I haven’t seen Star Trek: Picard, the latest incarnation of television’s most venerable franchise, nor am I inclined to go out of my way to see it. It will come around on free TV eventually if I outwait the hype. There’s enough Star Trek already available, in all its forms, to keep all but the most ardent junkies happy.

One of my cable channels runs a five-hour marathon of all the Star Trek series six nights a week, beginning with the original series at eight, followed by The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and the last series in real time but the first in the timeline of the Star Trek universe, Enterprise. I watch them now as I did years ago, with descending levels of interest.

The 79 episodes of the original series recycle every thirteen weeks plus a day. I’ve seen them all enough times to recite many of the lines along with the characters. Yet if I’m home in the evening, I’m likely watching Kirk, Spock, McCoy and company. I’ll hang in for The Next Generation if it’s a good episode, but Deep Space Nine has aged poorly. Voyager is marginally better, but I never paid much attention to Enterprise, and I’m usually asleep by the time it rolls around.

All this promotional noise about Picard as “Star Trek’s greatest captain” is, pardon me, nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, I like The Next Generation – in the same way I like Paul McCartney and Wings, and the Plastic Ono Band. Picard is a well-drawn character, and Patrick Stewart an excellent actor, but James Tiberius Kirk is an icon. And. There. Is. Only. One. William. Shatner.

What is it about the original Star Trek series, anyway? Why do I, and millions of others, never get tired of it? The show employed some great writers: Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, and the incomparable Dorothy “D.C.” Fontana. But many of the plots are contrived, some of the dialogue is inane, and the special effects – by modern standards – are primitive. Yet the original series retains a unique appeal that none of the subsequent iterations quite live up to – not even the feature films, though Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan comes close.

That quality is called genius, and it is the most elusive thing any artist can hope to capture. I’m reminded of something Joan Baez once said of Bob Dylan (and I’m paraphrasing here): There’s a touch of genius to everything he’s done, even the crappy stuff.

Even at its hokiest – and there are some pretty hokey episodes – that first Star Trek series resonates with the genius of its creator, a cop turned television writer named Gene Roddenberry. The spark of genius from that original series is what has kept the fires of fandom burning through all the subsequent series and films. Without it, there would be no Jean-Luc Picard to be plucked from his vineyard in France and returned to the cosmos. There would be no “Star Trek Universe” populated by Klingons, Cardassians, Romulans, Betazoids, Borg, Q, sentient androids, and countless other life forms large and small, made up of matter or pure energy. There would be no Prime Directive protecting developing civilizations from human hubris. There would be no phasers, transporters, warp drive, flip phones, or Vulcan salutes. Without Star Trek, we would have little relief from the shoot-em-up shows that sadly pervade much of television, including science fiction.

The original Star Trek series offered something different. It depicted a future in which human failings were tempered with hard-won wisdom, where people might give in to their baser instincts but usually pulled themselves back from the brink of disaster, with a little help from their friends. It was often funny, sometimes sad, but never pessimistic about the potential of human beings, or the species they (we) encountered.

Two first-season episodes that aired in the spring of 1967, as America’s involvement in Vietnam was escalating, showcase the Star Trek ethos.
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In “A Taste of Armageddon,” the Enterprise wanders into a solar system where two planets have been at war for centuries. The “battles” are fought in virtual reality: computer simulations enact scenarios and provide lists of “casualties.” Those listed as killed have 24 hours to get their affairs in order and report to disintegration chambers, where they are vaporized. The planetary infrastructure is preserved. As Anan 7, the planetary leader, tells Kirk, “The people die, but our civilization goes on.”

Kirk and crew run afoul of this system when the Enterprise, in orbit, is “destroyed” in one of these simulated attacks. To save his crew, Kirk decides to end the war – by destroying the computers. “Now you’ve got a real war on your hands,” he tells the aghast Anan. It is precisely the horrors of war, as opposed to sanitized suicide, Kirk explains, that make it “a thing to be avoided.”

“Errand of Mercy” marked the first appearance of the Klingons, sworn enemies of the United Federation of Planets. Kirk and Spock beam down to Organia, a disputed planet seemingly inhabited by a primitive but peaceful civilization of shepherds and farmers. The Klingons arrive, occupy the planet, and declare martial law. Kirk tries to exhort the pacifist Organians to fight back, but they refuse. As the Enterprise prepares to do battle with the Klingons in space, Kirk, stranded on the planet, grows increasingly impatient at the Organians’ docility.

The Organians intervene in both the battle in space and Kirk’s fight with the Klingons on the ground, by causing all the weapons in both places to radiate extreme heat, rendering them useless. Kirk and the Klingon commander angrily insist on the right to fight their battle without interference. In response, the Organians reveal themselves as highly evolved beings of pure energy that have temporarily taken on humanoid form, “as far above us on the evolutionary scale,” Spock says, “as we are above the amoeba.”

There will be no war, the Organians declare. Humans and Klingons must find another way to settle their differences. In the future, they add, the two species will become friends (presaging the presence of Worf in The Next Generation crew).

Kirk, chagrined, admits to Spock that he was spoiling for a fight. Humans still have much to learn, he says.

Yes, we do. We forget that at our peril. When we explore space, we will take our human foibles and swashbuckling stories with us, but we will also take our visions of a kinder and more compassionate future. The Star Trek franchise was at its best when it wrapped these lessons in the sometimes corny but always entertaining adventures of its original crew.

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Fifty years ago, human beings walked on the moon, touching another world in our vast Universe for the very first time. I remember watching it unfold on television as a kid, and being tremendously impressed. I still am.

But the moon landing was never as popular with the American public as it is from the perspective of five decades later. The more honest retrospectives remind us of this. I remember the protests as well as the expressions of triumph and awe. All shared the theme that the money spent going to the moon could have funded (take your pick) public housing, medical care, relief from hunger, better public transportation, and so on. As if it were an either-or choice.

These objections have always seemed disproportionately aimed at space exploration and space science. People seldom decry sports stadiums, the interstate highway system, or colossal shopping mall parking lots, let alone the huge sums spent on military equipment and interventions in other countries, as wastes of money that could be better spent somewhere else. But space is often seen as esoteric and unnecessary, outside of ordinary, earthbound human experience.

Race played a role, as it does in most American debates. The poet Gil Scott-Heron penned a critical piece entitled “Whitey’s on the Moon.” (It was featured in the 2018 Neil Armstrong biopic “First Man.”) Twelve white male Americans have walked on the lunar surface – no one else. And while many people of color – men and women – did crucial work behind the scenes to get them there, the television images from Mission Control showed a sea of white male faces.

There was also Vietnam, which was beginning to erode the international goodwill the United States had earned in the Second World War. At a time when young Americans were killing and dying in the jungles of a poor and distant country for no coherent purpose, it seemed overly self-congratulatory to leave a spacecraft on the moon bearing the message: “We came in peace for all mankind.”

But we did. Fifty years later, we have not weaponized the moon, nor turned it into a penal colony, both of which took place in Robert Heinlein’s 1966 novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. We haven’t, in fact, done much of anything with the moon. The last footprint in the lunar soil was made in 1972.

The author James Michener has a Norwegian character articulate this in his novel The Drifters, which takes place in 1969: “I think your men will get to the moon next month. But it won’t mean very much, because Americans are the Vikings of this age. Brave but stupid. You lack ideas… and there goes the moon. A hundred years from now, somebody like the Japanese will follow you and take with them a tremendous vision, and they’ll be the ones who really discover the moon.”*

But another thing I remember about the moon landing is that it transcended national boundaries. More than a billion people, in countries friendly, hostile, and neutral toward the United States, watched the moon landing on public and private television screens around the world, and almost all of them cheered.

Every astronaut who saw the world whole returned to Earth with a newly-honed environmental and international consciousness. The famous photo that graced the cover of the Whole Earth Catalogue(and countless classroom walls) brought home to us all that our planet is a single and singular place.

Decades later, Carl Sagan conceived another photograph, taken by the Voyager spacecraft, that showed Earth as a “pale blue dot” against an almost infinite background of stars. Like Apollo, the unmanned Voyager missions were made in America. And yet, one of the first things I learned when I went to teach in Bulgaria was that a traditional song by Bulgarian singer Valya Balkanska is on the gold record that was included on Voyagers 1 and 2 as greetings to any extraterrestrials who might discover them. The Bulgarians are quite proud of this. It’s their mission, too.

In these days when xenophobic governments are tightening their borders and repressing their own citizens in a last stand for a mindset that humanity must soon outgrow, I’m heartened that the moon landing is now mostly seen in a positive light. I’m pleased that generations born after the event seem to be interested in space. If the lasting legacy of the moon landing is the beginning of the end of nationalism, it was worth every dime.

*Michener, James: The Drifters, ©1971 by Random House Inc.

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