There was a Dean Martin comedy in 1967 that as a Syfy nerd I watched and enjoyed, though it had nothing to do with mainstream science fiction. It was in Martin’s series that were spoofs of Bond movies, where he played secret agent Matt Helm. His mission in The Ambushers was to retrieve an human-created flying saucer that could only be used by women, as its radiation would be lethal to anyone with a Y chromosome.
Fast forward six decades to the latest Star Trek franchise, Starfleet Academy, and The Federation is moving in the same direction. Quirky and adorable Holly Hunter, holding up at 67 way better than any of the Sex and the City actresses, is the chancellor of a newly reconstituted Starfleet Academy, still in San Francisco, and she trains her cadets there and on a new starship, named, what else, The Athena.
Not all the cadets, staff, crew and professors are female, but the majority are. I guess the 32nd century is continuing the trend where girls get BAs not only in women’s studies, queer theory and sociology but MBAs and MDs, while boys stay home and watch Star Trek and play video games until Mike Rowe talks them into getting a job in HVAC maintenance.
Since Paramount Studios is still using human actors and not AI-generated ones, the multi-species, multi-planetary characters who are the cadets and crew all have bilateral symmetry. More amazing, they have tits! Aliens who appear to be evolved from reptiles, fish, birds, insects, snails, or are silicon (not carbon) based life forms, including androids or sentient holograms, all have big titties like they’re mammals ready to give suck-and-serve as wet nurses to any child whose mother ended up on the wrong end of a phaser or disrupter.
The one woman in the majority female cast who doesn’t have breasts was savaged on FOX’s Gutfeld! show last week, by stand-up comic Tig Notaro. Tig has a dry sense of humor, usually with stories about her home life, her wife (actress Stephanie Allynne), their children and pets. (She and her wife sometimes disagree about things, like whether it is appropriate to “meow” at a kitten, since as her wife—portrayed as a little silly, a bit of a ditz—worries Tig may be saying something inappropriate). Notaro had breast cancer sometime back and a double mastectomy. A guest on the Gutfeld! panel first implied she’s a transman, referring to her as having had “top surgery.” (If Gutfeld! regular Kat Timpf, also a stand-up comic, who recently had a double mastectomy, hadn’t been on maternity leave, I suspect she would’ve corrected this.) The panelist then went on to joke that Notaro, “the lesbian in the yellow Star Trek uniform, ran her shuttlecraft over the Federation security officer telling her to land and get out,” referring to the Minnesota-visiting lesbians who mistook larping role play fun for interacting with law enforcement.
Tig did have one of the most boring pieces of dialogue in the first two episodes, where’s she’s a schoolmarm teaching “temporal mechanics,” and has to manage the classroom behavior of one of the lead characters, juvenile delinquent (and brilliant materials scientist and hacker) Caleb Mir, played by a multi-ethnic British newcomer, Sandro Rosta.
The Gutfeld! people (almost all comics) were sentencing the new Starfleet Academy for the crime of failing to entertain. I think they’re wrong. They thought that all the chicks and dykes proved this was just another DEI vanity project, like the failed Star Wars product, The Acolyte. I’m not sure the Gutfelders should even be allowed to judge here—they aren’t even savvy about who’s a lesbian. Holly Hunter’s number two is played by British lesbian stand-up comic, Gina Yashere, who, if you catch her on Netflix is a Joke radio, voice only, you’d assume is a guy. Yashere plays a reptilian alien, presumably female, with big ole titties! Perhaps the Starfleet Academy cafeteria or bar will show the cadets enjoying lizard ice cream. (They should have on black American lesbian comic Sam Jay for irony, since her best-known bit is full of anti-ET bigotry, as she says that white people are aliens not of Earth, as Terra’s life-giving Sol burns and kills them.)
A funny problem for DEI in Syfy emerged during previous shows in the Star Trek franchise and continues here: good-looking, bi-racial actors, like Sandro Rosta, seem to play humans (and human-looking aliens), less beautiful or darker actors have to wear alien face, like ethnically Nigerian Gina Yashere or ethnically Mandingo British actor Karim Diane, who plays a Klingon. What’s up with that, progressive Hollywood?
I don’t like shows that gratuitously replace historical European (Chinese, etc.) characters with other races, or men with women, especially if something good in the original story is sacrificed. But that’s not happening here. There aren’t many white men, and men are in the minority. But everyone pulls their weight in the two episodes released. The major story arcs so far are a cadet looking for his mom, a recently escaped ex-con in league with an alien super-villain played by Paul Giamatti in full perv mode, and Holly Hunter’s feelings about her lost (bi-racial, of course) child. So a female cast was in the cards, and so far they’re dealt fairly.
