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The main thing noticeably absent from Star Trek’s half-century anniversary was a network television series. By 2016, the primary output of the Trek franchise was a set of commercially successful feature films that had retconned a substantial portion of the early series history and consequently left later spin-off television series adrift in continuity limbo. One year later, or perhaps one year too late, three programs emerged to take up the mantle of Trek: Star Trek: Discovery (2017-), The Orville (2017-present) and the “U.S.S Callister” episode of Black Mirror (2017). This chapter investigates how these series make a claim to and justify deviations from, a familiar science fiction formula legendary for diverse themes and progressive ideologies with particular attention invocation of Gene Roddenberry’s vision for Star Trek.

This chapter examines the Mirror Universe as a figure for Star Trek’s negotiation of its own franchise identity. It argues that the Mirror is a tool with which Trek examines its own legacy, tropes, and purpose. It is no coincidence that this dark, funhouse vision is used most extensively in Discovery and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, two shows whose premises are built on re-examination and reinvention of the franchise, and whose themes draw morally murky connections between the Trek future and our real present. These shows repurpose the dystopian Mirror as a necessary means of reflection on what it means to be Star Trek, and how the franchise negotiates its complicated past. This chapter focuses in particular on how Discovery revisits and revises the systems of power inherent to the franchise’s operation, both onscreen and in audience distribution, especially as they pertain to women, power, and normative subjectivity.

This chapter explores the different depictions of sex, violence and swearing throughout the Star Trek franchise and argues that complaints about sex and violence in Star Trek, then, are nothing new; even the original Star Trek series seemed inappropriate in its day. In 1984, the BBC removed the episodes “The Empath,” “Whom Gods Destroy,” “Plato’s Stepchildren,” and “Miri” from the broadcast schedule for over ten years due to showing subjects of “madness, torture, sadism and disease.” One of the underlying reasons for this decision was that Star Trek was seen as a TV series for children, which it clearly was not. Seen in the context of the zeitgeist, the newest addition to the franchise, Star Trek: Discovery is not any more violent, gory, or even vulgar than any of the other series or feature films. Sex and violence have always been an integral part of Star Trek’s storytelling and are a vital part of showing its positive message of humanity’s future.

The Introduction compares Discovery to the earlier shows comprising the Star Trek canon and argues, against criticism raised by some scholars and fans, that the show’s darker tone in the first two seasons present an exploration of the established storyworld of the franchise. Thus, rather than betraying the utopian ideals underlying Star Trek, Discovery continues another franchise tradition: staying in touch with and commenting on its contemporary moment. In doing so, the show takes on the post-9/11 climate of war and explores the conscious effort it takes to uphold societal ideals in the face of outside and inside threats. The Introduction further comments on the nostalgia attendant on some critics’ comparisons between Discovery and other Star Trek shows and briefly reflects on the slightly more nostalgic feeling of the second season and the ways in which it avoids some of the retrofuturism other shows have been criticized for. Finally, the Introduction also summarizes the 18 essays and one interview included in this volume and their interconnections.

At the height of the Cold War, the original Star Trek series provided viewers with a utopian, racially inclusive, and altogether progressive alternative to the present standoff among superpowers. Yet, at the same time, it was caught within the Cold War world system. Star Trek may have interrogated U.S. policy in the Cold War, frequently posing the question what its heroic protagonists were supposed to do when given morally tenuous options, but it never questioned that the crew the show portrayed in fact was heroic and good. After the original run, Star Trek remained a narrative corollary to popular imaginaries of history. Trends, fads, and new focus points in historiography frequently cropped up in its later iterations. This chapter argues that Discovery however operates on an added meta level that is not found in any of the other editions of the franchise. It is not just political in the sense that it takes stances in its narratives and challenges viewers’ preconceptions regarding current political issues. It also pointedly reasserts Star Trek’s own role as a cultural force that can, and wants to be, part of such a discourse.

This chapter argues that in contrast to older iterations of the franchise, Star Trek: Discovery is not only centred on Michael Burnham, First Officer and later mutineer/science specialist, and thus departs from the usual focus on a starship Captain as lead character, it also introduces a wider variety of female characters – human and Klingon – who are instrumental in resolving the first and second season’s central conflicts. Thus, Discovery, through including of so many different and fully-fledged female characters not only continues in the franchise’s liberal tradition, it also explores new ways in which female characters can be represented in televised (American) science fiction series. This paper will argue that the show’s female characters push against and sometimes transcend generic tropes that have limited characters like TNG’s Deanna Troi and Dr. Beverly Crusher, picking up on and contributing to contemporary debates about gender and gender identity.

Until Star Trek: Discovery aired in September 2017 on CBS: All Access, all previous Star Trek series typically conformed to the prevalent narrative formats of their historical periods, i.e. most episodes were self-contained. When the series format was violated, e.g. in the two-part episode “The Menagerie” (Star Trek, 1966), this most often resulted not from a desire for narrative innovation, but from budgetary constraints, or to generate cliff-hangers at the end of a season. With Star Trek moving to CBS, and particularly its All Access platform, this traditional format – in parallel to other adaptations for streaming services – changed significantly: Discovery was created as a post-network serial, instead of a series. This chapter aims to investigate how this move from series to serial influenced not only the narrative structure, but particularly the world-building strategies and possibilities inherent in Discovery. As this becomes especially prominent when comparing the story world of the Mirror Universe, a fictional universe which has haunted the Star Trek characters since the franchise’s earliest instalment, this chapter focuses on episodes set in this dimension.

Although transgender individuals have been absent from Star Trek since its 1966 debut, this absence has conspicuously haunted the franchise in the form of illusions, allegories, metaphors, alien species, and various other metonymic mirages. Unsurprisingly, the franchise’s latest iteration, Star Trek: Discovery, is no exception. This chapter argues that despite depicting a seemingly cisgender universe, the show, like its predecessors and reviewers, does not seem to be able to escape this significant absence of trans characters and the associated cisgender anxiety. It examines the affective dimensions of the show’s and its reviewer’s struggle to come to terms with its nascent trans potentiality. Moreover, it explores the potential ramifications of these allusions to aspects of trans experience from a trans studies perspective.

After 50 years of franchise history, Star Trek has finally welcomed major canon queer characters in the form of Lt. Paul Stamets and his partner, Dr. Hugh Culber, counteracting an exclusion of LGBTQ characters that has been more than jarring for a famously liberal franchise. This essay argues that Discovery successfully normalizes queerness without reducing the characters to their sexual orientation – while, however, remaining fairly homonormative. The chapter further argues that by explicit intertextual references to the original Star Trek, the series also gestures to and brings to the forefront some of the queer subtext and potential that has so long been explored by fans. It also delves into representation and “actorvism” by out gay actors Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz behind the screen to note the ways in which representation before and behind the camera often still go hand in hand.

This chapter argues that contemporary representations of border crossing on screen engage with a specifically 21st-century U.S. manifestation of what Lora Wildenthal in following Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar calls “imperial feminism.” It examines how the most recent product of the Star Trek franchise, the TV series Star Trek: Discovery (2017–ongoing), interrogates the legacies of U.S. imperialism and, less overtly so, of U.S. imperial feminism. The analysis focuses on the geographical as well as the metaphorical border crossings that occur in the series when the crew of the Federation starship Discovery jumps to an alternative universe which is dominated by the fascist Terran Empire. It argues that Star Trek: Discovery can be read as a feminist text that exposes the limits of two very different kinds of post-sexist futures: one, the Mirror Universe, in which the empowerment of women depends on openly imperialist and racist ideologies and another, the Prime Universe, in which these ideologies threaten to make a comeback in the context of violent conflict. By contrasting these two possible futures and by connecting them through instances of border crossing, Star Trek: Discovery not only speaks to issues of intersectional feminist critique, it also responds to the political, social, and cultural changes in the United States leading up to and associated with the Trump administration.

In the canon, Star Trek: Discovery seamlessly joins the rank of its predecessors in questioning power and monoglossia. In the “fanon,” contemporary fan writers have done the same and continue the tradition of political fan fictions in Star Trek, as this chapter aims to show. While there certainly are many escapist stories with little, if any, political relevance, a significant part of the stories actively engages in contemporary debates and movements surrounding ethics and science, war trauma, and LGBTQ representation. To prove its claim, the chapter begins with a brief overview over the relevance of socio-political discourses in Star Trek Discovery. These discourses are then compared to political criticism and discussion in Discovery fan fiction. To make this viable, the chapter will analyse a sample of fan fictions published on the two main platforms fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.com. Ultimately, this chapter shows that the importance of socio-political debates is just as relevant in the Discovery “fanon” as in the Discovery canon. Certainly, Star Trek’s degree of political involvement has always been part of the franchise’s allure and Star Trek: Discovery continues this tradition well into the 21st century – and takes its fans with it to boldly discuss what many fans have discussed before.

This chapter will discuss how Discovery either reproduces, criticizes, or subverts established U.S. representations of diplomacy. The results will provide some leads on whether Discovery lives up to Star Trek’s progressive worldview. Revisiting Iver B. Neumann’s argument, this chapter argues that Discovery’s pilot episode can be viewed as a critical reflection on how the difference between idealist (“We come in peace”) and realist (a “Vulcan Hello”) approaches to diplomacy become blurred from the inverted perspective of the (Klingon) Other. However, over the further course of the season, Discovery loses its reflexive perspective on the ambiguity of diplomacy and settles for demonstrative idealism. The chapter discusses whether Discovery in its adaptation of a demonstrative ‘idealism’ subverts U.S. representations of diplomacy in the light of paradigmatic shifts after 9/11, or whether it reproduces the ambiguity of ‘realist’/’idealist’ representations, ultimately legitimizing the use of force for supposed higher ends.

This chapter aims to analyse narratives of non-human and human agency and their embeddedness in the interconnectivity of the mycelial network in Star Trek: Discovery. It argues that the mycelium can be considered rhizomatic in structure, leaning on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's explorations in their A Thousand Plateaus (2004). Neither Lt. Stamets nor the Tardigrade are able to connect Discovery to the network in innocence. Both trouble the mycelium’s fragile balance. Thus, the framework of the rhizome will be applied to trace transhumanist trauma and resilience in order to contextualise the mycelial network against the foil of the Borg, the other major instance of interconnectedness in the Star Trek universe.

Women scientists are often seen as anomalous exceptions in the fictional (and indeed real) world of white, male dominated scientific research. Even in the supposedly race and gender blind future of Star Trek, a black woman science specialist is considered revolutionary. Science and technology are a backdrop for the Star Trek universe. The theory and practice that gives the narrative a spectacular speculative frame is often perceived as neutral (or at least benevolent) as Starfleet explores the universe. Star Trek idealises science and the scientist, and throughout much of its history the science future it imagines has been distinctly white and male. This chapter argues that Star Trek has historically given women the space to be scientists, but Discovery goes further than previous entries into the canon by taking a black woman scientist from the margin to the centre of the story and offering a future when neither race nor gender present a barrier.

The Preface outlines the ways in which this volume’s essays on questions of race and racialization, sexuality and the politics of gender identification, and the new storytelling possibilities of television in the post-network era place Discovery in its larger Star Trek canon, show how it engages the history of this canon and reinvents the series through the new critical perspectives of twenty-first century cultural politics.

This Chapter argues that Captain Gabriel Lorca, upon first look, is the archetype of the Starfleet Captain in the vein of Kirk and Picard: a white, middle-aged, (presumably) heterosexual man. However, his reveal as a Terran effectively recasts the character from a capable leader to a white supremacist sociopath, and is thus powerfully subverting the trope of the action hero, and in turn, that of the Starfleet Captain. Discovery thus actively criticizes pervasive ideals of masculinity of the genre (and beyond) through Lorca. It further does so via the character Ash Tyler, who also represents an alternative concept to the traditional action hero. Unlike Lorca, whose sexual prowess is referenced often, Tyler engages in a romantic relationship, an aspect usually neglected in on-screen romances of male heroes. Additionally, he is a rape survivor, again successfully subverting the established gender roles of the genre. This chapter discusses both Lorca and Tyler in order to highlight Discovery’s engagement with, and subversion of genre tropes, and its criticism of traditional ideas of masculinity.

This chapter looks at the new television series Star Trek: Discovery, and investigate the troubling relationship Gabriel Lorca has with women of colour, particularly Michael Burnham. It specifically wants to analyse Lorca’s sense of propriety over the black body, one with a history that goes back to slavery, and that manifests itself here not only across time, but across alternate universes as well. It argues that the fact that certain assumptions about white male privilege manage to cross time, space and alternate universes in a series that successfully upends and criticizes many other racist and sexist tropes says a lot about how much room there is for us to examine aspects of our culture we accept uncritically. This chapter shows that afrofuturism as a critical approach is a strong tool for interrogating our cultural products and our cultural moment(s), past, present and future.

In its move to a streaming service and, with it, a less episodic structure, Discovery breaks new narrative ground for the Star Trek franchise – a wholesale move into the serial format. In a marked departure from The Next Generation (somewhat prefigured by the later years of Deep Space Nine), virtually no episode of Discovery functions independently of its fellows; watching the show out of order would not only be confusing, but actively ruinous to an assumed viewing experience built around slow accretions of narrative, long arcs of character development, and carefully placed disruptions of the status quo. The adoption of this format pairs intriguingly with the decision to release episodes weekly, which contrasts with the increasingly fashionable Netflix model of dropping an entire series at once. This decision also brings Star Trek’s storytelling into contact with some far older forms of science fiction, and this chapter seeks to understand Discovery’s serialisation by comparing it to that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

This coda sums up the book and gives an outlook to the show’s possible future. It discussed how, with the second season cliffhanger, Star Trek: Discovery allows for the show to both keep established characters and continue telling stories about the effects of the events seen in the previous two seasons, while also providing it with a ‘fresh start.’ This not only potentially disentangles it from established canon, it also impacts the worldbuilding of the show, while running the risk of reading like a cop out, or even an admission of defeat after two years of criticism heaped on the show from some parts of the fanbase as well as some media critics. However, as Discovery effectively reanimated a whole franchise that is now also one officially, it might also simply open up new ways for transmedia storytelling and crossovers with all the other properties being launched in the new Star Trek franchise group.