A response to what David Hajdu describes them in his illuminating op-ed piece on the “Star Trek” phenomenon in last Sunday’s Times The original series was never really about the 23rd century or outer space; and to think of it only in those terms is to misunderstand the show and ignore its real legacy. Despite its technological gimmickry — the flashing light bulbs and the transporter beams and the cafeteria dispenser that synthesizes the atomic structure of any lunch order — the series was essentially a trek around the past, and not even the real past, but the past of vintage Hollywood movies. Its fictions always had less to do with science than with popular entertainment itself. The most disheartening feature of the TV episodes was, to me, its utter failure of imagination. The program’s now-famous slogan “To boldly go where no man has gone before” promised wonders that the series itself consistently failed to deliver. The strange new worlds, the alien civilizations so remote they were accessible only by faster-than-light travel, turned out to be uncannily like familiar earthly culture of the past, such as ancient Rome or Egypt, or the American old West, the Berlin of the 1930s, and so on. Focusing on this odd feature of the original series, Hajdu, a professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, unveils the truth: “‘Star Trek’ was, from the start, more nostalgic than futuristic.” Certainly, few living astronomers expect to find Planet 892-IV, the gladiator-movie planet, where Spock and McCoy were forced to battle in Roman games. Or Ekos, the Nazi-movie planet, where Spock ended up discomfortingly sympathetic to the fascists. Or the unnamed orb in Melkotian space, the Western planet, where the crew literally re-enacted the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Or Tarsus IV, the Shakespeare-movie planet, where everything was just frightfully dramatic. Quite simply, Star trek is not about the future. Its about nostalgia.
You can't go forward without looking back to see where you've been. To me, Star Trek was about something new along with something old. A blend of what was along with what could be. If you remember that no other TV show was even similar to it back when it first came out. In the series they talked about light speed, other alien planets, other ways of living, laser weapons, phase cannons and on and on. For the time it was ahead of its time in certain aspects while trying to keep itself grounded in other ways that everyone understood.
I have always thought that sci-fi was basically the contemporary way to engage in a discourse on values, morality and basic life issues. The importance of courage, friendship, justice, overcoming fears and limitations, distinguishing between right and wrong, conflicts between personal desires and duties, etc. - these are the prominent themes of sci-fi. If we think away all the specific sci-fi gimmicks about space ships and all that, what is left is a very didactic discourse on values, morality and basic life issues. A discourse that would probably by many modern people be perceived as too directly moralistic or too cheesy if presented in a more realistic context (the days of Lassie and Huckleberry Finn are over). To paraphrase Cosmictraveler's words, sci-fi is trying to keep itself grounded in ways that everyone understands.
