[COLUMN] 'What is Starfleet?' is One of the Best Star Trek Episodes in Years | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains full spoilers for the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “What is Starfleet?”, which premiered on Paramount+ this week. It’s great, one of the very best episodes Strange New Worlds has ever produced and one of the best episodes of Star Trek in years.

To its credit, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is at least formally inventive.

In returning to the classic episodic format of the Rick Berman era, Strange New Worlds might have sacrificed a lot of the complexity and ambition of contemporary television, but it has been willing to try new things. The show’s second season, for example, featured “Subspace Rhapsody”, a musical episode including songs composed by Kay Hanley and Tom Polce, and blended live action and animation in “Those Old Scientists.”

While the quality of those individual episodes is debatable – “Subspace Rhapsody” is no “Once More With Feeling” and “Those Old Scientists” is no “Lux” – the show deserves praise for its willingness to play with the boundaries of what is possible within an individual episode of Star Trek. At the same time, it had been hard not to long for an episode of Strange New Worlds that blends that sort of formal inventiveness with the ambition of something like “Under the Cloak of War.”

It feels like Strange New Worlds has finally accomplished this with “What is Starfleet?”, the seventh episode of the show’s third season. Picking up on threads set up in the season’s second episode, “Wedding Bell Blues”, “What is Starfleet?” is essentially a forty-minute in-universe documentary about Starfleet produced by Beto Ortegas (Mynor Lüken), the brother of series regular and Enterprise helmswoman Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia).

The episode is formally ambitious, adopting the structure of a contemporary Netflix documentary following the crew of the USS Enterprise through one of their missions in the midst of a conflict between Lutani VII and its sister planet Kasar, involving the ferrying of an exotic space-based lifeform known as a Jikaru. It is just a really clever way to tell this story. Star Trek has plenty of episodes about the crew wading into interstellar conflicts, but none that look and feel like “What is Starfleet?”

To be fair, this is not the first time that Star Trek has attempted to use this format to tell a story. On the second season of Star Trek: Voyager, showrunner Michael Piller originally planned for the episode “Investigations” to unfold primarily from the perspective of the show-within-the-show, A Briefing with Neelix, as the Talaxian Neelix (Ethan Phillips) uncovered a conspiracy. However, according to writer Jeri Taylor, the idea was nixed by the studio during “the shooting of that episode.”

As with so many of these experimental episodes, Strange New Worlds is not so much breaking new ground as it is embracing ideas already executed by other episodic shows. The X-Files had “X-Cops.” Doctor Who had “Sleep No More.” Community had “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking” and “Documentary Filmmaking: Redux.” Documentary Now! is an entire episodic television series dedicated to the mockumentary form. Still, this is a new approach to Star Trek after 950 episodes.

It is worth acknowledging the work of director Sharon Lewis, who has extensive experience in the modern television documentary. She hosted the panel show counterSpin and the variety series ZeD for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She has directed documentaries Disruptor Conductor and With Wonder. As such, she understands the visual language of this sort of filmmaking, and so is able to lend “What is Starfleet?” a verisimilitude that makes it genuinely engaging.

Even just formally, “What is Starfleet?” is a lot of fun, particularly the way that it employs the conventions of the modern documentary. Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) is always keenly aware of the camera, trying to keep track of it without looking like he’s keeping track. Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) repeatedly interacts with the camera, swatting it away or crashing into it. There is lots of soft focus, along with canted angles and archive footage, along with voyeuristic framing.

However, the real joy of “What is Starfleet?” comes from the way in which the episode uses this framing device to explore and interrogate the larger Star Trek franchise by inviting the audience to consider these characters and their world from an outsider’s perspective. Beto is not a Starfleet officer. He is not a member of the senior staff on the flagship of the Federation. He has a certain detachment from the show’s primary cast, recalling classic Star Trek episodes like “Lower Decks.”

This was what made Star Trek: Deep Space Nine the best series in the Star Trek franchise. Through characters like Kira (Nana Visitor), Odo (Rene Auberjonois), Quark (Armin Shimerman), Garak (Andrew Robinson) and even Jake Sisko (Cirroc Lofton), the show was able to provide a more holistic view of the larger Star Trek universe, understanding that the Federation and Starfleet were really just one perspective rather than an unquestionable monolith.

Beto is forced to observe the plot of “What is Starfleet?” from outside the show’s established relationships. This works well in basic storytelling terms, allowing the episode to generate tension by withholding information from the viewer. However, this set-up also allows Beto to ask legitimately challenging questions of characters that the show tends to treat as unequivocal heroes. The audience trusts these characters because they’ve spent two dozen hours with them. Beto hasn’t.

“Have you ever refused an order?” Beto asks Pike at one point. Pike smugly replies, “I think I can confidently say that that’s classified.” Beto asks Joseph M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) , who killed a Klingon (Robert Wisdom) in his own Sick Bay in “Under the Cloak of War”, “Have you ever scrubbed the surveillance logs from Sick Bay?” M’Benga offers a very defensive answer, “I cannot recall.” Without being pressed, M’Benga repeats his statement. “I cannot recall.”

More to the point, Beto can ask bigger questions about the Star Trek universe. The episode is bookended by a question: “What separates a Federation from an Empire?” As Beto justifies the comparison, “Both colonise. Both impose their laws and doctrines on others.” He challenges the viewer to assess the characters as present to them. “Are they explorers as they claim?” Beto inquires. “Or soldiers as they appear?”

One of the larger issues with the modern era of Star Trek is the strange sense that the Federation and Starfleet are something of a cult. Characters will often repeat the mantra “we are Starfleet” without any attempt to define what Starfleet actually is. It occasionally feels a little bit like modelling fandom, characters swearing fidelity to the brand as is increasingly common in contemporary culture like The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

It would be very easy for “What is Starfleet?” to sidestep Beto’s questions and shrug them off as unfair or cynical. It is to the episode’s credit that it grapples with them head-on. One of the advantages of the documentary format is that it creates a compelling dramatic tension. The characters are all aware of the cameras, and so are performing. There is a dissonance between how they present themselves – how they frame the narrative – and what they actually reveal.

This is basic dramatic storytelling – this tension between what characters say and how they act is why “Under the Cloak of War” is the best episode of Strange New Worlds to date. However, like so much of modern streaming entertainment, modern Star Trek is full of characters bluntly expositing their entire internal lives to ensure that “viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” Luckily, the documentary format forces the show to embrace ambiguity.

Beto asks various characters why they enlisted, and the stories that they volunteer explain a lot about their devotion to the organization. “Before Starfleet, I was adrift,” admits Ensign Nyoto Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding). “I’d lost my family. I’d lost myself, really. Starfleet sent me in a direction at just the right time.” Before giving a more rehearsed answer, Erica confesses, “For me, joining Starfleet was something I could control. Mom was dying. I couldn’t do anything about it. I was lost. Scared.”

There is a sense in “What is Starfleet?” that a certain kind of individual is drawn to Starfleet. “Without Starfleet, I’d either be dead or undisciplined,” argues La'An Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong). Starfleet provides a sense of structure and a binding ideology that is attractive to those people who need such things. It makes sense that the institution would become part of a larger identity for them.

One of the central tensions of the larger Star Trek franchise is the question of whether Starfleet is a military or a scientific institution. “Starfleet is not a military organisation,” insisted Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) in “Peak Performance.” “Its purpose is exploration.” In Star Trek Into Darkness, Scotty (Simon Pegg) confronts Kirk (Chris Pine), “This is clearly a military operation. ls that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers.”

This question has become particularly pointed in the 21st century, in the aftermath of the War on Terror. Star Trek is a very American vision of the future, Kennedy’s “New Frontier” extrapolated to a Final Frontier. The War on Terror provided a challenge to the American exceptionalism that underpinned the Star Trek franchise, as most heavily articulated during the run of Star Trek: Enterprise and in Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond.

There have certainly been shades of this militarism to Strange New Worlds, particularly in the show’s treatment of the Gorn as the sort of monstrous alien other that justifies complete eradication. One of the interesting aspects of the second half of this third season is a willingness to challenge the franchise’s inherent humanism by daring to ask if humans are inherently special or different, in a way that feels in conversation with some of Strange New World’s more questionable impulses.

“What is Starfleet?” arrives directly after "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail", an episode in which the Enterprise is attacked by a bunch of monstrous pirates. The big reveal at the end is that these pirates are human, the descendants of a mission sent into space shortly before First Contact. As Pelia (Carol Kane) explains, “They were the best of us. The most optimistic. Searching for a way to carry on the flame of life.” Were they so different from Starfleet? Or the Gorn?

“What is Starfleet?” expresses this idea through metaphor, with the discovery that the space-based organism that the Enterprise has been sent to escort to Lutani VII, the Jikaru, is a peaceful entity that has been turned into a weapon of mass destruction. The creature has become so exhausted and traumatized that it longs for death. “She’s tired of being a weapon,” M’Benga explains. “She wants to die,” Uhuru argues. “It’s the only way she can find peace.”

The Jikaru feels at times like a metaphor for the militaristic impulses within Starfleet and Star Trek. So much of the episode comes from the tension of the crew having to lie to Beto about their moral certainty. “Do you believe in every mission?” he asks Uhura. She replies, “Yes. Of course I do.” Later, he calls her out, “You’re all just following orders and none of you like it.” Having no alternative but to help the creature take its own life, Pike confesses, “I didn’t like what I had to do, but I did it.”

It is a very complicated and nuanced exploration of the relationship between the crew and the institution, using the documentary format to demonstrate a tension that is often elided in the modern Star Trek franchise’s “feel good” approach to Starfleet and the Federation. Sometimes this institution forces these people to do things that they don’t want to do and to be things that they don’t want to be. “What is Starfleet?” avoids a trite feel-good ending.

If Starfleet and the Federation are best understood as idealistic extrapolations of American self-image, the “What is Starfleet?” becomes a much more loaded question. It makes sense that Strange New Worlds would demonstrate the same sort of ambivalence that informed Thunderbolts*’ recent meditations on the current state of American exceptionalism. American institutions and ideals are not what they were even a decade ago, let alone a generation ago.

“What is Starfleet?” resolves the titular question by pushing away from the institution. “What is Starfleet?” Uhura asks towards the end of the episode. “It’s the people. All of us. We make Starfleet what it is. Not the other way around.” It recalls Bucky Barnes’ (Sebastian Stan) observation in Thunderbolts* that Kierkegaard believed “that it was up to individuals to create values.” “What is Starfleet?” understands that the answer might be hard to define, but the question is worth asking.