The Dreams of ‘Star Trek’ Aren’t Dead

A $60B Vote of Confidence

The Artemis II mission, which broke the record set by Apollo 13, has been seen as a more sober and heartfelt vision of what space could be. The mission's crew, which included Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, was an earnest and representative group. The mission also commemorated the commander's late wife and featured the stark beauty of a total solar eclipse. The reminders of NASA's rich heritage and the promise of future lunar surface missions were also notable. The slow, steady footage sent back to us seemed like communications from another world—the past, perhaps, or a future that we could still have. It was like something from Star Trek, and there's good reason for that. Few TV shows have been more influential on the way we see the universe—or more contested. If the current crop of moonshots reveals the deep ideological divide that has emerged over who should take on the exploration of space and what we should be doing once we're out there, Star Trek has in turn been a battlefield for warring visions of the American dream. Sixty years since its first transmission, battles for intellectual control over both its cultural legacy and the futures it offers have become increasingly pointed.

Why Cursor?

The progressive politics of Star Trek were well established by the time the considered utopianism of The Next Generation, in which the moneyless and post-scarcity aspects of the Federation are foregrounded, appeared in the late 1980s. Yet lazy accusations of 'wokeness' began from the moment Star Trek: Discovery, which premiered in 2017, had the temerity to open by foregrounding two women of color. The latest entry in the franchise, Starfleet Academy, has been subject to vituperative review-bombing. The author of Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir, notoriously dismissed almost the entirety of the franchise's recent offerings as 'shit,' and has stated his preference for 'watch[ing] Romulans and the Federation shoot at each other.' Shots, we might say, have indeed been fired.

The Road Ahead

That recent iterations of Paramount's most enduring and successful IP have tended towards nostalgia (or perhaps, stated more generously, draw upon the program's rich heritage) is undeniable. Discovery establishes that its lead character, Michael Burnham, is the adopted sister of Spock, allowing that most iconic of characters to appear in the show. This, in turn, led to the commissioning of Strange New Worlds—set on the USS Enterprise under the captaincy of Christopher Pike, immediately prior to the arrival of Kirk (who also looks, rather charmingly, as if he's measuring for curtains each time he comes on board). A substantial part of the pleasure of Strange New Worlds lies in connecting the dots between its stories and characters and those from the original series.