10 More Classic Star Trek Episodes Based On Real-Life Events

Science Fiction began as an attempt to speculate about the form of future technology, and the effects it would have on people's day-to-day existence. Sometimes it's been laughably wrong (personal helicopters by 1980, nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM), other times it's been extremely prescient (the Get Smart pilot, of all things, eerily predicted a person's personal telephone ringing in a crowded theater). Star Trek has had an advantage in that some of the things it predicted (Floppy Disks and Flip Phones) happened precisely because they were modeled after Trek).

But Trek not only discussed the future, it discussed the present. Stories that couldn’t be told if you called the protagonists North and South Vietnamese could be addressed by calling them Villagers and Hill People and moving them from Southeast Asia to a fictional planet called Neural. This was a mutually beneficial arrangement, since not only did Trek provide commentary on the news, the news helped provide script ideas to Trek.

In his article "10 Star Trek Episodes Based On Real-Life Events", Sean Ferrick examines ten franchise stories that were inspired by the news of the day. Here are ten more, all from the original Star Trek:

Balance of Terror, The Undiscovered Country, A Private Little War, The Enterprise Incident, and Wolf in the Fold were covered in the earlier article, and will not be re-visited here. The earliest episode on today's list is The Conscience of the King. It's often said of this episode that it's not really a science fiction story at all, just a modern-day story that takes place in space. How true that is.

Kirk is diverted to a colony planet by an old friend who insists that touring actor, Anton Karidian, is actually Kodos the Executioner, a former colonial governor responsible for a massacre 20 years earlier.

Kirk is skeptical at first, but takes the matter more seriously after his friend is murdered, and after discovering that other witnesses to the massacre had also met mysterious deaths over the years. Since Kirk himself witnessed the incident as a child, he must determine whether Karidian is really Kodos before he himself becomes the next victim.

The story is loosely based on the hunt for Nazi war criminals, which was still a hot issue only 20 years after the war ended. The most high-profile of these cases was the Adolph Eichmann Trial. Eichmann was a Nazi bureaucrat, responsible for organizing the mass deportation of Jews to death camps.

Eichmann disappeared at the end of the war, until he was apprehended in Argentina in 1960, brought to trial, convicted, and executed. Eichmann was famous for his "I was just following orders" defense, as well as political analyst Hannah Arendt's claim that Eichmann was so terrifyingly normal that he represented the "banality of evil".