RED ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the original Star Trek, The Next Generation, Discovery, and Picard.
Why do Star Trek fans not like the new Star Treks? The Rotten Tomatoes scores for Discovery and Picard reveal high critics scores, but low audience scores. The same phenomenon was observed for Ghostbusters (2016) starring Melissa McCarthy and Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi.
It’s not just the fanboys either. Some mainstream outlets are wondering if the second season of Star Trek: Picard is the worst season of Star Trek ever made.
Why is new Star Trek so bad? In this article, I argue that it’s because the characters are poorly written because they are disconnected from basic human nature.
Is new Trek “woke”?
Fox News published an editorial bemoaning “woke” Star Trek, and it got a lot of backlash, because Star Trek has always been “woke.” It’s certainly true that Star Trek was ahead of every other show on American television with representation of women and minorities. It’s also no secret that Star Trek writers lean to the left. But new Trek reads much differently from the old shows.
It’s not because it’s political. By my estimate, I could only find one instance where the second season of Star Trek: Picard gets explicitly political, when Chris Rios gets abducted by immigration enforcement. The only other political message that gets hammered through the season is “fascism is bad” and “protecting the environment is good” — which most Americans would agree with.
Star Trek: Picard is also not very “woke” in terms of casting1, with just one nonwhite cast member.
On the other hand, fanboy-favorite Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which premiered almost thirty years earlier, had three black cast members, one MENA cast member, and a white cast member playing an alien with orange-ish skin. Depending on whether Quark counts as white, DS9’s cast was either majority-nonwhite or barely majority-white.
So why do people describe new Star Trek as being “woke”? Although there is less “woke” political messaging than you would think, new Star Trek is very much downstream of the “woke” project in its approach to gender roles and gender relations.
New Star Trek is feminized, while old Star Trek had a masculine bent, even though old Star Trek had much less guns and action.
New Star Trek is also androgynous, with male characters behaving like women and women characters behaving like men. The idea that gender is a social construct and biological sex is a spectrum overwhelmingly comes from a narrow, overly-academic segment of the population. The “woke” people.
This is why, by the way, “woke” is quickly becoming one of my least favorite words in the English language. It has grown to mean “left-wing thing I don’t like.” Conservatives use it as a rhetorical crutch. Since it has such a catch-all meaning, people will use it when they feel something is off without thinking about the root causes.
The measure of a man
Men and women are different. They experience emotions differently, solve problems differently, and have different ways of bonding socially. These behavioral differences are the byproduct of early human existence, when we were tribal hunter-gatherers.
Cross-cultural studies of human behavior suggest that women are brought up to be emotional and nurturing while men are brought up to be unemotional and self-reliant. There’s no secret to why this is: since women were in charge of raising the tribe’s children, they needed greater emotional sensitivity to know when the children are in distress. Men needed to be stoic and aggressive to protect the tribe from threats.
Women and men also approach problems differently. There was a popular video from a while back featuring a woman complaining about pressure from a nail in her head. Her boyfriend/husband says, “why not simply remove the nail?” She then gets upset that he isn’t listening to her.
Although the video is meant to be comedic, there is some truth to it. Women generally prefer to process emotions first before solving problems, and use emotions as a way of social bonding.
Turnabout intruder
Few male characters in Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard behave like men.
Let’s take Captain Picard, for instance. Picard is celebrated by fans for his speaking skills, and there’s no better Picard speech than in “The First Duty.”2
In this episode, Wesley Crusher and other Starfleet Academy cadets are under investigation for the death of one of their classmates in a training exercise. When Picard discovers that Wesley et all performed a dangerous, unsanctioned maneuver and lied about it under oath, he dresses him down:
The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based, and if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform.
Let’s compare this to a speech Captain Picard gives in the episode “Two of One” in his self-titled show, this time to his astronaut ancestor, to encourage her to go on the Jupiter mission as she struggles with personal issues:
You remind me of my mother. She also loved the stars. And she too, struggled. I found that even in the darkest circumstances, there is a light, even just a glimmer. Trust that light. Fear means you’re smart, you understand the risks. Sometimes those who shine the brightest feel the sting of fear and melancholy in ways that others can never understand. You're Renée Picard, astronaut of the Europa Mission. You must be capable of such great things to have come this far.
Picard’s “First Duty” speech is quite masculine. To get Wesley to tell the truth, he appeals to his sense of honor and integrity. In the “Two of One” speech, Picard is making a very feminine, emotion-driven appeal to persuade his great-great-(…)-great-grandmother to go on the mission.
It’s very out of character for Picard, who would usually appeal to a sense of honor, duty, or integrity to persuade characters, even characters of the opposite sex3. In Star Trek: Generations, Picard persuades Kirk to leave the Nexus by reminding him he has a duty, and that he can make a difference once again. In “Yesterday’s Enterprise4,” Picard rallies his crew for a suicide mission with the words “let’s be sure that history never forgets the name Enterprise.”
Of all the new characters introduced in Discovery and Picard, there are just three who are written as recognizably masculine:
Captain Gabriel Lorca from Star Trek: Discovery. Lorca is tough on his crew, but fair. Turns out he was actually secretly an evil dude from the Mirror Universe. He died in the first season finale.
Chris Rios, from Star Trek: Picard. He’s dead too! Killed in a bar fight off-screen in the second season finale.
Captain Christopher Pike from Star Trek: Discovery. Pike isn’t a “new” character by any means, having appeared in the very first (albeit unaired) episode of the original Star Trek. I’m still counting him as “new” because Anson Mount’s interpretation of the character as Prince Charming In Space is different from the stoic performances of Jeffery Hunter and Bruce Greenwood. Plus, Pike has appeared in ten times as many episodes of Discovery as the original Trek at this point, making him more of a Discovery character at this point.
Every other male character else is too emotional (Culver, Stamets), exists solely to be a love interest or sounding board for another character (Narek the Romulan, Cleveland Booker), or is not meaningfully developed at all (Admiral Vance, Elnor).
A tale of two finales
It’s not just the male characters that are feminized, it’s the plot too. Let’s compare the second season finale of Star Trek: Picard “Farewell” with the beloved series finale5 of The Next Generation, “All Good Things.”
In “All Good Things,” Picard is moving backwards and forwards in time. Picard believes the cause is a strange anomaly detected in the Romulan Neutral Zone that is nonexistent in the future and grows bigger into the past. Eventually, Picard figures out that he was the one who caused the anomaly. The Enterprises from the past, present, and future meet in the middle, and close the anomaly.
At the end, Q reveals that the whole gambit was his doing, to test whether humanity was capable of expanding its understanding the universe. Picard passed the test, and earns Q’s respect. “See you, out there!”
In Star Trek: Picard’s “Farewell,” Q is also testing Picard. But this time, the test is to see whether Picard can accept the trauma from having seen his mother hang herself as a child. The key to the story here isn’t solving a problem, but rather processing emotions.
In “All Good Things,” Picard is removing the nail from the forehead. In “Farewell,” he’s talking about it to anyone who would listen.
Is there any hope?
Fans loved Anson Mount’s interpretation of Captain Pike so much that they did what Star Trek fans do best: bullying institutions. Star Trek fans managed to bully NBC into renewing the original show for a third season. They even managed to bully the United States government into naming the prototype Space Shuttle after the Enterprise. And now, they bullied Viacom into making a spinoff featuring Captain Pike, titled Strange New Worlds.
When we meet Pike in Strange New Worlds, he has a girl in his bed, a beard, and is riding a horse in Montana. Can’t get more manly than that.
But Pike’s masculinity goes deeper than the male fantasy presented in the first five minutes. In Discovery, Pike sees his fate: horrifically scarred from radiation and confined to a wheelchair after saving cadets on a training mission. Strange New Worlds follows Pike’s grappling with knowing this. In private, Pike “meets with triumph and disaster” by ruminating about the cadets he’s destined to save. In public, Pike steels himself to be a strong leader for his crew.
Unlike Discovery and Picard, fans seem to be responding well to Strange New Worlds. Will Strange New Worlds keep the momentum and boldly go where Picard and Discovery couldn’t?
Probably not
While Strange New Worlds is off to a strong start, I have to say that I’m not optimistic for one simple reason. The people writing SNW are the same crop as Discovery and Picard, and the quality of writing on these shows is just worse than the original five shows.
It’s really that simple.
Just because new Star Trek is overly feminized doesn’t mean it has to be bad. I can think of at least a dozen romantic comedies that were mainly made for women, but can be enjoyed by anyone because they’re well-written. The James Cameron epic Titanic has a story that’s more appealing to women than men, and I think the film is a masterpiece. Discovery and Picard, however, just are not well-written6.
David Mamet, the writer of Glengarry Glen Ross and The Untouchables, has a saying: a story is like a joke, and a joke has a punchline. Every word, every syllable should build towards the punchline. If it doesn’t, take it out.
Breaking down this scene from “The First Duty”, we see that every shot, every line of dialogue, builds towards a punchline:
Picard shows Wesley a simulation of the dangerous maneuver, and asks him if he knows what it is.
We see Wesley gulp. He knows that Picard knows, building tension.
Picard recounts how he saw Wesley grow up on the Enterprise, convinced that Wesley would make an outstanding officer, “until now.” This raises the stakes. Picard isn’t just Wesley’s boss, he’s his father figure.
Which makes the punchline of the scene all the more devastating: “if you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform.”
In this scene, Picard encourages Renee to go on the mission by giving a speech about his mother. Picard has never met Renee before this scene, and will never meet her face-to-face again. Since Picard and Renee have no history together, you could swap Picard out for anyone else, and the scene would be unchanged. Picard is a deus ex machina, appearing out of nowhere to solve a problem.
The speech itself also isn’t particularly impressive. There’s no beginning, middle, end, or buildup to a punchline. You could reorder the sentences in any order you wish, and it would not have an effect on the scene. As a matter of fact, I did reorder the sentences when I quoted the speech earlier.
The writing in Star Trek: Picard is just empty regurgitation, with very little meaningful content underneath.
He just kept talking in one long incredibly unbroken sentence moving from topic to topic so that no one had a chance to interrupt, it was really quite hypnotic.
Although Star Trek: Discovery certainly is.
Which is a great episode, by the way. Wonder who wrote it.
One such example is in “Lower Decks,” in which Picard tells a young ensign convicted of lying in “The First Duty” that she can regain his respect by volunteering for a dangerous mission.
Another banger of an episode. Who wrote it?
Written by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga. Please miss just once, Ron.
The one nice thing I will say about these shows is that Viacom spared no expense on production design. The visual effects are decent, the sets and costuming are high quality, and the prosthetics and makeup are some of the best I’ve seen in any television show. Too bad the writing doesn’t stack up.