This will come as a shock to some of you, I’m sure, but I’m not offended by profanity.
In fact, I’m way more offended by people who make a point of not using profanity than
I am by profanity.
I don’t wanna psychoanalyze myself too much — I don’t have the credentials, for one
— but I think it might be related to something that happened to me when I was in fourth grade.
A bunch of us were outside at recess, playing on the lower playground — my elementary
school was built on a hill, and behind the school there was what was called the upper
playground, and then at the bottom of the hill was the lower playground, and that’s
where the basketball court and the kickball fields were, and only fourth and fifth graders
were allowed down there.
It was kind of a big deal, okay?
Anyway, a bunch of us were down there playing kickball, and there was a disagreement over
something, I’ve forgotten what, and I got into it with this kid named Jeremy.
And I shoved Jeremy and cussed at him — I said “fuck you” or something — again,
I forget exactly what — at which point Jeremy, being a rotten little snitch, went and told
one of the teachers.
So, before recess was over, Mrs. Kline, our fourth grade teacher, sat me and Jeremy down
and had a little talk with us about how we can’t be out there shoving each other.
And I think she said that we would have to stay inside for recess the next day as punishment
or something.
And then Mrs. Kline turned to me.
And she said, “Steve, I’m especially disappointed in you.
It’s bad enough that you shoved another student, but what do you think your parents
would think if they found out that you were cussing?”
I don’t remember what I said to that, but I’m sure it was appropriately contrite.
But in my head I was thinking, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
I shoved another kid — I put my hands on someone else in anger — but that’s supposed
to be secondary to me telling him “fuck you” while I did it?
It was at that moment I realized two things: first, some people are unreasonably offended
by profanity, and second, I have very little patience with those people.
That’s a very long-winded setup to tell you that when Tilly dropped Star Trek’s
first on-screen f-bomb in the fifth episode of Star Trek: Discovery’s first season,
it didn’t bother me even a little.
In fact, as Tilly said when she dropped that f-bomb, and as Lt. Stamets agreed a moment
later, I thought it was fucking cool.
It was also not nearly as unprecedented as the people clutching their pearls over it
made it out to be.
So, let’s take a few minutes here and discuss the history of swearing in Star Trek, why
it’s not a big deal, why sometimes it’s good, actually, and why people who have a
serious problem with it should just grow up and get over it.
First, it’s true that there isn’t much on-screen swearing in the various Star Trek
TV series that were produced prior to Star Trek: Discovery.
The main reason for this is that those shows were originally produced for American broadcast
television, which is regulated by the FCC — the Federal Communications Commission.
The FCC has rules prohibiting obscene, indecent, and profane content from being broadcast over
public airwaves, particularly during hours of the day when it’s more likely children
might be watching.
So, if you’re producing a TV show intended to be broadcast in primetime, you have three
options when it comes to profanity: you can include it, but censor it somehow — bleep
it out, for example; you can replace actual swear words with asinine made-up baby-talk
— like they did on Firefly, and to a lesser extent Babylon 5 and the Battlestar Galactica
reboot; or you can just not have your characters swear, which is what the producers of Star
Trek did.
And, of those three options, I think the producers of Star Trek chose the best one.
Bleeping or other forms of censorship can be effective if used the right way, and in
the proper context, but they usually read as funny or in a way that emphasizes the artificiality
of the show, which might not be the effect you want to create if what you’re producing
is more-or-less a straight drama.
And, swapping out prohibited words for inoffensive invented substitutes — replacing “fuck”
with “frak” or “frag” for example — is silly and juvenile and undercuts the
seriousness of any scene where it happens.
I think the best way to deal with profanity when under such constraints is to simply leave
it out altogether.
If you can’t do it, don’t do it.
Now, I don’t think Star Trek dialogue would ever have sounded like something out of a
Tarantino movie, but it seems obvious to me that if they weren’t limited by those FCC
regulations, the writers of pre-Discovery Star Trek TV series would have had their characters
swearing more often than they did.
Milder profanity that is allowed under FCC rules has been part of Star Trek from the
beginning: “hell” and “damn” and so forth.
In the Star Trek movies they never drop an f-bomb, but Dr. McCoy throws around “goddamn”
and “son of a bitch” with the casual ease of a practiced profaner, there’s Data’s
classic utterance of “Oh, shit!” as the Enterprise D is about to crash in Star Trek
Generations, and a handful of other instances of the Classic Trek and TNG characters employing
what Spock would call “colorful metaphors” in their speech.
Speaking of which, I think a couple of the gags from Star Trek IV, where the characters
appear inexperienced when using profanity and Spock notices that Kirk is swearing more
than usual since they arrived in the 20th century, plus the relative lack of profanity
in the franchise in general, left some fans with the impression that the characters in
Star Trek don’t swear by design, that it’s a signifier of how highly evolved humanity
has become, and that when the writers of newer versions of Star Trek have characters swearing
more often, it’s a sign that those writers just don’t understand what Star Trek is
supposed to be.
As with most of the rules such fans impose to limit “what Star Trek is supposed to
be,” this depends on a glib, superficial, and extremely selective interpretation of
the material.
Sure, Star Trek characters in shows and movies produced prior to the creation of Discovery
don’t swear all that much, and sure, our contemporary use of language being coarser
than what Kirk and Spock are used to is the basis for a couple of jokes in one movie,
but to conclude on that basis that Star Trek characters don’t, can’t or shouldn’t
swear, you also have to ignore the facts that those characters were prevented from swearing
in most cases by factors that existed outside the show, and that we’ve frequently seen
that Star Trek characters do swear within those imposed limitations.
I know I’ve made this point before when discussing the way some fans just reflexively
dismiss more recent versions of Star Trek, but often the things these fans are objecting
to in the new stuff are things that have been present in previous iterations of the franchise.
For example, the fans who howled at how silly the spore drive is, but aren’t bothered
at all by equally silly and made-up things like warp drive or subspace that are firmly
established parts of the fictional world.
Star Trek has always relied on goofy, implausible conceits to explain how our heroes are able
to travel from strange new world to strange new world so quickly, and likewise, Star Trek
characters have always seasoned their speech with whatever profanity the relevant content
guidelines allowed.
The only reason it took until 2017 for a Star Trek character to drop an f-bomb is that before
2017 Star Trek shows had always been produced for American broadcast TV, where f-bombs aren’t
allowed.
And while there have been thirteen Star Trek movies produced, and any of them could theoretically
have included a fuck in there somewhere, too many “fucks,” even when used in a non-sexual
context, all but guarantee that the film will get an R-rating, and R-rated movies that don’t
feature Deadpool, Jesus getting the shit knocked out of him for two hours, or Joaquin Phoenix
reminding us of better movies he was in, tend to gross significantly less at the box office
than movies with a PG or PG-13, which is why we haven’t seen Dr. McCoy absolutely light
into Spock like we all know he wants to.
Yet.
Star Trek: Discovery, and its sister shows Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks,
and the upcoming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, are all being produced for the streaming service
Paramount+, formerly CBS All Access.
Since Paramount+ is a subscription service and not an over-the-air broadcast station
or a channel that’s part of a basic cable package, it’s not subject to the standards
imposed by the FCC.
Like premium cable channels such as HBO and Showtime, Paramount+ is more or less free
to determine its own content standards, and evidently one of those standards is “Star
Trek characters can say ‘fuck’ now.”
Which is fine.
In fact, I would argue that it’s more than fine — it’s good.
It gives the writers of Star Trek, and the actors who perform the dialogue those writers
create for them, another tool they can use to convey emotion and reveal character.
Profanity is just like any other part of speech — use it too much, or in the wrong way,
and it becomes a liability rather than an asset.
So far, the writers of Star Trek have used their “fuck” privileges sparingly and
to great effect.
Every f-bomb in Star Trek to date has been excellent.
The first one, the f-bomb Tilly drops in “Choose Your Pain,” the fifth episode of Discovery’s
first season, is still the best one.
Tilly is working with Stamets and Burnham to find a way to operate the spore drive without
harming the giant tardigrade that they’ve been forcing to serve as a navigator of the
mycelial network.
When Stamets realizes the answer — injecting DNA from the mycelium into a host other than
the tardigrade — Tilly enthuses, “You guys, this is so fucking cool!”
Embarrassed about having sworn in front of Stamets, her superior officer, Tilly apologizes.
But Stamets isn’t upset.
He softens, smiles at her, and says, “No, cadet.
It is fucking cool.”
It’s a charming, lovely human moment between these characters, and I’m glad that I, not
being an uptight prude who swoons when people say naughty words, am able to enjoy it.
The next Star Trek f-bomb comes a little over two years later, in the second episode of
Star Trek: Picard, “Maps and Legends,” and it’s one that everyone remembers: when
Jean-Luc Picard asks Starfleet commander-in-chief Admiral Clancy to reinstate his commission
and give him a ship, and Clancy, fuming, mutters “The sheer fucking hubris.”
This one really got ‘em riled up.
Not only was this a Star Trek character saying the f-word, she was saying it to Jean-Luc
Picard — at Jean-Luc Picard — in a really aggressive, disrespectful way!
She can’t talk to him like that!
Doesn’t she know who he is?!
But, see, that’s the point.
She actually knows more about who he is than we do at this point in the series.
We think of him as Captain Picard, the guy we watched on TV all those years, the guy
who saved the galaxy from the Borg — but twenty years have passed since then and we
know very little about what happened in that time.
We see the heroic former captain of the Enterprise asking for Starfleet’s help on another noble
mission, but she sees this presumptuous old troublemaker who has walked into her office
expecting Starfleet to sponsor his personal quest.
She addresses him disrespectfully because, in that moment, she doesn’t respect him.
Her use of “fuck” underlines that disrespect.
It shows us where Picard stands, and lets Picard himself and us in the audience know
that he won’t necessarily be able to get by on inspirational speeches and heroic gestures
this time around.
True, Picard does ultimately save the day by making an inspirational speech and performing
a heroic gesture, but introducing that uncertainty early on is important for the Picard series,
and Clancy’s f-bomb helps to do that.
It’s a load-bearing “fuck,” and it holds the weight quite well, I think.
The next two f-bombs aren’t so significant: in Star Trek: Picard’s fourth episode, “Absolute
Candor,” Captain Rios refers to one of the many holograms that operate on his ship, La
Sirena, as “that fucking hospitality hologram”; and in the series’ seventh episode, “Nepenthe,”
Dr. Jurati, who has been shown a vision of future destruction by Commodore Oh, suggests
that they let the Romulans capture Soji, saying, “somebody else can find that fucking synth!”
Casual usage, less important in terms of character or larger story elements than the previous
ones, just a little added seasoning to emphasize the annoyance and anxiety felt, respectively,
by those characters — something profanity, properly utilized, is really good for.
The last two f-bombs in Star Trek, to date, come in the same episode, the eighth show
of Star Trek: Picard’s first season, “Broken Pieces.”
The first is another one from Admiral Clancy — such a potty mouth — Starfeet needs
fewer evil admirals and more potty mouthed admirals.
It’s a clever and satisfying callback to her swearing at Picard in the second episode.
Clancy tells Picard to “shut the fuck up,” but this time she’s not doing it to dismiss
his request, but because his impassioned arguments in favor of Starfleet intervention in his
mission are unnecessary, since she’s already decided to intervene.
The second, and the most recent onscreen usage of “fuck” in Star Trek to date, belongs
once again to Dr. Jurati, who announces to the crew of La Sirena that she intends to
turn herself into the authorities for this murder she did, tells her shipmates that this
is the closest she’s ever come to feeling part of a crew, and she’s sorry she “had
to fucking ruin it.”
As with the f-bombs in “Absolute Candor” and “Nepenthe,” Jurati’s f-bomb in “Broken
Pieces” is a more casual usage.
It helps to put across her emotional state in the scene: she’s upset, guilty, regretful.
The profanity serves as an intensifier.
She didn’t just ruin it — she fucking ruined it.
Now, does the line need the f-bomb to work?
No.
The line is clear enough, and Allison Pill, who plays Jurati, is certainly a good enough
actor to get the emotion of the moment across without swearing.
But is the line better with the f-bomb?
I think it is.
Profanity, particularly words like “fuck” which are generally perceived as hard profanity,
doesn’t always improve things, but used properly it does.
Swear words are regarded as highly informal, as rude, as crass, as offensive by many people,
so when a character chooses to express themselves in that way, they’re making a choice to
disregard a social norm, to break the rules of decorum, to say “I’m so upset, or frustrated,
or angry, or whatever that I can’t adequately express what I’m feeling within the bounds
of politeness.”
Or, alternatively, to say “I don’t care about this social norm, or the fact that people
who hear me might be offended.”
That component of profanity, the disregarding of social norms, is why the made-up words
that stand in for genuine profanity in shows like Firefly and those others I mentioned
don’t have the same effect.
Regardless of how we feel about them on an individual basis, we as a society have agreed
that certain words are impolite, indecent, profane.
These are words that we all either use or have heard used in everyday conversation.
They’re established in our shared lexicon.
Because of that, when someone says “fuck” or “goddamn,” it means something.
Used properly, these words have strength and impact.
When someone says “frak” or “gorram,” it sounds weak and silly and has no impact,
because we know that people don’t actually talk this way, that these words are being
used because the real words aren’t allowed.
For most of its existence, especially on television, Star Trek has been unable to have its characters
use more than mild profanity.
So they didn’t.
They didn’t replace profanity with toothless baby talk — they just didn’t do it.
Now that Star Trek characters are allowed to swear, they occasionally do.
I support both of those creative choices.
However, I do wish that profanity had been allowed in Star Trek before a few years ago.
I’ve enjoyed Discovery, Picard, and Lower Decks, and I’m looking forward to Strange
New Worlds and Prodigy — something tells me there won’t be much cussin’ in that
last one, though — but just think of the virtuosic profane tirades we missed out on
because the likes of McCoy, Scotty, Riker, Kira, Sisko, B’Elanna, and Trip, to name
only a few, weren’t allowed to swear.
And when I reflect upon the blood-curdling torrents of profanity we were denied from
Chief O’Brien, played by World Champion F-Bomber Colm Meaney . . . well.
The word “tragedy” just doesn’t seem sufficient, does it?
So far, profanity has been used effectively in Star Trek.
I don’t see the problem with it.
Neither do most fans, it seems to me.
If you’re one of the fans who does have a problem with it, because it offends your
tender sensibilities, because you think it makes the show inappropriate for children,
because you wish everyone talked like goddamn Sunday School teachers, whatever, I suggest
you either watch something else — like I said, the vast majority of Star Trek ever
produced is free of hard profanity, and also, there’s shit besides Star Trek to watch
— or, ya know, just get the fuck over it.
That’s it for me, folks.
Don’t forget you can support this channel by becoming a patron at patreon.com/steveshives,
or becoming a channel member by clicking the join button.
What do you think about swearing in Star Trek?
Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next time.
Take care, everybody.