Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 78

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Popular Culture Review

Trek will be aware that love interests from outside the central spaceship usually last
only for one episode (Blair 292), and are frequently treacherous or manipulative in
nature. Despite the Star Trek edict of equality of races, this tendency seems little
improved upon the Odyssey's own distinction between Greek and non-Greek women.
Although the allure of Homer’s Sirens lies in their promise of knowledge and epic
poetry, the language the y use is distinctly sexual, as is their location on a “flowery
meadow” {Odyssey 12.159), a setting of sexual entanglements in early Greek poetry
(Doherty 84, Schein 21). The Tauresians bypass such allusions, instead overtly offering
the lure of no less than group sex. Their sexual drive is, however, channeled specifically
for reproductive purposes.
Despite its twenty-fourth century setting, then, “Favorite Son” divests the Sirens
of their role as holders of great knowledge, and instead depicts the Tauresians in
terms of the dangerous nature of female reproductive power. While Voyager much
celebrated for having a female captain, it is a male ensign through which the Sirens
story is told, not Captain Janeway. Although Voyager s ensemble cast allows different
characters to feature prominently in different episodes, Janeway is closer to Odysseus
in rank and function as the leader of her crew. The choice of Harry as the hero, and
the addition of procreation as the source of the Tauresian threat, suggests a return to
the type of gender stereotyping often present in the original series.
Indeed, the video sleeve for “Favorite Son” explicitly links the episode with
earlier episodes from the original series and The N ext Generation. Under the heading
of “Species Survival,” the video sleeve notes that in the original series episode “Wink
of an Eye” (Taylor 1968), the crew encounter a species whose men have been rendered
sterile. The Queen of these aliens attempts to take all the men from the Enterprise in
order to repopulate the planet. Just as the various alignments and discontinuities
between Homer’s description of Odysseus and the Sirens and Voyager's version of
the tale will be evident only if the viewer is in possession of specific knowledge, so
too the episode’s alignment with earlier Star Trek can only be appreciated if the
viewer has seen the other episodes in question or has read the video sleeve. Visually,
however, the saturated reds and oranges of the Tauresian costumes with their black
neck trim are reminiscent of the original series’ Starfleet uniforms. While in “Who
Mourns for Adonais?” Greek antiquity is suggested through the iconography of
columns and (gold lame) togas, in “Favorite Son” the iconography suggests not the
Odyssey from which the plot is adapted but rather the original Star Trek series.
But if following explicit references can only take us so far, this by no means
marks the boundaries of a possible intertextual array. In terms of Greek myth, the
reproductive aspect of both “Wink of an Eye” and “Favorite Son” seems closer to
the Lemnian women of the Argonautika (1.608-914) than the Sirens of the Odyssey.
Similarly, a range of other Star Trek connections are possible, such as the animated
series episode “The Lorelei Signal” (Sutherland 1973), which takes its name from