This article contains spoilers for the latest episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."
In the latest episode of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" (titled "What Is Starfleet?"), a young civilian named Beto Ortegas (Mynor Lüken), the brother of the hotshot pilot Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), has decided to make a documentary film about daily operations on the U.S.S. Enterprise and how the ship's Starfleet officers carry out a typical mission. Beto has an agenda, however. He doesn't want to merely
vaunt Starfleet; he wants to confront it. He sees Starfleet as an aggressive military organization that's more devoted to conflict and violence than peace and diplomacy, despite its claims to the contrary.
Beto's suspicions prove to be disappointingly true when it comes to the Enterprise's current mission. The Federation has, quite bafflingly, taken sides in a war between two non-Federation worlds and has agreed to aid the aggressors, the Lutani, in their efforts to overthrow their foes. As a result, the Enterprise has been sent to retrieve a space-dwelling, starship-sized alien that has been specially bred to serve as a destructive weapon. Captain Pike (Anson Mount) sees that the alien is going to be a weapon and continues with the mission anyway. There are multiple times when Pike talks about how he and his crew need to follow orders, stating that the true nature of their mission is classified. Only through independent investigation and a careful moral re-wiring do Pike and his officers begin to question the ethics of delivering an enslaved killer alien to the aggressors of a murderous war.
Notably, it's never revealed how Starfleet became so deeply involved in a war effort to begin with. The "Star Trek" franchise has always famously been a property devoted to pacifism, not violence. War is the ultimate moral failure in the "Star Trek" universe, and Starfleet typically only becomes involved in an armed conflict when literally all other options have been exhausted.
But there may be something larger at play here. Perhaps the writers behind "What Is Starfleet?" are trying to make a comment on the way the "Star Trek" franchise has become distressingly violent since it began a new life on Paramount+.
Read more: 5 Star Trek Characters Who Disappeared Without Any Reason
Streaming-Era Star Trek Has Become Too Action-Oriented
From 2005 to 2017, there was no new "Star Trek" on television. "Star Trek: Enterprise" had been canceled, and the franchise had been rebooted on the big screen by J.J. Abrams. The latter re-cast characters from "Star Trek: The Original Series" as younger, sexier, alternate universe versions of themselves and, most notably, he ramped up the action and violence. In doing so, he transformed "Star Trek" from a nerdy franchise about diplomats and explorers into a high-octane shoot-'em-up. Audiences ate it up, and Abrams' 2009 movie "Star Trek" became a big financial success.
One of the film's writers, Alex Kurtzman, was also behind the screenplays for action-packed Michael Bay movies like "The Island" and "Transformers," so the tonal shift was significant. Kurtzman specialized in writing slick action sequences, while the "Star Trek" franchise was, prior to that, often quite stodgy and intellectual. Regardless, Kurtzman went on to co-write the 2013 sequel "Star Trek Into Darkness" before being put in charge of all things "Star Trek" when the property returned to TV in 2017 on the CBS All Access streaming service (which has since been renamed Paramount+). That same year, he co-created "Star Trek: Discovery," followed quickly by "Star Trek: Picard" and several other shows.
These new series didn't just look different from classic "Star Trek" shows, but they felt different as well. They embraced a much more aggressive tone, with the first season of "Discovery" dealing directly with the war between the Federation and the Klingons. There were also more scenes of hand-to-hand combat, phaser shoot-outs, and starship battles, with the protagonists of "Discovery" and "Picard" murdering others regularly. Fan sites have compiled the number of people slain by "Discovery" lead Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), with her kill count sitting at a whopping 58 across just 65 episodes.
Violence was the new ethos of the "Star Trek" franchise, and old-school Trekkies like myself bristled. There was just too much death for a property that had previously been devoted to peace.
Strange New Worlds Interrogates Modern Star Trek's Violence Problem
This is where "What Is Starfleet?" comes in. It seemed that the episode's writers, Kathryn Lyn and Alan B. McElroy, were interested in interrogating the violence of post-2017 "Star Trek" television. The title of the episode might as well have been "What is 'Star Trek?'" it depicts Starfleet (re: the "Star Trek" franchise) as having been given a mandate of violence. I sense that Kurtzman enjoys action stories more than sci-fi ones, a suspicion that plays out again and again in both "Discovery" and its spin-off movie "Star Trek: Section 31." He might have even encouraged his writers to include more gunfights, flippant one-liners, and otherwise traditional action nonsense.
"What Is Starfleet?" pauses to ask both the characters on "Strange New Worlds" and the viewers watching what we're doing here. Is Starfleet (and, by extension, the "Star Trek" franchise) devoted to war efforts now? Is it really our mission to deliver a badass super-alien into a war zone? Or should we maybe pause and question what we're doing here? Is our mission one of wartime victory, or is it more sensitive than that?
"What Is Starfleet?" ends with various characters praising the titular organization as the best example of strength of character. Starfleet isn't about its missions, as those can be -- no matter how good its intentions -- based on misguided principles, nor is it about military power. Rather, it's a conglomerate of the ethical powers of everyone inside of it. And, by extension, the "Star Trek" franchise is about the ethics of its characters. "Star Trek" isn't a violent property, this episode appears to posit, but a peaceful one. The show's creatives needed to pause and reconsider their actions just as much as the fictional members of the Enterprise's crew. It's a powerful reckoning indeed.
New episodes of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" begin streaming Thursdays on Paramount+.
If you're looking for the easiest way to keep up with all the major movie and TV news, why not sign up to our free newsletter?
Read the original article on SlashFilm.
