Actor Clifton Duncan Laments How Star Trek Treats Fans As "Toxic" By Comparing New Woke Series To Fan-Favorite Deep Space 9
Star Trek has been a hotbed of identity politics, shifting the focus of recent shows to pushing Hollywood's leftist agendas in recent years. Actor Clifton Duncan criticized their hypocrisy in a recent post about fan reactions to Deep Space 9 and Captain Benjamin Sisko as compared to the current year's offerings.
When Alex Kurtzman took over Star Trek for Paramount+, it became apparent that instead of exploring strange new worlds, the focus would be on exploring strange new genders. The Star Trek: Discovery show went from cool concepts of science to turning Klingons into an allegory for Donald Trump supporters. The characters were insufferable stereotypes of their identity politics niches: Michael Burhman being the lead Mary Sue who seemed to be able to accomplish everything through “black girl magic,” along with plotlines following characters who seemed to do nothing other than homosexual romance scenes.
It became worse in subsequent seasons of Discovery, where they introduced a Trill character to make heavy-handed lectures on transgenderism, including the character pushing they/them pronouns on the crew.
In Star Trek: Picard, the show famously turned Seven of Nine into a lesbian even though she’d been shown to have a relationship with Chakotay at the end of Voyager. The show, instead of focusing on Picard, showed him as a hapless, frail old man where the strong female leads solved the problems for him.
The animated parody show Lower Decks was no better, again featuring a black Mary Sue caricature of Beckett Mariner, who they later revealed to be bisexual. It seems they can’t have any plotline that doesn’t focus hard on identity politics.
Star Trek, to some extent, was always a show about how everyone in humanity could work together, at least in Gene Roddenberry’s vision, but the focus was never on these divisive political issues but instead focused outward into exploration, manifest destiny, and human exceptionalism.
Actor Clifton Duncan took notice of this on X this week in a post that went viral. He fondly recalled Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and how the show had a black captain, but it was universally accepted and hailed by many as the best iteration of the show because it didn’t paint Captain Sisko, played by actor Avery Brooks as a victim of his blackness. His character had depth and good storytelling, feeling natural, and Hollywood didn’t use it for a cynical marketing scheme to attack fans.
He posted, “30 years ago a black man was the lead in a Star Trek show that ran 7 seasons, got 31 Emmy nominations, and was one of the most acclaimed series in the franchise No one was outraged No one boycotted No one cared People who loved this show back then are called "toxic fans" today.”
X account Sheepisidian, the community manager of Eric July’s Rippaverse comic book line, reiterated the point, saying, “And even to this day, he holds the view of "I don't approach roles as a Black man. I approach roles as a man."
Pop culture analyst RazorFirst agreed, “Avery Brooks is one of the most underrated actors in all of Hollywood. He didn't do much (American History X and a couple other things) but he was excellent in absolutely everything he did.”
Hollywood doesn’t seem to understand these days that the concept of Star Trek was about humanity as a whole and not dividing into subsets based on race, gender, or sexual fetishes. It’s why the current series rings false and feels like lectures to the audience on how they should vote rather than space exploration shows meant to entertain with interesting science fiction concepts.
With ratings continuing to suffer and fans not seeming thrilled with the newest installments of Section 31 and Starfleet Academy forthcoming. Will they learn before the franchise dies completely?
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Agreed. Brooks played Sisko, a moral man forced to live in an amoral sector of the galaxy.
Thank the Bajoran gods I can still see these on the H & I channel.