Star Trek: Discovery And The Trek Fanon

Since we’ve covered the entire first season of Star Trek: Discovery here, the natural next step would be to do a bit of an end-of-season round up – go over what worked and didn’t work, what we liked and didn’t like, and so forth. But we’re not going to do this, because judging any Star Trek series by its first season is, bluntly, unfair.

The Next Generation was still trying to get Wil Wheaton to act, blissfully unaware of just what would happen when he did. Deep Space Nine had poor Sisko desperately try to explain baseball and other basic human concepts to actual gods. Voyager immediately buried the lead that they were stuck in the middle of nowhere with half a crew of terrorists. And Enterprise was attempting to sell Scott Bakula, the nicest of nice blokes, as some kind of Jack Bauer-style hard-ass.

So instead, we’re going to examine just how Discovery compares to the franchise’s established canon – or rather, the fanon. Discovery made much hay from featuring the show’s first canonically gay main characters, Stamets and Culber, which is nice, but please note, I said ‘canonically’ there. Ever since the original series, the fans have been reading gay subtext into the show – and it’s not hard to see why, as a lot of the time it’s less subtext than text. So today, we’ll be looking at Star Trek’s long history with same-sex relationships, and specifically, at those same-sex pairings who weren’t officially couples, but who even casual fans could look at and think something’s going on there.

I will add the caveat that a lot of this could be argued to fall prey to Frodo and Sam syndrome, that is to say, seeing a sincere, intimate same-sex friendship and immediately responding ‘gay as fuck, they’re totally banging’. However, most of these examples have more non-Platonic affection than Tolkien would ever have been comfortable writing – plus, the power difference between Frodo and Sam (remember, Sam is Frodo’s gardener) would have made any sexual relationship there fairly unseemly. By contrast, a captain screwing their first officer – while grossly unprofessional – has the participants on far more equal footing.

So, in reverse chronological order, we have:

 

Discovery

Stametz is a stick-up-his-ass science officer. Culber is…well, we don’t get too much beyond that he’s chief medical officer. Nonetheless, it’s a perfectly functional relationship. We’re first introduced to them as a couple brushing their teeth together. And for all that social justice warriors are mocked – and, yes, can often go too far – this is, at its core, pretty much what the LGBT lot want in media, gay people being presented as just that, people.

The issue was that the show couldn’t even maintain that baseline, and killed off Culber after a mere seven episodes. While his death was at least less utterly pointless and preventable than Landry’s, it left a bit of a sour taste. As I said at the time, ‘There is a long and unpleasant history of gay people in fiction being unceremoniously killed off – historically, it was very often the more aggressively gay part of the couple. Both Stamets and Culber are relatively gentle souls, so Discovery appears to have compromised by killing off the one who’s less white.’

Interestingly, the ‘bury your gays’ trope was, once upon a time, the most progressive option available. A lot of early gay literature complied with the censors by going full-throttle gay for 90% of the work, then including a jarring final chapter in which one member of the couple would die, and the other would realise they’d actually been straight all along. One famous example is Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla, which further complicated the dynamic by having the one who dies also be a vampire (predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula, no less).

Nonetheless, for the first canon couple, it’s less a bang than a whimper. Which is particularly galling, since it’s happening in a series which had no restrictions on depicting gay couples, something which you simply couldn’t do on television before the ’90s.

 

Enterprise

Enterprise takes the prize for ‘least gay Star Trek’ by default, as the bridge crew were all remarkably heterosexual by Starfleet standards – there was even a straight love triangle at work between Archer, T’Pol and Tripp. (T’Pol ended up with Tripp, because she wasn’t blind, deaf and dumb, and I mean dumb there in the contemporary sense.)

With that in mind, the average shipper might have simply excised the hypotenuse and matched up Archer and Tripp. On the surface theirs was a classic mentor-student relationship in the finest Ancient Greek tradition, with Tripp as the hot-blooded young stag and Archer as the voice of experience. Yet as the series went by, it quickly became apparent that Tripp should have been the captain all along, showing decidedly greater ability at most things (he even got the lion’s share of action scenes, despite being chief engineer) – meanwhile, Archer was committing war crimes, or nodding along the barbaric practices of alien cultures and pretending he was being realpolitikal.

So, all other candidates marked off (the only thing Archer and Reed would share is a Nuremberg prison cell), for Archer’s true love we’ve got to point squarely to the Enterprise-D’s recurrent frenemy, Shran.

Played by Trek villain mainstay Jeffrey Combs, Shran kept running into Archer over the years, and eventually the two developed a tentative mutual respect – generally giving a flimsy claim that they were just paying back the other for saving their life last time. More importantly, though, Shran could give Archer something he just couldn’t get from his crew – a severe beating. While this may sound like a distasteful joke, Archer was as fond of receiving enhanced interrogations as he was of giving them, and seemingly loved nothing more than being taken prisoner and goading his captors into having a pop at him.

 

Voyager

A lot of people would point to Janeway herself, because of the way people tend to respond to women in power and her conspicuous tennis-playing, but forget it – she and Chakotay were so in love it wasn’t even funny. Besides, the two main candidates for Janeway’s sapphic affection, B’Elanna and Seven of Nine, were both clearly rivals for the part of her surrogate daughter before anything else. (This also hints at why Seven eventually became involved with Chakotay – as a straightforwardly Freudian attempt to ape her adoptive mother.)

B’Elanna and Seven themselves had a curious love-hate dynamic going on. They were outwardly cool to each other, even standoffish given any provocation (and there was plenty of provocation to be had), but if one was in any sort of danger, the other would tend to drop everything else out of panicked concern. Could you call it erotic in intent? Chalk it up as a solid ‘probably not’ – but then, shippers have made hay out of a lot less.

Paris and Kim, on the other hand, had no such caveats. Paris was a hotshot pilot with a chequered past, and as such was naturally irresistible to a bright-eyed young pup like Kim. And for all that Paris was the one with the daddy issues (the presence, however distant, of Admiral Paris didn’t do a lot for his bad-boy image), somehow Paris and Kim found themselves fixing up more than one hot-rod racer together, including an actual 1950s auto-mo-car. One place this really shone through was when they got in the holodeck to play at being Flash Gordon. Typically in these sorts of holoprograms, there’d be a damsel in distress to rescue – yet for some reason they didn’t need one.

 

Deep Space Nine

With DS9, you’re spoilt for choice. First and most obviously, there’s Kira and Dax – the latter of whom actually had a canonical same-sex relationship. It was a grey area, since they were both alien parasites who just happened to be in the bodies of sexy ladies, but for network television in the ‘90s this was like running up the rainbow flag (although it wasn’t intended as an analogy for homosexuality, but rather for taboo relationships in general). As for Kira, she’d just successfully liberated her home planet from a totalitarian occupying regime – you’d want to have some fun, wouldn’t you?

Over in the mirror universe, evil Kira was also very taken with Kira – although, per Nana Visitor (who played both), evil Kira’s attraction there was based more in pure narcissism than anything. Despite this, she was quickly established as your hedonistic sort of villain, the kind who keeps a harem of both male and female consorts, the same ‘decadent evil bisexual’ trope Discovery pulled out with evil Georgiou. True to form, she was also briefly involved with Dax’s evil counterpart.

For those who prefer their gays arch and prickly, you also had Quark and Odo’s personal cold war. Theirs was ostensibly a criminal-policeman relationship, but in practice, they acted far more like an old married couple who moved past being angry at each other long ago, and now just trade languid put-downs across the bar. Quark, admittedly, was wont to lech over any pretty young woman within arm’s reach, but that’s practically an afterthought on the long list of reasons Odo might huck a frying pan at him now and again.

But even in the face of these strong contenders, Bashir and Garak take the prize. Really, theirs was a conventional sort of relationship, beginning in the remarkably humble way of going to lunch together and bonding over an interest in history. It’s just that one was a brash young surgeon who’d come to Deep Space Nine in search of adventure, and the other was an exiled spy living incognito (far, far more romantic subplots should be like this).

This wasn’t far off a mentor-student relationship – Garak loved nothing more than when his cynicism successfully rubbed off on Bashir. But for all Bashir’s puppy-dog qualities, he wasn’t so naive that he couldn’t hold his ground – or even, once in a while, teach Garak a thing or two. This reached a glorious height in ‘Our Man Bashir’, in which Bashir invites Garak to join him in a copyright-unfriendly James Bond simulation. This is initially to Garak’s distaste, his own experience leaning far more John le Carre, but when it turned out Bashir was willing to shoot him if the situation called for it – well, it was like a little light came on in his eyes.

It was purely because of the chemistry between the two that Garak became a secondary (bordering on primary) cast member – originally, the plan had been to kill him off early on. The showrunners were pleased as punch, until they realised exactly why the pair were so popular. They would eventually try to shoehorn in a heterosexual love interest for Garak as a sort of ‘no homo’ sop, but it didn’t work – not least because Ziyal was inappropriately young, and for this reason among others, Andrew Robinson, Garak’s actor, sensibly played his reaction as ‘bemused’ rather than ‘reciprocal’. As for Bashir, yeah, he flirted with Dax all the time, but then everyone did.

 

The Next Generation

As with Enterprise, no immediately obvious candidates among the bridge crew – at least, not from season 2 onwards. Perhaps it’s stereotypical to peg Yar as a lesbian because she had short hair and an aptitude for combat, but in that case, you’d have to explain her obvious, burning crush on Troi. Plus, she surely gets additional gay points for being killed off long before her time – in the course of saving Troi, no less.

The best candidates are probably best buds Geordi and Data, who spend pretty much every waking moment together. It may be debatable as to how far we can count Data, a robot, as male (and if we do, we then have to reckon with his one-time dalliance with Yar) – but if nothing else that’s how he identifies, and how everyone else identifies him, and anyway, the question is more often how far he can be counted as a living being. Plus, it’s for this very reason that Geordi spent a lot of time opening him up and fiddling about with his innards.

For all that he desperately played up the Kirk-style womanising, Riker was briefly in a relationship with Soren, a gender-neutral alien – which ended tragically, since their culture forbade any sort of expression of sexual identity. On the meta-level, this didn’t quite work as the analogy for gay rights the writers were going for, since all the gender-neutral aliens were fairly clearly played by women. Jonathan Frakes (Riker’s actor) even noted that Soren should have been more visibly male.

Q’s relationship with Picard, while by no means reciprocal, deserves an honourable mention here. Whenever Q turned up, for the Enterprise it’s a calamity, and for Q it’s, in the words of Rick Sanchez, ‘like when Bugs Bunny fucks with the opera singer for twenty minutes’. Despite openly considering humans on the same level as insects, Q just kept right on hanging around the Enterprise, and with Picard, even to the point of appearing in his bed more than once, b-but not because he likes him or anything. Q would later also turn up in Deep Space Nine and Voyager, to mess around with Sisko and Janeway respectively – but the spark just wasn’t there.

 

The Original Series

You already knew this was coming. Kirk and Spock were the two dads of gay space adventure – granted, it’s Kirk, so in his case it’s more like bisexual space adventure, but if you tot up his conquests over the years, most of them were him pulling the rare reverse honeypot, and none of them involved any sort of long-term emotional commitment. Almost as if there was already someone in his life. The show itself regularly said as much, but quaveringly pointed to the Enterprise itself instead of to its brooding science officer.

These two are probably the closest to your Frodo/Sam dynamic, in that they’re two best pals going around getting into adventures, but nobody in a million years is going to mistake their relationship for Platonic. It ranges from the little things, like Kirk being shocked to discover it’s not Spock giving him a back rub, to the plots of entire episodes – the most obvious one being ‘Amok Time’. Spock’s mating instinct kicks in, and the gang have to go back to planet Vulcan so Spock can consummate his arranged marriage. Somehow this turns into Spock having a duel to the death with Kirk, although for a duel to the death it involves a hell of a lot of rolling around in the dirt together. After a good bit of rolling around, Spock’s fever – the drive to mate, remember – clears right up, and then for a being without emotions he’s incredibly relieved to see that Kirk survived.

The second film adaptation, The Wrath of Khan, climaxes with (and spoiler alert here for a film that’s nearly forty years old) Spock sacrificing himself to save the Enterprise. Now, throughout this article, there’s been a certain amount of audience interpretation at work – and yes, a certain amount of giggling that these characters are secretly touching genitals. But really, you don’t need to read anything into this one. It doesn’t matter if Kirk and Spock are lovers or not, because their relationship carries enough weight that either way Spock’s death is going to be heartrending. You might say that there’s a thin line between Platonic and non-Platonic at this level, but really, there’s no line at all – ditto with Kirk’s subsequent eulogy (“Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most…human”).

Bones, the other member of the main power trio, was often touted as an alternative partner for both. Indeed, at the start it was Bones who was the heartthrob, based on DeForest Kelley’s well-established Southern genn’leman charisma (which had the advantage of being in a setting where being a Southern genn’leman no longer had any unfortunate connotations). However, Spock quickly usurped Bones’s position as sex symbol, with the fans apparently fixating on the ears – and beyond this, Spock became an icon of the series as a whole, with NASA adopting him as an informal mascot back when that really meant something.

As a side note, despite George Takei being well-known as a gay actor, Sulu was relentlessly straight, barely needing any alien hallucinogens before he stripped his shirt off and attempted to kidnap Uhura while pretending to be a pirate. The film reboots’ throwaway scene of Sulu having a husband is really in dubious taste – not for making him gay for confusing meta-reasons, but because Sulu would never settle down.