ST:Disco lost me again

(Spoilers for a couple of 30-year-old television shows, and one that's 40 years old. No real Discovery spoilers, though.)

For the past two weeks, I have thought of watching the next episode of Star Trek: Discovery season 4 in my queue, and then said "nah." I believe I've finally figured out why. This is hard for me to admit as a lifetime member of the Democratic Party who has championed progressive causes his whole life, but: it's too damn woke.

Back in 2020, some of you may recall, I wrote a long essay about how Discovery's third season irked me. My principal objection was that a warship popping 900 years into the future would be so disorienting to the crew and to the world it found itself in that the way the series glossed over it undermined the stories the series was trying to tell. I know that this comes close to the Dune joke going around about how fans accept magical space worms and superhero desert warriors but they find a main character named "Duncan Idaho" beyond the pale. It's actually not that far off, though: the way everyone in the 32nd century just blithely accepts the arrival of an ancient ship crewed by uncouth and incomprehensible people took me out of the storytelling.

I got through Season 3 anyway, and it was fine. Not great, but it entertained me while working from home during the pandemic.

Six years later, I realized I never started season 4. The show wrapped for good in May 2024 after season 5, so at least I wasn't falling farther behind, but I still thought I should catch up.

First, I had forgotten a lot about season 3, so I had to review Wikipedia to remember what I'd seen five years earlier. I also pushed aside my objections to the 900-years-in-the-future story and just went with it. But almost immediately in the first episode, season 4 started bothering me even more than season 3 did, for an entirely different and even more perniciously ahistorical reason.

Not only does season 4 continue to ignore the 900-year problem, but it plants itself so squarely in the politics of 2021 America that its politics get in the way of its storytelling. That's bad in any genre, but egregiously bad in sci-fi.

If you've read almost anything I've ever written here, you know that I have absolutely no objection to people or fictional characters on the basis of their demographic characteristics. What I have objected to is when people or fictional characters are solely and entirely concerned with their culture or background to the exclusion of anything else. And I think the contrast between the original Star Trek and this spinoff series illustrate the problems pretty well.

The original Star Trek was one of the most progressive series on television when it ran from 1966 to 1969. It shocked audiences in September 1966 to see a Black woman, a green-blooded alien, and (from season 2) a Russian all serving as bridge officers on the Enterprise. But here's what Gene Roddenberry did that made it work: nothing. Lt Uhura was African, and in-universe, no one cared. That was Roddenberry's point. Of course the future military would have officers from all over the Federation, and of course the other characters wouldn't even notice any more than the US Navy in 1966 would have noticed its officers' eye colors.

Showing that race, sex, and even planet of origin were beneath notice in the future demonstrated a progressive vision that made Star Trek such an enduring franchise. McCoy calling Spock "green-blooded [and] inhuman" in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan was funny because it was an over-the-top insult in-universe. It would be like me calling a friend a queer Roundhead villain ("yes, I have a same-sex partner, support the Parliament over the King, and was born in a farming community; and?").

Don't get me wrong: the original Star Trek had some howlers of politicking, like "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield" whose ham-handed message made eyes roll in 1969 as much as it does today. And like a lot of men of his generation (I'm looking at you, Isaac Asimov), Roddenberry's progressive vision somehow didn't fully include women. The Star Trek franchise didn't really address that problem until after he died, when Voyager finally gave us a female captain as a lead character.

Let's contrast that with how Discovery handles the issues of the day. The protagonist of the series is a Black, female officer who becomes captain of the ship in season 3. Cool. No one in-universe cares about her demographics, as it should be. Her story arc is compelling, the character is strong and respected by all, and Sonequa Martin-Green is fun to watch. There are some choices about how the character is portrayed that one could see as drawing attention to her being, well, Black and female, but none of it distracts from the story.

Unfortunately, there are four characters whose identities completely overshadow their characters, in really ennervating ways: the doubly-trans Adira Tal (Blu del Barrio) and their deceased um-friend (?) Gray Tal (Ian Alexander); and the gay male couple Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz). Both relationships hammer the orientations and identities of the participants and distract from the storytelling to a point where I don't even want to deal with them anymore.

Let's take the first pair: Adira and Gray. Both characters are of a symbiotic species (the Trill) in which a worm-like symbiont that lives for centuries rides around in an otherwise normal humanoid body for a few decades until the host dies of old age. The symbiont, being a worm, is just as comfortable in a female humanoid body as a male one. This was understood when the species was introduced in 1993 as an expy for gay and trans people. Deep Space Nine made lots of references to the fact that the Dax symbiont inhabiting the very attractive Jadzia (played by a very attractive 28-year-old Terry Farrell) had previously inhabited an elderly male body named Curzon. But no one cared, with the main character (Ben Sisko, played by Avery Brooks) often warmly addressing Jadzia as "old man."

But with the Adira and Gray storyline, the fact that both del Barrio and Alexander are non-binary is the point. Their scenes lean into this so hard that they often fall over. Like much of the far-left poltics of the 2020s, there is no subtext; it's all text, boldfaced and underlined. And their entire storyline feels to me like a Very Special Episode from a 1980s sitcom.¹ The Paul/Hugh storyline at least has some good stuff about how Hugh was dead for a while, and how that affected their marriage; but there are still way too many beats where I imagine someone running a chyron with "They're gay! And married! Look how progressive we are!"

Attention Alex Kutzman et al.: Babylon 5 had two explicitly gay relationships² back in 1997, both of which flowed directly from the characters and the story rather than the other way around, and in which the homosexuality was completely irrelevant to the story and to the other characters.

The problem, of course, is that Discovery takes these stories from the politics rather than from the characters. It reduces the characters to their contemporary identities, which science fiction has always tried to avoid. And it's just bad storytelling.

Science fiction's greatest strength has always been to frame a contemporary concern in a fantastic way to get at the essence of the issue. In 1966, the Civil Rights Act had just passed, but Black people were still treated as second class in much of the United States, and women of any skin color couldn't open a bank account without their husband's consent. In that context, having a Black female bridge officer on a spaceship, and having no one on that spaceship even notice she's Black or female³, was a groundbreaking statement. In 1996, during "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the earliest stirrings of the gay marriage movement, having two women fall in love on a space station, and having no one on that space station even bat an eye over it (at least until Talia's true nature came out, but that had nothing to do with her sex!), was a groundbreaking statement.

In 2021, having a non-binary character fall in love with another non-binary character is about as groundbreaking as one of Cassie's turds.

Kutzman and company clearly did not understand those lessons when plotting out seasons 3 and 4 of Star Trek: Discovery. I'd love to find out that it was really executive meddling, but even still, I'd hope the Discovery writer's room could have found better ways of handling it. Because, after a few episodes of season 4, it just seemed like pandering to a contemporary activist group at the expense of what could have been a much more entertaining series.

Someone please tell me: does it get better? Should I watch the last 15 episodes of Discovery? Or should I just call it a day and return to grown-up sci-fi like The Expanse?