OK- I'm going to be the further voice of dissent here. I was raised in Southern Arizona in the 70s and 80s, and racism was a matter of course. THE word for any Black person who had done something even perceived to be unseemly started with "N." THE word for any Latino in the area you didn't personally know referred to moisture on their backs from entering the country illegally. I was raised that it was just common fact that white people were smarter, more just, and deserved to be running things over those brown people who lived on the res up north, because they were a bunch of uncivilized drunks (this was before the Ak-Chin reservation opened their casino and started exacting revenge).
I was into Star Trek early, and though I was very much enamored with the adventure of Star Wars, as I got to be in about 5th and 6th grade and was thinking about my world a little more, Trek began to take on more appeal for me. In response, my Dad found at a local video store that was clearing out their video disk selection, (remember those? Actual movies and TV shows on a VINYL disk...look it up!) he bought three disks for me of Star Trek, two episodes each. This is not the original I owned, but here's one of them:
So, around this time I watched these six episode incessantly, and LTBYFB was among them. And slowly, as I watched it again and again, I began to think how silly it was for these two to be at each other's throats over their skin coloring that was so similar.
For the first time in my life I began to consider what it meant to judge people by their skin color.
I'm not going to tell you that I was instantly anti-racist, but it started a thought process, and the more Trek I watched, the more that idea grew. Then TNG started; then when I was about 20, DS9. And when my Dad started to gripe about a Black captain, I was taken aback by how silly that was. Because Trek had always talked about this and had so deftly cracked into my redneck programming back when I was 10 or 11.
Is the allegory on the nose in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"? Yes. Is the makeup a little silly? Yes.
Does it take a ham-fisted allegorical bludgeon to start to break generations of racism in a young mind? Also yes, at least with me it did, and I am grateful.
So, like all of TOS really, this episode is a little cheezy. But, for me at least, and I would imagine others, it's one of the most important ones they ever filmed. I will defend this episode from Keith R.A. De Candido or anyone else who wanted to take issue. Was it good Trek? Maybe not, but it was NECESSARY Trek for a lot of people, definitely including me. And yes, absolutely unequivocal evidence that Star Trek was ALWAYS progressive, and ALWAYS sought to advance the social constructs of the time.
For this, I am eternally grateful.
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