My trouble with Trek

Numbskull conservatives grumbling about Star Trek “going woke” can go to hell; anyone paying attention knows they don’t understand Trek.

I have the opposite problem.

The mission

A proper Trek story is a parable in which liberal-as-in-Isaiah-Berlin values prevail. (More on how that works in an earlier post.) In The Original Series, this expressed the hopes of Cold War America, countering dread that technology — in particular, nuclear weapons — would doom us all.

For a while I thought that both Discovery & Strange New Worlds Understood The Assignment:

• The pilot episode of SNW ending with Captain Pike talking down a society about to destroy itself with cold war brinksmanship could not be a more direct revival of the spirit of TOS
• The pilot episode of Discovery gave Captain Georgiou my favorite line of Trek dialogue ever: “Starfleet does not fire first”
• In Disco S3E02 “Far From Home” Tilly won over a room full of hard-bitten, hostile people from a brutal society just by relentlessly acting in good faith
• In SNW the Enterprise crew respected Hemmer’s resolute pacifism
• Disco characters called the Mirror Universe Terrans “fascists”, describing their seeming strength as “painted rust”

I could go on.

But.

The problem

It seems unmistakable that the people currently making Trek sincerly think their stories deliver the song of the liberal ethos. But more often they fumble the ball so badly that they say the opposite.

I understand why people took SNW S02E02 “Ad Astra Per Aspera” as first-rank Trek reflecting the values I am talking about … but I could not get past the Federation having regulations requiring apartheid planets.

I was thrilled when S3 of Discovery ended with the Federation refusing to compromise its values in the face of profound temptation, demaning that Osyraa must face trial if the Emerald Chain were to join the Federation. But then I was mortified that the story turned toward Captain Burnham resolving the conflict by running and punching.

SNW gave us big-hearted Dr. M’Benga as the moral center of the Enterprise crew … then revealed that he too is really good at punching … and might be is a war criminal.

The TOS episode S1E11 “Arena” which introduced the Gorn was a perfect exemplar of a proper Trek story: under the pulpy action and monster costumes, we got Kirk resolving the conflict through understanding. So when SNW revisted the Gorn and portrayed them as — in the showrunner’s own words — “not every other iteration of representation of the human other in alien skin, they’re evil”, it altered not just the worldbuilding canon but reversed what a Trek story is.

And worst of all, the worldbuilding of the far future 32^nd Century revealed in Discovery is a worse betrayal than any one botched story could deliver.

Yes, the Federation retained its liberal values for centuries, despite further technological change, but the Burn curtailing space travel shattered the Federation’s strength. Progress did not progress. Humanity did not mature further. Liberal values did not prevail on the merits; the Federation’s ethos only worked under historically-contingent material conditions.

So of course Discovery ended with the Federation refusing the Progenitors’ technology, fearing that they lack the wisdom to use it without it becoming destructive.

The people making Trek cannot find it in them to portray liberalism working, even as a fantasy.

It doesn’t have to be this way

Sean Kelly on Twitter describes how the Trek parody show dodged these mistakes and made a more Trekkian statement than actual Trek has done lately:

Interestingly, the Season 3 finale of The Orville took direct aim at the idea that Star Trek’s utopian future is only possible because of the replicator, and the typically-conservative Trek fans who make the argument.

A woman from an underdeveloped planet keeps begging for replicator technology on the grounds that it would bring her planet into the same socialist utopia that the crew of the Orville enjoys, and the first officer says “You’ve basically got that backwards.” She explains that it was their socialist utopia that brought about the cooperation necessary to invent the replicator, and that had it been invented during Earth’s 20^th or 21^st centuries it wouldn’t have worked, because the rich and powerful would have hoarded the technology.

As @BoomerNiner often says, we have enough resources on the planet right now, without a replicator, to give everybody food and housing — if we wanted to. The invention of a replicator wouldn’t change that.

Zefram Cochrane, famously, tried to invent the warp drive with a profit motive — he thought he was going to get rich off the technology, and it was only the realization that we weren’t alone in the galaxy (and perhaps a few lectures from people from the future) that changed him.

But mankind wasn’t ready for all the various technologies that sprang from this revolution, which is why the Vulcans tried to keep a close eye on humanity’s entrance into the galaxy. A few years after First Contact, Earth’s government launched a probe, called “Friendship-1” that tried to give other planets the means to contact Earth.

Instead, the people the probe found reverse-engineered the antimatter technology and accidentally destroyed their planet.

The same thing happened in The Orville — early explorers, acting like missionaries, tried to bring their advanced technology to other worlds in the hope of helping people — but the technology just created conflict and ruined entire planets.

People don’t suddenly become moved to share because of abundance — Elon Musk had 44 billion dollars and he didn’t decide to share it with the world, he decided to buy Twitter with it. He has always, and will continue to, hoard his wealth for himself no matter how much he has. If Tesla invented a replicator they wouldn’t give that away to everyone for free. They’d patent it, and sell it to world governments with DRM software they could deactivate remotely if those governments didn’t pay a subscription fee.

If governments had replicators, they wouldn’t suddenly start handing out free, delicious, nutritious food to everyone — “that will collapse the economy,” they’d say. “Free food for the needy would be unfair to people who’ve been paying money for food all this time.” “How will people be motivated to work,” the Republicans would say, “if they don’t have the threat of starvation hanging over them? If everyone has enough food, how will we motivate people to join the Army?”

Even though the replicator was producing molecularly-identical food to the real thing, conservatives would insist it wasn’t “real” enough for them. “Real” beef, they’d say, demands the slaughter of an animal. Replicated beef is basically vegan. The beef industry would quickly draw battle lines with their donation money, congressmen from places like Texas would move to outlaw replicated meat from being served on the grounds that it hurts entire industries. Conspiracy theorists would insist that replicated beef is full of additives the government is trying to sneak into them to feminize men and make you sick, even though real beef is full of antibiotics and hormones. Campaign ads would show Republicans personally slaughtering cattle and gutting deer to show their commitment to only eating meat that was really alive. We’re already seeing this type of thing when, like, Cracker Barrel tries to introduce plant-based sausage that’s entirely optional to order. People freak out that you might take their meat away.

In short, inventing a replicator wouldn’t save us — right now, it’d ruin us even faster, as the amount of bounty the wealth plays keep-away with would just grow even larger and more ludicrous.

Capitalism would never allow a replicator to exist to its true potential, too many people would go broke. Replicators didn’t create the Star Trek future, the Star Trek future comes first, then replicators.

A way out

I am not the first to notice how the Federation resemble us culturally more than they should, given the radically different world of teleportation and space travel and aliens and replicators and so forth which they inhabit. Indeed, they are obsessively backward-looking — Shakespeare and baseball and Dixon Hill and so forth.

Consider also:

• They vigorously oppose gene modification, and recent shows have underlined the point
• They recoil at AI personhood, despite the ability to produce it surfacing again and again, including in recent stories

These people are kicking and scratching to avoid the transhuman change implied by their technologies.

In-universe, we can see why they make this turn. The outcomes of embracing transhuman-like change they run into during their explorations are either baffling Pure Energy Beings or nightmarish dystopias.

What if they encounter something different?

I feel certain that someone in the current Trek writers room knows their Iain M. Banks. We just got two stories about the Federation botching their encounters with Excessions! So let’s bring in another thing about the Federation:

• The Prime Directive forbids them intervening in lower-tech societies, even where they could easily correct political and material horrors

We know where Iain M. Banks’ high-tech hippie anarchist Culture stand on this stuff. When they encounter the Federation, they are gonna be pissed.

A bunch of Starfleet officers will turn coat. Do you doubt that Christopher Pike would warp back to Omelas and set things right?

The Ballad of Michael Burnham

a later addition to the post

I wonder what the heck the writers of Discovery thought Michael Burnham’s story was about.

Discovery was going to be a Bryan Fuller project, but he dropped out shortly before its initial release. He has been politely evasive about what he wanted the show to be — letting the people who actually delivered the show own it — but it is obvious that much of the first season was assembled from his work and I have a hypothesis about where he wanted to go which sheds light on where it did go.

In the first episode, after a little prologue, the first real sequence in Michael’s story has her committing mutiny because she objects to the captain delivering the best line of Star Trek dialogue ever written: “Starfleet does not fire first”. Michael is talented, capable, goodhearted, and … bad. Her mutiny was as wrong as wrong can be, and it seems she knows it.

From that very first episode, we of course know that the story will eventually make Michael the captain of the USS Discovery. Starting there makes that look impossible. She’s a mutineer! How will she earn it? How will the show earn it?

I think Fuller wanted to portray a slow, hard process of Federation values redeeming Michael, making her into the person we want her to be. (In this long arc I think she resembles another SF TV antihero played by a charismatic actor whose story changed in the telling.) Fuller needed Michael to be so charismatic that we would root for her despite being a dangerous loose cannon who demonstrates at every turn that she shouldn’t be in Starfleet boots, much less destined for a captain’s chair, so they cast Sonequa Martin-Green.

I think her acting chops and screen presence let the post-Fuller writers tell a lazier story — Michael Is Awesome, Actually — trusting her to sell it without the story working to earn it. In a jiffy, everybody on the ship loves her; there are conflicts where characters disagree with her about what to do, but not out of profound disagreement. And while Michael has feelings — the show does good work with them — she doesn’t have inner conflict shaping what she decides to do, which I think is a serious problem.

In 1973, David Gerrold wrote a book about how Trek works which eventually landed him the gig writing the show bible for Star Trek: The Next Generation. He argued that one can talk about two kinds of Trek stories:

• Kirk in danger
• Kirk makes a decision

Gerrold argues that putting Kirk in danger can be fun but it is not compelling because we know he’s not going to die. Good Trek is about decisions. A morality play.

Most of the time Discovery is not about hard decisions, it’s a variant on danger which is Can Michael Crack The Problem, which is the same kind of tepid because we know that of course she will.

This can be proceedurally engaging, and sometimes Discovery gestures toward an approach to that which could make Michael an interesting character: Michael’s superpower is meant to be that she comes at problems in a unique way that nobody else would think, or dare, to do. This also papers over her mutiny by suggesting that that she wasn’t wrong to want to fire on the Klingons unprovoked, she was a lateral thinker. It could be made to work.

But again the storytelling rarely earned it. Most of the time, Michael succeeds because she is just Good At Everything. A certain kind of hater grumbled a lot that Michael is a Mary Sue, too competent to be interesting, and most of them were motivated by misogynoir rather than substantive critique of the show. The critique is not quite right — a proper Mary Sue experiences no adversity, while Michael encounters plenty — but it is adjacent to the problem.

Worse still, as I grumble above too often the thing that she is decisively Good At is just running and punching. Which is fun, and part of the pulpy joy of Trek, but should not define our central character or the heart of a Trek story.

So: what was the Ballad Of Michael Burnham about? She had good friends and cool adventures because she was so awesome.

Often that was fun. But it wasn’t interesting, and it wasn’t great Trek.

We deserved a better story about her, about Starfleet, about What Star Trek Is About. Given how we were introduced to Michael Burnham, she deserved a better story.