Television

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.”

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.