@[email protected] invited contributors from the old Daystrom to repost some favorites, so here is one of mine.
Throughout Star Trek, but especially in TOS and TNG, we are commonly asked to be very stressed out about our captain being overruled or displaced. Regardless of whether the replacement does a good job, it seems clear that we are supposed to resent him simply because he is not the usual captain we have come to know and love.
A particularly striking example of this is TOS “The Deadly Years,” where Kirk is aging rapidly and apparently going senile. This seems like a clear case where Spock should step in – but a good chunk of the episode is taken up with the procedings to relieve Kirk of command. In the end, the inexperienced starbase commander who replaces him turns out to be a disaster, and the ship is only saved when a cured Kirk is able to come in and be his usual decisive self.
The most gut-wrenching example, of course, is Captain Jellico, who arbitrarily changes everything, criticizes the way Troi dresses, won’t let Riker do his job – and regards it as a foregone conclusion that Picard is dead.
I have seen several comments to the effect that the crew’s response to Jellico is a little childish, and I think that’s a clue to what’s going on with this common plot. Namely, I believe that the captain is put forward as a father figure and that the displacement plots are speaking to a cultural anxiety about divorce. The replacement captain is the step-dad who always appears to be an illegitimate usurper – and in the end, we get the fantasy outcome that mom and dad get back together again.
This may seem far-fetched, but the earliest TOS episodes do a lot of work to establish Kirk as a father figure (most explicitly in “Charlie X”) and the ship as his wife (“The Naked Time”). This is more subdued in TNG, where Picard is awkward with kids – but Picard’s emotional distance completely fits with the “traditional” image of the father. Surely “Captain Picard Day” is something like Father’s Day for the Enterprise children! And more broadly, the backstory of many Enterprise crew members includes broken families, alienation from parents, dead parents or spouses – all factors that lead them to identify the ship as their true family (and invite the misfits in the audience to do the same).
Over the years, of course, our culture became less and less stressed out about divorce as it became more routine – and so those plots suggested themselves less and less. In DS9, it is far from a dominant theme. I haven’t rewatched in a while, but I don’t remember even a single plot that hinges on someone taking over for Sisko – when the Dominion takes over the station, the emotional focus isn’t Sisko’s lost command, but the loss of the station itself. [ADDED: I wonder if the fact that Sisko is the only captain who is presented as a literal father somewhat undercuts his role as father-figure thematically.]
And Janeway’s command is never seriously disputed. Of course, in-universe you can say it’s because she’s so far away from the admirals, but symbolically, she’s the mom – and in a typical divorce narrative, it’s never a question of whether mom will remain in place. The one clear example I can think of where the crew rebels against her authority is “Prime Factors” – and their main rationale is that they believe Janeway’s judgment is clouded by her obvious attraction to the leader of the vacation planet. In other words, the kids get restless when it looks like mom might have a boyfriend.
The theme of the displaced captain comes back somewhat in Enterprise, but to me it feels different. The issue isn’t Archer being replaced by a step-dad – instead, the problem always centers on Archer’s masculinity. In “Hatchery,” he becomes overly maternal toward the Xindi Insectoid babies, which leads to a mutiny. Similarly, in “Bound,” the Orion Slave Girls compromise Archer’s judgment with their aggressive sexiness. Archer’s either becoming a woman or being dominated by one – which calls back to the early episodes, when it could sometimes be unclear whether he or T’Pol was really in charge. Archer represents not a father, so much as an emasculated human race ready to prove itself – a more reactionary theme for a more reactionary time (the early 2000s).
Oh this one is really interesting, and a very compelling case.
I think one thing that we risk losing as the Second Generation series (TNG, DS9, VGR and ENT) pass into memory is an understanding of the cultural context in which they were written. So I think it’s really useful that you’ve explicitly connected this to cultural anxiety around divorce, which I think is still present but doesn’t seem like nearly the fixation I remember from 20+ years ago. I wonder, assuming that cultural anxiety fades over time, how the perception of those stories will thereby be impacted.
What follow is probably too freudian an analysis but: I wonder if fan reactions to DIS and PIC S1 and S2 can be read in this framework. Using this framework, DIS is characterized by an evolving roster of parental figures (lack of consistency) and betrayals of leaders (loss of trust), while PIC cuts its teeth on exposing the flaws of the titular father figure. There are lots of ways people have articulated that these series don’t “feel” like Star Trek, and I wonder if this subversion of convention plays into that.
@Equals @adamkotsko (I’ll give a try commenting from Mastodon, maybe this will go nowhere)
In the new series it seems that the main theme is of abandonment, either willing or accidental, resulting on the “children” (the crew) having to “grow up” on the parental role that’s lost.
Burnham is maybe too evident metaphor here: orphan of her biological parents, one of her formative moments is escaping from her (mostly) emotionally distant foster family, and the reason why her captain/mother is dead.
@Equals @adamkotsko the topic of losing her mother to a myriad of different unescapable situations repeats constantly in Burnham’s life, maybe synthesised on the inevitability of the death of her mirror universe version at the hands of her adoptive mother. That’s (at least for me) why having her actual mother returning as a mentor in the far future feels cheap: the series accumulated too much gravitas around her loss to have the very focus of it appearing as a simple supporting character.
@Equals @adamkotsko But let’s not dwell on a single character, because there’s abandonment for almost everyone on the new series!
To give a fast review: Saru gets estranged of his full species by disobeying the self-destructive advice of his father; Voq, literally “son of none” loses his spiritual leader T’Kuvma and further estranges himself from his species to save it; Tilly is obsessed with proving herself to her mother, which becomes a vain attempt after the time jump…
@Equals @adamkotsko the Asha twins discover traumatically that their lives and families are fake, and Soji also that the one real person she knew was just killed; the general mental state of the La Sirena crew is of different stages of estrangement, from Jurati being incapable of involving herself with other people, to the literal orphans Elnor and Seven, who, influenced as much as Picard and Ríos by their respective institutions, replace attachment with duty to any sort of lost causes…
@Equals @adamkotsko (this place is left best blank for the absolute obviousness of the abandonment theme on Prodigy)
@Equals @adamkotsko and back on SNW, the only chance to get a resolution to the many abandonment traumas (Uhura, M’Benga, Spock to name some) is also a lost cause, because the archetypical “cool dad” Christopher Pike is *destined* to sacrifice himself not only in an act of duty, but in an act of paternal sacrifice.
All in all, it seems that the overarching theme of the new series is not, as themselves say, “communication”, but the inevitable fragility of all forms of family.