Entertainment
Star Trek Has Updated The Worst Writing Trope In The Stupidest Possible Way
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
Decades ago, comic writing legend Gail Simone coined the term “women in refrigerators”, (better known as “fridging,”), which describes writers killing female characters in gruesome ways just to motivate male protagonists. Star Trek started doing its own, more inclusive spin on this trope in Star Trek (2009), and the practice is alive and well in shows like Picard and Starfleet Academy. Instead of killing off a single character, though, this venerable sci-fi franchise keeps destroying entire planets in order to give its characters the most basic motivation.
In the 2009 Star Trek reboot, Romulus is endangered by a supernova, so Ambassador Spock embarks on a crazy plan to save the planet using red matter. He fails, and the subsequent red matter reaction sends both him and a Romulan named Nero over half a century into the past. There, Nero becomes enraged by the death of his planet and his family; blaming the older Spock, he decides to go “eye for an eye,” using red matter to destroy the planet Vulcan.
In Space, No One Can Hear You Cry
This leads to some fairly exciting action scenes as the Enterprise crew tries (and fails) to save Vulcan. Arguably, though, the primary reason for having Nero destroy this iconic Star Trek planet is to have Spock lose his mother. Star Trek (2009) was all about making Spock an angry emo kid, and killing off his mother helped contextualize both his rash decisions about young James T. Kirk (he literally ejected him out of the ship!) and his later desire to kill Nero rather than resolve things diplomatically.
Years later, the spinoff Star Trek: Picard returned to the plot beat of Romulus getting destroyed, revealing that Picard left the Enterprise-E to command an armada of ships whose mission was to save as many Romulans as possible before the planet’s destruction. Unfortunately, that armada is wiped out by a rogue group of synthetic lifeforms, and Starfleet subsequently abandons its rescue efforts. This causes Picard to retire, ending a lifetime of service in utter disgust at Starfleet abandoning the very principles upon which it was founded.
Even Picard Gets Riled Up
For The Next Generation fans, it was fun to see Picard flesh out how the destruction of Romulus affected the rest of the galaxy, but the primary reason the writers returned to this plot point was to explain how and why Picard went from celebrated Starfleet celebrity to disgruntled old fart wasting away on his vineyard. Like Kelvinverse Spock before him, Picard now had a tragic back story that explained why he might be more emotional than usual (which is presumably why he later lets his Romulan sidekick just behead anyone who gets in their way).
Most recently, Starfleet Academy introduced the shocking plot point that the Klingon homeworld of Qo’noS had been destroyed by the Burn. That homeworld and all the worlds of the empire were apparently powered by dilithium reactors. After the Burn (a galactic event that rendered all dilithium crystals inert and blew up any ship with an active warp drive), the Empire that once nearly destroyed Starfleet was reduced to about 50 ships and eight family houses.
It’s Getting Hot In Here
While Starfleet Academy may do something cool with this plot development (hey, stranger things have happened), it really seems like the writers destroyed Qo’noS just to give extra motivation to Jay-Den, the show’s Klingon cadet. As a pacifist, wannabe doctor Klingon with a combo of Daddy and abandonment issues, this guy already has a lot going on. However, the show’s writers decided to also make him one of only a relative handful of Klingons trying to keep their millennia-old culture alive despite only a fraction of his people surviving the Burn.
Watching that Starfleet Academy episode, it hit me with all the force of a bat’leth blow: for Star Trek, blowing up entire planets is the new fridging. Back in the ‘90s, writers were content to motivate characters like Green Lantern by simply killing their girlfriends in the most edgelord way possible (and stuffing their bodies in the fridge, no less). Now, these modern-day sci-fi writers feel the need to destroy entire planets and snuff out billions of lives just to explain complex plot points like “why is Spock sad?” and “why is Picard sad?” and ‘why is Jay-Den sad?”
Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with blowing up an entire planet if it really suits the story; Star Wars, for example, had the Empire blow up Alderaan to demonstrate how evil they really were. But since 2009, Star Trek has gone to utterly excessive lengths to motivate its chief characters in the stupidest possible ways. Like, be honest for a minute: would you have found Spock any less compelling if his mommy didn’t die in an extinction event, or Picard any less engaging if his reputation didn’t die along with Romulus?
This Repetitive Plot Is Without Honor
The blunt truth is that this is just lazy writing by Star Trek creative teams who don’t know how to motivate characters without giving them tragic backstories with body counts in the billions. It was already tired when they did it in the first Star Trek reboot film, and it was completely played out when they used it to explain why Picard was now so cranky and boring. Starfleet Academy has returned to this well for a third time, and to nobody’s real shock, the well is completely dry.
Gail Simone was right all those years ago when she called out fridging, and her general thesis was solid: namely, that writers need to find better ways to motivate characters than by killing the ones they care about. Instead, Paramount has continually upped the fridging ante by destroying entire planets because their creators can’t figure out any other way to give characters depth or emotional growth. Now, it’s well past time for the Star Trek writers to boldly go where they arguably haven’t gone in decades: to original stories featuring dynamic, properly-written characters with grounded motivations.
Should that prove impossible, what should the Star Trek writers actually do? They should blow up our own planet, which would be far, far more merciful than making us sit through this predictably awful franchise plot point for the umpteenth time. Plus, the destruction of the entire Earth might finally give us the motivation to do what we should have done long ago: unsubscribe from Paramount+ before we are finally claimed by the void.