Star Trek: Discovery is designed for a world filled with bad idiots who have a lot of power
There are spoilers in this post up to episode four of Star Trek: Discovery
Somewhere in the future, Captain Jean-Luc Picard is confidently and calmly engaging in literate diplomacy with an undulating quantum space blob that everyone initially assumed was trying to kill them, but actually wants peace, or is maybe trying to mate with the Enterprise, or something innocent like that.
The Next Generation, the 90s iteration of the Star Trek franchise, was a utopic, fully-realised vision of peace and stability. War was brief and rare, with a few fulfilling exceptions (the Borg are my jam).
The most recent Star Trek series, Discovery, is four episodes in. It begins with the main character, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) triggering a war with the Klingons, resulting in the crippling of their ship and the death of their captain and countless crew members. Episodes three and four focus on the (literally) dark machinations of the captain of the Discovery, single-mindedly engaging in weapons development under the guise of scientific exploration.
There’s death, gore, deception and subterfuge. There’s very little humour and zero camaraderie. There are only hints of diplomacy, and there are no adventures on the holodeck with Sherlock Holmes.
This is jarring for a lot of fans. Star Trek is a specific thing to many people. The creator of Star Trek, Gene Rodenberry, outlined a vision of the future soaked with peace, exploration, intellect and science.
Discovery’s team want us to embed ourselves in the process of acquiring those ideals, rather than luxuriating in their fully realised presence. We have to start in a dark place and ratchet our way towards the utopia that we once took for granted as available on tap.
There are clues pitted throughout the first four episodes that support the theory of the show’s future. In the first episode, Burnham’s trapped in a jail cell aboard the Shenzhou, after having betrayed her captain. An injured officer stands on the other side of the cell, dazed and confused, and says:
“Why are we fighting? We’re Starfleet. We’re explorers, not soldiers”
The astronaut’s lament perfectly echoed the confusion of most of the audience— the writing seems self-aware, and very intentional.
In episode four, a gargantuan, aggressive space-tardigrade, captured with the aim of using it for weapons development, is revealed to be a peaceful, super-computing space navigator that just wants to chow on delicious spores. Burnham, who was introduced to us as an instigator of war, befriends the creature and discovers its talents. She’s perturbed even when it’s being used as a navigator; imprisoned and restrained for use in the captain’s war effort.
I think Burnham will be the closest thing to a conscience aboard the Discovery. Serialised, binge-watched streaming shows seem better suited to an elegant arc, rather than monster-of-the-week adventures, and Starfleet’s struggle towards peace and stability seems a worthy story to explore.
These suspicions were reinforced in an interview with CNET, where producer Alex Kurtzman said:
“You can not make Star Trek without respecting and honouring the fact that the essential vision that [Gene] Roddenbury had was an optimistic one of the future.
It’s very easy to be optimistic when everything is going well. It’s much much harder when you are compromised in many different ways. We’re saying it’s sometimes hard to hang on to your morals and ideals. But when you do, it’s personally more satisfying”
Fellow producer Akiva Goldsman said,
“Ours is the origin of the feeling that is [Star Trek: The Original Series],” he said. “We don’t start there. We get there. The name of the show, Discovery, is not by accident”
Discovery reflects the way our thinking has changed in the past two years. Everything is not going well, and it is not easy to be optimistic.
We’ve seen the solid manifestation of mass ugliness and the normalisation of total insanity. Racist despots brag about engaging in physical sexual harassment and are subsequently granted office. Denialists, racists, sexists, homophobes and authoritarians are no longer reviled — they’re handed unchecked power. Geopolitics is unstable, nuclear and unpredictable.
Discovery’s Klingons are an unsubtle mirror of America’s prominent assumption that globalisation means assimilation, and that violent enforcement of racial purity is the only logical response.
Starfleet officers are clean-uniformed and well-spoken, but they’re harbouring a horrible glee at weaponry, war and domination — a reflection of America’s Democratic war machine. The leaders we assume to be good are bad, and leaders we assume to be bad are worse.
Discovery is the Star Trek we know wrapped around a feeling that dominates our days: we can no longer assume the presence of peace, nor can we assume the commonality of goodness, diplomacy and intelligence. These things must be earned, through struggle, compromise and an adherence to the ideals we used to take for granted.
This is Star Trek for the age of the powerful, violent idiot, the morning show white supremacist and the empowered celebrity misogynist. Allegiances are confused and cross-sectional, threats have inertia and assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. Discovery will, hopefully, cut a path between memories of Picard-era peace and the grating reality of the present.
