30 Years Later, Star Trek Finally Fixes A Controversial Deep Space Nine Injustice

Let’s get to it immediately, Star Trek has always been a curiously sexless franchise. Yes, Captain Kirk explored strange new bedrooms and sought new sex-lives and new civilizations, and there have been a flash of sauciness over the years, but the demographic seems to have limited the potential for NSFW material. That may have changed thanks to Star Trek‘s newest series, which is inherently more dialed in to heightened relationship dynamics, because of the mostly youthful cast. At any point, it feels like someone might jump on someone else.

The latest episode of Starfleet Academy was the most sexually active, as it were, with an opening that was anything but cold, and which featured lots of artfully concealed nudity. Not quite up to the levels of romantasy fiction, but the tryst between Sandro Rosta’s Caleb Mir and Zoë Steiner’s Tarima Sadal bears all the hallmarks of that sort of dynamic. Magical powers (sort of), exotic otherness, burning physical desire, a touch of forbidden fruit, given she’s a War College student, and he’s Starfleet (and a bad boy, at that). If any Star Trek series was going to embrace the taboo of completely normal, healthy sex, it would be Starfleet Academy. And in that sequence, we also, finally, got justice for one of the most notoriously deleted scenes in Star Trek history.

Read Next

Star Trek’s Epic New Klingon Villain Return Officially Addressed by Star

Star Trek Finally Atones For A Prudish Scene Deletion from Deep Space Nine

DS9 was always a little more adult than either the Original Series or The Next Generation; it was cooler, darker, edgier, and that’s part of the reason I loved it a little more. And why I still do. It was also different – much like Starfleet Academy – and some contemporaries reacted similarly to that difference (albeit without the fire of a thousand angry YouTuber suns behind it vying for engagement), and almost managed to break one of Star Trek’s earlier taboos: nudity. Well, implied nudity, at least.

In DS9‘s Season 5, episode 7 – “Let He Who Is Without Sin…” Worf takes time out from his vacation (with Dax, Bashir, Leeta, and Quark on pleasure planet Risa), to join a radical fundamentalist group intent on starting a political and moral revolution. Somewhat hilariously, Worf is driven to the point of radicalization by his own prudishness and jealousy, first when Jadzia meets an ex-lover of a former host of Dax (who seemingly… fornicated said host to death), and then by Leeta and Bashir’s apparent infidelity to one another. It’s one of those episodes that almost strays into farce, and it was also almost more suitable raunchy, until censorship reared its head.

The original plan was for Worf to walk in on Leeta enjoying a bath naked while enjoying the company of someone who wasn’t Bashir (who we would later discover she was amicably breaking up with). The scene was shot with Leeta naked, and was actually shown in previews for the episode – a choice that underlined the moral undertones of the episode and helped Worf’s outrage – but Rick Berman got cold feet and demanded it was reshot because it was “too sexy for Star Trek.” The result – and the injustice here – is that Risa, a pleasure planet whose whole point was to sell the idea of hedonistic escapes from life, ended up looking ridiculously tame. And worse, Worf looked a stick in the mud.

Three decades on, Star Trek has finally realised that the best way to sell sex as an important part of storylines is to not hide it completely. Starfleet Academy artfully uses more veiled nudity than DS9‘s deleted scene ever did, and remarkably, there are not legions of pitchfork-wielding morality warriors trying to burn Paramount down. If only we could have gotten the full, uncensored version of “Let He Who Is Without Sin…” but at least the franchise has finally moved past the limiting prudishness that made Worf a puritanical weirdo.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!