January Meme: Female Leadership on Star Trek: Discovery
One of the pleasures of Star Trek: Discovery is the great number and variety of female characters - Michael and Tilly as regulars, Katrina Cornwell, L’Rell and Georgiou as recurring. As different as they are: Every single one of them is an ambitous carreer woman either in a position of leadership or wanting to get there.
When Saru in episode 1.05 tells the computer to provide him with the names of Starfleet’s most decorated, most highly regarded Captains, Philippa Georgiou is one of them. Meanwhile, Emperor Georgiou in the Mirrorverse holds the highest, most powerful position anyone can have in her universe, so you might well say the two versions og Georgiou present two extremely different ways to lead. With the (of course enormous) caveat of MirrorGeorgiou’s genocidal methods: are they really, though? The two pilot episodes are the only ones where we see Philippa Prime in action as a Captain, and in many ways you can see where all the respect and love everyone who serves with her holds her in comes from - she’s clever (before the teaser is over, we can see she’s figured out a way to signal her position to her ship when all technical communication has broken down), she’s got a sense of humor and a warm, playful manner of interaction but when the situation warrants it can be deadly serious, she does try peaceful, diplomatic ways first but is prepared to go to battle when it is inevitable, she encourages her subordinates and allows their input, but is also prepared to draw a line as the final responsibility is hers. The only display of a darker side we see in her is one I’m not even sure was intended as such, because a great many viewers didn’t catch it: her idea of putting bombs on the Klingon corpses before the Klingons retrieved them is actually a war crime according to the Geneva Convention and has been since WWI. Like I said, cynical me is tempted to assume Bryan Fuller and everyone involved in editing the pilot script didn’t know that.
Then again, maybe they did, because on the flipside, Emperor Georgiou’s has a playful, warm manner with the subordinates she favours, too - not just Michael, but also Tilly when she sees her and treats her like her Mirrorverse counterpart Killy -, only hers comes with fond reminiscing of wiping out the Betazoids or offering cooked Kelpian. (Lorca, before he went after her throne, was according to her a favourite, too, and she does casually refer to him by his first name - „Gabriel must have found something of interest here“ she muses when in the Primeverse, going through his weapon collection.) Either version of Georgiou has blind spots re: their favourite people - Georgiou Prime was wrong about Michael being ready for command at that point, and certainly didn’t see her mutiny coming, while Mirror Georgiou despite living in a universe were betrayal by the people you’re intimate with is the rule, not the exception was apparantly blindsided by her Michael double-crossing her with Lorca, and indeed by Lorca himself (twice).
Either version of Georgiou is good at recognizing potential in young, ambitious women, and in drawing it out, and them to her - MirrorGeorgiou’s scene with Tilly is in a way the twisted counterpart of that flashback where Prime Georgiou first meets Michael who strives to be more Vulcan than Vulcan. Michael eventually concludes that MirrorGeorgiou, like Prime Georgiou, has a code of honor she lives by, even if hers is twisted. This is still debatable - the only time we see MirrorGeorgiou keeping her word to someone not Michael, whom she’s personally attached to, it’s coming through with what she’d promised Starfleet Command she’d do, and there she has something to gain -, but let it stand, for now. It’s what makes me wonder whether Bryan Fuller actually does know prepping bodies with bombs before they are collected by the enemy is a war crime, because it would fulfill the mirror function - Prime Georgiou breaking that code of honor in an existential threat situation versus Mirror Georgiou keeping hers.
Between these extremes, there’s Katrina Cornwell, who while not being the first „good“ Starfleet Admiral certainly is one of the few presented as reasonable, honorable and brave while the Captain she deals with even before the reveal of his true identity is the shadiest character on the show, in a reversal to the most common Captain/Admiral dynamics on a Star Trek show (or movie). Considering she’s of an age with Lorca (either version) but outranks him, she must have worked really hard on her career. That her specialty is psychology isn’t something random but used repeatedly in the show, most impressively when she finds herself with a broken spine and an man in the middle of a nervous breakdown while Klingons bent on her death approach and manages not only to keep her cool but talk Ash Tyler down into some shape where he can help them both. She also connects with L’Rell, becoming the first human to impress the Klingon woman, and tries to use that connection later to gain some understanding of Klingon goals. And she, too, is someone ready to listen to and use input from subordinates when it helps.
Kat, however, also has her blind spots, and they’re very human ones. She lets Lorca use their history (well, what she assumes to be their history) and her affection for him to temporarily talk her out grounding him despite her (correct) conclusion that something is deeply wrong with him. Leaving aside Lorca isn’t really who she thinks he is at that point: say it had been Lorca Prime, who wouldn’t have had a phaser under his pillow (since that’s a Mirrorverse habit as your sexual partner is the most likely person to kill you), thus making her go from spending the night with him to deciding he needs to be relieved of command immediately, but who’d otherwise have done all the same things; then she’d have let herself be seduced into putting the personal (their connection) over the professional. (I mean, not that I can blame her, because Jason Isaacs, but still.) And near the end of the season, after nearly a year of the Federation losing its war with the Klingons, millions of dead Federation citizens and the possible end of humanity, she (as well as Sarek, and Starfleet Command) is ready to make the proverbial Faustian deal with the devil, sanctioning genocidal methods. It’s important here that the face of Starfleet Command in the season’s second mutiny scene is Katrina Cornwell, not some guy we never met or the unsympathetic admiral from the pilot; the audience has seen that she’s usually compassionate, that she tried to find other solutions and that she’s desperate, not evil. That she’s someone both audience and characters have learned to respect.
Micheal making her case, and Saru and the others joining her, thus comes across as very different from the usual „series hero versus mad/bad/dickish Admiral“. And here I’m not just thinking of the Captains prone to yell in such situations, but also Picard versus Satie in The Drumhead; he makes a very important point, but he also uses rethoric aimed at shaming her as a person by using her hero-worshipped father’s quotes against her). This is something utterly lacking in the Michael vs Cornwell situation. Michael appeals to the ethical leader she knows Katrina Cornwell to have been until now. Because she’s correct in her judgment and because she actually has an alternative plan, it works. (Presumably here Kat’s own interaction with L’Rell also helped, i.e Michael isn’t suggesting entrusting power in the Klingon Empire to someone the Admiral doesn’t know.)
Speaking of L’Rell, she’s living in a society where female ambition will only get you far and not further in terms of openly assumed positions. (Canon is contradictory in terms of just how sexist the Klingon Empire is in terms of the top jobs. Gorkon’s daughter Azetbur could become Chancellor after her father in Star Trek VI, yet in the earlier TNG canon which takes place later than Azetbur, it’s clearly stated women cannot assume a seat on the High Council. (And thus also not become Chancellor.) DS9 9 then added that Klingon women can’t lead their House, until Gowron grants Grilka that right at the end of House of Quark. As an explanation as to why the Klingons would go backwards in terms of gender equality, media tie-in authors came up with the explanation that Azetbur’s successor was so resentful of her that he passed a law against women in high positions and no one bothered to remove it since (until the DS9 era).) She tries to work around that by trying to become the power behind the throne, so to speak, but each of these attempts backfire. T’Kuvma makes the stranger Voq his faithful lieutenant rather than L’Rell; Voq does accept L’Rell as advisor and ally and is impressed by her, even falls in love with her, but then Kol takes over and L’Rell’s attempt at damage control and long term victory via planting Voq as Tyler on a Federation ship does not work as intended by her at all; and even her decision to deceive Kol and work undercover at his ship goes sideways the discovery of all the Klingons he had killed throws her enough for him to see through her escape attempt with Cornwell.
The thing is, L’Rell isn’t really suited to the grey eminence position she attempts to fill. Which doesn’t mean she’s unsuited for power, or that she hasn’t got enough smarts. (It’s L’Rell who figures out how to survive during those seven months stuck on the Ship of the Dead, and whose quick thinking saves Voq at the end of 1.04; and she’s the only Klingon ready to challenge her own assumptions and beliefs when faced with contradictory evidence - as shown in her scenes with Katrina Cornwell.) It’s the reverse problem Voq had when being made T’Kuvma’s successor; he’s ideal as the loyal supporter type (this is true for Tyler as well), not as the one making the big decisions and the plan. So the conclusion of the season - L’Rell as new ruler with Tyler/Voq as her supporter, as opposed to the other way around - feels like a recognition of this, as well as both of them trying to use the painful past to create something new. Whether L’Rell will succed in this, only the new season can tell, but one more thing: her getting the position would not have happened without Michael taking this astonishing gamble on her.
Michael, who starts the season as a protegé (a very successful one, but still clearly someone being mentored by Georgiou) only to lose everything, throughout becomes someone doing the mentoring - with Tilly, though Tilly also teaches her in terms of drawing her out of her self loathing shell -, someone who can negotiate with female leaders, be they Mirrorverse Georgiou or Katrina Cornwell, and in the end even a Kingmaker, or rather Chancellor-maker. It’s intriguingly outside the usual concept for a main character in an ST show, not least because it depends on her taking on the positions usually given to the hero’s supporting cast - mentor, enabler, catalyst -, not to the hero, and while I still think she’ll end up as Captain, I’m actually glad the show takes its time to get her there. (The Star Trek reboot making Kirk Captain at the end of the first movie felt terribly forced by comparison.) It also shows her, and the audience, the different ways of learning power. In the plot Michael the Shenzou’s first officer, i.e. the most powerful position after the Captain’s , and on the verge of getting her own command, but nobody follows her in her desperate mutiny. You don’t have the impression she has friends on board other than Georgiou, either, though she’s respected (pre-mutiny). She operates in isolation (katra skyping with Sarek aside). In the finale, everyone rallies behind her, and this is only possible because she’s worked her way up from complete powerlessness and disgrace again in a different way. Not just by being good at the various tasks she fulfills, though she’s always that, but by observing and relating to the seemingly hostile (starting with the Tardigrade), through opening herself up to the various crewmembers on Discovery - prominently Tilly, Stamets and Tyler -, forming relationships with them, not just with the Captain. That Michael can be someone who both gives advice and takes it, who sometimes is the one teaching the lessons and still someone doing the learning makes her taking the lead as something neither she nor the audience ever take just for granted, but something that feels earned when she does it. We’ve seen her do this in dark times. I’m very curious now where her path will lead her in peace.
The Other Days
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1324067.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
When Saru in episode 1.05 tells the computer to provide him with the names of Starfleet’s most decorated, most highly regarded Captains, Philippa Georgiou is one of them. Meanwhile, Emperor Georgiou in the Mirrorverse holds the highest, most powerful position anyone can have in her universe, so you might well say the two versions og Georgiou present two extremely different ways to lead. With the (of course enormous) caveat of MirrorGeorgiou’s genocidal methods: are they really, though? The two pilot episodes are the only ones where we see Philippa Prime in action as a Captain, and in many ways you can see where all the respect and love everyone who serves with her holds her in comes from - she’s clever (before the teaser is over, we can see she’s figured out a way to signal her position to her ship when all technical communication has broken down), she’s got a sense of humor and a warm, playful manner of interaction but when the situation warrants it can be deadly serious, she does try peaceful, diplomatic ways first but is prepared to go to battle when it is inevitable, she encourages her subordinates and allows their input, but is also prepared to draw a line as the final responsibility is hers. The only display of a darker side we see in her is one I’m not even sure was intended as such, because a great many viewers didn’t catch it: her idea of putting bombs on the Klingon corpses before the Klingons retrieved them is actually a war crime according to the Geneva Convention and has been since WWI. Like I said, cynical me is tempted to assume Bryan Fuller and everyone involved in editing the pilot script didn’t know that.
Then again, maybe they did, because on the flipside, Emperor Georgiou’s has a playful, warm manner with the subordinates she favours, too - not just Michael, but also Tilly when she sees her and treats her like her Mirrorverse counterpart Killy -, only hers comes with fond reminiscing of wiping out the Betazoids or offering cooked Kelpian. (Lorca, before he went after her throne, was according to her a favourite, too, and she does casually refer to him by his first name - „Gabriel must have found something of interest here“ she muses when in the Primeverse, going through his weapon collection.) Either version of Georgiou has blind spots re: their favourite people - Georgiou Prime was wrong about Michael being ready for command at that point, and certainly didn’t see her mutiny coming, while Mirror Georgiou despite living in a universe were betrayal by the people you’re intimate with is the rule, not the exception was apparantly blindsided by her Michael double-crossing her with Lorca, and indeed by Lorca himself (twice).
Either version of Georgiou is good at recognizing potential in young, ambitious women, and in drawing it out, and them to her - MirrorGeorgiou’s scene with Tilly is in a way the twisted counterpart of that flashback where Prime Georgiou first meets Michael who strives to be more Vulcan than Vulcan. Michael eventually concludes that MirrorGeorgiou, like Prime Georgiou, has a code of honor she lives by, even if hers is twisted. This is still debatable - the only time we see MirrorGeorgiou keeping her word to someone not Michael, whom she’s personally attached to, it’s coming through with what she’d promised Starfleet Command she’d do, and there she has something to gain -, but let it stand, for now. It’s what makes me wonder whether Bryan Fuller actually does know prepping bodies with bombs before they are collected by the enemy is a war crime, because it would fulfill the mirror function - Prime Georgiou breaking that code of honor in an existential threat situation versus Mirror Georgiou keeping hers.
Between these extremes, there’s Katrina Cornwell, who while not being the first „good“ Starfleet Admiral certainly is one of the few presented as reasonable, honorable and brave while the Captain she deals with even before the reveal of his true identity is the shadiest character on the show, in a reversal to the most common Captain/Admiral dynamics on a Star Trek show (or movie). Considering she’s of an age with Lorca (either version) but outranks him, she must have worked really hard on her career. That her specialty is psychology isn’t something random but used repeatedly in the show, most impressively when she finds herself with a broken spine and an man in the middle of a nervous breakdown while Klingons bent on her death approach and manages not only to keep her cool but talk Ash Tyler down into some shape where he can help them both. She also connects with L’Rell, becoming the first human to impress the Klingon woman, and tries to use that connection later to gain some understanding of Klingon goals. And she, too, is someone ready to listen to and use input from subordinates when it helps.
Kat, however, also has her blind spots, and they’re very human ones. She lets Lorca use their history (well, what she assumes to be their history) and her affection for him to temporarily talk her out grounding him despite her (correct) conclusion that something is deeply wrong with him. Leaving aside Lorca isn’t really who she thinks he is at that point: say it had been Lorca Prime, who wouldn’t have had a phaser under his pillow (since that’s a Mirrorverse habit as your sexual partner is the most likely person to kill you), thus making her go from spending the night with him to deciding he needs to be relieved of command immediately, but who’d otherwise have done all the same things; then she’d have let herself be seduced into putting the personal (their connection) over the professional. (I mean, not that I can blame her, because Jason Isaacs, but still.) And near the end of the season, after nearly a year of the Federation losing its war with the Klingons, millions of dead Federation citizens and the possible end of humanity, she (as well as Sarek, and Starfleet Command) is ready to make the proverbial Faustian deal with the devil, sanctioning genocidal methods. It’s important here that the face of Starfleet Command in the season’s second mutiny scene is Katrina Cornwell, not some guy we never met or the unsympathetic admiral from the pilot; the audience has seen that she’s usually compassionate, that she tried to find other solutions and that she’s desperate, not evil. That she’s someone both audience and characters have learned to respect.
Micheal making her case, and Saru and the others joining her, thus comes across as very different from the usual „series hero versus mad/bad/dickish Admiral“. And here I’m not just thinking of the Captains prone to yell in such situations, but also Picard versus Satie in The Drumhead; he makes a very important point, but he also uses rethoric aimed at shaming her as a person by using her hero-worshipped father’s quotes against her). This is something utterly lacking in the Michael vs Cornwell situation. Michael appeals to the ethical leader she knows Katrina Cornwell to have been until now. Because she’s correct in her judgment and because she actually has an alternative plan, it works. (Presumably here Kat’s own interaction with L’Rell also helped, i.e Michael isn’t suggesting entrusting power in the Klingon Empire to someone the Admiral doesn’t know.)
Speaking of L’Rell, she’s living in a society where female ambition will only get you far and not further in terms of openly assumed positions. (Canon is contradictory in terms of just how sexist the Klingon Empire is in terms of the top jobs. Gorkon’s daughter Azetbur could become Chancellor after her father in Star Trek VI, yet in the earlier TNG canon which takes place later than Azetbur, it’s clearly stated women cannot assume a seat on the High Council. (And thus also not become Chancellor.) DS9 9 then added that Klingon women can’t lead their House, until Gowron grants Grilka that right at the end of House of Quark. As an explanation as to why the Klingons would go backwards in terms of gender equality, media tie-in authors came up with the explanation that Azetbur’s successor was so resentful of her that he passed a law against women in high positions and no one bothered to remove it since (until the DS9 era).) She tries to work around that by trying to become the power behind the throne, so to speak, but each of these attempts backfire. T’Kuvma makes the stranger Voq his faithful lieutenant rather than L’Rell; Voq does accept L’Rell as advisor and ally and is impressed by her, even falls in love with her, but then Kol takes over and L’Rell’s attempt at damage control and long term victory via planting Voq as Tyler on a Federation ship does not work as intended by her at all; and even her decision to deceive Kol and work undercover at his ship goes sideways the discovery of all the Klingons he had killed throws her enough for him to see through her escape attempt with Cornwell.
The thing is, L’Rell isn’t really suited to the grey eminence position she attempts to fill. Which doesn’t mean she’s unsuited for power, or that she hasn’t got enough smarts. (It’s L’Rell who figures out how to survive during those seven months stuck on the Ship of the Dead, and whose quick thinking saves Voq at the end of 1.04; and she’s the only Klingon ready to challenge her own assumptions and beliefs when faced with contradictory evidence - as shown in her scenes with Katrina Cornwell.) It’s the reverse problem Voq had when being made T’Kuvma’s successor; he’s ideal as the loyal supporter type (this is true for Tyler as well), not as the one making the big decisions and the plan. So the conclusion of the season - L’Rell as new ruler with Tyler/Voq as her supporter, as opposed to the other way around - feels like a recognition of this, as well as both of them trying to use the painful past to create something new. Whether L’Rell will succed in this, only the new season can tell, but one more thing: her getting the position would not have happened without Michael taking this astonishing gamble on her.
Michael, who starts the season as a protegé (a very successful one, but still clearly someone being mentored by Georgiou) only to lose everything, throughout becomes someone doing the mentoring - with Tilly, though Tilly also teaches her in terms of drawing her out of her self loathing shell -, someone who can negotiate with female leaders, be they Mirrorverse Georgiou or Katrina Cornwell, and in the end even a Kingmaker, or rather Chancellor-maker. It’s intriguingly outside the usual concept for a main character in an ST show, not least because it depends on her taking on the positions usually given to the hero’s supporting cast - mentor, enabler, catalyst -, not to the hero, and while I still think she’ll end up as Captain, I’m actually glad the show takes its time to get her there. (The Star Trek reboot making Kirk Captain at the end of the first movie felt terribly forced by comparison.) It also shows her, and the audience, the different ways of learning power. In the plot Michael the Shenzou’s first officer, i.e. the most powerful position after the Captain’s , and on the verge of getting her own command, but nobody follows her in her desperate mutiny. You don’t have the impression she has friends on board other than Georgiou, either, though she’s respected (pre-mutiny). She operates in isolation (katra skyping with Sarek aside). In the finale, everyone rallies behind her, and this is only possible because she’s worked her way up from complete powerlessness and disgrace again in a different way. Not just by being good at the various tasks she fulfills, though she’s always that, but by observing and relating to the seemingly hostile (starting with the Tardigrade), through opening herself up to the various crewmembers on Discovery - prominently Tilly, Stamets and Tyler -, forming relationships with them, not just with the Captain. That Michael can be someone who both gives advice and takes it, who sometimes is the one teaching the lessons and still someone doing the learning makes her taking the lead as something neither she nor the audience ever take just for granted, but something that feels earned when she does it. We’ve seen her do this in dark times. I’m very curious now where her path will lead her in peace.
The Other Days
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1324067.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.