The Star Trek Line That’s Aged The Worst, The Fastest
Captain Lorca’s name check of Elon Musk just doesn’t make any sense
For generally being so progressive and future-minded, Star Trek’s attempts to dabble in anything related to present day have been largely hit-and-miss.
For every hit like the eerily predictive look at contemporary life that is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s “Past Tense,” there are at least as many misses, like one of the worst episodes of the original series, “Turnabout Intruder,” which forecast a future in which women would never be allowed to become starship captains.
But perhaps no single line has bombed so spectacularly as an almost throwaway bit of dialogue in Star Trek: Discovery.
It appeared in the first-season episode, “The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not for the Lamb’s Cry,” in dialogue between Captain Lorca (Jason Isaacs) and Chief Engineer Stamets (Anthony Rapp).
Trying to motivate Stamets to go harder on the Discovery’s experimental spore drive, Lorca appeals to Stamets’ desire to be remembered as one of history’s greats:
How do you want to be remembered in history? Alongside the Wright Brothers, Elon Musk, and Zefram Cochrane?
The Wright Brothers — Orville and Wilbur — and credited with the first successful airplane, were well-established figures and not especially controversial. And most importantly, they were long dead and there was no way really to come back to bite the episode’s writers.
And Zefram Cochrane (Glenn Corbett and James Cromwell), of course, is a fictional character from Star Trek’s own lore, supposedly the first human to pilot a warp-capable spacecraft.
But Elon Musk?
The mention of the world’s richest man aged so poorly within just six or seven years of the episode’s debut as to today simply be nonsensical.
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When writers Jesse Alexander and Aron Eli Coleite name-checked him, Musk was mostly known as an eccentric inventor of electric vehicles and rocket ships — and not particularly contentious.
But just a few years later, what at the time surely seemed like a clever idea has become one of Star Trek’s worst non-sequiturs.
That’s the risk when you mention a real-life contemporary figure who’s still alive.
Setting aside for a moment the things Musk actually has done, the truth is that in the years after “The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not for the Lamb’s Cry” first aired, Musk could have been revealed as an axe murderer or child molester.
But the outsized role Musk actually has played in US government just in the opening weeks of the Trump administration is even worse than that within Star Trek’s own lore.
This is not merely a personal opinion or view of Star Trek philosophy, but rather a point about canon.
In the debut, eponymous episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Captain Pike warns the aliens of humanity’s own history that included a “Second American Civil War,” during the early 21st century.
That war, Pike makes clear, was born of the extreme polarization and hostility that has overtaken our contemporary politics and that conflict leads directly to the World War III of the mid-21st century that has long been established within Star Trek lore.
If Musk were to be remembered at all by the 23rd century, it would be for his role in fomenting those conflicts — not as a great and harmless innovator.
Musk would be mentioned along with Khan Noonian Singh, or at least a secondary infamous figure like Col. Green.
There’s no way Lorca — even Lorca from the Mirror Universe — would be so ignorant as to mention Musk alongside Zefram Cochrane and think that Stamets would be flattered by comparison to him.
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