"Star Trek: Strange New Heterosexual Worlds"

 

Captain Christopher Pike was the captain of the starship Enterprise in the pilot epiosde of Star Trek, where runs afoul of mind-control aliens and meets a girl.  He returns in "Menagerie," severely injured, hoping to return to the planet and spend his life in the virtual reality with The Girl.  The new series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds covers more of the stories from Captain Pike's tenure, and it's rumored to have gay characters, so I bought the first season on Vudu.

Scene 1: A space center gets all excited because an alien spaceship is approaching. They're not alone in the universe!  Psych: they're the aliens (from our point of view): the spaceship approaching is the U.S.S. Enterprise!

Scene 2: A naked lady in bed.  Way to ruin the series!  But I paid for this, so I'll trudge on through the heteronormativity.  The elderly Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount, top photo) is making breakfast for his hookup, a much younger Star Fleet lady.  Wait -- these people have cell phones and flat-screen tvs.  It's supposed to be the 2200s! The Enterprise is returning to space dock; she wants to know what happened out in space that has made him hesitant to return to command.  Maybe he's traumatized by the mind-control planet?  She's shipping out, so she says goodbye until their next hookup, and gives him a 55-second long kiss.  Ugh! But at least she's not licking his lips -- that fad must be over.

Scene 3: Pike riding his horse through a snowstorm.  The Admiral lands in a space shuttle and asks him to go back to work, to handle the case of a starship that disappeared while trying to make first-contact, with his former first officer Number One, real name Mia, aboard.  "Naw, naw, dog, I'm traumatized.  Get someone else." "But I have a bigger cock, so move!"

Opening Credits: Replicate the original Star Trek, except "to boldly go where no man has gone before" has been replaced by "no one.'  Still ethnocentric: obviously there are lots of sentient beings out there.

Scene 4: Vulcan.  Spock (Ethan Peck), the chief science officer in the original Star Trek, and his girlfriend T'Pring are celebrating their anniversary.  Is it really essential to establish the heterosexuality of every single character in their first appearance?  Why are the producers so afraid of someone being misidentified as gay?  T'Pring proposes marriage; he eagerly agrees, and they kiss for 55 seconds.  This causes them to be kicked out of the restaurant, so they adjourn to their room for sex (more kissing, Spock with his shirt off, T'Pring half-naked).  The com rings: It's Captain Pike, ordering him onto the Enterprise.

Scene 5: Captain Pike beams aboard the Enterprise, being triggered by his trauma.  Spock, already aboard and being triggered by the death of his sister, introduces him to his crew: Security Chief Noonien-Singh, Navigator Ortegas. Communications Chief Uhura, Helm -- hey, they're all women!  What is this, a Playboy ship?

He explains the mission: whenever they detect the development of a warp drive, Star Fleet sends a crew out to make First Contact.  Six days ago, they sent the U.S.S. Archer to Kilev 279 (the 279th planet out from the Kilev sun?)   They have lost contact.  Their job is to find their people and bring them home without anyone dying.

Scene 6: Captain Pike in his quarters (a huge room with a fireplace), remembering a space accident that killed and melted his crew,  Spock enters; he explains that he went to the moon Borath to get a rare ore that causes temporal displacement: he's traumatized by the future, not the past!  "I saw my own death...in about a decade!"  Wait -- I thought it would be on this mission.  Who cares about 10 years from now?

Scene 7:  While Pike and Spock are talking, they drop out of warp?  So soon -- it's been like 20 minutes!  On every other Star Trek series, it takes days or weeks to get to the edge of Federation Space, even with the advanced warp engines of Deep Space Nine.

 The USS Archer is intact, but with no life signs -- no one is aboard.  Down on the planet, they have a pre-warp civilization.  They are incapable of developing warp technology, yet they have warp drive.  Correction: a warp bomb!  The equivalent of developing nuclear bombs before airplanes.  

Another problem: since they're pre-warp, they're pre-first contact.  The crew can't interfere with them in any way, or even make their existence known.

Scene 8: Pike consults The Doctor, M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) -- finally, a guy! -- who identifies as heterosexual immediately by exchanging lovey-dovey looks with a female crew member.  Also Nurse Chapel, who will stay on the Enterprise for the original series and fall in love with Spock.

Nurse Chapel modifies the physiognomy of Pike, Spock, and the Girl so they will look like the natives.  For some reason the Girl refuses sedation during the painful procedure.

Transporter Chief Kyle outfits them with local clothing, universal translators, and tricorders but no phasers.  

Scene 9: They beam down into a major city, where news broadcasts are telling everyone that Big Brother has the rebels under control, and there is no warp bomb.  It reminds them of the  two civil wars in the old U.S.A. on Earth.

At the building containing the warp bomb, they disable some scientists and steal their id badges, then beam them aboard the Enterprise so no one will notice. But they still need a DNA sample to fool the retinal scans.

Scene 10: In Sick Bay, Dr. M'Benga sedates the scientists and prepares to extract some DNA.  Whoops, one wakes up and runs away in a panic!  You didn't strap them down?  Uhura calms him down with a discussion of tagball, the planet's favorite sport, including team statistics.  She had time to research the culture?  And why would she bother, when she's not going down?

Scene 11:  Transporter Chief Kyle (Andre Dae Kim; I don't know if he's a regular, but I'm grasping at straws here) sends down the DNA in the nick of time, and Kirk, Spock, and The Girl are granted access to the facility.  They track Number One Mia's biosignature: she's in a cell the sub-basement.  What about the rest of the crew?   On the way down, a woman flirts with Pike (well, Kirk fell in love with an alien babe every week, so there's a precedent).

They spring Mia and two other crew members, a man and a woman.  Plot dump: there were only three people aboard the gigantic spaceship!  That's ridiculous -- in The Next Generation, Doctor Crusher specifically states that three people can't run a starship all by themselves.  What if someone gets sick or injured?  Besides, First Contact requires a load of anthropologists, linguists, biologists, protocol experts...

More plot dump: Mia, Pike's former Number One, appears to have a history with The Girl: "She helped me when no one else would."  I should say something snarky about everyone having a history with everyone, but I'm too relieved to find lesbians.  Unfortunately, they're too far down for a transporter, and Spock reverts to his Vulcan ears, drawing attention (and walking out of the facility with the "alien" prisoners doesn't?).  Fisticuffs result (Kirk engaged in fisticuffs in every episode, so there's a precedent).

Scene 12:  Ascending in the elevator, Mia gives the big reveal: how did a pre-warp planet get warp technology?  The Federation gave it to them!   By accident: their telescopes watched a battle between the Federation and the Klingons, and they managed to retro-engineer a matter-antimatter engine, centuries before they would be able to do it on their own.  And since they're still in the tribal stage of cultural evolution, they're going to use it to destroy each other!

"Captain, we're ready to beam up!"

"Nope, we're going to break the Prime Directive and interfere with this planet's development!"

Left: Dan something-or-other, who appears in five episodes as Lieutenant George something-or-other.

Scene 13: Pike and Spock meet with Fearless Leader and come clean about everything. "You're too primitive to handle warp technology, so please let us destroy it."   "But we can use it to kill all of the evil Communists...um., Terrorists...um...people who don't think like we do..."

So Pike orders the Enterprise to become visible.  "I give the order, and your entire planet explodes.  Now let's talk peace!"   The end.

Beefcake: Some of Spock's chest.

Heterosexism: Constant.  One gets the impression that guys join Star Fleet solely to get with alien babes.

Gay Characters:  I thought that Mia, the Number One, and the girl who beamed down, had a history.  Apparently not.  But later on, Nurse Chapel mentions dating both men and women, and there's a trans woman who "forms a surprising connection with Spock" in one episode.  Big deal -- Spock likes women, and she's a woman, so what?

Will I Keep Watching: Well, I bought the darn thing, so I don't really have a choice.