What Star Trek Won’t Admit About The Political Right
Visit any Star Trek-related forum or social media page, and you’ll see the Left now claims Star Trek as its own and tells the Right to find another franchise to watch.
But one can easily make a case that Star Trek — which celebrated its 60th anniversary this week — has catered to the Right just as much as it has the Left.
The series has a wide reach and inspired science fiction writers and scientists and engineers and many people who work at NASA.
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And, at its peak, it was just a lot of fun to watch, especially considering the casts of the earlier shows had undeniable chemistry.
And at other times the show challenged our intellects, much like The Twilight Zone did, and put characters in moral dilemmas. And then there were the character-driven plotlines, which the original series and its early successors had in abundance. Even when those shows operated on a shoestring budget, people of all political persuasions tuned in.
Unfortunately, the newer iterations of Star Trek have no character development. Instead viewers get served with a platter full of bad writing, CGI space battles and woke politics.
One new series, Strange New Worlds, a prequel about Captain James T. Kirk’s predecessor, Christopher Pike, jumped the shark big-time in recent years. One episode was a musical. In another, the characters became puppets. Last week’s episode was a parody of soap operas that was so cringe-worthy that my wife looked at me and said, “I should sue you for making me watch this.”
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Then, on Starfleet Academy — the first Star Trek series to get cancelled in its first season due to low ratings — we get gay Klingons in drag.
On another recent series, Discovery, Stacey Abrams cameoed as the Federation president as a rebuke to Donald Trump.
And, yes, Star Trek has had its share of liberal virtue signaling, since the series began.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Commander William T. Riker fell in love with an androgynous person. Captain Jean Luc Picard spoke of how people in his 24th century didn’t care about money. In one episode, Picard dismissed religion as a silly superstition.
But look at other episodes of the franchise where the characters of Deep Space Nine treat religion as something sacred. Look at the original series where Kirk railed against utopia societies that diminished mankind and made us lesser people.
To its credit, one recent episode of Strange New Worlds revealed that Captain Pike is a Christian and showed him praying during one personal crisis.
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who died in 1991, was no Christian and had wildly unrealistic ideas about human nature and traditional storytelling structures. His vision of the future was inconsistent with human nature, and it wasn’t long before his writers recognized that and broke his edict that none of the principal characters could have conflicts with one another. That’s an example of people with more conservative tendencies stepping in to make Star Trek a better show.
Clearly, Star Trek is not just a domain of the Left.
Star Trek has waned in popularity in recent years. Conservatives who expect better of the franchise are tuning out.
But Star Trek doesn’t need to preach conservative or liberal politics to survive. It just needs to tell good stories again.
And the Hollywood producers and writers who oversee the franchise can’t grasp that simple concept and will surely kill it unless they change their ways.
Trust me. It’s only logical.
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