The Star Trek Guide to our Culture, by J.L. Reiter
After two years of Covid, we’ve all watched a good deal more archive TV than we care to admit. On the positive side, my bulk-viewing of the Star Trek franchise has cast a new light on the series’ impressive ability to predict, or at least foreshadow, the future. Not taking the various re-boots in order, I am in the middle of Deep Space 9, a spinoff from Star Trek, the Next Generation (TNG), itself the 90s reboot of the original 1960s show which (tragically) only lasted three seasons. Deep Space 9’s diverse cast includes a black base commander, two alien (whitish) women, a being made of liquid (Rene Auberjonois from Benson), an Irishman married to a Japanese woman, and a doctor with an English accent who is perhaps of South Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry. The episode I just watched was set in San Francisco in 2024. The city is prosperous but contains large ‘sanctuary’ zones where there are homeless people everywhere living in tents or sleeping rough on the street. There is trash all over the place, and the police and respectable people avoid the area like it was the plague. This was family TV, so there are no open-air drug markets, sidewalk turds, or prostitutes, but they are inferred and the picture is clear enough: San Francisco, 2022 – nailed it!
How did they get it this right? In this futuristic telling (filmed in 1995) the situation is the result of a city government being unable to provide jobs to the residents of the sanctuaries, but willing to buy them off with a dole of food and no hassles from the cops unless they really turn violent. Again: nailed it. As Michael Shellenberger writes in his book San Fran-Sicko, Why Progressives Ruin Cities, the essential problem in the real San Francisco and other U.S. cities is that the authorities, out of an abundance of liberal guilt, are unwilling to draw the line between victims of circumstance and individuals who must be held accountable for their actions, so there remains a stalemate where the needy get no care, and the wealthy pay Danegeld to keep them off their lawns, even if they crap on their sidewalks and leave syringes in the bushes.
For those old enough to remember it the first time around or in reruns, Star Trek was an original, creative, unique show whose setting in space and other planets allowed the exploration of themes not always possible on earth in 1966, when segregation was only just ending and the lines of race and sex were still very clearly drawn. William Shatner’s laddish-but-brilliant, mini-skirt chasing Captain Kirk was very much of that era, but the casting of Lt. Uhura as a sexy but skilled science officer, Lt. Sulu as the pilot, Commander Spock as an emotionless Vulcan, the wry Dr. McCoy, the Russian (shocker! this was the Cold War) Lt. Checkhov, and the cantankerous engineer Scottie made up an unusually diverse ensemble for a television show at the time. Remember – contemporary shows were McHale’s Navy, Gilligan’s Island, and Bewitched. The original Star Trek explored all kinds of interesting ideas, but some things remained the same: men, alien or not, were men, and dames were dames, and Kirk fought the former and chased the latter.
Star Trek, the Next Generation (TNG) maintained the original series’ qualities, including the skirt-chasing and camp humor, but added in some 80s-style proto-wokery. There is endless empathy from ship’s Counselor Troi, a crewmember the original Enterprise, like all ships before her since the Argo, thought it wiser to leave at port. There is an android, Data, who advances Pinocchio-like into humanity over the many seasons. The new Captain, the more serious Jean-Luc Picard, gets little action with the ladies, but that side of the Kirk character is preserved in Will Riker, his First Officer, who hardly lets an episode go by without bedding something resembling female. To balance that aspect, Season 1/13 (Angel One) has the crew visiting a planet ruled entirely by women and in which Riker is dressed as a sex object, in a harbinger of laws later adopted in Scandinavian and other countries requiring minimum female participation in parliament.
The TNG episode Justice (Season 1/7) is set on a planet of perfect, hedonistic mid-80s Californians who bounce around, tanned and eager, in sheer white tunics and shorts, giving a lot of massages and generally seeming to have a good time. This is high camp as we remember it in 1987, like a visitation from the earlier Buck Rogers 1970s reboot series, wholly without guilt or ideological subtext. If there are any ugly people on that planet, they were evidently left on the hillside to be eaten by wolves. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are not forces to be reckoned with here, and there is a Mormon-fundamentalist-sect vibe that is enhanced by the planet’s imposition of the death penalty for relatively minor transgressions of their civil code, like stepping beyond an arbitrary boundary.
The Outcast, Season 5/17, from exactly twenty years ago, is another prescient take on our own day. The alien race is what kids on TikTok might call “agender,” meaning they all have bowl haircuts, breast-binders, and drab, earth-tone tunics and pant-suits. These non-binary types live in a gender-free society, but every now and then one of them reverts to a previous stage of evolution and as Aretha Franklin might say, feels like a natural woman. Of course, it is Will Riker’s magnetic manhood that brings one of them out of her asexual coma into full on babe-hood, although she decides to go back on the puberty-blockers in the end. The episode’s conceit, two decades ago, was that someone born actually non-binary, as opposed to merely self-declaring such a state as today’s narcissists do, could revert to an ancestral sex. The idea of someone clearly of one sex, like Riker, or Dr. Crusher, declaring that they were of the opposite sex, and everyone on the Enterprise treating them as such simply because they said so, would be a plot too weird even for Star Trek, a Generation ago. Today, to deny that Rachel Levine or Lia Thomas is a woman would be like someone asking for a salary in the money-less 24th century: anathema.
TNG even tackles assisted suicide, when Lt. Worf decides to kill himself after being paralyzed in an accident. For a Klingon, being unable to stand and fight is like a medieval nobleman being unable to ride. The arguments pro and con are well made, and the episode foreshadows our own era, where assisted suicide when life is no longer worth living in the eyes of the individual concerned is legal in some countries.
TNG’s recurring nemesis the Borg, a collective consciousness that absorbs individuals until they have no independent thought or motivation, is often referred to these days to describe the kind of group-think and social media mobbing one sees on Twitter and which wasn’t imaginable to the writers of the show. Imagine J.K. Rowling having written her essay on transgender questions in 1992; it would have been in the New Yorker, or some other magazine with limited readership of educated people, and it would have elicited a few letters to the editor at best, leaving its author’s reputation unscathed. In the age of Twitter, Rowling has been vilified by thousands if not millions of people who have almost certainly no understanding of her actual views. Twitter mobs are very Borg-like in their assaults, which come from all directions at once, with the group able to lose members at no cost to the cause. Individuals subsume their critical thinking skills to the Borg of woke ideology.
In the past few years, thousands of young girls have been convinced through their telephones by the gender-Borg, a blob composed of people they’ve never met, that they are trans, in a mass-hysteria event described as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) by Dr. Lisa Littman. Listening to the many stories of de-transitioning, where many of these girls realise at some point along the social-chemical-surgical transition journey that they’ve made a mistake and pull out of the process, to howls of outrage from the hardcore trans lobby, is a lot like the episodes after Captain Picard unplugs from the Borg. He is physically free of it, but guilt, and much of the previous group-think knowledge, remain with him.
The latest iteration of the franchise is Star Trek Discovery, where the process of Equity is finally complete. This future is full-on drama, and unlike the cool 1960s, the cast, especially heroine Sonequa Martin-Green, have their emotions set at ‘11’ at all times and over-act as if their lives depended on it. White, straight men have finally been bred out of existence, with the remaining example, evil cipher Jason Isaacs, being taken out in the first season. It is clear that a cocky, smirking, swinging dick like James T. Kirk would be phasered on sight on this ship, on the ‘kill’ setting. It dawned on me during one episode where the senior staff was dining together in celebration of something or other that around a table of maybe 16 people, there was not one single ‘cis-het’ man in this ideal future. Black female, check. Gay black doctor married to gay white engineer, check. Plus-sized gal, check. Tall, alien dude, check. Asian female, check; but no equivalent of Kirk, Scotty, Bones, or even Sulu (remember, no one knew he was gay back then).
Discovery is, when all is said and done, the final dream outcome of the post-modern movement - equity, de-colonizing, de-construction, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and the rest – the elimination of history, and those who created much of it, and their replacement with an alternate past with alternate protagonists. For Star Trek, the question remains: where does the franchise go from here? Is it a Balkan-style feud over representation by intersectional sub-group, with everyone accumulating points for each desirable trait? When a character dies or leaves, how can it be replaced without unbalancing the matter-antimatter of identitarian equilibrium? I have no idea, and as the franchise has jumped the shark and is now totally unwatchable, I will never know. Still, thanks to Netflix, I can watch the earlier seasons every few years and leave the evolved progeny to the more tolerant young. The original series’ special effects may suck, but I’ll take a smirking Kirk over an emoting millennial every time.