The Bold ‘Star Trek’ Kiss That Nearly Got Censored and Changed TV Forever
A look at the contemporaneous media coverage at the time reveals virtually no comment about the episode or its would-be controversy. In fact, it would be some years before anyone began to regard “Plato’s Stepchildren” as a milestone in the Star Trek canon. When Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released in 1979, a columnist looking back on the history of the show referred to it as having “TV’s first interracial kiss,” a misnomer that still crops up.
With respect to other pioneering programs like 1955’s Othello, it’s likely that Star Trek is singled out because of its subsequent and enduring cultural relevance. That a popular show could help break a societal taboo is certainly worthy of acknowledgement.
Curiously, the only place where the episode ran into problems wasn’t in the South but in England. The BBC initially refused to air it because of its themes of torture, madness, and sadism, correctly noting that it was the malicious behavior of the aliens that was questionable, not an interracial kiss.
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