The salute “live long and prosper” is the Vulcan equivalent of “shalom”, accompanied by a raised palm parted into a “V” between the second and third fingers. It neatly sums up the flourishing and seemingly never-ending story of Star Trek, whose original brief — literally, its mission statement — was to boldly go where no man had gone before, and, 726 episodes of five overlapping, live-action TV series, one animated series, 11 feature films and innumerable novels later, is still doing just that. The $150 million new movie — the very definition of what Hollywood calls a “tent pole picture” (that is, it is expected to carry the weight of commercial expectation for an entire media conglomerate) — docks in at your local multiplex next week. Its young cast, including our own Simon Pegg, are hailed as superstars. Blog and broadsheet alike have been falling over themselves to be the first with a rave review since it was first shown. Famous fans such as Jonathan Ross, Quentin Tarantino and even the leader of the free world himself line up to express their Starfleet-like allegiance.
But hang on. This is Star Trek, right? The tinpot space opera from, like, the Sixties, with the bad actors and the wobbly sets and the portentous ideas above its station? The one that was cancelled by its own network after three seasons in 1969 and relaunched as a movie franchise ten years later only by applying some sturdy corsets to its ageing cast and capitalising on the success of the much more exciting Star Wars? The Star Trek beloved only of sexless academics and sad white suburban males with few social skills and poor hygiene, tramping off to endless conventions dressed as Klingons and Romulans?
Well, yes. It’s a phenomenon, Jim, but not as we know it. By doggedly sticking to its guns over an astonishing 43 years — or rather, sticking to its peacenik “phasers”, which can be set to “stun” as well as “vaporise” — the starship USS Enterprise has become politically relevant again. Its once-radically multiracial, multispecies crew and its “prime directive” to explore rather than conquer “strange new worlds” chimed with the optimism of the space-race era and now chimes again, thanks to the election of Barack Obama, who showed his colours at an election rally in Wyoming, saying, “I grew up on Star Trek. I believe in the final frontier.”
Star Trek steadfastly refuses to reach that final frontier. But why? What makes a show about some men and women in space so enduring? Is it simple escapism, or something deeper and more profound that manages to make first contact with each successive generation?
Pitched by its creator, Gene Roddenberry, as a Wagon Train in space” — after the popular American TV western — his Utopianism may be the key to Star Trek’s durability. John Wagner and Jan Lundeen, authors of Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos (one of countless wordily academic books and papers devoted to the franchise), write: “Foremost among the tenets of Roddenberry’s vision is humanism — a compassion for our species and a faith in its ultimate wisdom and capacity for self-reliance. Bolstering the central premise are an optimistic view of the human future, an emphasis on the imperatives of freedom . . . a tolerance of diversity . . . an opposition to prejudice . . . and a visceral rejection of organised religion and divine authority.” And you thought it was all about beaming me up, Scotty.
The voyages of the microcosmic Enterprise represented the benign side of America’s pioneer spirit, offering a less paranoid flying saucer metaphor than the bodysnatching “others” of the McCarthyist Fifties. Even the franchise’s enduring alien foes find themselves understood and assimilated: Starfleet’s first Klingon, Worf, appears in The Next Generation; Voyager boasts a black Vulcan, a Native American, a half-Klingon woman and a Borg. Oh, and a hologram. Robert Hewitt Wolfe, staff writer on Deep Space Nine, says: “At its heart, Star Trek, especially the original series, is a romantic adventure that appeals to the dreamer in all of us. It says that there’s a better future waiting, one where humanity can pursue its best intentions.”
Famous fans have included the author Isaac Asimov, comedian Bill Bailey (whose son is called Dax, after a character in Deep Space Nine), Al Gore (who could be found watching Star Trek in his dorm at Harvard), Stephen Hawking (who appeared as a holographic version of himself in The Next Generation and wrote the foreword to The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss), and, perhaps less desirably, the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, who, according to the book American Terrorist, became obsessed by The Next Generation after leaving the army in 1992. He considered it “an ideal world” and described himself as a Star Trek junkie” in prison letters published by Esquire in 2001.
Like many other black viewers at the time of the civil rights movement, President Obama will have seen Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, as a role model. She is famed for sharing with William Shatner the first televised interracial kiss in 1968, the climax of a curious episode from season three called Plato’s Stepchildren. The fact that the clinch between Kirk and Uhura is forced on them by a bored, telekinetic race — for humiliating entertainment — takes the historic shine off it, but it still plays a mythic part in the desegregation of America. Nichols was urged not to leave the show by no less than Martin Luther King Jr, who said: “You have opened a door that must not be allowed to close. For the first time, the world sees us as we should be seen, as equals, as intelligent people.”
Directed by that walking energy field J. J. Abrams, creator of Lost and Alias on TV, and director of Mission: Impossible III, the fashionable new type of movie, a prequel, has no subtitle and there is no number attached; it’s just Star Trek.
Written by the regular Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, both Trekkies, and green-lit in 2006, the film was surrounded by a shield of secrecy similar to the Romulan “cloaking device” first used on TOS (common shorthand for the original series) — at least until a surprise April 6 screening in Texas and its world premiere in Sydney a day later.
In it, the young Kirk — roughhouse Iowa farmboy of legend — essays an unconventional, impulsive rise through Starfleet to captain and sows the seeds of his long friendship with the Vulcan science officer Spock. Interestingly, Heroes, for which the Spock actor Zachary Quinto is best known, cast several elder statesmen from the original TV series, including George Takei and Nichols. Leonard Nimoy appears in Star Trek to hand over the baton with intrinsic dignity. The ship’s engineer Mr Scott (“Scotty”) is played for crowd-pleasing comic effect by Simon Pegg, an unapologetic Trek nerd himself, who, in the cult Channel 4 “slack-com” Spaced, invoked the popular fanboy theory that “odd-numbered Trek movies are s***”. Star Trek is officially number 11. Thankfully — for us old hands — it is not rubbish. It is, in fact, very good, with enough wham-bam technology to snare a new generation, and plentiful nods and in-jokes for the old fogies. Detractors may reject Trek as po-faced, but it has always had a light comic touch. Roddenberry, who first mooted the idea of a prequel in 1968, was asked in August 1991 what he thought would become of Star Trek in the future. His assistant Richard Arnold vouches that he expressed hope that “some day some bright young thing would come along and do it again, bigger and better than he had ever done it. And he wished them well”. (Roddenberry died in 1991.) Abrams admits to being more Star Wars than Trek and claims not to have even seen the tenth film, Nemesis. This potential arrogance follows through into the ground- zero title of the film. In a recent interview with Empire magazine, he set out his stall: “The problem [with TOS] was they had a space adventure but never had the resources to show the adventure. Doing this movie with the technology that exists now gave us the chance to make something fast-paced, full of action and visually stunning.”
Mark Dinning, editor of Empire, says that for his magazine’s readers Trek was “a dated and practically defunct franchise, a sort of curious time capsule that they had affection for but had had its day. What Abrams has done is both bold and brilliant.”
As per the original template, though big and noisy, Star Trek is much more concerned with relationships than its nearest competitors for the sci-fi blockbuster dollar — Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (first sequel in a movie franchise that began as a range of plastic toys) and Terminator Salvation (part four in a series that has also spawned a TV show), both released in June. “What Star Trek really has in its favour,” Dinning says, “is that it’s pure escapist entertainment, shot with a relentlessly upbeat pace, style and wit, which should, given the current global doom, be the perfect antidote for the multiplex masses.”
I ask Simon Pegg, who confesses that his first Star Trek memory is of the animated series, but remembers going to see the first Star Trek film (1979) at the ABC in Gloucester, if he thinks Star Trek will ever die.
“Never. It’s too ingrained in the collective subconscious. Its parlance has become commonplace, its speculative science has fed into reality, from advances in physics to the shape of mobile phones. Even if the films stop being made and the television shows stop being aired, historians will forever explain why the first space shuttle was called Enterprise and in doing so, recall the television series that inspired that decision.”
I don’t mind admitting to being a fan. For my generation Jon Pertwee will always be our Doctor Who, and TOS the definitive Star Trek. I still find it tricky to accept any substitute for the original cast commanded by William Shatner, which explains why I stuck with the feature films only until Star Trek: Generations in 1994, in which Kirk, Scott and Chekov meet their successors, 78 years in the future (it’s something to do with an “energy ribbon”), led by Patrick Stewart’s urbane Jean-Luc Picard. Kirk dies, and, for me, something died with him. Perhaps a new audience will bond for life in a similar way with the new Kirk, Chris Pine, and Quinto as Spock. But the emotional response of what is disparagingly called the “MySpace generation” will partly be driven by the spectacular special effects. In the Sixties, with episodes shot in six days on a tiny budget, alien worlds were created by judicious use of green lighting, some curtains and the occasional trip to Vasquez Rocks National Park in northern Los Angeles.
I vividly recall an episode from season one called Operation: Annihilate!, in which the crew beam down to the planet Deneva, where adhesive, pancake-like alien parasites threaten to wreak galactic havoc. Rubbery or not, they certainly had me behind the sofa. Another formative memory is my granddad’s claim that the registration number on the Enterprise’s saucer section — NCC-1701 — stood for “Northamptonshire County Council”. I believed him. The point is, there’s an era for every life stage. Ina Rae Hark, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of South Carolina, notes in her BFI TV Classics monograph that Deep Space Nine coincided in the Nineties with the coming of the internet. “My engagement with fandom,” she writes, “which had waned over the years, was re-energised by this new way of communicating with other Trekkers.”
Jonathan Ross, a fantasy geek, has similarly unshakeable memories of TOS: “I thought, this is not only the greatest television show ever made, it’s the greatest television show that will ever be made,” he enthuses. “And I think I could still possibly make a case for that. What gave it its longevity and made it permissible, particularly in the States, was Roddenberry’s optimistic view of mankind’s future.”
Like it or not, Star Trek is far more than “just a TV show”, as William Shatner insisted in a self-mocking sketch on Saturday Night Live in the Eighties. It is, to borrow the title of a Doctor Who episode, an ark in space. It is as if the rainbow of late-Sixties civil rights idealism was packed into a 289m, warp-drive-powered starship along with 430 crew, and sent out at 186,000 miles per second looking for “hailing frequencies” to communicate with the outside galaxy. It is, improbably, a good advert for us. Except for that theme song.
Ross offers a final pet theory as to why Star Trek is still boldly going: “They’re essentially a family: Kirk is a loveable, roguish father, still in his prime, Dr McCoy is his wife and Uhura his mistress. Spock is his slightly grumpy brother, who’s a bit more sensible and they find themselves in business together and they’ve got to make the most of it. And Chekov’s the foreign exchange student.”
Star Trek opens nationwide on May 8
