"Classic Star Trek is not Shakespeare. It has always been the sort of show in which aliens could steal Spock’s brain, or Dr Crusher could fall in love with a Scottish space ghost. It sometimes screwed up—sometimes the plot dragged, the ending didn’t make sense, or the wacky science went too far and broke its own rules—but still, it was always primarily about trying to tell a good story.
Strange New Worlds is different. There’s less emphasis on story, more on being the right kind of show. Most of the screen time is devoted to fan service and contrived personal issues; what little remains for plot is rushed and simplistic, almost an afterthought, with shallow concepts and tacked-on progressive themes. The crew are less like individuals than demographic avatars (non-toxic male leader, trauma survivor), whose most profound quality is being really really excited to be on Star Trek...
They’re supposed to be part of a 2,000-year-old alien culture, but they sound more like ComicCon kids playing house. The episode is so stuffed with this sort of communal navel-gazing that we never get around to learning anything about the actual first contact—what the aliens believe, what they’re fighting about, even what they’re called—except, of course, that their political divisions are an allegory for ours.
When there’s actual science in this fiction, things get even worse...
Of course, fiction has always required that we suspend our disbelief. All shows have their little inconsistencies—what they used to call “fridge logic” because it doesn’t hit you until you get up for a snack. Star Trek has always required faith in impossible things like faster-than-light travel, humanoid aliens, force fields, a future without scarcity, a democratic society without elections, etc. They’re conventions of the genre. But these writers go further than that. They ask that we suspend not just our disbelief, but our desire for a believable narrative...
The message is clear: since anything can happen in a story, we should feel free to choose the outcomes we prefer.
Past Star Trek writers would never have considered this...
What could have changed in the intervening decades? What cultural or political revolution might have rendered audiences more receptive to the idea that we should not feel bound by traditional rules? That those rules might even be oppressive?
It's not difficult to see the ideology at work: art influences society, so it should reflect the world we want to see; to reach that world, we must raise the status of women and minorities and lower that of white men; traditional norms and rules were socially constructed to prevent this, and should change.
This would explain why Strange New Worlds plays fast and loose with cause and effect even when it’s trying to be gritty...
Perhaps the writers see a trade-off between setting up tension, which would require a little cruelty towards the character, and modeling the right behavior for the audience? Or maybe because Uhura is black, treating her more harshly would risk inflicting discomfort on vulnerable viewers just to entertain the majority? Maybe it’s better for young people to see themselves reflected as always complete, already brilliant, interesting in and of themselves? But if shows really do shape our values, might not they also shape our reasoning skills? What lesson would a young person learn from “don’t sweat the details, just go with the flow”?
And Uhura isn’t the only person being tested on that comet. Sam Kirk, the only white male human character other than the captain, is presented very differently. He is lazy and disengaged during the briefing. He jokes around on the mission, ignoring obvious danger. (His quips are the only quips treated with disdain.) He injures himself by touching the glowing acorn—a decision as implausibly dumb as Uhura’s solutions are implausibly brilliant—and spends the rest of the episode probably dying, a fact treated as so insignificant that we don’t even follow up on whether he survives. (He does return briefly in “All Those Who Wander” to demonstrate that he’s also an implausible coward.)
In fact, all the women in the show are suspiciously perfect, either stoic like La'an or unflappable wisecrackers like Ortegas. They talk down to the men, dish gossip behind their backs, peek at them while they're changing, beat them in fights, even hit on them openly in front of their coworkers. The black men are more subdued but still paragons of competence. By contrast, the white men—when not literally dying of stupidity—are remedial cases at best. Co-creator Akiva Goldsman intended to correct the "problematic" behavior of past captains, and it shows. His Pike doesn't lead so much as cheerlead, playing the nurturing dad, cooking meals for his higher-ranking girlfriend, telling her how little he deserves her. Ethan Peck's Spock is far from the self-possessed wag of the original series, comfortable without emotions and bemused by the crew. Instead, he’s a bumbling autistic fixer-upper who just needs the right woman to help unlock his feelings. When he's accidentally turned human in "Charades," it's not his male peers who coach him through it, but his human mother—while his love interest, Nurse Chapel, cures him by diving into a wormhole to confess her crush to (female) transdimensional superbeings (which also gives her the confidence to tell off an implausibly condescending male colleague)...
This flexible approach to values becomes even more problematic when the show takes on serious themes...
This could be a primer in Critical Race Theory. The law is simply wrong,
a byproduct of a cartoonish old-fashioned prejudice, expressed in
playground taunts and slurs scrawled on neighbors' houses. Starfleet is
no longer an exemplar, whose only controversies are big questions with
no easy answers. It's a flawed institution with systemic prejudice
against "moddies," and it's past time for a reckoning.
This, too, is meant to be about us. In “Ghosts of Illyria,” when Una’s background is first introduced, she laments to her private log that the captain only chose to harbor her because she saved the crew from an alien light disease. “When will it be enough just to be Illyrian?” she asks, a line that is jarring in context (it’s not a race) but evokes a familiar progressive catechism about the official minority lived experience. In case the message wasn’t clear enough, the show even introduces a black female “Illyrian civil rights lawyer” called Neera, who talks in breathless contemporary progressive clichés. “Congratulations, you’ve discovered empathy,” she snaps at the captain, when he dares to suggest that he understands where she’s coming from. (Shortly after unapologetically calling him “stupid.”) She even seems to reference the trans debate by mentioning people who in the past “weren’t allowed to look like what they really are.”...
The absence of any explanation other than systemic racism makes the episode feel incomplete and emotionally manipulative. It is the thematic equivalent of a fixed fight. If you already know the right answer to a question, counterarguments aren’t threads to be followed, but threats to be avoided. All logic becomes fridge logic.
It's a short leap from "tell your own story" to "make your own rules." In fact, the closer you look, the more "make your own rules" seems like the theme of the series...
The allegory is the point, so details must be avoided. Every plot hole
and forced revelation must be in service of inspiring the captain to
give a speech likening their problems to ours—a speech that seems less
designed to convince the aliens than to lecture the viewers. The United
States is treated as a distant, regrettable memory, whose civil war over
“competing ideas of liberty” dragged the world into chaos. There's even
an "AUDIT THE VOTE" sign in the historic montage, in case it's not
clear that the problem is the intransigence of the American right...
If truth is the first casualty of war, then perhaps good fiction is the first tragedy of culture war. With Strange New Worlds, Paramount promised a return to classic Star Trek, but has delivered something else entirely: postmodern, post-liberal, post-Prime-Directive, a progressive wolf in retro captain's gold. Perhaps it’s a sign of the changing times. The reviews are good, even if the audience scores are middling, but if the ratings start to resemble those of Discovery—tellingly, these are kept secret—then the creators might benefit from questioning the occasional creative choice, or even allowing a little more intellectual and political diversity back into the writers’ room. That is, if they’re interested in telling a sci-fi story that does anything other than explore the already known."
This provides an explanation for liberals believe that asking for internal or even logical consistency in a story shows that you're a bigot - they want to be free to do anything, free from even logical constraints