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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Did Star Trek: the Next Generation fail as science fiction?

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11:05 / 05.08.04

The pilot episode of Star Trek gave us a female second-in-command, the series gave us a multicultural cast and a black woman officer, all controversial science fiction concepts in the Sixties. What the hell did ST: The Next Generation have? I'm thinking specifically of the episode where Beverly Crusher's new boyfriend turns out to be a slug of the same symbiotic species as Dax from Deep Space 9, in a male body. The host-body dies, and the new host is female. Crusher dumps her lover faster than Britney Spears sobering up and realising she married a retarded hillbilly dumber than she is. AND BREAKS A SLUG'S HEART! Will no-one think of the slugs?! (sob)

ONLY NICE THINGS

11:22 / 05.08.04

Well, yeah. Oddly, considerations of gender and sexuality crop up a fair amount in Star Trek, and usually hamfistedly. I'd refer also to the episode in which fat Will Riker finds himself oddly attracted to a member of an androgyne race, only to discover that this particular specimen is a throwback who is actually female and has been hiding it to escape persecution, this preserving Riker's precious heterosexuality.

Apparently, the character of Malcolm Reed in Enterprise was conceived of as gay, which might explain why he wears lipstick, but this was abandoned in the planning stages. Presumably they just forgot about the lipstick. Actually could somebody out there clear this up for me? Why *does* Malcolm Reed wear lipstick? Is it a Manics thing?

11:52 / 05.08.04

is he the one who used to be in desmonds? blair's a huge ST fan you know, he never would have strode iraq-wards if the sherms had made the only british guy a poofter.

and successful as sf? the basic premise of next gen era star trek as i remember it was 'in the future everything will be fucked by viruses' pretty near the mark really.

Haus of Mystery

11:59 / 05.08.04

And both genders will wear clothes so tight they would appear to have NO genitals.

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:05 / 05.08.04

is he the one who used to be in desmonds?

Oh my sweet Christ. I knew he looked familiar. This has shattered, nay shatnered, my worldview.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:32 / 05.08.04

The word "Shatnered" has now officially entered my own private dictionary/spellchecker sort of thing.

Foust is SO authentic

21:01 / 05.08.04

What does this have to do with science fiction?

Haus of Mystery

21:37 / 05.08.04

If you don't know we ain't telling.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

05:14 / 06.08.04

Well, bouncy Johnnie Frakes has said subsequent to that episode that he would have had no problems if the androgyne had been more of a man, although considering Riker is so hetero it hurts... As for Reed, considering that he's 'British', and therefore also characterised as uptight, unable to express himself emotionally, has an extremely messed-up relationship with his parents and his father, I'm quite glad that they don't also make him gay too. What about that Travis fella that drives the ship. He's gone three years without once even getting close to be interesting, they could make him gay.

A couple of happy accidents in the sixties have allowed this big myth to arise that Star Trek is a bastion of liberalism, which I don't think is the case. The fact that it was apparently a fuss of five minutes that 'a black man' was put in charge of DS9 and 'a woman' in charge of Voyager says more about the sci-fi press in America than it does about Star Trek leading us into a new dawn where we all love one another.

08:16 / 06.08.04

Gene Roddenberry fought tooth and nail for some of the casting in Trek TOS. The execs ixnayed the female first mate from the pilot, and he basically smuggled Nichelle Nicholls in under his coat, only mentining offhand he was "going to add a little colour" to the bridge crew. Nonetheless, she was put through hell. The studio heads told the set guards not to let her in, the mailroom was told not to forward her fan mail, and she was ready to quit when Martin Luther King himself asked her to stick it out, because hers was the first television role for a black person that wasn't a negative stereotype. At any rate, the studio made sure she never got to do ANYTHING but sit there and look pretty, except for the episode where she and Kirk kissed, and even though they made Roddenberry shoot a version where they didn't, he BURNT the negatives. And that, Lithers, was the first interracial screen kiss. Now where did Next Gen ever go out on a limb like that? Hmm, reconciliation with the Klingons. Uh-huh. Pff, I swear the real cutting edge is all fanfic these days...

08:32 / 06.08.04

Hmm, reconciliation with the Klingons. Uh-huh

Whoa there Morkie!

Since the shaky peace of Organia in 2260s and the following Cold War, I never thought I'd see the day that a Klingon was accepeted in Federation society; let alone become an officer on their flag ship!

When Worf joined the Enterprise in 2364 he started a process which would continue until the Klingons joined their old foe finally, in 2554.

I don't think it's fair to belittle his efforts.

10:41 / 06.08.04

I'll tell you the REAL hero of the Klingon/Human alliance!
SCOTTY! That's right, who blew away the assassin at the end of Trek 6? Mama Scott's favourite boy, that's who. You better recognise! AND he rooted Uhura, that's more than Kirk ever did.

Jack The Bodiless

11:37 / 06.08.04

"Rooted"? Dear god. My eyes.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

12:19 / 09.08.04

Apparently he's got Alzheimers, Parkinsons and Diabetes the poor bastard.

Did anyone see that episode where Sisko thought he was a sci-fi writer in the 1960s? That was supposed to be closely modelled on the Star Trek offices of the time. I suppose it's a question of whether we're so jaded that the things they've done in the nineties like the black starship captain are genuinely a step forward or just something safe they've done hoping it'll be mistaken for revolutionary.

13:31 / 09.08.04

he has like a three year old kid too doesn't he? and he's in his eighties.

08:09 / 11.11.05

Searching for a pre-existing Trek thread to ask this, and here's one pretty close: So what have the various Trek iterations done that was forward thinking, first-times and transgressive moments, et al...?
OrigiTrek had...
First interracial kiss on television.
Mixed race cast at a time that you simply didn't.
And they were all bad-asses, too. Even the Russophilic fellow.
Eugenics morality.
That Bones humanitarianism and honest emotionality consistently putting Spock's dispassionate and artificial (that is, repressed) unemotional logic *and* Kirk's toddler with a meatgun policies in their place.
Sulu can fuck you up. Yes he can.

Next Gen. had...
A couple shots at avoiding homosexuality, re: Riker and his androgyn who was queer by eir cultural standards and got re-educated, and the (proto)Trill and Doctor loving/not-loving.
Picard as sexy.
Riza as a purely fuck off and have fun hedonism planet. That wasn't sinful in some way, to visit.
Data's full functionality, perhaps.

DS9 had...
Women periodically in charge of things and not fucking it up and weeping like children.
The n-word dropping in that DS9-is-a-story ep.
Governments are fucking liars and cheats and when war's involved your gov. will lie to you and fuck you over.
Religions big and loud and possibly legit.
Garek and his horrible bastard whose done some miserable and amazing things but he's still the man and you'd best back him up 'cause he knows what's up. Post-nowist, post-postmodern is Garek. Especially the tailoring bits.
Didn't they have the gay kissing at some point? Two women, obviously, since nobody ever wants to see two men liplocked, surely. Because seeing that would make your unborn babies gay, too.

Voayger had...
A willingness to show how hokey spirituality can become when it's stretched far from its roots and becomes a pan-culturistic distant miasma of goofiness. With space-rock meditation.
A willingness to show an absolutely inept captain... and make that captain a woman. Because it's not just men who're stupid, after all.
A willingness to have a crew who were so loyal they couldn't think for themselves, realize they were being perpetually screwed, and start pushing their leaders out the nearest dry dock.

Enterprise...
Hell if I know.

08:37 / 11.11.05

I dunno about TV SF, but a quick look at the shelve in my local bookshop reveals that spin off books have had a terrible impact on print SF, particularly shorter SF...

11:12 / 11.11.05

What the hell did ST: The Next Generation have?

Also, on Trek and homosexuality: both Q/Picard and Garak/Bashir are canonical from the actors' point of view (Andy Robinson is on record as saying that Garak is bisexual, and Patrick Stuart and wossname, John Thing, both think Picard and Q got it on - they defied the director at one point for a scene where they're in the same bed.) In general, though, I agree that Next Gen is indeed the worst of all the post-original Treks at imagining a future with non-heterosexual people in it.* I think the only thing it did that was innovative was show Picard as a man who had to renounce family life (marriage/children) in favour of his career, and show that that was a genuine source of lack and sorrow in his life. The only genre that usually lets men (rather than women) worry about a family/work choice is the detective story, which usually manages to glamourize being a shitty husband and father (oh, his wife weeps and has affairs, and we can see her point b/c he has not been home in days, but why can she not see that his commitment to his job is deep and commendable? What tragic depth his failed marriage adds to his character! A sorrowing woman and badly-fathered kids are a small price to pay for such tragic depth!)?

Anyway, so I quite like that about Next Gen.

*Though I'm reminded of some feminist SF novel whose name and author I can't remember, where the writer wants to segregate men & women on different planets and explore how heterosexuality would work there: so as not to interfere with her premise, she announces in an aside that they'd identified the gay gene and eradicated it. (Basically, she started a novel with Once we tidied up the loose ends by DESTROYING ALL QUEERS.....) Um, so Trek isn't the worst of all science-fiction in terms of its thinking about what gender/sexuality is going to look like in the future.

14:27 / 11.11.05

There's also something transgressive about the Borg -- which gets totally, like, detourned by 7 of 9 in Voyager, but....

The Borg were interesting because they were a pretty obvious comment on conformism & corporate assimilation (appearing as they did during the dawn of the multinational corporation as a global power). But they're also all poking tubes into bodies. The character designs seem borrowed from the S&M fantasies in Hellraiser, and the fact that the captain got Borged (leaving him feeling tainted and dirty, you know) always seemed a little... well, it was obviously sexual, or para-sexual at least. The fact that it was sort of genderless or de-gendered (at the time) might even make it a candidate for early symbolic treatment of bisexuality.

The 7 of 9 and Borg Queen (in whatever the movie was) iterations were really disappointing to me because I read them as attempts to "straighten" that whole dynamic. Since if it's genderless, it has to be feminine, right?

19:50 / 11.11.05

>> Patrick Stuart and wossname, John Thing, both think Picard and Q got it on - they defied the director at one point for a scene where they're in the same bed.)

Interesting bit of trivia; never heard this before.

16:39 / 12.11.05

I always wonder whether I'll hamfistedly fudge any and all of my posts relating to gender, but for my money DS9's Rejoined was actually pretty successful in shifting the taboo elsewhere. The fact that Dax and Lenara were both women wasn't even commented on and accepted by the rest of the characters without a flicker of reservation.

22:46 / 12.11.05

I think the commentary on the Borg goes a long way to say that ST:TNG did not fail as science fiction. It was new to most audience members, and said something moderately profound on consumerism and corporations. For me, the Borg have always been the most intriguing aspect of Star Trek. Anything that is so anti-Federation and anti-clean is just so fascinating. The Federation had to get rid of the Borg because the Borg are the ultimate reversal of the status-quo. The Borg is literally like Frankenstein's monster - it must be destroyed to return balance to the universe. (But this idea falls apart when you think of the Q continuum...)

09:26 / 13.11.05

Michael Eddington on the Federation and the Borg: "Why is the Federation so obsessed about the Maquis? We've never harmed you. And yet we're constantly arrested and charged with terrorism, starships chase us through the Badlands, and our supporters are harassed and ridiculed. Why? Because we've left the Federation, and that's the one thing you can't accept. Nobody leaves paradise. Everyone should want to be in the Federation. Hell, you even want the Cardassians to join. You're only sending them replicators so that one day they can take their "rightful place" on the Federation Council. You know, in some ways you're worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You're more insidious. You assimilate people and they don't even know it."

12:45 / 13.11.05

Fascinating. The Borg and the Federation are simply mirror images. Why doesn't Star Trek ever play this up as much as they should?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

17:59 / 13.11.05

The slight problem with the Dax thing is that in every other episode both Jadzia and Ezri are all about the men. Jadzia might have been a bit of a slut but she only slept with men.

I know Jonathan Frakes has gone on record as being disappointed about that hermaphrodite episode, and how they just couldn't get it to work.

Anyone able to verify the rumour that some ST fans believe the reason there aren't any gay characters is because by the time of the show queerness has been cured?

I thought I'd heard that Malcolm Reed in Enterprise was supposed to be gay, but maybe someone saw he was English and emotionally repressed and jumped to the conclusion.

Of course, the revolutionary things about DS9 was that the black man was in charge and Voyager that a woman was at the helm, unfortunately this was about 20 years after such tokenism would have been genuinely revolutionary on TV, or, if this is what was considered revolutionary on American TV in the 90s, god help us all.

06:17 / 14.11.05

Fascinating. The Borg and the Federation are simply mirror images. Why doesn't Star Trek ever play this up as much as they should?

There's not a huge amount of time spent mulling over the Fed/Borg similarities explicitly, but it's unquestionably in the subtext. DS9 spent a lot of time critiquing the Federation from a number of angles... often as many angles as there were characters. Happy to draw out edited highlights. Anyone interested?

Lady: considering that Patrick Stewart received hate mail from Trek fans for playing a gay man in Jeffrey then I'd have to go with the line that these things are revolutionary on American telly in the Nineties, and agree that it's a sorry state of affairs. Also worth noting that DS9 has a very strong black cast in general - it's not restricted to the Captain. Issues of race were frequently mentioned, but central to the story only a couple of times. And I'm not sure the Voyager's characterisation of Janeaway was doing anyone any favours in terms of representation: she was clearly delusional, irrational and inconsistent to the point by which any self-respecting crew would have mutinied.

06:43 / 14.11.05

The slight problem with the Dax thing is that in every other episode both Jadzia and Ezri are all about the men. Jadzia might have been a bit of a slut but she only slept with men.

That's fair enough in terms of the standards that you and I share, but I think you've already underestimated the conservatism of the audience. The Dax/Lenara kiss was already pretty controversial, and it's crucial that not a single character had a single issue with it being a same sex relationship. I also think the above quote misrepresents Dax' sexuality, in that between guys with exposed brains and broken bones in Klingon sex and the hinted at flirtations with Morn and several Ferengi she seems to cover a fairly broad base. Indeed, the only character to call her a slut was Worf, who was ridiculed for being a stuffy prudish traditionalist in retaliation and on several other occasions. Dax (and Trek in general) may not have been a beacon of gay representation but she was certainly an interesting example of a strong and particularly sexually active female character.

06:47 / 14.11.05

Anyone able to verify the rumour that some ST fans believe the reason there aren't any gay characters is because by the time of the show queerness has been cured?

I've heard other rumours from within fandom that Roddenberry was gay (and that Barrett was aware of this), although that doesn't necessarily preclude the above from being also true. Sorry dude, can't verify.

07:50 / 14.11.05

There's not a huge amount of time spent mulling over the Fed/Borg similarities explicitly, but it's unquestionably in the subtext. DS9 spent a lot of time critiquing the Federation from a number of angles... often as many angles as there were characters. Happy to draw out edited highlights. Anyone interested?

I read one of the Section 31 novels last year, which to be honest was pretty naff. However it does have an interesting line from Bashir regarding the Borg. A Section 31 spook is asking him his opinion on what the next big threat to the Federation is going to be post-Dominion War. Bashir says it will be the Borg, saying (something like):

"I think the collective hates us. I think we remind it of something it once was."

On a slightly different note. I always saw the Dominion as being the dark mirror image to the Federation. Where the Federation rule through diplomacy and respect the Dominion rule through fear and intimidation. The Federation are ideologically opposed to genetic enhancement. The Dominion custom breed super-soldiers and envoys.

On one of the DS9 dvds they mention that the Dominion were aware of the existance of the Federation before the discovery of the wormhole but that their plans to deal with them were based on actualling contacting them a couple of centuries down the road.

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:28 / 14.11.05

Happy to draw out edited highlights. Anyone interested?

Yes - I think I'm resigned to not having enough time left in my life actually to watch all of DS9, but I'd very much like to know what goes on in it.

09:37 / 14.11.05

Anyone able to verify the rumour that some ST fans believe the reason there aren't any gay characters is because by the time of the show queerness has been cured?

I heard that the bridge officer character who appeared in ST: First Contact (Hawk? I think that was his name) was taken from a novel in which he was gay. Wasn't mentioned in the movie, of course.

11:26 / 14.11.05

A gay character named Hawk?

Gah.

13:07 / 14.11.05

Here's the Wikipedia entry for Lieutenant Hawk:

In the first outlines of the script for the film, there are references to the fact that Hawk is gay, which would have been the first appearance of an openly gay character in Star Trek history. This did not survive into the final cut of the film

13:10 / 14.11.05

Hm. Regarding the question in the thread title, I suppose it depends what one considers to be the function(s) of science fiction. Myself, I'd say Star Trek falls down as science fiction for several reasons. Its timidity depicting non-heterosexuality would be one of those reasons, but not necessarily the primary one. I see that as part and parcel of a more general failure of imagination.

14:14 / 14.11.05

I'm not sure I really buy the idea that the Federation and the Borg are all that close. Its not that I think the Feds are above criticism as I think you can probably make a good case that the Federation is more or less a military society and perhaps a totalitarian one. After all, most of the key decisions seem to be taken by generals and the penalties for disobeying a political directive often appear slight.

But I think there are fundamental differences between the two. Mainly, I'd say that the Feds are extremely tied to naturalism. This is odd, given that they have such advanced technology, but they seem to constantly romanticise simple living, and are extremely wary of technology taking the pleasure and "humanity" out of their lives. You can see this in their attitudes to the holodeck, their distaste for replicator food and their stark opposition to developing artificial intelligence (beyond Data). I mean, Geordi sees better than anyone else is yet is still the subject of an enormous amount of sympathy for not having "real" eyes.

The Borg on the other hand *embrace* the benefits of technology, and see nothing wrong with "defiling" their bodies. The fact that they do this in service of a fascist ideal is only part of the problem the Federation has with them. I think you could probably argue the willingness to become unnatural is really where the gut reaction disgust stems from on the part of the Feds.

You could also argue that this is why the Federation is so hetero. Once you buy into an idyllic notion of "natural", the last thing you want to disturb it is someone who undermines the idea that it is an obvious universal. I think that First Contact provided an interesting moment, from this point of view. Because what you have is the unnatural creation, Data, who doesn't quite understand the sensibilities of the Federation intuitively, is an object for seduction by the S/M borg queen, who clearly values him without the prejudice he encounters pretty constantly amongst the Feds. In the end, however, he does the right thing and rejects unnatural sex thereby taking him one step closer to being a drone...I mean, upstanding member of Starfleet.

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