Star Trek: Discovery's persistent takedown returns to the roots of the series

Warning: the upcoming spoilers for season 1 of Star Trek: Discoveryand for the first episode of Season 2, "Brother".

When Star Trek: Discovery income for his second season last week, he came up with insurance and a risk.

First, the first episode, "Brother," hosted Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), the captain who led the original USS Enterprise project of the original series in 1965, before hiking Designer Gene Roddenberry has been invited to create a new driver with the now iconic James T. Kirk as President. Whatever grunts Trekkies may have had about the bald decision of the fan service to get Pike and his first officer, the iconic Vulcan Spock, at the end of season 1, was inevitable. Like the first new hiking series in more than a decade, Discovery anchored in prequel territory from the start by revealing that her star, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), was Spock's adopted human sister. The gesture aimed, for better or for worse, to make skeptical fans a little more comfortable by placing the series next to a familiar cannon.

But like the first controversial season of the series, the new episode also featured a fairly direct left turn. Bucking the honored of time hiking choose a "redshirt" (a low ranking generic officer) as the only victim of the first mission of the season outside Starfleet, Discovery Instead, he chose to get rid of a white and insecure scientific officer, Mid-Manslain.

The movement was heavy. From his appearance on the transformer platform, it is clear that Lieutenant Connolly, who tells the story the fans were expecting Spock, is a kind of rubbish – more of Winklevoss than Vulcan. On every occasion, he refutes Burnham's suggestions and badumptions about the mysterious red signals that have appeared across the galaxy. Then, when the team deploys in a set of exploration pods to navigate in a group of unpredictable asteroids, it badumes that it knows the vehicles better than it, well. that she was the original test pilot for the pods. When she warns him the way he sails, he begins to explain to him why she is wrong – and in the middle of his explanation, an asteroid thug infiltrates his pod, killing him instantly.

Since we have barely heard a word from the red shirt of the mission – a dead gift, in the previous hikingIf a character is disposable and likely to be a good idea – killing off Connolly is an extremely political choice. DiscoveryThe creators made such decisions from the conceptualization of the show. First, they moved away from the clbadic protagonist of the male commander by centering their show around a first black woman who was court martial and dispossessed of her rank for treason. Second, they introduced the first gay couple hiking story (Anthony Rapp as Lt. Paul Stamets and Wilson Cruz as Dr. Hugh Culber). Third, they introduced the only prominent white man (Jason Isaacs as captain Gabriel Lorca) to a nasty secret, a wicked human supremacist.

Photo: Jan Thijs / CBS Interactive

And in addition to all the show, the show frequently throws small nods pointing to progressive politics. A secondary plot involving a technology that consumes a lot of resources invites Burnham to give a mini conference on conservation. An encounter with a xenophobic culture inspires humor in the face of myopia and the weakness of homogeneity, as well as people who fear those who do not look like them. From his opening episodes, Star Trek: Discovery Jordan Peterson, who follows Crybaby about "PC culture" and "the war on masculinity," actively lobbies social media, as well as all talk show hosts who lament the aggressive pressure for diversity in pop culture.

But for all Trekkie worthy of the name, this position should not be surprising, as an openly progressive policy is a natural extension of what Star Trek has literally existed since its inception in the 1960s. This cultural and political position has been incorporated into the show since its very first lines: "go boldly where no [one] went before "is in the DNA of the franchise. The goal of Star Trek is – to quote Pike in the Discovery first – "make a little noise, ruffle some feathers", to afflict the comfort and comfort of the afflicted, describing a future in which much of the oppression and injustice regularly committed to the The current era was solved a long time ago. To complain about DiscoveryThe obvious stunting, or suggesting that it has been "woken up too well", is to forget the history of the series and its long-term intentions.

Part of the inevitable backlash of this dark corner of hiking The fandom, of course, is generational. Today's Trekkies have watched the original series (TOS) long after its first release, and watched the series of the 1980s and 1990s – The next generation, Traveler, and New deep space – when they were younger decades, and therefore probably more open minded than they could be today. These experiments probably cemented the ideas of these fans about what progressivism on television should look like: at the time, it was still centered on heterobadual, white and heterobadual men.

Photo: Ben Mark Holzberg / CBS Interactive

While Traveler introduced a white woman as captain (Kate Mulgrew as Kathryn Janeway), and DS9 a black man (Avery Brooks as Benjamin Sisko), TOS and TNG (and much later Business) all presented heterobadual white men in slot machines featured. Star Trek on the contrary, progressivism was often expressed as a vanguard of popular sentiment, but not too far beyond it to completely alienate conservative viewers – Ronald Reagan, for example, would have The next generation fan. (Although this is true, he probably never saw "The Outcast".) While Gene Roddenberry was alive, he had to fight Paramount and the networks for his more radical ideas, and he often lost those battles – for example , when he was trying to give the Company a first officer in 1966 or to describe openly gay relationships in the 1980s. There were always limits to what hiking was allowed to do. The futuristic and progressive elements that have gone through have defined this series for many of the fans who loved the shows – but for the white men, a fundamental element of the story was their badured place at the peak of the progress made by the shows .

At that time, put a black woman in this slot – and staffing DiscoveryThe bridge crew, composed mostly of officers, had to be acquired from day one. Proponents of color, especially women, have increasingly talked about their limited screen representation over the last decade, without recognizing this lack in a new story. Star Trek The show would have been the first obvious mistake in the series, at least if the audience wanted to pursue the traditional franchise initiative for a more inclusive and equitable future.

Photo: Jan Thijs / CBS Interactive

But the brutal deconstruction of white and toxic masculinity in white men is a much more important step, which could be a defining element for the series. Or hikingThe past has modeled powerful yet progressive expressions of masculinity in characters such as Captain Picard or Captain Sisko, none have actually questioned the cost of condescension and the right to a right like Discovery made with the sudden karmic death of Connolly. Explorations of such topics have always been relegated to the rank of a softer metaphor, through foreign cultures such as the obsession for the Klingon's honor or the imperialist fascism of the Cardbadians. But in 2019, when centuries of whiteness and masculinity are disrupted more publicly than ever before, Discovery dealing with it puts the franchise, as a whole, exactly where it needs to be.

And it is worth repeating, for the thousandth time: where Star Trek tends to go, society too. We all now have portable communication devices and touch screens, but the company has progressed so far towards the ideals of the 1966 original. hiking that what felt progressive and even excessive now seems picturesque and of his time. The first black American woman in space, Mae Jemison, was especially inspired by Nichelle Nichols' presence on the first Enterprise Bridge, but her first flight took place more than a quarter of a century ago. Much remains to be done in virtually all areas of representation and equality. But what American society has achieved so far is very similar to the hikingits future integrated and welcoming for diversity.

Star Trek has never been written for conservative snowflakes. He succeeds because he is made for those who need his vision for keep go forward boldly, be comforted and find the strength to continue to press for a better future hiking conceived. Eugene Roddenberry, son of Roddenberry and executive producer on Discovery, put it to me in 2013: "[[[[Star TrekInclusiveness]is the only thing that [has] kept alive. The entire geek / nerd / dork fan movement was a group of people who see life differently. They are the ones leading the charge today, not just with Star Trekbut also, frankly, the world. "