'Star Trek teaches us we can be better than we are': Finding comfort and optimism in Star Trek

Star Trek is back soon, with the fifth and final season of Discovery launching on Paramount+. There will plenty of people who will revel in its dark and gritty take on the franchise, light years away from the goofy coloured jerseys and computers which explode when you ask them a riddle, which we remember from the 60s show. 

But as someone who recently rewatched everything from The Original Series (1966-1969) to Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005), the dark and gritty nature of Discovery makes it rather atypical of the Star Trek franchise, and it risks throwing away the very thing which made The Original Series so ground-breaking and beloved. 

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Take The Devil in the Dark, from the first season of Star Trek. This begins with Kirk and the Enterprise being called in to deal with a terrifying monster which has already killed 50 miners – seemingly a pretty standard-issue hunt-the-creature story. So far, so Boy’s Own adventure. Only Spock’s scientific curiosity about an organism which might be the last of its kind stands between our heroes and their bloodlust. But midway through comes the revelation that the monster is a mother protecting her eggs. Before the episode is over, Kirk is threatening to kill any miner who raises a hand to the thing, and in the end, he brokers a peace between the alien and the humans. The story is resolved through compassion and understanding rather than superior firepower. 

Look at what Star Trek was up against on US TV in the 1960s. If you wanted something other than cop shows and cowboy shows, your choice was the goofy Lost in Space, or the bleakness of The Twilight Zone. And the pattern continues through movies and TV shows of the 1970s and 1980s. If you want your science fiction exciting and fun, here’s Star Wars, where dozens of anonymous stormtroopers get slaughtered, but it’s all just larks. If you want your science fiction to play like serious drama, there’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a psychotic computer murders four men without ever raising its chillingly level voice. 

Star Trek lives in this middle ground, where we aren’t assuming a dystopian future where everything is awful, but nor are we just playing everything for laughs either. When the show relaunched in the late 1980s as Star Trek: The Next Generation, original creator Gene Roddenberry laid down firm rules, which continued to be respected by his successors. Chief among them: no conflict between our regular characters. They are the best of the best and won’t succumb to petty personal vendettas. 

For many new scriptwriters, this was an insane directive. Drama lives in having characters with opposing viewpoints butt heads – and to be fair there are quite a few rather dull episodes in the first couple of years of The Next Generation. But over time, having to stick to this rule forced the writing team to find unexplored areas of narrative, and the results include all-time classic episodes like Ship in a Bottle, Darmok, The Inner Light or I, Borg. Star Trek teaches us that we can be better than we are, and in a world riven by conflict, it’s a useful lesson. 

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Later iterations of the franchise dealt with this in different ways. It’s a slightly weird quirk of fate that the series about characters hanging out in a shopping mall in space (Deep Space Nine) ended up being the one about the horrors of war, the pain of generational trauma, and the terrible things which people will do to obtain and cling on to power. Whereas the one about a tiny group of survivors stranded light years from home, desperately clinging on to the one small life-raft (Voyager), ended up being the one about spreading the Federation’s optimistic vision of the future to far reaches of the galaxy. 

So, it is with the current crop of shows. If the darker tone of Discovery isn’t for you, then the breezier Strange New Worlds may be a better fit for your tastes. Or if you think that Strange New Worlds has gone too far, with its cartoon-crossovers and characters bursting into song, then the pure nostalgia of the final series of Picard may be where you’ll feel most at home. 

But in all of its incarnations, there’s an optimism about the future which Star Trek always carries with it, and maybe precisely because the world feels scary, unempathetic and dangerous right now, now is when we need Star Trek’s utopian vision of the future the most. I know that I was much happier watching and documenting 724 episodes of science fiction adventure than I was watching the news.  

Star Trek: Discovering the TV Series by Tom Salinksy is out now (Pen & Sword, £25). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops. 

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