In the very first episode of Star Trek: the original series, we see a white Captain reporting to his black Admiral boss, a black woman on the bridge just a couple years after Jim Crow was abolished, wearing a short skirt (a symbol of feminist liberation at the time), a Japanese helmsman on the bridge only 20 years after the internment camps, a Russian crewmate on the bridge during the Cold War [edit: actually did not appear until Season 2 but the point stands], and the foundation of the modern concept of queercoding.
In the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we see male crossdressing crew members, a female officer on the bridge in charge of security, a literal ship’s counselor stationed at all times on the bridge, a single mom raising her teenage son on her own while juggling a full career in medicine, a blind mechanic whose “disability” is shown to be a strength, and an angry, all-powerful godlike being who is revealed to be simply a petulant child masquerading as a deity.
In the very first episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, we see a black man gain a powerful command position, respect the hell out of the customs of a religion he didn’t understand, show respect and equal treatment to members of three other alien races he didn’t understand, appoint a female guerilla fighter who defeated imperialist fascists to a position of authority within his administration and defer to her judgement in areas of her expertise, accept his friend’s gender change, and tell his son he loves him.
Star Trek has always been woke. You just grew up to be a bad person.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the wokeness complaints. They aren’t about who or what is presented in current trek, but how it’s presented. For example, instead of playing out insightful allegories that let viewers figure out the message, thereby crediting us with intelligence, the characters in Picard S2 walk around LA saying, “Wow what a terrible century, there’s so much social injustice.” That isn’t good storytelling, it’s a combo of lecturing and virtue signaling, and the fact that it’s the right message doesn’t change that.
In that case the issue is hamfisted storytelling, not progressive ideas. So calling it “woke” is pointing the wrong direction.
But that’s just it. Pushing progressive ideas through ham-fisted storytelling is the wokeness people complain about.
It is also when these things are blatant. Original Star Trek was progressive not because it showed a black person’s struggle for equality, it was progressive because it showed black people as equal.
A perfect example is DS9’s lesbian kiss. The short version, Trill are a joined species consisting of a humanoid host with a standard lifespan, combined with a very long-lived symbiote that can live for many host lifetimes. The resulting personality is thus a blend of the host and the symbiote.
In this specific episode, there is a rule in Trill society that if two Trill are romantically involved, that relationship has to end when either of the symbiotes move to a new host. The explanation is otherwise two symbiotes would just stay together forever through multiple hosts and never grow or learn. Anyway, one of the show’s main characters is a Trill female and in this episode encounters another female carrying the symbiote her symbiote was once married to. So this is a forbidden romance they are both tempted to. It’s explained that the previous relationship one of them was in a male host and the other one a female host. Now they are both in female hosts, and this is not brought up even once. The fact that they are both women is not even mentioned. It is completely and totally ignored.THAT is a non-woke progressive presentation of the idea.
It’s not trying to get the audience to empathize with the black person who can’t sit in front of the bus, it’s just showing the black person sitting in front of the bus and making it not a big deal.
I agree that this is valid criticism. The Star Trek writers have clearly gotten lazier over the years, opting for hamfisted, blatant, “see? we’re being woke in this scene” rather than allowing you to think for yourself.
However, the complaint here is laziness and not the nature of the message. I’d even go so far to say that due to the complex storytelling of earlier series, there’s a large continent of the fanbase that didn’t realise their progressive nature, and are objecting to how it’s woke now.
So basically I think there’s two complaints here: a valid one that you’re making: “lazy writing is terrible and arguably less effective”, and another one coming from, shall we say, those unburdened by an overabundance of schooling that are objecting to progressive ideas that were always there, but they only notice it now with the lazy writing.
Then again, I am pretty sure, when we walked around e.g. the medieval times, we would bubble out the blatantly ovious as well.
“Look, those idiots don’t know about bacteria. Dumbasses.”
My favorite answer:
“Woke” as an insult? In 2017 or 2019 and forward, I remember see people saying “Ted Kaczynski” was the “first woke” and then become something insulting instead of something cool.
Is a silly internet word at the end of the day, like “larper” “chad” “based”, trying to understand this words are like trying to speak with Darmok.
In the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we see male crossdressing crew members
I hate that a man wearing a dress is considered crossdressing. Actually I hate that the term exists at all. Oh, to live in a world where people wore whatever they wanted and nobody gave a shit. Yes, I get that was the point of it being in the show. Just let me bitch and complain.
At the time, I didn’t even think of that outfit as “crossdressing” - it just looked like they were trying to say styles had changed.
For real. It’s a skant, you philistines. It was the height of fashion and one of the officially accepted versions of the Starfleet crewman duty uniform as of 2364.
I whole-heartedly agree.
agreed. And tunics are gender neutral. Dresses are just mislabeled tunics.
Tunics and dresses are not the same. There is some overlap with the simpler dresses, yes but for one tunics hang on the shoulder while dresses don’t necessarily.
Ah yes, I heard that theory about shoulderless tunics.
More seriously, dresses are a European middle-age evolution of the tunic for fashionable noblewomen. The whole gender-specific is kind of built in the concept of the word.
based
The better question is: “When did the Star Trek writers forget how to do their jobs?”
Seriously, New Trek has the most garbage-tier writing I’ve seen in a while. It’s all just flashy effects and dumb characters. Old Trek had really interesting story lines that made you think, now New Trek treats the audience like we’re idiots.
It’s not that they forgot to write it’s more likely that they don’t have the time, have an asshole production team that push metrics in their throat (the Paramount family is particularly racist but prefer money over their racism) and every good writers have been laid off for attempting unionization.
It’s sad but Star Trek is in its Enshitification phase and is going on and on and on …
Don’t have time? 90s Trek had 20+ episode seasons and a season every year, current Trek is 6 or 8 episodes every two years. While the production quality has gotten better, the writing has somehow gotten worse.
The time isn’t invest on the writing.
I think the better question is “when did Star Trek start preferring awkward, hamfisted, and cynically inauthentic writing that makes you feel like you’re watching community theater?”
The answer is a toss-up between partway through Voyager and Enterprise, but ENT was definitely the point at which Star Trek was no longer being used to speculate about the possibilities of exploration and discovery in an optimistic future, and instead became an embarrassing soapbox on the part of writers and producers who haven’t had an idea challenged since they were in preschool. The entire 9/11 + War on Terror allegory is very possibly the most cringeworthy Star Trek content ever televised. That’s really saying something considering we also have Discovery, an exercise in why you can’t hire a bunch of hacks who all want to be Joss Whedon, nor give them free rein to produce a version of Star Trek in which every character is a creepy asshole who never shuts up and uses the kind of corny faux slang that only exists in TV commercials.
As with many things, I blame Rick Berman.
Discovery isn’t a bad show, but Discovery is TERRIBLE Star Trek. Not because its “woke” but because it acrively goes out of its way to eschew most of the tropes that make Trek what it is, the most egregious being the Spore Drive and instant travel. Academy was a much better Trek show than Discovery, to compare the two modern “futuristic” shows.
S-tier satire of the conservative “Trekkie” (please Gene, I hope you’re being satirical). Real comments like that always make me think of Douglass Adams’ “rules” on growing old:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Anytime someone says Star Trek’s progressivism was never “hamfisted” I usually just point them to the after school special that is Let that be your Last Battlefield:
Real comments like that always make me think of Douglass Adams’ “rules” on growing old
I would have thought my comment made you think of every digit of pi, because that’s also something you didn’t read all of before replying to me. Seriously, if conservatism were applicable, why would my thesis be trashing Voyager and Enterprise, and pretty explicitly pointing out that Enterprise is overall even worse than Discovery? Shows that came out when I was little, I might add, and about 20 years before I increased my lifetime watching history of Star Trek beyond a single digit number of episodes across all shows.
Plus, I never said older Star Trek shows didn’t have bad writing, but you chose a bad example. Let That be Your Last Battlefield isn’t hamfisted, it’s just a clear narrative about racism, obsession, and hatred that aired before there was any grass growing on Dr. King’s grave, but it admittedly doesn’t resonate with people who are so jaded they consider an objective and unambiguous moral position intrinsically corny and trite. I guess To Kill a Mockingbird is just a hamfisted after-school special too, huh? Do you know what Let That be Your Last Battlefield doesn’t have, though? I do: it doesn’t have an undercurrent of insincerity, nor does it have characters whose narrative function is contradicted by everything they say and do. In that way, DS9’s Meridian is not far from being a Discovery episode.
Star Trek has, at various times, televised episodes that were boring, nonsensical, transparently insincere, objectifying, hamfisted, acted poorly, or rife with grating and unnatural dialog. It wasn’t till Voyager that these became consistent (especially boring and nonsensical, which are rarely absent). Enterprise and Discovery very consistently share most or all of these qualities in abundance, though I will damn Discovery with the faint praise that it doesn’t really have characters whom elderly perverts shoehorned in to add sex appeal, like T’Pol or Seven of Nine (or arguably Troi, though she also got legitimate character moments whenever Gene Roddenberry and/or Rick Berman were distracted by sexually harrassing someone else).
Discovery isn’t the worst Star Trek, that honor goes to absolute trash that is Picard, but it’s still a bad Star Trek. And again, let me be clear because you probably skipped to this paragraph, that’s not because it’s “woke”. It’s not bad because it has LGBT characters (some of whom aren’t killed off immediately), it’s bad because they don’t have anything recognizable as personalities and still have a closet to come out of. It’s not bad because a the captain is a black woman, it’s bad because they can’t decide whether she’s a Starfleet captain, Jesus Christ, or the Rambo fantasy from UHF. Throwing the public a bone with representation for marginalized minorities is not the act of kindness it should be when what they’re being represented as is incompetent and unprofessional dolts who speak in monologues and act like they have lead poisoning. For wokeness done correctly, see Lower Decks, a show I intensely dislike but recognize is overall good. Discovery isn’t aspirational, it doesn’t have challenging ideas, it doesn’t incite emotion, it doesn’t make you think, and it doesn’t have any heart, at all. Discovery is really not a woke show in any substantial way. It’s still better than Enterprise, Picard, and TAS because the bar is so low it’s in the mantle.
Anytime someone says Star Trek’s progressivism was never “hamfisted” I usually just point them to the after school special that is Let that be your Last Battlefield
I never understood that episode. I’m sure there’s some sort of metaphor there but I just couldn’t figure it out
It was clearly about how marijuana makes your children communist
I’m mainly responding to your quote about new things being against the established order and my view of NuTrek is extremely biased since I mainly get my information from RedLetterMedia but do you think NuTrek ackchyually can sit on its own laurels?
I did watch Picard’s 3 seasons and I think it highlighted pretty well the problems with NuTrek:
- retconning established lore to the extreme (slavery vis a vis androids is cool with the federation, earth has super drug problems)
- gratuitous violence (I was disgusted watching the equivalent of SAW with the Borg torture porn)
- action action action (can’t have any philosophy, gotta have fast paced machinegun phaser shootouts)
I could probably come up with more issues, but it’s been a bit and I’m never rewatching Picard. NuTrek is a far cry from the old thinking man’s trek and is really watered down.
I agree completely. Which is why I love Academy. It’s silly, it’s got heart, it tires to build up the power of care and chosen family, and it meta pokes fun at itself. It’s like they tried to make lower decks into a mainline show.
Which was exactly what we needed after the lens-flare, torture-porn, throw-every-shred-of-history-out-the-window bullshit we’ve had for a decade.
It’s also notable we see the Starship Captain getting therapy and being emotionally vulnerable in the Pilot.
Not that notable. He got therapy for recurring nightmares and PTSD after his assimilation by the Borg. Dealing with his trauma was the central theme of s4e2 Family. It was some of Patrick Stewart’s best acting in the whole series, right up there with s5e25 The Inner Light.
What the show didn’t do was make his trauma and recovery an ongoing part of the series. That’s not because they wanted him to get over it, it’s because of the episodic nature of the show. For syndication to work, they needed most episodes to be self contained. This dramatically enhanced the show’s rewatchability, as should be the case for all great syndicated shows.
I am talking about Pike in TOS’ Pilot.
It’s a nonsensical question to begin with. Nobody will ask such a question and not be a troll so answering in any form is a defeat in itself.
Anytime someone anywhere on the political spectrum uses the word “woke” without also defining what the fuck it’s supposed to mean I just cannot take them seriously.
