Modern Star Trek is perfectly cromulent

We seem to be nearing the end of the current period of Star Trek. Star Trek Academy has been cut off with season two, Strange New Worlds has one truncated season left and after that? It doesn’t seem like Paramount has any other Star Trek coming along. Discovery is already gone, and mercifully so Picard as well, and Prodigy and most tragically of all, Lower Decks.

 

So I have decided to write this to explore my feelings about modern Trek.

 

I will concede that I am a bit of a hater. I have high standards and won’t be shy if I find something doesn’t live up to them. But even there I don’t hate every modern TV show. The first season of For All Mankind was a banger and the second season mostly held together. It turned into a darkly comedic farce after this, but we can’t have everything. The Expanse was nearly flawless up until it rushed it’s ending a little bit.

 

In writing this I’ve solidified my feelings. Some of the things I’ve realized shocked me. Many troglodyte Star Trek fans hate mightily on the modern era of Star Trek. I’ve regarded their criticisms as at best deflections from their real opinions at worst just stupid. The main thing I’ve learned is that the modern era of Star Trek has been just about cromulent. Not great, not horrendous, but acceptable.

 

The Conservative Reading of Star Trek

 

I think the origins of the conservative nostalgia reading of Star Trek first started with the original series. The Enterprise no bloody A, B, C or D was a working military ship. Yeah, their uniforms are essentially pajamas, but the ship had ranks, a clear chain of command, orders, and it went into battle with horrible regularity. The Enterprise herself was the pinnacle of human technological development, and the actual crew that primarily ran the ship were white men. How often did Sulu or Uhura take command?

 

The diversity that the original series gets a lot of kudos for leaves a lot to be desired in the modern context. Sulu and Uhura were the most important minor characters, but they were rarely the focus of an episode. Sometimes they get some fun bits, like space drunk Sulu going crazy with western swords, or that time Uhura relearned all her knowledge in a weekend. They are very rarely driving the plot, however.

 

A conservative nostalgia reading of the original series is pretty plausible. Starfleet ships are, Spock excepted, racially segregated. The Vulcans get their own ships*, presumably the Andorians and Tellarites as well, although we never see this. White men run the human ships. Minorities know their place.

 

As much as I like to hate on Big Rod, this is pretty clearly not what he intended. Star Trek was genuinely progressive although not entirely groundbreaking to have Sulu and Uhura as major characters. He fell down primarily on gender and on considering American imperialism**, but he seems to have wanted a pluralistic multiracial utopian liberal future.

 

I’ve written elsewhere about how Roddenberry picked up fandom narratives that accentuated the utopian aspects of the Federation and became high on his own supply. The show where this is most evident is The Next Generation, which is the cornerstone of the chunk of the franchise I’m most nostalgic for.

 

A conservative nostalgia reading of The Next Generation is much more difficult. The cast from the very beginning is more diverse. Tasha Yar is a woman, and the security chief for the Enterprise D, at least until her death. Then she is replaced by Worf, a Klingon raised among humans played by a black man. The helmsman and later Chief Engineer is Geordi LaForge, another black man, this time a character from the planet of weird glasses people. Our chief medical officer is Beverly Crusher, another human woman. Yeah, the captain and first officer are white men, and the second officer is Data, the whitest man of them all. There are some weaknesses of TNG, of course. The female characters very rarely have anything to do that doesn’t have anything to do with their gender. The show is terrified of referencing homosexuality. It makes some half hearted attempts at depicting gender diversity.

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation follows the Enterprise D (after the original Enterprise was destroyed in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the Enterprise A was revealed in Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales, and it’s been a few decades since then). The Big D’s mission is to go out and do Star Trek stuff; investigate anomalies, do diplomatic missions, teach alien women how to love and everything they did in the original series, but new for the 1980’s.

 

The kill blow for a conservative nostalgia reading of TNG comes fairly early, in the twenty-sixth episode of the first season, The Neutral Zone. Data unfreezes some cavemen frozen in a glacier from the far off future 1990’s. One of those is an obnoxious rich dickhead who keeps trying to boss Captain Picard around until the captain finally flips out and explains that capitalism was destroyed centuries ago money doesn’t exist, his bank account does not exist, he does not in fact have enough money from compound interest to “buy this ship,” and he’s lucky Data gormlessly unfroze his bozo ass.

 

Big Rod’s ideas about how the Federation worked evolved and even after he passed the crew on the show maintained a shocking reverence for his vision. I’ll be real, the reason I am who I am is because growing up I watched this pluralistic work place where these co-workers from myriad disparate backgrounds came together and busted their asses to make the universe a better place. If there was something weird and ammoral, such as in the second season episode Pen Pals, where Data is texting with a little girl with weird fingers, and her planet is about to be destroyed by volcanoes but Picard refuses to help because the planet hasn’t developed an arbitrarily selected technology, the point of the episode is to ponder power, the responsibility of the powerful, and the morality of intervention.

 

That is what makes Star Trek great, ultimately.

 

Next Generation always struggled with the legacy of Big Rod, but the next series took that legacy by the horns and grappled with it. Deep Space Nine is the greatest Star Trek Show, this is fact not conjecture. The lead is Benjamin Sisko, the first lead in a Star Trek series to be black. Unlike Picard he is a father and works hard to raise his son well. Also in the cast are Kira Nerys, a “freedom fighter” now working for her planet’s government now that they’ve thrown off the yoke of Cardassian oppression, Dax, a worm living inside Terry Farrel, Miles Edward O’Brien, a working class engineer transferred over from the Enterprise, Julian Bashir, a pervert doctor and Odo, a pile of goo that walks like a man. We also have diverse side characters, such as Quark, the first Ferengi to have more personality than just “the happy merchant but with big ears instead of nose,” Kai Winn, a cunning politician who fought her way to the top of the Bajoran religion, Gul Dukat, the former commanding officer of the space station where DS9 is set and a leader in the Cardassian occupation, and Garak, a Cardassian exile who can’t return to his home society. They live in the shadow of the rules laid down for Next Generation by Big Rod and this gives them a tremendous playground to explore the setting.

 

Deep Space 9 is a space station on the edge of Federation space. It is positioned to support the planet Bajor, now free, and prepare them to join the Federation.

 

People talk about how the good part of Star Trek is the bright look toward a hopeful future. Deep Space Nine has an attempted fascist coup of the Federation, terrorist attacks, post occupation and genocidal trauma on a societal scale, and a years long war arc that culminates at the end of the series. It’s a dark, bleak show, but it’s about a diverse cast of characters refusing to be complacent or cowardly. They fight for what’s right and they bring a measure of freedom to those living under the yoke of the Dominion, a brutal empire run by the same type of goo as Odo. Sometimes they make horrifying decisions, such as when Sisko poisons a planet to flush out an anti-Cardsassian insurgent movement (Season 5 episode 13: For the Cause) or perform a false flag attack on a diplomat from a rival society to draw his people into a war the Federation cannot win alone (Season 6 episode 19: In the Pale Moonlight). These episodes question the legacy of Big Rod. It still has some all time bangers that don’t go that far, but still explore heavy topics, such as Far Beyond the Stars (Season 6 episode 13), where Sisko has flashbacks to being a science fiction writer in the 1950’s and discriminated against because of his race.

 

When I was a child I liked TNG for it’s simple morality. When I became an adult I grew into DS9 for it’s moral complexity. Likewise, the structure of DS9 prefigured what the next great evolution of television storytelling would be, a serialized format that tells an episode too large to fit in one single episode. At best I think this has been a mixed bag, but DS9 effortlessly nails this moderate serielization.

 

Voyager lives up to the legacy of Big Rod a little bit better. The captain was Kathryn Janeway, the first female lead in Star Trek history, with her second in command Chakotay, an anti-Cardassian insurgent from a fake Native American tribe, BLT, a half Klingon/half human engineer whose few stories tend to play up the metaphor of being mixed race, Tom Paris, a character identical to one the same actor played back in Next Generation with with a fake mustache so they didn’t have to pay the writers of The First Duty (TNG season 5 episode 19) royalties***, Tuvok, a Vulcan played by a black actor, The Doctor, a chatbot left on so long it became sentient, and Neelix, a weird creep on the run because his girlfriend is two years old. Later on they added Seven of Nine, a human captured by a hostile cybernetic civilization called the Borg who is gradually learning how to be human again. Voyager is a ship investigating the anti-Cardassian insurgent force that then gets sucked halfway across the galaxy and has to embark on a likely multi-decade long mission to return to the Federation.

 

This is the most diverse cast to date on paper. I think the series generally falls down in two respects. Most of the plots focus on plots instead of characters. In writing you introduce danger and conflict to see how characters deal with this. In Voyager all too often they recombooble the energymotron or whatever and push the reset button, not have characters make sacrifices to win and face the consequences of their actions.

 

It was set up to have a serialized story, and kind of did, to an extent, but it could have gone so much farther. For the most part the series sticks to the status quo and updates it modestly season to season. They find some new shortcut that takes a decade off their voyage. Neelix’s three year old girlfriend dumps him because she was being mind controlled. Neelix’s four year old ex-girlfriend leaves to make room for Seven. One of the human crewmembers has a baby and then allows Neelix to be one of her caregivers for some reason. For the most part the main thing that changes are what kind of aliens they encounter and the supposed distance they are from the Federation. They could do a lot more.

 

Just a few short years later Ronald D. Moore, one of the aforementioned writers of The First Duty and one of the creative voices that made DS9 so successful(also very briefly a writer on Voyager), proved this definitively. He was the show runner for SciFi Channel’s reimagining of Battlestar Galactica, which went out of the way to serialize a similar story. You can see the wear and tear slowly build up on Galactica, it’s crew and the ragtag fleet that follows it. Resources were scarce, infrastructure crumbled. Yeah, perhaps it didn’t stick the landing perfectly, but it follows up on the legacy of Deep Space 9 beautifully.

 

Voyager probably earns more “progressive” points than TNG, just for how terribly written the female characters tended to be. In the capsule above I didn’t even mention the big D’s councilor Troi because she pretty much never does anything of consequence. At least Janeway pretty much always has something to do, even if it is just telling BLT to recombooble the energymotron or delete her husbando’s wife inside the Irish village game everyone plays. But overall I prefer TNG. It fails to live up to it’s potential less, and even a bitter old hater like me is susceptible to some nostalgia.

 

That brings us to the last series of mid-period Trek: Enterprise. This one follows the adventures of the previously unmentioned secret first Enterprise Negative Z before the original series and before the Federation. By this point the franchise had squeezed just about all of the juice out. Our heroes are Jonathan Archer, another white man captain, Trip Tucker, the white man chief engineer, T’Pol, the second in command and science officer, a vulcan woman, Dr. Phlox, the ship’s doctor who is from the polyamory aliens, the ship’s driver Mayweather (played by a black actor) and ship’s receptionist Hoshi Sato (played by an Asian actress).

 

TV itself was in transition during this time period. Serielized narratives were becoming common place in genre television. Enterprise itself was directly up against Battlestar Galactica, and frankly there is no choice. Enterprise floundered around trying to figure out what it was supposed to be. It was mostly monster of the week episodes that could have been transferred cleanly into TNG or Voyager and then at the end T’Pol or Archer would look directly at the camera and in a perfect Peter Griffin voice say, “Hey Lois, remember that time in future Star Trek show when they already had rules established and if we had those rules it would have impacted how we went through the plot of his episode?”

 

In truth I find that Enterprise is the first modern Star Trek series.

 

The first two seasons had mostly episodic plots that occasionally ran together in the background. The execution was kind of half assed, but I like the slowly budding friendship between the Enterprise Negative Z and the Andorians, along with the growing suspicion that the Vulcans are actually assholes. They resorted to sad gimmick episodes a few times where an alien that didn’t show up until TNG shows up but then fucks off before anybody can ask their name. A lot of people like the third season. This was when the show started to significantly transform. The entire season was one single arc. Previously unmentioned aliens vaporize Florida, so the Enterprise Negative Z goes and tries to do the Space Iraq War. Eventually they realize oh wait, this is Star Trek, you probably shouldn’t have the processors of Picard do crimes against humanity (Xindanities? I dunno). I feel like this was an also-ran attempt to capture the energy of what Battlestar Galactica was doing contemporaneously, and worse. With season four the show started to show some potential. This time they snapped the episodes together in shorter arcs. They vary in quality a lot. I rather like the episodes where Data’s previously unmentioned granddaddy goes joyriding with some genetic supermans. The episodes set in the Evil Universe are a fun diversion. But you also get the episode where Dr. Phlox looks directly at the camera and in a perfect Peter Griffin voice says, “Hey Lois, remember that time in Star Trek the original series where the Klingons were white guys in bronzer? And the less said about the series finale, which his actually an episode in an episode of a TNG episode, the better. What a way to tell the cast, crew and people who watched this show to go fuck themselves! What an abuse of nostalgia.

 

You will struggle to find a Trek fan to rates Enterprise highly in the mid period. I would definitely position it dead at the bottom, with Voyager on top of it, TNG above Voyager, and I’ve already established DS9 is the Greatest Of All Time.

 

For a decade the franchise languished. There were some movies. I can’t really care about Star Trek movies because the only ones I’ve ever really liked were the ones with the original cast. The JJ Abrams movies take on the surface elements of what we think of as Star Trek, set up cool set pieces and then don’t really have an idea where they’re going in the future. I think in general they relied way too heavily on the rule of cool and making Star Trek stuff way too big beyond what makes any kind of sense. Star Trek has never had a great understanding of scale except by accident, but the Abrams movies are particularly egregious. Star Trek Beyond did a halfway decent job of setting up a status quo for further development, but then that never came.

 

Finally Paramount dragged the old franchise out and began development of a panoply of new shows, and after three thousand words I finally get to the point of this piece.

 

Star Trek: Fine, Whatever

 

Star Trek Discovery was subject to a lot of fan backlash. I think most of it is bullshit, but it also made some deranged creative decisions early in it’s run that make it harder to defend. A lot of the internet whining was based around the lead, Michael Burnham, being a black woman. Her character is not the problem with the show. The two things that I think really do not work for Discovery are that for the first time ever it is intentionally and purposefully not an ensemble show. The strength of Star Trek is it is a place where you have a wide variety of characters who are very different, they bring different traits and skills to the bridge and they contribute variety. Star Trek Discovery is the Michael Burnham show, other characters show up, they might even be important, but everything is about Michael’s journey from officer, to traitor, and back to officer. You might even get a very special episode where a major plot features a given character, but also Michael is there and the one who is actually important. The other thing that really doesn’t work is that they didn’t have a clear plan of where they were going.

 

Fans complain about Discovery’s disregard for established continuity. I want to deny this, like, there is previously established canon about how Spock is extremely disengaged with his family, but his secret previously unmentioned brother is one thing, his other secret adopted sister starts to stretch credulity. Yes, Michael Burnham is Spocks secret adopted sister for some reason. I find the whole premise really frustrating. The idea of a human raised as part of an alien culture is super interesting, but it’s clear that Burnham is Spock’s sister to get a cheap hit from “Oh, I remember Spock,” and not for a deeper character reason. They use it to decent enough effect by having her relationship with Sarek (Spock’s father) be very different from the one he has with Spock. It’s used as a cheap bump when Spock actually shows up. After that, though, the entire plot element is nearly completely forgotten. Burnham feels like she had a relationship with Vulcan culture for about halfway through the first episode, then it gets entirely forgotten. Which is all the more frustrating, given everything that happens with Vulcan in the back half of the series. A couple times in the back half of the series Michael Burnham will do the Peter Griffin voice.

 

Otherwise, I don’t really care about the sanctity of every line in TOS that mentions the United Earth Space Probe Agency or whatever. The writers of TOS didn’t have a clear idea of what the Federation or Starfleet were, they were developing it as it went on. I actually really like that they decided to ignore the stupid bullshit from Enterprise to explain why come in The Original Series Klingons look like, to quote the philosopher Voltaire, “Puerto Ricans in gold lame.” You can’t constrain yourself to half formed ideas from fifty years ago.

 

JJ Abrams had a completely toxic effect on television. If you want to tell a story you need to have a beginning, middle and end planned out. This is something JJ Abrams hates. Lost was TV show from the early 2000’s that really kicked the serielization trend into high gear. The show was based around having weird shit happen to a bunch of castaways trapped on a weird island with weird shit going on. The foundation of the show was it’s mysteries and they kept expanding all the way through. It was fun to discuss what the deal was with the magic numbers or the smoke monster or John Locke walking around or whatever else. And through it all the writers maintained that they had a plan, they knew where they were going. They had no idea where they were going. But also with the delay they worked under they couldn’t simply adopt fan theories that made sense to come up with a reasonable conclusion. They just threw a bunch of shit together for it’s finale that emotionally felt right and was very unsatisfying.

 

The fun of the series was talking with other people trying to make sense of the crazy plot twists and weird bullshit. When it turned out that no, there was no plan, it really was a bunch of random shit thrown at a wall with no thought put into it. It’s a finale so bad it retroactively ruined the series.

 

With Enterprise this bad method of storytelling became ingrained in it, so you end up with wild swings like the various sub plots around the temporal cold war disappearing entirely in the wake of the Space Iraq War season, then everything that happened there forgotten while they do actual prequel stuff in season four. This is what I mean when I say Enterprise is the first modern Star Trek show.

 

With Discovery they didn’t even plan out as far as the end of the first season to begin with. From jump Michael Burnham is stationed on the USS Shenzou, the first officer to captain Michelle Yeoh and this is a decade or so before the Original Series. Yeah, the production design is very different from the Original Series, but it would be too insane to accurately recreate the style of the Enterprise no bloody A, B, C or D. They encounter a weird ship of Klingon dissidents that look like they’re wearing Klingon head-loaf on top of their already existing Klingon head-loaf. Burmham knows they have a stupid warrior culture and so to earn their respect you need to attack them. Captain Michelle Yeoh is from more of a Captain Picard Starfleet lineage and wants to bend over and expose their ass to the Klingons for a full wedgie offer. Burnham attempts a mutiny to try a less stupid approach but is stopped. Then the Klingon dissidents start a war with the Federation, which was what they were trying to do at any rate, kill Captain Michelle Yeoh and Michael Burnham is placed in custody pending mutiny charges.

 

I think this was a somewhat clever bait and switch, they played the advertising as if Michelle Yeoh was going to be the captain of the show, but instead she was immediately gone.

 

The first season follows Michael as she is brought into the Starship Discovery by her somewhat deranged captain Gabriel Lorca, another gimmick captain played by Jason Isaacs. There she runs into Saru, another officer from the Shenzou from a species of prey animals with a highly attenuated danger sense, her roommate Sylvia Tilly, who is weak and soft but wants to be an officer anyway, Paul Stamets, an engineer who is developing the magic mushroom drive that will allow Discovery to teleport anywhere the plot needs, and eventually Ash Tyler, who they rescue from a Klingon torture camp. The cast ends up being very diverse, and it’s almost not worth tracking it any more, except in constrast to Next Generation. By this point Star Trek is a truly diverse universe with diverse cast and crew, as well as weird aliens.

 

Almost entirely the show follows Michael on her journey to win back the trust of her crewmates and herself. All of these characters are super interesting and deserved to be developed more. But no, this is not an ensemble show.

 

I think Discovery makes interesting swings. It’s pacing is very uneven because it’s trying to tell a huge sprawling story, but when it fucks up it fucks up bad.

 

Season 1 episode 7 “Magic to the the Sanest Man Go Mad” is one of my most hated episodes of Star Trek ever, immediately after every episode of Star Trek Picard season three (I’ll get to that) and just before the last episode of Enterprise. In this one Dwight from the Office shows up, looks directly at the camera and then in a perfect Peter Griffin voice says, “Hey Lois, do you remember that time a weird fat scammer guy tried to traffic ugly broads with a magical glamour that made them look hot to oversexed space miners? I don’t!” and then he goes on a brutal killing spree and murders everyone on Discovery over and over again, using a time machine to do it. Yes, this is a reimagined version of Harry Mudd, an extremely minor villain from the original series. We only ever see him trying to run the worst scams in the universe there. Here is a cunning mass murderer. Stamets is high on mushrooms so he can see the time loops and eventually figures out a way to send information to Michael so she can finally defeat Murder Dwight and stop his reign of repeated murder. Then it ends with a bit where Murder Dwight’s wife shows up and hits him with a rolling pin and everyone laughs, freeze frame.

 

The season builds up it’s Klingon war arc and finally culminates with Discovery jumping with the magic mushroom drive into the unknown. There was a brief recess of a few months and then the second part of season one continued. It turns out they jumped into the Evil Universe.

 

The Evil Universe is recurring plot device throughout Star Trek. It worked reasonably well the one time it was used in the Original Series. Kirk and pals teleport into a weird fascist echo of the Enterprise and have to play along to survive. In this universe in this time period every character has an exact duplicate and they’re evil. Kirk ultimately reveals to Evil Spock(this is the version of Spock with a cool goatee) that there’s a universe where everyone isn’t evil, and then he gets back home. It was reused during Deep Space Nine, except now while many characters have their equivalents the political situation is very different. Evidently Evil Spock tried to make the Evil Universe not evil and this led to the Evil Federation being destroyed. It’s goofy, but it’s aware of how goofy it is. There’s even an episode where Quark’s brother Rom goes there and spends the whole time questioning the logic of why this dumb shit exists. And it’s great.

 

I think the problem with the use of the Evil Universe in Discovery is that the tone of the show is too self serious. You have episodes about trauma and abuse. Then you have an episode where our heroes repaint the livery on their ship to have a bunch of daggers stabbing the Earth it is inherently very silly. When you have a soft gentle character like Tilly get into drag and put on the goatee as the nefarious Captain Killy… what are we doing here? I want to like it. I like goofy things. Unfortunately, the tone of the rest of the show brings attention to how dumb this crap is.

 

One thing I think works relatively well is that they remember the Evil Universe arc of Enterprise. In that one Evil Archer (briefly) captures a derelict starship from the future of the regular universe. They remember this and the flag ship of the Evil Federation is this same starship, now tricked out with slightly more advanced technology. I guess this is trying to explain why come the Evil Enterprise will look exactly like the regular Enterprise in a few years? But more importantly it turns out the Emperor of the Evil Universe is Michele Yeoh. Yeah, that’s right, she’s still under contract.

 

There’s a big dumb conflict between Evil Lorca, who has been impersonating regular Lorca the whole slow, and Emperor Michelle Yeoh. He is killed, but the emperor humiliated, so she decides to come along with Discovery back to the regular universe, where they remember the first half of the season was about a brutal war with the Klingons and they come up with some halfassed hand waved solution to solve it.

 

It’s a bit of a mess. The backlash against it was heroic and mostly incoherent. It’s references to the rest of Star Trek are very clumbsy at best and actively detrimental at worst. I do think most of the chatter around it was trying to cover the real reason the haters didn’t like the show with explanations of every single minor reference to recent history made in the Original Series.

 

I think season two was largely a course correction. They did this by wrapping themselves in the Original Series as tightly as possible. The Starship Enterprise shows up and, because it’s all fucked up, Captain Pike takes command of the now captainless Discovery now that it turns out Lorca was actually Evil Lorca. They investigate a strange signal while trying to figure out what has happed to Spock, who has gone insane. The arc plot here is much more coherent and contained. It turns out the villain is Control, Section 31’s slop bot, which has decided it wants to blow up not just one, or a hundred or a thousand, but all schools everywhere and it needs Discovery for this process. In the future it will integrate Discovery’s computer into it’s slop and this will allow it to become intelligent. The only way to defeat it is to make sure it can never obtain Discovery’s computer by having it jump far into the future and erase all mentions of Discovery from continuity and Spock looks directly at the camera and in a perfect monotone says, “Hello Lois. Do you remember my sister Michael? No, you do not, because she never existed any more.”

 

It flows a lot better than the first season. I think the addition of the Enterprise crew is unnecessary and I want to hate it as another appeal to nostalgia, but the newly cast Enterprise crew of Pike, Number One and Spock are actually pretty good in their roles. The episode where they go to the Klingon cult planet and Pike uses time crystals to learn about his future fate actually works. It makes Pike an interesting character, where before he was pile of meat driving around in a wheel chair with one beep for “yes,” two beeps for “no.”

 

There’s a couple bad episodes this season. Let’s start with season 2 episode 5 “Saints of Imperfection.” There’s some kind of monster in the magic mushroom dimension and Discovery jumps into it to try and figure out what’s going on. I glazed over this from last season, but I do think it was pretty weak and cheap plot device. As part of Ash Tyler’s trauma arc he flips out and murders Stamet’s husband Hugh. But it turns out after being murdered he was cloned into the magic mushroom dimension somehow. At the time the show took a lot of heat for fridging Hugh Culver. “Fuck it, he’s still alive in the magic mushroom dimension for some reason” is a really weak reason to bring him back. It’s unearned and stupid. On the good side, after this they do a good job of having him grapple with the trauma of being killed and trapped in a mushroom dimension for a year.

 

The next episode “The Sound of Thunder” is also really bad but for different reasons. Discovery returns to Saru’s home world. We find out more about his fellow Kelpians. It turns out Saru is going through Kelpian menopause and transforming from an anxious wuss to a badass action hero where his threat ganglia which detect threats now become threatening gangia, which shoot poison darts. Normally, when Kelpians start to show signs of menopause they are sumarily executed by the dominant species of their planet, the Ba’ul (not to be confused with the Baku, the aliens with too much skin that F. Murray Abraham played in Star Trek: Insurrection). Discover stops this mass scale murder, which allows the Kelpians to hulk out in menopause and force the Ba’ul into some kind of peace.

 

One of my good friends has pointed out that up to this point Saru is a very rare type of character, someone with serious anxiety who none the less fights through it and even uses that anxiety to help him analyze situations and be a hero. After this point Saru is just a slightly twitchy side character no different from the Asian guy and the black guy who work on the bridge but literally no one ever remembers their names.

 

So with season three the show jumps forward to the thirty first century. The extreme jumpiness of the season plots calm down a bit. There’s a bunch of background elements that seem kludged together at random, but the series also takes on a more coherent character as it starts to establish it’s own setting and universe.

 

When you get down to it this is what I want from Star Trek a lot more than endless recycled nostalgia. In this far off future year all the warp fuel exploded for dubious reasons, so the Discovery with it’s magic mushroom drive, is one of very few ships that can actually travel through space. They spend the season searching for the remnants of the Federation and trying to find out why all the warp crystals exploded. In the meanwhile much of the galaxy has come under the control of the Emerald Chain, an economic cartel run by Osyraa, a particualrly skillful and evil Orion pirate.

 

There’s some dumb shit, like the episodes where Michelle Yeoh, who is still on Discovery for some reason, is glitching out. It turns out some wibbly wobbly timey wimey shit is happening. And the final explanation for why the warp crystals all exploded is extraordinarily stupid. Ultimately Osyraa is a solid villain and I enjoy this deeply frayed future.

 

In season four the Federation has begun to come back together. During this time an anomaly called the DMA appears and destroys planets at apparent random. I think they handwave reforming the Federation a little bit, but I appreciate that the problem the DMA represents isn’t a villain doing evil things. It’s a mystery that the crew have to slowly solve. Eventually it turns out to be an artifact from extremely powerful and particularly alien aliens. This is basically exactly what I want from a modern Star Trek show.

 

The only real problem I have with season four is I think they framed the threat of the DMA badly. It should have been something completely random and incomprehensible that is only occasionally dangerous but when it’s dangerous it’s very very dangerous. Instead they have it directly threatening important planets we care about, like Earth and Vulcan. I like that they went out of their way to not have a villain, but they could have gone further with this premise.

 

By this point Discovery had finally found it’s footing. The fifth season’s arc follows more or less logically from season four. Two couriers are trying to find the technology of the progenitors. It’s a more or less by the numbers cat-and-mouse story as Discovery hunts the couriers, Moll and L’ak. It has decent twists and turns and culminates in a slightly dumb resolution to the whole mystery. A projection of a lumpy alien from the past looks directly at the camera and in a perfect Peter Griffin voice says, “Hey Lois remember the time Picard went on a mission from his old archaeology professor and proved all species in the galaxy were seeded by a previous civilization of lumpy people?” I think the actual finale ends up a bit of a miss step because after this Michael Burnham suddenly remembers Short Treks existed.

 

Short Treks were little short bite sized films based on Star Trek that were ancilary to Discovery and came out around the first couple seasons. One of them featured a clearly 2250’s era Discovery just kinda hanging out alone in the distant future. This was before the time jump. The Disco was refit in the future to add even more obnoxious future tech.

 

I would have prefered they spent what little time they had focusing on the characters who followed Michael Burnham to the future. Yeah, we get to see a bit of her future life and family. Yeah, we see Saru’s wedding. But what about Tilly? What about the Stamets? This is the Michael Burnham show and ultimately she is the most truly important character. So she has Discovery de-refit and leaves it adrift so that the Short Trek can happen.

 

With how much I fucking bitched about the part of the series set before the Original Series you probably think I hate Discovery. I don’t. It’s flawed. It starts off weak, but the fourth season is really good. On the average I think it just keeps it’s head above water.

 

The Crown Jewel of Shit Star Trek

 

Star Trek Picard is empty nostalgia shit. It makes Star Trek: Enterprise look like Star Trek Deep Space Nine. It easily takes the bottom spot for Star Trek series in general.

 

The first season was actaully kind of promising. Captain Picard is an old man living on his family’s vineyard when he is called to adventure by a young girl having weird physical and mental episodes, who is then assasinated in a bizarre attack. Our characters are our elderly Captain Picard, who is now old and bitter and angry with Starfleet due to greater political events that have happened since the TNG movies. He is joined by Agnes Jurati, a doctor who has spent decades investigating now illegal robots, Raffi Musiker, a black former Starfleet conspiracy theorist whose theories are always actually correct, Elnor, a Romulan sword weaboo, and Rios, a Chilean who owns a fast space ship. Together they investigate the mystery of the murdered girl and find out she was a robot and assasinated by a weird Romulan cult. This eventually leads them back to a planet of robots built by Data’s previously unmentioned human brother. They created a tangled plot that was very complicated and would be very difficult to resolve in just one episode. A massive fleet of Romulan cultists want to blow up the robot planet and also the robots called for help from evil cosmic robots that exist outside the universe. Then a bunch of facile bullshit happens to defeat all the bad guys very quickly.

 

At this point the series shifted gears from being possibly good and trying to do new things to just being a bunch of nostalgia bullshit.

 

In season 2 the Federation is suddenly replaced with an evil version of itself for some reason, so our heroes, who are immune to the effect, look directly at the camera and Captain Picard, in a perfect Peter Griffin voice says, “Hey Lois, remember the time the Enterprise crew went back in time to save the whales?” So then they go back in time to the very modern 2024. I want to give it props, I really do, but it’s nothing more than a rehash of Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales stretched out over a whole season. They try to do some interesting stuff, like have Rios kidnapped by ICE and placed in an ICE concentration camp but instead of feeling ripped from the headlines it just feels stupid and empty. The villain this time around is Data’s previously unmentioned great great great grandfather, who is trying to fuck up the first crewed mission to Saturn (which is to be led by Captain Picards’ great great great grandmother) so a maniacal god-like energy being will give him a cure to his clone-daughter’s genetic disorder. When the plot is done and our heroes go back to the future Data’s great great great grandfather looks directly at the camera and in a perfect Peter Griffin voice says, “Hey Lois, I’m going to invent that Khan guy who has my name.”

 

That was bad, of course, but it was nothing compared to what we had to deal with in season 3. We start off by introducing Jack Crusher. It turns out immediately after the end of Next Generation Picard impregnated Beverly Crusher and now their son in an adult. There was no hint of any of this anywhere in the franchise either, not in the TNG movies or the last two seasons. When they are attacked by a mysterious enemy Beverly puts out the call. Picard abandons the cast from the first two seasons and calls in a favor with Riker and they try to steal Riker’s former ship, the USS Titan. The only good thing about this season is the other new addition to the cast, Todd Stashwick as Captain Shaw, who is intelligent enough to recognize a bunch of badly written bullshit is happening all around him and he’s perpetually exasparated. Initially they are faced down by Vadic, a scenery chewing alien that does a bunch of random annoying bullshit to be extra evil. They quickly kill Vadic then the Borgs queen looks directly at the camera and in a sligihtly robotic Peter Griffin voice says, “Hey Lois, remember that time we captured and assimilated Captain Picard?” It turns out Jack Crusher was a trap laid by the Borgs somehow and something something destroy the universe. Luckily, it turns out Geordi LaForge has spent the last twenty years reassembling the long destroyed Enterprise-D, so then the whole Next Generation crew gets together on it and goes on one last boomer adventure. The Next Generation boomer crew’s exposure to AI slopporated shrimp Jesus memes on Facebook has innoculated them against the new borgs something something, so they use their boomer powers to defeat the borgs one last time forever.

 

This is the worst Star Trek has ever been. It’s some of the worst television in general I’ve ever seen.

 

I had to heavily truncate a lot of the stuff from the show. There is weirdly a lot of disconnected borg stuff. There’s a subplot around a derelict Borg cube in season 1 where they meet and send off Hugh, a minor character who was once a borg. And that was pretty good! Then in season two there’s a whole subplot where Jurati is hallucinating the Borgs queen, then she becomes the Borgs queen at the end. But a secret different borgs queen with nothing to do with the borgs queen from season three. She is never referenced even once in season three. It’s bizarre. All of this highlights how little planning there was in the writing. These are plot elements that should have foreshadowed and fed into each other, but no, they’re just random plot elements with no connection.

 

But ultimately things are darkest before the light. The next new Star Trek show proved that you can still make good Star Trek.

 

One of these things is not like the other...

 

I really wanted to hate Lower Decks. As I’ve said above, I’m a celebrated hater. It looked like Star Trek Rick and Morty. I HATE Rick and Morty. It is the most painfully unfunny thing I’ve ever seen, and I routinely watch fascists humiliate themselves trying to become Facebook influencers or whatever. Star Trek: Lower Decks is not Star Trek Rick and Morty. Lower Decks FUCKING RULES.

 

Note that I’m using bold and italics and all-caps. Have you seen that anywhere in this essay up to now? No? Maybe I could edit it into the DS9 section, but Lower Decks needs the emphasis.

 

Lower Decks follows junior officers stationed on the support ship Cerritos that runs unglamorous missions while the hero ships get to go out and go on all the cool adventures. We follow Beckett Mariner, a Starfleet brat whose parents are both high level officers but she wants to prove herself without them(and also rebel against their rules), Bradward Boimler is a tryhard who joined Starfleet because he’s a Trekkie like all of us (and if we lived in the Federation wouldn’t you want to join Starfleet?), D’Vana Tendi, an Orion who wants to get away from the family business of piracy, and Rutherford, an engineer who loves being an engineer and (platonically[?]) loves Tendi.

 

It really doesn’t feel like a modern Star Trek show. The episodes are almost entirely episodic, focusing on a plot of the week with occasional multi-part episodes. Plots slowly build in the background. The mystery of a season builds until the finale.

 

I am highly critical of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. References to Star Trek canon in Picard and Discovery often times feel forced. Hey Lois, do you remember that time Spock was a half human half Vulcan officer on the Starship Enterprise? Hey Lois, do you remember that time Captain Kirk and Uhura and various others teleported to the Evil Universe? Hey Lois, do you remember that guy Spock choked out for playing music on the bus?

 

The reason I use that as a recurring device in my writing is because there’s an emptiness in a lot of references that media make to other media. It’s trying to establish a bond with you for being aware of the same media. Most of the time, it’s an attempt to wield nostalgia as a weapon to make you like a thing. It’s manipulative and I hate it.

 

Lower Decks is what you can make out of nostalgia if you have a high enough level of craft. Every time giant Spock’s skeleton shows up, every time they are attacked by a Mugato or Gumato, every time Tom Paris shows up opposite the guy Tom Paris was ripped off from and they point angrily at each other, Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel, it feels real and necessary unlike the way surface level references elsewhere feel forced in other media.

 

It is clear the cast and crew of Lower Decks love Star Trek. Yeah, they’re hitting it with their elbow in the rib, but it’s a loving nudge making fun of this big beautiful pile of cinema that means so much to so many people.

 

The magic trick is that even with all the jokes and the references, the show has really well fleshed out characters at it’s heart. The plot is driven by Mariner’s internal struggle about who she wants to be, Boimer’s growth from tryhard to succeedeasy, Tendi’s struggle against the culture she grew up in, and Rutherford’s struggle to find out who he always has been.

 

The only bad thing about Lower Decks is that Paramount canceled it.

 

I am not the target audience for Star Trek Prodigy. It is an animated show for children featuring a child cast. The story follows a group of children trapped at a mining slave colony who escape on an experimental Starfleet ship. The characters are Dal, a brash child from an unknown species who wants to be the leader, Gwyndala, the daughter of the weird alien who runs the slave colony, Jankom Pog, a Tellarite engineer, Zero, an alien who wears a robot suit because their physical form will drive most humanoids irrevocably insane, Rok-Tahk, a rock monster, and a blob named Murf. The main antagonist in the first season is the Diviner, the aforementioned weird alien, who has been trying to find the experimental Starfleet ship to get revenge for the future destruction of his civilization that he believes the Federation will bring.

 

I think show effectively leverages connections to the Star Trek canon. The references it uses mostly feel natural in the story and not like anyone is looking directly at the camera and speaking in a Peter Griffin voice. Okay, there’s an episode where they find a planet of Original Series cosplayers that does this a little but it’s not too bad. Tellarites showed up in the original series very briefly and somewhat more extensively in Enterprise. Jankom Pog gives us our most extended look into their culture. Likewise, Zero is a Medusan, an alien that showed up on the Original Sseries one time. The show plays with fun sci-fi stuff, like time travel and paradoxes. In the second season the Prodigies have managed to return their ship to Starfleet and receive an educational role. There’s a crazy scifi plot and they manage to return to Gwyn’s home world and they meet a different version of the Diviner who is horrified by his alternate future selves’ actions, and the villain of season two is a completely different character. Wesley Crusher, a minor character from Next Generation who everyone hates does show up and does do a little bit of Peter Griffin voice, bu I’m willing to forgive it.

 

And in another rare trick, each season feels complete and like they’re part of the same whole. They both clearly have an idea of the story they’re trying to tell, but the second season compliments the story of the first season, not just forgets it entirely and moves onto some unrelated bullshit.

 

It’s not for me, but it’s a great introduction to science fiction. In thinking about it, I think I realize I like it more than I give it credit for.

 

The Death of the Coward Strange New Worlds

 

In the wake of Star Trek Discovery’s second season the new Enterprise crew of Pike, Spock and Number One were spun off into their own prequel series, Strange New Worlds.

 

In Strange New Worlds we see a new version of the starship Enterprise no bloody A, B, C or D, this time crewed by Captain Pike, the apotheosis of a liberal hero who knows he is destined for the beeping chair and has accepted it, Number One, who is turns out is secretly a genetic superman, but is hiding it as of the start of the series, Spock, who is inflected by his more emotional portrayal as in the original Star Trek pilot, The Cage (and Discovery) but growing toward his canonical portrayal, and joined by Nurse Chapel, a returning character from the Original series now with more of a personality than just wanting to fuck Spock, Doctor M’Benga, a traumatized war veteran doctor (also a very minor character from TOS) and Uhura, an excited child newly assigned to the ship who will go on to be one of the legendary crew. The last important crew member is La’An Noonien-Singh, the security officer and also a genetic superman and Data’s grandmother.

 

SNW is kind of an attempt to reboot the Original Series. It is more episodic than Discovery and Picard, and this suits Star Trek a little bit better. This is an attempt to make a new hopeful version of Star Trek. The world around it makes this a little more difficult. The first two seasons came out during the Biden administration when it seemed like the threat of rising fascism was pushed back for a moment, and there are still the instincts that brought us the 1997 Crime Bill and the believed Colin Powell drawing rectangles on a random map as justification for the Iraq War. Christopher Pike is a liberal hero in the mold of Merrick Garland or Robert Mueller. His cool pompador waves in the air as he talks about “bringing democracy” to alien planets. You want to believe he’s a good character who wants the best for the universe, but really he’s just an agent of Space American imperialism and cares more about blowing up inferior races than actually protecting democratic values. I don’t think this was the intended reading but it feels fairly explicit. I think liberals were wishing that they could have a regular liberal hero who could win by using rule of law or whatever.

 

As the series goes on the Gorn become a recurring concern. In the Original Series they show up one time as a guy in a dime store Godzilla suit n The Arena (TOS season 1 episode 19). Here they are transformed into a viscous expanding horde, not a rival civilization to make peace with but an infectious parasite that makes you explode and give birth to dozens of little Gorns. They are monsters. They will eat you. They are an inferior race that you cannot negotiate with, you can only nuke the site from orbit (it’s the only way to be sure) or recombooble the energymotron or whatever to buy a few years before these space locusts reawaken.

 

They only show up a few times but this utterly dehumanoidized portrayal sits really poorly with me, especially in the context of events that have been ongoing in the Middle East for the last few years. I hate sapient aliens portrayed as monsters. Aliens in Star Trek are a metaphor for different foreign people. In the Original Series the Klingons represent the Soviet Union and the Romulans represent the Chinese. I can’t help but see this as a media portrayal of another human nation, stripped of humanity and dignity and turned by the media into unrepentant monsters. But they’re fucking human beings. If they’re doing horrible things they’re doing them for reasons that make sense to them, not because they’re evil monsters doing evil stuff to make it okay for our heroic occupation forces to vaporize them. Indeed, this is a big part of why I wrote Dissidents of Utopia and Refugees from Utopia, available at fine book stores and also Amazon now.

 

Int he context of 2022 the first season was all right. It as a return to episodic Star Trek, for the most part. We had an engaging crew and intresting moral quandries to think about. Each character is disctinct and has their own role in the stories. I think the biggest misstep beyond the Gorn arc is sesaon 1 episode 6 “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” where the Enterprise is on a mission to Omelas. Enterprise is tasked with escorting The Child to the torture box, and somehow Pike has never encountered this classic science fiction story so he just kinda goes along with it. He’s horrified once we finds out The Child is destind for the torture box, supposedly for the benefit of all Omelas, but also, like, doesn’t do anything about it. The season ends with a two episode arc about The Gorns, who stomp on babies and laugh evily.

 

Season two is better. “Ad Astra per Aspera,” “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” “Among the Lotus Eaters,” “Those Old Scientists” and “Under the Cloak of War” are all really great episodes. That’s half the season right there. These are all either playing with Star Trek canon in a fun way, biting into toothy philosophical questions or forcing the characters to figure out who they really are, without all their science toys. And in particular “Those Old Scientsits” is an incredible episode. Boimler and Mariner fall through a time hole to join the Enterprise crew and they freak out just like I would getting to meet the Enterprise no bloody A, B, C or D crew, but they do it with heart and an affection for the whole continuity. This is balanced out somewhat by “Charades,” which which Spock is turned human and has to hide this from his fiance for some reason. If that’s your worst episode you’re sitting pretty.

 

The problem is season three torches the good will the last two seasons built up. It was interrupted by a writer’s strike and you can instantly detect a cratered quality of writing. They should have just punted production until after it was resolved, because god damn. They’re clearly just producing halfway through out first drafts of scripts as fast as they can manage. The season opener, “Hegemony Part II” works relentlessly to finish the Gorns plot from the last season as quickly and thoughlessly as possible. The next episode “Wedding Bell Blues” features a god-like energy being looking directly at the camera and saying in a perfect Peter Griffin voice, “Hey Lois, do you remember that time the Enterprise ran into a god like energy being that turned out to be a child, or wait, it turned out he was thirty four and lived in his space parents basement?” Then John DeLancie shows up and says “No. But I do remember playing a god-like energy being in Star Trek: The Next Generation,” also in a perfect Peter Griffin voice. There’s a holodeck episode that could have easily been taken from a TNG script. There’s an episode where a wokescold strawman is making a documentary about Starfleet and the chad Captain Pike explains with his large chin and pompador that sometimes you have to blow up schools full of children for freedom and democracy. Then, the worst episode of the season by a country mjile is “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans,” where Pike, Nurse Chapel, Uhura and La’An are turned into Vulcans for some reason and prove that Vulcans are genetically assholes. I want to shit talk almost every episode this season. There is one diamond in the turd, though, Season 3 episode 9 Terrarium. Ortegas, the ship’s driver gets stuck on an alien planet with no resources and will soon die, so she is forced to Enemy Mine with a Gorns that is also trapped on the planet. They become friends. They work together to survive. They realize both of them are actually sapient beings deserving of respect. This is what I wanted all along. It’s a little clumbsy and forced, but it gets the job done. It’s a mediocre episode of Star Trek in the abstract and blows the doors off the rest of the season. I actually kind of like that when the Enterprise shows up the panicking crew immediately vapes the Gorns, because to do anything else would not make sense with these characters.

 

The last season is yet to be released. It is truncated to six episodes. I don’t hold out high hopes.

 

I think quality wise Strange New Worlds has it’s head just above the water. It is okay.

 

Star Trek: Suck 31

 

Section 31 is a movie the producers made because they still had Michelle Yeoh under contract. The evil spies in the Federation do poorly thought out spy stuff. I’ve already written a review of Section 31. My opinion has not changed. It’s very bad but only in the middle somewhere to how bad the TNG movies were.

 

 

This brings us to the latest show, Starfleet Academy. It is set after the end of Discovery’s main plot. Stafleet Academy has been on hold due to all the warp crystals blowing up, but that’s not a problem now, so it’s back. It follows Caleb Mir, a bad boy whose mommy is a space criminal and his step mommy feels guilty about briefly imprisoning his real mommy. Other characters include Jay-Den, a Klingon biology student, Genesys, another child of Starfleet royalty who is obsessed with living up to her parents expectations, SAM, everyone’s imaginary friend from the imaginary robot planet, Darem, an aristocratic alien who wants to serve, no matter what that actually means, and Betazoid Tiffany Trump. Our villain is Paul Giamatti who is ruining his teeth chewing on the scenery. It’s mostly green screens and LCD’s. It can’t be healthy for tooth enamel.

 

It is a show about college students getting into sexy adventures and sci-fi hi jinks. I think the problem with the show is that it goes after too high an age bracket. They don’t quite “show it going in,” but they come pretty close, and they swear endlessly. I’m in favor of adult content written for adults. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the show in general would work better if that stuff was cut in favor of going after a high school audience. I can’t relate to or care about college students, and the faculty are astonishingly fucking stupid. If you are writing about young people the audience that wants to read about that will be somewhat younger than the characters you depict. They would benefit from making their target audience not me.

 

In general I think the show does a good job of exploring it’s wide cast of characters, and indeed it has a wide cast of characters which not all the other modern Star Trek shows can claim. I enjoy when there’s dumb childish bullshit happening and don’t really enjoy when there’s stupid self serious scifi bullshit happening, with Paul Giamatti being cartoonishly evil for evil’s sake. I think most of the episodes end up succeeding at what they’re attempting, although the first season finale is basically entirely Paul Giamatti looking directly at the camera and in a perfect Peter Griffin voice saying, “Hey Lois, remember that time in Voyager where the ship goes into lock down because they find the evil molecule that blows up warp for some reason? I’ve got an infinite supply of that!”

 

I hope season two finds a less goofy villain, or at least, if they do they give him less goofy weapons.

 

Mostly, though, I just want something new and different. If Paramount is to make more Star Trek make something weird and new.

 

If you are interested in my power rankings of modern Star Trek it probably breaks down along these lines:

 

Lower Decks

…

…

…

Starfleet Academy

Star Trek Prodigy

Strange New Worlds

Star Trek Discovery

…

…

Section 31

…

…

…

…

…

Star Trek Picard

 

But I do think the average level of quality, from Academy Prodigy, Discovery and Strange New Worlds, just barely has it’s head above the water, and it’s a squeaker ranking which ones are which. It ends up good that Section 31 was reduced to a movie, and Picard only got three seasons.

 

The conclusion I have to take from all this is that modern Star Trek is perfectly cromulent. It’s fine. It’s okay. It is occasionally really good, but most of the time it’s just kinda there, and it could be a lot worse (unless it is a lot worse).

 

* See the USS Intrepid from the Original Series season 2 episode 19 “The Immunity Syndrome”

 

** See ACAB Includes Gene Roddenberry

 

*** I am well aware the producers deny it to this day. One thing that’s common that is really starting to piss me off rather a lot is when someone pretends to believe an obvious lie. When someone is not acting in good faith you don’t have to treat them as if they are acting in good faith. The producers are lying. This is obvious. Stop pretending like it’s true.