“Ugh. People really use it for that?” Captain Freeman asks incredulously in Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 1, Episode 4, “Moist Vessel.” “Oh yeah,” Commander Ransom replies. “It’s mostly that.” They’re referring to the holodeck, Star Trek‘s entertainment center aboard most 24th century starships that lets the user call up virtual characters and environments like a sophisticated VR game. That includes programs a lot steamier than those normally presented on the show, which Lower Decks makes grand sport of. Starting with Season 1, Episode 1, “Second Contact” – in which Beckett Mariner revealed a program called “All-Nude Olympic Training Facility” – the show has routinely poked fun at the erotic side of the technology.
It’s not hard to see why. The ability to arrange for an idealized sexual encounter with anyone, anywhere, in any context would be more than most people could resist. Even less satirical Star Trek shows sheepishly acknowledge the more prurient uses of the holodeck. But giggling aside, there’s a lot more to the notion than just providing sex fantasies on demand. In point of fact, erotic holodeck programs would have several practical benefits for a 24th-century starship.
According to Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, creator Gene Roddenberry intended to include the holodeck in the original series, but budgetary limitations limited the concept to a “recreation room” that differed little from any real-world lounge. Star Trek: The Animated Series Season 2, Episode 3, “The Practical Joker” portrayed a rec room with holographic capabilities, but it wasn’t until Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1, Episode 1, “Encounter at Farpoint,” that the room became formally codified. It was presented as a means of avoiding cabin fever – able to conjure up pleasant landscapes and open-air – and soon became a staple of life on board ship. The infamous “holodeck malfunction” served as the catalyst for multiple episodes, along with gentler moments such as Captain Picard’s Dixon Hill stories or his periodic theatrical endeavors with Data.
Yet even then, the show always winked and smiled at the sexier implications. That started with The Next Generation Season 1, Episode 15, “11001001,” which depicted an intense tryst between Riker and a holographic woman named Minuet. Reg Barkley had a recurring – and highly inappropriate – liaison with a holographic version of Deanna Troi in Season 3, Episode 21, “Hollow Pursuits.” Riker made it all but official in Season 5, Episode 21, “The Perfect Mate,” when, after flirting with an unavailable woman destined for a political marriage, he informed the bridge, “if you need me, I’ll be on Holodeck 4.” That culminated with the holosuites at Quark’s bar in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, whose erotic uses were often the point.
But beyond salacious musings as to all the possibilities that the holodeck entails, it’s an extremely practical way to solve certain inevitable social problems on a starship. Alien venereal disease, for instance, could be lethal and yet easily passed onto a starship crew after a bout of shore leave. The holodeck cuts down on that tendency without forcing the crew into unwilling chastity.
It’s apt to lower emotional tension among the crew as well. Brief flings and one-night stands would otherwise be common on a ship full of virile young people and would likely result in the inevitable consequences of being trapped in a confined space with a short-term hook-up partner for months on end. The holodeck lets them cut to the chase and avoid the potential emotional minefield of casual sex with a work colleague. Onboard romantic relationships are apt to be more stable and long-term as well, to say nothing of providing an easy fix for the Vulcans’ pon farr and similar medical issues.
Star Trek was always envisioned as a sexually liberated future, though it couldn’t always escape some of the problematic presumptions around that idea. Nevertheless, the holodeck’s kinkier side is simply a logical extension of that principle: treating sexuality as a human activity like any other and providing a tool for individual expression of it. It’s always good for a naughty laugh – Lower Decks simply states the quiet part out loud – but it also makes a lot more sense than it initially appears. Frankly, Star Trek wouldn’t be quite the same without it.
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