The arrival of the first trailer for Star Trek: Discovery was an exciting one for fans of the franchise; this is, after all, the first Star Trek television series since Enterprise ended in 2005. But of course, this being the internet, the trailer also attracted quite a few trolls, who flocked like tribbles to a buffet to criticize the casting of Sonequa Martin-Green and Michelle Yeoh as First Officer Michael Burnham and Captain Philippa Georgiou, respectively. NextShark has rounded up a few of these complaints, but to spare you the effort of actually reading their ilk, here’s an overview: They hate how “politically correct” it is that two women of color are the leads in a sci-fi show. Some of them don’t like Michelle Yeoh’s accent. Some use racial slurs to refer to Martin-Green. Some use a single line from the original Star Trek to explain why it’s simply impossible for a woman to be the captain of a starship. At least one called the show “white genocide in space.”
Actor George Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu on the original Star Trek, spoke about the dissatisfaction of these few but vocal critics with MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid: “Today in this society we have alien lifeforms that we call trolls. These trolls carry on without knowing what they’re talking about and knowing even less about the history of what they’re talking about—and some of them go on to be presidents of nations.” (Editor’s note: Slate pays for its content to be distributed on social media through a company called the Social Edge, whose social sharing clients include George Takei.)
Takei went on to explain why acting as though the diversity of this show is some kind of 21st-century social justice experiment is ridiculous, invoking the guiding principle of Star Trek as established in the 1960s: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. “Gene Roddenberry created this with the idea of finding strength in our diversity.” The original Star Trek, of course, was groundbreaking for featuring an Asian helmsman, a Russian navigator (during the Cold War, no less), and a black woman serving as communications officer. Later iterations of the franchise would give us the first black and female captains, while the new film reboots, as regressive as they are in some other ways, made Takei’s character, now played by John Cho, the first openly gay crewmember, another landmark for the franchise.
But as Takei points out, even setting the franchise’s radical history of casting aside, Star Trek itself is fundamentally about navigating and accepting differences, imagining a future where humankind’s mission is literally to meet and learn about other races. “We boldly went where we hadn’t gone before because we were curious about what’s out there. When you go out into space, you’re going to have even greater diversity.” Which makes it even more of a head-scratcher to figure out what, exactly, attracted these trolls to such a fundamentally progressive franchise in the first place.
