#Star trek online news movie
#Star trek online news series

Well before Discovery, or even The Next Generation, Star Trek has always been partisan - and politically liberal. In short, his own examples disprove the premise. There are countless other examples of this throughout Trek canon, but because Marcus seems to reference “A Private Little War,” when he mentions Star Trek “reflecting American and global foreign policy,” and because he was aware of a very pro-Greenpeace film with The Voyage Home, additional examples (of which there are countless!) aren’t really required.

#Star trek online news movie

The Voyage Home ( the one with the whales!), released in 1986, was a political movie more overt than anything in Discovery Season 4 or Strange New Worlds Season 1 (so far).

In his op-ed for Fox, Marcus complains that Strange New Worlds showing images from the January 6 Capitol Riots is “jarring and also breaks the narrative spell of fantasy and science fiction, which is why people tune-in in the first place.” And yet, Captain Pike and Spock are less specific in their critiques of American history in Strange New Worlds than Kirk and Bones were in “A Private Little War.” Marcus even acknowledges this when he writes, “To be fair since the original 1960s series, Star Trek has always delved into cultural and societal issues.”

The Enterprise faces a situation in which the Klingons are clearly coded as the U.S.S.R., and Kirk starts to act like the US government, arming and aiding people on “our side” to fight against “their side.” Bones and Kirk only talk about Vietnam as a historical precedent, which, of course, breaks the show’s reality a bit and instantly dates the episode. However, the basic themes of “A Private Little War” are far more overtly political than the Discovery or Strange New Worlds episodes that Marcus takes issue with. “A Private Little War” is probably remembered more for scenes of Kirk getting seduced by a witch doctor, and Bones phasering a giant alien ape called a Mugato. And outside of its more famous moments of racial representation, the classic Star Trek actually did, overtly, support protesting the war by talking about it specifically in one notable episode. Protesting against the Vietnam War was a partisan issue in 1968. Star Trek’s ‘60s politicsīones (Deforest Kelley) and Captain Kirk (William Shatner) talk about the Vietnam War. This seems to imply Star Trek has some history of centrism. That is to say, they got directly involved in partisan politics.” However, he makes one massive historical error in his premise when he writes that Star Trek has “crossed a line where no Star Trek has gone before. When you peek beyond its misleading headline, you’ll find that Marcus’s op-ed is mercifully not actually about “owning the libs” or slamming “woke” culture. (Republican Presidents Ford and Reagan both identified as Trekkies.) He’s also a conservative, which, historically, while rarer in the Trek fandom than non-conservatives, isn't entirely unheard of. While it might be easy to dunk on this op-ed, in Strange New Worlds, Captain Pike did recently remind us about having an honest “debate.” So beyond the hyperbolic headline of the Fox piece, it appears the author, David Marcus (no relation to Captain Kirk’s fictional son!), is a genuine Star Trek fan who seems to faithfully watch the new shows. Here’s why the premise of that argument is deeply flawed and historically incorrect.

#Star trek online news series

The article specifically points to a Stacey Abrams cameo in Star Trek Discovery Season 4 and a reference to the January 6 insurrection in the series premiere of Strange New Worlds as proof that liberal writers have gone off the rails. A recent Fox News op-ed titled, “Star Trek writers take Starship Enterprise where it's never gone before-woke politics,” argues that this political direction of Trek is somewhat new, and therefore, wrong. Star Trekhas always been political, and conservatives might want to look at actual history for proof.