10 Times Star Trek: The Next Generation Went Woke

"They wanted proof. I'm going to give it to them," said Doctor Serova before blowing up her ship, and herself along with it, to prove her theory about the damaging effects of warp drive on subspace. That kind of eco-radicalism, as depicted in season seven's Force of Nature, would easily be decried as 'woke' in its co-opted form these days. 

If we take a trip back to 1993, however, it would be difficult to argue that The Next Generation was ahead of its time on this particular issue. It was, at least, trying to keep up with it.

The real world had certainly been 'woke' to environmentalism for quite some time before 1993. The 1970s and the 1980s had been a hotbed of climate activism, with the first Earth Day taking place back in April 1970. Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior, the ship, had been sailing the seas since 1978, campaigning to save the whales (a cause dear to Star Trek as well, of course) and protesting against nuclear testing and the dumping of nuclear waste. In 1985, the Rainbow Warrior was bombed and sunk by French secret service agents, causing the death of Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira. The 1990s were also a turning point for public and political awareness of climate change following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, aka the 'Earth Summit,' of 1992.

No matter how much we love it, Star Trek is just a television show. The stakes shouldn't be much higher than entertainment, and they definitely aren't life or death. In that, we've perhaps all been a little unkind to Force of Nature. The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion called the episode a "disappointing though worthwhile 'message' show," whilst its writer, Naren Shankar, commented, "it wasn't one of my finer moments." Jeri Taylor thought it was a "doomed premise" to start with.

In the end, being 'woke' doesn't mean you have to change the world, it simply means, to paraphrase the comedian Lotus Weinstock, that you should be able to leave the room with a little dignity. When it came to representing the issues that mattered, The Next Generation, by and large, and Force of Nature too, managed to leave the room with its head held high.