Making It So for 60 Years: The Enduring Power of Star Trek

On September 8th, 1966, at 8:30 P.M., the starship Enterprise visited Planet M-113, an arid and forlorn world far from Earth. It was the sort of mission that would become characteristic of a new television show called 'Star Trek': the ship’s doctor, Leonard (Bones) McCoy, was sent to perform a medical examination of two archeologists, only to discover that one of them—Bones’s former paramour—had been replaced by a rather grotesque shape-shifting alien vampire that drew sustenance from the salts in human bodies.

The plot, a trope-filled forgettable procedural mystery with a schmear of horror, distilled the essence of the new program. On one side was M-113, which looked plucked right off a Western soundstage—glowing red skies, chaparral landscape, vaguely Meso-American ruins. Its resident alien was the last of its kind, a relic; Captain James T. Kirk compared it to the buffalo that once roamed the Great Plains.

On the other side was the starship Enterprise, a stunningly unconventional non-rocket ship-like design (it looked like an improbably elegant saucer with two drumsticks (as in the musical accessory, not the bird) behind it held together by a cigar) gliding ethereally above the planet. Scores of uniformed crew members strode along its expansive and brightly lit corridors. Save for the naval ranks and insignias (captain, commander, ensign), it could have been a research laboratory or a college campus in space. If the desolate past was earthbound, the civilized future was in orbit.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of science fiction. The first uses the trappings of the future to explore the present, suggesting to its audience that the existence of starships, aliens, and (to stray into that other sci-fi franchise) lightsabers, doesn’t meaningfully change the experience of the human condition. The second uses the same sorts of artifice for the opposite purpose—to imagine foreign, even utopian, futures. The original 'Star Trek' series was undoubtedly of the first kind. The present saturated it. For a show that purported to “boldly go where no man has gone before,” it was remarkably at home in the familiar, if turbulent, world of the nineteen-sixties.

Many of the show’s episodes appeared lifted from the headlines. 'Balance of Terror,' for instance, meditated on the futility of the Cold War. 'A Private Little War' was an unsubtle dig at America’s involvement in Vietnam. 'Let That Be Your Last Battlefield' offered a clumsy dramatization of slavery and racial discrimination. (That week, the aliens were painted half-white and half-black.) Indeed, the show’s only unfamiliar core character was the enigmatic science officer and second-in-command, Spock, whose devotion to logic—inherited, along with his pointy ears, from his Vulcan father—made him seem truly alien. Spock’s inner struggle embodied the conflict at the heart of the series. It pitted unchecked, anarchical emotion against stoic rationality, atavism against civilization, present against future.

Tellingly, the original series was at its best when its cast engaged in good, old-fashioned time travel. 'The City on the Edge of Forever,' penned by science fiction author Harlan Ellison, threw the dynamic trio of Kirk, McCoy, and Spock into nineteen-thirties New York. They were familiar characters dropped into a familiar setting, tasked with a familiar, if daunting, mission: save the world. (By a series of unlucky coincidences, their arrival in New York had altered the future, leading to Nazi Germany winning the Second World War. This had to be corrected.)

In the same vein, 'The Voyage Home,' the riotous (even anarchic) fourth feature film from 1986, saw the Enterprise crew rescue humpback whales from twentieth-century San Francisco and spirit them back to the twenty-third century. The conceit of fictional future humans judging their forebears’ foibles turned the movie into a space-age 'Gulliver’s Travels.' There were no orbital shootouts or alien archvillains, just the Lilliputians’ comical incompetence, shortsightedness, and occasional flashes of nobility. The series’ famous opening invocation—“Space, the final frontier”—could sometimes seem contrived, since present-day humanity was its favorite quarry.

It is hard to overstate how much of a departure the 'Star Trek' franchise’s eighties-and-nineties-straddling incarnation, 'The Next Generation,' (TNG) was from the original series. It retained much of the nomenclature and established codes (the occasionally inscrutable techno-scientific babble, the ship’s name, the naval ranks, the canonical alien species) but swung almost entirely toward the second, more cerebral form of science fiction. It had absolutely no anchor in the present, nor did it genuflect before America’s frontier myths. 'The Next Generation' was wholesale utopian in outlook, a thought experiment on how humans would behave under terminally improved material circumstances. Civilization, and the future, had won.

And what a future! At the end of the show’s first season, the new captain, Jean-Luc Picard, laid bare his world’s parameters. In 'The Neutral Zone,' a reverse-time-travel episode, cryogenically preserved twentieth-century humans awake on the Enterprise. One of them, a take-charge Wall Street tycoon, is particularly eager to reclaim his stock portfolio and his status as master of the universe. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things,” Picard tells him—and us, the audience—sternly. “We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

Picard and his crew did so with the help of an extraordinary machine, the replicator. It is nothing more than a background prop, the unassuming gadget that dispenses the captain’s favorite drink (“Tea, Earl Grey, hot”). Yet, unlike the show’s other striking technologies—the virtual-reality holodecks and the way faster-than-light warp engines—the replicator has fundamentally changed the moral calculus of being human. It stands as a metaphor for the distant endpoint of the Industrial Revolution. You simply ask for something, anything (food, clothing, medicine, instruments), and it automatically produces it, on the spot, with a suitably sparkly special effect. With such a tool, what is the benefit of owning objects or accumulating wealth? What becomes of life’s meaning when machines have abolished the necessity to work? To its own weighty interrogations, 'The Next Generation' offered a simple yet powerful answer: humans, once unburdened from material need, would be truly free to devote themselves to higher pursuits, like knowledge, justice, and mutual understanding.

The drawback of such a utopian premise was that it did away with most of the interpersonal conflicts that are the bread and butter of episodic television dramas, including the original series. Picard and his crew were all human carbon copies of Spock—even-keeled, rational, and almost impossibly ethical. (Spock himself says so of Picard in 'Unification,' the one 'Next Generation' episode in which he appears.) That left little room for identification. You could aspire to be more like Picard, the very model of enlightened compassion and culture, but you could never truly understand his moral universe, as the Federation had become almost too perfect. He was nothing like us twenty-first-century humans. He was almost too alien then and sadly, remains so today, especially when looking at those ‘leaders’ in charge of our world.

Even accounting for the inevitable ups and downs of a seven-year run, 'The Next Generation' was unique in its breadth and quality. Relieved from the conventions of scripted television by an outlandish premise, it could grapple with highly abstract topics. The best among the hundred and seventy-eight episodes—and there are many gems—are rigorous, self-contained philosophical treatises. You need only watch 'The Measure of a Man' to be persuaded of the show’s ambition. In it, Data, the android and valiant lieutenant commander, fights an eager scientist who wants to study him—in other words, take him apart. Can a machine endowed with sentience be considered a living being? Can it enjoy the rights and protections afforded to humans? Can it be a citizen? Such musings are far from idle and may turn into practical concerns much sooner than the twenty-fourth century.

In 'Darmok,' Picard must attempt to communicate with a species whose language relies on allegory rather than grammar and is thus unintelligible to the show’s other great behind-the-scenes technology, the universal translator. Rather than speaking of “failure,” for instance, the aliens say, “Shaka, when the walls fell,” apparently alluding to some tragic hero. The episode’s dialogue becomes disorienting, almost Beckettian in its absurdity, but after much wrangling and misunderstanding Picard succeeds in establishing a fleeting bond. He does this by recounting the epic of Gilgamesh to his alien counterpart. The oldest recorded human story, a tale of loss and brotherly love, serves as a bridge between two otherwise irreconcilable cultures. Whenever it could, 'The Next Generation' eschewed the brawling and braggadocio of the original series. Both shows were deeply committed to the same humanistic values of reason and tolerance, but the more evolved humans of 'The Next Generation' practiced what they preached. This was, arguably, 'Star Trek' at its finest, subtly making the case for communicative dialogue and showing how common ground is the starting point for mutual understanding.

When the show is at its best, it places a moral quandary in front of the audience and asks what we would do. Most often, Picard answers that question — and, occasionally, his answer is unsatisfactory.

In the episode 'Journey’s End,' Picard is ordered, unhappily, to relocate a colony of the American Indian diaspora from a disputed border zone. In many others, his attachment to the prime directive (the order never to interfere with any pre-warp civilization) seems obsessive and cruel. But Picard never acts without giving the audience a reason, and the spirited debates between his bridge officers as to the most correct course of action are, at least in my opinion, some of the best philosophical disagreements in any televised media.

However, as interesting as the crew is, what really makes TNG work is the relative utopianism of its setting. 'Star Trek' imagines a post-scarcity humanity where people live free from currency, wage labor, or poverty. By Picard’s own admission, humanity has “evolved” morally from its past (our present). This evolution is so deep and broad that the humanity of today seems more alien than many of the actual alien species the crew encounters. In one episode (not coincidentally written during a writers strike) the crew resuscitates a group of cryogenically frozen 21st century Americans and is immediately struck by how greedy and power-obsessed some of them are. In one of the best exchanges in the show, Picard very patiently explains to a former businessman that accumulation of power and wealth is no longer humanity’s primary goal:

The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” — Jean-Luc Picard, “The Neutral Zone”

This “evolved humanity” allows the show to place itself outside of our existing moral questions. It does not ask what is possible today, but what is right. By showing courtroom dramas where androids are given citizenship, conflicting with species which are deeply capitalistic, and presenting moral questions on the chains of command, TNG isn’t just asking how we would act today, it is asking how we would act if we managed to escape greed, poverty, and inequality.

In asking that question, 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' quietly insists that those questions are important; it insists that we need to consider the moral implications of space-age tech, the obligations of post-scarcity civilizations, and wonder what could be out there because we will one day face it.

“Star Trek: The Next Generation” has precious little to tell us about our present selves. Or, rather, it tells us who we are not, and who we might become someday. This is not the type of science fiction that we are accustomed to consuming, or that TV and film producers are accustomed to making.

'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine' (DS9) took the concept in a new direction. The uniforms, formerly brightly colored with black epaulets, now became mostly black with colored highlights. The entire tone of the series followed this shift toward chiaroscuro. The Starfleet crew were assigned to an impressive but uncomfortable space station built by an enemy of the Federation. Goodbye to the vaguely academic city in space concept encapsulated by the vast Enterprise-D. Instead of randomly traveling around the galaxy, the show concentrated on developing a new mythos during its seven seasons (including ancient Founders, shapeshifting Changelings, drug-addicted Jem’Hadar soldiers, and the sly, elfin Vorta). DS-9 also introduced the concept of 'Star Trek' as space opera, with individual episodes contributing to one vast story; along with this came a certain homogeneity to the series that could be stifling, since episodes never veered too far from the story arc (and those that did seemed like annoying tangents rather than stories that mattered). Back then, 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine' seemed unimpressive, but in retrospect it was a well-conceived show that was always watchable and had an excellent cast with scripts unafraid of taking risks by daring to challenge the utopian 'masterpiece society' elements of 'The Next Generation' by doing what not other series had dome before and plunging the peaceful (though on occasion insufferably smug) Federation into a no-holds-barred interstellar Dominion war where everyone (even the inestimable Picard in a guest role) was compelled to question how far they would go in order to save their way of life. DS9 shook things up enough to be different.

In regard to 'Star Trek: Voyager,' this should have been a return to the theme of exploration and discovery that made the original so captivating. But Voyager remained a show in search of a vision. With uneven scripts and occasionally underdeveloped (Neelix, Kes) characters, the actors were never given anything interesting to do, being basically there to advance the plot. The style of the show seemed to go whichever way the wind was blowing. One week they would emulate 'The X-Files,; the next week something else. Voyager foisted on viewers arguably the worst script in the Star Trek cannon: In 'Threshold,' Paris and Janeway are caused to ‘evolve’ into what humans will become millions of years from now—as if evolution was something that occurred apart from outside influences! So they evolve into salamanders. Huh? This problem is solved by filtering the ‘evolved DNA’ out of their systems which returns them to their former selves. Even by Trek technobabble and scientific leaps of faith this stretched credulity.

'Enterprise' was a prequel series assigned the thankless task of exploring Star Trek’s already very familiar concepts (starship, transporter, warp drive, etc.). It tried to introduce a large story arc in the form of a ‘Time War,’ but the mysterious enemies were largely faceless, and since Captain Archer never knew what was going on, neither did the audience. I enjoyed the focus on Archer and T’Pols working relationship, which was basically a ‘reboot’ of Kirk and Spock. But the result of all this was a bit lackluster. As with 'Voyager,' I missed entire seasons of this show because I just didn’t feel compelled to watch it, and later caught them in re-syndication. Coming from a 'Star Trek' fan, that’s pretty lukewarm.

More recently, 'Star Trek' has reflected its times by defaulting towards more of a popcorn-driven ethos with series like 'Discovery,' 'Lower Decks' (an animated take), 'Prodigy'( CG animation), the recently cancelled 'Starfleet Academy' placing their emphasis on lens flares, plenty of action set pieces and banter more suited to Marvel's 'Avengers' universe. 'Strange New Worlds,' which in some ways has been the one iteration of Trek that's taken the wildest swings in its creativity (try puppets and musicals mixed in with memorable tension-laced space battles -- though thankfully not in the same episode) comes to an end next year. Some Trek purists may not have appreciated this new take but their vented anger ignores a historical and cultural reality: every Trek series reflects its time as the original series and TNG did and with Paramount Pictures' recent acquisition, the studio's new owners have already signaled a desire to return to a new standalone film that -- at least this early juncture -- promises a return to a more Original Series style.

Today, three generations after its debut, 'Star Trek' stands at a crossroads. With new leadership at Paramount Pictures, the venerable franchise stands at the cross roads of another new iteration. And so, on the cusp of its golden years, with a new movie on the horizon, the final season of ‘Strange New Worlds’ a year away, it’s a pretty sure bet that Star Trek will continue in some form another.

We fans can but hope it will "Live long and prosper."