Criticism Of ‘Discovery’’s Wokeness Nothing More than Hurt Feelings of White, Male Snowflakes

Privilege has no place in Star Trek

May 19, 2024

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

— Brian Sims, the first openly LGBTQ person elected to Pennsylvania’s state legislature

I try not to give much thought anymore to the folks who hate on Star Trek: Discovery and the rest of the recent franchise, whinging endlessly as they do about how wokeness “ruined” Star Trek.

But when my thoughts do turn that way, my mind goes immediately to a certain scene from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock:

His patience at an end, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) gets fed-up with Commander Kruge (Christopher Lloyd) and dispatches the underhanded Klingon with a few satisfying kicks to the face.

And like Kirk, I just want to tell these small-minded haters, “I have had enough of you!” — without any of the face-kicking, of course.

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Despite my best efforts, sometimes it just becomes impossible to avoid these narrow-minded, emotionally sclerotic trolls.

Such was the case the other day when YouTube’s algorithm rather unhelpfully served up this product by Dave Cullen, which I will charitably describe as a video essay:

Titled “The Wokeness of Modern Star Trek,” the video from this conspiracy theorist and ultra-nationalist is every bit the tedious visual screed you likely imagine it to be.

But with his whiny, poorly developed arguments Cullen really just gives away just how privileged, fragile — and frankly often racist and misogynistic — these crybabies truly are.

And any real analysis of their complaints demonstrates how they’re just flat-out wrong.

Let’s just take a look at one area of Cullen’s critique, where he really hammers away at an episode of the Discovery spinoff, Star Trek: Short Treks, “The Trouble with Edward.”

It’s admittedly the darkly humorous origin story of the tribbles.

Cullen in particular seems to have a problem with the new captain of the USS Cabot and other female officers admonishing Lt Edward Larkin (H. Jon Benjamin).

Larkin is an insufferable prick who can border on insubordinate.

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Captain Lucero (Rosa Salazar) reprimands Larkin and tells him that she’s transferring him to another ship.

Larkin, however, argued with the captain to the point of refusing to leave her ready room.

But Cullen got his feelings hurt:

This female captain plans to transfer this guy rather than try to work with him and help integrate him better into the crew and it’s because he’s an idiot apparently based on her subjective opinion.

Of course, her “subjective” opinion. That’s why she’s the captain; it’s part of her job.

Yes, Starfleet is compassionate, but does Cullen want us to believe that Larkin is the first time a starship captain has transferred a member of her crew in Starfleet history?

Larkin is hardly the first time we’ve seen Starfleet officers get in trouble.

After all, the first time we meet Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) in the first episode of Star Trek: Voyager, he’s serving time in a Federation penal colony.

Did Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks) ever say, “Bygones are bygones,” and go for a beer with Michael Eddington (Kenneth Marshall) in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine? Of course not.

Heck, going all the way back to the original Star Trek episode “The Corbomite Maneuver,” Captain Kirk (William Shatner) is ready to transfer Lt. Dave Bailey (Anthony Call) off the Enterprise until Bailey ultimately realizes on his own that his place isn’t among Kirk’s crew and volunteers to join the alien Balok (Clint Howard) aboard his ship instead.

But I don’t see Cullen bemoaning any of these other situations.

I can only imagine that he just doesn’t believe Captain Lucero should have the same authority as these other male captains.

Indeed, Cullen criticizes her as nothing more than an “angry, condescending, man-hating feminist HR manager,” rather as the competent starship captain that she is, doing her job.

It gets worse. Cullen calls out another scene in which the captain calls for a briefing in the conference room. When she asks Larkin for a report, he can’t his PADD to work so the colleague sitting next to him helpfully tries to get the device going.

But Cullen doesn’t like that attempt at collegiality one bit, complaining that the officer who tries to help is a “Black, female character.”

His point seems to be that this “Black, female character” should have known her place; nevermind that it was Larkin who physically tries to swat her hand away from the PADD.

Like all the other “anti-woke” trolls like him, Cullen’s criticisms are actually projection.

At best, Cullen simply is so blinded by his privilege as a white man as to not see what’s so terribly wrong with his appraisal.

At worst, he actually supports the ongoing existence of that privilege, racism, sexism and misogyny to the degree that he truly believes that it’s Star Trek’s job to uphold privilege which rightly should be done away with long before the time of Star Trek’s future.

One might ask, quite reasonably, why I would bother to return to this topic — and why now?

Aside from Cullen’s video landing in my queue, it’s simply that Star Trek: Discovery is the series that ignited this falderal in the first place.

Rather than be properly celebrated as the series that brought Star Trek back to television for the first time in more than a decade, it’s too-often been reviled as the avatar for a load of toxic and illegitimate bunk.

With the end of Discovery just weeks away, the series deserves to go out not as some object of scorn or a franchise bugaboo — but with the love and respect it deserves.

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