I’ve been watching Star Trek Discovery lately. Expect spoilers throughout - I don’t intend to do a deep dive into specifics, but I am sure I will reference things considered spoilers, so fair warning. I’d say that I have a complicated relationship to Discovery, which is perhaps an overstatement, or should be, but nevertheless feels accurate. When Discovery first came out, I did not watch it - I didn’t have cable, and it wasn’t on a streaming service I was subscribed to, and I had been so disappointed with the new action-y reboot movies that I felt there was little chance I would enjoy it and thus was not very motivated to try it.
I heard a lot about it, though - fans in online spaces were vociferous in hating it, but largely for reasons that struck me as stupid. It has a black woman as a main character. It has gay characters. It’s catering to social justice warriors - I believe that was the term du jour at the time, now it would be called woke. Star Trek has always been about, among other things, the importance of and value of diversity, so these complaints came off to me as fundamentally wrong headed. I got the impression that I might actually like this new show - if all these idiots hate it for such dumb reasons, surely its got to actually be good, right?
Well eventually I got around to watching it - I believe some time after the second season was released - and suffice to say, I hated it. Not for the trivial reasons other people hated it - I don’t object to the presence of or centering of diverse perspectives, and as noted, that has always been a major component of Star Trek. Had this been a new version of a show with a poor historical record with that, that had always only been about white people, like Friends, I would nevertheless have had no problems with them shaking things up with a more diverse cast - it being Star Trek, this was not just fine but expected. If anything I’d say Discovery suffers a bit from a lack of diversity of perspectives, but not for lack of trying, but for deeper structural reasons.
Star Trek up to Discovery had largely been episodic in nature, with ensemble casts lead by a Captain. Discovery up ends this - it is highly serialized, at least in Season 1, with episodes running into one another, often ending on cliffhangers and with the focus not on telling individual, smaller stories in episodes, but telling the larger, season long PLOT of the show. Television in general has shifted from episodic storytelling to serialized, with only a few shows in a few genres resisting this trend, mostly comedies and crime procedurals. There is nothing inherently bad about one or the other, but they are in tension with one another - it is not impossible to seamlessly weave good episodic storytelling into a greater tapestry, but it is difficult, and most TV shows, modern and classic, don’t even try - Classic Star Trek and TNG are almost entirely episodic, and even Deep Space 9, often praised for its strong serialized plot, devoted usually at most 6 episodes a season to its serialized plot - a premier, a finale, and a mid season climax episode, each of which might be a two parter, but otherwise the serialized plot mostly occurred in the background of episodes as a setting for the individual story being told in the episode which was begun and ended all within the one hour with commercials time period. Modern shows do the opposite - most are eight hour movies, and episode breaks are chosen to maximize dramatic tension and get people to want watch the next episode immediately, rather than to tell a complete story.
As noted, most Star Treks also tend to be ensemble shows. Arguably The Original Series is the least like this, with episodes invariably focusing on either Kirk, Spock, Bones, or some combination of the three, but even there, there are clear multiple points of focus. TNG has episodes focusing on all sorts of characters, from Picard to Data to Geordi to Wesley to even never before seen minor characters who became break out stars like Barclay or complete nobodies almost never to be seen again like the Lower Decks episode. DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise also all follow this formula, where any given episode could focus on any combination of one to several to all of a large, diverse cast. Discovery, however, focuses on only one character, Michael Burnham. Other characters exist, but mostly in service of Burnham’s story, and almost never get exclusive focus, again, at least early on. This is her story, and we get her perspective.
So what is my point? Well, I hated Season 1 of Discovery, but a lot of that had to do with it flouting my expectations. I didn’t get a wide diversity of perspectives, I got one. I didn’t get a bunch of self-contained stories, I got one. And because that one story takes fifteen episodes to unfold - not just an eight hour movie, but a fifteen hour one! (minus commerical breaks I guess, don’t make me math) …because it takes fifteen episodes to unfold, it doesn’t, ahem, get to the point immediately. We see Burnham advocate for a first strike war, we see her commit mutiny, we see that the Federation apparently has some pretty dismal seeming prisons that involve forced prison labor under dangerous conditions, we see Lorca advocating for some drastic policies during war time, including torturing and using innocent sentient life like the tardigrade, we see Burnham engage in sci-fi cannibalism of one of her best friends alternate universe self (okay thats big spoilers but come on that was fucking weird and gross), we see the Federation contemplate genocide… all for it to eventually resolve with a message of, damn, we kinda lost our way for a bit. We need to do better. We’re suppose to be the Federation, damnit. We’re the good guys! What were we doing?
When I first watched this I was furious. Up until the last episode of the season I was legit wondering, “Is this suppose to be pro-fascism? Why is our hero doing a fascism? Why is everyone doing a fascism? Do these writers have no fucking clue what Star Trek is?” And you know? I was wrong. They did know what they were doing. When I got to the end, the message was clear, and it was antifascist, at least, a bit. It was kinda lukewarm to be honest, but it is clear that 1) Lorca is a bad guy (I mean he literally says he wants to make the Terran Empire Glorious Again, its not subtle who he is suppose to represent) 2) Burnham has been getting shit wrong this whole time 3) The Federation needs to do better.
And thats a good message. A Star Trek message. My visceral reaction was because of structural choices in how the story was told, but fundamentally, they got the message right. Right?
Anyways I was too mad after watching Season 1 to move on to Season 2, so I sat with it a while before I tried to watch Season 2. To be clear, I understood that they knew what they were doing, that it was “real Star Trek”, but the story structure was so frustrating to experience that I was still mad. I think you can fairly blame me for not having better media literacy, that I should have realized from the start what kind of story was being told, but at the time, I felt manipulated in an unpleasant way and needed to clear my head before moving on in the series.
Well, a few years later, after Season 4 was released but before the final season, I watched Season 2. Season 2 incorporates a lot more episodic storytelling, centers a lot more of the side characters, and to me just feels a lot more Trekky. Some have real takeaways, even if they are all still in service to an ongoing plot. But nevertheless, I found myself angry at the end of the second season, too, and for somewhat similar reasons. For one, the back end of the season abandons the episodic trend to focus on pure plot, and in doing so also seems to lose a lot of its coherence. I’m revisiting it now and honestly I have a lot of questions that could be frankly summed up as “What is even suppose to be going on?” Ultimately, I was too angry to move on to Season 3 and took another break after finishing Season 2. I don’t think I could have at the time fully explained what my problems were, and I’m not entirely sure I have it nailed down yet either, but I do have some thoughts.
I’ve also been watching a lot of Steve Shives content on youtube. He is very critical of a common perspective that the Federation is suppose to be always right and good, and that modern Trek misses this by making it dark and bad. His point, summarized simplistically and poorly by me, is that the Federation is a stand-in for the United States, and thus if the United States is bad as judged from a leftist perspective, then a leftist show as Star Trek is and always has been, should portray it as such.
Prior to watching his videos, I would have said, no, the Federation is not a stand in for the United States. Star Trek is a portrayal of an idealistic future where if we fixed all our current problems, we could live in an Utopia, that then uses that setting to show the flaws in our current society through thinly veiled allegory, or sometimes directly as some of the DS9 time travel and meta fictional episodes demonstrate. And that is right, but it is also wrong, because while Star Trek does imagine such a future, at the time it was first conceived, both in the 60s and the 80s and 90s when what is now considered “classic” Star Trek series were written, a lot of people on the left believed that the Star Trek future is one we could reach from where we were. That the United States, as is, was just a few small incremental steps from reaching it. Yeah, we have inequality, yeah, we have racism, yeah, we have poverty, but we’re figuring it out, we’re dedicated to figuring it out, and with expertise and common sense and good ethics, we can provide a better future for everybody.
But thats a lie. The United States is not some shining beacon just a few steps from perfection. It is a rotting, bloated corpse being devoured by the vultures of capitalism. Even as a kid, I never held so optimistic a view of the United States that I ever could quite reconcile it with the Federation, but as an adult with full media literacy, I definitely can tell now, that is the intent of the show. The Federation is supposed to be a perfect version of us, but it is still a version of us. So what can a show do when its trying to portray a hopeful vision of a possible future when you realize that the entity you thought was the model of that hope is actually a lie?
I think Discovery was in fact trying to be this show. And I think thats why it failed, too. Season 1 of Discovery tried to show Trump’s America, and it ended on a hopeful note, that its just a few bad eggs like Lorca, the system is ultimately fine, we can do better and will do better, he’s not even technically from our universe, he is an anomaly, Lorca does not represent what America stands for anymore than Trump represents what the Federation stands for. Oh wait, I got that backwards. But then Season 2 comes around, and with Georgieou, Leland, Control, and Section 31, we are faced with the same story. Our great nation that is always right has a few bad eggs, lets just keep stamping them out, surely eventually we’ll run out of bad eggs and can get back to the good old days when everything was normal and the Federation was good.
But the United States isn’t good. And thats the lesson Star Trek needs to take. I liked what I saw of Starfleet Academy, I am sad it was cancelled, but it wasn’t the show to meet this moment. It too was about the Federation during a dark time with a message that with just a few tweaks, we can fix it. We need a show with the guts to actually come out and say the truth. We need a show that portrays a Federation falling apart, straining from its expansionism and militarism and ignoring the needs of its citizens, that sold them a glorious dream of the future built on peace and prosperity and equality and diversity but failed to deliver. Because that is the world we live in. But ultimately, we also need it to be a story of hope, a story of a better future we could have. Because that is what Star Trek is about. Which is why the heroes of our story need to rebel against the Federation, destroy it, and replace it with something better. Honestly I could have titled this, “Star Trek needs an Andor” but to my mind, the model isn’t Andor. It’s One Piece. Thats probably a subject better left for another day, but fundamentally, that is the only story I think that can be told about a hopeful future these days. If you tell me a story of a hopeful future whose message is “Things are mostly okay, we just need to get rid if a few bad eggs,” its always going to ring false, and I think thats the hole modern Trek keeps falling into. It may be comforting pablem, but its not leftism, and its not optimistic to dream so small, but in fact cynical, and Star Trek at its heart is about leftism and optimism.
Star Trek isn’t about the Federation, or Starfleet, or Vulcans, or transporters, or even that luxury space communism is a possible or reasonable plan for society. It’s about a hopeful future built on the principle of infinite diversity in infinite combinations. It needs to speak to that, even if what it has to say makes us uncomfortable. Trekkies of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your combadges! That joke probably deserves a second pass, but oh no, looks like I clicked post…
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