Star Trek Episode Featuring Nazis Airs for the First Time in Germany



The 1968 episode of Star Trek entitled "Patterns of Force" is set in a society modeled after Nazi Germany. Because so many uniforms from the Third Reich are featured in it, the episode was not aired in a Germany still sensitive to anything remotely resembling Nazism. But recently the broadcasting company ZDF concluded that it is time to make that episode available for German Trekkies who have never had the opportunity to watch it. Due to controversial subject matter, broadcasting officials will give it a restricted rating and only air it after 10 PM.

There is still no news about when "Spectre of the Gun" will be permitted in Arizona.

Link -via The Mary Sue | Image: Paramount

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By modern standards, Roddenberry was unimaginative and his plots often silly. But by the standards of the day, his science fiction was groundbreaking.

On a related note, it's a pity that he was not allowed to stick to his original plan and have a female first officer and decent uniforms for the women on board.
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Ryan - I am German (and Canadian, dual citizenship) but have lived in Canada all my life. We spoke German at home and I didn't really learn English until I started going to school, and spoke with a German accent when I was younger. As a young child I was regulary beat up on the school bus by teenagers who "hated Germans" presumably because of things their grandparents had conditioned them with... Not a fun experience. The schoolboard's dubious solution was to bring in a speech therapist to eliminate my accent (they did the same for some Dutch kids going through the same thing).
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I have to put something straight here: The Episode was not shown during the original Run of Star Trek on german Public Broadcasting during its initial run or the later Network reruns because of the Nazi Uniforms, but because it had a higher Rating than other Episodes (16+ instead of 12+) and would have to be send later in the evening instead of the usual Afternoon Spot Star Trek usually had.

And it was not the first time this Episode was shown here, it was shown on PPV some years ago.

Patterns of Force was not the only Episode not shown during the initial run, the Programming Directors of the ZDF decided that nearly 40 out of 79 Episodes were to brutal and/or disgusting to be shown in german Television, especially in a "Kiddies Show" like Star Trek.
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This was the second episode of STAR TREK that I ever saw, but the first where I knew I was watching a show called STAR TREK (The first, at about age 4, was "The Apple", with the jungle planet and the big Godzilla head-temple-computer. In some hazy way I thought I was watching a World War II movie set in the South Pacific. A really weird World War II movie).

But by age 6, I was a little more with the program, and I saw "Patterns of Force" at my cousins' house.

Afterwords, I was asking my cousin who was my age how this Mr. Spock character came to be on the crew, since he was obviously extra-terrestrial.

She theorized that the Enterprise was flying through space, encountered Spock in a small one-man scout ship, "Blew it up", then rescued him (Presumably beaming him out of the wreckage before he died in the vacuum of space), and then invited him to join their crew.

It was about 4 more years before I realized there was no such episode. I still think it's a great First Contact story. Encounter an alien in his little ship. Blow it up. Ask him if he wants to join the crew and become First Officer and Science Officer!
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