On November 22, 1968, Capt. James T. Kirk was forced to kiss Lt. Uhura by a race of sadistic telepaths. This was not the first interracial kiss on TV, but it's easily the one that sticks in the minds of the American public. The episode itself doesn't remark on this fact even once, the kiss is forced because there is no attraction between Uhura and Kirk: they are friends and he is her commanding officer, nothing more. The humiliation is inherent in the loss of agency and free will, not their respective races.
Everyone on set knew it was a big deal, though. NBC intentionally made them film an alternate version where Kirk refuses to kiss her out of fear from reprisal from Southern viewers. Shatner intentionally overacted the hell out of this version of the scene so that they had no choice but to go with the kiss. (Which, just stop and think for a moment, that means there's a level of Shatnerian overacting that's so over the top it's actually unairable. MINDBLOWING.) The show intentionally normalized something that parts of the society didn't want to be normal, and it did it without obscuring the issue, but also without making it a big deal. This is not amazing- it is normal. Deal with it.
On October 30, 1998, Lt. Jadzia Dax kissed the woman she loved in a former life, Lenara Kahn. This was not the first same-sex kiss on American TV, but it was one of the first and one that ended up getting quite a lot of angry calls to Paramount. The episode, however, lets their relationship as a same-sex couple go unnoticed. The fact that they're two women? Unremarkable. Normal. However, it uses metaphor as a 'fuck you' to those would remark upon it. The entire episode revolves around social norms preventing the two from having a relationship. It's an intentionally thin metaphor, they're only not allowed to be together because of Trill taboos against starting relationships with people from past lives, but an effective enough one, because it lets the writers comment on the heartbreak of society keeping you from someone you love, while at the same time not adding any stigma to the real controversy.
However, Deep Space Nine had a problem with metaphor. The comically misogynist Ferengi episodes were...well, comic. The Ferengi come across as an unamusing parody of misogyny and patriarchy. "Look! They hate women so much they won't even let them wear clothes." So the episodes where feminism comes to Ferenginar also come off as equally satirical. There's no real life victory for the American woman when Moogie earns the right to wear clothes. That's already normal. The writers get to get their ya-yas out 'fighting the patriarchy' without attacking anything of substance and, in the process, made the entire subject seem ridiculous.
On February 5, 2003 Sub-Commander T'Pol was revealed to have an infectious disease called Pa'nar Syndrome. Pa'nar Syndrome is caused by mind melding(a practice stigmatized and derided in Vulcan culture at the time) with an infected Vulcan. This plotline came about from insistence up the chain of production command that all UPN shows have a plotline about the AIDS-HIV pandemic. So, instead of try to do anything directly, they framed it entirely as metaphor. And good lord, it was terrible. For one, they framed it as something that only comes from aberrant behavior, i.e. homosexual relations/mind melding. For two, they never even explain why this aberrant behavior might not be unusual at all, they just keep right on with that whole thing being unnatural (anyone remotely familiar with Star Trek will note that Vulcan mind melds are just a matter of course in every other series, but the episode, of course, doesn't acknowledge this because...because). By hiding behind a metaphor, not only is the effect of the intended acknowledgement of the AIDS pandemic weakened, but they manage to add stigma(haha! that's the name of the episode!) to an entirely different cause.
In the pursuit of social justice, metaphors can work. They can make people confront things they'd be defensive about if put bluntly. They can add power to a plot and underscore the issues at hand. But they can also be used as a shield, not just for protecting the writers/producers from controversy, but also protecting the public from acknowledging the reality of an issue.
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