Star Trek is a Collaborator with Contemporary Injustice

Star Trek is a dangerous, denialist lie that is about hope in the future. We cannot hope for a future without injustice where Earth is a paradise without first addressing injustice here and now. Then we can talk about utopia. I realize not all science fiction does what Trek does. I also realize Star Trek does not exclude contemporary issues, but it does so with a backbone that Earth is a utopia and it is the other that we find morality tales of conflict. This leads to just one conclusion. Star Trek is a collaborator.

In the Deep Space Nine episode, “The Maquis, Part II” (1994), Sisko states, “The trouble is Earth. On Earth there is no poverty, no crime, no war. You look out the window of Starfleet Headquarters and you see paradise. Well it’s easy to be a saint in paradise.” Paradise. This is the A story in every Trek episode and series to the B story of conflict and problematic justifications in all other homeworlds for all other species. Paradise is the backbone and it is us! We are portrayed as being capable of utopia. The best that Trek could do was invent a WWIII, Eugenics War, and global catastrophe that lead up to First Contact when we suddenly started behaving. We did not do so internally. It took First Contact to get us there.

Babylon 5 does not portray a paradise. Battlestar Galactica certainly does not. While they acknowledge and give hope to a possible future grace, it is only established through considerable cost in lives and wars that shook entire civilizations. Utopia cannot be a given. We cannot assume that the premise of social-ecological-economic salvation comes from a strong place in which we already find our mutual community. As Cmdr. Kelly Grayson explains in The Orville season three finale, “Future Unknown,” (2022), first humanity must learn to come together and realize that we each stronger when we take care of each other and work towards our own common good above all else. It is only then that the exceptional technology that improves life for everyone can be invented because, as a course of nature, we have become responsible enough to know how to use it.

Star Trek creates a minor backstory that states we became responsible only after global destruction followed by First Contact. We had no choice. In The Orville, we made the choice. We, too, must make a choice. With that in mind, Star Trek cannot be healthy as a morality clock. It cannot set a good example. To rephrase Audre Lorde, the master’s tools cannot build a freedom house. As such Star Trek collaborates with capitalistic, dogmatic, stoic determinism that influences bootstrap ethics and far-reaching morbid desires that we will get to where we need to be through will alone. Such massive movements are never done alone. We are lost without each other. Without mutual sacrifice and an everlasting communal agreement to let conflict pass away, we are not responsible enough for utopia and all the light that it would bring.