Interpreting Meyer’s Star Trek Ⅱ and Star Trek Ⅵ from Ricketts’s Angle of Breaking Through

All the Star Trek works have commented on the controversial situations of the time for half a century up to now. Notably, a director Nicholas Meyer let his two Star Trek films show the settlement of deadly conflicts between the opposing forces. For example, Star Trek Ⅱ : The Wrath of Khan treats the strife between humans and genetically human-made super-humans, and Star Trek Ⅵ : The Undiscovered Country between pacifists and anti-pacifists in the galaxy. Meanwhile, a Californian scientist Edward Ricketts established an idea called breaking through based on the traditional holism that the whole has something more than the sum of its parts. Interestingly, the linking points of Meyer’s two movies can be discussed adequately according to Ricketts’s philosophy in the way of treating the mutual mistrust at the higher level. Given this, this paper aims at interpreting Meyer’s two films from Ricketts’s angle on how to break through the conflictive relations between the various forces. For this purpose, I introduce the background of Ricketts’s philosophy of breaking through in the light of his essay “Breaking Through” and Meyer’s Star Trek Ⅱ and Star Trek Ⅵ and then observe the films from Ricketts’s angle. This analysis reveals that Ricketts prefers not going for the ordeal of struggle, proceeding compromise prudently and patiently, taking a relativistic position by considering each other’s circumstances, and a dialectic which is over a simple eclectic or partial way. In this sense, Ricketts would have something to say about the two Star Trek films.