this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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I still don’t understand why they wrote him off of SNW.
The explanation from the EPs is somewhat lame, and exposes some awkward systematic abelism, despite best intentions.
They intended to have a new character die to support Uhura’s character development. They ended up creating a great Aenar character when they asked Kirsten Beyer to suggest a potential alien. Then they cast a legal blind actor to play him who was so much more capable in his craft than they had hoped for.
But they were fixed in their idea that it was necessary to fridge an important character to develop Uhura (🤦🏽♀️).
Which leaves the EPs searching for other roles for Bruce.
On the other hand, if Bruce Horak becomes the multi-character Jeffrey Combs of current Toronto Trek productions, it would be an important advance for representation in its own right.
I hate it when they kill a character just to develop another, it's so lazy and cliché. Definitely one of my pet peeves in media, along with 'the plot only works because characters refuse to communicate'.
Henry Alonso Myers, one of the SNW executive producers, said in an interview that, " ... people are gonna say, "There's no tension because we know everyone survives." And we wanted to say, "What if not everyone survives?" And part of that was also to see our characters go through loss."
With TV series, the "kill off a well liked character so that the audience knows this is serious," approach frustrates me. I think it's lazy. What I think is difficult is having a strong story with strong writing that makes the audience believe that a character(s) is in peril in the moment. Hemmer's death did nothing to change that legacy characters (Pike, Spock, Uhura, and more) are not going to die during SNW. Being Star Trek, I have to say that at least they won't stay dead.
I think that they had lightning in a bottle with Hemmer. That was the time to rethink killing him off. The "seeing the SNW characters go through loss" rationale is shaky and doesn't ring true to me. From TOS through PIC, the main characters have grieved the deaths of any they cannot save.
The EP explanation of needing Hemmer's demise in order to grow Uhura as a character is ridiculous. In SNW, Uhura is already dealing with loss. Hemmer being there to help guide her growth through such turmoil makes a lot more sense to me than piling on more grief and loss.
Henry Alonso Myers Interview: Star Trek Strange New Worlds, July 7, 2022
Yeah, I'm a frustrated fan of Hemmer.
Share the feeling.
I personally never buy the fridging a character to ‘make it real’ argument, but it seems to have a great deal of sway with a certain generation of writers.
Unfortunately the EP/writers arguing this are almost always heterosexual cisgendered males and the characters fridged are almost always women, LGBTQ+ or in the case of Hemmer, a person with disability.
And like most systemic bias, they just don’t seem to see the issue. After the backlash from killing off Culber in the first season of Discovery, Akiva Goldsman (and Alex Kurtzman who signs off on the season arcs), should have been more hesitant to repeat the situation with another representation character. I don’t doubt their progressive values, but this can only be understood as an enormous blind spot.