SNW and Disability Discourse
Jul. 3rd, 2022 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI am sorry, I am so very sorry, but I am going to hold forth about Star Trek, about which I have Opinions. Not because there are not more important things going on in the world, because there absolutely are, but because I am procrastinating on editing a scene that is annoying me and blathering about pop culture is fun, and because I think there will be more interesting discussion here than in the comments on YouTube where I initially expressed some of these ideas.
So! I am really enjoying Strange New Worlds, with the exception of the one episode that was a blatant rip-off of a famous Ursula K. LeGuin story that made no sense for the setting. All of my critique here is said with love—I think it's the best written of the NuTreks and it in general makes me very happy to watch every week. But we must also criticize the things we love because we are nerds and nitpickers and because culture reproduces ideology, etc.
And while I think it does most things well, it does disability kinda badly.
At the very heart of the Disability Issue in SNW is a problem not truly of the writers' making. "The Menagerie," an episode of Star Trek TOS, aired 56 years ago and was very much a product of its time. Back then, people could conceive of a miraculous future without class, racism, or scarcity, but they still wrote a story in which Captain Pike is burned beyond recovery and confined to a Beep Boop Chair, unable to communicate other anything other than yes or no. And then, at the end, he gets a happy ending where he is freed from the prison of his own disabled body and gets to live in a telepathic fantasy, because Star Trek.
Discovery cranks this a notch further by 1) making Pike someone I actually care about, thanks Anson Mount, and 2) through various plot contrivances, having him become aware of his inevitable Beep Boop Chair future fate. This is a genuinely interesting setup for a character study, because how do you live the next decade of your life, knowing what awaits you? How much wiggle room is there—can he quit Starfleet and never be in this situation? But if he does, the kids who he is burned saving will die. And so on. It's a cool twist that makes the problematic plot work a little better.
And then we get SNW, where he's now the main character. While the overall tone of the show is the most optimistic out of the three live action Treks, you've still got, at its heart, an inciting incident that revolves around disability being a fate worse than death, even in a utopian future. This is about Pike grappling with knowing he will endure life-altering disabilities. I...don't expect it to be done well. But this is also a situation I can really relate to, and I think you can do it well, with sensitivity and nuance.
This might be a good place to mention that I don't wholly subscribe to either the social model of disability or the medical model of disability. The latter leads to false hopes at best and eugenics at worst, whereas the former denies lived reality. If I could live a life with a fully functional spine and no chronic pain, migraines, or arthritis, you are damn right I would choose that. I would also choose 20/20 vision over glasses. That said, my immunecompromised ass does not deserve to be collateral damage in the rush to reopen the economy. So maybe theoretical models of disability are useful to a point but not particularly complete.
Anyway, back to the show. Hemmer, the chief engineer, is not disabled by the standards of his society. All Aenar are blind, so he is no more disabled than a human would be considered disabled because we lack telepathy. However, he is disabled-coded because he's played by a blind actor, and because his establishing scene is Uhura, of all people, being well-meaning but insensitive at him. It's an interesting setup to contrast Pike, a character who is (quite justifiably) terrified of his disability that the medical model of disability cannot solve with Hemmer, a character for whom the social model of disability is his reality.
But wait! There's more! There is yet another character, and that is Rukiya, the young daughter of Dr. M'Benga. M'Benga is secretly keeping her in stasis inside a transporter beam (cool!) because she has Incurable Space Cancer, and thaws her out every so often so that her pattern doesn't degrade. A cure is teased in the awful Omelas episode, but this doesn't work out for reasons.
Which is where we start to run into problems. One problematic plotline that the writers really didn't have a say in is absolutely fine, especially since there's a lot of potential to do something interesting with it. But now we get the plot of "The Elysium Kingdom," and two dots start to form a line.
I won't bother recapping the plot. It ends with a powerful cosmic consciousness that has taken a shine to little Rukiya offering to free her from her failing body. She will get to chill in a nebula cloud and have adventures and basically be a Fanfic God (it makes sense in context) but she will never get to see her father again. She and M'Benga agree to this, and her consciousness is liberated from her body. You know. The way Pike is in "The Menagerie." She pops back in 30 seconds later as an adult to reassure him that he made the right decision, and now he is free to move on without the burden of a medically difficult child.
Now. This is a really good episode. On its own, it was beautifully done and touching and tearjerking, operating more on fairy tale logic than within sci-fi conventions. But there's no getting around to what freeing a soul from a body means for disabled people in the real world, where people are encouraged to seek out medically-assisted death if they can't find suitable affordable housing.
Which brings me back to Hemmer. He's our counter-example, remember? He is very specifically a disabled character who is not tragic and not defined by his disability, not seeking a cure, not only has adapted but ensures that other people adapt to him. He's not the most well-developed character but he's kind of a necessary counterweight when you have the difficult premise that SNW is set up to have.
What happens to him in the penultimate episode, you might ask?
Oh, he sacrifices himself saving everyone else from being infected/ripped apart by Gorn hatchlings. After giving Uhura an inspirational speech that makes her reevaluate her life.
On its own, again, this is a really great episode. It's scary and tense and I respected the giant fucking balls required to kill off a major character like that. It upped the stakes and was well-written, compelling storytelling. Without the other two dots, it would have simply been well-done TV.
However, we now have a setup where there is a lot of disability representation on the show and it all falls into either:
1) Tragic disabled person whose life is not worth living and they must be freed from the cage of their body through sci-fi metaphorical death, or
2) Inspirational disabled person who nevertheless must sacrifice themselves for the good of all, but not before making the able-bodied people around them realize an important lesson about their lives.
If you look around at pop culture representations of disability with these two tropes in mind, you will notice how often they pop up. Weirdly, one of the most memorable counter-examples is also Trek. For all that TNG isn't my favourite Trek (sacrilege, I know), Geordie LaForge? Pretty much a great character. Love him. Look, a blind guy who has futuristic adaptive tech, and he's never treated by other characters or the narrative as lesser or weird, besides when he is weird for reasons other than his blindness. He's an excellent way to explore how a future utopian society would view disability. Generally, the Federation cures anything that can be cured, but in his case that's impossible so they provide technology that makes the world accessible to disabled people. Rad as hell. This actually seems like a synthesis of the two models of disability that I can completely get behind.
Why does this matter? I mentioned the folks who were forced into MAiD because we, as a society, could not provide them with accessible housing. There is the overarching narrative of the pandemic, in which the deaths of disabled people are brushed off with the phrase "underlying condition" and disabled people are framed as being acceptable losses for the good of the economy. TV tends to lag behind social progress, so I think it's a matter of SNW reflecting contemporary social attitudes more than it is a matter of them influencing it. Also, episodic TV production behind what it is, I'm not sure that they thought about it in terms of a pattern so much as there are certain types of sci-fi stories and they happened to do three of those types of stories in one season.
That said.
One thing the modern Star Treks have done really well—and the older ones did for their time as well—is shown us a future in which we can imagine ourselves. Diversity is baked into the show's DNA, from giving us a Black woman on the bridge in the very first series to having multiple neurodivergent and queer and trans characters now. (I can do a whole other post on Discovery and the Bury Your Gays trope, but I think that's ground well-covered by others.) The thing that I've praised SNW most for is its depiction of a future in which things are, broadly speaking, better than they are now, particularly for people who currently find themselves marginalized. It mostly does this. Except, it seems, when it comes to disability.
As I write this, the last episode hasn't aired, so maybe they'll find a way to subvert these tropes and do something interesting with the Beep Boop Chair. As a good Trekkie, I am nothing if not optimistic.
So! I am really enjoying Strange New Worlds, with the exception of the one episode that was a blatant rip-off of a famous Ursula K. LeGuin story that made no sense for the setting. All of my critique here is said with love—I think it's the best written of the NuTreks and it in general makes me very happy to watch every week. But we must also criticize the things we love because we are nerds and nitpickers and because culture reproduces ideology, etc.
And while I think it does most things well, it does disability kinda badly.
At the very heart of the Disability Issue in SNW is a problem not truly of the writers' making. "The Menagerie," an episode of Star Trek TOS, aired 56 years ago and was very much a product of its time. Back then, people could conceive of a miraculous future without class, racism, or scarcity, but they still wrote a story in which Captain Pike is burned beyond recovery and confined to a Beep Boop Chair, unable to communicate other anything other than yes or no. And then, at the end, he gets a happy ending where he is freed from the prison of his own disabled body and gets to live in a telepathic fantasy, because Star Trek.
Discovery cranks this a notch further by 1) making Pike someone I actually care about, thanks Anson Mount, and 2) through various plot contrivances, having him become aware of his inevitable Beep Boop Chair future fate. This is a genuinely interesting setup for a character study, because how do you live the next decade of your life, knowing what awaits you? How much wiggle room is there—can he quit Starfleet and never be in this situation? But if he does, the kids who he is burned saving will die. And so on. It's a cool twist that makes the problematic plot work a little better.
And then we get SNW, where he's now the main character. While the overall tone of the show is the most optimistic out of the three live action Treks, you've still got, at its heart, an inciting incident that revolves around disability being a fate worse than death, even in a utopian future. This is about Pike grappling with knowing he will endure life-altering disabilities. I...don't expect it to be done well. But this is also a situation I can really relate to, and I think you can do it well, with sensitivity and nuance.
This might be a good place to mention that I don't wholly subscribe to either the social model of disability or the medical model of disability. The latter leads to false hopes at best and eugenics at worst, whereas the former denies lived reality. If I could live a life with a fully functional spine and no chronic pain, migraines, or arthritis, you are damn right I would choose that. I would also choose 20/20 vision over glasses. That said, my immunecompromised ass does not deserve to be collateral damage in the rush to reopen the economy. So maybe theoretical models of disability are useful to a point but not particularly complete.
Anyway, back to the show. Hemmer, the chief engineer, is not disabled by the standards of his society. All Aenar are blind, so he is no more disabled than a human would be considered disabled because we lack telepathy. However, he is disabled-coded because he's played by a blind actor, and because his establishing scene is Uhura, of all people, being well-meaning but insensitive at him. It's an interesting setup to contrast Pike, a character who is (quite justifiably) terrified of his disability that the medical model of disability cannot solve with Hemmer, a character for whom the social model of disability is his reality.
But wait! There's more! There is yet another character, and that is Rukiya, the young daughter of Dr. M'Benga. M'Benga is secretly keeping her in stasis inside a transporter beam (cool!) because she has Incurable Space Cancer, and thaws her out every so often so that her pattern doesn't degrade. A cure is teased in the awful Omelas episode, but this doesn't work out for reasons.
Which is where we start to run into problems. One problematic plotline that the writers really didn't have a say in is absolutely fine, especially since there's a lot of potential to do something interesting with it. But now we get the plot of "The Elysium Kingdom," and two dots start to form a line.
I won't bother recapping the plot. It ends with a powerful cosmic consciousness that has taken a shine to little Rukiya offering to free her from her failing body. She will get to chill in a nebula cloud and have adventures and basically be a Fanfic God (it makes sense in context) but she will never get to see her father again. She and M'Benga agree to this, and her consciousness is liberated from her body. You know. The way Pike is in "The Menagerie." She pops back in 30 seconds later as an adult to reassure him that he made the right decision, and now he is free to move on without the burden of a medically difficult child.
Now. This is a really good episode. On its own, it was beautifully done and touching and tearjerking, operating more on fairy tale logic than within sci-fi conventions. But there's no getting around to what freeing a soul from a body means for disabled people in the real world, where people are encouraged to seek out medically-assisted death if they can't find suitable affordable housing.
Which brings me back to Hemmer. He's our counter-example, remember? He is very specifically a disabled character who is not tragic and not defined by his disability, not seeking a cure, not only has adapted but ensures that other people adapt to him. He's not the most well-developed character but he's kind of a necessary counterweight when you have the difficult premise that SNW is set up to have.
What happens to him in the penultimate episode, you might ask?
Oh, he sacrifices himself saving everyone else from being infected/ripped apart by Gorn hatchlings. After giving Uhura an inspirational speech that makes her reevaluate her life.
On its own, again, this is a really great episode. It's scary and tense and I respected the giant fucking balls required to kill off a major character like that. It upped the stakes and was well-written, compelling storytelling. Without the other two dots, it would have simply been well-done TV.
However, we now have a setup where there is a lot of disability representation on the show and it all falls into either:
1) Tragic disabled person whose life is not worth living and they must be freed from the cage of their body through sci-fi metaphorical death, or
2) Inspirational disabled person who nevertheless must sacrifice themselves for the good of all, but not before making the able-bodied people around them realize an important lesson about their lives.
If you look around at pop culture representations of disability with these two tropes in mind, you will notice how often they pop up. Weirdly, one of the most memorable counter-examples is also Trek. For all that TNG isn't my favourite Trek (sacrilege, I know), Geordie LaForge? Pretty much a great character. Love him. Look, a blind guy who has futuristic adaptive tech, and he's never treated by other characters or the narrative as lesser or weird, besides when he is weird for reasons other than his blindness. He's an excellent way to explore how a future utopian society would view disability. Generally, the Federation cures anything that can be cured, but in his case that's impossible so they provide technology that makes the world accessible to disabled people. Rad as hell. This actually seems like a synthesis of the two models of disability that I can completely get behind.
Why does this matter? I mentioned the folks who were forced into MAiD because we, as a society, could not provide them with accessible housing. There is the overarching narrative of the pandemic, in which the deaths of disabled people are brushed off with the phrase "underlying condition" and disabled people are framed as being acceptable losses for the good of the economy. TV tends to lag behind social progress, so I think it's a matter of SNW reflecting contemporary social attitudes more than it is a matter of them influencing it. Also, episodic TV production behind what it is, I'm not sure that they thought about it in terms of a pattern so much as there are certain types of sci-fi stories and they happened to do three of those types of stories in one season.
That said.
One thing the modern Star Treks have done really well—and the older ones did for their time as well—is shown us a future in which we can imagine ourselves. Diversity is baked into the show's DNA, from giving us a Black woman on the bridge in the very first series to having multiple neurodivergent and queer and trans characters now. (I can do a whole other post on Discovery and the Bury Your Gays trope, but I think that's ground well-covered by others.) The thing that I've praised SNW most for is its depiction of a future in which things are, broadly speaking, better than they are now, particularly for people who currently find themselves marginalized. It mostly does this. Except, it seems, when it comes to disability.
As I write this, the last episode hasn't aired, so maybe they'll find a way to subvert these tropes and do something interesting with the Beep Boop Chair. As a good Trekkie, I am nothing if not optimistic.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-04 07:37 pm (UTC)But I think if someone goes to their doctor and request MAiD and they're not imminently dying, the system has a duty to ask why, and whether there aren't better alternatives. If it's something like "I can't afford the drug that keeps me alive" or "I can't find affordable accessible housing," it should be illegal to kill that person and the government needs to provide an alternate solution. This would probably lead to an uptick in disabled people being all, "well, I need MAiD because I can't afford my rent" just to get rent, which goes a long way to making life more livable for everyone.