There can be no nerdier post of the Quirky Muffin. This is the one. The one about 'Star Trek'. That show forms one of the primary texts of my existence and probably always will. I started off with the diluted 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' and then fell in love with the original, as it truly is an iconic show.
It has been said - but not by me - that 'Star Trek' was an analogy for the West exploring the barbarous rest of the world and imposing its own values, but that's really nonsense. If that were true then the crew would never bump into even more advanced cultures like the Metrons or Trelane or the Organians, all of whom are quite happy to not impose their own values on the Federation or the Klingons or anyone else. 'Star Trek' is actually the opposite of that, and above all it's optimistic. Repeating from elsewhere on this blog, 'Trek' broke the link of science fiction to horror and then danced off into the world of adventure, chuckling on the way. And then they came back and made a number of excellent films too, as well as some debatably bad ones. It's actually freakish that a 1960s television cast could transfer so well en masse into a film series, a fact which becomes even more impressive when we consider how badly the next cast did on the big screen.
None of the spin-off Treks can really claim to do anything as legendary as the things the original series did. 'The Next Generation' can to some extent claim to bring a certain maturity to science fiction in the 1980s and 1990s but apart from that mainly succeeds despite its own flawed structure instead of because of massive virtues. It was a show that would have collapsed into a small black hole of dreadfulness without Patrick Stewart holding it all together with a classy grip of iron.
One of the wonderful things about Trek is that optimism, personified in the crew of the ship, and their attitude to the adventure ahead. We can have an alien on the bridge and have him be 'one of the guys'. We can have a black woman have a responsible role and never even raise an eyebrow, nor question the Asian eyebrow or the Russian navigator or any of the crew from all around human parts of the galaxy. This was unheard of in the institutionally racist network philosophy that dominated most of the twentieth century. There's a grand Federation of sentient races that gets along in a grand alliance and that is fascinating although almost untouched by the series itself. Another important thing about Trek is the fusion of character humour with serious allegorical plots. Oh, allegory, the grandest thing about the original series and I almost forgot! This was a series that tackled important issues by couching them in allegory and for the most part succeeded. In fact, it was only when it overtly tried to do things that it got into trouble (see inter-racial kisses and so on), and that was with the caretaker creative team of the doomed third and final season.
Anyone can recite the story of 'Star Trek' so largely this is all redundant. Gene Roddenberry created a wonderful template for something in the vein of a 'Wagon Train To The Stars' and then Gene Coon added the character nuances that made it fly into a stratosphere of greatness, that wouldn't be recognised until after it was all over. That's easy to find elsewhere. What you won't find is the love that a person can have for the oddest things: Dr McCoy has the best taste in women, Spock is a great big fraud and would sacrifice himself almost gratefully, Kirk is ultimately insecure, and the crew tolerates Uhura's singing over the intercom as they're secretly very scared of her. Uhura can be creepy sometimes...
Finally, the show was in colour, glorious colour and none of them wore green cardigans like Captain Crane in 'Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea'. That point can not be overstated enough. And Kirk loved destroying super-computers, as much as I would love to after years of coding and frustration. Go, Kirk, go! Talk that thing into self-destruction.
O.
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