60 years later, Star Trek's worst critics still don't get the sci-fi show's basic premise
While Patrick Stewart is now as strongly associated with Star Trek as William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, his casting as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation raised some eyebrows in 1987 because… he didn’t have a full head of hair. When a reporter commented that, “Surely they would have cured baldness by the 24th century,” series creator Gene Roddenberry responded, “In the 24th century, they wouldn’t care.”
Roddenberry died in 1991, but if he was still alive, he’d probably have a similar response to the criticisms leveled by Elon Musk, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and others against Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which premiered on Paramount Plus on Jan. 15. “Turns out they banned Ozempic and LASIK in the future lol” the world’s richest man commented on X in response to a clip showing Captain Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) wearing reading glasses and standing alongside first officer Lura Thok (Gina Yashere) and Lt. Rork (Tricia Black) on the bridge of the U.S.S. Athena. The series has also been review bombed for being too “woke.”
Photo: John Medland/Paramount Plus
But Star Trek has always been woke. When the original series launched in 1967, in the midst of the Cold War and the American civil rights movement, the idea of a crew that included a Black woman and a Russian man represented a radical vision of the future. Beyond breaking barriers with the first interracial kiss on television, Star Trek regularly mocked intolerance with episodes like “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” in which depicted a war between people who divide themselves based on which side of their face is black and which side is white.
Image: Memory Alpha
The series has been pushing boundaries ever since, while always facing backlash from a subset of viewers who miss the point of its progressive, utopian vision. Star Trek gave the captain’s chair to a Black man in Deep Space Nine and a woman in Voyager. After including plots about gender identity in TNG and DS9, Discovery introduced the series’ first gay, trans, and nonbinary characters. If anything, the writers were slow to keep up with Star Trek’s actors and fans. The very concept of slash fiction originated with viewers imagining a romance between Shatner’s Kirk and Nimoy’s Spock. Alexander Siddig and Andrew Robinson loved the idea of their characters Dr. Julian Bashir and Elim Garak hooking up on DS9, championing the relationship at conventions and performing romantic fanfiction until it was finally made canon on Star Trek: Lower Decks. Musk’s criticism of Starfleet Academy came the same week the SpaceX CEO joined Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on stage for the “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, where he said he wanted to “make Starfleet Academy real” while Hegseth flashed the Vulcan hand sign. There is a lot of irony to this moment. The tour shares the name of a 1988 TNG episode about the dangers of artificial intelligence, a lesson completely lost on Hegseth, who promised to integrate AI models into what President Donald Trump has renamed the Department of War. Musk has repeatedly boosted antisemitic conspiracy theories, but the Vulcan salute was inspired by Nimoy’s Jewish roots.
Image: Paramount Pictures
Star Trek has shaped the future, imaging concepts like tablets, sliding doors, and video calls that inventors would turn into reality. But beyond the gadgets, it also helped create a more inclusive world. Star Trek star Nichelle Nichols worked for NASA recruiting women and people of color, while George Takei became a leading advocate for LGBTQ+ rights after coming out in 2005.
If Musk and Miller had actually watched an episode of Starfleet Academy, they’d inevitably have found more to hate. The show is packed with queer relationships and emphasizes diversity, with characters who trace their ancestry to multiple species. Co-showrunner Alex Kurtzman told Polygon the story about a new generation inheriting a divided world is meant to follow Star Trek tradition by commenting on current conflicts. The show’s primary villain is a space pirate, echoing the might meets right ethos Miller presented as a justification for America’s proposed takeover of Greenland. Star Trek’s vision of the future isn’t about everyone being skinny or having perfect vision. It’s not even about convenient new technology. It’s about people accepting each other for who they are and traveling the galaxy to learn and experience its wonders, rather than to conquer and extract resources. It’s a franchise absolutely antithetical to the regressive politics Miller and Musk espouse. Their criticisms just show they don’t understand Star Trek at all.
