Class in Science Fiction Television

For all its supposed racial liberalism, science fiction television has done a relatively poor job of addressing class issues. Farscape, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Doctor Who, Star Trek: Voyager, and Space 1999 all had nearly zero class analysis in their plots. The original Star Trek series "Cloud Minders,"
pictured to the left, is probably the most direct class analysis ever done by science fiction. It's one of the few science fiction TV episodes to question the nature and purpose of capitalism. While Star Trek ultimately came down on the side of capitalism, the "Cloud Minders" episode clearly implied that the workers were right in making demands for better pay and equipment. Unfortunately, Star Trek's insistence that poverty would disappear in the future ended up serving as a way of erasing working class people from the Star Trek universe. That universe is comfortably middle class, really upper middle class, with no discernible analysis as to how the Federation managed to achieve this poverty-less society. The Marquis, featured in later episodes of DS9 and Voyager at least showed us that Federation colonial policy wasn't all it's cracked up to be.

Babylon 5 did a somewhat better job of dealing with class. Security Chief Garibaldi clearly was a grunt, a guy who had seen better days. And two episodes, "A View from the Gallery" and "By Any Means Necessary" dealt with working class laborers and the issues they dealt with, including oppressive corporate bosses. Earth 2 was also fairly nuanced in its view of labor strife, not picturing a perfect future, but one in which class strife was epidemic. Battlestar Galactica (the reboot) pictured future humans using slave labor forces, as did Blake's Seven, so neither series could be accused of painting a bright picture of the industrialist class. Unfortunately, today, class is too often relegated to the background, in favor of simplistic analyses of race issues that usually end up condemning racial and ethnic minorities more than helping them. Science fiction television still needs a Marxist classic to match the fifty capitalist classics it has given us.