If World War III breaks out, which of the following events would you say triggered it?
A: NATO confronting a nuke-rattling Russia.
B: China’s increasing violations of Taiwan airspace.
C: Iran developing the atom bomb.
D: The January 6th protesters’ US Capitol intrusion.
According to the new “Star Trek” prequel series, “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” the answer is D. This would make the idiot with the Viking horns worse than Khan!
I wanted to like the show, even knowing the Hollywoke leeches now in charge of “Star Trek” would ruin it with political correctness. Everything woke turns to crap, particularly once fun properties like “Star Wars”, Disney heroines, “The Terminator”, and especially “James Bond”. Although “Star Trek” had long been sinking that way as far back as the first spinoff, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in the eighties. That series becoming a hit doomed the franchise artistically.
I always found its metrosexual characters, personified by Whoopi Goldberg, extremely bland compared to the colorful “first generation” ones, and woke before the word existed while appreciating the occasional clever script and an outstanding enemy, the Borg. Only one of these elements, the Borg, translated to the big screen in a quartet of terrible “Next Generation” films. The last installment, “Star Trek: Nemesis,” got laughed out of theaters.
Much worse than “The Next Generation” were the two awful TV iterations that followed: “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” “Voyager” initially proved so male repellant – a sexless, mannish captain (Kate Mulgrew) gets her starship lost in space on her first mission and still bosses around the beta men on board – producers had to urgently add a beautiful half-Borg crew-babe (Jeri Ryan) to save it. A fourth TV spinoff and prequel, “Star Trek: Enterprise”, had throwback male camaraderie plus – Voyager lesson learned – a dynamic Vulcan beauty (Jolene Blalock) but never quite gelled.
Yet those series appeared in the Nineties and early 2000s when producers still valued entertainment over message. The opposite is the rule today. Two current franchise standard-bearers, “Star Trek: Discovery” and “Star Trek: Picard,” are both inartistic and insufferably PC. “Discovery” recently ended its fourth season in unintentional SJW self-parody with the appearance of failed Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in a nauseatingly cringeworthy scene.
I held out faint hope for “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” only because it went back to Gene Roddenberry’s first “Star Trek” pilot, “The Cage,” and its characters for inspiration. Before there was a James T. Kirk, there was Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter), the swashbuckling young captain of the Enterprise. Pike is introduced at a crossroad in his life. Should he continue as a proper Star Fleet officer or pursue his deepest, darkest fantasy – to be a trader of green-skinned Orion slave women? As politically verboten as the mere thought may seem today, it’s a believable male one, less science-fictional than the liberally embraced pathology that men can become women. And because Roddenberry was a master writer, and “Star Trek” his brilliant creation, Pike gets to make that very choice – only in an alien-created illusion. And that is why he chooses painful reality over erotic unreality.
It’s the same choice Odysseus makes in the second book, and the first sequel, ever written, to sail on toward his aging wife rather than remain with immortal Circe. Had Hollywood existed in Ancient Greece, “The Odyssey” would have been called “The Iliad 2: The Voyage Home.” For “Star Trek” was what it shall never be again – Homeric. It wasn’t about its wonderful technical concepts – the Federation, warp drive, molecular beaming, phasers on stun. It was about men boldly going “where no man has gone before” with all their passions, and the women who fulfill them – and inspired us as boys.
The most memorable was Edith Keeler (Joan Collins) in Harlan Ellison’s sublime “The City on the Edge of Forever.” The episode transcends “Star Trek” to be one of the best television hours ever produced. Kirk and Spock travel back in time to early 1930s New York to stop Dr. McCoy from somehow changing history and erasing their civilization. Penniless, the pair are given refuge by social worker Edith Keeler. Kirk is initially attracted to her radiant beauty, but soon falls in love with her spirit. Eventually, he learns that Edith is the focal point between the two timelines, and only her premature death can assure the continuance of their universe. Spock logically expresses Kirk’s dilemma. “Save her – do as your heart tells you – and millions will die who did not die before.” In the gripping climax, Kirk not only doesn’t move when Edith is about to be hit by a truck but has to restrain McCoy from saving her – and then take grief for it. “You deliberately stopped me, Jim!” cries McCoy. “I could have saved her! Do you know what you just did?!” “He knows, Doctor,” Spock says. “He knows.”
Such knowledge is beyond the purveyors of modern “Star Trek,” including of course “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.” Sure, it has Captain Pike (an acceptable Anson Mount), Mr. Spock (a superb Ethan Peck, grandson of Gregory, and the best reason to watch), Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding, likable but not physically close to the awesome Nichelle Nichols), and other “Star Trek” icons.
But this Pike is a politically correct cold fish, and his Enterprise is a ghost ship, stuck in a woke orbit, maintained by insignificant leftwing obsessions like January 6th and Stacey Abrams. And without great original series writers such as Roddenberry, Ellison, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, and others who understood mythology, dramaturgy, literature, and humanity, it will never attain warp speed.
Lou Aguilar is a novelist, screenwriter, and arts culture essayist.
The opinions expressed in this piece are the author’s own and not necessarily those of The Daily Wire.