A little while ago I made a Trek, Actually video about how the franchise has
depicted disability over the years. I cited lots of examples of characters who had
a disability of one kind or another, talked about how those disabilities were portrayed,
but there was one example I left out of that video that a lot of you mentioned in the comments.
It’s an example that raises a lot of interesting questions about Star Trek and the fictional world
it shows us, and has some important things to tell us about the real world we live in
every day. So, I wanted to talk about it in this video, and as you’ve probably already guessed,
because you saw the title and the thumbnail, the example I’m talking about is this guy:
Deep Space Nine’s Doctor Julian Bashir.
Unlike other disabled characters in Star Trek, Geordi, for example, Julian’s disability isn’t
apparent when we first meet him. There’s a good reason for that: the writers of
the show hadn’t thought of it yet. Julian’s disability is a retcon — it’s not introduced
until relatively late in the show’s run, about two-thirds of the way through season five — so,
it’s fair to say that for most of Deep Space Nine, Julian isn’t actually a disabled person,
because that facet of his character literally hasn’t been invented yet.
Actually, it’s also fair to say that Julian isn’t disabled for the rest
of Deep Space Nine’s run after the retcon, because
the retcon doesn’t establish that Julian has a disability, but that he used to have one.
This all comes from the episode “Doctor Bashir, I Presume?” It’s a noteworthy show
for a couple of reasons. Not only does it retcon Julian in ways I’m about to discuss,
it also features a crossover with the other Star Trek series that was in production at the time,
Star Trek: Voyager. Well, it’s sort of a crossover — Robert Picardo, who plays the holographic Doctor
on Voyager, guest stars, but not as the Doctor — as Lewis Zimmerman, the scientist
who created the Emergency Medical Hologram and patterned its physical appearance after himself.
Zimmerman visits Deep Space Nine because he’s been working on a new kind of medical hologram,
a long-term model capable of permanently replacing biological doctors in locations
where Starfleet might not want to risk stationing somebody. And who better to use
as a basis for the look and personality of this new holo-doc than Julian Bashir, who’s just
about the best doctor there is, and ain’t exactly hard on the eyes, either, know what I’m sayin’?
As part of his research, Zimmerman conducts an extensive background check into Julian
that includes interviewing all his friends, trying to fuck his ex-girlfriend,
and contacting his parents. That last one, especially, presents a problem for Julian,
who has been estranged from his parents for years. Soon after they arrive on the station, the reason
for their icy relationship is revealed: when he was a child, Julian’s parents had him undergo a
dangerous and illegal form of genetic engineering to remove serious learning disabilities.
Julian’s intellect and athleticism are the products of that genetic engineering,
but because that sort of thing has been banned in the Federation for centuries, it could cost
him his career in Starfleet and send his parents to prison if the truth were ever to come out.
While Julian has unquestionably enjoyed many benefits thanks to the procedure, he’s also
carried around a lot of resentment toward his parents because of it. Yes, he’s in Starfleet,
he’s led an amazing, exciting, and important life that few people could even dream of,
and yes, his parents gave him that, but they also gave him a secret that could cost him everything.
And there’s another question at the heart of Julian’s bitterness
toward his parents that is even more fundamental:
Why wasn’t I good enough the way I was? Why did you think you had to “fix” me?
Julian’s parents do have an answer to that question. It’s an answer that tells us something
about them, and something about the society in which they live, and that hints at the Federation
being less of a utopia than we’ve long been told. Of course, this is Deep Space Nine — they’re
always dropping hints like that! Taking the shine off the Federation is kinda their thing! That and
wacky Ferengi-centered hijinx! Heh. Those darn, big-eared bozos, with their schemes and whatnot.
Anyway, after Zimmerman discovers Julian’s secret, the episode has a big scene
where Julian and his parents really have it out. Facing the possibility of being kicked out of
Starfleet because of being genetically engineered, Julian accuses his father,
Richard — played by Brian George, the South Asian Charlie Chaplin — don’t tell me I’m the
only one who sees it! — of designing a better son to replace the defective one he was given.
“You don’t understand, Jules,” Richard tells his son, “You never did.”
And Julian’s like, “Don’t be callin’ me Jules,
old man. I haven’t gone by that name since I was a teenager and I found out what you did to me.”
Richard fires back, “What we did was save you from a mediocre life of underachievement.”
And Julian says “You did what you did because you couldn’t stand having a son
who didn’t measure up!”
It’s at this point that Amsha, Julian’s mother, speaks up. She tells Julian he’s wrong,
it’s not because they were ashamed of him.
“You don’t have kids of your own, so you don’t know what it’s like,” she says. “You see your
child trying, but falling further behind every day. And you wonder if it was something you did.
You can condemn us for what we did, but we did it because you were our son and we loved you.”
Julian seems moved by what his mother says, and he softens toward both his
parents from that point on. And in the next scene, Richard makes a personal sacrifice
to save Julian’s Starfleet career, making a deal with an admiral to plead guilty to
illegal genetic engineering and serve two years at a penal colony in New Zealand — hey, I wonder
if he’ll get Tom Paris’s old cell? — in exchange for Julian being allowed to remain in the service.
That’s all well and good, but the episode never really addresses the serious problem in Federation
society that is indirectly revealed by the fact that Julian’s parents thought it was necessary
to genetically engineer him to alleviate his learning disabilities. We’ve been told over
and over again how great life on Earth in the 23rd and 24th centuries is, how there’s
no poverty, no hunger, how the driving force in life is working to improve oneself and the world.
And yet, judging by what we’re told about the example of young Jules Bashir,
it seems like life for people with learning disabilities can still be pretty shitty.
I mention this in my previous video about the depiction of disability in Star Trek,
but it bears repeating: a lot of the difficulties experienced by disabled people are
not the unavoidable results of the disabilities themselves, but the products of society having
been arranged without disabled people in mind. So, if young Jules Bashir was struggling to
such an extent that his parents found it necessary to have him undergo a dangerous
and illegal genetic engineering treatment, we can infer that the society in which they lived
didn’t treat people with disabilities, or at least with those kinds of disabilities, very well.
Or, if Julian’s accusation is correct, despite his mother’s insistence to the contrary, and
he was subjected to the procedure because his parents, or at least his father,
found his disability personally embarrassing, we can infer that the society in which they lived
didn’t regard disabled people very highly, that being disabled, or being the parent of
a disabled person, was looked upon in such a way that it became a source of shame.
Either way, it doesn’t sound like that highly evolved of a civilization. In fact, it sounds
a lot like our own civilization back here in the backwards and barbaric early 21st century.
This sort of thing happens in Star Trek from time to time, a story will hinge on something
not being as advanced, either socially or technologically, as we would expect it to be
given what else we know about the story world. An evolved 24th century human will exhibit a form of
prejudice that they’ve supposedly grown beyond, or an enlightened and benevolent institution
like Starfleet or the Federation will turn out to be corrupted or morally compromised in some way
that feels more appropriate for our time than for the optimistic and idealized future of the show.
Fans will often criticize the show for instances like this, chalk them up to lazy writing,
or complain that these apparent inconsistencies break their suspension of disbelief or
spoil the utopian setting to which they’ve grown attached. But I don’t think such criticisms
or complaints are necessarily fair. There are a couple of reasons why I think that.
First, while the society in general may be what we could consider evolved and enlightened,
that doesn’t mean every individual member of that society has to be.
We have examples of such individuals in Star Trek starting at almost the very beginning: remember
this asshole from the classic first season Original Series episode “Balance of Terror,”
the guy who Kirk had to literally tell to stop being such a bigot?
So, maybe most people in the Federation are more enlightened in the way they view disabilities,
but Julian’s old man is still kind of a prick about it. I could buy that.
Also, social progress of one form doesn’t guarantee progress of another form,
even if the problems are extremely similar. You might think that once our eyes have been opened
to inequality of one kind, it would lead us to stand against inequalities of other kinds,
too, but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. There are people — many people, unfortunately,
who recognize that racism is bad, but have no problem with prejudice against
gay people, or trans people, or people who belong to some other category they don’t like.
Logically, if you’re against discrimination based on skin color, you should also be against
discrimination based on other traits that people don’t choose for themselves and can’t change,
but sadly, human beings are not always logical. We have our prejudices, our biases, our flaws,
our gaps in knowledge, our petty grudges and axes to grind.
We’ve seen that reflected in Star Trek all along as well. Remember that Captain Picard
had to initiate and win a court hearing to stop Starfleet from treating Data like
property in the second season of TNG, and then several years later, the holographic Doctor on
Voyager had to fight a similar battle for his own rights in the seventh season of that series.
Some might consider this unrealistic — how could the progressive and utopian Federation practice
such obviously unjust discrimination against androids and intelligent holograms? How could
such a society still allow children with learning disabilities to face such intolerable conditions
as the ones that compelled the Bashirs to subject their son to illegal genetic manipulation?
But I see nothing unrealistic about that. It sounds pretty damn true-to-life to me.
The most consistent thing about us is our inconsistency.
Second — yeah, that was all part of the first thing, sorry, I do tend to run on — let us never
forget that Star Trek is not actually about a fictional society in the future. It’s about
our real society, right now. The prejudice and inequality and injustice that we see
depicted in Star Trek — whether it is found in alien societies encountered by our heroes,
or within Starfleet or the Federation themselves — are there to reflect the
prejudice and inequality and injustice present in the real lives of the people watching the show.
Why is there still bigotry and prejudice and inequality in a civilization supposedly as
advanced as the Federation? I don’t know — why is there still bigotry and prejudice and inequality
in a society supposedly as advanced as ours? Why did young Jules Bashir face,
as his father puts it, “a lifetime of remedial education and underachievement”
due to his learning disabilities? Because real children and the real parents of those children
face that same prospect, because too often our society fails people like them,
just as the society of the Federation fails Richard and Amsha and Julian Bashir.
Or, if we want to take the interpretation that the struggling young Jules was an embarrassment
to his parents, we can ask the question this way: why were Richard and Amsha so disappointed in
their son, so worried about the stigma attached to him because of his learning disabilities,
that they were willing to risk his life and all of their futures to “fix” him?
Because too many real parents fail their real children in the exact same way.
These aren’t products of lazy writing. These aren’t inconsistencies — and even if they were,
they would only be so under the most facile, literalist interpretation of the text.
These are the things the show is about.
These are problems the characters face because the creators of the show have something to say
about those problems, or about how we respond, or ought to respond, to those problems in real life.
The retconning of Dr. Bashir into someone who was genetically engineered out of
having a learning disability tells us something important about that character
and how he fits into his world, but it also tells us something important about that world.
It tells us that ableism is still a pretty serious problem. It tells us that kids with special needs
like six-year-old Jules Bashir are still left behind in that world, are still made by their
parents to feel like burdens to be carried or afflictions to be cured. It tells us that,
despite whatever other advances have been made and obstacles have been overcome, the society of
the Federation still has a long way to go before it is in fact the ideal utopia it claims to be.
It tells us those things to remind us that all of that is true not just
for this fictional Earth of the 24th century, but for our society, too. And if we can agree
that the Federation should have provided better options for Jules Bashir and his family,
hopefully we can also agree that we should be working to provide better options
for the real-life Jules Bashirs and their families who are living among us right now.