Bitchy History - ＂Warp Speed Woke＂ Lecture 4： Voyager and Third Wave Feminism

00:00:00.000 All right, so today we are talking about Star Trek Voyager. Sorry about having to postpone

00:00:07.200 last week's lecture. I was just completely out of it last week. I was not feeling up to dealing

00:00:14.260 with this particular show because I have feelings about this show and it wasn't going to be positive.

00:00:20.800 I didn't want to start on a negative note. So yeah, we're going to be talking about

00:00:26.900 Basically, we're going to be talking about how Star Trek deals with the 1990s third wave feminism.

00:00:32.280 I don't really go into as many specific episodes in this lecture, and in my thesis, I didn't either.

00:00:41.440 And we'll get into why in a little bit, but suffice to say that there just isn't as much content,

00:00:46.400 especially as Deep Space Nine had, episode by episode. So let's get started.

00:00:51.160 all right so voyager comes out uh it airs in 1995 so it starts a few years after uh kind of

00:01:02.160 after ds9 starts it runs from 1995 to 2001 it's another show that has seven seasons uh unlike

00:01:09.120 ds9 it's going to return to a very episodic adventure format it doesn't have that continuing

00:01:15.340 storyline that DS9 gives us. And of course, it also gives us our first female captain, which is

00:01:21.860 Kate Mulgrew playing Catherine Janeway. This is a big moment for the franchise, right? This was

00:01:28.520 a very, very big moment, a big change for what was going on in the world. Obviously, this is the

00:01:34.540 1990s. We're starting to see the beginnings of third wave feminism during this period. That 1.00

00:01:40.320 kind of really starts in 1991-ish. And so this is a this is a big step forward for the genre.

00:01:48.260 Jerry Taylor is one of the co-creators of the series. So the three co-creators of the series

00:01:54.180 are really Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jerry Taylor. Brandon Braga is a writer on the series.

00:02:00.340 He's going to eventually become the showrunner for the show as well. And she said about the

00:02:05.260 about the show that we felt we needed to create an avenue for new and fresh storytelling. We

00:02:10.000 were forced into creating a new universe. We have to come up with new aliens. We have to come up with

00:02:14.540 new situations. So one of the very interesting things about Voyager is that it never really

00:02:19.940 defined itself as what it was. It really defined itself as what it wasn't, very intentionally so.

00:02:27.500 So it was not Deep Space Nine. They didn't want to be that. Paramount didn't want another morally

00:02:33.040 gray serialized drama like Deep Space Nine. They didn't really want that depth of storytelling.

00:02:38.840 Studio executives were aiming for something that was brighter, that was happier, that was a more,

00:02:44.180 you know, positive version of Star Trek than Deep Space Nine had been, in their opinion.

00:02:48.400 I think Deep Space Nine is perfectly valid as a positive message, but Paramount executives

00:02:56.420 weren't the brightest, I guess. And they also did not want to be the next generation. They did not

00:03:03.100 want to have that Federation safety net. They didn't want to have these recurring alien alliances

00:03:08.900 that TNG had had. And they wanted to be forced to encounter civilizations, new civilizations,

00:03:15.040 every single episode. So Michael Piller and Jerry Taylor were explicit about wanting to create a

00:03:21.640 show that was not Deep Space Nine and was not TNG. Instead, they wanted to be, and I quote,

00:03:27.540 a slam-bang adventure show and a romp and a true action adventure without all of the heavy

00:03:33.940 metaphysical and philosophical baggage that had been a big part of Deep Space Nine, obviously,

00:03:39.540 and even to a degree part of TNG. Additionally, while they returned to the format of most of the

00:03:46.420 most episodic shows, they didn't want it to be the same kind of thing that TNG had given them.

00:03:51.460 So in order to do this, obviously, if you've watched the show, you know. If you haven't,

00:03:57.780 I'll give a brief explanation. They take the crew of the USS Voyager and the crew of an enemy vessel,

00:04:05.700 the Maquis, and fling them 70,000 light years across the galaxy into the Delta Quadrant.

00:04:14.020 And it's going to take 75 years to get home, basically, at the speed that they can go.

00:04:20.500 So of course the entire show is about them trying to get home

00:04:23.540 and decrease the amount of time it's going to take them to get there.

00:04:30.260 Now there's one main problem with Voyager that a lot of people comment on,

00:04:36.100 which is that they absolutely ruined a plot point that a lot of people had spent a lot of time

00:04:44.020 setting up in TNG and Deep Space Nine. So the Maquis are a group that were part of something

00:04:50.680 known as the Maquis Resistance. They were a resistance group of Federation-born colonists

00:04:55.280 and discontented Starfleet officers. They organized themselves against Cardassian

00:05:01.060 occupation of the demilitarized zone because their colonies had been Federation and then

00:05:06.940 they ended up ceded to the Cardassian Union. It's a whole complicated backstory. But basically,

00:05:12.060 the Maquis are freedom fighters, or if you talk to Starfleet, traitors. And the Cardassians view

00:05:20.640 Maquis to be terrorists. So the Maquis are trying to formally declare their secession from the

00:05:24.900 Federation and leave Cardassia as well. And Deep Space Nine and TNG introduced the premise of the 0.95

00:05:32.580 Maquis in their shows almost against their will. Like they were told to write these plot lines

00:05:38.120 into their shows to set it up for Voyager. And I'm going to show you a couple of clips here that

00:05:44.680 deal with that. So this first one is from TNG and it's the establishment of the Maquis in that

00:05:51.080 universe or in that timeline. We're coming into visual range. On screen.

00:06:01.000 those are federation ships isolate one and magnify

00:06:09.080 the maquis open the channel open to all maquis ships call off your attack or we will be forced

00:06:21.520 to engage you so the maquis in that particular scene i know the sound was really low on that

00:06:26.900 one apologies uh the maquis are attacking uh cardassian vessels starfleet vessels i can't

00:06:33.040 remember the exact context of that episode um but yeah so they introduced these characters we also

00:06:38.060 see them introduced in deep space nine in a two-part episode uh that's specific to to the

00:06:44.440 maquis um let's see if i can find the clip i'm looking for here i've complete fix establish a

00:06:50.180 dialogue with the maquis they're still federation citizens i'm sure they'll listen to reason good

00:06:55.460 not commander establish a dialogue what the hell does she think I've been trying

00:07:01.460 to do just because a group of people belong to the Federation it does not

00:07:05.240 mean that they are saints excuse me do you know what the trouble is no the

00:07:10.100 trouble is earth really on earth there is no poverty no crime no war you look

00:07:16.640 out the window of Starfleet headquarters and you see paradise well it's easy to

00:07:20.540 be a saint in paradise, but the Marquis do not live in paradise. Out there in the demilitarized

00:07:27.500 zone, all the problems haven't been solved yet. Out there, there are no saints, just people. Angry,

00:07:33.900 scared, determined people who are going to do whatever it takes to survive, whether it meets

00:07:38.460 with the Federation approval or not. All right, so they do a really great job of introducing

00:07:44.620 this incredibly interesting plot point of, you know, this complicated idea of this group of

00:07:51.980 people who are not being taken care of by the Federation, at least they feel they're not being

00:07:55.900 taken care of, and they are forced into doing whatever they need to do to survive against 0.68

00:08:02.780 the Cardassians who they see as being oppressors, which is not hard to believe. The Cardassians are 0.96

00:08:10.620 are very oppressive people. So unfortunately Voyager essentially abandons this entire premise 1.00

00:08:17.660 almost immediately. They do not go with this storyline at all. I'll show you a clip here from

00:08:23.900 the beginnings of the first episode of Voyager because they do introduce the Maquis as a plot

00:08:30.220 point, but it doesn't go anywhere.

00:09:00.220 Damage report. Shields at 60%. A few line interruptions attempting to compensate.

00:09:07.660 Dammit! We're barely maintaining impulse. I can't get any more out of it. Be creative. 0.99

00:09:14.460 Okay, so this is from the very start of the of the first the pilot episode of Voyager.

00:09:19.820 We're introduced to the scrappy crew of Maquis. Obviously, if you've watched Voyager,

00:09:25.740 you recognize several of the characters there who are going to become main characters on the USS

00:09:30.620 Voyager as well. So like I said, we kind of just abandoned this entire plot line almost immediately.

00:09:37.820 As you can see in these scenes here I'm going to play for you, everybody's basically just getting

00:09:42.860 along. We need a way to get that ship out of there. Any ideas? I was thinking we could remodulate a

00:09:47.420 tractor beam to match the subspace interference. It might be enough to cut through the event horizon.

00:09:51.900 Right? Both of those characters there are immediately in Starfleet uniform, almost from the start of the series. I think this is from the third episode.

00:10:06.980 There they are, your staff.

00:10:12.140 I'll try not to break any of their noses.

00:10:14.660 Okay, so they also give Boana the job as chief engineer. She has a very important job on the ship, kind of goes over the head of people who had actually gone to Starfleet Academy and graduated because she's more skilled than they are. She ends up getting that position.

00:10:32.060 So really what we see is the Maquis integrating almost immediately with the rest of the crew.

00:10:37.900 There are a couple of holdouts that have to be dealt with over the course of a couple of episodes.

00:10:43.160 But by about midway through the first season, this plot point is entirely gone.

00:10:49.320 Now, Glenn Oliver, who was a TV and film critic at the time, said this.

00:10:53.600 He said that Voyager offered a cast I very much enjoyed, but it hamstrung itself in two ways almost immediately.

00:10:58.980 The notion of colliding two crews of disparate backgrounds on the bridge of a Federation starship was more or less abandoned by the end of Caretaker, Voyager's opening episode.

00:11:08.780 Any tension had been, sorry, any tension had been, and quest for enlightenment, which could have been hugely beneficial to the series' dramatic structure, was more or less jettisoned from the get-go.

00:11:25.000 And with it went any substantive exploration of the human condition, without which the creation of drama is difficult at best.

00:11:32.060 And so this kind of feeds into a lack of clear messaging within the entire Voyager series.

00:11:41.400 This was caused by decisions by the writers, the showrunners, the studio executives,

00:11:46.560 who gutted massive plot points that had been planned out since, you know, other series.

00:11:53.040 had been written into the pilot episode. The problem was described by Michael Piller as the

00:12:00.720 studio made the executive decision that Voyager needed to be brighter and happier than Deep Space

00:12:05.380 Nine, and to do that they had to get rid of any serious conflicts that the Maquis versus Federation

00:12:11.200 interaction would have given to viewers. The studio wanted an attitude on the USS Voyager that it was

00:12:16.520 one for all and all for one, rather than allowing for the conflict laid out in the pilot episode to

00:12:21.620 play out naturally. Ronald Moore is going to call this Voyager's biggest mistake.

00:12:29.300 Ronald Moore considers there to be a lot of mistakes in Voyager.

00:12:34.220 He said, here are Starfleet officers who had become terrorist resistance fighters, guerrilla

00:12:38.080 warriors. The Federation has got them on the run, and both of these groups are thrown in a ship on

00:12:42.080 another side of the galaxy and forced to live together. You'd think that's a setup for a major

00:12:45.940 show about conflict, but at the end of the pilot, they all put on the Starfleet uniforms, and that's

00:12:50.480 it. So this was a big problem. Ronald Moore is going to end up being the squeaky wheel on Star

00:12:57.080 Trek Voyager. Unfortunately, he is not the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. He ends up just

00:13:01.360 quitting. He does not like working with Rick Berman or Brandon Braga. There's a lot of reasons

00:13:07.060 for that. We'll get into my distaste for both of them in a second. And he ends up taking a lot of

00:13:14.220 the ideas that he wanted to use, which would have been great political commentaries. He takes those

00:13:20.740 with him and basically creates a fuck you show with the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Many of 0.96

00:13:27.640 the plot lines that he uses in that reboot are things that he had pitched on Star Trek Voyager,

00:13:33.620 such as having elections and kind of recreating a system of government and things like that on a

00:13:39.440 far-flung ship that doesn't have any sort of safety net. So he basically takes all those

00:13:44.600 ideas and just runs with them somewhere else. One of the major reasons for this was Brandon

00:13:51.720 Braga. He's one of the writers for the show and eventually the showrunner after season four.

00:13:56.440 And he says, I wasn't a fan of the Maquis thing. That kind of political stuff just bored me. I was

00:14:01.820 more into doing weird sci-fi. I was in weird sci-fi shit mode. While writing my thesis, 0.99

00:14:08.480 I want to explain to you guys I typed the sentence fuck you Rick Berman and Brandon Braga so many 0.98

00:14:14.520 times in texts to both my best friend and my thesis advisor that my phone started to auto 0.99

00:14:20.080 fill in that sentence every time I finished typing the word fuck because that is a recurring theme 0.99

00:14:26.720 for me. My hatred of Braga has been much to my chagrin mildly cooled in years since that. If you 0.99

00:14:33.820 guys have watched the Orville at all. He has been responsible for some of the masterworks of

00:14:40.020 socio-political commentary on gender and transgender issues in that show, which, as you will see as we 0.62

00:14:46.740 get into my discussions of Bran and Braga, is weird. It's really, really weird for him to have

00:14:52.340 taken that shift in these last few years. I still hate him for what he did on Voyager, though,

00:14:58.740 and there are many reasons for it. This had been a conflict between Braga and Michael Pillar in

00:15:04.460 the past. When Braga had actually worked on The Next Gen, he admitted that, and this is a quote,

00:15:09.580 Pillar focused on the humanity, whereas Braga always saw it as a crazy sci-fi show personally,

00:15:16.120 and as a result, my episodes seemed to be reft of any so-called character development.

00:15:21.680 I don't know why he was proud of that. That does not seem like a thing you should be proud of to

00:15:26.180 me. The difference here was that Braga has a lot more control over this series than he had on Next

00:15:32.880 Generation. Michael Peller was, you know, kind of over focusing still on Deep Space Nine to a degree

00:15:39.200 and so Braga kind of and Rick Berman kind of got to run the show over there on Voyager. He wanted

00:15:45.280 Voyager to be very high concept science fiction which is basically the weird shit. He wants to 0.99

00:15:51.540 focus on the weird shit. So the storytelling style is not going to lend itself to the subtleties of 0.99

00:15:56.660 kind of character-driven socio-political commentary that had been in all three of the

00:16:02.160 previous Star Treks. This presented a huge problem for me when I started writing this section of my

00:16:08.200 thesis because the socio-political themes of the next gen and Deep Space Nine have been so clearly

00:16:13.760 focused on the political ramifications of the end of the Cold War. There was just this clear link

00:16:19.460 between the philosophical debates of that era and the shows and what was going on in those shows.

00:16:26.080 This was going to be lacking in Voyager. I knew that from the very start. So I was kind of trying

00:16:31.420 to figure out a way to incorporate my thesis into Voyager. And, you know, I had to think about that.

00:16:39.980 I was, you know, a beleaguered MA student who's sitting here going, fuck, I don't know if I can 0.99

00:16:45.380 make this work. But I was able to kind of grasp one particular point that was socio-politically 0.98

00:16:51.100 relevant. And that was the fact that Voyager was the first show to have a female captain

00:16:56.260 in it. And I realized, hey, the 1990s, big time for third-wave feminism. It's a big, big deal, 1.00

00:17:03.360 right? The 90s are going to give us kind of riot girl feminism, lipstick feminism. We're getting 1.00

00:17:11.460 protests on things about, you know, violence against women. We're having the Anita Hill

00:17:16.880 hearings, things like that. And then we also get this first female, first female captain. 0.98

00:17:23.660 The rise of third wave feminism is a big part of that era. So despite the much less focused 0.98

00:17:30.180 political concept for the series, I ended up focusing on Voyager's choices with women and

00:17:37.440 how they addressed those. And now this was a show that did have a substantial number of main female

00:17:42.720 characters in pretty important roles. I also want to point out that Garrett Wang, who plays Harry

00:17:48.320 Kim in Voyager, has said that essentially they got death threats and bomb threats sent to the

00:17:55.700 Voyager production offices at Paramount Studios because of their decision to have a woman in

00:18:00.920 command on the starship. I actually can't verify that anywhere. All I know is that Garrett Wang

00:18:06.840 has said it in an interview. I can't verify it based on news. So, but it seems like a pretty

00:18:13.260 over-the-top reaction to just a woman being on the front row in the command chair. 0.98

00:18:21.400 So this is a whole new era of Star Trek, though this is the woman's era of Star Trek. Unfortunately, 0.98

00:18:27.120 despite this number of female characters in it, the feminist socio-political message of the series

00:18:33.820 is really muddled and unclear because of a lot of the behind the scenes views of producers and

00:18:39.820 writers, right? The actresses that portrayed them got a lot of flack from writers. They didn't

00:18:45.640 really do their best. And as a result, unlike The Next Gen and Deep Space Nine, Voyager is a really

00:18:53.900 confusing mix of feminist philosophy on one hand and almost a near satire of feminism on the other

00:19:00.580 hand. So this conflict between Voyager and the feminism of the 1990s isn't immediately apparent

00:19:06.660 on screen. On the surface, we get a highly competent female character in multiple leading

00:19:11.460 roles. We have Captain Janeway, we have Boana Torres as the chief engineer, the medic and 0.94

00:19:18.180 botanist Cass, and then eventually Seven of Nine as well, who's an important character in the show.

00:19:23.300 Unfortunately, both on screen and behind the scenes, there's a lot going on about this. So

00:19:28.980 So let's talk about the first two, which is Janeway and Bellana Torres.

00:19:33.380 They fare better on screen than the other two, but they are very objectified by producers behind the scenes.

00:19:41.820 This is one of my favorite things to talk about with this, and it's one of Kate Mulgrew's favorite things to talk about too. 0.98

00:19:47.820 That bloody thing with my hair, endlessly stupid hijinks with my hair. 0.98

00:19:52.120 Not only my hair, my hair, my breasts, my feet, my waist. 1.00

00:19:55.620 there was a woman in the captain's chair and they didn't know what to do. So it was all

00:20:00.080 physicalized. How many times did they change my hairdo in the first six months? Ten, right? You

00:20:05.560 can see it's a crazy amount of hairdos. So Kate Mulgrew plays a very strong captain. She insisted 1.00

00:20:12.220 on playing a character that was not sexualized to the point where she rejected any possibility

00:20:17.260 of sexual or romantic relationships for Janeway throughout the series. They tried to sell her on

00:20:22.600 on a relationship with Chakotay. She shot that down. There's only one real romance and we don't

00:20:29.880 talk about that episode because it's got lizard babies in it. We don't talk about that. We're not

00:20:34.840 bringing that up again. Mulgrew wanted to establish the character as a strong leader. She wanted to

00:20:39.800 break the mold for women and she needed to kind of transcend her gender. She didn't want to be 1.00

00:20:45.160 mistaken for anyone's mother by men who watched the show. So this is a lot of problems that are

00:20:52.200 are going to come up it for this. When Rick Colby was one of the writers on Voyager and he said that

00:21:00.120 for Kate's character I knew they had to find a way of not writing her as a man but writing her as a

00:21:04.200 woman which might have been difficult a thing to do because there were not many female writers on 0.70

00:21:08.680 Star Trek uh yeah this is difficult right they have difficulty writing Janeway because they 1.00

00:21:13.960 don't have female writers in in the writer's room as much and that is a problem in and of itself

00:21:20.680 when talking about the representation of feminism in a TV show that they aren't hiring 1.00

00:21:25.400 female writers, right? Only about 25% of the episodes in Star Trek Voyager

00:21:30.040 had a woman listed in the writing credits. That's still more than say, you know, TNG,

00:21:36.680 which I think was about 17% of their episodes, but still, it's not not ideal.

00:21:42.280 now rick burman he is where things get just gross all right so the challenge with janeway was we

00:21:52.580 wanted her to be a starfleet captain which is a very high-ranking military position of authority

00:21:57.000 but we also wanted her to be feminine sometimes those two things don't go hand in hand if you 1.00

00:22:01.660 look at female officers in the military who make it to the rank of admiral or general they tend to 1.00

00:22:06.300 not be babes. Kate's a very interesting actor. She's got a deep kind of sexy but odd voice. 1.00

00:22:13.200 She managed to be a feminine woman at the same time she was a leader. Now, I want you to realize

00:22:18.240 that my entire facial expression while reading anything by Rick Berman is this. This is what's

00:22:24.060 happening when I deal with anything. Same facial expression I make when dealing with Brandon Braga.

00:22:30.060 It's so gross. It is so gross for him to sit here and talk about how, oh, she's got a sexy voice,

00:22:35.680 or he wanted her to be a babe and it's hard to find a to cast a woman who's a strong military

00:22:41.480 leader as a babe like he never speaks about actors for TNG male actors for TNG or Deep Space Nine in

00:22:51.060 this fashion he does talk about some of the female actresses uh from Deep Space Nine this way as well 0.99

00:22:55.840 because Berman is a piece of shit uh when it comes to women but and probably in other ways as well 0.99

00:23:03.020 um but yeah he he just really focuses on wanting everybody to be sexy all the women to be sexy 1.00

00:23:09.940 now let's talk a little bit about balana torres um so balana is rick berman says more or less the

00:23:18.560 same thing about her as he does about janeway which is that oh she's half klingon half human 0.80

00:23:24.080 again a very hard combination to have a klingon woman who is even vaguely attractive because 0.99

00:23:28.920 Klingons by definition are kind of monstrous. What? This is such a weird take. It is not like 1.00

00:23:35.660 we had had unattractive female characters as Klingons in the past. Like we definitely had. 0.99

00:23:41.720 And it was very odd for them to like focus on her physicality in this way, which they don't do with

00:23:47.700 Worf, right? Like there's no, there's no comments by Berman on the casting of Worf that are like,

00:23:54.920 oh man, it was really hard to find a guy who could be, you know, Klingon and also sexy. Like

00:24:00.540 he doesn't, he doesn't say that about that. It's only focused on women. So like Janeway,

00:24:05.820 Torres is, you know, a very important character and it appears fairly progressive in its portrayal

00:24:12.100 of her on screen. But just like with Janeway, they are obsessed with her physical attractiveness.

00:24:16.840 They're obsessed with her casting as, you know, trying to find a way to make her sexy as well as

00:24:23.260 being half Klingon. This is not not a problem they had with any other with any other male

00:24:28.440 characters for some reason. We also really can't afford to ignore that Klingons throughout the 0.94

00:24:34.840 series have been often a stand-in for people of color in plot lines and they are often played by 0.58

00:24:41.060 black and brown actors which is the case with B'Elanna. She's played by Roxanne Dawson who is

00:24:46.640 Hispanic. And the racial stereotyping of people of color, especially women, as angry or aggressive

00:24:54.460 or hostile is kind of a nasty thing. Now that is not a situation that's unique to Voyager,

00:25:00.820 but it does take on a massively new dimension in a show that was meant to be more feminist,

00:25:06.660 meant to treat women with a little bit more respect and dignity. But with Bran and Braga

00:25:11.360 and Rick Berman running the show, that was never really likely to happen.

00:25:15.500 They kind of play her violence for laughs most of the time, but it is there.

00:25:23.260 Where are you going? You were doing great!

00:25:25.420 You were in perfect position to deliver the death blow.

00:25:27.940 All you had to do was follow through. Come on, let's try it again. 0.66

00:25:30.880 Don't push me, Tom.

00:25:32.620 I am not pushing you, I'm encouraging you.

00:25:35.360 To do what?

00:25:36.520 Try something new.

00:25:38.300 This martial arts program is the best workout I've ever had.

00:25:40.840 No, no, it's more than that. 1.00

00:25:43.300 That working with a batleth is an art. 1.00

00:25:45.280 You have to use your mind and body, your movements. 1.00

00:25:47.180 Look, you may find all of this Klingon stuff really fascinating, 1.00

00:25:50.560 but I don't. 1.00

00:25:51.400 I'm not going to waste my time

00:25:52.560 trying to disembowel a bunch of holographic monsters.

00:25:55.220 I only came down here 1.00

00:25:56.260 because you tricked me into that stupid bat. 1.00

00:25:58.600 Would you watch it? 1.00

00:25:59.320 You could take somebody's head off with that thing. 0.60

00:26:03.680 I have tried this, and now I am finished. 0.58

00:26:06.780 Got it?

00:26:08.160 Look, if you don't like the program,

00:26:10.380 That's fine, but why do you always have to get so hostile?

00:26:13.380 I am not hostile!

00:26:16.760 Now, admittedly, that's a good laugh, right?

00:26:19.100 I'm not hostile, you know, but still, it's a little weird.

00:26:23.580 Now, my issues with Janeway and Torres aside,

00:26:27.720 they are portrayed fairly well on screen.

00:26:31.580 Janeway's obsession with coffee notwithstanding, it was still weird.

00:26:34.600 Um, but the real problem shows up when we get to, uh, Kes and Seven of Nine. This is my biggest

00:26:42.000 concern with the show. It's the concern that I am addressing in the paper I'm delivering later this

00:26:47.040 year, uh, because it is, it is so creepy how they portray these characters. So let's start out with

00:26:54.680 Kes first, since she is, of course, the first to be in the series. Uh, Kes is an Okampa. She's from 1.00

00:26:59.980 an alien race which is canonically very short-lived so I need you to understand that her race lives 0.51

00:27:06.700 and dies within eight or nine human years. When Kes is introduced to the series in season one

00:27:12.800 she's not even two years two human years old. She's existed on the world for less than two human

00:27:21.580 years. So she's very canonically young. Now admittedly she's probably like teenage years

00:27:28.980 for her race, but that's still weird, right? Cass is an alien who joins the Voyager crew

00:27:35.300 briefly after they arrive in the Delta Quadrant. She makes herself very useful. She sets up a 0.99

00:27:39.940 hydroponics garden so they can supplement their food resources. She begins training to be a nurse

00:27:44.520 in the infirmary. These are very important roles on the ship, but it's a very problematic portrayal

00:27:51.220 of her as a female in the series, which we'll get into. So this is quotes from both

00:27:58.760 Winric Colby and Rick Berman on her character. You didn't want a ball buster. You didn't want 1.00

00:28:04.100 to have some tank-like woman saying, follow me. We wanted somebody who could be fragile, 1.00

00:28:08.860 but with a steely will underneath. And then Rick Berman says, for her character, we were looking

00:28:13.180 for a sort of elfin female. So they're looking for something very fragile as a character. This

00:28:18.540 is the original script for the first episode describes her as a dazzling, ethereal beauty, 0.73

00:28:23.960 wayfish and fragile. All of those descriptions are emphasizing a very youthful childlike quality

00:28:30.920 in their focus on this character. These casting notes when combined with her canonically extremely

00:28:36.480 young age was the reason I ended up naming this chapter in my thesis Lolita Complex in Space

00:28:43.020 because it was just such a weird, such a weird area to go with. This is compounded by the fact

00:28:50.620 that this character becomes the object of romantic love or obsession from three different

00:28:56.520 older male characters during her three seasons on this show. And in one case, her body is actually

00:29:02.460 possessed by another being which attempts to seduce another older male figure in the character's life

00:29:07.680 as well. But every single one of her romantic entanglements is with a much older male, even in

00:29:13.720 context of her her age like much older of course technically speaking the doctor is a hologram but

00:29:21.080 that's a whole other issue uh in this episode elogium in season two there is an event that 1.00

00:29:29.720 radically speeds up Cass's natural reproductive process and causes her to go into her uh fertile

00:29:35.560 period much earlier than she should have uh essentially creating a plot in which we have a 0.99

00:29:40.760 the threat of teenage pregnancy or almost prepubescent pregnancy. And she is pressed

00:29:48.040 to decide if she's going to have a child because she only has one opportunity for having a child 1.00

00:29:54.080 in her race. While there's an opportunity in this episode for a discussion of reproductive rights, 1.00

00:30:00.080 consent, all of these things, the episode doesn't really deliver any meaningful or social or

00:30:05.580 social or political commentary, unfortunately. But it is, it's a very odd thing to put this very

00:30:11.620 young canonical character through. The volume on this is really low. Sorry.

00:30:26.860 Essentially, this scene goes into the fact that she can only have children once in her life and 0.64

00:30:34.120 she's going to have to get pregnant now if she ever wants to have children, even though 0.96

00:30:38.400 usually her race doesn't go through this change until they're about six or seven,

00:30:42.980 and she's not even two years old at this point. So very, very creepy scene and context.

00:30:49.740 I just want to find out from you guys, are you hearing sound really low on your end as

00:31:06.280 well or is it sounding clear on your end?

00:31:14.580 it's coming through really low on my side. Okay. Okay. You barely hear it. Okay. Then

00:31:33.500 I'll probably skip some of the videos. I'll just describe them to you as we go through.

00:31:36.820 I don't know what's going on. I didn't have this problem with previous episodes, so previous

00:31:40.560 lectures. I don't know. All right. So additionally, there's a later episode called Before and After

00:31:47.680 in Season 3. Kes is shown marrying and having a child with Tom Paris, who is a significantly older

00:31:54.240 male member of the crew. The child of that union, Linus Paris, also ages physically as quickly as

00:32:01.760 her mother and ends up marrying the much older best friend of Tom Paris, Harry Kim. It's really

00:32:08.520 weird. It's like Child Bride on steroids in both cases. It's just very strange overall

00:32:15.640 what is going on in that particular episode. And I just always find it very disturbing that

00:32:23.640 Linus Parris is like would have been a baby that Harry Kim would have been like an uncle to. And

00:32:29.080 then he marries her and has a baby with her. It's very weird on every level.

00:32:33.880 So major problems with the portrayal of Kes in the show. Then, of course, we get to the point

00:32:42.620 where Kes just gets summarily written off the show because we don't need her anymore. She's not 1.00

00:32:48.220 doing enough for our ratings. Instead, we are going to bring in a new character in the form

00:32:54.380 of Seven of Nine, a rehabilitated Borg drone. And this is the way that she's described by some of

00:33:00.980 the writers talking about creating her character. This woman who was raised in the wild by wolves

00:33:06.680 and now has to be trained to be human again. Ryan spoke about the character rediscovering

00:33:11.680 things like her first memories of laughter and the unruly teenage phase her character

00:33:16.940 eventually goes through. These are all indicative of writing a character who is intentionally

00:33:21.820 written to be emotionally underdeveloped. This is another concept of the Lolita complex in this,

00:33:28.980 right? The same issues that appeared with Kes really appear with Seven of Nine as well. The

00:33:36.260 character is canonically 24 human years old when she joins the crew, but within the context of the

00:33:43.100 plot she had been assimilated by the Borg Collective at the age of six. She loses all of her

00:33:47.640 individuality at that time. It freezes her emotional development at the age of six and

00:33:53.200 restricts any possibility of developing her personality or maturing naturally, right? She's

00:33:59.600 a very, she's very stunted emotionally as a character. Brian Fuller described her as like a

00:34:06.800 woman who'd been raised by wolves, right? So you're trying to give this person an emotional chance to

00:34:13.760 mature, which is going to be weird considering they are going to make her the forefront of every

00:34:19.760 Star Trek fan's sexual awakening for some reason in the 1990s.

00:34:28.080 Now here's another one of those I'm gonna vomit quotes from Brandon Braga. What if we had a Borg

00:34:34.140 character on the show? I mean, there's some conflict for you. Then I called Rick and it

00:34:38.020 was his idea to make it a Borg babe. We formulated the character who had a proper name at the time. 0.90

00:34:43.540 I think it was Perrin, short for Perineum. Yeah. Some of the guys on Deep Space Nine thought we

00:34:51.340 were sellouts, just putting tits and ass on the show. And I was like, yeah, we're putting tits 0.99

00:34:55.280 and ass on the show. Again, it's gross. There's so many reasons to dislike Brandon Braga in the 1.00

00:35:04.080 90s. So many. Kenneth Biller and Tom Mazza, who both worked on Voyager as well, said there's no

00:35:11.480 questioned that at the studio and marketing and producing level they were trying to add TNA to

00:35:16.280 the show. It was a sexy actress playing a sexy character. I remember commenting to my thesis 0.92

00:35:21.960 advisor at one point that I have had to type the words tits and ass way too many times in this 0.99

00:35:26.600 in this master's thesis. Way too many times because it's been quoted way too many times. 0.96

00:35:35.560 Biller also stated that the character, while brought on for her sex appeal,

00:35:39.960 was not written like Jane Fonda's sex kitten Barbarella, but that's not really true. Seven

00:35:46.600 of Nine is written as extremely forthright about sex with other crew members in the episode

00:35:51.480 Revulsion in season four. As soon as Seven of Nine has any indication that Ensign Harry Kim

00:35:57.960 is sexually attracted to her, she immediately offers to copulate with him as a way to just

00:36:02.200 learn about being a human. So sex is kind of the first and foremost on the minds of the writing 0.88

00:36:07.960 and production team when it comes to this character they're kind of obsessed with uh

00:36:12.040 with the idea of her being a sexual character

00:36:19.160 slide is insufficient but it's relaxing don't you think after hours quite

00:36:26.920 unless you wish to change the nature of our affiliation

00:36:31.240 what do you mean i may be new to individuality but i'm not ignorant of human behavior

00:36:35.960 i've noticed your attempts to engage me in idle conversation populate no i mean i i i don't know

00:36:45.820 what i mean all of these elaborate rituals of deception so she she's immediately offering to 0.62

00:36:52.860 have sex with him and he's like ah no probably not a good idea uh it's not not gonna not gonna

00:36:57.360 end well uh but it becomes a problem and just like kes she is kind of the focal point of a lot of 0.94

00:37:04.760 older male characters uh sexual fantasies in this show uh specifically the doctor also a problem

00:37:12.520 uh we're gonna talk about this scene right here show this scene here in uh episode i

00:37:17.800 can't remember the name of this episode right now but yeah do you like them species rosa rubifolia

00:37:28.360 state your intention

00:37:34.880 I wanted to congratulate you

00:37:36.740 on the latest phase of your social development

00:37:38.680 why don't you read the card

00:37:41.460 you are my sunshine

00:37:48.220 these past few days

00:37:52.460 have been

00:37:53.360 unforgettable

00:37:56.780 It's basically he admits to loving her.

00:38:02.240 This next episode is an episode in which he's kind of trapped in his own fantasies, his

00:38:07.760 own imagination, which is a weird thing to have for a hologram, admittedly, but here

00:38:15.140 Here is one of the fantasies that he is acting out in his head.

00:38:31.520 All right. So he's doing nude portraiture of Seven. It's very, just very, very gross

00:38:46.020 in many ways. And there are other episodes in which she's put into very hyper-sexualized

00:38:52.400 positions in order to, you know, deal with different characters. 0.77

00:38:59.800 Now one of the major issues from the show comes with the issue of her costuming. 0.97

00:39:05.840 She is so hyper sexualized in her costume. 0.99

00:39:09.360 She's a gorgeous woman and they wanted to sell her sexuality. 1.00

00:39:13.100 The preoccupation with sex is major in this. 0.96

00:39:16.080 The costume choice for her was a significant step backwards for women in the Star Trek 0.73

00:39:20.600 franchise.

00:39:21.600 I want you to keep in mind this was 1998.

00:39:24.260 This was 30 years since the female bridge crew of the Enterprise had ceased wearing 0.93

00:39:28.580 miniskirts and five years since The Next Generation had done away with that horrible costume that they 0.73

00:39:34.680 had put on Marina Sirtis as Counselor Troi in The Next Generation. And then they just took it all

00:39:41.100 the way back and put her in these skin tight, incredibly uncomfortable outfits. All it took 0.97

00:39:46.820 was Berman and Braga feeling that Voyager needed a little extra sex appeal for them to put her into 1.00

00:39:51.280 skin tight spandex, complete with a specially engineered corset to make the character's breasts

00:39:57.240 as prominent as possible literally there is a interview from 2002 in which uh jerry ryan is on

00:40:04.380 the letterman show talking about the fact that they really wanted uh they really wanted the

00:40:10.040 separation they wanted her her breasts to be very prominent and so they created an entire special 0.99

00:40:15.580 corset for her to wear um it was argued that it was medically necessary because it was skin 0.98

00:40:22.500 regenerative, which is the biggest load of bullshit I've ever heard. So the skin had to be 0.98

00:40:28.740 as skin tight as possible. It was also very impractical as a costume. It required help to

00:40:34.280 dress and undress. She could not dress herself. And it interrupted production for at least 20

00:40:39.620 minutes every time she needed to go to the bathroom because she had to fully remove her 0.84

00:40:43.980 costume and then put it back on. Yeah, this is a great quote from her in an interview.

00:40:50.060 interviewer asked her, I read that there was a corset under there. Oh yeah, apparently they 0.73

00:40:54.820 don't wear bras and underwear in space. It was a very elaborate undergarment. I have to say that

00:40:59.580 Robert Blackman, the costume designer, is an absolute genius. The costume was a real feat

00:41:03.140 in engineering because producers had said they wanted it to look like skin, to be skin regenerative

00:41:08.420 fabric. There's no reason for that. For the breast mound, they wanted two individual breasts

00:41:14.360 and they wanted it to hug every curve like skin and it's just very uncomfortable. It was not

00:41:20.280 not good at all on set. Now I want you to take all of this that I've said about Seven of Nine

00:41:26.280 and I want you to think back to when we were talking about Next Generation and we talked

00:41:31.960 about that episode iBorg in which they recover a Borg drone and begin to you know rehabilitate him

00:41:41.160 right i want you to think about that and think about that in the context of this scene

00:41:47.240 you know it's funny when i first started creating this invasive program i didn't

00:41:50.360 have a problem with it the more i work with you the more that hugh that's what we call him

00:42:01.080 you named the board well it was easier having something to call him

00:42:05.400 oh so now you have a borg named hugh right and there's nothing like what i expected

00:42:11.160 How so? I don't know. It's like he's just some kid who is far away from home. Do you know that

00:42:23.240 you are the second person today to refer to that Borg as though it was some sort of lost child?

00:42:29.260 All right. So in this quote here on the page is directly from my thesis because I think I did a

00:42:34.300 pretty good job explaining myself here. This vastly different treatment of two very similar

00:42:38.840 characters between the two shows shows a great change in how the franchise approach to sociopolitical

00:42:44.360 issues had shifted in just five years. When asked to discuss how saving a Borg from the collective

00:42:49.320 would work, the Next Generation treated Hugh as a traumatized child regaining their sense of self.

00:42:55.240 Voyager treated Seven of Nine as a sex symbol to save their ratings. It's also worth noting that

00:43:01.160 Brannon Braga was also responsible for writing the script for Star Trek First Contact, which also

00:43:07.320 contains an overtly sexualized Borg queen character. He's just very obsessed with this

00:43:13.400 idea of the sexy Borg. So I can't really dive into, you know, individual episodes as much with

00:43:25.040 the show because there just isn't any individual episodes that really deal with socio-political

00:43:30.740 issues. It's just, it's kind of frustrating. It was a very short part of my thesis as a result.

00:43:35.720 we're going to see a little bit more in-depth stuff with Enterprise. It's not going to be great,

00:43:42.080 but it is going to be a little more in-depth. So there's some major successes for Voyager,

00:43:49.040 right? Voyager actually, as many things in the 90s did with Scully and the X-Files, it inspired

00:43:55.940 women to go into STEM and leadership roles. Kate Mulgrew really became kind of a feminist icon as 0.97

00:44:02.880 Janeway, right, wrong, or indifferent. But it had a lot of failures. The studio interfered a lot

00:44:09.520 in its writing and creation. It really diluted a lot of the more progressive themes that previous

00:44:15.880 shows had had. And of course, by choosing to allow Rick Berman and Brandon Braga to just

00:44:21.140 run the show by themselves, essentially, it just created a situation in which there was no way

00:44:26.740 that a feminist message was going to actually, actually coalesce in this show. And Seven of 0.99

00:44:32.640 Nine's legacy, while empowering, and I think that they've done a better job with her character

00:44:37.100 since in later versions, but it was a very exploitative role to be putting a female character

00:44:43.720 in. Also, I want to note that Brandon Braga was sleeping with her at the time, which is another

00:44:49.700 set of problems to be addressed. But we'll get into it here. I'm not trying to shame anybody,

00:44:55.320 but it was weird. Voyager is a huge paradox, basically. It had a step forward in representation,

00:45:02.000 but it was heavily, heavily influenced by the male gaze. And the studio's choices ended up

00:45:07.560 reshaping Star Trek into something that was not about critique of society, that was not about

00:45:13.380 sociopolitical issues. It was purely about ratings and entertainment. Star Trek Voyager was, you know,

00:45:19.700 the first female captain, but it also becomes all about the ratings, all about ratings-driven

00:45:24.480 content. And as a result, this legacy of it is a very complicated thing to deal with. There's a

00:45:30.800 lot of missed opportunities, a lot of things they could have done better, and an awful lot of

00:45:34.980 exploitation of female characters. In the end, the choice to bring on Jerry Ryan as Seven of Nine

00:45:40.440 was effective. It did give Voyager more sex appeal. It accomplished exactly what Braga and

00:45:46.880 Berman wanted, which was series ratings to improve. And Seven of Nine became the face of the series.

00:45:52.660 She was on magazine covers. She was on talk shows. The inclusion of Seven of Nine gave the series a

00:45:57.860 huge boost in ratings, which had been kind of slowly sliding downward since the beginning of

00:46:02.400 the series. We can talk all day about why it was sliding downwards. My personal thought is that

00:46:08.120 maybe if they had done more character-driven socio-political commentary, like people expected

00:46:12.820 from Star Trek, maybe it would have done better. But they decided that they were just going to go

00:46:17.740 with with sex appeal instead and the eyes of the studio this was a huge improvement from the early

00:46:23.340 days of the series when they were getting those supposed bomb threats and death threats over having

00:46:27.900 a female captain so nobody was really upset about it um this became kind of the the linchpin moment

00:46:35.420 for star trek where it stopped being a critique of society and became a reflection of just what

00:46:42.380 society wanted or what men wanted in in many cases ultimately this means that this entry

00:46:48.220 on the franchise was not making an effort to use uh to to actually critique society at all and it

00:46:55.580 was a really disappointment a really big disappointment in my opinion as a result of

00:47:00.620 that as far as what star trek is meant to do uh which is unfortunate thank you so much for coming

00:47:07.500 uh this was you know very fun to do because i like to talk about how much i dislike braga and

00:47:13.660 how much i dislike voyager um maybe i maybe i'm too mean i don't know if you think i'm being too

00:47:20.380 mean to voyager let me know uh and next week we will be back i will not be skipping a week uh

00:47:25.660 we'll be back and talking about star trek enterprise um that's also not going to be a very nice

00:47:32.140 nice episode because i really don't like enterprise for a lot of reasons

00:47:36.700 all right thank you guys for coming and i will see you next week

Bitchy History - February 09, 2025

＂Warp Speed Woke＂ Lecture 4： Voyager and Third Wave Feminism

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