Expendable Appendages: Exploring Medicine as a Final Frontier in Star Trek: Lower Decks

Abstract

Disability representation in science fiction often shows the limits of human imagination by either not imagining disability in the future at all or accommodating it in liberating ways. In Star Trek, medicine, and by extension, disability, as a “Final Frontier” is often depicted in a serious light, and while this has led to numerous thought-provoking explorations into the future of disability through live-action portrayals, Lower Decks has injected a needed element to these narratives: levity. While comedy seems out of place in relation to disability in many people’s minds, disability activists have sought to strip their identity of its taboo status and association with brokenness and vulnerability, meaning humor is a reasonable avenue for dismantling such negativity. Lower Decks poses the question: How might people’s ideas about bodily integrity change with advanced medicine and unquestioned accommodations? As evidenced by the series’ storytelling, anxieties about the body that exist due to ableism and unequal access to medicine disappear and people are bolder about not just risking life but risking limb as well. Utilizing a disability studies framework that builds on previously established disability models and theorizing about the future of disability culture in a utopian Starfleet society, this essay asserts that Lower Decks offers a glimpse of how humanity’s relationship with the body transforms when disability no longer generates grief and fear but is instead treated as a part of human diversity.