To boldly get married

George Takei, alias Mister Sulu, and his partner Brad Altman, tied the knot at a Buddhist wedding ceremony in Los Angeles today. Nichelle Nichols, alias Lieutenant Uhura, was their matron of honour, some dude who is not Scotty played the bagpipes, and Walter Koenig, alias Mister Chekov, was best man. (Insert joke about these two being forced to split their time with Brad Altman.)

Nichelle Nichols, as is widely known, was the first person to have an interracial kiss on American television, when during the third season of Star Trek she kissed William Shatner. (Yes, yes, I know it wasn’t the first for a variety of reasons. It was still groundbreaking.) And from then on we saw quite a number of cross-species kisses, and even some romance between people of different skin colour within the same species (e.g. black Klingon Worf and his on-again off-again white half-Klingon ladyfriend K’Ehleyr on TNG). But we never saw marriages between people of different species, or skin colours, or rarely even cultural backgrounds, at least on-screen. I’ll illustrate with a few examples.

Worf has a (dark-skinned) son by K’Ehleyr and is completely absent for the boy’s upbringing until the little tyke shows up on the Enterprise one day, turns out not to want to be a warrior, is corrupted by Lwaxana Troi, and is unceremoniously dumped off on Worf’s foster parents on Earth—until near the end of Deep Space Nine, when he suddenly reappears much to the dismay of his absent father. Worf’s foster parents, incidentally, are White Russian Jewish types (his father is played by Theodore Bikel, which should give you the idea—he also played Rabbi Koslov on Babylon 5). Black Captain of Deep Space Nine Benjamin Sisko also was married twice—first to a black woman, second to another black woman. White Captain Janeway of the intrepid starship Voyager was engaged to a white man before being stranded on the other side of the galaxy; she later had several romances with other white men, notably a two-episode fling with an Irish hologram. Black Vulcan Tuvok’s wife T’Pel was also black. White Doctor Beverly Crusher was married to a white man and had romances with several other white men, including (but not limited to) Captain Jean-Luc Picard, that creepy guy from Planet Scotland, and the guy whom she rejects when he becomes a woman. Hell, Wesley Crusher dates Ashley Judd for a while.

The same is true for virtually every other high-profile and lasting romantic relationship or marriage on the show: they are all heterosexual couplings between people of similar species, skin colour, and cultural background. (Props to Miles and Keiko O’Brien on being a successfully married Irish-Japanese family, but no props to Tom Paris and B’Elanna Torres because she’s only half-Klingon and doesn’t turn out to be all that different from the other human members of the crew.)

So yeah, it’s not news that the Star Trek franchise was a socially and morally conservative show. (Simply refer to the extended discussion about Star Trek’s conspicuous lack of homosexuality if you doubt this claim.) Where the original series was daring and bold, with the first kiss between a fictitious black woman and white man on American television, the franchise never developed this as significantly as the people in charge obviously thought they were doing, and thus a great opportunity was lost. My guess is that Rick Berman secretly disapproves of Takei’s marriage.