Bigotry, the final frontier. These are the tedious endeavours of basic empathy for other humans. Our continuing mission – to keep explaining that, actually, so what, it’s not even a big deal and genetics are much more complicated that XX and XY, anyway, look it up. To celebrate diversity because if everybody was exactly the same, things would be super boring, like, what if you weren’t into blondes and everybody was blonde, that would suck. To get over our stupid prejudices because if we haven’t worked those out by 2200, that would be embarrassing.
When Star Trek: The Original Series debuted in 1966, it was provocative. Not because of the bad acting – that too, though – but because the cast included a black woman, Nichelle Nichols as Nyota Uhura. It seems absurd now, but this wasn’t even two years since the cancellation of the racist Jim Crow laws in the US, and a black woman on a TV show who wasn’t “the help” was very much a political statement. Her kiss with co-star William Shatner the next year, even more so.
This was by design. Show creator Gene Roddenberry proposed an optimistic version of the future, one in which social inequalities were resolved, and episode plots dramatised situations and problems analogous with contemporary issues. As such, the recruitment of trans and non-binary characters onto the USS Discovery is not unexpected. Maybe in a decade or ten, we’ll remember the inevitable controversy as absurd too.
The third season premieres in October, with the screen debut of Blu del Barrio as the non-binary Adira, and The OA’s transbro Ian Alexander as Gray. Both characters are Trills, a symbiote alien species with an established history in the show – Deep Space 9 fan-favourite Jadzia Dax was also a Trill, who presented as female at the time but had previously been male. One of her scenes in the show featured US TV’s first same-sex kiss because, as Star Trek had proved, kisses are important like that.
Via Daily Dot.