Some fans who are reacting against Star Trek: Discovery‘s “dark tone” often talk about the characters being the source of this darkness. I’ve even heard one fan theory that the crew of the Discovery is actually from the Mirror Universe. In the essay below I argue that these fans are confusing psychological complexity for darkness, and this is keeping them from seeing that most of the main characters–from Burnham to Lorca to Samets–openly espouse core Starfleet values. Others have made the case that in our troubled times Discovery has an obligation to avoid treating questions of human morality wth pat and easy answers. I want to look at this from a storytelling perspective: the franchise’s habit of crafting appealing but 1-to-1.5-dimensional characters simply had to be updated to the standards of TV drama in 2017. “Starfleet Nice” is still with us, but now combined with the full range of human emotion.
Let’s look at the history.
In the summer of 1966, Gene Roddenberry fired off a memo to the writer of “Court Martial”–the 14th episode produced in the Star Trek franchise–that was an early articulation of what would later be called Star Trek‘s No-Conflict Rule. Kirk is on trial for the death of an officer, and Roddenberry took issue with the “harbor master prejudiced against Kirk” and the “ugly antagonism from what seems an unreasoning group of individuals on the base.” In the final script, the harbor master is more sympathetic to Kirk, but the “ugly antagonism” of the officers who shun Kirk in the starbase lounge survived–resulting in a great scene of realism and drama that subtly depicts what is at stake in the this trial for Kirk’s career.
In an earlier episode, “What are Little Girls Made Of,” the mad scientist-turned-android had a line that explained his motivation for wanting to spread android replicants like himself across the quadrant: “Power over minds and thus over everything else … I’ve decided to use it for myself… after all these years of doing things for others.” The line did not sit well with Roddenberry. He explained to Marc Cushman that “his hope for mankind was to overcome petty differences and emotions such as envy, jealousy, and greed.” The line was cut from the script, and a character who could have been a memorable Star Trek villain became nonsensical, evil-for-evil’s-sake. I suppose for Roddenberry it was better for a character to be a wholly defective person easily dismissed (and killed off) than one who acts on base and relatable elements of human nature.
In that memo to the “Court Martial” writer Roddenberry drew a line in the sand that would be barrier to Trek writers for another fifty years: “When you add up the things [in your script], it is hard to have much feeling or respect for Star Trek‘s century.” That we should look to this fictional century as an ideal to strive for was all-important to him from the very beginning. This was part of Star Trek‘s genius that made it endearing to audiences and enduring for half a century. It was also a double-edged sword that Roddenberry and his successors used to hack away at interesting characters and stories until…well, until Star Trek: Discovery chose to set a different course.
Note that while Roddenberry was clear about his standard, he did not apply it consistently even in Star Trek‘s first season. In the first episode–in the first Kirk speech–Roddenberry had Kirk say: “Let’s talk about humans, our frailties. As powerful as [Mitchell] gets, he’ll have all that inside of him. You know all the ugly, savage things that we all keep buried, that no one dare expose.” Kirk suggested that we must learn from those frailties in order to transgress them. A few episodes later, in “The Enemy Within” and “The Naked Time” the express theme was that our baser emotions are essential ingredients to a person’s identity. In “The Conscience of the King” the script spent a lot of time rationalizing the point of view of a mass murderer who engaged in eugenics (though in the first draft the massacre occurred on Earth, but Roddenberry wanted the Earth of “Star Trek‘s century” to have progressed beyond such things, so he moved the massacre to a fledgeling Earth colony.
Consider this: How how does Roddenberry’s desire to rid his human characters of “envy, jealousy, and greed” synch up with Harry Mudd, a character and early Trek episode he was very proud of?
In “What are Little Girls Made of”–the very script that he struck lines from because they painted too dark a picture of human nature–the android says: “Can you imagine how life could be improved if we could do away with jealousy, greed, hate?” Kirk replies, “It can also be improved by eliminating love, tenderness, sentiment. The other side of the coin, Doctor.” Two other writers started that script, but Roddenberry spent two months rewriting it, so we can assume he approved of that line. As he should. The fact that we “need our pain” is a central theme of Star Trek.
So in the original series, they were able to manage this tension between an optimistic depiction of humanity’s future with the fact that humans are imperfect and prone to terrible flaws.
That tension was real from the very start. Roddenberry the Visionary wanted to inspire us with perfect people. Roddenberry the Storyteller had to ground his characters in truth, which dictates that no person can be perfect and to force perfection on someone exacts terrible costs.
But by the time he was creating The Next Generation, Roddenberry had spent two decades on the convention circuit giving spellbinding lectures about the state of man and humanity’s bright future. The Visionary had supplanted the Storyteller. The tension was snapped, which spawned a philosophy about narrative and characters that would shape every subsequent series until… well, until Discovery.
It is said that Roddenberry initially conceived of the Enterprise-D crew as each being an allegorical avatar for a single, idealistic human virtue. Picard being the consummate explorer, and so on. This idea was dropped in the development phase. But in TNG‘s first season the characters were constantly reminding us how evolved they were. All trace of negative emotion was stripped from their personality, and whenever they met a character who exhibited that negativity, they were quick to point out how humans had evolved past that “centuries ago.”
I am not suggesting that is not a lovely sentiment, especially considering most science-fiction then and now is painted in shades of dystopia. My point is that this particular narrative philosophy, as applied by Trek writers of the various series, resulted in ship-loads of bland characters.
First, TNG.
This may come off as sacrilegious since many of us grew up worshiping the crew, but even as a child I was aware of the mismatch. At a convention my dad purchased for me two pencil drawings, one of the seven TOS crew members, and another of the seven TNG crew members, each one arrayed in a semicircle in the same style like they were meant to be displayed together. I remember thinking that the faces on the TNG poster did not quite measure up to the ones on the TOS poster. Is Will Riker an interesting character? Is Geordie LaForge compelling? As characters, what is there to sink our teeth into and chew on? To be certain, they are pleasant. We enjoy being around them. They did not need to be anything more than pleasant so long as the story wrapped around them was interesting, which is why TNG worked so well. It is well documented how the writers’ room struggled writing for these characters, especially after season three when Roddenberry stepped back and Michael Piller took over creatively, but by then the characters were already established.
With the next spinoff series, Deep Space Nine, Roddenberry was ailing and no longer involved in the franchise. But the expectation he established for how a human character must speak and behave in “Star Trek‘s century” was deeply entrenched. Since DS9 was predicated on being different from TNG–which for two years aired episodes on the same night–and after feeling burned by the no-interpersonal-conflict rule imposed on the TNG writers’ room, Piller and his writers figured out how to inject conflict and dynamic characters into DS9. Of the eight top-billed regulars, four were full aliens, the most of any series before or since. Between Kira, Quark, Odo and to a lesser extent Dax, DS9 was able to explore jealousy, envy, greed, hate, and lust.
Since they were looking in from the outside, those characters were able to comment on the nature of their milquetoast Starfleet companions. In a famous scene two of our resident aliens, Quark and Garak, compare them to root beer: “so bubbly, cloy, and happy.” As the writers gained more independence, the human characters grew more complex, some might argue darker. Dr. Bashir was basically rewritten mid-series thanks to some genetic engineering. Sisko committed war crimes.
But DS9 was a one-off, and practically ignored by the wider culture (if you need further proof of that, note the review of Star Trek: Discovery that heralded Soniqua Martin-Green as the first African-American lead of a Trek series). If DS9 needed to set itself apart from TNG, the third spinoff, Voyager, was supposed to be just like TNG. The premise offered some DS9-style potential for conflict by adding a pack of defectors/terrorists to the crew, but that was dropped by the end of the pilot when they all donned crisp, clean Starfleet uniforms. The characters were all cut from the same cloth that Roddenberry fabricated back in TNG‘s first season. Show-runner Rick Berman felt obligated to carry on Roddenberry’s mantel, probably out of personal loyalty as well as the fact that TNG‘s formula had made the all very wealthy. But he also added his own wrinkle. Some of the Voyager actors of human characters have said that they were told to tone down their performance, that their characters had to be bland so to make the alien (and holographic) characters stand out.
By the time VOY ended, TV’s next golden age was just dawning. Shows like The West Wing and The Sopranos were showing just how far you could go with characters on a scripted drama series. By now, Star Trek Enterprise‘s show runners–Berman and Brannon Braga–openly admitted that the TNG-era method of character development was a straightjacket. Making ENT a prequel was their solution to escape it. They claimed that writing a prequel series set only 150 years from present day would mean their characters could be more relatable to modern TV audiences. I will leave it to people who actually watched this show to argue over whether they were successful. Since I did not watch it, here is how the (favorable) New York Times review put it: Captain Archer’s “fellow travelers include some appealingly one-dimensional characters,” each of which he went on to label as “cocky,” “wide-eyed,” “brilliant,” and “jolly” (if you can match all four, good for you ENT fan). The review closed by saying ENT does not “reinvent Gene Roddenberry’s wheel, they just give it a spirited turn.”
Here we must pause to consider just how entrenched Roddenberry’s character rules were. Writers and producers who had created countless Star Trek stories under those rules believed that the only way to write complex, dynamic Trek characters that can have emotions resembling what their 21st Century human audience would recognize was to have those characters be born well over one hundred years before Kirk ever met Spock. Star Trek’s chief executive was admitting that there was no way to write captivating Trek characters so long as they were humans living in the 23rd, 24th or 25th Centuries.
I am not suggesting that the only way to make characters interesting is to imbue them with negative emotions and dark intentions. What I am suggesting is that no modern Trek series has succeeded in complimenting its ships with psychologically complex, compelling characters who also adhere to Roddenberry’s optimistic, all-positive view of human nature in “Star Trek’s century.” Maybe it can be done–but it has not been done.
This is all prologue to a defense of Star Trek: Discovery. I believe that all of the above is the reason DSC‘s “tone” is throwing some long-time fans for a loop. The characters seem so “dark” primarily because they are being compared to the plucky crews of the 1701-D, the Voyager, and the NX-01. Especially after viewing the fifth episode, “Choose Your Pain,” it is clear the show-runners and writers are showing us–like DS9 did before–that this Trek series is different from what we are used to.
But it is wrong to say it is not Star Trek. It may not be your Trek, but that is because you elevate tone–specifically the TNG-era tone–over the many other elements of the franchise. It is as if some fans think that having pure, innocent and bland human characters is an ironclad rule of canon: Trek cannot have a human with negative emotions and drives as surely as transporters cannot beam through shields. Other fans say no, that is not canon, it is poor writing based on strained implementation of some half-baked memos that Roddenberry scrawled in 1988.
And even if you set out to honor those memos, modern TV drama is predicated on complex characters. Characters who, as David Milch described, must spin against their own drive. Nearly all of DSC‘s characters succeed in that, where nearly all of modern Trek’s characters have failed. With DSC, the curse of Roddenberry’s genius has been lifted, and the blessings of it are still there for those who are open to viewing it through a different lens.