Star Trek Canon Has Just Explained One Major Gene Roddenberry Rule

Star Trek is 60 years old, which means we’ve all gotten rather used to it. As a result, some of the franchise’s many eccentricities slip past our notice, because they’re like old friends who we’re just so used to. Take, for example, the strangely theatrical way characters – especially captains – talk. There’s something oddly Shakespearean about the dialogue, and deliberately so. “Many comparisons have been made between Shakespeare and Star Trek over the years, and quite authentic ones,” Patrick Stewart admitted in The Fifty-Year Mission by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross.

Sometimes Star Trek has deliberately mocked itself for this dialogue. In one episode of The Next Generation, Picard was kidnapped by a species who communicate only in allegories; in The Undiscovered Country, a Klingon quotes a poem and says it sounds better in the original tongue. What we never expected, though, was to get an actual canon reason for the general theatricality of Star Trek. And it’s delivered in the most surreal way possible.

It Turns Out Starfleet Academy Trains Captains… With Theater

Starfleet Academy episode 8 is perhaps one of the strangest we’ve seen so far. On the one hand, it pays homage to one of the best (and most traumatic) Voyager stories, exploring the emotional impact the loss of his holographic family had on the Doctor centuries ago. It’s an absolutely heart-wrenching story, brilliantly told through Robert Picardo’s captivating performance. But, on the other, all this is told through a surprising lens; namely, the lens of theater. Because the same episode features Mary Wiseman’s Tilly (of Discovery fame) giving theater lessons to the Academy’s cadets.

That’s right, theater studies are mandatory at Starfleet Academy. Given Tilly is a time traveler from 2259, predating every other Star Trek show bar Enterprise, it’s safe to assume Starfleet Academy has always mandated theater studies. Even more incredibly, Tilly insisted that theater studies are the difference between making captain… and not. As she explained, theater is all about performance, and so is being a captain. A captain’s role is to inspire, to present themselves as confident even when they are not, and to understand the different roles they’ll play in a given scenario. It’s a performance.

Starfleet Academy’s Approach Actually Mirrors the Real World

Surprisingly, there’s actually a real-world basis for Starfleet Academy’s approach. It may seem odd for would-be Starfleet captain to learn theater as part of their training, but quite a few of our own military organizations take advantage of what’s called “drama-based training.” The U.K. military, for example, has expanded this approach as an engaging and interactive way to learn, recognizing the value in terms of building teamwork and generating empathy as cadets learn to embrace the lives of others.

Amusingly, some military academies have encouraged would-be leaders to organize actual theatrical shows. They’re required to run the whole thing, even working together to write the dialogue and stage directions, and it’s been found to encourage self-awareness – a crucial trait in military leaders, as it allows commanding officers to know their own weaknesses. Looking beyond the military, diplomatic corps offer role-play and theater as a way to understand diplomacy; Starfleet is as much diplomatic as it is military, so it makes sense for this approach to be used.

We Finally Have An Answer to the Last Question We Expected to Deal With

We’d never expected a canon explanation for the theatricality of Star Trek. That, incredibly, is what we just got, the strangest part of the franchise’s 60th anniversary. It’s true that, in the context of the episode itself, the focus on theater feels more than a little surprising; but it does make sense. This even explains why Enterprise was the least theatrical of all the different shows; because it’s the earliest in the Star Trek timeline, set in the dawning days of Starfleet and the Federation, which means there was no Academy to teach theater studies in the first place.

One question does, however, remain unanswered. The Discovery crew traveled from the distant past, and it’s entirely possible they brought theatricality with them. We can be confident theater studies were still taught in the time of The Next Generation – Jean-Luc Picard alone is surely evidence of that – but we don’t know whether it held all the way through to the 32nd century. It’s entirely possible this is yet another strange way the arrival of the USS Discovery affected the Federation of the day.

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