Abstract
Fighting for the Future comprises a lengthy 18-chapter consideration of the programme that returned Star Trek to the small screen after a 12 year hiatus. 2005 saw the cancellation of the sixth Star Trek television series Enterprise. From then, until Star Trek: Discovery premiered on CBS All Access in September 2017, the JJ Abram’s Kelvin timeline feature films kept the once mighty Star Trek franchise on minimal life support. Discovery rebooted not only Star Trek television but the Star Trek franchise, which at the time of writing encompasses two live action and one animated series, with an additional live action and animated series in production. Discovery and its progeny offer an excellent case study for television studies scholars wishing to interrogate the renewals and reconfigurations of intellectual properties.
However, those seeking that case study will not find it in this book. Fighting for the Future studies a television programme but the majority of the chapters are not informed by television studies. Only 2 of the 18 contributors have a background in media studies, while the rest hail from American, literary and political studies. The majority of the authors frame their analyses within the conceptual frameworks and assumptions of their respective disciplines. The book’s interdisciplinarity attests to Star Trek’s inherent mutability; like Shakespeare’s plays, the decades-old and ever-expanding Star Trek universe encourages analyses from a multitude of angles, none necessarily inherently more valuable than others.
The authors may not know their television studies, but they do know their Star Trek. While the editors acknowledge that not all the authors are fans, most of them display the in-depth knowledge of the extensive franchise required for intelligent analysis and critique. And the authors also know their Star Trek literature: quite a task since as my co-author and I observed in Star Trek and American Television (Pearson and Davies, 2014) the series has inspired more scholarly research than any other single television programme. The bulk of this scholarship focuses neither on the production context nor the industrial operations of American television; rather it employs textual analysis to illuminate the manner in which the various series represented the dominant and occasionally oppositional perspectives of their respective periods on race, sexuality, gender, nationalism, technology and religion. Many of the contributors to Fighting for the Future work in this tradition, albeit updated to include viewpoints still effectively marginalised at the time of Enterprise’s production in the early 21st century. Other contributors reflect on Discovery’s role within the franchise, but do so largely through the analysis of individual episodes and narrative structures rather than through attention to transforming modes of production and distribution. A few chapters, either in whole or in part, follow on from previous scholarly work documenting the activities and opinions of the fandom, the (in)famous Trekkies/Trekkers.
The book consists of an introduction, eighteen chapters and a coda, which the editors have organised into four sections: 1. Discovery and the franchise; 2. modes of storytelling; 3. negotiating otherness and 4. queering Star Trek. The 10 chapters in sections three and four focus squarely on the programme’s representations of racial, gender and sexual identities; the chapters in the first two sections frequently distinguish between Discovery’s more inclusive representation of race, gender and sexuality and that of the previous series. Scholars concerned with the ways in which science fiction texts reflect and refract contemporary debates about identity politics may find valuable insights in many of these chapters.
One of these is an interview with Diana A Mafe, author of an influential book on the representation of black women in science fiction (Mafe, 2018). Mafe places Discovery’s elevation to central character of a black woman, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), within the relatively short history of prominent black women in science fiction screen texts. Whit Frazier-Peterson’s contribution takes a complementary but different approach, analysing the Burnham character through the lens of Afro-futurism, a theoretical framework that ‘explores the crossroads of identity politics, history, technology and the African diaspora’ (p. 211). Other chapters explore the ways in which Discovery’s characters resist conformance to the gender stereotypes and hetero/cis normativity frequently manifested in previous Star Trek series. Mareike Spychala argues that the female characters push against and sometimes transcend the generic tropes that have limited past characters such as The Next Generation’s Beverly Crusher and Deanna Troi. Sabrina Mittermeier and Jennifer Volkmer argue that Discovery’s white male captain, ultimately revealed as a Terran hailing from the evil Mirror Universe, subverts the hegemonic and sometimes toxic masculinity exhibited by post-network anti-heroes. Si Sophie Pages Whybrew demonstrates that Discovery offers points of identification for trans viewers, a pleasure often denied them by the cisnormative anxiety of Eurocentric cultural products.
The chapters in the modes of storytelling section address Discovery’s intensely serialised form. Ina Blatzke argues that Discovery’s shift from series to serial narrative impacted world building strategies, particularly with reference to the gradual reveal of Lorca’s Terran origins. Will Tattersdill, whose contribution is distinguished by knowledge of television studies and of contemporary telefantasies, illuminates Discovery’s narrative structures through fruitful comparisons to the series and seriality conventions of Victorian publishing.
But even these investigations of storytelling fail to account for the impact of the streaming era and international distribution upon narrative structures. And while the editors’ coda acknowledges that Discovery interrogated ‘established storytelling patterns and tropes’ (p. 401), no chapter gives extended consideration to the programme’s fit with the vast Star Trek storyworld, a subject of great concern not only to fans but to narratologists. The editors also assert that Discovery has engendered optimism about the franchise’s future, referring parenthetically to the launch of the new Star Trek Global Franchise Group. But the book does not employ a media industries perspective to document how Discovery birthed four more Star Trek series. The book studies a television programme but is not informed by the version of television studies that attends to the complex interdynamics of industries, texts and audiences. Nonetheless, taken on its own terms, the book contributes to the field of Star Trek studies.