Why Star Trek’s Gates McFadden Struggled With Gene Roddenberry’s Work

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On “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” especially in its early seasons, women were often relegated to motherly, caretaker roles. Shows of capability, strength, and guidance were, in contrast, more often handed to men. Initially, the Enterprise’s security chief was a woman named Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby), but Crosby left the show during its first season and her character was notoriously killed. By 2023, and the third season of “Picard,” McFadden felt that the women of the series had finally been allowed to take action — to fire weapons, to dispatch with the villains, to be the villains. McFadden said of the third season that: 

“The women are much stronger. […] [T]here’s nothing that you would exclude them from. That wasn’t true before. Obviously, I have enormous, endless respect for Gene’s vision of the show and his idea and his concept of the future and the possibility of what it could be, but I actually struggled with some of the roles that women were in.” 

McFadden noted that after Gene’s death, the roles for women in “Star Trek” were expanded to more command roles, and referred to the fact that Kate Mulgrew played the captain of a starship in “Star Trek: Voyager.” 

“But I absolutely love the way all of us are portrayed in this season, and I think that’s one of the things I would say. ‘You see, women can do that. […] [W]e can have conflict like this and still work together, collaborate, and find a resolution. It might not be a perfect resolution — because the world is imperfect — but we are doing what’s great for the greater good.'”

Perhaps too often, action addressing Trek’s moral issues would fall to men. “Picard,” McFadden felt, finally let women have an equal voice.

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