The Journal of Rockett Science

So, yes, I loved the new Star Trek movie. Loved it. Despite it making some fairly ballsy changes to the continuity, I persist in arguing with naysayers that nothing has been lost–only gained.

However, Nathan Schneider of Religion Dispatches (via Episcopal Cafe’s The Lead) makes a compelling case that something significant is indeed missing from the new Trek. As far as I’m aware, every incarnation of the series made the case that mastery of one’s passions was a good thing. Whenever there was a conflict, the winner was always the person who responded calmly and rationally.  (Even if it took them most of an episode or movie to get to that point.) We’d all be a lot better off, Trek seemed to be saying, if we would all just chill the f*** out.

This is not at all the case in the new movie, where Spock’s insistence on following the logical course of action is an obstacle Kirk has to overcome on the way to smashing the enemy to smithereens.

Schneider:

The golden ages of Star Trek have thrived on prolonged meditations on repression… While Spock was always trying to shun his human half, The Next Generation’s android crew member Data wanted nothing more than to become more human. Still, lacking an emotion chip, Data blundered his way through personal interactions with what turns out to be an uncanny charm and wisdom. Star Trek, you would think, makes a bit of a case for self-control.

(I could throw in any number of other examples. Remember Errand of Mercy? Day of the Dove? Picard being shamed out of his fairly justifiable anti-Borg fury in First Contact?)

I can’t help feeling that there is a connection between the loss of tortured-yet-sympathetic repression and the loss of political consciousness in the recent Star Trek. Our society, and consequently our science fiction, has gotten so uncomfortable with self-discipline that Data needs an emotion chip and Spock needs to go in for Primal Scream therapy. Meanwhile, politics goes off the map. …Setting our emotions free, somehow, means the freedom to see our enemies as demonic madmen, to forget about a Great Society that might someday encompass us all. Maybe Freud was right; maybe it’s time to start thinking about mastering our passions again, rather than unbridling them.