Note: This piece contains spoilers for the latest Strange New Worlds episodes, “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” and “Terrarium.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Star Trek: The Motion Picture is, as its reputation suggests, a cold movie, one where emotion and character give way to tedious docking sequences and 2001 rip-offs. And the movie has those, sure, but it’s not about those things. It’s about love.
More specifically, it’s about Spock—half-Vulcan science officer of the Enterprise, fixated on observable facts and sound logical thought, beneath the surface consumed by angst about his residual emotions—considering destroying his emotional self through a Vulcan ritual, the kohlinar, that’s said to cleanse one’s mind of anything but logic. And then, before he can go through with it, the Enterprise gets called to deal with a galactic threat: a strange cloud of matter that eliminates anything in its path. At the cloud’s core is V’Ger, a sentient space probe in turmoil from its inability to approach the world through anything but logic. Spock goes out to V’Ger across the void of space to mind-meld with it, gets knocked unconscious, and is dragged back to the Enterprise by Kirk.
And there, in a white bed surrounded by his friends, Spock realizes the futility of his attempt to achieve kohlinar. He grasps Kirk’s hand, looks him square in the eyes, and says that, quote, “this simple feeling is beyond V’ger’s comprehension.” He doesn’t need to say what feeling he’s referring to; we can see it on Kirk’s face as he smiles back tears, seeing that the man he loves (in whatever sense of the word you find appropriate) is alive and, more, that he has elected not to kill the part of himself that feels.
It’s a gorgeous moment, one of my favorites in all of Trek. I love it for how sincere it is, how gentle, how radically uncringing. But I also love it because, like many moments in Star Trek: The Original Series, it lets a Vulcan be a person rather than an automaton.
Vulcans in TOS are beings of logic by culture and choice, not by biology. Spock struggles with what he often terms his “human half,” absolutely, but the show makes clear that, more than a biological struggle, this is an anxiety about his upbringing, about the way he’s internalized other Vulcans’ bigotry toward him. In season two’s “Journey to Babel,” we meet Spock’s parents, the stern Vulcan ambassador Sarek and his gentle human wife Amanda Grayson. When Spock and his father quarrel about whether Spock ought to give his own blood to save Sarek’s life, the entire scene rests on you, the viewer, knowing that these two bickering Vulcans are using the idea of logic as a shield for what they actually want. Even some of TOS’s cringier properties are fundamentally about the fickleness and contingency of Vulcan logic: see, for instance, Spock’s secret half-brother Sybok in Star Trek V, someone who has more Vulcan ancestry than Spock and yet who by choice speaks and acts like a fully emotional human.
And it’s not as if this theme—the primacy of culture and individual volition over innate biology—is limited to the series’ consideration of Vulcans. Think, for instance, about “Arena,” the famous and famously goofy episode of TOS where Kirk fights a Gorn in a poorly-articulated rubber lizard suit. Kirk’s grudge against the Gorn is not small: it appears to have annihilated a Federation outpost. Moreover, when Kirk finally sees the Gorn, he regards it as monstrous, cold, inhuman, a beast. And yet, after hours of tussling atop Vasquez Rocks, Kirk finally manages to speak to the Gorn, who says they were just defending their own territory to stave off what they feared would be a Federation invasion. When Kirk finally has the upper hand, he decides not to kill the Gorn. He’s still horrified by their actions, but he realizes that they were likely telling the truth about their motivations. It’s an act of mercy, but also one of recognition: this creature Kirk took from its appearance to be monstrous is in fact an individual agent capable of free will, just like Kirk himself.
All of which makes it rather odd, when you think about it, what Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has done with Vulcans and Gorn.
The show, Paramount+’s flagship program and the only remaining Trek series on the air, is a quasi-prequel to TOS, set seven years before with a crew composed of both original and legacy characters. It’s both largely (not entirely!) faithful to established show canon and reverent in its attitude toward many of its parent program’s most famous episodes, going so far as to remake an entire TOS episode to prove that Kirk’s actions in that original episode were correct. Yet its vision of nonhuman species is just about entirely at odds with that we see in TOS.
In SNW, Vulcans are most often the butt of jokes, and that joke is, just about universally, look at how logical these Vulcans are! In season two’s “Charades,” Spock (already half-human) is turned fully human by a noncorporeal intelligence. This immediately makes him smelly, horny, hungry, and catastrophically emotional, things he apparently was unable to be when he was biologically part Vulcan. Later, in season three’s “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans,” four human crew members are turned into Vulcans, which makes them into science-loving assholes obsessed with facts and logic, save for one who, because she got turned into a Romulan, turns scheming and mutineering and altogether evil. There is little nuance in the show’s portrayal of Spock and his emotions, and even less in how it regards anyone with two Vulcan parents. Vulcans in SNW, to oversimplify (but not by much), are cruel, petty beings obsessed with logic and science simply because they are Vulcans.
Things are even further from TOS’ vision with the Gorn, who have become the series’ primary antagonists. In SNW, the Gorn are both a known galactic power and a race of shadowy, monstrous lizard-men. Gorn episodes of SNW are routinely the show’s most audacious attempts at gristly horror. In these episodes, Gorn eat humans and use them as fuel on their starships. They implant their young, xenomorph-like, into humans who will act as incubators. Their young are ravenous beasts who long to rip you—yes, you—limb from limb. In season three’s “Hegemony, Pt. II,” the Enterprise crew find out that the Gorn have what is in essence a good/evil switch regulated by solar flares, and by imitating one of those flares they manage to turn the whole Gorn fleet, and possibly the entire Gorn species, docile again.
Until this week’s “Terrarium,” more than halfway through what we now know will be the show’s entire run, no Gorn had spoken a line of dialogue on SNW. And while “Terrarium” complicates the way the Gorn have been portrayed on the show (more on that below), it’s one episode against a solid handful throughout the entirety of the show’s run that have portrayed the Gorn as, essentially, mindless beasts, forces of nature rather than thinking minds with goals and motives and friends and dreams and loves.
Strange New Worlds has often been hailed as a progressive breath of fresh air in a repressive political climate. And yet its commitment to one of the fundamental tenets of not just progressivism but any left-wing ideology—that people from groups unlike your own are still complex individual people, not marionettes strung up on stereotypes—seems less than that of a show that premiered before the Moon landing. What’s going on?
In a word: bioessentialism.
Bioessentialism, or biological essentialism if you want to be fussy about it, is a term that gained popularity in late twentieth century feminist discourses. It means pretty much what it says on the tin: that one’s inborn biological traits determine one’s personality, preferences, and actions in life. I would argue that it’s the defining ideology of being alive in America right now.
In its native academia, bioessentialism is often used to describe conservative worldviews around gender and sex. In this usage, it’s a very useful term to cut through right-wing bluster and get at the core of these arguments: that boys are born to become traditionally masculine heterosexual men and girls are born to become traditionally feminine—and, vitally, childbearing—heterosexual women. In a bioessentialist view of sex and gender, gay men, women who work outside the home, and trans people of any stripe are all deviants, trying in vain to fight against their rightful, biologically determined life path. (If you find yourself wondering why these roles would need to be enforced if they are also natural and innate, great question!)
It would maybe be an overstatement to suggest that a bioessentialist worldview about sex and gender is currently running America, but there are signs. See: the encroaching aesthetics of fascist ultrafemininity as embodied by administration goons like Kristi Noem , the growing number of cis men convinced that they must take massive doses of exogenous testosterone to feel sufficiently masculine, the news attention the same couple of right wing childbirth enthusiasts get every time they open their mouths. These cultural signifiers, blasted constantly toward us in mass media, in turn lend credence to the administration’s material attempts to enforce bioessentialist views of womanhood. A trans person unable to leave the country because they cannot get an accurate passport and a brain-dead cis woman kept alive as an incubator for a fetus are in the same category of person to the Trump administration: those who need to be violently returned to their biological essence.
This in itself would be bad enough, but bioessentialism doesn’t only refer to issues of sex and gender. Bioessentialist views of race and ethnicity have never been far from the American conservative imagination, but they’ve taken on even more import since January. The vice president’s favorite thinker is an open “race scientist”; the shadow president regularly retweets white supremacists; the administration regularly massively overstates the proportion of undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, creating an indelible impression in many people’s minds that undocumented immigrants are criminal in their very essence. I am no longer on what is now called X, The Everything App, as I value the ability to use my brain, but in what leaks over to my sphere of knowledge from there, it’s clear that a number of Silicon Valley elites have become utterly besotted with phrenology.
Bioessentialism, in brief, is the ultimate anti-liberty philosophy: a bioessentialist universe is a clockwork universe, one where every choice a person makes can be traced back to a fundamental and irrevocable feature of their DNA. A bioessentialist wants nothing from you but your cooperation in the role they’ve decided you must play in their world; God help you if you say no. It’s an ideology so self-evidently evil that it’s at the center of just about any young adult dystopian novel my fellow Millennials may have read in middle school. If you believe in human self-determination in any way, it’s a concept you must not only refuse but actively resist.
Which, of course, makes it all the stranger that it’s so present in a television show that’s been celebrated since its debut for its progressive politics.
The skeleton key to all of this, in my opinion, lies in what, precisely, it means when we call Strange New Worlds “progressive.” It’s a term that’s been bandied about for the show online for years for reasons that seem initially quite obvious: it has a main cast that’s more than half female! It had a nonbinary character in its first season and never once got their pronouns wrong! It’s, as best I can tell, the first ever Trek show to explicitly refer to the franchise’s future as “socialist”! In its very first episode, it showed footage of the January 6th coup attempt in a slideshow meant to demonstrate Earth’s history of needless violence! All those things are true, and I sincerely think the show is better for all of them.
Unfortunately, they are also all surface-level espousals of progressive beliefs rather than deeply-thought-out thematic statements. The themes the show does incorporate are, paradoxically, often pretty conservative. I’ve laid this out at length in an essay in Emily St. James’ newsletter Episodes, but the summary is that that the show has two main modes, one in which its episodes point toward broad and sort of mealy-mouthed progressive morals (see: “Ad Astra per Aspera,” “Lost in Translation”), and one in which its episodes hide a profound xenophobia beneath their slick production (“A Quality of Mercy,” “Under the Cloak of War”).
Nineties Trek shows, generally speaking, had a far different attitude toward progressive thought, especially in regards to bioessentialism. While they routinely churned out horrifically anti-progressive episodes like Deep Space Nine’s stunningly transphobic “Profit and Lace,” they simultaneously took pains to avoid bioessentialism in their worldbuilding. Consider, for instance, the way Klingons transition from enemies to allies by The Next Generation, the many conflicting ideologies of the Cardassians we meet in Deep Space Nine, and the literal individuation of a former Borg unit in Voyager. I’m not suggesting this approach was perfect, of course. I’m glad Trek no longer routinely makes plainly offensive episodes. But it suggests a level of baseline consideration toward avoiding bioessentialist thought on the meta level that SNW hasn’t nearly matched.
I’ve spent some time thinking about SNW since writing the essay I linked above, and I’ve come to the idea that the conservatism I clocked in those latter episodes is probably negligent rather than malicious. Trying to square the circle of the show’s left-wing cultural signifiers and regressive bioessentialist ideas in any way that suggests intent eventually leads to the conclusion that it must be some sort of sinister operation, and no matter my thoughts on Paramount’s new ownership, Occam’s razor rules out a grand conspiracy to smuggle right-wing ideas to the public through a show mostly watched by lefty nerds. No: I think Strange New Worlds’ bioessentialist politics are a product of the show chasing after TOS’ afterimage without spending enough time considering why TOS made the choices it did.
SNW is a distinctive show in Trek’s history in that (and I do not mean this in a derogatory way!) it seems to exist almost entirely to sate fan nostalgia. After Discovery veered, in many fans’ eyes, too far away from Trek’s in-universe tentpoles, it was hard to find a review of SNW that didn’t focus on how the show harkened back to Trek’s roots, both in its in-universe content (the 23rd century! Exploration! No fate-of-the-galaxy battles!) and its out-of-universe format (episodic television with character arc serialization, a format Nineties Trek perfected but which TOS arguably innovated). Its unique place in Trek’s timeline means that it can show on screen many things that TOS merely alluded to (Spock and Kirk meeting for the first time, for instance) and that it can have a second story—the origins of TOS’ crew—running in parallel to its main plot. As a critic, I’m ambivalent in particular about that last point, as I think a TV show should have higher aims than “turn into a show that already exists,” but if IMDb ratings are any indication, SNW episodes like “A Quality of Mercy” and “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” that focus most directly on TOS characters developing into their Sixties-accurate selves are among the show’s most popular entries. Bluntly: fans love this stuff.
And so is it a surprise that SNW wants to give those same fans more of what they want? That it is going out of its way to stack what is ostensibly a standalone program rather than a prequel with signifier after signifier of how much the writers’ room loves TOS? Spock is (sorry, Kirk!) Trek’s most iconic character, and his inner turmoil about his Vulcan heritage forms TOS’ emotional core; if you’ve got Spock on your new show and want to keep TOS fans engaged, why not make the differences between Vulcans and humans the center of a few episodes? “Arena” is one of TOS’ most famous episodes; considering SNW’s affect toward TOS, I’d be shocked if the Gorn didn’t show up. These species of aliens are present on the show to do the same thing, say, Scotty is present to do: to say the line and get the fans to cheer.
Here, I think, lies the problem. Scotty, in SNW, has been reduced down to teleological caricature, someone whose character growth is inextricably tied to him paraphrasing TOS lines and learning how to be the miracle worker we see in his later incarnation. I wouldn’t argue that that’s good, narratively, but it’s largely inoffensive. The exact same sanding-down of Vulcans and Gorn to their absolute minimum rewriting-from-memory TOS stereotypes, though, is what gets us the bioessentialist ick. SNW abandons the lessons these species’ episodes are meant to teach us as viewers in favor of aping those species’ bare images to sell fans back the same thing they’ve always loved, and in the process they’ve (to borrow a phrase) reversed the polarity of Trek’s moral universe. It is a bigotry arrived at, I believe, through pandering rather than hatred, but its laziness does not make it any less despicable.
In fact, I think that laziness makes it more damning, for all of us. The more I think about SNW’s biologically determined view of the world, the more I fear that it is not an isolated case of terminal Franchise Brain but a damning example of the way that being an American of relative privilege is a massive risk factor for being a negligent bioessentialist.
The thing about growing up in America is that bioessentialism is the water you’re slowly boiled in. When my parents were born, Jim Crow laws were still in place across most of the American South, and the American North was, via white flight and redlining, in the process of hardening its own segregation boundaries. They grew up at a time when legal, social, and moral systems across the country were blaring the message that Black people were inherently and essentially less deserving of wealth, safety, or respect than white people. By the time I was able to walk and talk, such messages often used softer language, but much of the time they conveyed the same content. I got my first bank account less than forty years after the Equal Credit Act, before which women were often assumed intrinsically incapable of managing credit without a husband or father’s guidance. The American discourse around trans rights has regressed toward a bioessentialist framework so quickly it makes me queasy to consider; only eight years separate the NBA pulling out of North Carolina to protest HB2 and the present moment in which major national Democrats have adopted right-wing talking points about trans women as “common sense.”
No one, no matter how smart a writer they may imagine themself, lives outside the context and political norms of their era. This is especially true for writers of horror and comedy, two seemingly distinct genres that are nonetheless two sides of the same coin, exploiting surprise, anxiety, and the grotesque to elicit a specific lizard-brain emotional reaction. It’s unsurprising that both these genres have a tendency toward explicit and implicit right-wing messaging that’s difficult but absolutely necessary to guard against. (Trust me; I write both.) And it’s therefore sadly predictable that it’s from episodes in these two genres—broad Vulcan comedy and derivative Gorn horror—that Strange New Worlds’ most grossly bioessentialist moments have come.
More cynically, too, I don’t think the adjectives in that last sentence, the broadness of SNW’s Vulcan episodes and the derivativeness of its Gorn episodes, are incidental. Bioessentialist storytelling is morally queasy at best, but it’s also just so goddamn boring. The heart of TOS’ best Spock episodes is always the painful depth of Leonard Nimoy’s performance, the pathos when we see Spock holding back tears, working so hard to live in a way he’s been told since he was a child ought to be easy. That’s why The Motion Picture’s emotional climax is so powerful: Spock finally, without angst, accepts his individuality and thus his emotionality. How do you find that kind of catharsis in a show where Vulcans are flat caricatures without agency or complexity? How, for that matter, do you make the comments “Arena” makes about the American tendency toward xenophobia and warmongering in a show whose Gorn are so often portrayed as thoughtless beasts, cheap bodies to be phasered while too-loud dissonant strings crescendo? If everything you need to know about a character can be summed up by their ancestry, why bother writing a character at all? I imagine there will be readers of this essay who envision me yelling like a madwoman at my TV screen when SNW goes bioessentialist, but in truth I’m usually bored stiff, pausing the episode every thirty seconds to see just how many more flat jokes or muddy action sequences I’ll have to watch before I can go do something else.
I know Strange New Worlds can do better. I think it’s already trying to. Above, I mentioned that “Terrarium,” this week’s episode of Strange New Worlds, broke with how the show has depicted the Gorn so far. In it, hotshot pilot Erica Ortegas gets stranded on a moon with a Gorn, whom she tries to fight before realizing their only option for survival is mutual cooperation. It’s far from a perfect episode: I could call the episode’s entire plot literally from the summary in Paramount+, Ortegas’ constant talking to herself gets old quickly, and the episode’s conclusion reveals it to be a groanworthy “Arena” redux, down to the entire plot being the result of Metrons meddling in human/Gorn relations.
But, crucially, “Terrarium” is also the first episode to portray an individual Gorn as a person with agency and culture and desires. Ortegas rigs up a crude device to talk to the Gorn via yes-or-know questions, challenges her (the Gorn) to a chess match, tends to her wounds even when she wants to give up hope entirely. We find out that, although Ortegas doesn’t understand the Gorn’s language, the Gorn has been learning English to better understand her enemies. The episode’s filmic language is just as changed: the shots of the Gorn’s teeth and claws and reptilian eyes are now clearly from Ortegas’ point of view and get replaced with a more humane framing as the episode goes on.
The whole thing certainly makes me wonder whether the show will continue the work it starts in this episode to reconcile the monstrous Gorn we saw earlier with the individuated Gorn we see here. It’s hard to be sure, particularly since “Terrarium” tiptoes around or straight-up ignores the most offensively bioessentialist bits of SNW’s Gorn worldbuilding: there’s nothing here about Gorn breeding planets or Gorn eating human flesh or the special sort of solar flare that turns the Gorn less evil. But, well, it’s a start. And it’s already yielding dividends in terms of quality: “Terrarium” is one of SNW season three’s best episodes. It’s certainly the first Gorn-centric episode of Strange New Worlds I legitimately enjoyed, and, crucially, it’s the first of those episodes to have a theme beyond flat xenophobia.
I won’t pretend I have no investment in Strange New Worlds being a progressive show. The United States is in a genuinely frightening political era, and in an era where progressive political candidates are citing Andor when describing why they’re running, left-wingers need all the help from fiction we can get. But as much as I want SNW to be a politically astute show, I just as much want it to be a good show. I have many issues with Discovery’s large and often reactionary hater-dom, but I broadly agree with them that I prefer Trek when it’s episodic and moderate-stakes like SNW. More importantly, as the only Trek left on the air, SNW holds the fate of the franchise on its shoulders. By stumbling into bioessentialist storytelling in an attempt to become a show that already exists, though, it will only ever come across as a cheap imitation of the genuine article, something that might delight a handful of fans in the moment but which will leave both the show and this era of Trek with a mushy, bland legacy.
These past two weeks have shown us the two radically divergent paths SNW’s attitude toward bioessentialism can take from here: blundering further into that mushy blandness with the fanservice nothing of “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” or sticking with the messy, worthwhile searching of “Terrarium.” I know which one I’m pulling for.
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