10 Star Trek Episodes That Completely Ignored Convention
4. Plato's Stepchildren
While it wasn't the first time that an interracial kiss had ever been seen on American television, Plato's Stepchildren was definitely a move against the norm in broadcasting standards. The stories that Nichelle Nichols and William Shatner continually flubbed the takes that required them not to kiss, or that the episode received tonnes of hate mail, all have their truths.
Star Trek did an awful lot to advance, as much as it could, civil issues that affected America at the time. The country was in the grip of the Cold War, and the Enterprise had a Russian navigator. Asian Americans had been rounded up and sent to internment camps, yet George Takei, a former resident of one such camp, was the ship's pilot.
But the sixties could be defined by the struggle for Black Civil Rights, so showing Uhura and Kirk, two lead characters, kissing was a big statement at the time. The details in the episode hardly seem relevant today, especially as they were forced into the kiss by the Platonians, but even approaching the topic was almost taboo. There had been a precious few episodes of television before that had attempted it, but it went down in history for its efforts.