Star F**king Across The Universe

It’s over 50 years since Star Trek first hit American TV screens and it reached the BBC in July 1969, just a week before Neil Armstrong took humanity’s first steps in its own wagon train to the stars.

In those 50 years-ish, the whole franchise has been at the forefront of making history and pushing all sorts of boundaries. From the famous first interracial kiss to being an inspiration to real-life astronauts, Star Trek can likely lay claim to being the most aspirational umbrella of speculative fiction in history.

There have been some truly outstanding attempts to show the whole of humanity’s potential, whether directly such as the inclusion of the Russian Chekov during the real life Cold War, or through analogy like Sisko’s Prophet-induced vision in Far Beyond the Stars. It’s also been a genuine inspiration to real life events – the very first Space Shuttle is called Enterprise, although it never left Earth’s atmosphere, and this idea came full circle when Enterprise’s fictional second NX-class was named Columbia.

With flip phones, automatic doors and touch screen personal devices already in use (or obsolete!) and genuine efforts to build a tricorder and successfully create matter teleportation, Star Trek can also likely lay claim to being the speculative fiction that most influences real life society.

In 50 years, the franchise has covered so many forms of discrimination and representation that it’s difficult to imagine that there is any frontier they haven’t breached. They’ve tackled racism, speciesism, religious intolerance, terrorism, fundamentalism, disease stigma, even the very definition of humanity.

It has done it well… Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, Terra Prime…

And it has handled some with appalling heavy-handedness and even offence… men in minidresses in Encounter at Farpoint, Rejoined, The [abysmal] Outcast…

Sadly, those last ones are the very few representatives of the sort of issue that Star Trek has avoided and seemingly deliberately ignored over its 50 year history.

Regular readers will know that I have very little time for Star Trek when it comes to how they tackle LGBT and related issues. As I said, their attempts have been generally offensive, both in front of the camera and, in many cases, behind the scenes as well. All too often, they’ve stopped short of really tackling the issue. In The Next Generation, Riker gets a family-friendly female actor to play his androgynous squeeze. In Deep Space Nine, they always used American-audience-friendly girl on girl action and specifically vetoed a suggestion that, after the death of Jadzia, the Dax symbiont should be put in a male body. One can only imagine the hilarity that would have ensued were Worf’s season seven storyline with Ezri Dax echoed in a male-male context.

Star Trek has consistently avoided bringing in a regular gay character over the years. There have been rumours and broken promises galore that such a character was going to be introduced as far back as The Next Generation, and in every iteration of the franchise since.

Things seemed finally settled when the powers that be reneged on JJ Abrams’ earlier claim that he didn’t want to see gay characters introduced into the “Kelvin” reboot universe, when he said that he didn’t want to shoehorn in a gay character either just for the sake of it, or to explore a character arc that would lessen or impinge on his main story.

We now know, due to an extremely subtle (some might say actively restrained, but I couldn’t possibly comment...) single scene in Star Trek Beyond that Sulu is gay… and thinking back, there’s actually nothing in the Prime Universe screen canon to contradict that.

But was one tiny gesture, which could actually have been interpreted as something platonic, even familial, after 50 years of not so boldly going enough?

Well, obviously not. So, when a new television series was announced, we waited with baited breath and – YES! – the new show would definitely feature a gay character. It wasn’t too long before a further statement announced that he would be in a relationship with another character and, not only that, but they would both be played by actors who were, themselves, gay.

It would be petulant of me to decry this news, especially with the way that the show’s creators and the actors themselves enthused about how this revelation would be dealt with and I allowed myself to get a little excited.

Star Trek: Discovery finally debuted to not a little critical and popular acclaim, and we were waiting patiently for the big reveal. We knew that astromycologist Paul Stamets was gay from the pre-publicity and that he and Dr Culber were the couple we were promised, but we were waiting for it, waiting for the big reveal that would finally canonise a regular gay character into the Star Trek mythos.

Episodes pass and we don’t even meet them. Another couple and there’s no indication that they’re friends, never mind anything else.

Then we come to episode five. It makes for uncomfortable viewing as we see some of the most graphic violence I can remember seeing in Star Trek. Captain Lorca was captured, thrown in a cell with Harry Mudd and an as-yet unseen Starfleet officer.

The methods of torture and implications of violence went down a whole new path. It was genuinely a bit shocking. And just when you think the episode will go down in history for those very reasons…

WHAT? Wait, what? What did she just say?

Yep, Cadet Sylvia Tilly just said “fuck”. On a Star Trek series.

Instantly wiping memories of Data’s “Oh, shit”, Riker’s “We're through running from these bastards” and O’Brien’s myriad “Bloody hells” and “Buggers”, you suddenly realise that this will forever be the episode where Star Trek said fuck.

Later, Stamets and Culber are brushing their teeth.

Well done, Star Trek: Discovery. I see what you did there…