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 agree with you…to a point. Story should come first, but if a story fails the Blechdel Test, there should be a good, defensible reason for it, and there are good reasons to fail the test, e.g. a story takes place exclusively on a Royal Navy ship circa 1800; there were no women there, so it wouldn’t make sense to pass. I’ll buy it.
In Star Trek though, there are fewer defensible reasons because of the nature of the show. Off the top of my head, “Measure of a Man” could have Capt. Louvois discussing Android rights with Dr. Pulaski (without mentioning Data) or Troi expressing to Guinan how upsetting it is that these trials are necessary. Does the lack of a scene like that make the episode bad? No. It starts a discussion, though, which is the primary purpose of the test to begin with. In the case of “Measure of a Man,” a scene like that would have probably been left on the cutting room floor to make way for a tighter story that just happened to not have women at the center of it.
Also, reasonable people can disagree on how important a particular scene could be, but the discussion of female representation is still an important one. The goal isn’t to “pass” the test for everything, but there shouldn’t be an overwhelming amount of failures of the test.