From Starship Captains to Galactic Rebels: Leaders in Science Fiction Television by Kimberly Yost (review)

In March 2009, Battlestar Galactica (US 2004–09) actors Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos (who played Laura Roslin and William Adama, respectively) spoke at a panel on human rights held at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City. At the time I was struck by how literal an idea this was, with its implicit suggestion that because both actors played leaders on television – albeit within the complex multi-layered narratives of Battlestar Galactica – they, along with producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, also on the panel, were therefore equipped to provide leadership on human rights abuses.

As I remind students each year, a function of cultural forms is to make us (re-)consider the world around us, reinforcing or challenging normative ideas (sometimes both at once) and providing us with further critical, imaginary avenues into understanding our current moment and imbuing us, at best, with different ways of seeing. However, television does not reflect life; it instead re-presents elements of it for our contemplation. Thus a UN panel on human rights featuring the perspectives of actors and producers seemed to me to be missing the point of the critical capabilities of television in general and sf television in particular.

Sf narratives have historically been concerned with, even dedicated to, producing a critique of contemporary social and political problems by relocating current preoccupations to another space and time where their implications can play out, producing an estranged and potentially critical perspective. In the past decade, television series Battlestar Galactica, Continuum (Canada 2012–), Dollhouse (US 2009–10), Firefly (US 2002–3), Orphan Black (Canada/US 2013–), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (US 2008–9) and Utopia (UK 2013–) – the list is not exhaustive – have all produced multi-layered sf narratives, expanding the capacities and characteristics of the genre on screen while using the space thus created to produce further and more complex societal critique.

In this context, Kimberly Yost’s From Starship Captains to Galactic Rebels: Leaders in Science Fiction Television focuses on representations of leaders in sf television, and draws on descriptions of these characters to produce a summary of characteristics of qualities of effective leadership. Yost situates the book’s project at the start, stating that the ‘goal is not to predict behaviours but develop our further and deeper understanding of leadership in extremis for reflection and dialogue, while questioning how the visual text may influence our perceptions of leadership in general’ (xviii). Certainly sf television offers ample opportunities for such questions – yet for the most part the book reads less like an enquiry and more like a series of recommendations.

Each chapter comprises analyses of selected characters in leadership roles from several sf television programmes, via a focus on storylines, character actions and dialogue. Yost frames these as templates of leadership effectiveness related as object lessons in optimal leadership ‘behaviours’ (her term). She notes sf television’s capacity for ‘working through’ (x), an idea taken from Laura King and John Hutnyk (2009), though earlier formulated by John Ellis (1999) in relation to a central function of television more generally. However, her analysis in each chapter remains focused on character representation. Aside from a very occasional mention of the ‘long form’ narratives enabled by the television serial, there is little engagement with the formal qualities (or the ‘visual text’) of television as medium. There is sparse evocation of sf scholarship, and none at all with informing approaches such as genre analysis, narrative analysis or television studies. The scholarship drawn on here comes from leadership studies and theories of management, organisation and social psychology.

Chapters are arranged thematically in relation to different categories of leadership, defined primarily in relation to title and (military) rank. The third and final section, ‘Galactic Rebels’, appears to complicate such categorisation; however, as with the discussion throughout, the terms of reference are descriptive and drawn from leadership and management literature. Indeed, there is less use of...