“Star Trek” is usually touted for its progressive attitudes and themes of multiculturalism, however in terms of LGBTQ characters, it is usually fallen brief. Some apologists may argue that the franchise’s future was so welcoming to queer people who their sexuality was now not talked about, however in by no means mentioning queer folks, they’re being explicitly erased. When it got here to relationships, “Star Trek” was frustratingly heteronormative. On “Star Trek: Deep House 9,” Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) was maybe the primary kinda-queer illustration within the franchise. Jadzia was a humanoid girl with a long-lived sentient worm residing in her abdomen that will get reimplanted in a brand new host each 70 years or so. The symbiote — Dax — had been female and male in its life, and plenty of queer and trans viewers appreciated the character’s fluidity.
When it got here to “The Outcast,” it was pushed particularly exhausting by author and supervising producer Jeri Taylor. She was clear in her need to jot down a sci-fi model of a queer rights story. Within the early ’90s, Taylor felt that these sorts of tales weren’t widespread sufficient on community TV. She was quoted in “Captains’ Logs” as saying:
“It got here out of employees dialogue. We had needed to do a homosexual rights story and had not been ready to determine easy methods to do it in an fascinating science-fiction, ‘Star Trek’-ian method. It got here up with the thought of turning it on its ear and I actually needed to do it as a result of, partly, it will be controversial and I welcome that. The concept of any drama is to the touch folks’s emotions and have interaction them, whether or not you make them snicker, cry, offended.”
However, Taylor was fast to level out, she is not queer, and will have been underqualified to jot down such a narrative.