Trek-Nature

Over the weekend I commented on a YouTube clip – surely one of the most pointless activities¹ on the Internet – and used the term “Trek-nature” with reference to modern Star Trek series: Discovery, Lower Decks, Picard, Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds. I coined the term as an analogue to “Buddha-nature”, which I remembered from high school researches into Buddhism as a nebulous, mystical term for the “Buddha within” … or some such.

Too many discussions on the Internet and elsewhere use loaded terms. In fandom circles statements like “it’s not real Trek” are common. Which, specifically, is ridiculous: all five shows listed are set in the Star Trek universe, produced by the legal copyright holders to previous Star Trek shows, and feature references to said previous shows to establish they belong in the same continuity. (Or to pander to fans of those shows, depending on one’s perspective.) Thus I eschew terms like “real Trek”, that sound like they means something specific but really don’t. “Trek-nature” sounds ambiguous, pretentious, silly, and ultimately unresolveable.

But what do I mean by Trek-nature? “Trek-nature” is, put simply, the thing that drew you to Star Trek. It’s the thing that makes one show resonate with you, while the lack of it leaves you cold (or even angry). Obviously everyone will define that thing slightly differently, and that’s OK.

For me, it’s scenes like this², from Strange New Worlds episode 1x01:

Star Trek, to me, is the hopeful notion that, even if our present world is a godawful mess, future humans will learn to get along, reach out to the stars, and forge an alliance with hundreds of alien worlds³. In my lifetime I’ve seen America’s great bogeyman the Soviet Union fall, the two Germanies unite into a peaceful industrial nation, and the Internet, a technology once reserved for academia and the military, connect people around the world. Granted, all these things gave rise to new problems, with many more unanticipated ones cropping up, but to paraphrase a new favorite space opera, Legend of the Galactic Heroes⁴, the current order of things had a beginning, so it will sooner or later have an end. (Which, now that I write it and remember the context, sounds ominous.)

In any case, the best of Star Trek shows people – human and otherwise – resolving their differences with a minimum of violence.

As for which of those new shows, in my opinion, have Trek-nature:

• Discovery has partial Trek-nature, mainly in seasons 2 and 4, both of which involved science mysteries. Season 1 was a war story with especially rubbery science, and Season 3 started well with a brave new future but ratholed into yet another war, this time against Orion pirates.

• Lower Decks has Trek-nature in its own irreverent, self-parodying way. Sure there’s a lot of slapstick, gross-out humor and poking fun at the contradictions and embarrassing moments in prior shows. But the directors and writers really love Trek, and it shows. Even the peons in one of the most chaotic support ships in Starfleet ultimately strive to uphold the ideals of the Federation, even as they fall short.⁵

• Picard took beloved Trek actors … and put them in a tired and tiring “end of an era” story in the first season. I got the impression that that Star Trek universe had degenerated into an uneasy cross between Star Wars, Ghost in the Shell, and Asimov’s later (and less good) robot stories. I gave up on the second season as soon as I saw Q and alternate history. Verdict: very little Trek nature.

• Prodigy, especially for a kids’ show⁶, has a lot of Trek-nature. Granted, the initial two-parter feels more like Star Wars than Star Trek, but beyond Hologram Janeway’s pitch for the Federation we see the message of the Federation slowly take hold. Young people who don’t necessarily like or trust each other – including one who came aboard against her will – gradually form a cohesive crew. The self-centered self-appointed captain becomes more responsible. The former enemy learns who her real allies are. The scared child conquers her fear and discovers her calling. And so on. By the time they discover the Fedration is, for them, still out of reach they’ve become as worthy of Starfleet as anyone in Starfleet. Episodes are still dropping each week as of this writing, so I’m excited to see how (or if) they resolve their current … misunderstanding.

• Strange New Worlds has abundant Trek-nature, maybe too much. The producers used the format of The Original Series: standalone episodes, or at worst two-parters, where the Enterprise visits a new planet or encounters a new anomaly each week. They also tap into the lore of TOS: Pike’s future as a crippled shell of himself (revealed to him in Discovery), Spock’s (eventually failed) marriage, the enigmatic Number One from the unaired 1965 pilot, brief and horrific encounters with the Gorn before “Arena”, and probably others I’m forgetting. On the other hand they’ve shed the unspoken constraints of TOS: women have no trouble being captains (or anything else), LBGTQ+ characters are visible and in the 23rd century unremarkable, PTSD is part of one character’s backstory, and the hypocrisies and blind spots of the Federation (e.g. their ban on human genetic manipulation) are at least implicitly if not explicitly called out.

  Unfortunately they’ve also delved into the less exalted tropes of Star Trek, like episodes with a painfully obvious moral or episodes where a superbeing transforms the ship. Perhaps they’ve succeeded too well in recreating TOS for modern times: in an age where full-season story arcs have taken over TV, planet-a-week shows feel almost … quaint.

So the lesson here, I guess, is be wary of the over-hyped “serious” shows and watch the cartoons. (And Strange New Worlds.)