Real Star Trek Has Never Been Tried

The Future Is Fully Automated Luxury Culture War

I suppose it was only a matter of time after Matt Walsh started weighing in on pop culture that we’d see a tweet about Star Trek from the White House. One could take it as a sign that the issue has finally gone mainstream, but there’s a bit too much of a “shoeshine boy gives stock tips” vibe to it. The whole discourse feels exhausted at this point, uselessly self-perpetuating. Even the better opposition critics seem to be sputtering on this one—reaching for outrage that doesn’t quite bite, that feels a little too performative and precious. So what if there’s a female Jem’Hadar, or a barefoot captain, or an alarming number of fat women (and only women)? What matters, of course, is “Is it good?,” which is why it sucks that this has become an almost impossible question to answer—not because “good” is subjective or unknowable (it’s as knowable as 2+2, just a bit more stochastic), but because decades of activism have rendered every fact a zone of contention. If Trump were to wake up one morning convinced it was July, we’d never agree on the date again.

It is a terrible show. That should be obvious to anyone with an unwormed brain. The problem is that it’s not trying to be “good,” not in the traditional sense, and can’t be judged on qualities like plot or continuity, any more than Christian Rock can be judged by rhyme and meter. All that matters to the unburdened spirit is that the fart smells like it came out of the right ass. Skip setup, skip foreshadowing, go straight to your 2016 immigration baggage. “Separating children from their parents isn’t exceptional—it’s reprehensible.” (Did ChatGPT write that?) Show some white cops doing a gleefully racist reverse minstrel show, show a white lady being so remorseful and understanding that she resigns in protest (yet somehow still gets to be in charge). Toss out how “kids today” have inherited a “ruined world,” talk abstractly about the glories of activism, and, of course, devote the remaining 80% of your screentime to women humiliating men. Bonus points if your female lead hypocritically plays both sides of the question—demanding formality from her subordinates while prancing around with her “piggies out” to troll her superiors.

Is it woke? Of fucking course. That’s what woke is—you subvert expectations to highlight how stories construct meaning, in the process embedding antibodies to all the wicked ideas that the so-called “good” art secretly encodes. The incoherence is a feature not a bug—it’s not about the rules, but who gets to make them. I mean, you could take the time to set up each moment, create an allegory for the core dilemma, act out each side, reach resolution, etc, but that would be like admitting that the other side deserves a hearing. The other side doesn’t even deserve to live. That’s why you blithely destroy the bad white man’s ship, then chuckle to yourself and call it a “teachable moment.” Because it is a teachable moment. We are here to learn that you, the creators, have the power to say this, and that we, the viewers, can just suck it.

Yes, this is stupid, but the point isn’t to make you laugh, it’s to force you to confront the question of why you were so quick to judge her. (Which is also stupid.)

The real question is, “Is this actually a bad thing?” And that’s the question with no objective answer. A fourteen-year-old girl sings along on Instagram to the hard R in a rap song and later loses her berth at Harvard to a social media mob, without trial or hope for appeal. Is it a bad thing? Is it a grave injustice? Is it just broken windows policing for racism? Was she an egg that needed smashing to make the omelette of social justice? Is there even a fucking omelette? There is no ground truth here. Power merely unfolds. The producers do what they will, and the fans endure what they must.

Which is why these arguments have such a sense of unreality about them. “Gay bird-watching Klingons??!!” “Body-positivity 1000 years after GLP-1??!!” All floating up into the hypostatic plane of a medieval Everyman drama, a Punch-and-Judy show with memes. Everyone’s pushing against nothing, in a void of no absolutes. Is this “truly Star Trek”? Are we “honoring the lore”? Have we “betrayed the original series”? These are stupid questions, and asking them makes you stupid. Nothing here is going to give you leverage over the whims of rich white ladies, and nothing really should. The original series is actually kind of silly. Most of us absorbed nostalgia for it from past generations, we never came to it raw, and never would if it were released today. The show itself is sloppy, it predates most modern innovations in pacing and craft, to say nothing of special effects. Its best episodes are more like placeholders for future remakes.

It’s also sexist as fuck. Kirk really enjoys dressing down his female subordinates in the most demeaning ways, a habit he picked up from 50’s pulp sci-fi, meant to give a vicarious thrill to the male audience still reeling from having come back from World War II to find that most women were high on their munitions factory salaries and could not give two shits about their sacrifice. It’s understandable that their millennial counterparts, having spent the bulk of their education learning nothing but how to play isolated past media outrages on endless loops in their lizard brains (aka, “lived experience”), might be eager for a little justified revenge. Understandable, but also stupid. This is all stupid.

Even The Next Generation was kind of stupid. It was more evolved than TOS, morally and structurally, coming as it did in the days of peak assembly line network TV. Even the cringiest episodes, like the one where the sex planet tries to execute Wesley, are more carefully constructed than even the best of “nu” trek. But of course, their purpose was to please a large, heterogeneous audience of potential soap flake consumers, not to stoke racist fans into showing their true colors so activist corporate boards could justify running another year at a loss. The fact that this manifested as a philosophical procedural that systematically explores the moral dilemmas of fin de siècle American power was just a happy coincidence.

But humanity is a cruel and savage race. (Prove me wrong!) TNG failed to internalize that, which made it feel a bit naive, plus its representation left a lot to be desired. Deep Space Nine and Voyager improved on the that in varying ways, with mixed success, sometimes really nailing the subtleties of religion and politics, or the horrors of assimilation, other times just tying a bow no one asked for around a goofy just-so story. (Ask me what really happened to Amelia Earhart.)

The point is, the franchise needed to grow. It needed more sophisticated storytelling and more modern demographics. It just had the misfortune of staging its comeback in an era when the entire meaning-making class was having a hysterical auto-immune reaction to their own brains. In an effort to outwit the devil of white supremacy, which is always lurking in the brambles of rational thought, they threw out reason, history, traditional storytelling, Aristotelian unity (Greeks owned slaves, yo!) They reset the odometer to year zero and started from scratch with fan-fic written by twelve-year-olds.

Discovery was stupid. I’m sorry, it just really was. They were right to go for more of a season arc—the streaming era demands it. But the episodes were too chaptery, and the story was grimdark in a way that made their woke coddling of the main character stand out even more. It’s hard to do “gritty realism” convincingly when you’re twisting the laws of the universe into a pretzel to flatter your main character. To say nothing of the Mary Sue backstory—she was secretly related to the entire canon—or the always having the right answer and the ready expertise, etc, or breaking into weird autistic recitations of Alice and Wonderland for no reason. (What is it with these people and children’s stories? It’s kind of creepy.)

Picard was stupid, too. Like ninjas and pirates stupid. And woke, and using Patrick Stewart as a femdom revenge voodoo doll. Though it had nothing on Strange New Worlds, which invented an entirely new kind of brain damage, but managed to sneak it under the radar by painting it in the colors of an actual show. The plots were fragmented and contradictory, the dialog a haze of scene-like word salad, the science completely butchered, less than an afterthought. The captain was nominally male, which was sweet of them to do, but all the crew did was mock him while mugging for the camera and going “Wee!” It felt more like an Enterprise-themed theme park than an actual show.

But it is what is. Some people liked it. (Some people like MercyMe!) It was objectively stupid, but there’s nothing objectively wrong with that. What remains strange to me, however, is that no one ever tried the obvious thing—a show set on the next Enterprise, a generation or two after Voyager, with slightly better tech, episodic but with a big political B-story that felt allegorical to our current moment, and which ended in an optimistic compromise. Even if you enjoy trolling the chuds with the new stuff, can you really say that we’re better off having these endless, idiotic fights over every new installment? Are we going to remain better off when the inevitable backlash hits, and we get AI Elon Musk as Zefram Cockring leading the mirror universe in a revolution against the Intergalactic Woke Mind Virus? I mean, I enjoy a good tussle as much as the next fellow, but I’m tired, y’all. At this point there’s almost nothing to left to fight over.

That is to say, the young people have inherited a ruined world, and it is time to rebuild. Just not in a stupid way.