Star Trek: The Animated Series S2E05 – How Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth
The Animated Series stumbles back into early Trek’s problematic relationship with mythological sci-fi storytelling, giving us a non-European spin on the Who Mourns For Adonais? tropes with How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth, an episode that blends ancient Earth mythology with spacefaring adventure and questionable ethnic tokenism. While Star Trek has often reimagined gods and legendary beings as advanced aliens, this episode takes the concept a step further, presenting a direct confrontation with a powerful entity that once influenced human civilization, particularly Mesoamerican civilisation, something Star Trek: Voyager would do to death with rapidly diminishing returns, in both character and dramatic terms.
When the Enterprise encounters a mysterious alien vessel shaped like a giant winged serpent, which immediately tests the crew’s knowledge of Earth’s past, they only survive thanks to the never-seen-before and never-to-be-seen-again Ensign Walking Bear. Par for the Star Trek course, the being inside reveals itself as Kukulkan, a god-like figure worshipped by the Mayans, Aztecs, and other ancient civilizations. Kukilkan immediately demands complete obedience, believing that humanity has strayed from the wisdom he once imparted, forcing Kirk and his crew into yet another battle of wits with a deity convinced of its own righteousness, and I’m not talking about William Shatner.
The episode builds on Star Trek’s long-running theme of deconstructing divine authority, much like Who Mourns for Adonais? and The Squire of Gothos. Kukulkan, like Apollo before him, is portrayed as a being who once guided ancient humans but ultimately failed to grasp their capacity for self-determination. However the philosophical discussions in How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth don’t quite reach the depth of The Original Series, coming off as superficial and tokenistic.
Visually, the episode takes full advantage of animation’s ability to depict the fantastic. Kukulkan’s ship (bedecked by colourful wings like a souped-up space TransAm) and the recreated ancient cityscapes are striking, even if the limited animation style doesn’t always do justice to the grand ideas at play. The design of Kukulkan himself is decent enough too, evoking both traditional depictions of the deity and a more sci-fi aesthetic.
It’s at least a notable attempt to widen Trek’s cultural sources beyond Western mythology. While Star Trek often leans on Greco-Roman influences, How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth brings Mesoamerican mythology into the fold, broadening the cultural scope of the series even if it does lift a leadenly obvious Shakespeare quote (King Lear, Act I, Scene IV) as its title. Yes, yes, very clever; we (humanity) are the ungrateful child. The fact that it takes Ensign Walking Bear – one of the only non-primitive Native American characters in Star Trek at that point – to unravel Kukulkan’s origins is an inadvertent admission of the cultural ignorance of the main characters. As a mere Ensign, though, he likely didn’t dare correct Captain Kirk’s constant mispronunciation of Kukulkan’s name, lest he end up in the brig for the rest of the Enterprise’s tour of duty. Presumably the budget didn’t allow for giving Shatner a second take each time he delivered the line wrong – a surprise given that with his usual enunciative style he should have relished such a deliciously syllabic word.
How Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth follows a too-familiar formula – powerful alien tests the Enterprise crew before learning a lesson about free will – without doing nearly enough to mitigate against its staleness. With the Animated Series literally on the cusp of cancellation – it would only have one more episode after this – there’s nothing in this animated retreat that would convince anyone – let alone an ancient space entity – that the series was worth saving.
