The Deranged Sex of Star Trek
Written by: Tony Lazlo, CC2K Staff Writer
A look at the unhealthy sex of Star Trek and how J.J. Abrams might be just what the franchise needs.
Alias star Jennifer Garner has popped up on Star Trek’s radar.
Or instead of “radar,” I should use Trek-speak and say she turned up on their “sensors.” In any event, geek blog TrekMovie.com reported a rumor that Garner will appear in the eleventh Trek movie, which will be directed by Alias and Lost brain-trust J.J. Abrams.
Who knows if the rumor is true, but it makes sense that Abrams would recruit one of his mainstays to help out in his formidable quest to jump-start the venerable Star Trek franchise.
(I bet you a jillion dollars that Greg Grunberg will show up in a Starfleet uniform, too).
But let’s hope it’s true, because not only would Garner’s presence increase the babe quotient in the new Trek considerably, but the combined forces of Garner and Abrams might invert Star Trek‘s perennially wrong-headed perspective on sexuality.
First, though, let’s talk about Jennifer Garner.
The Buffy Era
I’ve written before about how great episodic TV has been one of the defining pop-culture events for me in the 2000s. Almost inescapably, I had to talk about the strong, intelligent, beautiful women that populate — in some cases dominate — these programs.
Writer-director Joss Whedon reigns as the head-honcho, high aldwyn, big-cheese, badass motherfucker of strong women on TV. James Cameron holds that title for movies by virtue of Aliens and Terminator 2 alone, but Whedon elevated the crafting of strong women to a high-art form — and he brought all of TV with him. (Well, David Chase helped.)
That said, J.J. Abrams emerged during this era with Alias, which started in 2001. There’s plenty of grist to grind about the ridiculous lengths Alias goes to exploit Jennifer Garner’s leggy good looks in the gazillion disguises (or fetish-fantasies) she appears in, but I want to focus directly in on that exploitation to illustrate why Garner is so cool.
Garner wins big-time points from me because she’s not a typical Hollywood beauty. She’s earthy, not glamorous, and she lacks the signature, creepy-thin waif-waist that the likes of Cameron Diaz and Michelle Pfeiffer boast. Instead, Garner tromps around her movies and TV shows with long, powerful legs and arms like a collegiate power-forward, her breasts firmly medium-sized and her dimples always plunging into her flawless cheeks. Sarah Michelle Gellar should have great bronze statues erected in her honor for her marathon performance on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but between the two, Garner is the lanky, charming oddball, while Gellar remains a prom queen (which is what she was cast to play, after all).
Well, part one of this examination got completely out of hand. Now that I’ve established Garner’s unique babeness, I’ll move on to what especially qualifies her for Starfleet duty in part two.
OK, earlier I promised to explain why I think Alias star Jennifer Garner will make a great addition to the Star Trek universe. Here’s why:
In its storied history, Star Trek has never had one legitimate female character. (At least, I don’t think it has.)
In case there are any outraged Trek fans out there, let me explain. Gene Roddenberry had great intentions when he conceived the utopian future seen in his magnum opus. He made a black woman one of the main officers on the bridge of the starship — and made a fan out of civil rights paladin Dr. Martin Luther King in the process. When Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) considered leaving the show, King himself told her he was a fan and that she was a role-model for children everywhere. That rocks.
That said, Uhura (and the rest of the female personnel) on the original Enterprise slinked around the ship in crotch-length skirts.
But that’s not the original series’ greatest offense. At no time in the run of the original series did Uhura ever, say, take command of the ship in an emergency situation. (Though she did assume command in a memorable episode of the animated series.)
The standing of women didn’t improve in Trek’s subsequent incarnations, though I admit I’m not familiar with the franchise’s redheaded stepchild, Deep Space Nine. I welcome correction from any fellow geeks.
But let’s take a look at some of the other women that Trek has offered us:
Dr. Beverly Crusher and Counselor Troi, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden) started out as a drippy, formless girly-girl, but by the end of the series, the show’s writers actually started to give her some interesting stuff to do.
Counselor Troi (Marina Sirtis) started out as a drippy, formless girly-girl, but by the end of the series, the show’s writers actually started to give her some interesting stuff to do.
Hell, both of these characters were headed in compelling directions before the show’s writers fucked them up. By season seven, Crusher was getting close to a full-on relationship with Patrick Stewart’s wonderfully overcooked Jean-Luc Picard; while Troi was getting cozy with Michael Dorn’s masterfully crafted Lt. Worf.
Unfortunately, by the time the movies rolled around, the writers jettisoned both of these complicated relationships in favor of the (ostensibly) crowd-pleasing choice to pair Troi with her old flame, Commander Riker. The writers largely ignored Dr. Crusher and apparently forgot about her relationship with Picard. Ugh.
Seven of Nine, Star Trek: Voyager
Jeri Ryan is probably one of the most talented and versatile actors to ever appear in a Star Trek show, but unfortunately, she got stuck playing a literal robot on Voyager.
The Seven of Nine character also deserves scorn for how it fulfills a classic, wrong-headed sci-fi archetype: the fembot. Seven of Nine doesn’t just appeal to geeks because she’s hot. She appeals to geeks because she is one of them. She’s super-intelligent and socially stunted. One memorable Voyager episode follows Seven of Nine as she tries dating, and get this: Seven of Nine chooses her date based on the crew manifest — sound like online dating? — and she chooses the one guy on the ship who’s known for being jittery around women. And the date turns out to be a disaster because of her lack of social skills.
Kathryn Janeway, Star Trek: Voyager
Sexless autocrat. Shares a few token gooshy scenes with her husband, who later divorces her. When she isn’t making batshit-insane command decisions, she’s activating the ship’s self-destruct. Well done, Star Trek writers. The one female leader you offer us is a fucking maniac.
Why would Garner make a great addition to Star Trek? Because she’s played a real woman, and the franchise could use one. Stay tuned for more analysis of Trek‘s wrong-headed perspective on women. Actually, calling it “wrong-headed” is too kind. At best it’s wrong-headed, at worst it’s actively deranged. Let me explain:
Rarely in the Trek universe is sex presented as simply sex. The writers always bury it under alien ritual or skewer it with a kooky sci-fi premise. For example:
• In the original series episode Amok Time, we get the first glance of the Vulcan mating ritual, Pon-Farr. Here’s how it works: Vulcans — those are the pointy-eared, logical ones — are celibate most of the time, but every seven years they have to fuck or they die. (I believe female ferrets have a similar mortal need to mate.)
So get this: On the episode, Spock has to go back to Vulcan to either mate with (and marry) a Vulcan woman, or he has to fight some guy to the death to satiate the blood-lust built into the Pon-Farr.
So, in one swift move, the Trek writers equate sex with death, but on top of that, even after Spock “kills” Kirk — Dr. McCoy helps them fake it — Spock divorces his wife and returns to the ship. In other words, male friendships can’t survive the introduction of women. Great message, guys! (Huge credit goes to an unbylined essay over on About.com for great analysis of that episode.)
It somehow manages to go downhill from there through all the different incarnations of the show. Many a geek has cracked a joke about Kirk being a lothario, but let’s not forget how his cavalier attitude toward women sets a Modonna/whore-enabling precedent for the whole damn franchise.
The show’s reboot, Star Trek: The Next Generation, put families onboard the ship while still leaving the main characters in asexual-misogynistic haze. Here are some of Trek’s most spectacular offenses, just off the top of my head:
• On ST: TNG: An alien wants to experience life as a human being, so he gets Counselor Troi pregnant. It’s essentially a rape, but Troi decides to keep the child, which grows at an accelerated rate and sacrifices itself to save the ship. The writers actually have the temerity to touch on abortion issues in this shitstorm. Awesome.
• On Voyager: Ensign Harry Kim falls for an alien engineer while helping repair her spaceship. They mate. He catches an exotic extraterrestrial disease. Captain Janeway dresses him down for getting involved with an alien without getting permission from Starfleet. The name of this episode? No bullshit? The Disease.
• Holy fucking shit. I almost forgot about this one: On ST: TNG: The Enterprise crew is helping out an androgynous race of aliens. Ship’s ladykiller Commander Riker falls in love with a “deviant” member of the race who tends toward womanhood. The “deviant” alien’s shipmates brainwash her back into gender-neutrality after she’s been put on trial as a pervert. (I suppose you could look at this episode as a metaphor for homosexuality, where the female-leaning alien is realizing she’s gay, and her brainwashing evokes one of those creepy places that “cures” homosexuality — but it’s a stretch.)
How does this stack up to the shows of J.J. Abrams?
For starters, Alias features the stalwart Sydney Bristow (Garner) as the show’s primary power-point, but more than that, the main narrative not only follows Bristow as she fights global terrorism in high style, but it also shows her actually trying to have a normal relationship.
To be sure, high-concept shenanigans thwart Bristow as she gets closer to a romantic relationship with her handler, Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan), but the creative team behind Alias drives home the idea that Sydney not having a regular relationship is bad. (Abrams explores this same theme in the criminally underrated Mission: Impossible III.) The most dramatic example of this from Alias: Bristow drops off the face of the earth for two years, but even after she gets back, she still tries to maintain a relationship with Vaughn.
In this noble effort, I’d liken Alias to another geek staple: The X-Files, which features similarly celibate characters who slowly track a course toward each other — David Duchovny’s Mulder and Gillian Anderson’s Scully don’t kiss until the finale of the eighth season. (Though to be fair, X-Files is guilty of its own anti-sex neuroses. In one episode, Scully randomly hooks up with a guy while on a field assignment. On a lark, she gets a tattoo and has a one-night stand. Poisoned ink in the tattoo drives her insane, and the guy turns out to be a murderer.)
So. Star Trek is fucked in the head when it comes to sex, and J.J. Abrams might have the remedy. I’ve been watching the latest incarnation of Trek recently, the underrated Entertprise, which recalls the original series’ robust tone of human exceptionalism. When faced with a belligerent alien standoff to arbitrate, Scott Bakula’s Captain Archer makes many a speech about how humans worked together to solve their problems.
This schtick is pretty quaint until you realize that Gene Roddenberry never meant to suggest that there’s something inherently great or exceptional about humans. No, he rather meant to argue that we appear exceptional because we got our shit together as a people, and the rest of the galaxy simply caught us during one of our finest hours.
I want Star Trek to see another of those fine hours — perhaps the finest since The Wrath of Khan. J.J. Abrams is committed to portraying healthy relationships, and an inversion, revision and revamping of the entire franchise’s outlook on sex is way the hell overdue.