Has Starfleet really been a force for good in the galaxy, or has it always been just another colonial power marketing itself as benevolent liberators?
Told from the point of view of Umberto Ortegas’ documentary cameras, declassified footage from the ship’s security recordings, and interviews with its crew, Enterprise accepts a dangerous mission to deliver a powerful, experimental weapon to a planet losing a war against its militarily superior neighbor.
“What Is Starfleet?” attempts to interrogate Star Trek‘s accepted narrative legitimizing the paramilitary force whose mission we’ve always understood to be all about exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations as well as protecting the broader interests of The United Federation of Planets. It’s a terrific premise that has the potential to truly challenge the audience. Unfortunately, writers Kathryn Lyn and Alan B. Mcelroy fail to completely capitalize on it by taking the story in a bold enough direction to deliver on that potential.
I certainly don’t expect a Trek episode to conclude with Starfleet is bad actually. If they did, that would truly be a surprising turn of events. Just watching the fan outrage play out online over such a colossal rug-pull would almost be worth the price of admission. But especially in the modern era of safer, uncontroversial Trek, nobody is likely to be fooled into thinking this episode would resolve in Starfleet being the villains.
But what I think was required here to turn this better than average episode into a bonafide classic would be if Lyn and Mcelroy had written themselves into a corner where the evidence for Starfleet’s malevolence appeared overwhelming and damning before sitting down to find a creative solution to write themselves out of that corner.
From the very start we’re told Enterprise is providing aid to one side of a conflict between two parties outside of The Federation, which while seeming a bit unorthodox, we’re nevertheless told the side they’re helping is the militarily inferior one with the far heavier casualties, so they’re already framed as at least being on the side of the underdogs. In that sense, Western audiences might draw real world comparisons to U.S. and NATO aid to Ukraine, largely presented within a Western hegemonic framework as the victims of the prolonged invasion of the militarily superior Russia.
But I can’t help but wonder how our earlier impressions would be shifted if Enterprise was aiding the superior military force instead. What if, from Umberto Ortegas’ and our perspective, it looked more like the Western military aid provided to the slaughter and starvation of civilians in Gaza? And what if each act ended with Starfleet looking even more complicit in crimes against humanity?
And what if those secretly recorded half conversations Umberto picked up in the Ready Room presented Pike and Una as horrific war criminals? Then, only in the final act would Umberto — and the audience — learn the full story behind the mission, exonerating Enterprise as actually being on a secret mission to secure a lasting peace?
Photo: Marni Grossman/Paramount+
The episode tries to build a lot of mileage out of crewmembers, Uhura particularly, seemingly expressing blind loyalty to Starfleet to suggest the nefarious but it’s just not enough to make the audience question for a moment that our heroes are on the wrong side of justice. And had this episode really gone there and pushed to sell the illusion of something sinister at the heart of Starfleet, it’d give the episode real bite.
“What Is Starfleet?” is a decent episode that ultimately falls short due to lack of nerve. This could have been one for the ages, an all-time classic if not for the writers settling for a lazy cop-out that reframes Umberto Ortegas’ skepticism as a mere misguided emotional temper tantrum rather than an authentic questioning of the pure intensions of a paramilitary from the outsider’s perspective.
It undercuts Umberto as a character and robs the audience of the opportunity to really wrestle meaningfully with whether this supposed benevolent paramilitary institution envisioned by 1960s TV writers — who never could have imagined their work remaining relevant 60 years later — is consistent with our values today.
New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New World release Thursdays on Paramount+.
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