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Episode details

Radio 4,3 mins

Professor Robert Beckford - 05/09/2020

Thought for the Day

Available for over a year

Star Trek Discovery, the latest incarnation of the Star Trek franchise, is to break new ground in science fiction television, by introducing the first-ever non-binary and trans characters later this year. The actor, Ian Alexander, will play the trans character, 'Gray,' and similarly, the actor Blu Del Barrio will play the non-binary character, 'Adira.' It is not the first time Star Trek, has gone where no programmes have gone before. In the shows fifty-year history, the writers have consistently confronted cultural barriers by portraying characters or depicting scenes that resist the mores and values of the time. The first TV series back in the late 60s, for instance, pioneered ethnic diversity in casting and subject matter. The crew of the USS Enterprise was made up of a dynamic array of nationalities, ethnicities and an alien too. The writers did not stop there. Recently, the series has feature same-sex relationships and leading roles for women of African and Asian American heritage. Religious themes of love, salvation and resurrection have also peppered the programmes storytelling. However, for some fans, the appeal of the franchise is its equal commitment to subverting religion: some of the TV episodes and action-movies, actively seek to debunk the beliefs of crew members or those of a people in a far-flung alien planet. Less controversial is the literary idea that science fiction programmes are metaphors; they help us re-imagine new ways of existing, unfettered by the inhibiting social constrictions of contemporary society. Science fiction as metaphor has much in common with apocalyptic or extreme images and visions in the New Testament. At the end of the Bible, the Book of Revelation portrays a titanic struggle between good and evil. The outcome is a world free of pain, injustice, inequality and racial strife. All people are free to exist as intended, and in harmony with each other and the environment. The architect of this new world order is the Lamb of God – who is the symbol of universal peace and justice. But the Book of Revelation's dramatic images of a hopeful future is not a fleeting illusion or just for the end of time. There is more to the genre than meets the eye, because, as apocalyptic literature, the writers of this drama want their readers to see the imaginary future as a present reality. And the Book's Revelation of the Lamb of God is the model we must follow to confront and transform the dangerous and discriminatory world in which we currently live. In the Bible's version of science fiction, acceptance of difference is possible in real life, in the real world today, and not just on some distant planet or galaxy far away.

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