Star Trek 60: The 90 Year Journey

 

I haven't been very motivated to celebrate or respond to Star Trek's 60th anniversary.  I fear for its future, and am dissatisfied with its present.  Besides which, this anniversary seems a little empty, and in this at least I'm not alone (I've heard Jonathan Frakes suggest it on his podcast with Brent Spiner.) Things feel really uncertain.

But then, I can't ignore the history--Star Trek's or my own.  I've been writing about Star Trek on this blog for more than 20 years.  My first published article about Star Trek appeared in 1976, the 10th anniversary year.  

I've felt that I bring a couple of unusual elements to this practice.  First, I was an inquiring adult viewer since the very beginning, the first episode sixty years ago.  I experienced Star Trek's revival in syndication as it happened, and everything that happened afterwards.  I saw all ten of the first regime's feature films in theatres on their first run.  Over the years I've met Gene Roddenberry, Majel Roddenberry, James Doohan, George Takei, Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis, among others.  I've met and interviewed Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, LeVar Burton and Rod Roddenberry, as well as phone interviews with Rick Berman and Denise Crosby. 

But more importantly perhaps, I have done considerable research and writing into the long history of not only Star Trek as television and film and a cultural phenomenon, but on the longer history of what contributed to--what formed--the soul of Star Trek.

The usual histories of Star Trek that have appeared and likely will appear this year tend to cover the same familiar ground, beginning in the early 1960s.  The history I've written here goes farther back and deeper, to the likely contributions and origins of "the vision" that evolved into the soul of Star Trek in the lifetime of its originators.  It appears on this blog in some detail, some collected under the "Countdown to 40" label (to the 40th anniversary), and the Trek50 (or 50th year) label, which includes detailed analyses of key original series episodes.

Together with the essay I wrote that kicked off the Soul of Star Trek panel I chaired at the 40th anniversary convention in Seattle, here titled "A Passion for the Future,"  this seems to me to be the most extensive history about Star Trek anyone has accomplished, even if it is lacking in areas of television business and personality clashes.  Some would classify it as background.  I think of it as essence.

So for this 60th anniversary, I've streamlined some of what I now seem as the main elements of this history of the soul of Star Trek, which goes back not just to the 1960s but at least to the 1930s.  

There are many precedents and ancestors to the science fiction elements of the Star Trek universe.  But inspirations and precedents to the soul of Star Trek can also be found in the real world.  They include not only those from the 1960s (the early space program, JFK, the Civil Rights movement, ecology and Spaceship Earth) but from the 1930s and 1940s, when the principal creators of Star Trek were growing up and becoming young adults.

The Great Depression, FDR and the CCCs

While Gene Roddenberry (born in 1921, same year as my father) was growing up in 1930s Los Angeles, so was Robert Justman in New York, Gene Coon in Nebraska, Matt Jeffries in Virginia, Alexander Courage in Philadelphia, Harve Bennett in Chicago, DeForest Kelley in Georgia and James Doohan in Canada.  Even the slightly younger generation crucial to Star Trek were children in the 1930s, including Leonard Nimoy in Boston, William Shatner in Montreal, Walter Koenig in New York, Nichelle Nichols in Chicago, Majel Barrett in Ohio, John D. F. Black in Pittsburgh and D.C. Fontana in New Jersey, among others.

The Great Depression gripped their America beginning in 1930.  "It wasn't just the very poor--it was everyone who was affected," recalled historian Julie Willenz.  "I think the fact that one grew up in that environment changed your perspective for the rest of your life."

Gene Roddenberry (according to David Alexander's biography) saw some of the effects. He went to school with children who didn't have shoes, and he saw the travails of neighbors or heard his parents talk about them.  He also saw the haunted strangers, some of the one million men who rode the rails continuously, or the displaced families that poured into California from Oklahoma when black walls of wind turned their farmland into the Dust Bowl.  His father had a modest but steady job as a police officer, and Gene saw that he felt a responsibility to help others because he was able to help them.

This ethic was recognized by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  "If I read the temper of our people correctly," he said, "we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well."

FDR was an inspirational leader, who spoke directly to everyone in his fireside chats on the radio.  "Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money," he said.  "It lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort."

But FDR also acted boldly.  His New Deal programs put people to work while it built new infrastructure and elements of the future. For those who were young in the mid-1930s, the most relevant program--and perhaps the most successful in history--was the Civil Conservation Corps.  Millions of young men (and later, young women as well) were organized and employed in state parks and other conservation projects, as well as other public improvement projects.  (In one five month period, its workers built or improved 255,000 miles of roads and 40,000 schools, among other infrastructure.)

Those young unemployed enrolled in the program lived together in camps and were provided with food, recreation (including sports teams) and lots of education. They worked together for the common good. They were paid, with the bulk of their earnings mandated to be sent back to their struggling families.  For them and their families it was a lifesaver (my own father was in the CCCs and spoke highly of it all his life) but it also greatly benefited the country, and still does.  Much of what the CCCs built--in fact, that the New Deal built--exists and is being used today.

In a time that invited despair, these examples and inspirations offered hope--especially to the young. Historian William Manchester wrote that in contrast to their elders, the 1930s young had a different look. "There is an intensity to their expressions.  They are leaning slightly forward, as though trying to see the future. And they are smiling."

There's more here about the 1930s and their relevance to Star Trek.

 The World of Tomorrow

By the end of the 1930s, science fiction pulp magazines that would fascinate young Gene Roddenberry and Sam Peebles were coming into their own.  Tom Swift novels, with their futuristic technology, were popular among avid young readers like GR, who was already reading science fiction novels by E.E. Smith and Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter of Mars.  (And for similarly adventure- minded readers, C.S. Forrester was publishing his Horatio Hornblower series set on the high seas.)

Science fiction had come to the movies as well. The more advanced ones came from Europe, like Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon and Metropolis from Germany, and especially the H.G. Wells/Cameron Menzies Things to Come from England.  But Saturday matinees at the local movie palace were beginning to be a part of growing up in America, and their young audiences watched Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, among others. These and others were also on radio, and some were in the newspaper comics.  

 In 1938 science fiction took a new and more serious direction when John W. Campbell became editor of a prominent pulp, Astounding.  According to writer and s/f historian Lester del Rey, "he wanted them [his writers] to live in their futures.  And he wanted those futures to be livable."

The writers responded by becoming "future-oriented" (del Rey continued), "with the sense that the present was not the permanent center of everything: to them, the future was a real place.  It was three-dimensional."

Then very soon, one vision of the future did in fact become three-dimensional.  The future in this way entered the real world.  And millions of Americans experienced it.

It was the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, which called itself The World of Tomorrow. Spread over more than a thousand acres at the far edge of New York City, it was one of the largest fairs ever attempted, and the most carefully planned.  It was, noted Harper's magazine, "revolutionary in its contrast to other Fairs."  It was also the best known: the subject of numerous cover stories in magazines, and a star of movie newsreels.  Everyone knew about it.

Many nations of the world built pavilions, though many of the most impressive attractions were made by American corporations. The architecture was stunning.  The gleaming white buildings, dominated by the slender Trylon (fifty feet taller than the Washington Monument) and the global Perisphere (with space inside adequate to two Radio City Music Halls), all reminded more than one observer of the Cameron Menzies images in Things to Come, which may well have been an inspiration. 

Inside the Perisphere was the Democricity exhibit of America in 2039.  In the Futurerama exhibit, fairgoers sat in plush chairs with individual sound systems that moved them into another future--America in 1960--a place of green suburbs around gleaming cities, with multi-lane highways.  They left that dynamic experience with a button that said, "I have seen the future." 

That future was otherwise hard to imagine. At the time almost half of American families did not own a car.  There was no four lane highway without crossing lights anywhere in the country.  The first would be a 160 mile stretch of what became the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which opened just as the Fair was closing.  But this future didn't have to be entirely imagined.  For the people who visited the Fair, it was right there.

They saw it, they heard it, they walked around in it, interacting with new technologies (like robots, space rockets and television) and new visions, such as the exhibit which admitted that FDR was right, one third of the country was ill-housed and ill-fed, and a full 90% had incomes insufficient for "the good life."  But the power to raise the incomes of the entire population to the good life was not science fiction: "With modern technology and power production, it is no longer physically impossible...we need now to discover a workable formula for its distribution to 'three-thirds of a nation.'" 

This was the spirit of the Fair. "The tools for building the world of tomorrow are already in our hands," said the Fair's science director.  "Action is our slogan...If the world is awry we can change it."

And why not?  In the depths of the Depression they had already built parts of the future, from the TVA dams bringing electricity to millions, to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Cathedral of Learning; from highways to airports and national parks.  

The Fair had a direct effect on American science fiction.  Young Isaac Asimov read science fiction stories in the pulps in "vivid and agonizing transport because I wanted to be part of the story and couldn't." But in 1939 he could, when he visited the Fair. He was one of a number of science fiction writers (including Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury) who walked the Fair when they were in town for the first World Science Fiction Convention.  It was at the Fair that a science fiction editor came up with the character that Edmond Hamilton featured in a series of novels, called Captain Future.

It was a powerful place for many.  Young Carl Sagan visited as a child and it inspired him. In a survey, 90% of Americans said they wanted to see it.  A lot of them did--in its two years, the Fair drew some 44 million people (which counts the many who went more than once.)  They came by ship, car, train and special long-distance buses.  Among them were my mother.  The power of a future you could walk around in cannot be overestimated.

But the real world was also turning darker. The New York World's Fair closed in 1940, as German bombers and British fighters battled in the English skies.  The Trylon and Perisphere and most of the other buildings were torn down.  Their steel was used to make weapons for World War II. 

Superman

The Depression and then the rise of Hitler in the 1930s had a powerful effect on two young men in Cleveland, who in response created a character that has lived--and changed-- for generations.  But its relevance to Star Trek may be mostly in what that character was intended to be, and who he was for his first decade or so.

Superman appeared in a comic book for the first time in 1938.  When he first started dreaming about the character four years earlier, Jerry Siegel was influenced (as he later recalled) by "President Roosevelt's fireside chats...being unemployed and worried during the Depression, and knowing hopelessness and fear.  Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless Jews in Nazi Germany...seeing movies depicting the horrors of privation suffered by the downtrodden..."

Siegel was also reading about crusading heroes and seeing them in movies.  He wondered what he could do for these victims of the 1930s.  "How could I help them, when I could barely help myself?  Superman was the answer." 

This became the key to Superman's character that has endured many reductions and perversions over the years but has somehow survived.  His first adventure in Action Comics involved saving an unjustly condemned woman from the electric chair.  His next stop was a wife beater.

In his 1930s adventures, he rescued miners in a cave-in, battled stock market manipulators and munitions manufacturers fomenting wars to sell their wares.  He fought crime, but also poverty and unsafe labor conditions. He battled crooked politicians and lobbyists, slum lords and corrupt industrialists and corrupt labor leaders alike.  He came to the aid of individuals in trouble, and was devoted to the common good.  He was a compassionate, high-spirited and humorous hero of the people.

Superman became so immediately popular that he appeared at the 1939 New York World's Fair: the "man of tomorrow" at the World of Tomorrow.

His adventures were soon heard on the radio. In  the intro to the very first radio broadcast Superman was described as "champion of the oppressed...who has sworn to devote his existence on Earth to helping those in need."

Later the radio introduction would describe him as a "champion of equal rights, valiant, courageous fighter against the forces of hate and prejudice."

In 1946 a 16-episode series had Superman battling an organization based on the KKK ("The Clan of the Fiery Cross."  Reputedly based on descriptions by an actual reporter who infiltrated the still basically mysterious Klan, it exposed its secret rituals as well as its crime.  The series was credited with reducing KKK recruiting.  Notably, it related this domestic racism to Nazi racism.

Of course he also rescued Lois Lane a lot, but this particular Superman was the one that young people knew in the late 1930s and 1940s.

The Real War--and What Came After 

In 1940 young Gene Roddenberry was learning to fly. He'd been recruited for a pilot training program instituted by a U.S. Army Air Force General. Aviation was still so new that the General (Henry "Hap" Arnold) had himself been trained by the Wright Brothers.

Even though the US was not yet in the war, Roddenberry knew what he was training for.  After joining the Army Air Force, he flew B-17 bombers on missions in the Pacific. He was one of many of those who created and worked on the original Star Trek who were veterans of that war--who saw battle, were wounded, taken prisoner, including one who as a child was taken prisoner by his own government, in the U.S.

World War II was the most destructive war in history.  It involved an estimated 100 million people in 30 countries on every continent on Earth except Antarctica. In just six years, some 36 million died as a result of the war--many of them because this war was the first to employ as policy repeated large scale bombing of cities and civilians.      

They knew the enormity of war, and the intimacy of war.  According to Alexander's biography, Roddenberry was enraged by incompetent orders by a high officer that resulted in needless deaths of those in his command.

It is important to realize this, and to note that decades later that while they made some tense episodes of armed confrontation, this group of Star Trek creators created episode after episode which showed the grim folly of war, and the need for alternatives.  The space wars in later Star Trek were created by those who had never seen a moment of real war.

During the war, many soldiers as well as civilians became determined that the world would have to change when it was over.  It was a palpable feeling in England, and resulted immediately after the war in a change of government and new social programs such as free medical care.  It was expressed in America in a remarkable series of radio programs by Norman Corwin, who influenced GR (and later had a favorite young actor he employed named William Shatner.)   

Corwin wrote about "the little guy" in America, who proved his mettle and judgment in the war, and who could do great things when given the opportunity, including good housing, health and education.

He noted the international cooperation that won the war, as well as the nature of a war that spread around the world, and soldiers overseas who experienced different cultures.  "Before this war all of our countries were islands, each one of us cut off in spirit from the rest of the world," he wrote.  "But now we're together..."  Interdependence was a fact of future life.  

These sentiments entered the real world in a big way. As the war ended, the attempt to create the United Nations began.  It was not the world government that H.G.Wells and others had advocated for years, but it was a step towards recognizing interdependence, and solving problems and settling differences peacefully.  

The exterminations of the Holocaust became dramatically apparent immediately after the war.  But that immense crime against Jews in Europe was not the full extent of the suffering there.  During the war in Europe, anywhere from half to two-thirds of the housing in major cities had been destroyed. Some 30% of houses in Great Britain were reduced to rubble, and 40% in Germany.  The war in Europe had created from 13 to 20 million displaced persons. Some cities and villages in Italy were bombed repeatedly by airplanes from four or five nations on both sides.  "There has never been such destruction, such disintegration of life," wrote Anne O'Hare McCormick of the New York Times.

So in 1948, the United States--with the most intact and largest economy in the world--devoted some $13 billion to rebuilding Europe, in an unprecedented program called the Marshall Plan.  In addition to humanitarian help, the plan assisted the restoration of European economies. It encouraged (and occasionally mandated) close cooperation--economic and otherwise-- among European nations, including former enemies, which helped pave the way to the Common Market and then the European Union.  

In the United States, the federal government instituted two crucial programs: the G.I. Bill which enabled millions of veterans to obtain higher education in institutions of their choice.  The federal housing program helped them and others afford to buy their own homes. (There was obvious prejudice against black families in this program, though there was no racial discrimination in the G.I. Bill.) A third program in the 1950s led to coast to coast highway construction.  Together they helped to move the country towards the future envisioned at the World of Tomorrow. 

The contributions from the 1960s are perhaps more familiar.  The early space program began to bring science fiction space travel into the real world.  I still remember the thrill of those first Vanguard launches on live TV, so much like the Rocky Jones blast-offs I'd watched just a few years before.  Then came the manned flights, including John Glenn becoming the first American in orbit.  At least for awhile, a future in space seemed like a realistic possibility.

President John F. Kennedy became an obvious model for a future leader, not only because of his style but for the inspiration of his words.  In accepting the Democratic nomination in Los Angeles--where Gene Roddenberry was writing for TV--he pretty much stated the premise of Star Trek when he began: "From the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind me, the pioneers of old gave up their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world...Their motto was not 'every man for himself' but 'all for the common cause.'..We stand today on the edge of a new frontier..."  

In his Inaugural he stated the new reality: "For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life."  He challenged the Soviet Union to join in creating a better future. "Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce."

 His later efforts paid off in the nuclear test ban treaty, the first success in limiting the madness of the arms race.  He started this process with a remarkable speech at American University, when he again stated the new reality. "For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet.  We all breathe the same air.  We all cherish our children's future.  And we are all mortal."

By then there was growing awareness of the implications of inhabiting one planet, in the concept of Spaceship Earth of Buckminster Fuller and others, and in the beginnings of an environmental movement and a more focused science of ecology.

From the mid 1950s through the early 1960s, the Civil Rights movement brought awareness of racial injustice and action to establish racial justice and equality, obviously reflected in Star Trek sixty years ago, and not only in the matter of race.  Other social changes  of the late 1960s concerning equal opportunity and equal humanity, war and peace and human fulfillment were also reflected in original series stories.

So from the 1930s through the 1960s, the first part of the journey explored possibilities as at least glimpsed in the real world, resulting in a better future.  And even when reality fell short, the ideas and ideals came alive for all to see.

The soul of Star Trek is infused with these ideals--of a united Earth with adequacy for all, of an end to war as the reflexive choice when in conflict, of the value of all life, of interdependence and equal standing and opportunity, of doing big things to solve problems together and work for a better future.  While it is also expressed for many simply in the way people treat each other on the Enterprise, these elements were in the lifetimes of Star Trek's creators represented not only in hopes and fictions but in the real world. 

As for the science fiction elements of the Star Trek universe, they also had ancestors in the 1940s and primarily in the 1950s.  Major elements of it were derived--or at least had appeared--in Saturday morning space shows on 1950s TV and even earlier in written science fiction. Those 50s shows (Space Patrol, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet; Rocky Jones, Space Ranger) all had the equivalents of the Federation of Planets, Earth united under a single government and an idealistic Starfleet for defense and exploration.  Space Patrol explicitly had the equivalent of warp drive (as well as something called Time Drive.) 

 Other Trek technology had many precedents: transporters and phasers with stun settings appeared in the Buster Crabbe Buck Rogers movie serials beginning in 1939.  Even some favorite plots had ancestors, like the one that appeared several times in the original series and began several later Star Trek series: earthlings on trial by a more advanced alien civilization.  Examples of that story go back at least as far as the early 1940s Captain Future novels. 

What became known as the Star Trek vision began with these earlier elements, and were augmented and elaborated during the run of the original series (with contributions by new producers, writers and the actors themselves.)  Gene Roddenberry further developed it when he was talking at a lot of conventions between the end of the original series and the beginning of the Next Generation.  The vision was shaped further during the run of that series, and to a lesser but important extent in subsequent series and the first ten features.

While the tech in Star Trek set some standards and fascinated many fans, and character interaction played its part, these were not what most distinguished the saga, nor what drew so much attention, inspired so many people around the world, and led to its 60 years of existence. It was the soul of Star Trek.  Star Trek orchestrated that sci-fi tech and stories, and imbued the Enterprise with soul. 

  And right now, just as American democracy is assaulted and wounded and deeply damaged, but stubbornly kept alive by the activism of ordinary people, the soul of Star Trek is also under assault by some of the same forces, along with the usual foolishness of corporate Hollywood.  But it too is being defended by the knowledge, the loyalty and the stubborn idealism of those who watched it, many of whom throughout the decades knew that the soul of Star Trek helped transform their own lives, bringing a future into their present.  

Coming Soon? Star Trek: In Name Only

 "Could Star Trek be dying?"  Those were the opening words of my New York Times article in 2004.  At that time, as in some previous moments, the threat was that there would be no new Star Trek stories on television or as feature films. (Leonard Nimoy laughed when I asked him that.  Of course he turned out to be right. So far.)

Today, sixty years since it began, Star Trek is endangered again, but in a different way.  There is likely to be a new feature film, and possibly more television beyond the series' now running or ready to resume.  But recent events suggest the distinct possibility that future stories could well be Star Trek in name only.  In essence they may even be anti-Trek: Star Trek without its soul.

The first of these events was the purchase of Paramount by Skydance Media, headed by David Ellison. He is, in the words of Wikipedia, "the son of Oracle Corporation co-founder Larry Ellison, a centibillionaire." It has been widely reported that David Ellison became an ally of President Trump, possibly or probably to help secure federal approval of the deal.  

Paramount is the parent company to the CBS network, and Ellison soon installed a Trump-friendly far right commentator as editor in chief of CBS News.  She engineered firings and layoffs, delayed broadcast of a 60 Minutes segment that cast the Trump administration's war on immigrants in an unfavorable light, and has by numerous accounts turned the network in a far right direction, losing viewership and staining the good name of what was once among the most hallowed in television news.

More recently, Ellison attended the State of the Union address, a day before he made the only offer now existing to purchase Warner Brothers properties, including CNN. He promised Trump he would make sweeping changes to that news network.  Warners had previously signaled it would accept the purchase offer of Netflix, but federal approval was delayed.  

On the day Ellison made a new offer for Warners, Josh Marshall at Talking Points memo reports,  the Netflix CEO was at the White House "apparently trying to see whether Netflix had the thing any company needs for a merger in 2026: the personal approval of Donald Trump. Apparently they didn't have it.  That's the autocracy playbook.  And at the federal level that's the game we're playing right now."  Netflix declined to make a new offer, leaving the field wide open for Ellison.

What this may mean for Star Trek revolves around this administration's evident white supremacist and white nationalist agenda, its wanton cruelty and bad faith, all antithetical to what Star Trek has represented for more than half a century.  

There are other recent events that are suggestive in this regard, both generally and specifically in terms of a current Star Trek streaming series. 

 In January 2026, Secretary of Defense (which he styles as Secretary of War) Hegseth and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk spoke jointly about employing advanced Artificial Intelligence systems in warfare, in events they titled "The Arsenal of Freedom." They both pronounced their goal is to "make Star Trek real."

It's long been known that a lot of tech industry people consider themselves Star Trek fans. Musk was one.  Another was Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.  (I watched Bezos receive a Legacy Award at the 40th anniversary Star Trek convention in Seattle.  His mother showed off the cardboard communicator he made as a child.)  Bezos purchased the Washington Post and then, apparently to please Trump, censored it, drove away its top people and gutted its staff, losing subscribers and respect. 

A number of actual Star Trek fans and several publications pointed out that this Musk-Hegseth event's title, "Arsenal of Freedom," was the title of the Next Generation episode which exposed the fatal folly of depending on the same sort of AI systems they were bragging about.  Hegseth also had the temerity to flash Spock's Vulcan salute. 

Remember that Musk went to Washington at the start of this second Trump administration as the first loud voice decrying Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs (not exactly enacting Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.)  

He had his Department of Government Efficiency minions and thugs bodily throw out staffers of the Institute of Peace and trash the place.  He cut off US funding for medical programs and other aid to poor populations in poor countries--"the richest person in the world killing the world's poorest children," as Bill Gates described it.  He supported false accusations of genocide of whites in South Africa and supported far rightists in Germany, raging against multiculturalism.  At Trump's second inaugural he repeatedly gave what has been described as the Nazi salute.  Not exactly Live Long and Prosper.

For his part, Hegseth presided over firing much of the top brass in the US military who coincidentally included almost all blacks and women, at the same time as he vilified DEI. Recently he announced that the Pentagon will forbid military personnel from taking graduate courses at some of the top universities in the US, because he calls them "woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination."

Hegseth is also a proponent of lethal military force first, last and always, and evidently agrees with the aide behind the White House throne, Stephen Miller, that the world "is governed by force."  That's a long way from the time that the US Secretary of State praised Star Trek: The Next Generation as a global model of peaceful mediation.

I could not help but think that a subtext of these "Arsenal of Freedom" events is to re-imagine Star Trek for the Ellison regime. Or perhaps it reflects a triumphant belief that this is going to be the direction that Ellison takes.  I see this also in the tenor of some unusual criticism of the new Star Trek series, Starfleet Academy.

Star Trek fans, especially on line, can be prickly.  Although I enjoy Starfleet Academy a lot more than I thought I would--I think it's very well done, and a breath of fresh air-- I sympathize with those who see its very contemporary slang and "language" as a little problematic.  Other nitpicks don't bother me--and the vitriol is simply unacceptable.  

But the sudden criticism over its "diversity" caught my attention, especially when it came from those who don't usually comment on Star Trek (which included the aforementioned Stephen Miller), and especially in the context of the Ellison takeover and the Musk-Hegseth appropriation of Star Trek.  Some of this critique (including at least some of the vitriol), especially online, even seems a little--shall we say-- organized. 

The timing is suspect, for it's not as if Starfleet Academy is an exception in terms of enacting diversity, of embodying IDIC.  If anything, this was even more pronounced in Star Trek: Discovery, from its inception in 2017.  Why single out Starfleet Academy now?  Well, why do you think?

As I write this, the fate of the team now in charge of Star Trek on television is not settled--contracts reportedly end this year.  There's not even a date set for the resumption of Strange New Worlds, which has seasons 4 and 5 ready to go.  What is known is that all previous Star Trek movies in development were cancelled, including the proposed fourth of the "Abramsverse" features.  Instead, a new movie is being written and developed by people new to Star Trek.

I suppose the tech is what far right fans like about Star Trek, but it's not all about the toys.  Yet that seems to be what they want to make Star Trek represent.

So here is what I fear, and unfortunately what I expect: There will be a new movie with Star Trek in the title, and it will be about high tech warfare, pitting humans against aliens: white far right Christian men conquer the universe! Phasers on overkill!  And the central starship will feature a cast overwhelmingly comprised of white males identifiable as Americans.  By then the current team running Star Trek television will be long gone, and so will Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, and nearly everything that has constituted the soul of Star Trek for sixty years.  

Coming soon: Star Trek: In Name Only. STINO. I hope I'm wrong.  But I will also be surprised if I am.

Update 3/23/26: Paramount announced today that the second season of Starfleet Academy will be its last. Was it done in by disappointing audience share, or to please White House white supremacist, psycho Stephen Miller?  There's no doubt he will be pleased.  In response, the creative team responsible for Starfleet Academy, most of whom helped create all the Star Trek on television for the past decade, issued an unusually long and pointed statement (reproduced in full here at Trekmovie), defending the Gene Roddenberry vision of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.  In addition to suggesting why they thought they were cancelled, it also seems like a goodbye, not just from Starfleet Academy, but the larger creative team itself, as discussions are supposedly going on about their participation in Star Trek's future.  That they now have no shows to work on tells its own tale.

Photos 1 and 2: Screen captures from Star Trek: The Next Generation first season episode "Arsenal of Freedom," from Trekcore.  Photo 3: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.  Photo 4: Starfleet Academy cast and creative staff at the beginning.

Star Trek Nemesis (Star Trek X)

This is the tenth in a series of essays on the first ten Star Trek movies, comprising the Roddenberry-Berman era, and so completes the Trekalog.

Star Trek Nemesis, the tenth and, as it turned out, final feature film of the Roddenberry-Berman era, is by now a movie almost nobody likes.

That includes some of the people who made it. Patrick Stewart, who initially called it the best of the Next Generation movies, was subtly dissing the final cut during his promotional tour. He was later quoted as calling the film “pretty weak.”

Even while defending the movie, Rick Berman (producer and co-creator of the story, with John Logan and Brent Spiner) found ways to be softly cynical about it. Cast members were soon talking about tensions with the director on the set. (In her typically understated way, Marina Sirtis called him an idiot.)

From the beginning Nemesis got a mediocre response both critically and at the box office, and its reputation has not grown much in the years since. I saw Nemesis in a movie theatre on its first day of its general US release in 2002, and was more disappointed than not. I saw it again during its first run and then on DVD, and was even less enthused-- also dismayed and maybe a little angry at what increasingly looked like the last lost opportunity.  For there is now one undisputable fact: this was our last look at the Next Generation crew on the big movie screen.

More than 20 years later I’ve looked at it again a few times on DVD, and in some ways Nemesis is not a bad movie. The narrative is tight, with one thing leading to another, and every event contributes and pays off. It has the over-the-top villain and the big space battle that the loudest fans say they want. It includes incidents not seen before in a Star Trek movie: a shuttle careening through the interior of a starship, an android jumping through space from one ship to another, and the Enterprise ramming another starship, not to mention an attempted psychic rape.

And it certainly has a message, spelled out several times: to be human is to strive to be better than you are. It’s a classic, core Star Trek ideal, and one sorely needed in these times especially.

While its reputation was set a long time ago and people who haven’t seen it in years still hold to the same opinion, I have to admit that even after seeing it again—without the same emotional baggage—I still don’t feel it. It still doesn’t land. And I have some idea of why for me it doesn’t.

There was an unusually long delay after the ninth Star Trek film. According to Rick Berman, Paramount wanted a new and younger crew for the tenth theatrical feature. Berman pointed out that a new crew had just been introduced on television in Star Trek: Enterprise, and another set of unfamiliar characters might be too much. The studio eventually agreed, perhaps grudgingly. The Next Generation and the Enterprise-E would get another voyage.

Meanwhile, actor Brent Spiner (TNG’s Data) and screenwriter John Logan were talking out ideas for the next Next Generation movie. Logan had been a Star Trek fan since childhood, inhabiting the Enterprise and Star Trek stories as he and his family moved from place to place.

By this time John Logan was riding high as a screenwriter for Gladiator, a box office and critical hit that won the Oscar for Best Picture of the year 2000. (In fact he was one of three named writers of that film--he reportedly wrote part of the second draft-- while its star Russell Crowe claimed the script was incomplete and arrived on set in sections, with lots of improvisations ending up on screen.)

Logan’s status got Paramount’s attention, and he pitched his concepts to Rick Berman. Over the next year or so, Logan, Spiner and Berman continued to develop the story, while Logan wrote numerous drafts of the script.

Logan wanted a direct confrontation between Captain Picard and a major villain to be at the center of the story. In interviews he cited Khan in Star Trek II as the model. He wasn’t the last to do that, and as we know now, in 13 feature films, a single, larger than life villain has worked really well in a Star Trek movie exactly once: in Star Trek II.

He wanted the villain and hero to have a personal connection, as in Star Trek II. So eventually he made him a biological clone of Picard.

The first scene in Nemesis happens in the Senate of the Romulan Empire. The Praetor dismisses the proposal by someone named Shinzon, after which an innocuous box left on a table blossoms in a double helix of laser light, and everyone in the room turns to dust.

That Logan would select the Romulans as the focus for this film was predictable, since they are based on the same Roman Empire he wrote about in Gladiator. Like other stories about Rome from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar forward, that movie concerns internal power politics, treachery and murder. So does the opening of Nemesis. (How there can be an interstellar empire aping ancient Rome so closely has always been an embarrassing aspect of the Romulans, which is unfortunately emphasized in this film.) 

Like the hero of Gladiator, the villain of Nemesis is a former slave—this time from the enslaved world of Remus. (In the myth of Rome, the city was founded by the twins, Romulus and Remus.) But Shinzon is not Reman by birth—he is human, born in a test tube from the DNA of Jean-Luc Picard, meant to someday replace Picard where as a Romulan agent he could undermine Starfleet and the Federation.

As Shinzon tells Picard in their first private meeting, then the Romulan regime changed, the plan was dropped, and the very young Shinzon was abandoned to die in the dilithium mines of Remus. Instead he grew up to become a military leader in the Dominion Wars, helped by the Reman known as his Viceroy (played by Ron Perlman in heavy Nosferatu-alien makeup.  That is, the influential 1922 German expressionist vampire film of that title by F.W. Murnau, not of course the 2024 remake.) 

Before that however, we see the Enterprise crew celebrating the wedding of Will Riker and Deanna Troi in Riker’s native Alaska, after which the Enterprise is off to Troi’s Betazed for a wedding ceremony there. On the way, Geordi picks up a positronic signal on an obscure planet near the Romulan neutral zone, where pieces of a Data-like prototype, called B-4, are found and reassembled. (The sequence on this desert planet features a new ground vehicle—a kind of open-air, hyper-dune buggy-- in scenes that were subjected to mockery by some fans. In seeing it again, the more conspicuous challenge to credibility was that the planet’s pre-Warp aliens sped around in exactly the same kind of vehicle, right down to the goggles they all wore.)

So from here, the Data/B-4 pair is thematically linked to the Picard/Shinzon pair, although B-4 serves also as a plot device and a possible escape hatch when—is it possible to call this a spoiler after 20 years?--Data sacrifices his life.

Though Shinzon turns on the charm at first, it pretty quickly becomes apparent that his fearsome huge starship, the Scimitar, is a weapon generating something called thalaron radiation, and is bent on destroying all life on Earth. 

Though the plot turns out to be not much more than an Evil Twin story, cloning was a hot topic at the time Nemesis was made.

The first animal was successfully cloned in 1996 (a sheep named Dolly.) In 2000 the first “rough draft” of the human genome was produced. The next few years saw a race between a government project and a corporate project to finish the genome. In particular, Craig Vetter, who ran the corporate project, was often on television hyping the importance of the human genome. When completed, it would be the key to ending human diseases and improving human health and performance—and longevity.

Hyping the importance of the genome played into a kind of genetic determinism that was dominant in science and the popular mind. Richard Dawkins, in his classic The Selfish Gene and other works, championed the gene as the major if not sole determining factor in human evolution, in interaction with the environment. According to biologist E.O. Wilson, this was generally accepted until 2010. Other scientists began questioning it after that, seeing large roles for epigenetics (factors other than DNA), behavioral means and symbol-based means (language) in human evolution.

As scientists dug deeper into genomes, they realized that the existence of particular genes wasn’t enough in itself—some genes didn’t “express,” but were still passed down, with the potential to be turned on under unknown circumstances. In any event, once the human genome was sequenced it did advance the diagnosis and treatment of some diseases and conditions, but it turned out not to be the miracle panacea it was hyped to be.

Cloning was a bugaboo on Star Trek several times before, threatening a human’s sense of uniqueness and identity, as well as the threat of its “deep fake” capabilities to replace people, the intent of the Romulan plot. That, in turn, is a standard science fiction device in various permutations (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.)

Moreover, problems with animal cloning suggested that the process might not produce as exact a copy as in science fiction and the popular mind. Even twins with very nearly the same DNA are not completely identical or indistinguishable in all respects, even if they are raised together.

The movie plays with these themes of identity (Picard and Shinzon are “mirrors” of each other; Shinzon complains that he is the echo and Picard the voice, and so on) and the influences of environment (Shinzon says Picard would be the same evil genius he is if Picard had grown up in slavery, and Picard wonders if he’s right.)

But the idea that Shinzon and Picard have exactly the same perceptions and thought processes because of their genetic identity doesn't pass my smell test. It represents more disbelief than I could suspend.  I've known identical twins.  It doesn't work that way.   

There is another fatal flaw of credibility to the movie: that Shinzon is a clone of Picard is supposed to instantly create an intimate relationship based on their genes. But in the story, they are just meeting. They have no prior relationship in the real world, as (for example) Kirk and Khan did. From a dramatic point of view, the relationship is too abstract, and without content.

Shinzon is played by Tom Hardy, now a celebrated and accomplished actor, in an early role. He is supposed to be a younger version of Picard, although more physically battered by his hard life on Remus. Tom Hardy creates a character worthy of a Roman epic. But after seeing this movie a number of time over decades, I am still stopped by one impression: I do not for a moment feel, believe or accept that Shinzon is a clone of Picard.

Part of it may be the age difference, but the physical detail that often give credibility to a young actor being accepted as a child of an older actor—let alone a clone-- just isn’t there for me. Bald heads aren’t enough.  Rick Berman recognized this problem: Tom Hardy didn’t look like Patrick Stewart, “so that was kind of hard to buy,” he said later. “But we worked very hard.”

Moreover, while Hardy and Patrick Stewart act well in this film, their scenes together feel like they’re in different movies. (The two actors apparently had no contact beyond their scenes during the weeks of filming.) Hardy approaches Shinzon as a version of Ricardo Montelbam’s outsized performance of Khan, while Stewart is a much more subtle and understated Picard. (Picard in a scene with Beverly Crusher emphasizes that as a young man he was arrogant "and a damn fool" but that's not what I see Hardy playing.)  As contrasting characters of different ages that wouldn’t be a problem. But the continuing emphasis on the clone aspect changes that, at least as you watch it.

The Data/B-4 B story continues throughout the movie, but there’s no credibility problem there because Brent Spiner plays both roles, and B-4 is a less sophisticated prototype. As a perhaps unforeseen consequence, this is an obvious contrast to the not mirror-images of Picard and Shinzon.

There are other bothersome aspects to the story and the backstory. Reman society is not even suggested beyond a single dimension. Where for example are its women? How did a slave society produce a starship that dwarfs the Enterprise, with so much firepower that must require huge supplies of energy? Where the hell did thalaron radiation come from? Apart from the mind of a screenwriter.

And of course, Shinzon’s target is Earth. We won’t waste our heroes heroism on a distant planet with only a few inhabitants (as in Insurrection) or unknown alien planets (as in Generations). Earth is the biggest hot button, though it might have resonated specifically in 2002: filming had begun only weeks after 9/11, and America was feeling vulnerable. That and the subsequent War on Terror changed the direction of the Enterprise TV series and eventually all of Star Trek, from novels to almost everything that subsequently appeared on screen, right up to now. Nemesis was by no means the worst victim of this.

Logan did provide some hints to credible elements of Shinzon’s character and motivations. He was a human raised without other humans. In Picard he sought a family lineage he could feel. The idea of Shinzon regarding Picard as a father, and his pathological need as a young man to outdo him, to conquer him, can be found in the film, but not easily. His snarling assertion that by destroying Earth, he would be more famous for a longer time than Picard, is a motivation that could have been given greater prominence.

Shinzon is also fighting off death as a result of his cloning, so he attempts to kidnap Picard and drain his blood as a treatment for his genetic malady--so in the middle of this muddle it's a vampire movie after all.

If these weren’t enough, Shinzon is also lonely, and immediately attracted to the first human woman he sees, Counselor Troi. His attempts at forcible sexual contact through psychic means does pay off somewhat later as a plot device, but it leads to one of the most embarrassing scenes in all of Star Trek, in its only overt sex scene ever. (Logan told Marina Sirtis that he had a “purely professional crush” on Troi, but one wonders.)

In the end, even the core message (to be human is to strive to be better than you are) feels flat, probably because it was stated but not really dramatized. Picard pleaded with Shinzon to be better than he is, but Shinzon simply refused. In fact he did become more than he’d been, rising from a slave child to an emperor, with his own vision of greatness. The difference between what Picard and Data saw as basically choosing to emphasize one side of human nature—our “better angels” in the Lincoln formula made contemporary by Barack Obama—and what Shinzon did with his life was implied but not focused.

To further muddy that message, strict adherents of the selfish gene theory would likely be on Shinzon’s side: survival (or conquest) at all costs. This is a debate that goes back to Darwin and especially T.H. Huxley, who introduced ethics into the human evolutionary equation. But none of this is engaged by the references to the genes shared by Picard and his nemesis. It just becomes another in too many themes and currents. To be fair, the elements are there: nature, nurture and human choice. They’re just jumbled up.

So the story, which unfolds logically, is nevertheless so crowded that it erodes its own credibility while feeling rote and forced.

And then there is the production itself.

Nemesis went before the cameras in November 2001.  Besides a new screenwriter in fanboy John Logan, the director was also new to Star Trek, but Stuart Baird was not a fan. He knew little about Star Trek and specifically the TNG episodes and movies, and apparently made no effort to change that.  Baird was known mostly as a film editor, notably for the great 1979 Richard Donner film, Superman.

At the time Berman said that he selected Baird because he was impressed by his directorial feature, Executive Decision. But years later Berman admitted (as revealed in the second volume of The Fifty Year Mission by Altman and Gross) that he was instructed to hire Baird by Sherry Lansing, head of Paramount.

Still, the idea of bringing “fresh blood” (Berman’s words) to a Star Trek film was extended to the cinematographer. At first it seemed it would be Dante Spinotti, Italian-born veteran and innovator, that IMBD calls “one of the most appreciated cinematographers in Hollywood.” But in the end the job went to another Hollywood veteran, Jeffrey L. Kimball, known mostly for action films, including Mission Impossible II, which included Star Trek veterans Ronald Moore and Brannon Braga as two of the three writers.

I recall at the time that I for one longed for a different visual approach for this well-known Star Trek crew, so we could see them in a new way—something akin to the creativity directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks brought to their westerns, with cinematographers like Gregg Toland, Winton C. Hoch and Joe McDonald.

Seeing Nemesis on DVD recently I did notice some different framing and camera movements inside the Enterprise, but nothing really striking. Others have complained of the visual darkness and murky imagery.  Still, Ford and Hawks showed you can come up with memorable images in a movie that emphasizes action.

Some fans fault aspects of the production (and I tend to agree that the Romulan uniforms are comical) but for all the difficulties the Enterprise cast had with the director, they all managed to come through. For me the most discouraging aspect of production was what we didn’t see in the final film.

It quickly became known that some 45 or 50 minutes of Nemesis had been cut before theatrical showings. When the movie was released on home video in 2003 and then in the Special Edition two-disk set in 2005—which is the one I own— at least some of the deleted scenes were included in the otherwise lackluster special features.

Some were trimmed scenes (and the DVD only included one part of the wedding sequence that was cut—this time fortunately, for it was a well-acted but misguided scene with Wesley Crusher) but some full scenes are notable. The first is introduced by Patrick Stewart, who calls it “an important scene” between Picard and Data that early on set up major themes of the movie. (If memory serves, Stewart talked about this scene in a pre-release talk show appearance as well.)

There’s a useful scene in sick bay that gives the neglected Gates McFadden another moment, and allows Picard to bookend something he said to Shinzon when he asked if Picards were always warriors. “I think of myself as an explorer,” Picard replied. In this scene he recalls that when Charles Darwin went on his voyage of biological exploration, his ship sailed “without a single musket.” “That was another time,” Crusher says gently, pocketing a phaser. “How far we’ve come,” Picard replies, ruefully and pointedly.

The final cut includes one scene of group mourning for Data. Deleted was another scene—a very TNG scene-- in which Geordi and Worf are in Data’s quarters, examining and packing up what he left behind—and Data’s cat Spot adopts Worf.

But the most conspicuous loss is the scene that was supposed to end the movie. Its the last few moments on the Enterprise bridge for Riker, now leaving to become Captain of the Titan, and the introduction of the new First Officer with a Riker prank. Captain Picard gets a new command chair—with seatbelts. “It’s about time,” he says, and so say we all.

Then we see the movie end the way Star Trek films properly end: with the Enterprise warping into space, bound for where no one has gone before. Instead Nemesis ends with a shot of the Enterprise still in space dock, an unfortunate metaphor for the impact of this film.

J.M. Dillard’s novelization of Nemesis includes these deleted scenes in her narrative. The result is a more satisfying Star Trek story, especially since it exposes fewer of the story’s problems. But my response to the scenes as filmed and cut was that, not only would it have been a better movie with most of them included, but as scenes they were better than some that made the final cut.

All of these possible reasons for less than enthusiastic responses to Nemesis are responses to the movie itself, and so require that the movie be seen first. None of them explains the conspicuous mystery of the film’s relative failure to attract the usual proportion of fans to the opening weekend, so Nemesis was in some ways a failure before anyone had actually seen it.

When I began this series of posts on the first ten Star Trek movies (The Trekalog) way too long ago, I described a little of what it was like to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture in a movie theatre in 1979 with an early audience (as I did): the anticipation, the cheers as each major character was first seen—including the Enterprise. This set a pattern of long lines and enthusiastic fans to greet each new film’s first showings.

In December 2002, I saw the very first showing of Star Trek Nemesis at my local theatre in a far northern California college town. It was in the afternoon—not the midnight show that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets got in some places in November, or that The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers would have the very next weekend after Nemesis.

Besides me, there were all of four people in the seats when Nemesis began that afternoon, and when it ended. I knew two of them from seeing them around and exchanging greetings when we passed. One had a disability that isolated him (for awhile he had to wear something that made him look like that 22^nd century soldier in the TNG pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint,” which he no doubt realized.) The other was the most conspicuous cross-dresser in town. I note this not to disrespect them (quite the opposite), but to recognize that from first to last, Star Trek found some of its most fervently committed fans among such outsiders.  But on that afternoon, we were alone.

In terms of numbers in the seats, Star Trek Nemesis didn’t start out quite that badly across the country, but it was the first Star Trek movie not to win its opening weekend, and its direct competition wasn’t formidable. Eventually it would be one of the least popular of the Trekalog, and least liked by critics. But it was also somewhat mysteriously ignored even before anyone saw the actual movie.

“...nobody came to see it,” producer Rick Berman is quoted as saying in the second volume of The Fifty Year Mission by Altman and Gross. “It wasn’t even a question of not getting good reviews. Any Star Trek movie opened and it would have a huge opening weekend, but this one didn’t. Now, why? I understand and appreciate the criticism of the production or script, but to this day, I have some difficulty understanding why it met with such a poor reception.”

At the time, the most repeated reasons involved the competition from Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and the “franchise fatigue” that seemed to contribute to the early demise of the “Star Trek: Enterprise” series on television a few years later. There was also a sense that Paramount essentially subverted this film with weak marketing and perhaps deliberately fateful placement in the release schedule. But by the time Nemesis got to the international market, that direct scheduling competition didn’t exist (as Berman also acknowledged), and the film didn’t do well there either.

All of that pertains mostly to the general public. Why didn’t the fans show up? A lot of the diehard fans probably did that first weekend, there just weren’t as many of them. Many who might have been Star Trek fans had perhaps moved on to other sagas. But there was also a new factor in fandom in 2002: the Star Trek fan sites and their “bulletin boards” (or BBS.)

The two big ones then were Star Trek Today (which went online in 1999) and TrekWeb (around the same time.) I was reading both of them in the pre-Nemesis period, and I was a BBS participant. Looking back, I’d say at least two trends still noticeable in fandom today more or less began then.

The first was increasingly fan attention to “the biz” aspects: movie and TV budgets, studio politics, etc. There were still threads in which participants discussed the deeper meaning of individual episodes or movies, both current and past, and why Star Trek spoke to them—something that I find is rare these days, if not quaint. But there was more and more talk of promotion budgets, movie grosses and TV ratings.

The second was a kind of negativity, a virtual competition for attention-getting nastiness and outrageous assertions. There was also a growing sector of far right fandom on the boards, very different from the fandom that attended conventions and still championed the Roddenberry ideals. (Star Wars also had such fans, who rooted for the Empire to win.)

The Internet had already become a source of early information about the films still in production, including posting the entire script of Star Trek: Insurrection before its release. But these new sites made such information and speculation even more widespread, so there were debates about scenes, characters and plot points expected in Nemesis well before anyone had seen a frame of the finished film.

Rumors about Nemesis— known at first as Star Trek X—began on this sites some three years before release. At various times the director was said to be Josh Whedon, Jonathan Frakes and LeVar Burton. Outlines of the actual Nemesis plot were known more than a year ahead.

There was a lot of sustained and insistent negativity not only about Nemesis but about Star Trek: Enterprise, and those in charge of Star Trek—Paramount as well as Rick Berman. Perhaps this somewhat represented the views of a more general public, or of many Star Trek fans. Or perhaps it represented the views of only certain fans—and certain kinds of fans—that found an outlet and identity on the BBS.

It wasn’t all negative. Though the negativity was my enduring impression, I actually kept some pages about Nemesis from these sites, and there was also positive sentiment—including a lot of anticipation for the film’s release. Still, the debates and the expectations—both positive and negative—went on for months before that release. Did the movie itself become irrelevant?

In any case, the tepid box office and general grousing response to Nemesis was part of a larger dissatisfaction. By 2004, Star Trek: Enterprise was getting a lot of grief on the fan sites, and UPN—Paramount’s ill-fated attempt to start a cable channel—moved it to Friday nights, the well-known graveyard of the original series Star Trek, in what would predictably turn out to be its final season.

I visited the Star Trek: Enterprise set that summer of 2004 as part of my New York Times article about the ongoing Farewell to Scotty convention and the talk that Star Trek was dying. At one point I was in the shotgun seat of one of the electric carts studio people used to travel across the Paramount lot. Manny Coto, that year’s new showrunner for Enterprise, was in the back seat. Our driver was careening around and had to make a sudden stop to avoid a collision. “I have never understood the human predilection,” said I, “for piloting vehicles at unsafe velocities.”

Manny Coto laughed. “So you’re a fan,” he said. I’d paraphrased Data’s line from Nemesis, as Captain Picard sped his ATV across an alien desert.

Now I realize this is the only line I even half-remember from this movie. Unlike just about any other Star Trek movie you can name, I can think of no memorable lines associated with memorable moments. And as DeForrest Kelley once sagely pointed out, Star Trek movies are made of special moments.

Coto was upbeat about Star Trek’s future that day. But for my article I spoke with Leonard Nimoy, LeVar Burton, Denise Crosby (whose second “Trekkies” film had just come out) and others, including writer Nick Sagan and the president of a large Star Trek fan organization, and they all said more or less the same thing: maybe it’s time to give Star Trek a rest. There had been two and sometime three series running simultaneously for years, and new movies every few years. There was a sense that both creators and audiences were exhausted and, if not oversaturated, at least no longer hungry for Star Trek stories.

My article quoted UPN’s president denying he would do what he soon did: cancel “Enterprise” after four seasons. Even afterwards Rick Berman was still insisting plans for the next movie were being discussed—not John Logan’s proposed story bringing the captains of the Roddenberry-Berman era together, but the approach Paramount had wanted before Nemesis: a brand new crew unrelated to the prior ones.

Soon that project was abandoned as well, Berman disappeared (as did UPN), and the people who had been making every aspect of Star Treks for a generation were scattered. The original Roddenberry lineage was effectively broken.

For years, fans mourned the loss of a better exit for the TNG crew than Nemesis. And then, nearly 20 years later it miraculously happened. The third season of the limited series Star Trek: Picard (ten episodes in the new world of streaming) reunited the crew—and the Enterprise D—in a new adventure. The magnificent seven all got their stories—including at long last Doctor Crusher. Since there were also links to a future (like the next generation of the Next Generation), fans were left wanting more. But if--as seems very likely-- it is the last we’ll see of the Next Generation, these episodes are a fitting end.