On September 8, 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 “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to perform a medical examination of two archeologists, only to discover that one of them—Bones’s former paramour—had been replaced by a shape-shifting alien vampire that drew sustenance from the salts in human bodies. The plot, a forgettable procedural mystery with a schmear of horror, distilled the essence of the new show. 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 Kirk compared it to the buffalo that once roamed the Great Plains. On the other side was the Enterprise, 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) lightsabres 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 stories appeared lifted from the headlines. The episode “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 Harlan Ellison, threw the dynamic trio of Kirk, Bones, 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 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 arch-villains, 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,” was from the original series. It retained much of the nomenclature and established codes (the 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 no anchor in the present, nor did it genuflect before America’s frontier myths. “The Next Generation” was wholesale utopia, 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 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 whizzing 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 compassion and culture, but you could never truly understand his moral universe. He was nothing like us twenty-first-century humans. He was too alien.
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—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.
“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. To wit, if the news is any indication, the upcoming “Star Trek” television reboot, “Discovery,” goes back to the original formula. It is set in the same time period as the nineteen-sixties series. Like one of the many programmed “Star Wars” prequels (starting with “Rogue One,” this December), it will dredge the recesses of the “Star Trek” universe for fun and profit. There will be no replicators, and certainly no utopia. The protagonists will be closer to us—perhaps more enlightened, but still beholden to darker impulses. And so, on the cusp of its golden years, “Star Trek” swings back toward the present and the familiar. Live long and prosper, indeed.
