Star Trek's latest voyage to 'strange new worlds' charts a 'final frontier' evocatively close to home

"In Defense of Episodic TV," read the headline on a story by Associated Press journalist Ted Anthony last week about Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Paramount's serialized prequel to Star Trek's 1960s Original Series.

Author of Chasing the Rising Sun (2007), the intriguing biography of a classic American song, Anthony lauded Strange New Worlds for what might seem like its mundanity (e.g., Miami Herald):

Members of the Enterprise crew on “Strange New Worlds” are living their lives. They’re doing their jobs, even when their jobs really suck—like when they lose one of their own or are under attack. Like us, they find themselves in different moods from episode to episode, from scene to scene. They’re silly one moment, crisp and efficient the next, emotional the next and then, maybe, silly all over again. It all feels more like the cadence of actual life than one of these deep dives into a single, relentless story arc.

I second Anthony's paean. Strange New Worlds is a peculiar joy. In its return to the episodic formula of the 20th century Original Series and Next Generation, and, indeed, a classic television formula that has given way to the predominance of the season arc in the streaming era, showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers have reinvigorated the incomparable capacity of science fiction to comment critically on the real world through a veil of analogical fantasticism. Such was the original vision of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (on this blog).

Strange New Worlds episode 5, "Spock Amock" (released June 2, 2022), beautifully exemplifies the episodic approach. (Plot details, but no story-end spoilers, follow.)

Paramount invested lavishly in Strange New Worlds, and it shows in elaborate sets and stunning special effects with epic space battles. "Spock Amock" subtly exhibits this investment, but action and suspense are not at the heart of the episode. Rather, "Spock Amock" is a deceptively low-key human interest story unfolding as the Enterprise crew go on shore leave. Frankly, such stories usually turn me off because, in the streaming era, they are the product of lesser writers seeking to fill time in unnecessarily multi-episode productions. That's not what's happening here.

This story by Myers and Robin Wasserman comprises three discrete lines. In one, Spock (Ethan Peck) and his fiancée T'Pring (Gia Sandhu) wrestle with a sometimes mildly comical Freaky Friday flip of consciousness; Number One (Rebecca Romijn) and Lt. Noonien-Singh (yes, she's related) (Christina Chong) investigate a ship disciplinary matter; and Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and Spock/T'Pring negotiate a treaty with frustratingly obstinate alien leaders. Without giving too much away, the striking theme that unifies all three story lines, in the end, is, simply, empathy. By interacting with the unknowable ways of other beings, every character is compelled to look inside her or his own mind, own character, and thereby to grow in the capacity to see the world from a different perspective.

The Enterprise never leaves space dock in "Spock Amock." Yet perhaps better than any other, the episode exemplifies her mission, to explore the strange new worlds of the final frontier. For it always has been true of Star Trek since its opening sequence first aired in 1966:

The final frontier is us.

See America in black and white

13th Amendment

With the imprimatur of federal law, today is National Freedom Day, celebrating the day that President Abraham Lincoln signed the joint congressional resolution proposing the 13th Amendment in 1865.  Congress passed the proposal the preceding day, and it was ratified on December 6, 1865.  Today also is the first day of African-American History Month.

With my comparative law class recently, I had the occasion to visit a classic treatment of race in Star Trek's original series.  We were studying "the perspective problem" in comparative research, which refers to the way a legal system (any social system) can look one way when studied by someone within it, and a different way when studied by an outside observer.

There's a scene in the 1969 episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" (s3e15) that's been talked about for half a century even by social commentators outside science fiction and entertainment communities.  The theme of the episode is almost cliché insofar as it typifies the tendency of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and 1960s showrunner Gene L. Coon to employ heavy-handed metaphor to effect social comment.  Still, the story is effective.

Gorshin with Lou Rawls in 1977
(Orange County Archives CC BY 2.0)

What cliché might have diminished was restored and then some by ferocious performances in Frank Gorshin (Bele) and Lou Antonio (Lokai).  Gorshin, who continued acting right up until his death in 2005, was already a well known villain to TV audiences in the 1960s, as Adam West Batman's Riddler.  Antonio had recently played chain-gang prisoner Koko in Cool Hand Luke (1967).  He followed up Star Trek with a four-decades-long career in TV directing that ranged from The Partridge Family and Rockford Files to legal classics Picket Fences, Boston Legal, and The Guardian, not to mention one West Wing.

The first scene below sets the stage; you only need about the first two minutes.  I'm sorry that CBS has labeled it inappropriate for children, so you have to open a new window to watch it.  I rather disagree; I recommend the clip especially for children, especially now, part of an essential diet of dialog about race and America.

The second scene below delivers the pièce de résistance.  I won't spoil it, in case it's new to you.

For social context, this Star Trek episode aired in January 1969.  Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated only nine months earlier.  While this episode aired, student protestors were occupying buildings at Brandeis University; they renamed them "Malcolm X University" and demanded the creation of an African-American studies department.  Stonewall, the moon landing, and Woodstock followed in the celebrated summer of '69.

Happy National Freedom Day.

Can ‘Star Trek’ put the U back in –topia?

This weekend will see the premiere of the newest entrant in the Star Trek franchise, CBS’s Star Trek: Discovery (trailer).  Notwithstanding CBS’s dubious bid to build a new model for content delivery in CBS All Access—creative initiatives crushed by commercial imperatives is a tradition in Star Trek history—Discovery marks a worthwhile moment to take stock of where we are now as a global village, 51 years after the premiere of Gene Roddenberry’s groundbreaking Star Trek, now “The Original Series.”

Roddenberry’s vision was a utopian one.  It seems almost cliché now to recount the novel “enterprise” of a multi-national crew spreading humanist idealism throughout the galaxy.  Despite its military trappings, Star Fleet was tasked with exploration of the final frontier on behalf of a United Federation of Planets (UFP).  Star Trek represented all the good parts of cultural imperialism and mitigated all the bad with deep, moral self-reflection.

Martin-Green
(CC 2.0 Gage Skidmore 2016 via flickr)

It looks like Discovery will resonate in the Roddenberry tradition.  The series, which might vary perspective and setting across seasonal sub-arcs, opens with a strong black female lead in Sonequa Martin-Green (The Walking Dead’s Sasha) and a female captain of color in Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger’s Yu).  Discovery takes place after humankind’s first forays into deep space, which were depicted a decade ago by Star Trek: Enterprise, but still before the adventures of James T. Kirk and crew in the 1960s Original Series and the current movie-reboot series.  The nascent UFP is in a cold war with the Klingon Empire.  This fictional era and the name of the starring ship, U.S.S. Discovery, suggest fealty to Roddenberry’s vision of a “wagon train to the stars.” 

But can that vision get traction in today’s world?

However much our multi-platform electronic environment has served up an embarrassing surfeit of science fiction, we remain awash in dystopian imaginings.  Disclaimer one, yes, I realize that dystopian fiction is not new; even 1984 dates to 1949.  Disclaimer two, let me be no hypocrite; I have devoured it all, from The Hunger Games to The Handmaid’s Tale, having just finished the latter’s s1 yesterday.  (Nick is going to save her, right? right?!)  Yet many a commentator has observed the peculiar resonance of dystopian fiction today, in a world in which hunger and poverty persist, the wealth gap widens, and our standard of living and expectation of leisure seem after all not to have skyrocketed in consonance with technological ingenuity.

There was a time after the Berlin Wall fell, in the 1990s amid perestroika and glasnost, that it seemed like we might be on an upward trajectory.  The turn of the century brought with it a cautious optimism.  Maybe the era of world war and nuclear nightmare could be put to bed, and humankind would rise from those ashes and turn at last to the business of life on, and beyond, earth.

Then 9-11 happened.  The world went back to war, and we’re still in it.  Our American streets fill with protests fueled by racial division.  An unprecedented humanitarian crisis tears at the seams of European socio-economic union.  The septuagenarian United Nations—real-world analog of the thinly veiled UFP—seems impotent to stop a threatened nuclear detonation in the atmosphere.  And oh yeah, the ice caps: they’re melting.

Inevitable dystopia seems the apt model to envision our future on earth.  Wherefore art thou, Discovery, into our world of social and political fracture?  Can we even recognize ourselves in utopian science fiction?

It bears remembering that the world to which Roddenberry first introduced Star Trek was itself no utopia.  The Original Series tendered commentary that might seem trite now—e.g., TV’s first interracial kiss between Kirk (Shatner) and bridge officer Uhuru (Nichelle Nichols), the “black on the ‘right’ side” racism of Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, the futile primitive conflict of A Private Little War.  But that commentary was sophisticated and controversial in its time.  Star Trek’s very proffer of earthbound east and west in common pursuit of human survival and space exploration was a calculated critique of Jim Crow, the space race, Vietnam, and the Cold War.  Star Trek’s utopian vision was launched amid the civil rights fire that forged our second national reconstruction.

So maybe now is exactly the time for Star Trek.  Maybe we need utopia now more than ever, precisely because it is so unfamiliar.

As Star Trek turned 50 in 2016, Sir Thomas More’s enigmatic Utopia turned 500.  More’s Utopia was a social critique, not a social blueprint.  Critique always has been the raison d’être of science fiction.  There is no utility in only imagining the future.  The endgame is to hold up that parallel world next to your own, to see how the two compare.

For Star Trek, the final frontier is not space.  The final frontier—the discovery—always has been us.