Phasers on Stun: A fun and informative tour of the ever-expanding Trek universe

Phasers on Stun! by Ryan Britt

Phasers on Stun!, by Ryan Britt, is a breezily informative and fun look at the many (and I mean many) incarnations of Star Trek over the decades since it first appeared on television in the late 60s. While it’s true there isn’t a lot new to say about the original series, and to a lesser extent The Next Generation, Britt still manages for find a few nuggets to offer something fresh to fans, while the later materials covers ground that is far less trodden.

Moving chronologically, Britt begins with several chapters on the original series — its creation, the writing, its politics, and finally its cancelation and the “birth of Star Trek fandom.” From there he moves between the creative output of the franchise and its relation to American society (each being shaped by the other). Included in the discussion are all the films (though some get more time than others) and nearly all the TV shows (The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery, Picard, and Lower Decks), with only the most recent missing in action: the just released Prodigy and the yet-to-be-released (as of this review’s writing) Strange New Worlds. With regard to social critiques, Britt discusses politics, gender issues, representation of non-white and non-cis characters, and the mystery of Trek’s enduring “immortality.”

Besides the primary sources, and various secondary sources, Britt also calls upon the many interviews he’s conducted over ten-plus years with people connected in a host of ways with Star Trek: writers, actors, directors, etc. In fact, he begins with an engaging personal anecdote about his first interview with William Shatner that was interrupted by Britt’s crying baby daughter and peppered with parenting advice from Shatner. It’s an appropriate entry into his subject, given that he later argues that “Star Trek’s power is in its humanist strategy”, which he says is encapsulated in a quote from Captain Picard: “We are what we are … But we’re doing the best we can.”

One of the better aspects of Phasers on Stun! is not what Britt says happened in the Star Trek universe but what didn’t happen. He does an excellent job of either debunking some of the lore that has grown up around the show or in taking a more nuanced look at some the praise its garnered over the years for just how progressive it was. As an example of the former, Britt notes that with regard to the network rejecting Roddenberry’s first pilot (later seen as “The Cage”), “the idea that Majel Barrett’s Number One was too feminist and too progressive for NBC is almost certainly a myth perpetuated by Roddenberry himself … It’s far more likely — as others have stated — that the network didn’t like the fact that Gene cast his mistress as one of the leads.”

Ryan Britt

As an example of the latter, Britt praises Roddenberry for the diverse casting of the original show, but accurately reminds the reader that the diverse cast showed up in the second version of his creation. The original pilot was nowhere near as diverse. He also highlights the more-than-a-little disturbing fact that the famous Kirk-Uhuru kiss, often lauded as the first interracial kiss on television, was not portrayed as voluntary (the two are forced to kiss by telekinesis). As Britt puts it, “Any way you slice it, a Black woman being forced to kiss a white man isn’t exactly progress.”

This willingness to cast both a laudatory and a critical eye runs throughout the book Roddenberry is rightly praised when appropriate, but this is no hagiography; Roddenberry’s addiction troubles, womanizing, self-mythologizing, and willingness to take credit for accomplishments not entirely his own are also well charted.

In the context of Trek’s civil rights credentials, again, Britt gives credit when due, but also points to how long it took to arrive at some LGBTQ+ representation, pointing to how it appears Roddenberry himself killed a TNG script portraying gay crew members on the Enterprise. It took until 2005, nearly 40 years of Trek, to get “one explicitly gay character.”

Mixing fannish love of the show and its creators with journalistic detail and research, Britt offers up a work that is equally fun and informative and takes us all the way to the very chronological edge of the Trek universe, including the “non-heroic” Picard and Lower Decks. Given that Prodigy just may be my favorite new Trek since the original show, and that I’m eagerly looking forward to Strange New Worlds, and given as well that Star Trek shows little sign of vanishing into the black hole of canceled television anytime soon, I look forward to a revised edition of Phasers on Stun! in a few years.