In “3001: The Final Odyssey” and some other unusually good sci-fi they actually do get this right, and in 3001 when future humans encounter Frank from 2001 they make note of his unmixed appearance.
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My experience too: I thought wearing hats or scarves or wigs over a bald head was all about fashion or embarrassment, but it turns out hair has a very practical use…especially in cold climates.
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So we all agree, Patrick Stewart - pretty hot for an old dude?
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Well, we love his acting too. But yeah, I’m with ya.
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Oy. Super common misconception. Blondes aren’t going extinct either. Even if the Mendelian model was the whole story, recessive genes don’t really go anywhere. Star Trek is only set a few centuries from now, which isn’t enough time for evolutionary pressure to take root. Star Trek’s biggest biological sins have always been inter-species breeding and the assumption that most intelligent life is humanoid, but maintaining racial characteristics isn’t one of them.
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I’ve long thought that both of those problems (and several others) could have been mitigated or resolved by setting Star Trek much, much farther in the future. Then it’s a galaxy populated by descendants of humans, isolated for long enough for at least superficial differences to take root due to wildly divergent local conditions, but not so long as to prevent inter-breeding. A few thousand years, say. (There was an episode of TNG where they tried to explain the humanoids-everywhere galaxy as the result of bio-seeding by a common ancestor billions of years ago, which is better than nothing I guess, but still stretches credulity on the inter-breeding.)
Of course, there are many more problems with Star Trek. I still love much of it, but to sustain that love I need to give the various series and movies a pass for all kinds of questionable stuff. Mostly, that means accepting that Gene Roddenberry’s heart, and those of his associates and successors, were generally in the right place even if they failed miserably at times, right up until the very recent past.
Sometimes I indulge in my own retconning. Why is arguably the greatest TNG episode of all – The Inner Light – set on a planet that looks like a gated community somewhere outside Taos? Surely the aliens must have programmed their device to make the transmission recipient see individuals in a form he would easily recognize – i.e. based on his own appearance – not as the hideous arachnoid aliens really looked on their doomed planet.
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Having binge-watched all of TNG recently, I can actually say that the science and engineering are sound… because there isn’t any. All of the technology is based in principles that are complete fabrications not subject to scientific scrutiny. Actually the most glaring scientific error I noticed (aside from sound in space and the fact that whatever artificial gravity system being used never fails) was in a Barkley episode. He became endowed with super-intelligence and was explaining to a holographic Einstein what was wrong with his equations on a blackboard. If I recall correctly, none of the equations were relevant to their discussion.
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I think that Futurama often did better in that regard, since I think at least a couple of the writers were like Math PhDs or something.
Star Trek was always much more about an idealized, postwar/human conflict future. The documentary I watched recently about Roddenberry’s son, who directed/starred in it, I think makes that pretty clear:
Apparently, there was tension between Roddenberry and the other writers about wanting to include more conflict on the ship, but he didn’t want to. But you finally get some of that with late TNG and most productively with DS9. The fact that it’s Sci-fi is kind of secondary to the idealized realtionships between human beings, for Roddenberry at least.
And Mae Jemison was inspired by the show AND later appeared on the show… Can’t complain about that, actually.
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I agree as far as the science goes – it only needs to make enough dramatic sense to get you to suspend disbelief, no matter how absurd the premise.
I was thinking more in terms of the social aspects of the future already mentioned in various other posts. The almost complete silence on same-sex relationships? (That time Riker fell for a member of an androgynous species was almost an exception.) Skimpy uniforms for women? Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I like to think that things like this would have been handled very differently had Roddenberry not had to worry about the social mores of his time and the ratings-obsession of his medium.
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I think that’s the biggest failing, same-sex relationships. I also always thought they were better on race than on gender. But of course, if Roddenberry had gotten his way on TOS, they would have been better (the miniskirts and less leadership roles for women came from the network, not Roddenberry). But that aspect gets better with late TNG and DS9 - though there is the issue of 7 of 9 on Voyager and T’pau (was that her name? on Enterprise).
But they never really did LBGTQ community justice, which is a shame, I think. I don’t know if that was on his radar at all in the mid-60s.
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T’Pol.
T’Pau was a minor character in TOS. And also Carol Decker’s band:
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Thank you… I was too lazy to look it up! And I think Decker named it after T’Pau… who was the the Vulcan in the angry, sexually frustrated Spock episode… Amok Time?
And - HOLY CRAP - I just realized that there was a voyager episode I watched recently, which focused on the sexual maturation of Kes, which was basically a version of that spock episode… weirdness.
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There isn’t a single bald person on my mother’s side of the family. Thick, lustrous heads of hair are all there is to be seen in all the men, back at least 3 generations. My dad’s side of the family, however, is all bald men. I started losing my hair at about 17, gave up and started shaving (not completely down, just a nice #1 all over) around 23 or so. So yeah, fuck that “it comes from the mother’s side” bullshit. False hope, that’s all that is.
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Recessive genes don’t go anywhere, but they don’t meet as often any more.
Differences between individuals aren’t going anywhere. There will be darker-skinned people, blond people, hook-nosed people, flat-nosed people, round-eyed people, etc.
My point is that races are going to fade. It will be much rarer for the recessive genes for blue eyes to meet up in the same person as the recessive genes for blue eyes and for light skin. I am sure that some of the traits traditionally associated with the “black race” are recessive, too, so those, too, will be less likely to all manifest in the same individual. (You’re right that Mendel is not the whole story, though).
Look at the Sisko family again: Sarah and Joseph Sisko, both African American, have a son, Benjamin Sisko, who marries an African American woman named Jennifer Sisko, also African American. He later re-marries, again an African American woman. Most of the “white” families on Star Trek have been white for generations. In Star Trek, there is more interspecies marriage going on than there is interracial marriage among humans. That might of course be just coincidence. Just like the fact that there are no gay relationships on Star Trek.
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Memory Alpha told me that Sato was born in Kyoto. She’s supposed to be a language genius (ridiculously so, in fact), so her accent doesn’t count.
I overlooked Uhura, I had assumed her to be African American. She sure has an American accent. It’s kind of telling that we only know she’s “somewhere from Africa”, while we usually know the US state that one of the “North American” characters was born in. The United States of Africa will probably have something between 20 and 2000 official languages. I’d expect English to be one of them, but I’d expect people raised there to sound more African and less African American. Given that British and Scottish and several variants of American accents have survived pretty well until the 24th century, I don’t see Nigerian English disappearing, either.
Maybe it’s just the fact that I nitpicked about STTNG before I ever thought about my own sexual orientation, but I disagree. Its militaristic America-centrism is its biggest failing.
What did they do with respect to same-sex relationships? They remained silent. Which puts the 24th centure foundation about on the same level as Austria in the year 2000. Overt discrimination had mostly gone out of fashion. People agreed that people had the right to love who they want. But somehow, you didn’t hear about many people who were out, so most people thought it was a “non-issue” and just about what “people do privately”. Basically, 90’s Star Trek failed to be ahead of the times in this respect.
But on the America-Centrism front? Star Trek is way worse than reality. Half the quadrant is a nominally democratic military dictatorship run by White Americans and their Token Minorities. Even the Vulcans show the same 70:30 white-black mix that is characteristic of the present-day US.
Justice in the Federation is closely modeled after US military Justice. Apparently, Civil Law has been eradicated together with most non-English languages. What’s worse, in TOS, the Federation still has the death penalty for one weirdly specific offence (General Order 7).
And when the Xindi probe attacked Florida, the ENT crew went all George W. Bush on the Delphic Expanse.
But yes, I’d have appreciated to see a happily married same-sex couple on Star Trek.
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Fair enough on that. In fact, TOS is not much more than modernization theory in space - hence the expectation is that all societies develop along the lines of American society. So yeah, that’s entirely true. I think the context of the show helps us to understand why. The thing is deeply Cold War, hence, that helps to explain the American-centric nature of the show. Plus, the initial audience was American. To say that there isn’t a propagandistic note to the show would be naive.
That being said, for all it’s failings, it had the first interracial kiss on American televsion, at the height of the civil rights movement. Even King (at least according to Michelle Nichols) found the show to be helpful in that regard. TNG had black admirals, a black engineer, and black officers. American centric, again, to be sure, but again, it’s still an American show, with a somewhat modernizatin theory agenda.
But I also have to argue that the end of TNG and going into DS9 they bring in some more complicated geopoltiical points of view. DS9 deals with some pretty heavy shit, regarding decolonization and positioning the Federation as always being “the good guys”, because at times they are not. So, once you start to move away from the Cold War, you get more complicated political story lines, which are shades of grey all the way down, as opposed to more black and white. Few things were better for the Franchise than the struggles with the Cardassians over bajor (and later the Klingon/Cardassian war). If you haven’t watched that series in a while, it’s entirely worth a re-watch.
Which I noted was wrong on their part. I too would have liked them to be more proactive in presenting a more sexually diverse set of characters.
But do you have the same problems with classic Doctor Who, in this case. It was a deeply British show, and likewise had similar issues with race and gender all through it’s history. It took the reboot to bring in a gay character (which they absolutely ran with in Torchwood), but again, it came in the rebooted series.
[ETA] One more thing on this - fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, I find to be genres meant to help the viewer/reader work through issues of their day. That’s another reason why LBGTQ characters just weren’t found on TOS or even TNG (with the Riker exception you mentioned), because for many, it just wasn’t on their radar. Wrong, of course, but it wasn’t.
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There will be more mixed-race people in the future than there are now, but there’s no reason to think that we won’t have plenty of “black” or “white” -looking people a few centuries from now.
Just look at Brazil: people of various races have been intermarrying there for half a millennium but you’ll still find a wide variety of ethnic features among Brazilians.
In any case Star Trek isn’t really about the future anyway. Like most science fiction it uses “the future” as a way of making commentary about issues we are dealing with in the present. It’s unrealistic to expect the majority of the Enterprise crew to look racially ambiguous because that’s not reflective of either contemporary society or the Hollywood talent pool.
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Oh, I actually agree with most of that dream of progress in society - there are just some areas where I delude myself into thinking that it’s not America that leads human progress, and on these issues, too, Star Trek remains an American show. But it was actually mostly the superficial Americanness that I was complaining about - the fact that everyone who matters seems to be American or at least British.
Entirely true about the original show, and at least financially true about the spin-offs. But America is a (the) major exporter of pop culture nowadays, so everything is produced for a global audience. If people can complain that straight white male artists focus too much on a straight white male experience, I can also complain that American artists are focussing too much on an American experience.
I really enjoy that part, though my favourite “geopoilitical” star trek is Worf and Picard’s meddling in Gowron’s ascension to chancellor, and the various stories that show a more “human” side to the Romulan empire (e.g., TNG:Reunion).
I was a bit sceptical about the later DS9 because it had too much of a black-and-white world view. Gul Dukat literally in league with the devil? Puh-lease.
Star Trek geopolitics in general seemed to be somewhere between a Cold War mindset and post-Cold War superpower fantasies. The Federation never seems to have had a powerful but essentially peaceful neighbor. All “foreign” cultures were either “minor powers” (like Bajor), clearly inferior in power (Klingons in TNG) or evil, closed-off dictatorships (Romulans, Cardassians). Hello? This was supposed to be about a positive view of the future.
I must admit that I still haven’t managed to catch up on classic Doctor Who, so I won’t comment on that. With the new series, though, I find it’s blatant British patriotism much easier to forgive. The Doctor seems to have taken a liking to one particular country on the planet, and for some inexplicable reason, that same country is also the target of 99% of all attempted alien invasions. That’s just fiction. It’s sort of like “reverse racism”. America is the dominant superpower, militarily, economically, and culturally, so “mind your privilege”. But the British aren’t the world’s hegemonial power, so it doesn’t offend if their science fiction makes them out to be the center of the world.
But when they still sort themselves in “black” families from New Orleans and “white” families from Iowa, that means there’s still a problem.
Yes!
Voyager, for all its flaws, actually had a couple of nods to this. As in the other series, there was a lot of “The Prime Directive says we must not interfere!” before going ahead and interfering. But in that series, there were at least a few episodes where we see Voyager and its crew from other perspectives – as a dangerous, trigger-happy, hypocritical, self-serving, imperialistic force.
Maybe not enough to make up for several series’ worth of pretty intense America-centrism (though I agree with @anon61221983 that much of that is an artifact of the series being American, and TOS in particular is a clear Cold War allegory), but at least there was some acknowledgement that Federation (read American) self-righteousness looks pretty awful from the outside.
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When J.J. Abrams was rebooting Star Trek, I said to myself, “Hey, they should get that guy from the Monkees biopic to be the new Kirk!” J.J. Abrams didn’t listen to me, because he wasn’t in the room. I was specifically thinking of '80s Kirk, of course, because Wrath of Khan, and Monkees Biopic Guy turned out to be Aaron Lohr, whereof just tell me this is not Young Kirk.
Then I noticed that various sources identify Aaron Lohr as biracial. I went back to the stills of Shatner in various dark curly wigs, thinking they did that on purpose. For just the reasons zathras mentions?
