| My rant on the state of the character of Kathryn Janeway, Captain of the starship Voyager, with hopes for her future evolution. See also my script, Sweet Home. |  |
The Face of a Woman
Generations of feminists have struggled and died to make the world safe for Kathryn Janeway, Star Trek's first female starship captain. As we cast our eyes forward to the 21st century, what do we see in this icon of 24th century womanhood? We see strength and loveliness, a fierce determination to protect her ship and crew, and a nun-like dedication to bringing them safely through the long trip home. I love it when she kicks butt, stares down aliens and uses her brilliance to save the day. And I fully appreciate the sight of a lady in charge of Starfleet's finest; I'm old enough to remember when such a thing would be unthinkable.
But now that we have her, brave and perfect and in command, where do we go from here? Voyager should have a few good seasons left. Do we really want to spend them watching her fight disgusting alien after disgusting alien after disgusting alien? Stellar anomalies have been done and even temporal anomalies get old after a while. What's left? The answer is found in the dimensions of her character and the issue of confidence.
Star Trek's starship captains are all human. And consequently they share the human frailty common to the race. The two white males, while splendid people, had flaws that generated lots of great plots: Kirk broke rules and hated Klingons; Picard did the Ahab thing and almost forfeited the future of the human race. Sisko, even though he's a "minority," is a fully-drawn human being whose imperfections drive lots of great stories. And he has emotions. He grieves for is dead wife and gets carried away with anger at her unjust demise; he does a mystical thing with the people on Bajor and barely comes back intact; he lives through the ongoing anguish of both protecting and separating from his son. He is a complete human being. So I guess we think that by the time we hit the 24th century, the question of race will be irrelevant; it will be fully absorbed by the person that we are, flaws and all. Unfortunately the same does not appear to be true of gender.
Kathryn Janeway is perfect; she is everything a woman needs to be in order to be a success. She's seventy million light years from her home, her (ex-)lover and her dog, with hundreds of people depending on her, with malicious aliens lurking in every nebula, and she never weeps; she barely even gets cranky. I understand the need for some care in the treatment of our first female captain, but enough already! What's the point? Any more perfection and she's going to look as assimilated by her role of getting the troops home as Seven was by the Borg.
The way Kathryn is portrayed puts me in mind of the way blacks were portrayed in the early days in the movies. Remember Sidney Poitier in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner? Handsome, brilliant, polite, strong, understanding, moral, courageous. Yada yada yada. With Janeway, we have the same thing, and it just doesn't work anymore. We have the face of a woman but we don't have her soul. And if Voyager plots are becoming grindingly one-dimensional (gee another bad alien race is trying to destroy the ship) then I think we need to look at the one-dimensionality of the character of the captain as its cause.
The time has come to let Kathryn blossom into the full looniness her race is famous for, with all the passions and fears and imperfections that make us what we are. And the time has come to go with all the relationship possibilities and plot possibilities that this opens up. How about a plot constructed around a decision she makes that's dead wrong, so we see her coping with failure? How about one where she explores her spiritual dimensions? We know how she handles stellar anomalies; how about a story showing how she handle despair? How about one where she meets a soulmate? If we can listen to Picard play the flute in the Jeffries Tubes we can watch Captain Janeway deal with a life form that touches her very soul.
This goes beyond just wanting to see the tough broad cry. It's about wanting to see a person of her considerable strength and dignity handle the interior challenges we all face daily. Give us stories about a Kathryn Janeway who is a fully-drawn, flawed, passionate, prayerful, emotional, and vulnerable (YES IT'S OK TO MAKE A WOMAN VULNERABLE IT'S PART OF BEING HUMAN) human being. Give us stories about a captain who knows her way around a compression phaser rifle AND can shake her booty! Give us stories about a captain who acts like she knows something about ecstasy and despair! Then her speeches to Seven about individuality might mean something! Put it all out there, folks. You're not serving anyone by protecting our captain from her own flawed humanity.
So what does Kathryn need to become more fully human?
Well for starters, Kathryn needs relationships. A healthy woman can go a long time without sex but there's no way she can survive without a girlfriend, so give her one. And give her an authentic relationship with Chakotay. As much as I'd like to see one, they don't have to have a romance; nevertheless, they could have a friendship filled with humor and challenge and tension and affection. No one on Voyager, especially Janeway, has come close to manifesting the caliber of relationship like the one between Kirk and Spock. Can you imagine Janeway breaking into Starfleet HQ, bonking a few guards on the head, stealing a starship and sabotaging the only means of pursuit to boot? Me neither. So what are we saying here? That after 400 years of liberation, the accomplished female of the 24th century is worse at bonding than an aging macho hot dog and a Vulcan?
And what about the life of the spirit? Is Chakotay the only one on board who has any sense of the sacred? She flies through the cosmos, staring day in and day out at the wonders of creation and she has no sense of the divine? Janeway needs to have a real long chat with her Spirit Guide; that girl needs to get down on her knees and pray.
Of course the ultimate turn of plot would be for Kathryn to have a family, but that's probably too much Girl Power to hope for, even as we approach the millennium. I expect that her biological clock ticks as loudly in the Delta Quadrant as it does here on Earth and I can't imagine someone as eager for adventure as she would want to pass up motherhood; that's a trip that makes getting slung 70 million miles into nowhere look like a piece of cake. The trick is imagining it. You can't NOT have a family just because there are barbarians at the gate; if that were the case none of us would be here. And one would hope that by the 24th century we'd have some better clue of how to balance family and career. Somehow I think she's clever enough to make it all work, and when we figure it out for Janeway maybe we'll learn something about that for ourselves.
Voyager is a great story. The problem is, this great story may be having a crisis of confidence, having written itself into a dead-end with characters and plots artificially constrained by the need to have a "carefully drawn" female captain. Excuse me, but this sounds like a FAILURE TO BOLDLY GO. And if we can't be bold in our stories, where can we be bold?
The human race is now just beginning to hear from the other half of its peanut gallery and Kathryn is an icon for that other half. Personally, I'd like to see in her a little more of what I have come to know as human. And that's a story I'd stay tuned for.
Copyright (C) 1998 The Jade Writers Group, Ltd.