I found this after reading and responding to this post here about early Trek fans’ prejudicial negative reaction to TNG. One of my responses (see here) was to point out that any fans of the progressiveness of Trek ought to have been mindful of the room for improvement over TOS, with female representation being an obvious issue. I posed the question “when did Trek start consistently passing the Bechdel test”, thinking that it didn’t start happening until Voyager, which those hard-line TOS fans would never have allowed to be made (along with TNG and DS9).
And of course, someone’s done the analysis with graphs and everything! Awesome! (though note the links to tumblr posts at the bottom that are now behind a sign-in wall … fun).
The results aren’t surprising to me, generally. I expected TNG to do worse, but also thought it did a pretty good job with female guest characters so it might score higher than I thought. DS9, I expected to do better than TNG, which, to my surprise is only marginally true. But I didn’t expect, from memory, how much of that is attributable to so many characters breaking off into (hetero, yes even Odo) couples. Voyager obviously does very well. And Enterprise … well we shouldn’t expect much of that … honestly, for me, this cements the show’s status as a blight on this era to lean so masculine straight after voyager.
And of course TOS shows its age, which, surely by 1987, good Trek fans should have been aware of?
Beyond that, I can’t help but think of SNW here, which, IMO has a wonderful cast/crew that’s well balanced and which I’d expect to be doing well on the Bechdel (as low and superficial bar as it is). But, as it starts to transition into a TOS prequel/reboot (as it is trending from S2 and as the show runners are indicating), all of those TOS characters are going to carry that 60s baggage with them. They’ll all be men (Uhura is already there!) and all be special miracle workers. La’an’s story has already been sidelined into a Kirk romance. Pelia the engineer was already somewhat substituted by Scotty the engineer. As it goes on (presuming it does), I think it could begin to look awkward once you squint.
EDIT: For those asking about new seasons/series … I found this page/blog by the author of the parent blog post … which provides data for some new Trek (Disco and Picard S3 and SNW S1 it seems).
Somewhat notably to me (though only one data point) … the one episode of SNW S1 that (clearly) fails the test is the one with Kirk in it.
In a similar vein though, while Disco generally does well (best of all Trek so far it seems), the author notes that Season two had the most episodes that were close to the line, because Michael’s arc was so intertwined with her search for her brother, Spock. That is, the more new Trek leans into TOS nostalgia, the worse this gets.
I’m amused at Voyager not hitting close to 100% for every season with Janeway in the lead. Like, season 3 only has ~65%?!
I don’t have clear memories of VOY S3 distinct from the other seasons, but I’m guessing it’s about then that the writers don’t know what to do with Kes any more and that’s a big part of it. Of course, once Seven is so prevalent in seasons 4 and 5, it basically goes to 100%, with Janeway and Seven having a personal relationship and neither being sidelined by any romantic plot lines (kinda a big deal, especially for 90s, IMO). The author makes a good point that failing the bechdel test in Voyager’s case wasn’t always a bad thing from a feminism point of view because they were often Janeway centric episodes that just had talking to lots of men.
I kinda think Voyager failing the test despite Janeway is still a symptom of a representation issue. The test was designed because there are plenty of fully fleshed out female characters in fiction, but usually they exist as exceptions in a man’s world and creators still feel too awkward writing women to have two or more of them having meaningful exchanges.
I’d say that despite Voyager being a trailblazer for representation with Janeway, it still had these exact issues. At least until Seven of Nine came along.
It’s still important to note that the test is in no way a formal analysis, and not even its creator claims this.
For sure … the test is flawed. But an episode full of Janeway that fails the test is surely something very different from an episode that passes only because Beverly and Crusher have a quick exchange in a meeting.
Ok, I know this was probably meant to be Troi and Crusher, but in Star Trek it’s not impossible, so I found it funny. Riker had the transporter duplicate, not Crusher!
That voyager doesn’t get 100% represents a failure in the fundamental concept of the test.
I’d disagree and say that it demonstrates its flaws (as the author of the linked post says also). But there is no reason to think that it meaningless that Janeway doesn’t talk to other women about something other than a man.
That’s a fact, in some episodes, with some meaning independent of whether the episode otherwise has plenty of dialogue delivered by its female lead. Would a TOS episode have ever failed the reverse bechdel test? No, Kirk had plenty of men to talk to and did so about many things other than women. Why not Janeway? Because the show, in many episodes, surrounded her with men. Paris, Harry, Chakotay and Tuvok surround her on the bridge, while Kes, B’Elanna and Seven are often “downstairs”. The test surfaces these aspects of the show, if you think about it for a moment … and I don’t think that’s a failure of the test at all.
Except it doesn’t surface “those aspects of the show”
The fact remains that those three characters are easily the three most critical and important character on the ship. Which is one of the primary flaws of the test. It doesn’t test their agency. On that alone, the test is flawed and cannot accurately represent Voyager.
If you take Enterprise on the other hand, then that legitimately fails since there is a vulcan-human relationship so bad the character even talks about it with her future self.
Well, you know, thinking about it, an awful lot of Kes’s life revolves around Neelix and the Doctor, with occasional training by Tuvok. I suspect a lot of her dialogue was about one of the three…
Hold on… A show getting 100% represents the entirety of its content NOT having any woman characters talking about a man correct?
Last I checked, women do indeed talk about men, and men about women… So to have a 100% pass would be… Unnatural.
The test should ideally never be passed with 100% (at least over the course of several episodes) - because that’s just not how humans behave - but then it shouldn’t have a low score either.
@MaxMouseOCX @startrek That’s not the criterion for the Bechdel Test — it’s ONE conversation between two women that’s not about a man.
Oh… ONE conversation… Fair enough, that’s actually surprising then; surprising that I haven’t really noticed.