There just comes a time when a Star Trek series calls for a courtship episode. Whether it’s internal Starfleet politics or the ability to represent the Federation’s ideals to an alien society, Star Trek loves the opportunity to craft its subtexts in a way that practically knocks an entire book over your head. And so it’s no surprise that Strange New Worlds is already at this crossroads in exploring the franchise’s classic tropes.
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Ad Astra per Aspera picks up on the climax of the end of season one when Number One (Rebecca Romijn), aka Una Chin-Riley, is arrested by Captain Batel (recurring guest star Melanie Scrofano) for doing this before the She is actually an Illyrian – a genetically engineered species whose cultural practice of adapting her body to the worlds she colonized violates the Federation’s strict laws against genetic enhancement in the wake of the disastrous Eugenics Wars.
After Captain Pike (Anson Mount) took a break from the Steal My Own Starship teams last week, we catch him visiting an Illyrian colony world to try to make Commander Una’s case as smooth as possible. In the perfect Star Trek courtroom episode, Una happens to have an old Illyrian friend who’s now a preeminent intergalactic civil rights attorney. Despite their tough past together, the attorney – Neera, played in a heated superstar role by American Gods’ Yetide Badaki – agrees to take on the case. Not because she’s particularly interested in Pike or Una at this point, but because Neera believes she can represent not only Una but the Federation at large for their discrimination against genetically modified species.
Image: Paramount
This is Strange New Worlds’ one great twist on the classic Trek courtroom format: the champion of Star Trek’s ideals is not the Captain or a Federation officer, but a member of the same fringe group being tried. Many of Trek’s previous courtroom dramas are often based on the fact that the rights of a marginalized person – Starfleet officer or otherwise – are being brought to justice, and the only way to protect those rights is for someone who doesn’t belong to them marginalized group, comes in and educates them in the courtroom and sometimes even to other members of the same marginalized group. That often works in Trek’s favor because we like its heroes, and we like them a lot when they have big acting monologue moments where they triumphantly champion Star Trek’s belief in equality and empathy for all, and us conveniently forget the fact that the one person on trial in these moments has to just sit there and watch their rights being defended.
In fact, “Ad Astra per Aspera” goes out of his way to remind us that a big, outlandish speech from Pike would actually be the worst thing he could do to improve Una’s case when Batel – who is – all the Here Pike’s girlfriend is even more confused – reminding him that the moment he takes a stand, she interrupts every speech with the simple question that would destroy his career: How long did he know that Una was an Illyrian? His personal pride in his first officer or his penchant for charming puns, the very things we’d normally see as the case’s strengths in earlier episodes like this one, are immediately rendered ineffective, and it’s up to Neera to face those things as well as their own goals for the case and their troubled past with Una and linking them to victory.
Image: Paramount
It makes the allegory at the core of “Ad Astra per Aspera,” which in more clumsy phrasing could have worked as a parallel to racial prejudice when a white woman is on trial, much stronger, and Neera’s arguments in court — which begin with a double attack on the Federation itself, before becoming something more nuanced as the process progresses – become more effective because she speaks from the same perspective and experiences as her client. While her reasoning and Una’s revelations about her past lead it to become more about the privilege of who can publicly pass as Illyrian and who can’t, Una reveals that her family managed to avoid persecution during her childhood by giving her left the separate side of her hometown to live among humans, leaving Neera and visibly changed Illyrians behind) and what Una intends to do with that privilege, the societal commentary parallels push the riff from Strange New Worlds to the courtroom episode in the present and relate to the current moment of things like LGBTQ+ rights and the ongoing federal persecution of trans people across America.
Crucially, because of their shared background and experiences, Neera and Una work together to advocate for changes within Federation law so that Star Trek can not only metaphorically blow your mind with what its subtext has always been, but so can the two-pronged approach of marginalized people inside and outside the Starfleet apparatus. And of course, that defense will work, because it’s Star Trek, and it wants to remind you that it’s always been about the power of infinite variety in infinite combinations…even if it’s Neera who actually bails Una out of jail with a literal book with Starfleet rules and find a formality to turn Pike’s concealment of Una’s Illyrian background into an asylum case, rather than a violation of extended race rules.
Image: Paramount
But as good as it all is – and it’s once again superbly grounded in Badaki’s portrayal of Neera, very much in the footsteps of Patrick Stewart in Measure of a Man or Avery Brooks in Dax – there’s something structural about Star Trek itself, which must make this victory as Pyrrhic as it is inevitable. We know that Una needs to avoid being kicked out of Starfleet because we know she’s going to be First Officer of the Enterprise for quite a while. We also know that the Federation’s laws on genetic modification will not change in the way Neera wants. That’s just Star Trek canon at work – there’s no suspense as to whether or not the case will end in Una’s favor, because it has to. And so, for all the wild talk and advocacy of empathetic quality we flaunt here, things must end with what is essentially the same unspoken problem of most Star Trek courtship episodes: our heroes come out victorious in the Clear moment, but the full picture of the rights they championed in victory is set aside lest they be touched again.
While it’s a dampener, it’s not strong enough to undermine the fact that Ad Astra per Aspera is largely a smart, contemporary evolution of a typical Trek episode format, in the vein that Strange New Worlds has excelled at so far. But at least, as Neera herself says, escorting Una back aboard the Enterprise to reunite her with her friends is a good step in the right direction, if not a complete victory.
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