Star Trek and Social Justice

An introduction to the course I just started teaching today

[This semester, I am offering an eight-week course on Star Trek as part of the Honors program at North Central College. Last spring, they invited me to give a public lecture on the topic of my course to help Honors students choose which seminar they wanted to take. This is a lightly edited version of that talk, followed by a listing of the episodes I selected to provide background for the centerpiece of the course, Discovery season 1.]

I’m glad to be able to share some of my thinking about Star Trek with you tonight. Star Trek has always been a big part of my life—one of my earliest memories is watching The Original Series with my dad, and Next Generation was a calming ritual for me as a young teenager, certainly much more comforting and empowering than the church services I attended the next day. I left Star Trek aside in college and much of grad school, but when my partner suggested we rewatch Next Generation together, she didn’t know what she was getting into. That suggestion gave me permission to unleash my inner Star Trek geek, and my habit grew to encompass multiple watches of every series and film, the reading of countless tie-in novels and comics, and active participation in online fan forums.

Most recently, it has culminated in a book on the mostly unloved Star Trek material that aired after the Next Generation era, entitled Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era, to be published by the University of Minnesota Press. I have adapted some material from the book for tonight’s talk, so you are getting a sneak preview!

While obviously there are relatively few weird obsessives like me, most people know at least something about Star Trek. Whether it’s characters like Captain Kirk or Mr. Spock, iconic aliens like the ultra-logical Vulcans or the warlike Klingons, or science fiction concepts like the warp drive or the transporter machine, odds are that most Americans have at least some little snippets of Star Trek trivia floating around in their brains. But if we take a broader view, I would say that—apart from those kind of plot and character elements—Star Trek is primarily known for two things.

The first is that Star Trek is the most progressive and optimistic mainstream science fiction franchise. This is true on the production level—where Star Trek is known for breaking barriers in representation, beginning with the racially diverse cast on The Original Series and then expanding more or less continually from there—but it is even more true on the story level. Alone among major science fiction franchises, Star Trek presents us with a broadly utopian future where Earth has eliminated poverty and war, where the benevolent Federation invites any sufficiently advanced alien world to join a society based on mutual respect and open-ended exploration, where our heroes work for Starfleet, a primarily scientific and peacekeeping force that only resorts to violence in cases of extreme necessity.

The second is that Star Trek has one of the pickiest and most detail-oriented fanbases out there, obsessed with the minutae of franchise “canon” and eager to jump on supposed mistakes in new productions. In fact, aside from the DC, Marvel, and Archie comic book universes, it is arguably the oldest to be in more or less continuous operation. New Star Trek stories have come out essentially every year since the early 1970s, even when the show and its spin-offs were off the air. And though this observation opens up serious ontological questions, it is the oldest fictional universe that purports to take place—outside of the brief interregnum of the JJ Abrams reboot films—in “the same” universe and timeline since the original series began broadcasting. Despite fans’ love of theories involving forked timelines, the clear intention of the writers and producers is that there has been no Crisis on Infinite Earths, no reset, nothing overwritten, nothing lost. Unless it is very explicitly flagged otherwise, everything we see on TV really happened within what is known as the Prime Timeline. Similarly, Star Trek basically invented common conventions where stories have differing levels of “canonical” authority depending on medium—for instance, novels and comic books can be overwritten at will, but all TV and film episodes permanently “count.”

In some ways, these two features go together. The fact that Star Trek is an ongoing storyworld seems to lend itself to exploration of how the utopian ideals it espouses would work in practice. This aspect of Star Trek has made it especially attractive to left-wing thinkers, such as Peter Frase, whose book Four Futures uses Star Trek: The Next Generation—the most critically and commercially successful installment of the franchise by far—as an easy reference for the idea of a purely post-scarcity world where a combination of automation and instant replication of consumer goods have eliminated need and toil. He quotes the first-season episode “Neutral Zone,” in which the Enterprise discovers some cryogenically frozen humans from the 1990s. These characters—including a businessman who is obsessed with learning how his stocks have performed over the course of three centuries, a charismatic drunk, and a housewife—serve as audience stand-ins, allowing the show to mark the profound difference between their world and ours. Where one might normally expect at least some degree of historical curiosity from the Starfleet explorers, the future characters all seem to regard the viewer’s own time as virtually without value or interest—the period when humanity was destroying itself. Captain Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, regards the business guy in particular with open contempt, and after repeatedly failing to get through to him that capitalism no longer exists and therefore his centuries-old investments are meaningless, he finally declares to him: “A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy” (“The Neutral Zone,” TNG 1.26).

This monologue represents the high-water mark of Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision for Star Trek, and on a superficial level it appears to be a stunning rebuke to the capitalist triumphalism of the 80s and 90s. But things are not quite what they seem. To untangle exactly what is going on here, I will need to introduce a term that a lot of people claim to find confusing: “neoliberalism.” The term originated among thinkers like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, who advocated free market ideas (hence “liberalism”) but recognized a need to revamp them for the changed context of the post-New Deal world (hence “neo-”). After the postwar economic settlement began to break down, those neoliberal ideas were ultimately taken up by politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Only with the fall of the Soviet Union, however, did neoliberalism truly attain global supremacy. In the wake of that triumph, Francis Fukayama issued his infamous declaration that all serious debate about the proper political and economic system had ended and we had therefore reached “the end of history.” In the long run, all major political conflict would give way to the purely technical management of the economy according to neoliberal principles.

In many ways, Next Generation fit seamlessly with the cultural optimism of that period, particularly on the geopolitical level. The most significant change in the Star Trek storyworld in the roughly one-hundred years that are supposed to have elapsed between The Original Series and Next Generation was the conversion of the Klingons—who often served as a stand-in for the Soviets in Cold War allegories—from enemies to allies. On the one hand, that move might appear prophetic in light of Gorbachev’s opening to the West and the events that followed. On the other hand, it could appear equally ironic, since the “wrong” side wound up triumphing in Star Trek’s post-capitalist future.

We need to tread carefully here, though, because the franchise as a whole—up to this very day—remains surprisingly incurious about the actual economic underpinnings of its utopian abundance, much less the path their society took to get there. This gap alone should make us hesitate to identify Star Trek with Marxist values. Going a step further, we could observe that in other early episodes Picard shows similar contempt for the idea that economic systems might be a site of political conflict. In “Lonely Among Us” (TNG 1.7), for example, he explains that on the backward planet of Antica, “these life forms feel such passionate hatred on matters of custom, God concepts, even, strangely enough, economic systems.” Here we can perhaps discern a more optimistic echo of Margaret Thatcher’s infamous dictum that “there is no alternative” to the neoliberal order. When the economic system stops being a matter of dispute because the “correct” approach has been adopted, people are free to pursue their own destiny in a context of diversity and meritocracy. This strange indifference to economics leads Dan Hassler-Forest to conclude that the series, far from representing a thorough-going anti-capitalism, “ends up celebrating and mythologizing capitalism’s core values of individualism, entrepreneurialism, and hierarchical authority.” Far from being an instantiation of Marxist values, as Frase claims, Star Trek gives us “a postcapitalist future in which class struggle is transcended and a technocratic utopia is realized.” This attitude surely explains its profound cultural resonance during the most optimistic and self-confident years of the neoliberal era, and from this perspective, the fact that the decline of the franchise began just as 9/11 shattered the “end of history” idyll seems like more than just a coincidence.

So the relationship between Star Trek and capitalism is more complex than it may seem—even when Picard is forcefully rejecting capitalism, he turns around and espouses individualistic capitalist-style values. And within Star Trek itself, however, the kind of utopianism represented by Picard’s memorable monologue is an exception—a reflection of a moment when Trek creator Gene Roddenberry effectively “drank his own Kool-Aid” and came to regard himself as a futurist guru. In the Original Series, there were continual references to commerce and trade, and an animated episode even features a wealthy philanthropist (surely a dystopian prospect from our perspective). Tie-in literature before the early seasons of Next Generation also takes for granted the idea that there is money and economic inequality in the Star Trek universe. And a few years after Next Generation, Star Trek launched a new spin-off, Deep Space Nine, that reintroduced economic and political tensions into the supposedly utopian world. It also reverses the premise of Star Trek in many other ways. The series is set on a space station, rather than an exploratory vessel, that stands near the opening of a newly-discovered “wormhole” that allows near-instantaneous travel to previously unreachable parts of the galaxy. While initially it seem like the ultimate dream from the perspective of Star Trek’s love of exploration, the wormhole proves to be a greater danger than a benefit. As it turns out, a powerful empire known as the Dominion holds sway in that distant quadrant of the galaxy—and they quickly set about colonizing “our” side, leading to a war that kills billions. Yet despite this seeming violation of Star Trek ideals, Deep Space Nine is also widely beloved for its challenging political allegories and its innovations like featuring the first Black captain or the first explicit same-sex romantic relationship in the franchise.

We could continue this pattern of ironic reversal. The next spin-off, Voyager, is about a ship that is unexpectedly stranded in a very distant part of the galaxy (though thankfully far from the evil Dominion). Far from focusing on the excitement of exploration, Voyager is about the near-impossible quest to get home, and it winds up exploring very dark emotional territory as the crew goes through cycles from optimism to despair and back again on the prospects of getting back to Earth within anyone’s lifetimes. While Deep Space Nine and Voyager were set in the same time period as Next Generation (and in fact, for most of the three series’ run, two of them were running concurrently), the next show to air, Enterprise, adopted a prequel concept. Jumping back a hundred years before The Original Series and two hundred before Next Generation, the much-hated show followed Earth’s early efforts to join the galactic community in an era marked by xenophobia and terrorism, both at home and amid the stars. The reboot films helmed by JJ Abrams, which used a complicated time-travel mechanism to give us a contemporary take on The Original Series characters, also went back again and again to the terrorism well. The series that launched Star Trek’s streaming era, Discovery, is all about war and trauma and disaster, and its more popular spin-off, Strange New Worlds, continues to explore those themes.

Many fans thought that this darker, grittier mode of Star Trek would end with the series entitled Picard, which promised to return to the iconic captain from the Next Generation era. But that series, too, focuses on terrorism and loss and the threat of genocide, as our former hero is reduced to a resentment-filled shell of his former self, nursing grudges while working his family’s vineyard. Even the post-capitalism of Next Generation is called into question. When Picard is inevitably inspired to do “one last mission,” he contacts a former colleague named Raffi, who lives in a depressing isolated trailing and practically spits the word “chateau” at her former commander. Ironically, the only show that has fully embraced the post-scarcity optimism of Next Generation is the adult cartoon series Lower Decks, and I think it’s telling that it can only appear to us today in the form of comedy and even self-parody.

The tendency is even more pronounced in science fiction more generally. As Star Trek scholar Ina Rae Hark points out in her article “Franchise Fatigue?,” by the 90s and early 2000s, the optimistic formula embodied by Next Generation fell out of favor. Whether out of a simple desire differentiate themselves or because the optimism of Star Trek had come to seem naïve and unrealistic, a number of new space opera shows had debuted that focused on darker themes that made Star Trek “look like the outlier.” Shows like Babylon Five, Firefly, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Farscape, The Expanse, and basically any other you could name all took things in a much more pessimistic direction. The one exception I can think of is Iain Banks’ Culture series, which implicitly argue that Star Trek’s utopianism is too timid—but still spend most of their time among the galaxy’s more primitive species rather than in the hedonistic utopia of the Culture itself.

From an artistic perspective, it’s easy to understand why the more pessimistic path dominates. Utopia means no conflict, which means no story—except maybe the Star Trek formula where the enlightened utopians swoop in and tell the primitives how to solve all their problems. Even leaving aside the imperialist and colonialist implications of that framework—which the existing literature has very thoroughly explored—that framework is politically inert. At most, it inspires us to imagine that some alien deus ex machina will swoop in and save us as well. And within the framework of Star Trek, all we can do is hope that technology keeps advancing until we manage to get their attention. The closest they come to showing the moment of transition, when humanity’s history starts moving in a redemptive direction after a series of disasters that are as grim as anything in the most pessimistic sci-fi franchises, is the film First Contact. In it, Zefrem Cochrane becomes the first human being to discover the faster-than-light propulsion method known as the warp drive, and his first flight attracts the attention of the benevolent Vulcans, who help shepherd humanity to a more peaceful and egalitarian existence. And as if that deus ex machina is not enough, they set up a time travel narrative where Cochrane’s first flight is disrupted by the evil Borg, forcing the Next Generation crew themselves to fix his engine and make sure things go as planned. In a later series, this sequence of events is characterized as a predestination paradox—Star Trek’s future causes its own past.

Perhaps this strange meta-fictional moment can be read as reflecting the hope that the vision of Star Trek’s utopian future will itself propel humanity toward a more redemptive future. Yet to the extent that Star Trek has any real account of what concretely moves us in that direction, it consists of a technological determinism that would make the most simplistic Marxist blush, and any genuine political conflict or struggle is dissolved. The capacity for interstellar travel leads directly to the revelation that we are not alone in the universe, which leads directly to the abandonment of past divisions and conflicts among humans. The development of the replicator, which makes most food and consumer goods instantly available at the touch of a button, leads directly to the abolition of economic inequality and the pursuit of a more meaningful life. But the franchise seems to admit that even these outcomes are not truly inevitable. The Borg have even more powerful replicators and more advanced technology, yet they are oppressive imperialists. And in the Mirror Universe, where all the characters inexplicably have a doppelganger with the opposite moral orientation, an evil version of Cochrane uses his warp flight to lure the Vulcans and steal their technology.

At this point, one might expect me to endorse the more pessimistic science fiction as more productive. And in some ways I do—at the very least, it often provides a more convincing avenue for political critique. Yet it always seems to involve an element of fatalism, of assuming that our oppressive capitalist society will always find a way to sustain itself even amid unimaginable disaster and deprivation. We may live in a world where it is impossible to present Star Trek’s idealism except in a self-deprecating cartoon like Lower Decks, but that is still preferable to the all-too-serious gritty realism of an eternalized capitalism. I remain drawn to Star Trek as an atmosphere, an ethos, a set of values, even if they are incoherent ones.

On a more purely fantasy level, you could say that I’m drawn to Star Trek because it’s a world I would want to live in. And that’s what makes Lower Decks my favorite current show. In keeping with its less serious tone, Lower Decks also does a good job of keeping its stories decidedly low-stakes and character-focused than most recent installments. In fact, some episodes are essentially no-stakes, as they take place entirely within the simulated entertainment environment known as the holodeck, but they always shed some light on our characters and the dynamics between them. And blessedly, that dynamic is never romantic, even if there are hints of crushes and repressed attraction. Overall, though, the main friend group we follow is remarkably casual about their personal space (living as they do in small bunks in a hallway, which they share with the other shifts) and even about nudity, as they are sometimes portrayed in an all-gender community shower with no apparent embarrassment or titillation. This strange innocence reminds us that they live in a very different world from us, one in which the overcoming of scarcity has radically changed people’s ideas about possessions and relationships.

Here we might even credit Lower Decks with thinking more seriously about what humanity looks like when, in Picard’s words, we have “grown out of our infancy” than any previous series. Yet the fact that this utopia appears most clearly in a comedy series—indeed, in one that is self-consciously parodic of the franchise of which it is a part—does seem to point to something important. From our perspective, amid the ruins of the War on Terror, the Global Financial Crisis, and COVID-19 Pandemic, and the recently announced Era of Global Boiling, there is something unbelievable about the relatively happy and optimistic ethos of the 1990s, to say nothing of the utopianism of Next Generation. The writers of Picard chose to make that world believable for contemporary stories by infecting it with the same cynicism and corruption we know from our own daily experience. The writers of Lower Decks took the more unexpected and yet somehow more profound move of transposing us into this world and writing our attitude of bemused disbelief directly into the dialogue. This approach may not make it any more believable, but it arguably treats the material more seriously by truly imagining Star Trek’s world as a truly different world—and one that would be a joy to inhabit, even as a grunt worker on a no-name ship.

There’s a lot more to say about Star Trek than this. For example, I recently said about 80,000 more words about it. If you want to know more, you can obviously take my course—which is the whole reason I was even invited to give this talk. Hence I thought I would conclude with a little bit of an overview of what I hope to do in the course. First of all, there is currently a little under 700 hours of “canonical” Star Trek material, which would take seventeen and a half weeks to watch if you treated it as your full-time 40-hour job. There are also hundreds of novels and comics—not to mention the whole wide world of fan theories, fan fiction, convention cosplay, etc., etc.

To cut a path through that unwieldy mass of material, I want to center the class on a relatively self-contained chunk of Star Trek from a relatively recent series—namely, the whole first season of Discovery, which debuted in 2017 (coincidentally, the first year I started at North Central). I’ve said that Lower Decks is my favorite current series, but I think that the first season of Discovery is probably the best sustained story Star Trek has ever told—a story so well-constructed, well-acted, and densely-packed that, to me, it ranks up there with the best HBO drama. (In fact, in my book I frequently compare that season to HBO’s Watchmen series, which was the main focus of my previous Honors course.)

At the same time that it is telling a very compelling and unique story on its own terms—one that won over a lot of very smart people in my friend circle who had never watched Star Trek before—it is also telling a story about Star Trek. As the scholar Andrea Whitacre puts it, Discovery “does not just want to be a show that fixes the franchise, it wants to be a show about fixing the franchise.” It very intentionally picks a prequel setting, uncomfortably close to the events of The Original Series, in order to rewrite the history of Star Trek and make it more truly progressive. While the installments of the 2000s and early 2010s had taken the franchise in a more conservative direction, Discovery rejoins the trend of representation started by Deep Space Nine and Voyager by putting a Black woman in the lead, and they compliment her with other strong female characters. And in a long-overdue move, it introduces explicitly queer characters, portrayed by well-known gay actors, in a way that is, in Whitacre’s words, “utterly unsensationalized, almost quotidian”—as though gay people had obviously always been part of the Star Trek universe. This last gesture partly explains why Discovery was not content to move forward in Star Trek’s fictional timeline. Introducing gay characters in Star Trek’s future would leave open the possibility that the fictional utopia had been discriminatory up to that point. Only by injecting more diversity into Star Trek’s own past could it effectively update the franchise as a whole.

Returning to my two broad features of Star Trek—the progressive values and the obsession with canon—I claim that Discovery somehow wants to vindicate the former by intervening very strategically in the latter. Thankfully, you don’t have to have all of Star Trek memorized to understand what’s going on here, so I think I will be able to give students an introductory sample of other series that will give them more than enough background to follow Discovery’s weirdly “meta” attitude toward its source material while simply enjoying it as a well-crafted show. There will be the occasional article, but by and large we are going to be doing what Star Trek fans do best—taking old TV shows deadly seriously. I hope you join me in the class, and I look forward to continuing our conversation here today as well.

List of Episodes Selected as Background (as paired for each class session):

• TOS: “Journey to Babel”; “Mirror, Mirror”

• TOS: “Errand of Mercy”; “A Private Little War”

• TOS: “City at the Edge of Forever”; “The Enterprise Incident”

• TNG: “Measure of a Man”; “I, Borg”

• TNG: “The Inner Light”; DS9: “Hard Time”

• DS9: “Past Tense, pts. 1 and 2”

• DS9: “In the Pale Moonlight”; SNW: “Cloak of War”

After that, we do two episodes at a time of Discovery season 1, with the exception of “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” which is paired with TNG “Cause and Effect.” This leaves a final week for student presentations over thematic groups of episodes they will select from a list of possibilities I have compiled (and may post later).