Kooky Captains, Glasses, Wokeness: The Starfleet Academy Backlash

For me the Star Trek saga properly ended in 2005, with the last episode of Enterprise, if not earlier. (Certainly its best days were well behind it by that point.) This is especially in regard to what made it more than just "another" space opera, the humanistic, socially critical, utopian dimension of the show. The J.J. Abrams cinematic reboot set that aside as it focused on summer blockbuster action, prequelisms, nostalgic appeal, and legitimating itself as part of the Star Trek canon with its use of the parallel universe concept that Hollywood executives have seized on and run with ever since as a prop to their ever-more lumbering franchises. Subsequently Paramount's reboot of the franchise on television crapped all over the humanistic, utopian, socially critical aspect of the show as it eagerly seized on the darker elements of the universe. Thus do we get the grimdark Star Trek: Discovery's devotion of so much time to the Mirror Universe, the decision to make a whole series about the Section Thirty-One the showrunners introduced amid the Federation's bitter war in Deep: Space Nine, and perhaps most striking of all the whole premise of Star Trek: Picard, where the Federation is treated as having been rotten all along, so much so that within Picard's own lifetime it had rotted away to the point that we seem to be getting Turkana IV on a galactic scale in a pointed contrast with what we saw in The Next Generation. Thus where amid the right-wing turn in world affairs so evident by the '80s The Next Generation, the conception of Jean-Luc Picard appeared an act of defiance against the Oliver Norths and Gordon Gekkos, the later Picard represented abject surrender to them and all they represented as, to the ecstasy of all those who had despised all that was humane or progressive in the show (the Ralph Offenhouses call the shots in our time, and the thought of a world beyond "hunger, want, the need for possessions" all "eliminated" is their biggest fear and hate ), it fell in line with the misanthropic pessimism mandated by the leaders of "respectable" opinion, and the despair of so many of those who had ever espoused anything else. Certain that the world cannot go on as it is--they agree with the Wellsian-Stapledonian-scientific world-view vision on which Star Trek was founded up to that point at least--they have also lost all hope that the world can ever be anything else (they agree with the misanthropes to that extent), and as a result all they can picture is ecological and social collapse.

All this continues with the 32nd century-set Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which can seem very much of the moment in its vision of the Federation fallen apart yet again due to technological disaster, with the drama about the survivors picking up the pieces--Luddism added to the unhappy mix in the idea of the "Burn." At the same time, just when one might have thought from the right's crowing over and many others lamenting the death of wokeness that American culture was sparing a little more time for other things the din of battle between the woke and anti-woke over the content of pop culture rises again. Thus do we have a conspicuously kooky and quirky lady in the captain's seat in Holly Hunter's Nahla Ake, and Gina Yashere as her First Officer Lura Thok, with such personae as Tig Notaro as an Academy instructor rounding out a cast that makes it clear that "diversity" was not a kobayashi maru after all--and in the supposedly wokeness-is-dead period went all in on it, with the review pages laudatory (88 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes), as at least a highly vocal portion of the viewership is the opposite. (The audience score stands at 43 percent--a gigantic gap being attributed to review bombing that, even if one may be unsure that it is representative of the audience, at least testifies to some having very strong feelings about the matter.)

Starfleet Academy thus begins to look like it is doing for Star Trek what The Last Jedi did for Star Wars, through comparable creative choices prompting comparable reactions. Thus do we have a franchise that was traditionally male-led not merely putting a female captain at the helm of a ship (hardly controversial stuff thirty years after Voyager) but presenting a more broadly and fully female-dominated ship in a piece of feminist "cultural appropriation" of what was long an object of male fans' affection (as The Last Jedi did with Star Wars). Thus do we also have it making the Person in Charge conspicuously quirky in a manner rubbing a good many fans the wrong way (the way Last Jedi's Admiral Holdo did). Going beyond the parallels to the Star Wars franchise, one may add that, in line with the sensibility prevailing in the medium, there isn't much inclination to make male fans any concessions in the way of the visuals, with this "matriarchy" not having, say, a catsuited Deanna Troi or Seven of Nine, or even the inclusion of any actress comparable to Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Rebecca Romjin in the cast, with all that means for the "male appeal" as instead "diversity" and "body positivity" carry the day. Indeed, I suspect that this is what all the fuss about the glasses one female character wears is about--not that spectacles have been wholly unprecedented in this universe (Admiral Kirk wore them in the earlier movies), but rather that (given American attitudes toward glasses wearing) this is yet another dismissal of conventional beauty standards and the male gaze in a show the detractors think already too woke to bear.