@blogdiva @mwl how did this little scene about the Kobayashi Maru escape my memory? I guess I wasn’t all that invested in The Original Series and the details from that series just didn’t stick with me like the details from later iterations of Star Trek. But yeah, when you re-examine some of the doctrine it is pretty profound… sometimes.

Roddenberry was kind of the opposite of Kubrick. He was astoundingly optimistic about human nature.

I remember back in 2016 after the first time Trump was elected, to give help give people hope, The Oatmeal did a comic about how Roddenberry survived an airplane crash while he was deadheading in a Lockheed Constellation over a desert in Syria, and how he helped try to calm and comfort the passengers right up until they hit the ground. That’s the kind of guy he was, and it shows through in the science fiction he wrote.

(EDIT: it was indeed Syria, it was a Lockheed Constellation and not a DC-8, and he was the deadhead and not the copilot.)