Star Trek: Voyager’s Kate Mulgrew Claims Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek: TOS are “Extremely Misogynist”
Kate Mulgrew, who played the first female Star Trek Captain in Captain Kathryn Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager claims Star Trek: The Original Series is “extremely misogynist.”
In an interview with the Radio Times while promoting her upcoming documentary series titled The Space Race, Mulgrew responded to a question regarding a numbers of fans discontent with Star Trek: Discovery. The question noted that some people claim the dislike of Discovery has a “misogynist edge to the vitriol.”
Mulgrew responded to the question by not only stating that the original series was “extremely misogynist,” but that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was too. She even lumped in Star Trek: The Next Generation as it followed Jean-Luc Picard.
“I don’t think you should be surprised by that. Did you watch the original series? It was extremely misogynist. That’s what it was for years and Picard followed that to a certain extent. Roddenberry himself was that way. We are simply going to have to change this sensibility, this ideology, and we are, but it’s like moving granite. It takes a long time. We are not a society that has endorsed females as equals to males on television.”
However, earlier in the interview Mulgrew would praise Roddenberry.
“Well now you are talking about a visionary, and his name was Gene Roddenberry. He foresaw what others could not see. The fact that Star Trek emerged at the same time is no accident. Roddenberry came into his own at exactly the time we recognised the value and possibility of material space travel.”
She then touched on the importance of playing the first female Captain and how it furthered Roddenberry’s vision.
“Without question, playing the first female captain came with huge responsibility. Not just to further these extraordinary ideas, given wings by Gene Roddenberry, but to do so with an intention and intelligence that would extend itself, in particular, to the women in my audience.”
Mulgrew even recalled how she met a number of women during a visit to the White House and recalled how they had been inspired by Janeway.
“They came out of school, MIT, Harvard, Yale, and instead of going into research, sitting in the office, they said they wanted to go into the field – they wanted to go up! Watching Catherine Janeway captain a starship empowered them in a way that nothing else could at that time. We’re talking about the 90’s in Hollywood. What they put on television is a harbinger of things to come.”
Mulgrew would also make her opinion of President Donald Trump and his goal to return to the moon known.
“Now we have this clown Donald Trump, who has no vision whatsoever, so our space imagination has been blunted for the time being. I don’t think he has any intention [of returning to the Moon]: he’s not educated, he’s inept, and there is nothing of self-gain in space for Donald Trump, nothing promotional for him.”
To close out the interview, after calling Star Trek: The Original Series “extremely misogynist” and painting not only Gene Roddenberry, but Jean-Luc Picard as misogynistic as well, Mulgrew would indicate she would like to return to the franchise in the upcoming Star Trek: Picard show.
“I might go back and talk to them, passionately, about the way, the truth and the light.”
What do you think of Kate Mulgrew’s view on Star Trek? And would you like to see Janeway make a return?
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