As Star Trek hits 60, it is once again struggling to find its audience. So, asks John Mosby, how did we get here and exactly where does the most famous split-infinitive go next?
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Star Trek is more than a mere television franchise. In an industry known for quick results rather than longevity, it made a humble yet historically significant mark on the schedules of the 1960s. Its ratings were not outstanding, but despite there only being 80 episodes over three seasons (1966-1969), there’s no denying the massive impact that echoed down the decades thereafter.
So, firstly a future-history lesson of quite epic proportions…
Beyond its influence on many of the tv shows that came after The Original Series, its view of a mostly positive future where mankind had learned to work together and had reached for the stars was an important one in an era full of Earthly conflicts. People who work at the likes of NASA have since cited the show as the reason they got into real-world science and Martin Luther king famously told Nichelle Nichols that her role as Uhura, a black woman on the bridge of a starship, was of societal importance beyond the confines of the television set.
An animated series ran for two seasons between 1973 and 1974 and then a proposed live-action sequel series was mooted for the early 1980s but ultimately became the start of the feature film arm of the franchise. Star Trek: The Motion Picture opened in 1979 but swapped the fun flourishes of the show for a more sterile 2001-theme. 1982’s The Wrath of Khan went back to basics as a sequel to one of TNG‘s episodes Space Seed and it remains one of the most iconic films of the Trek franchise. Two years later, the crew would search for their fallen comrade in The Search for Spock and 1986 saw the crew time-travel to rescue whales in The Voyage Home. Then, in 1987, The Next Generation – set around 100 years later and with a totally new cast of characters – strode purposely out of its parental shadow and on to tv and ran for 176 episodes / seven seasons between 1987 and 1994 making the new Enterprise captain (Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Lic Picard) and the ship’s crew equal household names. 1989 and 1991 brought the last two feature films with the original tv crew (The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country, respectively).
TV series Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) swapped a roving starship for a static, but strategic space-station and exchanged regular strange alien encounters for a more nuanced, political tone (arguably well ahead of its time). Voyager (1995-2001) stranded a disparate crew of Star Fleet officers and rebels on the far-side of the galaxy, having to work together to get home and then Enterprise went back to the earliest days of cosmic space-travel, charting humanity’s earliest voyages into the cosmic unknown and the start of a fledgling Federation. (Running from 2001 to 2005, it ended on something of a sour note with a finale that focused more on TNG characters experiencing an historical story about them on the Holodeck – with some even suggesting the whole show had been such a recreation). The Next Generation crew featured in four feature films (1994’s Generations – which united Picard and Kirk, with the latter apparently perishing at the end, 1996’s First Contact – another time-travelling story featuring the Borg, 1998’s Insurrection and 2002’s Nemesis). For the next decade, televisual Trek dried up with the movies assuming the most bankability. It wasn’t until the rise of better bandwidth and streaming than Trek would start to make a real come-back…
