On Nostalgia and Star Trek

I’m in Germany at the moment, attending Disruptive Imaginations, the annual conference of the Science Fiction Research Association, which this year was held as a joint event with the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung at TU Dresden.

I really wanted to have a new essay ready for you before I left but then I was still working on my paper until the last minute — the paper that I was presenting at Dresden, so it was kinda important that I get it together — and then when I had a free day I spent it inexplicably hiking up a steep path to a bridge which I am dying to tell you about but unfortunately I used all my writing energy on a million stairs and now here we are.

The one new thing I did write this week was a brief introduction for the Star Trek round table. Six of us were there to discuss the Third Age of Star Trek, that is to say, Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds. All of us were asked to make an introductory statement but I only discovered once I’d arrived that it needed to be five minutes long, rather than just “Hi, I’m Sylvia.” Over the course of two days, I wrote the following piece about being an old person who likes Star Trek and Star Trek’s continued difficulty with age and aging.

Anna Kurowicka was in the audience and took this great photograph of us and although I can’t share the 90-minute discussion with you (it was fascinating!) I did think it would be nice to share my introductory statement with you alongside the photo.

I’m a child of the 70s so I imprinted on The Original Series. At that time, it was very clear to me that there were men’s jobs and women’s jobs. When I was six, the teacher asked all of us what we wanted to be when we grew up and I said the first woman on the moon. And she made me say it twice and she got the principal and made me tell him too. And he said, but what if there’s a girl who wants the same thing, but she’s 16.

But what no one noticed was that I’d already internalised that women only competed with women, that I couldn’t shoot for the stars: a man had to do it first. Sure, my mom told me that I could be anything I wanted to be but she also told me that the Germans would come to our home and take my citizenship away if I didn’t eat my braised cabbage, so she was not a reliable source.

So for me, Uhura was an amazing display of what I could reasonably be. Asimov’s Susan Calvin was a spinster and not handsome and socially inept and romantically thwarted. Uhura, on the other hand, wore miniskirts proudly and was flirty and fun. And she had a female coded job! “Excuse me, Captain Kirk, I have a call for you on line three. I think it’s the Romulans, shall I put the call through?”

So I find the “younger” versions of Uhura difficult to accept, as they could not possibly progress to become the woman that I idolised in Original Star Trek. The new younger versions of Uhura cancel out both Star Trek canon and my head canon of what I saw, back then, as a possibility for myself.

But I also understand that it is 2023 and we’ve moved on. And honestly, I don’t WANT to see a professional young black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise being anything less than at the top of her game.

In that way, new Star Trek really is better. I work through my frustrations about the retconning through the acceptance that the Star Trek of my youth really hasn’t aged well. I tried to make my daughter watch the original series with me and she just couldn’t stop laughing.

And so I asked her, you know, which Star Trek generation are you, that you remember as a backdrop and she said, “Picard.” I should say, she’s 29. I finally worked out that she meant The Next Generation, she just didn’t know what it was called. (I say this knowing that it shows where I have failed as a mother.)

BUT, this new generation of Star Trek shows has succeeded where I had failed and my daughter has watched every episode of Lower Decks without me even knowing about it. I don’t know how you can watch that without having seen every episode of the Treks that have gone before but she assures me she’s fine and I shouldn’t worry.

Clearly, New Trek is doing something right. Which makes it particularly frustrating that the shows are all still struggling with ageism.

From the beginning, old age and experience has been othered in Star Trek, represented by aliens, half of whom present as young. I thought it was getting better. Pike is 55, although he’s played by an actor just turned 50. Discovery gave us our first centered Captain over 50, Philippa Georgiou, but then she got killed off and replaced by her Mirror Universe version. Picard, of course, was amazing, as he was still competent and ready for new horizons in his 90s, played by an actor in his 70s. And he almost made it through the first series! But then, no, he was turned into an android.

I understand what story they were trying to tell there but it does seem like it is every damn time. In Strange New Worlds, we have Pelia! Played by Carol Kane who is 71! But guess what? Wild reveal: she’s super experienced and competent but not human.

They appear not to even realise what’s happening. In an interview, Carol Kane referred to being part of a long Star Trek tradition of older actors, like Dr McCoy. Who was, um, 39. Star Trek seems intent on portraying old age like some kind of uncanny valley and it is clearly making us crazy.

Did you know… That the majority of test pilots are over 60? That US Air Force fighter pilots can start training at 33, or at a push at 35? That’s their career just beginning, not the end of the line. And in the Royal Australian Air Force, a fighter pilot recently retired at 66. Now, ok, yes, he was the oldest active fighter pilot in Australia but at the same time, that’s a job that’s a LOT more demanding than being on the bridge of the Enterprise.

Where are the 50 or 60 or 70 year old humans in Star Trek who are still in their prime, preparing for retirement at a hundred and twenty? That’s what I want to know!

<mic drop>

The conference finished today and I’m so tired, I swear there are words bleeding out of my ears as my head can’t keep them all in. I’m home for three days and then travelling again but I’m definitely booking some downtime after that to get caught up on all the new stories I’ve been wanting to share with you.