Captain Jean-Luc Picard sees something foreboding on the horizon. It’s not the threat of a Romulan saboteur, whose potential presence drives Starfleet command to send retired admiral Norah Satie (Jean Simmons) to the Enterprise to investigate. Rather, it’s the turn towards totalitarianism that Satie threatens as she gives into her fear of an enemy among us.
“You know, there some words I’ve known since I was a school boy,” Picard tells Satie during a hearing of the suspected saboteur. “The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably. Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie as wisdom and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged. I fear that today.”
More than a clever rhetorical turn, in using the words of his opponent’s father against her, Picard’s statement returns all of the Starfleet personnel who are present back to first principles. Yes, they’re scared. Yes, things look bad. But that’s all the more reason to hold to our ideals.
“The Drumhead,” in which Picard issues his warning, isn’t just one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s one of the best Star Trek entries of all time. So it might be a little unfair to compare “The Drumhead” to the recent movie Star Trek: Section 31, which is already on its way to infamy as one of the worst Trek stories ever.
And yet, the issue here isn’t a matter of quality, but rather of theme. Where Section 31 takes a cynical approach to heavy themes, “The Drumhead” conjures up the possibility of Starfleet becoming a totalitarian army and responds with hope and optimism…
We need that classic Star Trek optimism now more than ever.
Star Trek: Section 31 may spin off from the more recent Star Trek: Discovery, but it has its roots in classic Trek stories. It stars Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou, the one-time Empress of the Terran Empire in the Mirror Universe, the alternate reality introduced in the Original Series episode “Mirror, Mirror.” Georgiou joins members of Section 31, a black ops division of Starfleet introduced in Deep Space Nine, the most morally complex series in the franchise.
Georgiou joins a ragtag Section 31 team to track down the Godsend, a superweapon she created as Terran Empress. She and her teammates may violate Federation treaties to complete their mission, but the movie argues that the ends justify the means. As executive producer and showrunner Alex Kurtzman has been saying on the press tour for Section 31, the movie suggests that the “optimistic utopia isn’t possible without people operating in the shadows to make it possible.”
It’s easy to see why Kurtzman and his fellow creators might take that point of view. Almost sixty years since the voyages of the Starship Enterprise began in 1966, we seem farther than ever from a future where humanity overcomes racism and sexism and capitalism and truly bonds together. Even canonical low points in Trek’s human history—World War III in the 1990s and the mass inequality that sparks the Bell Riots in September 2024—can seem like a more realistic version of our future than the founding of the Federation.
Of course Trek as a franchise needs to respond to humanity’s lack of evolution over the last several decades. The whiz-bang approach of J.J. Abrams’ 2009 movie is one of the more innocuous examples of this change. So is the sliding timeline introduced in Strange New Worlds, which showed that Khan Noonien Singh, who was one of the major belligerents in World War III, is still a seven-year-old in 2012 and not a grown man in the 1990s. But Section 31 is the most notable example of a terrible response to the realities of our disappointing present. Section 31 makes Star Trek cynical, glib, and violent, as if optimism is too corny and passé for modern audiences.
Boldly Going Where Trek Is Needed Most
One of the most trenchant criticisms of modern Star Trek I’ve encountered comes not from any online uber-fan or pop culture critic. Rather, it comes from Nathan J. Robinson, founder and editor of Current Affairs. In his book Why You Should Be a Socialist, Robinson laments, “Lately, even Star Trek has given up.” He compares Star Trek: Discovery to the dystopias of The Hunger Games and Ready Player One, stories in which the human spirit has been defeated and people have retreated into paranoia and isolation.
Lots of people were complaining about Discovery when Robinson’s book released in 2017. But his complaint has nothing to do with Burnham’s connection to Spock or whether there was “too much crying” on the show. Robinson mourns the loss of utopian fiction, arguing that we need such stories precisely because they aren’t real. Utopias can “stimulate the imagination in useful ways,” Robinson writes. “When we ask what would an ideal society look like and sketch the result, the exercise can help us come up with ideas that might actually be practical in our own world. I actually think that lacking a utopia can be just as dangerous as having one, because if you don’t have a guiding star for your journey, you won’t know whether you’re going in the right direction.”
Robinson’s right to point to Star Trek as a once-reliable provider of utopian vision. In “Arena,” Kirk relies on trust and logic to overcome his fear of the bestial Gorn captain to see not an enemy, but a fellow captive, finding that they can work together. The Romulans debut episode “Balance of Terror” sees one of the Enterprise crew turn to xenophobia and paranoia upon realizing that the enemies look just like Mr. Spock, earning a stern rebuke from Kirk.
Picard takes it even further in The Next Generation, delivering passionate orations about our highest ideals. Even beyond his warning against giving into fear in “The Drumhead,” there’s the defense of Data he makes in “The Measure of a Man,” urging another Starfleet officer to see the lieutenant not as a piece of materiel to be dissected but as a new form or life to be respected. In the midst of being tortured by Gul Madred in “Chain of Command,” Picard shares a story about a bully, calling upon his captors’ sense of pride and civility instead of simply wiping the baddie out.
Countless more examples can be found across all of the series. Even the original Section 31 story from Deep Space Nine serves more as a reaffirmation of Starfleet ideals, as Dr. Bashir rejects the shadowy organization’s covert ways and Odo sacrifices himself to undo the group’s genocidal tactics.
Are these choices realistic? Anyone who’s turned on the news recently would answer with a sardonic “no!” Are these stories corny? Sometimes, yeah. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting a chance deliver a Picard-esque speech to the current president or his cronies, let alone that the speech would change their minds.
But the fact that we consider solutions based in empathy and community so unrealistic only makes fiction about these ideals all the more important. We live in a world where the government does actually send military groups to commit horrific acts, where political posturing and expediency almost always outweigh any real concern for people’s lives, a world in which kind and professional people who are good at their jobs are consistently overworked and underpaid, and the vulnerable and underprivileged are victimized and reviled. We don’t need Star Trek, of all things, to reflect that reality. We need them to keep going forward, to keep seeking out new life and new civilizations, in the hopes that they’ll inspire and galvanize us when we need it most, and remind us that it’s possible to make our lives and civilizations better.
Not that it matters, but I was complaining about Discovery for the right reasons: A Trek show entirely about war misses the point before it’s even begun.
I agree, but only the first season of DSC was a war story. Deep Space Nine devoted more than two seasons to war.
People only assumed Discovery or Picard were dystopian because they didn’t recognize that they were serialized. Most stories start out seeming terrible; TOS episodes like “The Changeling” began with the discovery of entire civilizations being wiped out. What makes the difference between an optimistic and a pessimistic story is how it ends. But in a serialized season telling a single story arc, everything’s going to stay bad until the finale, because that’s how such stories are structured. So it’s the finales that matter. And these so-called “dystopian” seasons of DSC and PIC all ended with upbeat resolutions where idealistic principles won out over the forces of cynicism and conflict. In DSC season 1, the “morally gray” captain we’d been following for most of the season turned out to be a purely evil impostor from the Mirror Universe, and the heroes won by rejecting moral gray areas and convincing the enemy to take a chance on peace. In DSC season 2, the morally gray Section 31 turned out to be a literally apocalyptic threat which the heroes overcame with a purely sefless sacrifice, reaffirming Starfleet values. In PIC season 1, the Federation was shown to have taken a dark turn, but in the finale it was all reversed with implausible casualness and the Federation’s ideals were restored.
So none of this has anything to do with modern Trek taking a turn toward cynicism. The resolutions to the season-long arcs are just as idealistic as ever, and if anything tend to make it too easy for goodness and decency to prevail in the end. The only reason the stuff before the finales seems so relentlessly dark is because modern TV is addicted to season-arc storytelling, a formula that requires the heroes to keep losing over and over again until they finally pull out a win in the finale. It’s not just Trek — look at Superman and Lois and the way its seasons were structured. When you only tell one story per season, the heroes only get to have one victory per season, after a series of setbacks and failures.
Yeah, if anything, the problem with Picard (at least the first two seasons) was that it wasn’t “cynical” enough. The Synth ban got repealed offscreen in the last five minutes of season 1; Jurati talked the Borg Queen into joining her after temporarily reasserting control of her body. Both of these plot points would have worked a lot better if they had been harder, taken more work, and been more strongly motivated.
Meanwhile, Lower Decks, the parody show was all in on Star Trek being optimistic.
People forget that utopian fiction is always a form of social critique; people write utopias because they know that they’re not living in one.
I’ve been muted in my criticism of Alex Kurtzman; I think that he generally takes a hands-off approach to most of the series (with the possible exception of Discovery), and that Lower Decks in particular probably leans harder into the utopianness of the setting than any series since TNG (though, perhaps it’s telling that the only place that you can get away with imagining, e.g., security officers taking a holistic approach to protecting their crews, is in a comedy). His latest remarks, though, make me think that he just fails to understand Star Trek at a very fundamental level.
Anyways, I’m not sure if we can realistically expect the official stuff to get much better in the near future (given the way things are going more broadly), so I am going to plug fan series like Star Trek Continues.
Heaven knowns, when Real Life provides very few visible reasons for optimism – at least on the political scene – we can always use the reminder that positive progress is not only possible, it can actually happen.
Also, it never hurts to have an escape hatch from the tyrannies of the waking world.
A story about the margins of utopia, people doing the dirty work required to maintain that order, could have been good. Think Special Circumstances in Iain M Banks’ _Culture_ novels.
Thank you for this article. Absolutely — dystopias are easy and utopias take more skilled writers but we need the utopias and the good storytelling. We need to dream of better worlds so that we can work towards them. Very interesting point made by other below regarding serialized storytelling. There can be an overall arch over a season and also episodes that stand alone and convey some positive messages.
The problem with unending dystopian fiction is the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even with a “there’s still time to fix this” ending, they breed apathy and hopelessness. There’s still a place for it, but we need selfless heroes like Picard as well, to fuel better aspirations.
Dystopia becomes a reactionary genre when all possible divergences from the existing state of affairs are depicted as dystopian.
The other problem with this trend of complaining that Discovery or Picard are “dystopian” is a misunderstanding of what the word means. Dystopian fiction isn’t just fiction where bad or depressing stuff happens. It’s only dystopian if the bad or depressing things are true on a society-wide level as the result of an oppressive or unjust government, post-apocalyptic anarchy, or the like. The Mirror Universe is a dystopia. Cardassia under the Union or the Dominion was a dystopia. The chaotic quadrant in the wake of the Burn was a dystopia, at least in certain parts.
The only dystopian threads we’ve ever seen in the Federation, the only instances where an oppressive or destructive element came from the state or social structure itself rather than an external threat, were Section 31, the synth ban, and the ban on genetically engineered people. Often a society can be dystopian for some groups but not for others, depending on how the law treats them. But those are flaws in a mostly beneficial system. The Picard season 1 status quo may have been slightly less utopian than usual for Trek — but then, so was Deep Space Nine.
I’m not so sure they lost the ideal – just packaged it differently. Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds certainly still have it, as does the later seasons of Discovery. Picard is a journey towards regaining that hope and ideal future. Meanwhile, Section 31 as a film is in a place where it’s not really meant to be corny or utopian (of course, that movie has enough issues of its own as a Mirror Universe story and as a Section 31 “story”).
And it’s one of the things I adored about Prodigy in this current Trek era. It challenged the Trek ideals, but it never let them be thrown aside. From Dal and the others’ point of view, the Federation was just as much a threat as the Diviner, because they didn’t know who they were. And their first run-in with the Dauntless only reinforces that fear. But Janeway’s own actions in chasing the Protostar is equally based on incomplete information and the influence of Asencia. Once both sides learn about each other, that fear is dispelled and Janeway immediately and eagerly embraces them as future cadets.