Star Trek isn’t exactly known for profanity: the franchise’s image of the future – created off the back of Gene Roddenberry’s often idyllic vision – never quite sat with the idea of Starfleet officers swearing like sailors. In the wake of Picard’s edgier adoption of profanity, a wave of thinkpieces landed online protecting the sacred Roddenberry rules, and insisting the creator would never endorse such base behavior. But by the time Picard came around with its laser-guided “sheer f*cking hubris”, another Trek show had already stolen its sweary thunder.
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Back in 2017, Star Trek: Discovery‘s fifth episode brought in Rainn Wilson – as underrated TOS villain Harry Mudd – and solved a major issue with the spore drive by discovering how to use it without relying on Ripper, the tardigrade-like alien. In doing the latter, the show also broke a long-running Star Trek taboo, with Cadet Tilly (Mary Wiseman) responding to Stamet’s theory about injecting Ripper’s blood into another host with: “You guys, this is so f*cking cool!” It was an eyebrow-raising moment for the typically prudish show. Swear words had mostly been associated with the freedom of the big screen, and even they had never gone as far as a “f*ck”. And it led to one channel getting in big trouble.
Star Trek Discovery Got Space TV In Trouble
Tilly’s outburst – mirrored back to her by Anthony Rapp’s Stamet (who ends up volunteering as the host) – was quite widely criticized as a betrayal of Roddenerry’s more advanced vision for Star Trek‘s future. One of the creator’s golden rules dictated that his Original Series characters would have no conflict between them, as a mark of their more evolved civilizations, and swearing sort of lives with conflict. But in reality, Captain Kirk used “hell” as an explicative in TOS’ The City on the Edge of Forever, so it’s not like Roddenberry was entirely above a good swear.
It’s perhaps more appropriate to think that there’s no swearing because everyone chooses not to. That was later expressed rather well by Kirk calling the Klingon Kruge a “b*stard” for murdering his son in The Search For Spock, and when Data says “sh*t” in Generations. In both cases, it was appropriate usage. And the same goes for Tilly; her excitement simply boiled over into a repressed emotional response to underline the emotion. And Discovery got away with it further for a logistical reason: according to Discovery’s co-executive producer Aaron Harbets (via A.V. Club): “Because we are streaming, so we could do whatever we want. […] It was in the context of three scientists having a victory and celebrating. […] It was sort of like nerds unite, they kicked a**, and dropped a few F-bombs, fine.”
But it wasn’t quite that simple: the Canadian channel that aired Discovery broadcast the episode uncut at 8 pm, breaking the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council’s rules by not warning the audience about the coming curse words with a warning icon. Space was ordered to air an official “apology” statement in a prime time slot twice over the next week. It turns out Space actively chose to air the episode uncut, and explained it with their own statement (via TrekMovie):
“After having viewed the episode prior to airing, Space acknowledged that the use of the word “f*ck” “was surprising given the series and franchise’s previous 51-year track record of being fairly clean with regards to its content… The Star Trek franchise has an extremely loyal and engaged fan base so we took into consideration how the coarse language was used and we decided to air the episode uncut and uncensored in order to deliver the content our Space viewers expect.”
In an alternate world, Tilly wouldn’t have been the first to say “f*ck” at all. The milestone was originally intended for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, when a 20th-century garbage man was supposed to say “What the f*ck was that?” before it was toned down to “hell” in the final version.
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