Like few television shows before or since, Star Trek has soaked deeply into the grain of contemporary popular culture. Appearing in four distinct incarnations over the past three and a half decades (with a fifth on the way), it is the longest-running and most popular television series of all time, as well as a highly successful movie franchise with nine feature films released to date and a tenth in preparation. Scarcely a day goes by without some headline punning on its catchphrases: "the final frontier," "to boldly go," "it's life, Jim but not as we know it." Lobby correspondents routinely compare John Redwood to a Vulcan, though politically-literate Trek fans are convinced he's actually a Romulan.
The protagonists of the original 1960s series (Captain Kirk, Mr Spock, Dr McCoy, Chief Engineer Scott, Lt Uhura) and the actors who portrayed them (William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols) have become folk heroes. Nasa's first space shuttle, Enterprise, was named after the iconic starship featured in the original series and its successor, The Next Generation. Thanks to Nasa, the ashes of the show's creator, Gene Roddenberry, were scattered in space.
Why has Star Trek remained so popular for so long? Even allowing for the high quality of much of its acting, writing and design, the source of its perennial appeal is the commitment brought by all its makers, from Roddenberry to the current custodians of the franchise, to a guiding social vision and the exploration of a basic premise. Which is: that humanity can solve its domestic problems (though in the Trek mythos it takes the thermonuclear cataclysm of a third world war to provide sufficient motivation), and in the future will be able to export those solutions peacefully to much of the galaxy via a United Federation of Planets, with Starfleet as its operational arm. In charting that master narrative, the programme-makers have been guided, not always reliably, by the moral compass of a very American liberal humanism, with all its high-minded ideals and embarrassing contradictions.
Starfleet, according to Gene Roddenberry, wasn't so much a military organisation as "paramilitary." Though its jargon and hierarchy owe much to British naval traditions as transmitted through Roddenberry's beloved Hornblower books (whence originated Captain Jean-Luc Picard's catchphrase "make it so"), Starfleet's brief is not imperial rule. The driving impulse is exploration for its own sake and much of the work is diplomatic in nature, including complex negotiations with hitherto unknown worlds as well as existing power blocs. Of course, these altruistic activities frequently place Starfleet crews in physical peril or open military conflict. As a participant in one of the many online Star Trek newsgroups recently observed, "this is one way Star Trek satisfied both hawks and doves: by showing images of combat while preaching messages of peace." The controversy continues. Debate is punctuated by titles like, "is the Federation communist?" or "Star Trek: leftist propaganda or right-wing indoctrination?" One set of partisans will cite the series' devotion to the sanctity of the individual and the joys of watching a uniformed crew kicking alien butt in deafening space battles, while their opponents retaliate with references to its secular-humanist outlook, its challenges to racism and its philosophical elevation of right over might. Each faction finds plenty to enjoy within the Trek canon.
The voyages of the Starship Enterprise commenced in the mid-1960s (our time) and the 23rd century (Trek time). In the original series, the cosmos of the 23rd century was an optimistic fantasy of a technologically advanced and socially enlightened future: liberal America's most hopeful vision of our collective tomorrow. Although from the beginning the programme-makers were not afraid to highlight some of the enduring dilemmas of this vision, in Trek's most recent incarnations the values of Starfleet have been scrutinised with a more jaundiced eye and the original liberal-humanist confidence has looked profoundly shaken. The new fifth series, ominously entitled not Star Trek: Enterprise but merely Enterprise, will take a giant step backwards into the 22nd century, not so much boldly going as timorously retreating to a time before the era of Captain James Tiberius Kirk and Mr Spock, predating even the foundation of the Federation itself.
A forthcoming Trek movie, the tenth, will be the last to feature the cast of Next Generation, the most commercially successful of the television incarnations. The show's key actors Patrick Stewart (Captain Jean-Luc Picard) and Brent Spiner (the android, Commander Data), have demanded that their characters be killed off. Tentatively titled Star Trek: Nemesis, this may be the final feature film. Neither of the more recent television series, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, have earned sufficient following to justify translation into cinema.
Meanwhile, the first season of Enterprise is due to make its broadcast debut in September. And George W Bush is in the White House.
But before we consider whether American liberal humanism, Star Trek-style, still has a future, let us examine the future it's already had, and is currently in the process of abandoning.
The original crew of the Enterprise was a micro-cosmic UN-an African, a Russian, a Japanese and a Scot; plus, of course, their resident alien, Leonard Nimoy as Mr Spock, the emotionless science officer from the planet Vulcan-all happily co-operating under an enlightenend but no-nonsense American leadership. Specifically, the leadership of Captain James T Kirk as incarnated by William Shatner, probably the most annoyingly complacent action hero in television history. Kirk was a kind of interstellar John F Kennedy, a parallel emphasised by the reference to JFK's New Frontier rhetoric in Trek's much-parodied invocation of "space, the final frontier." Here the liberal conscience was to guide and tame military power and scientific advance.
The Enterprise was launched in 1966 and limped back to space dock in 1969. The first run of Star Trek never achieved the big ratings necessary to maintain an expensive series in production, but it was instant cult television. The audience it attracted was small but fanatical, entranced by the interplay between the three principals: dashing Kirk, enigmatic Spock and cranky Bones McCoy. No sooner was Star Trek cancelled than it began an endless loop of syndicated repeats, earning the mass popularity which had eluded it the first time around. Long after its creator, cast and crew had given up on Star Trek, its fans, "Trekkies" nurtured its legacy and ensured its survival as a true grassroots pop-culture phenomenon, (although it would be 18 years before the second series was broadcast).
Catchphrases like "illogical, captain," "the dilithium crystals cannae take it," and "live long and prosper" became a generational currency. Trekkies held conventions, wrote their own Star Trek fiction, fabricated Starfleet uniforms and even translated Hamlet into the language of the dreaded Klingons (a name derived from one of the many Greek terms for "barbarian"), an aggressive race apparently unreconcilable to the Federation's pacific designs for the galaxy.
Yet the three-year run of the original series (TOS hereafter) coincided with a major crisis in the liberal consensus that its premise embodied. These were the years when black militants broke from the moderate civil rights movement, spurning its shibboleths of tolerance and integration, and when the war in Vietnam shattered the alliances (and illusions) on which Trek's liberal humanism was based. By the time the first series left the air, much of the youth of America, its target audience, was in revolt against militarism and bureaucracy. At this point, the image of US interplanetary leadership seemed unsavoury to many, and the notion of infinite human progress orchestrated by a benign liberal elite simply preposterous. Which helps explain the show's initial commercial failure, as well as its underground success. It was at once too radical and too conservative for such fractious times.
How radical was it? The episode in which Kirk attempts to solve a war between two races who are both black and white-their bodies are divided vertically: the ones whose black side is on the left are locked in mortal combat with those for whom it is on the right-did not pull its anti-racist punches, though they mostly failed to connect. The spirit on the bridge of the Enterprise was generously inclusive. At least as far as terran humans were concerned: some of the banter aimed by McCoy at Spock ("green-blooded... pointy-eared") strikes an incongruous note nowadays. Nothing like that would be permitted on Picard's Enterprise.
Contrary to myth, much of it generated by Roddenberry himself, the NBC network objected neither to his original scheme to make the ship's first officer a woman (though they did object to his casting of his girlfriend, Majel Barrett, in the role); nor did they have a problem with the presence on the bridge of a female citizen of the United States of Africa (Nichelle Nichols as Lt Uhura-the name derived from the Swahili word for "freedom"). In fact, with an equal opportunities programme forced on them by the civil rights movement, the network needed all the on-screen minorities they could find. They were anxious, however, that there would be complaints from the Bible Belt concerning the "satanic" appearance of Nimoy as Spock, and repeatedly entreated Roddenberry to drop him. It was an ironic commercial miscalculation. Spock became an enduring icon of cool, a master of comic, Zen-style understatement and (much to Shatner's annoyance) the show's defining and most popular character.
The celebrated "interracial kiss" between Nichols and Shatner did indeed create a mild furore, with southern television stations refusing to screen that particular show. However, in the story the characters are acting under compulsion by alien beings, and the body language of both actors telegraphs their unwillingness to comply. Considering Kirk's numerous interstellar romances, it appears to have been more acceptable for him to have sexual contact with entirely different species (provided the species resembled Caucasian humanoids), than with a fellow human of a different skin colour.
So, how conservative was it? In the Vietnam allegory "A Private Little War," written by Roddenberry himself, the Enterprise crew finds a planet engulfed in civil war, with the Klingons supplying armament to one faction. Kirk's solution? Arming the other side. At least one cast member was unimpressed. Walter Koenig (Ensign Chekov), whose peculiar "ock-sent" belied the fact that he was the authentic offspring of Ukrainian communists exiled to the US in 1905, wrote in his autobiography, "we were trying to espouse a philosophy which held that in the 23rd century all civilisations would be better served by a decrease in weapons use. Yet the driving statement was that the balance of power between feuding sides was best achieved by a mutual build up of arms. It seemed reactionary to me, and out of touch with our desire to deal with topical issues in an enlightened manner."
Planetary civil war turns up in another Roddenberry-scripted show, "The Omega Glory," where sophisticated "Comms" are pitted against primitive "Yangs," later revealed to be abbreviations for "Communists" and "Yankees." The climax of the story comes with the Yangs revealing their sacred text, which turns out to be the American constitution. Cue patriotic music and the stars & stripes. In this episode, at least, Roddenberry's liberalism dissolved into cold war partisanship, and left him looking uncharacteristically out of touch with the Vietnam sceptics in Trek's core audience.
Yet despite the concessions offered to conservative sentiment by the liberal Roddenberry, Star Trek was on the side of the angels, and perceived as such. Roddenberry's Vulcan slogan sums it up: "infinite diversity in infinite combinations." Much is made in TOS of the centrality of "the prime directive," which forbids Starfleet personnel from interfering in other cultures. Here, in keeping with the real world emergence (and entry into the UN) of a host of newly independent nations, Trek suggests that the lessons of colonialism have been learned. Famously, however, Kirk seems to be forever violating the prime directive. Even this most idealised future America found itself unable to operate according to its most fundamental principle. In fact, the awkwardness of applying the prime directive became a way of posing awkward questions. Under what circumstances is it permissable for a major power to intervene in the affairs of a smaller and weaker one? When is force justified? What constitutes a "moral purpose"? We have heard much in recent years of "humanitarian wars." Even in the 1960s, Trek was asking just which wars qualify for that justification, and who should decide whether they qualify. Back then, on the whole, the answer was that the likes of James T Kirk were best placed to bear that burden.
Set 80-odd years after TOS and featuring a new crew aboard a new Enterprise, Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG hereafter) was helmed by a very different captain. On the bridge this time was the impeccably enlightened Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played with Royal Shakespeare Company gravitas by Patrick Stewart. Picard was middle America's ideal European: a notional Frenchman who behaves and speaks like an Englishman of the officer class. TNG split the Kirk function (a fusion of action man and moral leader, familiar from countless westerns and war movies) between Picard, who does the bridge-pacing and moral agonising, and his bumptious deputy Commander Riker, whose task it is to beam down to the surface of the iffier planets to perform the villain-punching and bimbo-snogging. Replacing Spock at the science officer's station is Lt Commander Data, an android with the brain capacity of an army of computers, gold skin and a whimsical personal charm flowing from his hopeless social na?t?Data enabled TNG to continue to play with one of the themes raised by Spock's presence in TOS, an investigation into what it is to be human. But where Spock considered himself superior to humans, Data envies them. His paradoxical quest is to become more human and driven by emotion-more fallible.
On the bridge of the new Enterprise there was even a resident Klingon, in the formidable shape of Lt Worf. These long-time antagonists of the Federation were first brought on side in the 1991 glasnost-era movie Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a swan-song for the original cast in which Kirk, Spock & Co frustrate an attempt by militarists in both Federation and Klingon camps to wreck an historic peace accord. Picard's Enterprise can seem more like a therapy group than a military operation. It's so 1980s Californian, there's even a "ship's counsellor" on board.
Where Kirk was brash and confrontational, Picard is introspective and diplomatic. Picard prefers to negotiate first and launch photon torpedos only as a last resort. TNG premiered in 1987, in the heyday of Reaganite conservatism, but its whole ethos is a rejection of Reagan's neo-cold war militarism and social authoritarianism. In embracing many of the phenomena-multiculturalism, sexual diversity, respect for developing societies-lambasted by 1980s conservatives, Picard's Enterprise was a wonderful specimen of the enduring American popular rebellion against puritans and mono-culturalists.
In TNG, we learn more about life back home than we ever did in TOS. The Federation is now presented as a moneyless, post-scarcity economy. Replicator and transporter technology, as well as non-toxic renewable energy sources, provide fully for everybody's needs. "Money and personal wealth are no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves," Picard states in Star Trek: First Contact, the first full-blown TNG movie. How extraordinary that this idealistic vision of a society casting aside material gain for philosophical self-improvement should emerge from mainstream US television, the most rampantly commercial form of popular culture the world has ever seen.
Simultaneously, however, the citizens of the Federation in the TNG era inhabit a far more insecure universe than their forebears. Peace with the Klingons is shaky. The Romulans are still out there, alongside new antagonists like the militaristic Cardassians, and the profit-obsessed Ferengi (governed by "The Rules of Acquisition," a reductio ad absurdum of unfettered capitalism, they come uncomfortably close to anti-Semitic stereotype). Most unsettling of all are the Borg. The emergence of this seemingly invincible hive of interconnected "bionic zombies" has been viewed by Trek deconstructivists as an expression of the rugged individualist's terror of socialist collectivism, or alternatively as a sublimation of western loathing of the Japanese. As usual with Trek, there is something in both theories. However, it may be that the Borg's most potent metaphorical function is that that they embody a dark fantasy about the internet come to life, a system without soul or centre, globalised information technology alienated from its human creators and turned against them. The Borg are not a "race," like Klingons or Cardassians. They spread by absorbing other species into the collective. Their watchwords are "you will be assimilated" and, most disquieting of all, "resistance is futile." Anti-capitalist protesters have puckishly modified this slogan to "resistance is fertile," an indication of Trek's continuing appeal to those who self-consciously set themselves against the dominant culture.
Despite the saintliness of Picard and his team, in TNG galactic realpolitik demands harder and harder choices. As the saga progresses, the benevolence of the Federation becomes less convincing. Legitimate movements of planetary liberation, such as the Maquis, fighting to free their world from Cardassian occupation, are suppressed when their struggle conflicts with the Federation's need to maintain a delicate balance of power. Starfleet's Admiral Alynna Nechayev is named after the 19th-century Russian nihilist Sergei Nechayev. His belief that the revolution must be "tyrannical towards others" is said to have influenced Lenin. Substitute "Starfleet" for the revolution and you have the Admiral's own philosophy. Even Picard is lied to, manipulated and sacrificed on occasion in order to serve the purposes of Federation strategy. However distasteful he may personally find it, he also, at times, has to do the same to others.
TNG's reassessment of the morality of the Federation really gained pace only after Roddenberry's death in 1991. This revisionist spirit also infuses Star Trek: Insurrection, the ninth and most recent Trek movie. Here Starfleet command, battered by conflicts with just about every other major power bloc in the Trek universe, and obliged to make allies wherever it can find them, conspires with a bunch of singularly unpleasant aliens to evict and expropriate a group of rather twee blond settlers from a planet with a unique natural resource. Picard removes his Starfleet insignia and leads his crew in a guerrilla mission against the bad guys. In previous Treks, Federation ideals and institutions would have provided sufficient protection for vulnerable species. But Insurrection ends with the Enterprise gang speeding earthwards to confront corruption at the highest levels of the Federation council. At which point the saga screeches to an undignified halt.
With the launch of Deep Space Nine (DS9 hereafter) in 1993, the mood of the Star Trek franchise darkened further. The crew of DS9, a vast and cumbersome space station under the command of the haunted Benjamin Sisko, are no longer explorers, but administrators in a Federation outpost at the heart of an unstable universe. War and catastrophe are ever imminent, diplomatic alliances unreliable, and moral certitudes elusive. While the powers of technology appear as limitless as ever, there is a new harping on the limitations of a scientific and rationalist worldview. Mysticism and ritual are rife.
Under the pressures of unresolvable dilemmas and unforeseen dangers, Trek's liberalism begins to unravel. A product of the 1990s, the triumphant decade of deregulated global capitalism, DS9 sees the power of money erupt into the hitherto economically innocent Star Trek universe. The DS9 station guards the wormhole, a crossroads of galaxies which opens vast new opportunities for trade. This is a universe of contracts, speculative investments, industrial plants and a thriving arms trade. There are references to inequality, famine, strikes, political corruption and mercenary armies. Unsurprisingly, as the series progressed, the devotedly capitalist Ferengi played an increasingly prominent role (the name derives from "firangi," the Urdu word for foreigner, itself derived from the Arabic word for the crusader Franks). In DS9, as in previous Treks, humankind itself is seen to have evolved beyond capitalism, but this happy proposition now begs a host of questions. Questions the programme-makers skirt as nimbly as they can.
The destabilising of the moral credentials of the Federation, hesitantly begun in TNG, becomes insistent in DS9. Sisko's decision to carry out his orders to suppress the Maquis is questioned by the other characters and by no means endorsed by the programme's storyline. As portrayed by Avery Brooks, Sisko himself is suave and authoritative, but also something of a neurotic, with a stuttering, hectic delivery as mannered in its way as Kirk's preposterous pauses. It is not at all clear where Sisko's ultimate loyalties lie, apart from his dauntless dedication to his crew. There is a private and psychologically-driven dimension to his mission that makes his leadership less patient and less consensual than Picard's.
In DS9, the multiculturalism that first appeared in the casting of TOS, and was so warmly embraced in TNG, is now simply the enduring condition of the universe. In the interplay between cast members, it is material for rueful comedy in the classic Trek vein. But it is also seen to be a larger, more intractable and dangerous reality, a source of disorder and division. Liberal tolerance-the keynote of Star Trek-is under pressure as never before. Religious fundamentalism and social conservatism are disturbing and potent forces. Planetary or species identity is constantly counterposed to Federation assimilationism. Starfleet has become the military arm of something resembling the WTO more than the UN, and the conflicts its agents deal with are closer to Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Palestine than the cold war.
In contrast to TOS's proud colour-blindness, but in keeping with DS9's more problematic take on multiculturalism, Sisko's "blackness" and its historical resonance are increasingly emphasised, apparently at Avery Brooks' own insistence. One of the high points in the entire Trek canon must be the DS9 episode "Far Beyond the Stars," directed by Brooks himself, in which Sisko finds himself transported back to mid-20th-century America, and reincarnated as a black science-fiction writer struggling vainly to publish his visions of a post-racist 23rd-century future, and coming up against white racism of the most brutal kind. In this social realist yet Borges-like fable, Star Trek's own historical origins are laid bare and the racial question-the great failure of American liberalism-addressed with a candour which Roddenberry himself would never have dared.
For its first three seasons DS9 was preoccupied with the post-colonial aftermath of the brutal Cardassian occupation of a nearby planet, Bajor, and the gradual discovery of what lies on the other side of the wormhole. But from the outset of the fourth season the story fills an ever-widening canvas-the inter-galactic threat posed by the shape-shifting "Founders" with their genetically-engineered army of pharmaceutically-controlled warriors. What lies behind the wormhole, it turns out, is slavery for all, a nightmare inversion of Trek humanism. As with the Borg in TNG, this threat unites the Federation with Klingons, Romulans, Ferengi and even Cardassians.
At first glance, the presence of an unambiguously evil enemy might be thought to simplify things, but instead the series plunges into ever murkier waters. In prosecuting the war against the common enemy, the crew of DS9 find the values they assumed they were fighting for undermined. There is an attempt at a military coup on earth. The Federation resorts to biological warfare and political assassination. It emerges that much of Federation policy may be manipulated by an unaccountable intelligence agency, Section 31, a malign state-within-the-state, using the values of the Federation as a cloak for ruthless self-interest. The post-cold war ghost of the CIA, that creepy underside of American liberalism, stalks the corridors of Starfleet.
In questioning the moral purpose of the Federation, DS9 fulfilled the enduring Star Trek mission: holding up the mirror to a changing American society, reflecting popular hopes and (increasingly) fears about the future. But with DS9, the Trek epic entered new realms of political, moral, and psychological sophistication, subjecting the original liberal humanism to a relentless bombardment from all quarters. Despite often inspired writing and acting, the series never achieved TNG's popularity, and many Trek fans view it as a betrayal of Roddenberry's legacy, a surrender to fashionable decadence.
So where could Star Trek go from here? The answers were as far away as possible, and then backwards. DS9's successor, Voyager, took the eponymous Starfleet vessel, under the command of Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), and stranded it in a quadrant of the galaxy so impossibly distant that it would take decades to return to Federation space. Voyager's isolation, its sheer distance from the arena of the conflicts (and the species) depicted in the first three series, meant that Trek's main narrative thrust was stalled. At last there was a woman taking the lead. But where once that might have been enough to spark the Trek writers' more radical imaginings, Janeway often seemed little more than a reprise of traits previously associated with Kirk and Picard.
The subsequent decision, in Enterprise, to abandon the vaulting, 35-year-old plot arc established by Roddenberry and his successors, and to take us back to before the birth of the Federation, compounds the felony. What will become of Star Trek's visionary liberal humanism? Nothing, it seems. In the annals of science fiction, where dystopias rule the imaginative roost, Star Trek stood nearly alone in telling us that our future would be better than our past, that our common problems could be solved, that we as a species were fundamentally good, and that the universe would reward us for our goodness. Then it told us that beyond this glowing horizon lay another, darker, future. Finally, by retreating into the prehistory of its own mythos in Enterprise, it seems to be telling us that we no longer have much of a future at all.
And did we mention that George W Bush is in the White House? n
