Star Trek and History (44 page)

These episodes were aired in the late 1980s and early 1990s: getting in touch with one's feminine side was de rigueur in the popular culture of this period. In one of the series' most famous and moving episodes, “The Inner Light,” Picard is controlled by an alien probe that erases his memory of life as Picard and causes him to experience a lifetime as a man from the long-destroyed planet Kataan. While Picard lapses into a coma on the
Enterprise
, he lives the life of the craftsman Kamin, from middle age to death, all in the space of twenty-five minutes. In this agrarian society, Picard/Kamin is a doting father and grandfather, a humble musician, an undistinguished community member—he is immersed, in other words, in what in the paradigm of
The Next Generation
is the world of the traditional female. At the episode's end, he is restored to himself as Picard, but Riker brings him a box from the alien probe that had disabled him. The box contains the flute he played as Kamin, and the episode's final shots are of Picard playing the tune he played at his son's naming ceremony: the idea being, of course, that Picard's life as a warrior-prince continues, albeit deepened and enriched by his experiences as Kamin, in much the same way that feminine presence and viewpoints serve as an enriching point for the men of the
Enterprise
—useful and occasional foils, but there it ends.

If there is one race immune to getting in touch with their feminine side, it is the Klingons. In the original series as well as in
The Next Generation
, the Klingons are the ultimate example of a warrior society: patriarchal and violent, Klingons value physical combat and prowess above strategy and education, and their Warrior Code makes them fearsome enemies—humans' encounters with Klingons, in
The Next Generation
, are like collisions between conflicted characters from nineteenth-century Gothic romances (the humans) with characters from the
Iliad
(the Klingons). In giving the audience the Klingon sisters Lursa and B'Etor,
The Next Generation
shook up the paradigm of male warrior versus female supporter a little. As a contrast to the fantasy creation of Troi's hyperestrogened healer-empath female figure, the show played out its fantasy of the woman who so rejects her womanhood as to become utterly masculinized: the Klingon female warrior.

Lursa and B'Etor appear three times in
The Next Generation
—in “Redemption,” “Redemption II,” and “Firstborn.” With their appalling dental work and masculinized features, the first lesson seems to be that warrior women are naturally unattractive—their protruding teeth (unlike, say, Lt. Commander Worf's) are unmistakably canine in appearance. These warriors, in other words, look like she-wolves. In “Redemption,” in which the audience first meets them, Lursa and B'Etor scheme to place their candidate on the High Council and thus to consolidate the control of their corrupt House of Duras over the Klingon Empire. Their plot means that they must ensure that the fiction that Worf's father was a traitor to the Empire continues to be upheld. At Picard's urging, Worf challenges this judgment and, through the course of the episode, arrives at a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Klingon.

In the original
Star Trek
series, what it meant to be Klingon was simple enough: a nihilistic embrace of violence and the warrior code at the expense of everything else. But
The Next Generation
approaches Klingon culture with 1990s sensitivity and impartiality. Picard respects Klingon customs and law to an almost slavish degree, even speaking enough of the Klingon language to get by and clearly regarding Klingons as just another fascinating manifestation of the universe's many diverse cultures.

Lursa and B'Etor's machinations are foiled, naturally, but not before Picard tells the sisters that “they have manipulated the circumstances with the skill of a Romulan” (
TNG
, “Redemption”). The viewer begins to see that these women are not, of course, ordinary warriors; since women, as Chancellor Gowron reminds Picard, are not allowed to hold seats on the High Council, they have been relegated to back-room manipulation and scheming. In other words, they are just as much a nineteenth-century projection of female nature as the ever-sympathetic Troi.

Picard's taunt is a pointed one; he knows, as does the audience, that Lursa and B'Etor have indeed been plotting with the Romulan general Movar, as well as a shadowy female figure, to seize control of the Council with threats and potential assassinations. By the episode's end, the audience sees this unknown Romulan—it is Commander Sela, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the deceased Tasha Yar. It is the patriarchal conundrum: women must be denied power, but how can you trust what you are oppressing? In classic myths and popular culture, women's loyalty must often be suspect, and nowhere is that primal male fear played out more clearly than in the shifting stratagems of the Duras sisters—comfortingly alien, rather than human, and thus potentially removed from what human women might be suspected of, but they symbolize a shadow play that reflects a fear of powerful women.

“There are three things to remember about being a starship captain: keep your shirt tucked in, go down with the ship, and never abandon a member of your crew.”

—Captain Kathryn Janeway,
VOY,
“Dark Frontier”

When
Voyager
premiered in 1995, for the first time
Star Trek
fans saw a female captain as the lead character—Captain Kathryn Janeway, played by Kate Mulgrew. The
Voyager
ship is stranded seven decades' travel away from Earth, making the premise of the show a fascinating one—what of Starfleet and its directives when a ship truly is on its own?
Voyager
provided an interesting contrast to the highly regulated world of
The Next Generation.
If
The Next Generation
focused on the values of community and civilization,
Voyager
was
Star Trek
's answer to the Western: freewheeling, lost in lawless space, and with a frequently lawless crew.

The pilot episode, “Caretaker,” shows
Voyager
in its first mission under its new captain, out to find a rebel Maquis ship. But of course, what was meant to be a simple mission, like Gilligan's cruise, turns into a seven-year odyssey, as the mysterious alien known as the Caretaker transports both
Voyager
and the Maquis ship seventy thousand light-years away from Federation territory, with significant casualties on both sides. Janeway is forced to consolidate the Starfleet and Maquis crews, with mixed results that require her to assert her authority and, at times, reconsider the meaning of a captain's authority.

So what does it mean to say that
Voyager
is in part a meditation on the limits and significance of authority, when that authority happens to be wielded by a woman? Perhaps that the show's writers (Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor) and the network executives thought audiences would find such meditation easier if it was divorced from an often-instinctive link between maleness and authority—or perhaps they saw that keeping women out of command was beginning to look, well, as odd and dated as the old-fashioned bridge. But while appearing to be progressive (if the idea of a woman in authority in 1995 can somehow be called progressive),
Star Trek
was once again imposing an almost Victorian morality on the future. Janeway has to be the most undersexed command figure in the whole franchise, and she is a kind of rewriting of ancient Rome's Vestal Virgins.

The Vestals enjoyed unique power and authority in classical Rome: chosen from among the best families, they served for thirty years as guardians of Rome's sacred hearth fire, the fire of the goddess Vesta. They were not secluded nuns, and they enjoyed high social prominence, received the best seats at the theater and the games, entertained in their luxurious residence, and safeguarded the wills and legal documents—and frequently the treasures—of the city's elite, but they remained virgins. Rome's Vestals are just one example among hundreds of a basic human equation well known in Western civilization, from mitred abbesses to Queen Elizabeth I: if women want power, they must give up any public expression of sexuality. So what does all of this social anthropology have to do with Captain Janeway?

In the beginning of the series, the viewer sees a photograph of Janeway and her fiancé, Mark Johnson, their dog in between them. Significantly, it's the dog that's pregnant, not Janeway. Even more significantly, Mark is her fiancé, not her husband, making it possible to assume (at least in the puritanical world of
Star Trek
sexuality) that Janeway is not sexually active while on tours of duty, no matter how far away her ship is from normal sources of authority. Throughout the show, her devotion to her fiancé is as absolute and unshakable as her confidence that
Voyager
will find a way back to Earth—indeed, they are the same faith.

Her crew frequently expresses doubts about seeing Earth and their loved ones again, and some find ways to build lives and connections in the Delta Quadrant, far from any people they knew on Earth—but never Janeway. As long as her crew sees her absolute confidence in their return, expressed in her complete fidelity to her fiancé, then they can be assured of their own community's survival. By the same token, however, Janeway is not available either sexually or romantically to any other character: she is abstinent throughout the series.

Thus her chastity is as significant as any Vestal Virgin's, and the one possibility of romantic connection—her former Maquis first officer, Chakotay (Robert Beltran)—she firmly rejects, finally telling him explicitly in “Elogium” that as captain she cannot become involved with anyone on board her ship and that she fully intends to return to her fiancé. When the stage appears to be set for real romance to blossom in “Resolutions,” as Janeway and Chakotay are quarantined together on an M class planet and face the possibility of a life together there, that romance is once again firmly rejected after a brief flirtation with the possibility. And “brief,” in this setting, doesn't mean even a kiss, as Beltran exasperatedly pointed out in the unauthorized
Captain
'
s Log Supplemental
: “It's
Star Trek
,” he complained, “which means we touch hands and it's supposed to be thrilling.”
5

In a 1991 interview, Gene Roddenberry expressed his willingness to portray lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender characters on
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, which was then about to enter its fifth season. He confessed that his own attitudes about sexuality had evolved in much the same way as his attitudes toward women had, and he even made a promise that in the upcoming season viewers would finally see a gay character on
Star Trek
.
6
It was not to be: soon after the interview, Roddenberry died, and control of the franchise passed to executive producer Rick Berman. There was no hint of a gay character appearing after that, although the franchise did flirt with alternative sexuality on
Deep Space Nine
, in both instances with women—presumably because male homosexuality was seen as too threatening at the time or perhaps unprofitable.

The prominence of a Trill character on
Deep Space Nine
opened up the possibility for more sexual fluidity. As symbiant beings, the gendered body of a Trill serves as host to a nongendered (and distinctly Trilobite-appearing) creature. The creature is extremely long-lived, unlike the humanoid host, and hosts are not selected on the basis of gender; thus, over its life span, a Trill might have both male and female bodies and have sexual relationships with both males and females.
Deep Space Nine
's Trill, Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell), appeared safely heterosexual until, in “Rejoined,” she meets up with her female spouse from a former joining—when the Dax symbiant had been in a male host. This episode was the first
Star Trek
episode to receive a higher-than-PG rating in its VHS release, entirely because of the “lesbian” kiss the two characters share as they contemplate violating Trill taboo and reuniting in their new host bodies.

But of course, as LGBT viewers and others are quick to point out, this was not strictly speaking a lesbian kiss at all. It was the expression of lingering sexual attraction from a heterosexual marriage, and far from being a celebration of lesbian sexuality, the encounter was a kind of repudiation of it—Dax and her/his former wife are drawn to each other in spite of their current bodies, and alternative sexuality is represented as a kind of willful ignoring of the physical rather than an embracing of it. More sinisterly, the women were understood as engaging in a deeply taboo relationship by seeking out and becoming involved with a former symbiant, and by portraying this new relationship as nonheterosexual effectively conveyed the sense of taboo that Trill society would feel. In other words, twentieth-century prejudices were used to convey the quite different taboos of an alien society, with the assumption being that viewers universally shared this prejudice.

This attitude is seen most graphically in the five
Deep Space Nine
episodes, stretching from 1994 to 1999, that portray the “mirror universe.” In this universe, Bajoran major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) is simply evil. Instead of the conscientious, pious, dutiful Bajoran viewers were used to, they were treated to a vision of Kira as a cruel and tyrannical commander, or Intendant, of the space station. It is the sort of place where humans are enslaved, obedience is the only virtue, and rights are for the few—and not coincidentally, this mirror station is ruled by a bisexual woman, in a kind of
Twelfth Night
inversion of the “natural” order. The Intendant even suggests a sexual relationship to her “real universe” counterpart, as if to imply that same-sex attraction is itself a kind of “mirror” in which people are simply drawn to other versions of themselves rather than experiencing genuine or mature erotic emotion.