Happy Father’s Day! The 5 Worst Dads in “Star Trek”
Every nerd worth their salt knows at least a little bit about the future space utopia Gene Roddenberry unleashed on America some fifty years ago and how bizarrely progressive and influential a goofy show originally sold as “Wagon Train to the Stars” turned out to be. But for all the things Star Trek got right, familial relationships wasn’t really one of them.
I’m something of a Star Trek scholar, and I also happen to be a dad (these things overlap: my son’s middle name is Tiberius), so the good folks at G33KPR0N asked me to lend my knowledge of the Milky Way’s future history to a look at the dads of the 23rd and 24th century. And I’ve got to tell you, with a few notable exceptions I wasn’t particularly impressed. But, in the interest of “this is a Father’s Day post – quit being so negative”, I’m going to try to stay egalitarian, so without further ado, and in no particular order: my picks for the five best and five worst fathers of Star Trek.
Let’s start with the stinkers: the ones who make me wonder why being a parent still isn’t a licensed activity three hundred years into the future.
5. Captain James T. Kirk
But I totally pulled out!
Oh yeah, I’m going there. Good leaders don’t always make good dads, and Jim Kirk is a great example of why. As a starship captain, his first love is his ship and the crew are his family. That’s good news for the inner circle (not so much for the red-shirted step children of the security department), but the skills that allow Kirk to be an effective military commander don’t translate particularly well into a paternal environment. Frankly I’m shocked that man only fathered one child with all the interstellar hanky panky he so enjoyed, but the fact of the matter is he was Dad In Absentia to at least young David Marcus, who grew up not knowing and eventually hating his father for choosing his career over his dadly duties. Sure, they eventually managed to reconcile (for reasons not adequately explained beyond “my dad’s a dick but he’s also a space hero”), but for those keeping count, that reconciliation came scant hours before Dave bought the farm on the business end of a Klingon dagger. As parenting goes, this is not A+ material.
4. Kyle Riker
My father, the storm trooper.
I’ll admit it came as a shock to me when it was revealed that the Enterprise’s resident bearded charmer grew up with an emotionally crippled alpha male for a father figure – you know, since he’s so in touch with his feminine side and everything, ladies. The death of Number One’s mom when he was a boy apparently caused a rift between he and Riker Sr., whose misguided efforts to teach his son to “man up” and (presumably) “quit being a little pussy” led him to play such Father Of The Year-winning cards as “using illegal moves to beat his son in games of American Gladiators In Space”. I can just imagine the dinner conversation when Will brought up trombone lessons. Oh, and there was the whole issue of him abandoning his fifteen year-old son and not talking to him for well over a decade. There was that, too. Like Kirk and son above, they managed to reconcile after years of this bullshit, but only because Riker the Younger grew up to be the better man despite the best (worst?) efforts of his man-child of a father.
3. Enabran Tain
Daddy drinks because you cry.
It’s not easy to be a good dad when your day job is basically running the Gestapo. Enabran Tain, one-time leader of the Cardassian Obsidian Order, also happened to be the father of Deep Space Nine’s “no really, I’m a” tailor Elim Garak. Of course, Tain never admitted the parental line publicly, since his son was – and I quote – “a weakness [he couldn’t] afford”. Keep in mind, this wasn’t a reviled public figure trying to protect his son from his political enemies – this was a reviled public figure who didn’t want his enemies to be able to use his son to harm him. Parenting! Anyway, Tain is the guy we have to thank for Garak’s intelligence and espionage training, which in Cardassian terms basically means “he could torture a meow out of a bull moose”, and shortly after putting the finishing touches on the Jackson Pollack painting that was Garak’s fractured psyche, exiled him to a space station on the ass-end of nowhere for…ah, reasons. Once again, a deathbed reconciliation was attained, but one wonders how sincere two career spies can really be with one another, blood or no blood.
2. Gul Dukat
Seems legit.
Look, I’m not trying to hate on the Cardassians, but you have to admit – there’s a reason Dr. Phil doesn’t trend well on Cardassia (fun fact: they tortured Dr. Laura to death!) DS9 purists will probably argue with me for adding the Mad Gul to this list because from a certain bent point of view, all the shitty decisions he made were motivated by a well-meaning attempt to look out for his illegitimate daughter. But he failed so hard. First of all, Dukat had a wife and seven children back on Cardassia during his tenure as Prefect of Terok Nor, who would later disown him altogether. Why? During that time he fell in love with a Bajoran slave and fathered a daughter with her (social faux pas alert). But in order to avoid for a few years the inevitable shame and ostracism a Bajoran love child would bring down on his veiny head, he sent Ziyal and her mom off into deep space to get shot down and forced into slavery (again) by the Breen, where Dukat found Ziyal years later. And while Dukat fans (if such a thing exists) will argue that at least he didn’t let his shame override his fatherly duties (the second time around, anyway), he did insist on keeping her with him on a contested battlefield of a space station, where she was eventually killed by Dukat’s bosom buddy for totally unexpectedly developing Federation sympathies. You’d think the mass-murdering prefect of a slave plantation would have made better parenting decisions, wouldn’t you?
1. Q
I have candy.
Go think of a guy less-suited to parenthood than the galaxy’s number-one omnipotent prankster. I’ll wait. The first of his kind born in thousands of years, Q’s son Junior was supposed to end the Continuum’s civil war (check) and serve as an example to all other Q (not so much). In reality, Junior grew up to be just like dear old dad – a shithead with a penchant for fucking with humans and generally causing a nuisance all over the cosmos. A lot of the boy’s behaviour can be attributed to Q’s lackadaisical attitude towards parenting – as you might imagine, “discipline” is about as foreign to Q as “humility”. So what does he do? Well, like most deadbeat dads, he pawns the little urchin off on extended family – in this case, the long suffering Kathryn Janeway, who’s forced to play nursemaid to a super powered tween because she’s just got nothing better to do. “Aunt Kathy” and the crew of Voyager managed to straighten the little bastard out, and in thanks Q gave them a map to a shortcut that shaved three years off their 75-year journey home. When asked why he didn’t just, you know, send them home, he countered by saying it’d be bad for the boy to see dear old Dad doing the heavy lifting for the stranded crew. What, now you’re suddenly father of the year? You dick.
Honourable Mention: Gul Madred, who didn’t make the list because I’m totally not racist against Cardassians, I swear, but the guy routinely invited his children down to his torture den to watch him humiliate and traumatize enemies of the state. I hope the state pays the therapy bills.
Yes, I’m the “four lights” guy.
Stay tuned for part 2, wherein I recount the dads whose parenting doesn’t make you want to toss them into a plasma stream. Think of any terrible dads I missed? Leave them in the comments!
