We have never been Star Trek

As a televisual mythology, there’s really only one story to tell about an Idea, which is the story of a time the Idea failed (at least for a while). That’s what story is; that’s how story works. If the characters can’t struggle and can’t suffer you don’t have a viable narrative, much less a viable franchise. And so from The Cage on – before the Idea is really even an Idea – we see the Idea fail again and again and again and again. Nor would it be hard to craft an anti-utopian counter-Idea out of characters like the salt vampire, or the Talosians, or Edith Keeler, in which we discover that the true message of Star Trek is that the seductiveness of our naïve fantasies is in fact the real threat, and we have to be cold, calculating, rational, and logical to protect ourselves from being made foolish by our hopes. And at some point the showrunners and suits will finally crack and tell the one Star Trek story they haven’t yet allowed themselves to tell, the story they’ve been inching closer and closer to without ever quite getting there, which is the story of how the Federation collapses and Earth gets invaded by aliens or destroyed by some Crazy Space Whatzit and the dream dies and it all just goes to hell.

Nonetheless, despite all these many disproofs, the Idea of Star Trek somehow persists. The Idea of Star Trek – an idea that exists independently of any particular episode of Star Trek, an idea that at times has had only a very loose connection to the larger set of texts that shares its name – is that the future might be good; we might be good; we might find a way, somewhere far beyond the stars, to become our better selves; that the misery and malice of our present might be someday be redeemed.

And, yes, Star Trek is also a commodity, a brand, a magic trick for turning hope and nostalgia and warm feelings about watching TV with our fathers into money.

And Star Trek is old now, and my dad is old now, and I’m old now, and Gene and Kirk and Spock and Data and Leonard and DeForest and James and Anton are all dead. And the schlockiest, hokiest climate-change disaster movie is a far more realistic articulation of the likely future of human society than the Federation ever will be. And warp drive is probably physically impossible. And transporters almost certainly murder anyone who uses them. And holodecks seem like an utterly impractical waste of ship resources, even in the most generous appraisal. And of course in 2016 we all know better than to believe in anything, anyway, especially in something so deeply flawed, so essentially and irredeemably and aggressively uncool as Star Trek. I mean, the uniforms alone.

And yet.