To boldly go .?.?. back to 1995!
Wednesday at a Television Critics Association panel in Beverly Hills, Calif., Bryan Fuller, executive producer of “Star Trek: Discovery” (premiering in January on CBS, then airing on CBS All Access), revealed that a woman will be the new show’s main character.
But this isn’t the typical self-righteous Hollywood back-slappery that launched a thousand Medium.com essays. Nor is it the Girl Power! casting of summer’s “Ghostbusters” flop, nor the newly announced all-female “Ocean’s Eight” caper. “Star Trek” has always done diversity the right way.
Take, for example, the greatest “Trek” captain ever: Kathryn Janeway.
In the mid-’90s, Kate Mulgrew, now known as Red on Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” played the intrepid, brilliant captain of the USS Voyager. And being the first woman ever with top billing on a “Trek” TV series, Mulgrew and the show’s writers handled the situation in the best possible way: They didn’t make a big deal out of it.
Loudly calling attention to inclusion has never been the “Trek” style.
When the scrappy original series premiered in 1966, there were no self-congratulatory press conferences trumpeting the fact that a black woman, a Japanese-American man and a Canadian would all be working together in the same room.
Likewise, the “Star Trek: Voyager” creators didn’t smugly brag about Janeway. Instead they crafted a badass character who instantly commands respect and admiration: a stalwart pragmatist, scientist and moral compass for a lost ship 75,000 light-years from Earth. If the show was making any grand point, it was: Here is a woman doing her job and doing it really well.
Truly, Kirk’s got nothin’ on Kate.
On “Voyager,” Janeway didn’t flaunt her gender. She never took a dramatic pause and said, “Being a starship captain — is a job for a woman.” Nor did a battle of the sexes wage in the 24th century. Gene Roddenberry, the ingenious creator of “Star Trek,” believed that in the future, society would move beyond such pettiness. It’s a series rooted in optimism.
My guess is the absurd backlash “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” received from disgusting social media trolls for having a woman and a black man as its leads won’t happen with “Discovery,” which is also including a gay character among its crew.
The diversity factor is partly why we Trekkers love the show so much, and why we demand it keep going. For 50 years it’s shown us that differences in gender, race, sexuality, religion and hairstyle can and should be uniters instead of dividers.
What “Ghostbusters” and “Ocean’s Eight” have touted as the final frontier was boldly reached by “Star Trek” 20 years ago.