Star Trek Is Less Progressive Now Than It Was 30 Years Ago

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 1 hour ago

Critics and social media pundits have been quick to frame the modern era of Star Trek as the franchise’s most progressive. Often, that’s cited by NuTrek defenders as one of the best reasons to watch each series. Those defenders are wrong. Star Trek has never been less progressive than it is right now.

To find out where the disconnect is, all an objective observer need do is take a look at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Before NuTrek started giving itself credit for being open-minded, Deep Space Nine was regarded as the most progressive entry in Star Trek’s canon, and it still is.

Far Beyond Identity Politics

Why is Deep Space Nine Star Trek’s most progressive show? It had the franchise’s first Black captain in a leading role, and the show found clever ways to explore modern issues of race through episodes like “Far Beyond the Stars.”

Compare this to Discovery, which got progressive brownie points for making Michael Burnham the franchise’s first Black, female captain in a leading role. That might sound similar, except Sisko wasn’t treated as a black Captain; he was treated as a great character, being played by a great actor, breathing life into great writing.

That didn’t happen with Michael Burnham. While Sonequa Martin-Green was excellent as Michael Burnham, she was frequently hampered by bad writers who had nothing to say about race or racism but were eager to shout, “Look who we put in the captain’s chair!”

Sisko wasn’t the only progressive character in the series. The prominent Trill character Dax effectively served as an allegory for trans people. Sisko originally knew her as a curmudgeonly womanizer, Kurzon Dax, and their friendship remained the same when she became a beautiful young woman.

Over the course of the show, Deep Space Nine offered surprisingly nuanced allegories exploring what it is like to become another person and how that affects how you are treated. Compare this to Discovery, which introduced an explicitly trans Trill (Gray Tal) and did little with his character, instead focusing on the nonbinary character Adira Tal.

They’re Here, They’re (Secretly) Queer

While it was tough to pull off in the Rick Berman era of Star Trek, Deep Space Nine even managed to squeeze in some bisexual characters in the form of Bashir and Garak. When Andrew Robinson read about Garak introducing himself to Bashir, he decided the Cardassian had a sexual interest in the young doctor and acted very flirtatiously. This created a subtext that the characters were gay (or, as Robinson claimed, “omnisexual”), and Lower Decks even showed alternate universe versions of Garak and Bashir ending up together. 

For DS9 fans curious about these characters’ seemingly mutual attraction, their every interaction was filled with a delightful “will they, won’t they” energy. The queer coding of Bashir also added a frisson of tension to his friendship with Chief O’Brien (especially when, in “Extreme Measures,” Bashir suggests O’Brien likes him more than he likes his wife). Compare all of this sexual tension to NuTrek, which presented gay romance as stable-but-boring (like with Stamets and Culber in Discovery) or loudly one-dimensional (like with Jay-Den in Starfleet Academy).

When Kira agreed to have O’Brien and Keiko’s baby, Keiko pushed her husband to spend intimate time with Kira, including giving her massages. Eventually, O’Brien and Kira developed a mutual attraction that they agreed not to pursue because he’s a married man.

In retrospect, it really looks like Keiko wanted the three of them to become a throuple, and the modern fandom enjoys this (admittedly brief) acknowledgment of polyamory and the ways love and sex might be different in the future. Compare this to NuTrek, whose exclusive embrace of monogamy makes shows like Discovery and Starfleet Academy seem downright conservative. 

To Explore Strange New Speeches

These examples from Deep Space Nine underscore why modern Star Trek isn’t nearly as progressive as Alex Kurtzman and his supporters think it is. Remember when Spock said that “logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end”? Well, the storytelling corollary to that is “diversity is the beginning of progress, not the end.” Just throwing someone other than a white, straight, male into a role doesn’t magically make a show progressive unless you use them to tell interesting stories exploring complex ideas.

Star Trek made waves by casting a Black man and a woman in leading roles decades ago, and those shows used those characters to explore questions of race and femininity while pushing back against negative cultural stereotypes. Discovery cast a Black woman in a lead role and made her alternate between crying and giving inspirational speeches. That’s just bad storytelling, and her combination of race and gender doesn’t retroactively make the storytelling any better.

Tokenism Disguised As Progressivism

Similarly, Discovery and Starfleet Academy prominently featured gay characters but gave them remarkably little to do as a couple. Discovery controversially killed Culber off (don’t worry, he got better after Paramount did the “kill your gays” trope) and focused very little on their relationship. Starfleet Academy focuses even less on Jay-Den’s romantic relationships outside of quick cut shots, instead just putting him in a skirt and calling it a day. It’s tokenism disguised as progressivism, which is offensive on the face of it and infinitely less rewarding than DS9’s more veiled (thanks, Berman) attempts at presenting queer relationships.

All these years later,  Deep Space Nine remains the gold standard of progressive Star Trek storytelling simply because it used its diverse characters to tell exciting stories that challenged the status quo. NuTrek wants credit for being progressive simply because it includes these characters, but these series fail to do anything interesting with them, instead telling bland stories that are mostly Trek in name only. Now that Paramount is moving forward and taking the franchise in a new direction, we can only hope they slingshot into the past and take their storytelling cues from DS9, the decades-old show more progressive than Alex Kurtzman could ever conceive of.