Why the Pakleds are an inspired choice for 2020
Ever since Star Trek came back to television in 2017, the storied science-fiction franchise has seemed to struggle with relevance to today’s world. In particular, it has been an open question how a series famed both for its utopianism and for its habit of mirroring contemporary political issues can approach the global rise of the authoritarian right.
Thus far, attempts to thread this needle have been…mixed, at best. Even for a franchise that did an episode in 1969 about racial hatred between black-and-white guys and white-and-black guys on an alien planet, having Mirror Lorca scream “Make the Empire Glorious Again!” on an episode of Star Trek: Discovery felt a little on-the-nose. Picard, meanwhile, approached the problem by effectively turning the Federation into Brexit-era Britain, with the titular hero recast as a sort of “Harry Leslie Smith” figure, railing in opposition to Starfleet’s xenophobic and militaristic turn. And then, there’s Lower Decks, the goofy animated workplace comedy that constitutes the franchise’s ninth series. On the face of it, Lower Decks is the least interested in social commentary of the new crop of Star Trek series. In fact, one review of the first few episodes even suggested that “There’s something admirable about how fiercely committed Lower Decks is to being low-stakes entertainment, which is difficult to achieve in an era in which there is pressure on all creators to be political.” And yet, it would be a mistake to assume that it is intended to be wholly apolitical either, particularly in view of the season finale, “No Small Parts” (spoilers ahead, for those concerned about such things).
The major twist in the finale is that it brings back the Pakleds — minor, somewhat inept villains from a single 1989 episode of The Next Generation. Except the surprise is that they’re no longer minor villains: after decades of stealing technology and kidnapping engineers from more advanced civilizations, they have made themselves into a mighty threat, easily able to rip Federation starships apart. Comments one of the characters in the episode: “I thought they were kind of a joke!”
In an interview with IGN, the series creator Mike McMahan explained his motivation for bringing the Pakleds back:
“When I wrote that episode, it was in a really dark time where there was a lot of nationalism and fascism re-rising in Europe, and obviously we have a real problem with that here as well,” says McMahan. “And for me, I wanted to find an entity that Starfleet could not be focusing on, that could then have been built up in power. And that line about, ‘Oh, aren’t these guys a joke? Well, they’re not a joke anymore.’ That feels, to me, like a lot of what we’re dealing with right now. That dangerous people are dangerous even if you didn’t know they were.”
Beyond McMahan’s point about how many formerly “ridiculous” things have recently come back to bite us all on our collective asses (it’s difficult to believe now, but the Huffington Post initially filed all news about Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign in their entertainment section), I would argue that what really makes the Pakleds into superlative villains for the 2020s is the fact that they actually are kind of unsophisticated. Unlike the Klingons on Discovery, there’s no frighteningly foreign values system at work behind their actions, nor any completely inhuman reasoning, like that of the Borg. There is no “N-dimensional chess” being pulled off with impossible clockwork precision; not even any witty banter or scathing observations of the sort you might expect from villains in other media. Rather, the Pakleds’ motives are childishly simple: They want to be a POWER! And why they want that is a question that would never even occur to them to ask.
And that is the true face of Evil in the year of our lord 2020. Not the brilliant chessmaster who thinks 20 moves ahead — they’ve long-since managed to outsmart themselves — but the selfish, authoritarian dumbass who delights in hurting people to prove how STRONG he is and who protests COVID-19 restrictions because he honestly thinks that he has a God-given right to eat at Applebees. We are living in the Age of the Pakled, where the formerly ridiculous can become deadly dangerous in the blink of an eye. And it seems entirely appropriate that it would be a comedy series, rather than one of the “serious” ones, that finally managed to tap the nail on the head.