This post contains spoilers About "Star Trek: Episode 31."

There's a tendency among fans of TV and movies — or consumers of any kind of pop culture, really — to let portraits off the hook by defining them as "of their time" or as something that "couldn't be done today." . It's one of the most insidious habits we have as viewers, and it's usually wrong. Marginalized people have been fighting to be accurately represented on screen for as long as visual media has existed. Bigot-led 70s sitcom All in the Family it was considered a network poison Before it became a hit, lesbian readers already were Sick of sad gay love stories by the 50sand the famously racist Disney film A Song of the South was controversial Even before its 1946 release.

It's easy to fall into the trap of assuming that history was somehow more one-dimensional, hateful, or backward by default than it is today, and that trap can cause us to give credit where it's not exactly due. Case in point: When I was a young teenager, I thought the Star Trek: The Original Series season 3 episode "Let It Be Your Last Battlefield" ties into the new Star Trek movie Part 31 in an unexpected way (more on that later), was a Really good A metaphor for racism. Sure, her visual representation of social constructions of race—people with half-white, half-black faces fighting against people with almost perpetually half-black, half-white faces—was a bit heavy-handed, but I found the Central Gene Roddenberry Message, about the power of manipulation to destroy society, important. That must have been when it first came out, right?

Not completely. The original Star Trek series was endlessly important in almost every way, including its portrayals of racial diversity. It was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who Convinced Nickel Nichols not to quit the show Between seasons, after all. But despite my misguided eighth-grade epiphany that this extra-blatant episode could change hearts and minds, "let it be your last battlefield" has always been considered obvious and questionable—if not downright offensive—by some. After all, it came out in 1969, when black Americans had already been leading the civil rights movement for years. By that point, America didn't need plaid face paint to know what was wrong with it. The episode also depends on several false equivalents to serve up "both sides" of conversations around racism, with the Enterprise crew's manism-free, slave-thinking Lokai (Lou Antonio), a man with "extreme views ” just Like the old oppressor Bell (Frank Gorshin).

The episode is, frankly, an ideological mess. Journalist J .. Neil Shulman wrote in his book "Profile in Silver" that Harlan Ellison, who himself wrote one of the Best Star Trek Episodes of All Time"hated that episode". In the 1995 book by Ton Tulloch and Henry Enkins "Science Fiction Audience" The authors cite "Let It Be Your Last Battlefield" as one of several TOS episodes that are "often considered among the worst moments of the series," representative of the franchise's "most generic elements" and "showcasing its ideology at its strongest." ". There is even a two-tone make-up of the central characters are compared to a black surface. The racial allegory at the heart of the episode was so clumsy and flawed that the episode's central species, the Sharons, were never seen on screen again after 1969.

Until now.

Let's get one thing straight here: the new movie Star Trek: Episode 31, the first Star Trek feature film of the Paramount+ era, neither "solves racism," nor does it try to. Sprawling, silly, fast-paced Capital draws as much inspiration from the Guy Ritchie movies, Ocean's Eleven and DC Comics as it does from Roddenberry's venerable, upbeat flagship series. There is no big metaphor here, no bigger picture. However, it also includes the first Sharon's character fans have seen in more than 50 years (with the exception of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it castle in Star Trek: Lower Decks). Their name is Virgil, and they are clearly a scene-stealing diva.

Virgil shows up right around the time viewers begin to realize that Episode 31 is a lot more camp than they expected, and that it possesses a sense of humor, flamboyance, and looseness that Trek fans will either love or (perhaps more likely ) hatred. The character appears on stage early in the film, when we get to see what the mirror version of the Star Trek: Discovery universe Filipa Georgiou has been over the years since the film's prologue showed him killing family and maiming true love. Actor Augusto Bitter, whose past credits include the film White Muscle Dad, the horror series Ezra and the short film Uncle, plays Virgil.

We learn very little about Virgil in this film, but somehow they still manage to make a strong impression. Their job title is never revealed, but it's clear that they work as a sort of bar-host-glow-right-hand-alien to Philippa, whose makeup and costumes in this scene reveal that we're now meant to see her as a stylish badass. , not a tyrannical ruler. We immediately code Virgil as a kind of oddball lackey - they laugh when they break the news that the bride "stopped just as things came to a climax" in the honeymoon suite - but also as a competent ally to Philippa with a flair for drama.

Virgil is decked out in glitter and jewels, but they're still clearly Sharon, a fact that's never addressed—and maybe not a big deal in this day and age, and in this area of ​​the galaxy. It's a refreshing contrast to the original series episode, in which DeGhorst Kelly's Dr. McCoy declares the Sharons to be an inexplicable mutation and pretty much says that if he had his biological abilities, he'd be one of the most powerful specimens around. The implication there, of course, is that Sharons can never reach their full potential as a white, male human could because of their surface-level physical difference.

As relatively fickle as the character's presence is in the scheme of things, it's nice just to see Cheron in "Part 31" freed from the constraints of a fairly binary and basic half-century-old metaphor. Instead, Virgil is given the gift of being righteous some personliving his best life in a family bar and seems to be doing it well. The Paramount+ Trek era wasn't perfect, but it did a pretty great job of rehabilitating some of the species featured in earlier Star Trek shows that got the short end of the stick during their first contact missions. The Sharons were among the most ridiculously considered; Despite their poetically tragic "TOS" conclusion, viewers are told very little about them - beyond their hatred of those who don't match their looks.

We now know that the long-forgotten species is made up of more than the sum of their conflicts, and perhaps that added layer offers a little bit of redemption for a winning original series episode. After all, if they can be fun sidekicks with a heightened sense of humor, the Sharons can be something. Only, you know, not if they're all sentenced to murder to kill each other for a painfully neat lesson in tolerance.

Star Trek: Episode 31 is now streaming on Paramount+.