Captain Jean-Luc Picard sees something foreboding on the horizon. It’s not the threat of a Romulan saboteur, whose potential presence drives Starfleet command to send retired admiral Norah Satie (Jean Simmons) to the Enterprise to investigate. Rather, it’s the turn towards totalitarianism that Satie threatens as she gives into her fear of an enemy among us.
“You know, there some words I’ve known since I was a school boy,” Picard tells Satie during a hearing of the suspected saboteur. “The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably. Those words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie as wisdom and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged. I fear that today.”
More than a clever rhetorical turn, in using the words of his opponent’s father against her, Picard’s statement returns all of the Starfleet personnel who are present back to first principles. Yes, they’re scared. Yes, things look bad. But that’s all the more reason to hold to our ideals.
“The Drumhead,” in which Picard issues his warning, isn’t just one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s one of the best Star Trek entries of all time. So it might be a little unfair to compare “The Drumhead” to the recent movie Star Trek: Section 31, which is already on its way to infamy as one of the worst Trek stories ever.
And yet, the issue here isn’t a matter of quality, but rather of theme. Where Section 31 takes a cynical approach to heavy themes, “The Drumhead” conjures up the possibility of Starfleet becoming a totalitarian army and responds with hope and optimism…
We need that classic Star Trek optimism now more than ever.
Star Trek: Section 31 may spin off from the more recent Star Trek: Discovery, but it has its roots in classic Trek stories. It stars Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou, the one-time Empress of the Terran Empire in the Mirror Universe, the alternate reality introduced in the Original Series episode “Mirror, Mirror.” Georgiou joins members of Section 31, a black ops division of Starfleet introduced in Deep Space Nine, the most morally complex series in the franchise.
Georgiou joins a ragtag Section 31 team to track down the Godsend, a superweapon she created as Terran Empress. She and her teammates may violate Federation treaties to complete their mission, but the movie argues that the ends justify the means. As executive producer and showrunner Alex Kurtzman has been saying on the press tour for Section 31, the movie suggests that the “optimistic utopia isn’t possible without people operating in the shadows to make it possible.”
It’s easy to see why Kurtzman and his fellow creators might take that point of view. Almost sixty years since the voyages of the Starship Enterprise began in 1966, we seem farther than ever from a future where humanity overcomes racism and sexism and capitalism and truly bonds together. Even canonical low points in Trek’s human history—World War III in the 1990s and the mass inequality that sparks the Bell Riots in September 2024—can seem like a more realistic version of our future than the founding of the Federation.
Of course Trek as a franchise needs to respond to humanity’s lack of evolution over the last several decades. The whiz-bang approach of J.J. Abrams’ 2009 movie is one of the more innocuous examples of this change. So is the sliding timeline introduced in Strange New Worlds, which showed that Khan Noonien Singh, who was one of the major belligerents in World War III, is still a seven-year-old in 2012 and not a grown man in the 1990s. But Section 31 is the most notable example of a terrible response to the realities of our disappointing present. Section 31 makes Star Trek cynical, glib, and violent, as if optimism is too corny and passé for modern audiences.
Boldly Going Where Trek Is Needed Most
One of the most trenchant criticisms of modern Star Trek I’ve encountered comes not from any online uber-fan or pop culture critic. Rather, it comes from Nathan J. Robinson, founder and editor of Current Affairs. In his book Why You Should Be a Socialist, Robinson laments, “Lately, even Star Trek has given up.” He compares Star Trek: Discovery to the dystopias of The Hunger Games and Ready Player One, stories in which the human spirit has been defeated and people have retreated into paranoia and isolation.
Lots of people were complaining about Discovery when Robinson’s book released in 2017. But his complaint has nothing to do with Burnham’s connection to Spock or whether there was “too much crying” on the show. Robinson mourns the loss of utopian fiction, arguing that we need such stories precisely because they aren’t real. Utopias can “stimulate the imagination in useful ways,” Robinson writes. “When we ask what would an ideal society look like and sketch the result, the exercise can help us come up with ideas that might actually be practical in our own world. I actually think that lacking a utopia can be just as dangerous as having one, because if you don’t have a guiding star for your journey, you won’t know whether you’re going in the right direction.”
Robinson’s right to point to Star Trek as a once-reliable provider of utopian vision. In “Arena,” Kirk relies on trust and logic to overcome his fear of the bestial Gorn captain to see not an enemy, but a fellow captive, finding that they can work together. The Romulans debut episode “Balance of Terror” sees one of the Enterprise crew turn to xenophobia and paranoia upon realizing that the enemies look just like Mr. Spock, earning a stern rebuke from Kirk.
Picard takes it even further in The Next Generation, delivering passionate orations about our highest ideals. Even beyond his warning against giving into fear in “The Drumhead,” there’s the defense of Data he makes in “The Measure of a Man,” urging another Starfleet officer to see the lieutenant not as a piece of materiel to be dissected but as a new form or life to be respected. In the midst of being tortured by Gul Madred in “Chain of Command,” Picard shares a story about a bully, calling upon his captors’ sense of pride and civility instead of simply wiping the baddie out.
Countless more examples can be found across all of the series. Even the original Section 31 story from Deep Space Nine serves more as a reaffirmation of Starfleet ideals, as Dr. Bashir rejects the shadowy organization’s covert ways and Odo sacrifices himself to undo the group’s genocidal tactics.
Are these choices realistic? Anyone who’s turned on the news recently would answer with a sardonic “no!” Are these stories corny? Sometimes, yeah. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting a chance deliver a Picard-esque speech to the current president or his cronies, let alone that the speech would change their minds.
But the fact that we consider solutions based in empathy and community so unrealistic only makes fiction about these ideals all the more important. We live in a world where the government does actually send military groups to commit horrific acts, where political posturing and expediency almost always outweigh any real concern for people’s lives, a world in which kind and professional people who are good at their jobs are consistently overworked and underpaid, and the vulnerable and underprivileged are victimized and reviled. We don’t need Star Trek, of all things, to reflect that reality. We need them to keep going forward, to keep seeking out new life and new civilizations, in the hopes that they’ll inspire and galvanize us when we need it most, and remind us that it’s possible to make our lives and civilizations better.
