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The Discovery crew encounters a serious difficult moment at the beginning of the third season. They are permanently disconnected from everything they have known in the 23rd century and have no one to talk to. Post-traumatic stress disorder in space is something the Trek franchise tends to enamel, but Discovery I just changed it.
In season 3, episode 4, “Forget Me Not,” Keyla Detmer (Emily Coutts) loses his temper with his shipmates, and the scene touches on something that the Star Trek canon has only hinted at: the people who flying on these ships are often treated. like crap.
Spoiler ahead for Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, episode 4.
After learning the warp engines are fixed in Khan’s wrath, Admiral Kirk says “God bless you, Scotty! Go Sulu!” This line is a total microcosm for a perpetual bias in most of Trek’s narratives: the engineer who runs the ship’s engines has a hard job, but the pilot just pushes a button. Sure, Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, and Archer tended to push their primary engineers to the limit, but we expect the helmsman to be a rock solid.
Our original Trek flight controller was Sulu (George Takei) who was mostly left to his facial expressions to convey the stress on piloting the USS Enterprise. In The last frontier, when Kirk casually orders Sulu to fly a shuttle into the shuttle bay at top speed, Sulu reminds everyone that “actually, it’s my first attempt.” This scene is mainly played for laughter, but the biggest point remains; Kirk (and the audience) just expect the helmsman of their respective spaceships not to get confused or stressed. But what if they did?
From the beginning of Discovery In the third season, the show anticipated this exact question. After suffering a bad fall in Episode 2, “Far From Home”, Lt. Detmer was greatly shaken. In episode 4, shoot. After Stamets (Anthony Rapp) takes some credit for keeping the Spore Drive, Detmer says, “I’m the one flying this monster!”
You are right. But the most interesting thing about this is that Star Trek has never talked about it before. Yes, some riders make mistakes on Trek, but the main characters we see episode after episode and in all movies never talk about how stressful it is to fly a giant piece of metal into space. Whether it’s Sulu or Tom Paris, or Lieutenant Valeris in The Undiscovered Country, pilots of Trek’s biggest (literally, biggest) spaceships are generally taken for granted.
When Sulu is promoted to Captain in Star Trek VI, he too yells at his helmsman, a poor boy who says “He’ll fly apart, sir!” Sulu, taking a cue from Kirk murmurs, “Well, send her away!”
In Discovery, when Detmer admits to Dr. Culber that he’s having a hard time with responsibility joking, that pilots should be “macho,” a moment that openly acknowledges the hot-shot pilot stereotype that pervades not only Trek’s canon but also lots of other science fiction stories. For some reason, in many science fiction narratives, our attention tends to stay with the characters to load, and not always with people pressing buttons. Or, if we’re worried about the pilots, as we say in Star Wars, we rarely check out those who have made mistakes. While some Star Wars novels and comics have touched on this aspect, it’s not that we dwell on Wedge’s guilt for retreating from the Death Star, or Luke’s concerns about his abilities after the emergency landing. Two ships in The empire strikes again.
Star Trek has always explored psychological realism in more depth than Star Wars, but until now both franchises have had the same attitude towards star pilots, placing them in two broad categories: fantastic or dead.
Fortunately, it is Discovery tear down this trope with Keyla Detmer. Yes, piloting a great spaceship makes you tough. That doesn’t mean it’s not the most stressful job in the galaxy.
Star Trek: Discovery airs Thursdays on CBS All Access.
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