‘Star Trek’, swear words and characters’ changing mores
Crossing of linguistic frontier shows turbulence created as ‘family-friendly’ era evolves within streaming landscape
For nearly four decades, Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek has largely been presented as genteel, erudite and — at times — quite buttoned up. Yes, he loses his temper. Yes, he was reckless as a callow cadet many years ago. Yes, he occasionally gets his hands dirty or falls apart.
But the Enterprise captain-turned-admiral stepped into a different place in last week’s episode of the streaming drama Star Trek: Picard. Now, he’s someone who — to the shock of some and the delight of others — has uttered a profanity that never would have come from his mouth in the 1990s: “Ten [expletive] grueling hours,” Patrick Stewart’s character says at one point during an intense conversation in which he expects everyone will die shortly.
The whole thing was in keeping with the more complex, nuanced aesthetic of this decade’s Star Trek installments. And the online conversation that ensued illustrates the journey undertaken when a fictional character voyages from the strictures of network and syndicated television to high-end streaming TV.
“Star Trek was G-rated when it first came out. The Next Generation was clean-cut and optimistic. What we’re seeing now with Picard is a little bit more of the grit,” says Shilpa Davé, a media studies scholar at the University of Virginia and a longtime Trek fan.
Over the weekend, Star Trek Twitter reflected that tension.
“Totally out of character,” said one post, reflecting many others. Some complained it cheapened the utopia Gene Roddenberry envisioned, that humans wouldn’t be swearing like that four centuries from now, that someone as polished as Picard wouldn’t need such language.
“Part of Star Trek’s appeal is the articulate way characters speak. Resorting to gutter language feels like a step backward since Star Trek’s characters are meant to be better than this,” John Orquiola wrote for the website Screen Rant on Sunday.
The backlash to the backlash followed. Christopher Monfette, the Paramount+ show’s co-executive producer, wrote an extensive and persuasive thread about the moment and why he believed it worked.
“It’s easy to hear that elevated British tone escaping the mouth of a gentlemanly Shakespearean actor and assume some elevated intellectualism,” he said, while acknowledging: “Criticism of its use is fair even if it just strikes a personal nerve — or if you’ve equated Trek with more broader, family-friendly storytelling. But regardless, cursing in the show is carefully debated and discussed in the room or on set. We don’t take it lightly.”
The showrunner for Star Trek: Picard this season, Terry Matalas, said the F-word from Picard wasn’t scripted but was a choice by Stewart in the moment. The result, Matalas said, was “so real.”
“Everything you do as artists, as writers and actors, even as editors, is authenticity. That’s the thing you want to feel,” he told Collider. “I was really torn because hearing that word come from your childhood hero, Captain Picard, it throws you. But wow, is it powerful.”
Star Trek has a long history of pushing boundaries, linguistic and otherwise.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Capt. James Kirk said on network TV in 1967, when that word was edgy. He’d just lost someone dear to him in the most trying of circumstances. Dr. McCoy, the ship’s irascible physician, would often say, “Dammit, Jim.” And in the larger realm, the original series delicately danced with NBC censors over everything from women’s costumes to war references.
But the crossing of last week’s linguistic frontier is an interesting case. It highlights the turbulence generated when a beloved character born during the “family-friendly” TV era evolves against the streaming landscape, where constraints are fewer and opportunities for unflinching authenticity greater.
“This isn’t just a rethinking of a fictional world. This is the same actor and the same character in the same setting that we had before. And all these years, he has been speaking and behaving in a certain way,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.