doctor or psychiatrist is the compassionate right side of the brain. We take this ship and its crew to represent humanity as a whole, and through the actions and choices the individual characters make, we can better understand live on earth and possibility even the mysteries inside ourselves as an individual. Looking at a whole planet of people would be big and messy, and the overload of data would lead to an abstraction of the truth. While looking at a few individuals, on the other hand, forces us to extrapolate and focus, taking concrete truths and focusing us to form our own abstractions. In each episode, the captain must make the choices, listening to the advice of each component part of his or her crew. And therein lies the key difference between the Enterprise and the Pequod. The captain must make choices. Ahab, unfortunately, can make no choices. His fate is sealed.
Star Trek is a show about choices. Every episode of TOS hinged on Kirk’s ability to make a difficult choice. In any given situation, the dynamic trio would be faced with an impossible situation. There was always a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” moment in the old show. Spock gave Kirk the logical solution, the cold calculated readout, and predicted the probable outcome based on statistics. McCoy would tell Kirk the humane thing to do and told him to follow his heart. And then Kirk would have to make a choice. Ahab, however, is beyond choices.
Star Trek focuses on choices (until Discovery and Picard, but that’s a different story) and in stark contrast, the key theme of Moby Dick is fate. Destiny, stars, whatever you want to call it. Ahab and the Pequod are locked on course. The title of the first chapter is Loomings, for gosh sakes! Early in the novel, a crazy man named Elijah jumps out of the bushes and tells Ishmael that they’re all going to die. Later on the voyage, another crazy guy named Gabriel tells Ahab the same thing – turn back now. All the while, Ahab ignores the assorted crazies and his trusted crew. His fate lies in his personality – his destiny is his character. It’s not a prophesy that kills Ahab, but his own anger, stubbornness, persistence, and sometimes ingenuity. Yes, ingenuity. When his compass shorts out and starts pointing the Pequod the wrong way, he cleverly jerry rigs a new one using scotch take and chewing gum a la MacGyver. No kidding, check out chapter 124. I doubt Scotty himself could have patched together a better homemade space compass on the Enterprise.
Which brings us to another aspect of the Pequod and Enterprise that are similar. Like the Enterprise, the Pequod is full of specialists. The ship has a blacksmith, a carpenter, a cook, harpooners, rowers, and even an entertainer. Each serves a distinct and unique role. But while the captain of the Enterprise listeners to the council of his or her crew, Ahab uses his crew like a nose uses a Kleenex, then tosses them aside. He does not listen to advice; he does not weigh outcomes. Ahab commands, and the crew obeys. The Pequod, like the Enterprise, is a metaphor a single human being, but Enterprise runs democratically while the Pequod is a dictator. The Pequot is the Hitler of the seas, the Napoleon of the Pacific, the Stalin of the deep.
