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To boldly hope: how Star Trek dares us to be better

Amid dystopian dramas, Paula Duncan analyses the attraction of the Star Trek franchise.

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

Spock and Kirk stand on the bridge of a spacecraft.
The young Spock and Kirk, in 2009's Star Trek.

It’s something of a running joke that the popular animated series The Simpsons can predict the future – so much so that this was addressed by Time magazine. It is far from the only show that has a take on our pending fate. There is no shortage of dystopian futures available to us – nuclear war, rising sea levels, zombie apocalypse, super-contagious virus… Some of these no longer feel quite as fictional or remote a possibility as we might like. Such storytelling allows us to consider what it might mean for us to live through such scenarios and, perhaps, think more carefully about how we might prevent them.  

I’m sure there are movies, games, books, or TV shows that spring to mind for each of us when we think about this. For me, it is the Hunger Games and the Divergent book series by Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth, respectively. Even when these stories offer us a hopeful possibility of redemption, they do so in the wake of disasters that humanity has failed to prevent. We are invited to dwell in the worst parts of humanity and human nature. In some stories we destroy ourselves. In others, we find ourselves simply destroyed. I find it all too easy to become preoccupied by the potential horrors in our near or distant future. 

This is why I’m so drawn to the vision of the future that the Star Trek franchise offers. There’s a hopeful message at the heart of the series that makes our continued existence seem plausible but doesn’t discount the changes we need to collectively make to achieve this. I am slowly making my way through Star Trek: Deep Space 9, having now completed The Original Series (TOS) and The Next Generation, and I’m always struck by this ultimately hopeful view for our future. It’s a not-quite utopian view of the future. We don’t achieve perfection in any way but we do learn to survive and thrive despite the challenges presented to us.  

What do we pass on to our literal next generation? What morals, what values? What hope for a future in which we both survive and thrive? This, I think, is the crucial point. 

Listen now

It's certainly not perfect. There are definitely things that are uncomfortable on the show – the portrayal of women, for one thing, often misses the mark in TOS. But I do think it represents a beginning, a promise that things can get better. I’m reluctant to write any line that begins “for its time”, but I think there is something in that here. I also defer to the judgement of someone who was actually there, contributing to the formation of the Star Trek universe: Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura. She wrote compellingly about the importance of diverse representation in the cast and what it meant to viewers in her autobiography Beyond Uhura. She reflected there:  

Like all of Gene’s characters, Uhura embodied humankind’s highest values and lived according to principles that he was certain would one day guide all human endeavor. In Star Trek Gene created a work of fiction through which he communicated a timely, yet timeless message about humankind’s power to shape its future. But most important, he gave that vision to the world: to writers, to enlarge upon; to directors, to dramatize; to actors, to personify and make real; and to audiences, to enjoy, cherish, and incorporate into their own hopes for the future and for humanity. 

For all its flaws, TOS set up a universe where we could see a better and fairer future for ourselves. In this early series, there are certainly problematic elements that would be written differently today. But there is, at least, hope.  

What speaks most clearly to me is the idea of stewardship. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, it began when TOS originally aired in 1966 and follows the crew of the star ship Enterprise on a five-year exploratory mission through space. On the bridge, Captain James T. Kirk is accompanied by some of the best crew Starfleet has to offer. We follow them through the stars, visiting new people(s) and places and getting into an uncanny number of scrapes.  

Airing in 1987, The Next Generation shows us the new and improved Enterprise is now captained by Jean-Luc Picard and a whole new crew with new skills and talents but the principles are the same – a crew that looks out for one another and their ship, caring for their home away from home. The Enterprise changes and different people take the helm, but the common goals remain. 

Perhaps if we contemplate our world to be something like this: if we consider that we might each be given a collective opportunity to hold the fate of our planet, how should we act to make sure that we hand over the best possible future to those that come next? What do we pass on to our literal next generation? What morals, what values? What hope for a future in which we both survive and thrive? This, I think, is the crucial point 

There are some key messages that we can draw from Star Trek’s view of our future. Captain Kirk frequently talks fondly of an Earth that has eradicated poverty and many unjust power structures. What might need to change for us to get to a position where we hold the same values? Where might we need to sacrifice personal gain in order to create a more sustainable world? I cannot help but think that we are not acting on this as quickly as we should be. The BBC recently published an article focusing on the episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in which 2024 is shown to be a year of riots and unrest on Earth. Even in our sci-fi not-quite-utopian future, our progress is slow.  

I’d like to conclude with a reference to the 2009 movie reboot of Star Trek. Captain Pike says to a young Jim Kirk:

“your father was Captain of a star ship for twelve minutes. He saved eight hundred lives, including your mother's. And yours. I dare you to do better.”  

What if we looked at our stewardship of our planet in the same way? We briefly, collectively, have a chance to make a difference. We have a chance to do better. We need, therefore, to boldly go.  

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The overwhelm

What follows is an act of female emancipation. Belle Tindall reviews the Oscar-winning Women Talking.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

a group of women stand and sit around a table lit by a gas lamp.
Women Talking's lead characters meet together.
Universal Pictures.

A trigger-warning to our readers: this article tackles the themes of sexual and physical abuse, which, for some readers, may make this piece a particularly hard one to read.  

The title to this film could be so many things: women forgiving, women fighting, women growing, women shrinking, women believing, women doubting, women conserving, women demolishing. If you find yourself settling down to watch Sarah Polley’s masterful film, you’ll witness eight women from a Mennonite community in America do all of this, and infinitely more.  

Women Talking will be unlike any film you’ve seen before.  

In an eerily context-less setting, the women of an isolated religious community come to the traumatic realisation that they have been abused, violently and systemically, for many years. This abuse has been at the hands of the men in their radically patriarchal community: their fathers, their brothers, their uncles, their sons. Catching one of these men red-handed, the women realise that what they had long been manipulated into thinking was either their own irrational imaginations or ghostly/demonic encounters, was actually sexual abuse perpetrated by the men they had shared their entire existence with. The men they had raised. The men who had raised them.  

Based on the acclaimed novel by Miriam Toews and inspired by a harrowing true story, the Oscar-winning script offers us a front row seat to the falling apart of an entire reality as these women begin to unravel all that they know to be true.  

Do they stay and forgive the men? Do they stay and fight to the (literal) death? Or do they leave and make a new home for themselves in an outside world they know nothing of? This is the question that drives the narrative of the film as eight representatives from three different families are tasked with coming to a decision, this is the conundrum that has the women talking.  

'This film tackles a truly traumatic subject with the utmost care, it is as empathetic as it is empowering.'

With a sense of specific time and place that is only given one opportunity to interrupt the narrative (in the form of a call for the residents to be counted in the 2010 census), there is a distinct sense that this story is tragically universal in its nature. As countless critics have observed, this film tackles a truly traumatic subject with the utmost care, it is as empathetic as it is empowering. It does not minimise the atrocities that these women and girls have experienced, nor does it sensationalise them. Through the immensely talented ensemble cast, Director, Sarah Polley has curated a spectrum of raw and complex emotion - brutal honesty, righteous anger, utter despair and rebellious hope are weaved together to create a tapestry of reaction.  

The complexity and care with which this story is told is a gift to the women who inspired the film, and to the women who will watch it.  

Audiences watch as the powerful rage of Salome (played by The Crown’s Claire Foy) is countered by the defiant gentleness of Ona (Rooney Mara), while the loud terror of Mariche (Jessie Buckley) is quelled by the silent care of Melvin (a transgender character played by August Winter). And, all the while, not one reaction is judged. Every woman is given the right to her own natural response, and the right to have that response shift and stretch and adjust. The dignity and love that flows out of this conversation is somewhat of a masterclass in the beginnings of healing and the liberation that follows.    

And yet, the film has even more to offer its audiences, there’s yet another question that is written into the rock of Women Talking, one which was articulated by the director herself  -

‘What does it mean to be true to your faith? What does it mean to get rid of the structures that have sprung up around your faith, that are insidious and corrupting?’ 

It is utterly fascinating: the women are determined to rid themselves, one way or another, of the men who have hurt them so deeply, but they refuse to be separated from the God whose name has been manipulatively enacted in the process. Where we are so used to the entanglement of God and the people who wrongfully use him as a means to an awful end, these women seem to demonstrate quite the opposite. And what’s more striking is that they do so, not out of obligation or duty, but out of pure love and hope.  

When the women speak of earthly things, there is a heaviness to their voices. When they speak of God, their words feel light.  

We see them recite the Bible in moments of overwhelm, meditate on it in moments of decision-making, pray it in moments of panic, and refer to it in moments of relief. It is their faith that fuels their rebellion, it is their belief in God that informs their desire for more. A verse from the Bible is ultimately the catalyst for their decision to leave, as they choose to re-build their lives on ‘whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable’. It seems that if the oppressors wanted these women to believe that they were inherently less than, they simply should not have introduced them to a God who tells them differently.  

One of the most powerful monologues comes from a bruised and bleeding Mariche towards the end of the film. She says,

‘We have decided that we want, that we are entitled to, three things… we want our children to be safe, we want to be steadfast in our faith, and we want to think’.

Her weighty words are responded to with tears and with a song. The sound of the women singing the words ‘nearer my God to thee, nearer to thee’ becomes the soundtrack to them packing up their lives as they leave familiarity in search of freedom, a freedom which is not intended to create distance between them and God, but to bring them nearer to each other.  

To watch faith flow from the wounded is humbling. To see the complexities between God and hurt play out in this film is captivating. It feels compellingly honest, and messy, and real. 

The Oscar win and the endless five star-reviews are sufficient evidence of the power of Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. But deeper evidence may also be found in the profound catharsis felt by those viewers who, in varying contexts, are trying to disentangle their faith from their hurt, or perhaps the curiosity of those who are left wondering what kind of a faith would ever be worth such an endeavour.  

 

 

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