The episodes written by Gene Roddenberry piss me off.

The day before you wrote your post I saw a Roddenberry authored episode. The title is "The Golden Toad" ---> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0597605/reference Here is its IMDb plot summary: "Webster, a man with three daughters, thinks he's found gold. He's worried that feisty Doris, a woman with three sons, is going to take it away from him so he hires Paladin to protect his interests. Paladin does some research before leaving San Francisco and discovers a solution which breaks the impasse in more ways than one."

I don't recall what solution Paladin found to break the impasse, but Doris established early that she is the kind of woman who is not afraid to pull a gun on someone. After taking samples of the mine, Paladin tells the two feuding sides that there are no gold deposits. He then blows up the mine causing a stream of water to flow out into the flat land below. (That reminded me of the passage in Exodus 17:6 when Moses struck the rock and water gushed forth.) Before Paladin blew up the mine the two families were about to give up their farms because their wells were drying up. Roddenberry didn't resort to the three daughters and the three sons of the feuding families ending up together. So there was at least one episode that didn't fit your observation of other Roddenberry penned episodes.

They can't all be winners, and I admit to being turned off by almost any episode whose premise is for Paladin to "teach someone to be a woman," but the few that Roddenberry wrote like that are more than offset by episodes like "The Posse," "Four O'Clock Stage," or "The Road to Wicksberg," none of which had a woman swooning over Paladin, and I will go so far as to say I think Roddenberry's work on HGWT is generally better than his Star Trek writing.

Je suis Charlie Hebdo.

It's sad that you can't see the Spock and the McCoy in Paladin. I can do and so can other people. There have even been books written about Paladin's character containing Kirk, Spock and McCoy long before STAR TREK came about. You don't say whether you're a fan of ST:TOS or not but the women tend to be most independent in the episodes he wrote. If not, they're dysfunctional and clingy.

Women were supposed to be dumb and dependent on men after WWII. That's what all the television and film programming told them, anyway. They had to do, so they could leave their jobs for the men who came home from war. Little girls still hear this programming and they learn to hide their intelligence before age six.

If you look harder at Paladin rather than the other characters, you'll see hints of other ST:TOS characters in him and it's wonderful to see them before their birth. The first HGWT Christmas episode was written by Roddenberry and it shows a very STAR TREK solution to the problem.

The women characters are a sociological response to their perceived roles in society at the time. It isn't Roddenberry's fault. Blame society. It still goes on. Look at the White House. A deranged psychopath with anger management issues was voted into office rather than a qualified woman with experience and knowledge, just because he has (presumably) a penis and he's white. It's lunacy.







Bored now.