Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Hugh Culber

One of the most interesting points about Hugh Culber is that, as a character, he neatly represents the normality, almost the banality of gay life, at least to the extent that a fictional, spacefaring, time-travelling doctor who returns from the dead can. We gays really are just like everybody else! There is irony, then, to the title of this entry — an homage to another Wilson Cruz role — in that, just like any couple, it's not all been plain sailing (warping? Spore jumping?) for Hugh and Paul.

Both have been dubbed 'Space Dads' by fans, but the road to happy families was fraught with pitfalls. When Culber got home from the mycelial realm, he had a brand new, 'pristine' body, no (physical) scars, but had been emotionally uprooted by the incident.

Culber began to question his romantic relationship and was planning to leave Discovery to join the Enterprise, but after Stamets was gravely injured in the battle with Control, Culber realised that home was with his husband. As Saru had put it to him, "Perhaps, in feeling less like you were, you are more like who you were meant to become".

The doctor then had to face the emotional consequences when Discovery hightailed it to the future, with very little opportunity for respite as it was one calamity after another. In all of this, however, his family grew to include two new members, Gray and Adira Tal, played respectively by actors Ian Alexander and Blu del Barrio, blazing their own trail for LGBTQIA+ representation in Star Trek.