Lieutenant Alara Kitan and Ideal Leadership (Science Fiction and Charles W. Mills’s Critique of “Ideal Theory” Part I)

Charles W. Mills begins the wide-ranging discussion in his 2005 essay, “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” by clarifying that feminist thinkers have expanded the larger discussion of ethics in rapid and unifying ways (165). I have completed a list, however, incomplete, of feminist readings that might be useful to some of you who, like me, are always looking for something new to read. In The Orville episode, “Command Performance,” I believe more than one ethical framework has been constructed, from feminist concerns to diversity and inclusion and reverse ageism.

I would dare say that there is more than Lieutenant Alara Kitan’s lack of experience that makes her reluctant to take command when Capt. Mercer and Cmdr. Grayson leave the ship and fall victim to the transportation buoy in holographic disguise. There is clearly an internalized sexism at play when we see that the first thing she does is run to the masculine, (mostly) “all” male Moclan species second officer, Bortus, who is unable to take command due to his parenting responsibilities. He is sitting on an egg; symbolic of the birth of the commanding officer that is becoming manifest in Lt. Kitan in this episode. That internalized sexism is more than one-sided, more than internalized. The crew notices, too. Lt. LaMarr makes a quip, “We have Dora the Explorer running things here” (to paraphrase), but Alara does quickly demand obedience on the bridge and even dismisses Lt. Malloy from duty.

However, her attempt to imitate command is clear when she ignores Issac’s advice and causes great damage to the ship. As Dr. Finn points out to her, she only needed to feel the need to “appear in command.” She has yet to step out of that internalized sexism that is preventing her from showing her true, confident self. However, there is more happening here. Clearly, at her young age, just 23, there is a great deal of reverse ageism that the crew places on her. This “youngism” is evident not only just after the Captain and First Officer go missing, but especially when she follows orders from the Admiral to return to Earth where the Captain and First Officer will be declared lost in the line of duty. Would the crew be so spiteful, so hateful, so resentful of the officer in command if it were not a 23-year-old woman? I believe there certainly would still be mixed feelings, but they would not have been so judgmental and would have obeyed and understood the chain of command.

The fact that the Captain and First Officer are being held in a zoo offers us great insight into how the crew has idealized what the commanding officer in this case should, in their minds, be like. It is nothing less than a pre-written ideology; what is inscribed in their minds is ideal.  

Ideal theory, I would contend, is really an ideology, a distortional complex of ideas, values, norms, and beliefs that reflects the nonrepresentative interests and experiences of a small minority of the national population – middle-to-upper-class white males [..] Once this is understood, it becomes transparent why such a patently deficient, clearly counterfactual and counterproductive approach to issues on right and wrong, justice and injustice, has been so dominant. (Mills, 2005, 172)

There is also a sense of continuous foreshadowing throughout the series on ideal representation such as in “Majority Rule” when the away team has to take money with them down to the surface as they interact and move about society on the planet. Alara refers to the idea of money as “weird” and when Kelly must pay for their counterfeit badges, it does not occur to her to take out the money she was given. The ideal is at play here as well. Though it is not just in-story, the ideal ideology plays out in the casting of The Orville as well. It cannot be missed that we have yet another science fiction series with a white male captain. While there is greater representation in general than many science fiction series, I would argue that could be improved even further.

What is most evident in “Majority Rule” is the socialized lack of autonomy, all the while claiming to have mastered individualism, believing in a false sense of autonomy. What this unstructured capitalist democracy needs is holistic degrowth.

The feminist degrowth debate and related discourses (Abazeri, 2022; Jax et al., 2018; Rendueles, 2017) argue for a conception of selfhood founded on the existential condition of being fundamentally dependent on others and on nature, exposing growth societies’ androcentric ideal of individual autonomy as a hollow fiction. This is not about abandoning the ideal of autonomy, but about redefining it as a capacity for collective self determination that is always already social, because it is based on mutual concern and access to limited, shared resources (Asara et al., 2013; Kallis et al., 2020; Schmelzer et al., 2022). (Eversberg and Schmelzer, Degrowth Journal, 2022, 7-8)

The zoo in “Command Performance” can be seen as representative of Ideal Theory – that everything has its proper place, held on a shelf, dominated by one class over another – and in the process we see this is the very locale where Alara blossoms into a commanding officer and rescues her captain and first officer. Where do we see this in our own society? It could be argued we see this as having grown from the Wages for Housework (WfH) campaigns that began in the early 1970s. As Emma Pizarro discusses in London School of Economic and Political Science blog,

Whilst there may have been some confusion or disagreement outside of the group as to what the actual aims of the WfH campaign were, they have campaigned on family allowance and pay equity, lobbied the UN to measure and value unwaged work, contributed to the Green New Deal for Europe and regularly organised conferences which centered the experience of black and immigrant women. The movement continues today as the Global Women’s Strike, Women of Colour in the Global Women’s Strike, and Queer Strike. (2024, 8-9)

Charles W. Mills states, “In its ignorance of oppression, ideal theory also ignores the consequences of oppression” (2005, 175). Lieutenant Alara Kitan navigated a plan of action through enemy territory to save her commanding officers from oppression. She used imagination and demonstrated her innate leadership skills doing it. While at the zoo, she was quick on her feet to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances when their plan did not go according to an even structure. She was given the room to command, and with a little sage advice from an older, experienced woman, Dr. Claire Finn, Alara proved her value to the crew and in the process demonstrated the crew’s value to each other. She went against the commands of Admiral Tucker, went against the low pre-judged and sarcastic remarks of Lt. LaMarr, she went again the reverse ageism of Chief Engineer Steve Newton, who called her “kid” more than once, and she resisted the Ideal-framed dominance of the unfolding situation, which is exactly what a capable leader does.