Message To Star Trek at 55: Don’t Ruin It

 

Star Trek turns 55 on September 8, the anniversary of the first episode to air in 1966.  There are extensive posts on this blog about Star Trek history from the 50^th and even the 40^th anniversaries.  But instead of just the past, this time I have thoughts about the future—and a plea: please don’t ruin Star Trek.

 Unlike the 50^th anniversary, this year sees Star Trek feature films and television under single command.  While the landscape continues to change for feature films (theatrical v. streaming), in television the transition from broadcast to cable to streaming is much more complete this year.  There are (or will soon be) five Star Trek television series being streamed. And there are proposals and plans for more, plus a number of proposed and/or in the works feature films.

 The 55^th anniversary will be celebrated on the Paramount streaming service with a series of panel discussions, some of which will focus on the legacy of Star Trek, and one on Gene Roddenberry’s vision that was the rationale for Star Trek’s particular storytelling.  Star Trek evolved based on it, and at its best expanded that vision (especially in the Next Generation era), until it had a more definite identity: its soul.  The question has always been, can the soul of Star Trek survive and thrive as the world around it changes?

 Today’s media corporations prize the “tent pole franchise” with a history and built-in fandom, and Star Trek is again a hot commodity in the media marketplace.  So the temptation to diversify, to create all kinds of programs and stick the Star Trek name on them is strong.  So is the temptation in feature filmmaking with enormous budgets to follow trends regardless of the integrity of what became a unique saga with a soul.

 But populating a story with Star Trek uniforms, even with characters, ships and plots derived from stories deep in the “canon,” does not make it Star Trek, no matter who owns the trademark.  Nor is slavishly obeying the demands of the loudest fans on social media.  And it’s not even paying pious lip service on the margins to previously championed values.

 In my view, the current series Star Trek: Discovery (at least in its second and third seasons) enacts the value of diversity while continuing in other ways as well to model a better future through its characters and stories in the Star Trek tradition.  While adopting contemporary visual and storytelling styles, it continues the mythic qualities of Star Trek heroes.  It even provides that Kirk-like, almost over the top acting style in Sonequa Martin-Green’s Burnham.  

 But another current series, Star Trek: Lower Decks makes me nervous.  It’s a cartoon series focusing on the lower ranked officers (apparently Starfleet has no enlisted personnel) that employs broad comedy. For those who enjoy this approach, it can be a workplace comedy on a starship, with a series of in-jokes for Trekkies. 

 But even though some implied pretensions of previous Star Trek series and its bridge officers are satirized at times, notice that the series focuses on what essentially is the starship’s working class, not the bridge officers.  Making fun of the lower class has been an historically easy comedy reflex.  It’s akin to the broad ethnic humor that characterized much of the American past, well into the 20^th century.  

Compare this approach with the much-praised (and fan favorite) episode of The Next Generation that ostensibly inspired this series, titled “The Lower Decks.”  It followed several young lower rank officers in a story that is primarily dramatic, but with the same kind of character-based comic moments as the rest of the series.  It portrayed them as awkward but learning without demeaning them, and ultimately as heroes.

 Classic Star Trek created recognizable characters but with a difference: the Starfleet culture of the future. Making a contemporary situation comedy on a starship risks diluting the Star Trek difference and therefore its identity as Star Trek. The cartoon series will do well to avoid such easy pitfalls.

 I worry as well about how the (sometimes) imminent Section 31 series could be handled.  Invented for Deep Space 9 in 1998, the black ops Section 31 truly emerged in Trek fiction during the fevered post-9/11/2001 years in which alien terrorism became an obsession, and “extraordinary rendition” and torture suddenly became okay, because terrorism was the greatest danger.

 Nowadays we’ve got a deformed climate literally wrecking the world, we’ve got an ongoing pandemic, armed white supremacists and Orwellian cults running state legislatures and apparently the Supreme Court—all much greater threats than alien terrorism, and still the obsession with off-the-books violence against the violent.  Where is Starfleet’s Climate Corp?  Starfleet Medical bringing public health to the galaxy? Michelle Yeoh is always watchable, but if Section 31 turns into a decades-old video game, haven’t we seen enough of it already? 

 More worrisome are two other proposals (or rumors of proposals) for Star Trek stories. One is the much-discussed Quentin Tarantino feature film.  When it was first announced, and met with near universal gushing online, I was more than skeptical but kept quiet because I didn’t believe it would actually happen.  And it hasn’t.  

 But more recent news (assuming it is modestly accurate) suggests the plan was for an R-rated movie (I assume for violence) based on the original series episode in which the Enterprise confronts a planet run by gangsters imitating human mobs of the Capone era. It’s not impossible for a director as talented as Tarantino to develop a good story. But if this report is true, it’s really troubling that an ultraviolent feature with an easily exploited premise was even contemplated for Star Trek—or may still be.

 The second proposal I’ve seen referred to more than once is for a Star Trek horror series, a truly horrifying prospect.  There are so many ways such a series could shatter Star Trek.  Even the idea of depicting horror movie violence as entertainment in a Star Trek context is so antithetical to Star Trek storytelling that it could damage the credibility of other Star Trek series. Though the Star Trek identity can probably survive two cartoon shows, it is already being diluted. A horror series attacks that identity directly.

 (If the idea is inspired by the Borg and the First Contact feature, we may be actually talking about a Star Trek zombie series. But that sounds like simple and degrading exploitation.  Star Trek is not genre cardboard.)

 Star Trek became an international phenomenon partly because of what it stood for, and how it told its stories so that generations could watch it together, parents and now grandparents and children sharing a culture of the future.  If Star Trek gets sliced and diced into niche programs for different audiences, its universality could evaporate. A horror series is the definition of a niche that repels other viewers.  It’s a horrible idea. 

At their best, Star Trek stories exist on a particular but very thin line. They are not realistic, but moment-to-moment they are truthful.  They ground the symbolic and allegorical in human response. They deal with the complexities of existence, through heroes and heroic institutions. They may contain irony and even physical comedy, but basically they are sincere. They provide models in the future for people in the present, and models of a culture worth aspiring to and especially worth building.  

 For all its drama and science fiction adventure, in the classic sense Star Trek has also always been a comedy. It follows the classic U shape of comedy defined by literary critic Northrup Frye and others: the story starts at a high point when all’s right with the world, plunges into difficulties with whatever danger it faces, confronts the danger at its worst, then ascends as it works together to solve the problem, until it basically reaches the high point where it started,though with something added, like knowledge, even wisdom. 

 This is not exactly real life; this is Story World.  But it is the kind of story that Star Trek is.  It is the way it explores and excites, dazzles and inspires. It is how it contributes to the lives of its viewers, the aspirations of the culture, and the soul of the future.

 In a way, new Star Trek shows are none of my business.  I am not the audience for them.  But still, I repeat my plea: in the rush to “expand the Star Trek universe,” please don’t ruin it.  Because if you do, you could ruin to some degree not only its future but its 55 year old past.

I've revised part of this piece thanks to a comment correction by Unknown, about which one of the original series episodes was the basis for the proposed Tarentino Star Trek film.