Star Trek: Picard--Thoughts on Trans Futures and the Anxieties They Produce

 CBS released the latest addition to the Star Trek universe in Spring 2020, a ten-episode limited series to run concurrently with their other ST property, Discovery, which is now in season 3. I’m writing this post under the assumption that possible readers are at least somewhat familiar with the broader contours of the Star Trek universe, even as its new multi-verse approach complicates much of the basic, linear chronologies of the original series, the first ten films, and the Next Generation. Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise all fit into the original canon with more-or-less ease, though the introduction of a time war in Enterprise inaugurated an approach to the franchise that began to incorporate non-linear temporalities that challenge the confines of filmic narrative. Then the “new” films and their short-lived fame literally blew up the original chronology by destroying both Romulus (due to a supernova in the future) and Vulcan (due to a Romulan ship traveling backwards in time to the past), both after The Undiscovered Country was premised around the demise of the Klingon Empire. In short, it sucks to be from alien world in Star Trek; or, more specifically, it sucks to be an alien.

 The new universal stage of Star Trek should, in theory, be completely alternative. The destruction of Vulcan occurred before what would be the timeline for the original series. The destruction of Romulus (which occurred first, in the future) provides a narrative closure after the events of Voyager and the Next Gen films. Thus, Discovery, which is ostensibly set in the pre-original series days before Vulcan has gone the way of Alderaan, has become an exploration of alternate dimensions of space/time wherein a ship can appear instantly in any place in the galaxy (Captain Janeway is jealous) and Michael can be an archangel figure literally creating her own story by darting through time from the future to control the present in an omnipotent fashion that starts to beggar belief after a while. I believe in season 3 they are now stuck in the distant future, or maybe it’s all just a holodeck simulation—much as we are all maybe a simulation and our reality is itself a fantasy that boils down to a cat in a box with a jar of radioactive isotopes connected to a hammer hovering over a glass vial of poison. I’ve read about season 3, but I gave up watching midway through season 2 when it just seemed like the show had no future.

 Enter Picard, the COVID installment. This new series focuses on the titular Jean-Luc (JL) in what should be the pleasant days of his retirement, but with a rather significant catch. The series takes place on the original timeline (sans Spock, who is now stuck forever in that alternative timeline because of that whole red matter thing). It is 20 years after the events of the final installment of the Next Gen movie franchise, Nemesis; a bit longer since the events of Insurrection, a film that began with Data going off the ranch due to his programming being compromised and also involves bad guys who use wretchedly bad plastic-surgery to hide their true identities (they literally reconstruct the skin of their faces like the campiest over-done joke about facelifts in the history of film—the joke: too many facelifts and you look kinda inhuman; the moral: too many facelifts and you aren’t human anymore; the deeper implication: plastic surgery is superficial and can’t change the bad soul within). In Nemesis, plastic surgery has gotten even more complex—the Romulans have even made a fake JL, but his unnatural construction doesn’t make for a happy life. Sadly, the concept of species-changing reconstructive surgery is retro-fitted into Discovery with that whole white Klingon turned dark-skinned human thing in season 1—apparently, the best spy is the one who can hide in the actual skin of their enemies, but the better spy is the one who might even forget their origins because of the trauma of transition to their insidious skin-show. From a trans perspective, to frame surgically constructed identity as sneaky and artificial is to imply that one is born, say, Klingon, and always will be Klingon, as Voq so amply demonstrates. Ash Tyler may look human, but remind him of his origins, and even in painfully acquired Terran drag, he is and always will be Klingon (he already stood out anyway—again, he was the white Klingon, and—who’d have guessed it—their future leader). There is no trans identity; there is just the mask of the inherent identity that cannot change.  

 Picard is also set after the explosion of the Romulan Star, from whence has derived the very name of the Romulan Star Empire. Now Romulans are space refugees. JL had played a significant role in helping them resettle and even has two house-servant Romulans who owe him fealty in a feudalist kind of way at his French vineyard. However, approximately 14 years prior to the start of the series, advances in synthetic/android technology seemed to have led to a coup by the androids on Mars, where they were helping terraform the planet for Romulan settlement. These androids lowered the planetary shields, which led to the destruction of the colony and the loss of 90,000-odd lives.

 JL, mourning Data’s death after the events of Nemesis, wants both to continue helping Romulans and continue promoting the development of artificial intelligence to re-achieve the advanced lifeform construction that manifested as Data. As we are reminded throughout the series, Data’s complexity was unique in a time when AI was otherwise nowhere near sophisticated enough to achieve Data’s level of humanity (notably, in First Contact, a significant part of the plot revolves around the Borg grafting actual skin onto Data’s arm to tempt him to betray his human companions—and I could write an entirely separate blog about how the Borg also signify anxieties over post-humanism and artificiality; in fact, they play a significant role as such in Picard).

 After the attack on Mars, JL challenges the Federation’s decisions to scale back resettlement of Romulans and questions the wisdom of banning additional development of AI. He resigns in protest; his resignation is accepted. And que the new series, all these years later. We first re-encounter JL having tea with Data and play chess, a dream sequence in which JL stalls the inevitable outcome (Data wins) because he doesn’t want the game to end—an apt metaphor for JL’s character. He just wants to get out into space again—but the future is a bit like an undiscovered country, and JL turns out to have a tumor in his brain, a residual growth related to his previous Borg implants. He is actually dying from one of the few conditions which the advances of science in his sci-fi world cannot save him, or so it seems. Little does JL know that Data’s “daughter” is on earth and in need of his assistance. But the show begins in just a dream, and on waking to the real world, JL codes as an old man in search of an adventure and still mourning his lost friend from the exile of his vineyard. Only once in the series is there a reference to his artificial heart, which seems to cause no anxiety for anyone. Alas, perhaps humans don’t need a real heart, just a real body. Wholly artificial bodies are bad!  

 So, Romulans, AI, Jean-Luc, and memories of that perfect robot Data—and was he a robot, or did he achieve something more? Or are “robots” just machines; can a robot as a robot be a life form? And what is life, exactly? Or humanity? versus what is artificial? Life itself, or just intelligence?

 In the sutured storylines animating this new incarnation of the original Star Trek universe, I doubt it was the intention of the producers to construct a narrative of trans futurity and its attendant anxieties—though that Michael Chabon helped develop the story certainly offers credibility to queer readings of it—but nonetheless, especially the first half of the series is saturated with rhetoric of transphobia and trans affirmation. Whether or not Picard ever settles the tensions that arise between them is up for debate, no doubt, but one can’t deny the show wouldn’t make meaning without embedding this discourse in its otherwise Sci-Fi frame.

 The features of the series directly relevant to trans discourse—and its attendant transphobia—are as follows:

 1.) Data—the series fundamentally centers on the absent center, the aporia that is Lt. Commander Data. In the Next Gen series, Data’s journey from android to human formed a central part of the weekly/seasonal narrative, to the extent the show had overarching narratives (at the time, TV was still mostly devoted to episodic structures whereas now most mainstream shows read like chapter books). In Nemesis, Data sacrifices himself to save the Enterprise crew, and in Picard, the writers insert the theory that a single positronic neutron (or something?) from Data’s body could be used to recreate Data’s entire neural web. But that is not enough, for Data was not just an ultra-advanced feedback loop of AI learning; he was also a body that could be programmed to feel emotion but was, nonetheless, primarily inorganic—he was a thinking machine. He appears at the start and end of the series, but his legacy is the fulcrum, an actual absent center, around which the plot revolves when we learn that a scientist working to solve the problem of re-creating a being as complex as Data did, in fact, scour the cosmos for the one sub-atomic particle left over from him that could then lead to additional developments even after his death.

 To this extent, Data’s one neutron is zygotic. He cannot reproduce in a sexual fashion similar to the binary heterosexual systems of mammalian life on earth, but his “cell” can be used to create new life—and his creation is framed in the Next Gen series and in Picard as being a true quantum leap in AI evolution, the duplication of which seems impossible without his “cell.” Herein Picard nods to evolutionary biology and Freudianism. First, the spark of life that led to self-reproducing organisms in a primordial sea is the spark that has alluded all subsequent knowledge save that of Victor Frankenstein. Similarly, one Data is all the Data we get—to recreate that spark of life is otherwise impossible. Second, as Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, sex is just an “intimation of immortality” wherein a cell seeks to live even beyond its own death by reproducing its DNA in a new cell that can, in theory, produce its own new cell on to infinity—life is immortal even if any single life is not.

 Data’s quantum leap does not, however, mean he represents irreducible complexity. He had a predecessor, a “brother,” named B4. The name is not even a veiled reference. Before Data was B4, the inhuman android. Data’s perfection is that despite his imperfection, he wants to be human; B4 does not. 

 Picard plays on this blunt taxonomy. On Mars, on the day of the catastrophe when the androids rebel and destroy the colony, the series cannot show ALL the androids suddenly changing their otherwise subservient behavior into mass homicidal maniacs. Rather, the series follows one android working with “his” small group of humans. This android is vaguely like Data—yellow eyes, unnaturally greenish skin. He is the next step in AI, not a thinking machine like Data but a useful worker in a bigger system for the betterment of the galaxy. His designation is F8.

 F8 goes haywire, and suddenly reprograms the computer system to shut down the planetary shields, thus allowing a band of renegade Romulans to destroy the Martian colony—14 years late, JL tells us, the surface of Mars still burns.

 After his role in lowering the shields, F8 takes a laser mining gun and murders his human companions. Then, of course, he turns the gun on himself. Our last visual of him is from the back, as he puts the gun to his own head. He is also unlike Data in that he is bald. His number is printed on the back of his head. F8, or FATE, then kills himself. The symbolism is abundantly clear. To pursue artificial life is suicide for humanity—for all organic things. Indeed, F8, Data, B4, and all the other androids later introduced in the series are substantially superior to their organic counterparts. So, qua Terminator, what will keep them from killing us one day when they realize how awesomely more awesome they are than we could ever be? Or will we organics just sort of, you know, die out—like we do, and all.

 2.) The ban—as a result of the attack on Mars, the Federation institutes a ban on artificial life forms and on experiments to develop them, even if to create ones less given to whatever flaw led to F8’s betrayal (we later learn it was an inside job by the Romulans who hate artificial intelligence, but we aren’t there yet). On the one hand, the ban represents a direct critique of bans on stem cell research; Dana and Riker are now married with children but mourn a child they lost to a simple infection that could have been easily treated with a protocol developed in a positronic matrix, such as the ones necessary to sustain androids like Data, at least according to Star Trek lore. But that ban! Their child dies. Bans on scientific research are bad, the show seems to say.

 It also reads, if more in code, as fear of trans bodies. The entire discourse about “artificial” life is a surrogate for fear of non-human, or more properly, post-humanist, “life.” Powerful forces want to stop technology from being something that serves a “natural order” with humans—and their Romulan, Vulcan, and even Klingon counterparts—on top. But to imply fear of post-humanist science is to defer to humanism, which as a branch of philosophy is embedded with naturalizing rhetoric meant to praise the human form so long as that form is binarily gendered, heterosexist, and “natural” like all non-queer things supposedly are. Per J. Jack Halberstam, trans discourse moves away from such privileged discussions of “natural” bodies with their “natural” roles and functions; and if Halberstam embraces the label of post-humanist, there is also an extent to which heterosexist humanists deny the humanism of trans identity and thus push it into “post-humanism” as a category for inferiority, as if to say, “see, you’ve taken this too far!”

 That last note is where the anti-trans rhetoric emerges in Picard—which is not to say the writers or producers endorse anti-trans discourse so much as they create a narrative that serves as a metaphor for it, as Sci-Fi often does for so many of our societal anxieties. The ban in Picard is, quite literally, a fear of the post-human galaxy overrun with AI, artificially, non-real bodies that are not governed by the biological (read: natural) order of organic life. To call trans bodies artificial, or otherwise uncut them for not being “the real thing” (as Marjorie Garber phrases it in her seminal trans studies essay, “Spare Part”) is nothing new. Even as I write this post, the early days of the Biden administration and its open endorsement of trans rights has already led to a re-emergence of the violent, caustic anti-trans rhetoric of the latter Obama years—never silenced just unnecessary when the Trump administration was so actively undermining trans existence.

 The extent to which artificial and synthetic are used interchangeably in the series, the same critique holds. Only real, natural, and organic lives matter—those unreal, artificial, synthetic things are not to be trusted anymore. 

 3) The Tal-Shiar/Zhat Vash—the former is the secret Romulan police that everyone knows about, but that is now, quite surprisingly, carrying out missions on Earth, which is a stone too far no matter how generous a treaty with the Romulan Star Empire had been post-supernova. More grimly, the Zhat Vash is the secret police inside the secret police—Romulans are the Id in Star Trek for intrigue and secrecy compared to the id that is the Klingon’s unfettered emotions or to id that is the Vulcan’s utter logic. Each are manifestations of distinctly human projections.  Notably, this secret-secret police is specifically determined to rid the galaxy of artificial life. As JL’s Romulan friend asks, “Did you ever notice the complete absence of artificial intelligence on Romulus?” It is a good question. In the Next Gen series, Data is the emblem for a natural progression from tricorders that know everything to ship computers that make the body of the vessel a nearly living thing. Undoubtedly, that kind of wildly powerful technology is moving closer to fully autonomous AI, but before Data (B4?) such a step had not been achieved.

 On Romulus, apparently, even the intermediary steps were greatly underdeveloped for fear that one day AI would take over and all organic life would die (or be killed—at any rate, it would be superfluous). To this extent, the Zhat Vash represents the more reactionary elements of real, 21^st-century American society that actively employs anti-trans rhetoric to advance transphobia to erase trans lives.

 In Picard, members of the Zhat Vash have infiltrated the highest levels of the Federation as well as the Tal-Shiar. Whereas the Tal-Shiar would represent something like the John Birch Society, the Zhat Vash are the actual unregenerate Nazis. Both stand in for right-wing extremism in its multi-dimensional forms in our current reality. Despite being recognized by anyone with half a brain as “bad,” they nonetheless exert enormous influence on the Federation and shift it into a conservativism in direct contrast to the science-based, liberal, inclusive Federation JL once spoke for in the far reaches of the Alpha-quadrant. But let me be clear about what is being signified here—though everyone would say the Tal-Shiar is sketchy and the Zhat Vash crazy and dangerous, nonetheless, the Federation adopts their extremist policies, so long as they can keep distance from the actual group associate with it. Similarly, vast swaths of American society readily embrace right-wing bigotry, so long as its spouted by ostensibly credible sources like Senators and Congresspeople, who could never—just never, I tell you—actually be the crazies in the conspiracy cults.

4.) Elnor and the Qowat Milat—though Elnor’s character promises early in the series to play a significant role, by midway through, it seems like the writers literally don’t know where to put him, so he hides out on the “artifact,” a Borg cube in Romulan space looking for lost causes to defend with his life. He is a member of the Qowat Milat—sort of. The Qowat Milat is an order of assassin nuns from Romulan society. They employ “absolute candor” in their speech and dealings, and at times they are described as being the anti-thesis of the Zhat Vash . . . or the Tal-Shiar. This angle of the narrative remains underdeveloped. They don’t so much embrace artificial intelligence as they spurn the secrecy of their nemeses within Romulan society. And they are also nuns, which is to say that they are an all-female order. And yet, there is Elnor, the boy Qowat Milat.

 Elnor’s family dies in the Romulan supernova. JL arranges for him to be taken in by the Qowat Milat on a refugee planet until he can find a more suitable arrangement. The queer value of an all-female assassins’ sisterhood has precedent in other queer-inflected texts, though they are presented as nuns (ergo, celibate) who have no interests in raising a boy child.

 14 years earlier, JL had been visiting Elnor when the attack on Mars occurred. He promised to return to visit Elnor, who sees JL as a father-figure. JL cannot keep his promise after the attack. Thus, when we meet the now-grown Elnor, he has been raised by the Qowat Milat who, having not other options, raised him as a member of their warrior sisterhood.

 On the one hand, Evan Evagora plays Elnor certainly as a badass ninja warrior, but his build seems suggestively feminine, his voice soft and young. He can code as queer for these reasons alone, and certainly Evagora brings a sex appeal to the series for young male and female fans alike.

 On the other hand, his gender identity is unfixed. Other Romulans recognize that he is a “boy” Qowat Milat, and they regularly call him by feminine pronouns. Certainly, this designation is intended as at least partially insulting, but Elnor never seems to mind, nor flinch. He accepts that he has grown into this role wherein he is read as feminine to match his inclusion into the Qowat Milat that raised him—which also seems unperturbed that it had to bend its rules in the face of an actual global (Romulan) catastrophe. “He” needed a home. He became a sister. The series does not fill any lack in his masculinity by making him lovestruck over any female character, artificial or otherwise. In fact, his most endearing moments are with Raffi and Seven of Nine, both of whom hug him as if he is a lost little boy and they his logical mothers. 

 5.) The Borg—no revival of JL’s character could be complete without the Borg making an appearance, though if the Borg were the end-all of bad guys for a solid 25 years of Star Trek series, the recent reinventions of the original series in the new films and in Discovery have noticeably erased them in favor of other supposed threats. No doubt a few formal scholars and no small number of cultural commentators and fans have commented on the Borg as metaphors for anxieties in the 1980s and 1990s about increasing computerization and alienation in our ever-globalizing economy. Indeed, what is the difference between a device drilled into your head to make you part of the collective and a device you carry in your hand all day to track your movements and feed you news?

 The Borg also represent the fully appendaged body—thanks to nano-technology, being “Borg” is literally having your body adjusted to be a monstrous cyborg, an erasure of humanity into artificial technologies that also erase individuality. Basically, the Borg are post-human, too. The Borg, however, do not create fully autonomous AI. Rather, they integrate body with not-body, real with artificial, thus creating the most frightening monsters of all.

 Except, of course, for the de-Borged. In Picard, we encounter a Cube that has been rejected by the collective. The former Borg on the Cube are now being re-humanized, but their bodies are scarred, their memories unable to erase the trauma of assimilation. They present in the series as grotesqueries, and Romulans and humans alike see them as sub-human more than post-human. Their lives and deaths literally don’t matter—there is an actual point at which thousands are jettisoned, namelessly, into space to die. The incident happens and is barely mentioned again. In Picard, the Borg almost feels like a plot device simply to give JL and his crew a mid-season destination, except for the appearance of Seven of Nine.

 6.) Seven of Nine—one could reasonably argue that the original intention of adding Seven of Nine to the cast of Voyager was to have Jeri Ryan’s statuesque figure in tights on screen as much as possible to appeal to a certain type of Sci-Fi viewer who prefers such things. In Picard, Seven is thoughtfully repurposed. The still gorgeous Ryan plays a hardened space cowboy who also doubles as a mother figure for former Borg like herself. She is a lesbian who was previously duped by a woman who trades in Borg parts, usually by cutting them out of living Borg (Seven manipulates JL and his crew to pay revenge on said former lover, whom she vaporizes with no guilty conscience at all). At the end of the season, she is seen holding hands with Raffi, JL’s female “number one” whose backstory of alcoholism and the loss of a connection with her now grown son haunt her—both were caused by the events on Mars and Raffi’s insistence that Romulans had planned it. Raffi’s “conspiracy theories” are dismissed as crazy, but she was, of course, right. Raffi failed to understand the anti-synth element that motivated the attack—Romulans used artificial lives to cause a small catastrophe to pressure the Federation to ban additional AI development to prevent their apocalyptic belief from coming to fruition, that a synth revolution is soon to destroy all organic life in the galaxy.

 Seven continues her role from Voyager (a riff on JL’s own Borg experience) to humanize the victims of assimilation. For all their grotesque medical-freak-show appearances, former Borg are still subjects with agency and individuality that must be restored to them despite their mangled appearance.

 I’d argue that “former Borg” status is not a nod to reverse transitioning. Rather, the former Borg represent the literally hideous body, mutilated by the loss of their agency. Now they are enfreaked as inhuman but challenge viewers to see the beauty in the destabilized body. If former Borg can live and think freely, then assimilation might be trauma, but life remains, even when partially artificial.

 More pointedly, in a flashback scene, Seven has to euthanize a fellow former Borg when she arrives to late to save him from a surgery to harvest his valuable tech, that is also an integrated part of his body. Seven refers to former Borg as her family—a nod to the idea that shared experience creates family in the absence of biological relatives. These “logical” families are a cornerstone of queer community and identity, as signified by Seven’s lesbianism. Seven and the former Borg represent otherness as a mode of community along deeply queer frames of reference; their bodily otherness signals to ability/disability discourse and queer identity beyond intact bodies figured as natural that are still, by degrees, figuratively queer. That they love and empathize with each other in the aftermath of their shared trauma makes them a visible reminder of another particular community from the late 80s and 90s—the gay community that survived, not without deep emotional and physical trauma, the AIDS crisis. Both are communities seen as expendable by those in power; both find in their collective trauma the beauty not inherent in intimations of immortality but in simple, day-to-day continuance of life.

 7.) Soji/Dahj—Data’s daughters, the lynchpin of the series, are “twins” born in the dual-productive process of android creation (they are made in pairs). Both are works of art—Dr. Jurati, a troubled roboticist who once dreamed of creating autonomous synthetic life, remarks that the craftsmanship that created both was not simply a matter of utility, but that the addition of frivolous, asymmetrical features, such as moles on the face, make Soji, at least, a work of art. Jurati never met Dahj.

 Both are artificial. Neither knows it. Both are androids with actual organic matter incorporated into their matrices. They are as human as humans, and maybe even more human, too. In community, one could say they attain realness, at first because of their ignorance and possibly moreover as they learn their histories, leading Soji on a journey of self-discovery as clear as any mythos recorded by Joseph Campbell. Soji, who lives (Dahj dies in an attack of the Tal-Shiar), is the hero with a thousand faces, and her particular face is actually shared by her own twin and by a previous pair of androids, one of whom also died as a result of fear of these artificial lives.

 Soji becomes a bit of a Pinocchio, always wondering if she is a real girl. JL and others seem determined to agree she is, but not without some hesitation—JL, Riker, and Dana all seem more determined to celebrate Soji as an android despite Soji’s desire to remain “real” in her own mind. Herein lies the muddiness of the series—by midway through, the affirmation of Soji’s uniqueness overtakes the rhetoric of her sameness. It is basically like having a bunch of friends who just have to keep reminding you that it is so totally okay and awesome to be trans when you really want them to see you as just a boy or just a girl or, for that matter, just a person.

 The question in trans discourse about when one is trans and if one can arrive at a cis identity is not without precedent, but the biggest reason Picard was clearly not written with this discourse intentionally in mind is the clumsy way it never quite can resolve it effectively in the second half of the series. Perhaps there is no resolution that functions universally for all trans lives, but the series does not fail for celebrating ambiguities and possibilities. It fails because it can’t control the reverberations of its rhetoric into trans discourse. When it seems aware that it is making a bigger point, it turns to moralizing from an outsider perspective—it is, at best, showing cis people how to be supportive of your trans friends. It is not, necessarily, speaking to a trans audience.

 This is just an outline of the way in which Picard finds itself infused with a trans discourse, and even if that discourse slips away from the show by the latter episodes, it is important to acknowledge that the show is not only speaking to trans identity, but it is also indebted to the discourse that derives therefrom. Indeed, Picard dwells at length on the future of the galaxy itself as we, in our own time, contemplate computerization and automation through considerably more banal but no less relevant lenses. Good Science-fiction is always about the society that produced it and gives voice to the anxieties and tensions of its origins—what will become of us; how will our current policies play out? These questions could become the subject of political debates that diffuse them into partisanship; or, when we are lucky, they animate stories of futurity that speculate on improbabilities that suggest to us the err, or sometimes the grace, of our ways.

 In this regard, Picard may mostly be a treatise on computers and technologies, but it roots these concerns in technologies of the body and in the very nature of the human form itself. Where is the line between the artificial and the real body? Or so it seems to ask. Asked differently, it also broaches the enigmas of metaphysics: who has the right to define the nature of life? And what is natural, by the way?

 To ruminate on these questions, Picard needs a discourse from our present to ground the vagaries of the metaphysical into an experiential realm. Thus, it finds itself employing a discourse about trans identity and (post)humanism to say, however inelegantly, that there is no such thing as synthetic nor artificial life, only life and death, and that which is living should always be privileged, even when it doesn’t fit our preconceived notion of what is natural, organic, or whole.  

 I wouldn’t argue Picard is a trans narrative, but it couldn’t exist without trans narrative. That feels like that kind of statement worth putting to words.