Misunderstanding Mr. Spock

In the wake of the cancellation of yet another ridiculous “Star Trek” property, this time the hilariously cringe-inducing “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” sane audiences are once again asking the question “why can’t anyone get ‘Star Trek’ right?” The answer may be as simple as this… it’s because the studio’s leadership, as well as the creatives so far tasked with bringing new “Star Trek” stories to life, do not understand what “Star Trek” is, they only know what they wish it was.

These days, Hollywood creatives seem to want to write overtly about their own personal politics more than they want to tell great stories. In the Trump era many of Hollywood’s biggest writers, directors and actors believe deeply that the most important thing they can do with the positions in Hollywood to which they have ascended is to use their art to advocate for Progressive policies. It is the Great Cause which has finally brought meaning to their lives.

The problem is that this approach creates terrible drama every time it’s tried… a truth to which Hollywood has remained uniquely allergic over the last twenty years, in part because they believe “Star Trek” is an exception to this iron rule of story. To the modern Hollywood Progressive, the original “Star Trek” series was one which successfully combined exciting sci-fi adventure stories with constant Progressive political agitation. This is a tragic misunderstanding, but one in which Progressives believe so deeply, they have convinced themselves not only that “Star Trek” can continue to agitate for their preferred political outcomes while succeeding as a piece of popular entertainment, but that it must, because Progressive politics is built into the DNA of the “Star Trek” universe and you cannot have one without the other.

You see it in all of the press materials released alongside “Starfleet Academy”… quotes from its stars and creators saying things like, “Star Trek held up a mirror to our society” and “The message that I think that Starfleet Academy gives, is that in the future, it doesn't matter who you are. There's no discussion of whether it's another man or a woman or a transgender person. It's just relationships. And that's what I like, the inclusivity of the show,” and, perhaps dumbest of all… “Star Trek has always been Progressive.”

The original “Star Trek” series, as Captain Kirk’s weekly opening voiceover reminds us, was about “The Starship Enterprise” and its “five year mission… to seek out new life and new civilizations” and most importantly, to “boldy go where no man has gone before.”

“Where no human has gone before…”

Star Trek was, and is, a human story. It is the universal human condition which anchored the weekly drama in which the officers and crew of the original Enterprise found themselves. And it was human ingenuity, striving, courage and a certain Western reverence for the individual which drove that drama episode-to-episode.

The core theme of the franchise is that there is something special about humanity, something fundamental which makes humans uniquely suited for the rigors of deep space exploration. And in keeping with the spirit of a sci-fi show about the human condition, there is but a single alien amongst the crew of The Enterprise… Mr. Spock.

Spock is a Vulcan, an alien race which long ago physically and mentally rejected emotions, embracing stoic lives of pure logic. For the Vulcan, this lifestyle is not a choice, it is an evolutionary response to a devastating ancient war fueled by base emotions which almost destroyed the Vulcan civilization. Vulcans are, to coin a phrase, “born this way.” One way to look at this backstory is to see the Vulcan lack of emotion not as something aspirational, but as an unfortunate byproduct of civilizational trauma. In a very real sense, the Vulcan race has been fundamentally broken by its violent past.

And indeed, a recurring theme in the original series was Spock’s frustrating attempts to understand the complexity of human emotions and specifically why those emotions often seemed to give Captain Kirk an advantage in his dealings with the various “no-win” scenarios in which the crew of the Enterprise routinely found themselves. Throughout the now 60-year history of the original show, Spock understood that not being able to experience or express emotions could sometimes be a detriment to his ability to complete the mission, a realization which left him conflicted, both wanting to feel what humans feel while also being unable to allow himself to do so because of his unique ancestry. It was Spock’s stunted emotionality (Spock is actually half-human, having been born of a human mother) which often caused him to fail in scenarios where the highly-emotional Captain Kirk was able to succeed by virtue of his vital humanity.

And this, finally, is the beating heart of modern Progressives’ fundamental misunderstanding of what “Star Trek” is… Spock has never existed in the “Star Trek” universe to prove to the audience how important diversity is, or to “hold up a mirror to our society,” Spock exists to show the audience how awesome humans are by comparison. That is his purpose on the show. He is a storytelling device, there to show us through his emotional deficiencies that there is something special, something indefatigable about the innately emotional human race.

It has always struck me as darkly comedic when Progressives compare Barack Obama favorably to Mr. Spock, rejoicing in the wake of his 2008 election that finally the emotionless coldly rational science officer had replaced the cowboy Jim Kirk figure in the White House, because fans who actually know the show understand that Spock’s emotional deficiencies made him fundamentally unfit for command… the irony being that Mr. Spock himself understood this fundamental truth too, even if those who are currently in charge of the “Star Trek” universe do not.

We see this most clearly in a scene from “The Wrath of Khan” in which Captain Kirk tries to gently break the news to Spock, who has temporary command of the Enterprise, that he (Kirk) must assume command in order to deal with a developing emergency.

Spock: Of course, the ship is yours.

Kirk: No, that won’t be necessary. Just get me to Regula One.

Spock: As a teacher, on a training mission, I am content to command the Enterprise. If we are to go on actual duty, it is clear that the senior officer on board must assume command.

Kirk: It may be nothing… garbled communications…

Spock: Jim… you proceed from a false assumption… I am a Vulcan… I have no ego to bruise. If I may be so bold, it was a mistake for you to accept promotion. Commanding a starship is your first, best destiny. Anything else is a waste of material.

“Human material,” Spock does not say, because the qualifier is unnecessary in a story about the power and vitality of the human spirit.

With the best characters on the best shows and in the best movies, these sorts of iconic scenes don’t spring up unbidden like wildflowers from the ground in Spring. They are always the result of long, careful and deliberate character development. The scene I quoted above was arrived at through decades of work bringing Spock fully to life. Spock’s understanding of Kirk’s unique human qualifications was hard-won over the course of seventy-nine episodes of television and one previous film. One episode of the original series in particular, reveals much of what I’m writing about. Titled “The Galileo Seven,” it is a rare episode in which Captain Kirk takes a back seat so that Spock may assume command, and in so doing reveal to the audience something vital about what makes human beings special.

In this episode Spock’s reliance on pure logic for all his command decisions causes his subordinates to lose faith and trust in his decisions… decisions which often seem capricious or cruel and which ultimately get several of them killed. In the end, as in “The Wrath of Khan,” what saves the day is a very human act of desperation on Spock’s part…

Spock was always a resourceful, brilliant and courageous character, and while he was absolutely indispensable to the franchise, his primary role on the show was to provide a contrast to the human characters, primarily Captain Kirk, who drove the show’s emotional drama. And “Star Trek” was not afraid to show its audience how Spock’s inability to feel emotions made his job and his life more difficult.

As we all know, it takes a human being years of growing up to learn how to deal with intense emotions. In the episodes where Spock is either forced or allowed to feel something alien to his Vulcan makeup, the show often treats him like a teenager experiencing an emotion for the first time. In “Amok Time” his anger at having to compete for the attention of a mate blinds him to the fact that his opponent in a fight to the death is his friend and Captain. In “This Side of Paradise” spores make Spock feel happiness, love and contentment and Spock immediately abandons his duties so that he may aimlessly wander in nature and shag his pretty girlfriend in a state of childlike innocence. Sometimes it even seemed as if the show was poking fun at Spock and his emotional deficiencies, something no Hollywood creative in good standing would ever attempt with regard to an “out-group” character in today’s political climate:

In the original series, Mr. Spock was the only alien serving on the Enterprise. But over the years, the alien content of Paramount’s “Star Trek” offerings has slowly increased to the point where, in “Starfleet Academy,” there is only one fully human main character on the show, and he has zero command authority. Thus has a franchise which was once about the unique power of the human mind and spirit completely inverted the purpose of the original series and surrounded a single subordinate human character with smarter, wiser and more competent alien and human-hybrid characters, including a full complement of alien “teachers” who are there, presumably, to “teach” the humanity right out of him.

Over time this has been done because, to the sorts of Progressive creators who run these shows, humans… particularly American humans… are icky. We don’t like to follow the rules, we value the individual over the collective, we don’t like to be told what to do, we will fight back hard when bullied, too many of us are male and we sometimes vote for Republicans.

By contrast, so many of the policy goals which dominate the ascendant hard Left here in 2026 seem almost anti-human, as if the Progressive dream is a planet Earth entirely devoid of the beautiful messiness that is an inextricable part of being human… policies like abortion on demand or as a tool for reducing poverty by eliminating the poor, insane environmental initiatives which prioritize de-growth (a blandly euphemistic term which really means the elimination of human life on Earth), the sterilization of an entire generation of teens via gender-affirming care, the wholesale embrace of Medically Assisted Suicide and the de-centering of the family under the theory that having children is a terrible burden that young people in the prime of life should refuse to accept… and also because having children contributes to climate change. These anti-human ideas are, and have always been, contrary to the spirit of Star Trek’s pro-human ethos.

Nevertheless, if you assume as I do that many of the writers working in premium TV today are writing about Progressive politics, as well as inserting themselves and their own personal struggles into the drama wherever they can as a sort of self-directed therapy, it makes perfect sense that humans would find themselves mostly written out of these stories.

Aliens are much easier to write, after all. They can do any culturally fad-ish thing a writer can imagine… they can physically change their gender on a whim, for example. They can be enormously fat, clearly unable to run from here to there without collapsing in a heap, and yet still manage to rise to the top of a quasi-military organization which should value, if not require, extreme physical fitness. They can choose to look any way they desire simply by snapping their fingers. And they can be weird and unattractive by any modern human standard and still land the hottest most desirable guy on the ship, even without first enduring a 1980’s style makeover montage.

And in each case, the few human characters who remain, but especially the men (spit!), must dutifully nod and agree that their human instincts are wrong and that we are finally going to have to realize that being human, in all the ways that Captain Kirk was a human man in full bloom, is bad… so very bad.

This is why “Starfleet Academy” failed… not because of terrible writing, although there was certainly plenty of that. “Starfleet Academy” failed because its creators forgot that the “Star Trek” brand is a human brand. It is a show about all the things that make humanity not only special, but worth fighting for and which gives us an aspirational view of a human-centric future that represents the best of us.

Instead, somewhere along the way, the humans in charge of the “Star Trek” brand decided instead that Mr. Spock, the non-human outsider, must have been the hero of the show all along.

To quote another wise alien from a different science fiction universe…

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