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

Counterculture movements have been around for ages, but hippies as such date back to the early 1960s, and were on everyone's radar after the so-called Summer of Love in 1967. Star Trek wanted to weigh in on hippie culture, but what could they do with it? They couldn't show drug use, the Federation had no war to protest, and on Star Trek, sex is for the Captain only.

Trek hit on the clever idea of distilling the issue down to the question of alienation, or people who feel like outsiders in their own society, and then of associating that feeling with Spock's everyday existence. That’s what they did right.

What they did wrong was to, once again, assume that the viewers were too stupid to understand what they were getting at, unless they spelled it out in excruciating detail. As a result, the people in The Way to Eden chosen to represent 1960s hippies are, in fact, virtually indistinguishable from actual 1960s hippies. They’ve got everything from the look and the long hair, to the attitudes, the flower power, rock music, and banal slogans. (“Herbert! Herbert! Herbert!”) Producer Fred Freiberger probably worried that it was still too subtle. Odder still, Chekov, the character who was added to appeal to younger viewers, was cast as one of the hippies' greatest nemeses.

The other major flaw with The Way to Eden is that it's not a Star Trek story at all. The plot involves the hippies looking for the mythical Eden, the one unindustrialized planet left in the galaxy, where they can finally get back to nature. Funny, I could have sworn that planets like that were a dime a dozen in Star Trek.