How did Trek Become Such a Phenomenon?

[Tequila Sunrise]

Does it play on some deep sense of optimism for the future of technology and culture? 'Cause Trek is more than a little silly in both regards.


Aside from faster-than-light travel and unlimited clean energy, the Federation utopia strains credulity at the very least. Apparently humanity has overcome its aggressive and expansionist impulses -- even though the Fed supposedly doesn't allow the genetic engineering that'd be required to remove such a genetically ingrained part of our survival instincts -- and now we just want to hug strange aliens.


(To be fair, some of them are pretty hott...but the others are usually ugly and villainous.)


On a related note, why are the captains such a topic of debate? They all do absolutely idiotic things:


Kirk: Khan, the genetically engineering sociopath, attempts and nearly succeeds at taking the Enterprise by force. Kirk's reaction? "Instead of, I dunno...imprisoning or executing your dangerous and unrepentant ass, I'm going to drop you and your traitor girlfriend on the nearest habitable planet. Good luck!" Really Kirk? I know you're a space cowboy, but that's just moronic. I hope Khan comes back and kills your best friend.


Janeway: Voyager encounters a planet with a humanoid culture in the very early stages of civilization. Two ferengis have already discovered the planet, and are posing as prophets of the local gods in order to take the natives for all they're worth. Janeway, in accordance with the Prime Directive, hatches a scheme to get the ferengis out without freaking out the natives, but of course things get messy. The natives end up deciding to burn both her and the ferengis at the stake, and she figures well, I'll just have Voyager beam us up and the natives will think we're all divine emissaries! Are you ing kidding me, Janeway? You just created a precedent among these people for burning each other at the stake as a means of moral judgment that might last for EONS. You might very well have just steered this planet's people down the path of blind religious zealotry. I hope you're proud.


Archer: Humanity's first encounter with the klingons occurs when the Enterprise discovers a warbird with a debilitated crew sinking inexorably into a gas giant. After resuscitating the klingon crew, the klingon captain goes into battle mode: Despite being at the Enterprise's debt and mercy (his ship is still largely non-functional), the captain threatens to take the Enterprise by force. Archer's response? Finish rescuing the warbird from the gas giant, and then zoom away before the klingons can repair their weapons! All of this after the klingons have told him how proud they are of having pirated some less-fortunate alien ship before getting caught in the gas giant. I could understand maybe taking the klingon captain prisoner, and then giving the crew the chance to show a little sense before leaving them to their fate. But rescuing a clearly aggressive and dangerous group of aliens for no other reason than, gee, maybe someday we'll all be friends or something...that's morally reprehensible in addition to being incredibly stupid.


Picard and Sisko: Nothing immediately comes to mind, but I'm sure they both did things equally idiotic during their respective multi-season reigns.

 

[sabrinathecat]

It was also the right show for the right time. It wasn't like there was a lot of Sci-Fi at the time. Doctor Who was only running in England and her colonies, and mostly considered kiddie-fare. Lost in Space--cough cough. Wild Wild West? Star Wars wouldn't be released for another decade.
Here was a show where humans had stepped beyond petty racism, and was working to improve and explore.
Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelly formed a great acting team with well-balanced chemistry. Say what you want about Shatner, but he has shown that A: he can act, B: he has a sense of humor (even if he sometimes comes off as a self-absorbed Richard), C: he was working with a character written by others in an era of massive cardboard characters and Over The Top hams. None of the other shows developed anything like that chemisty combo. Closest was Voyager with Tuvok, Doctor, and 7ofTrippleD.
They may not be impressive now, but those model shots were very expensive.
Why transporters? Because the show didn't have the budget to have the shuttlecraft take off and land every single episode.

Stranding a group of criminals on a primal world where they have no hope of escape, on a world that would have been quarantined and off-limits to all traffic? Giving a chance at redemption is more civilized than killing. Plus it tied into the original Botany Bay penal colony: It was a historical reference.

Burning at the stake was already a part of their religion. Imagine if they'd checked the corpses and found the modern dental work! OK, that was one of many poor scripts.

Saving the klingons: sure, this ship is full of what we would consider criminal scum, but saving people from death is part of the ideals of the future. Maybe the Klingons would learn that they can't just bully everyone--that there is a better way. (Yeah, I know--they're Klingons. But maybe Archer was delusionaly optimistic). Enterprise was on a mission to promote good will and explore, not start/get involved in wars. What was offensive and stupid was changing the opening credits song from meh to folk-rock quasi-country.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Going to answer just on the ST:OS - it was timing. People wanted, no needed, what the show provided, a window to a better future than they were living in. It sparked adventure and exploration in the viewer but it also took us away from what was going on in the real world at the time.

Kirk and Khan, you are the good guy and you are out in the middle of nowhere, you don't kill, you give a fighting chance. Yea, Kirk could have blown Khan out an air lock but you just did not do that stuff back then.

 

[Kaodi]

I am becoming of the opinion that Star Trek needs a successor, not a reboot or a new series. They may have thought they were recreating the possibilities with the reboot, but I think what is really limiting to Star Trek nowadays is that because nothing like the Eugenics Wars has happened Star Trek has no vision of our present. And that is problematic.

 

[sabrinathecat]

I am becoming of the opinion that Star Trek needs a successor, not a reboot or a new series. They may have thought they were recreating the possibilities with the reboot, but I think what is really limiting to Star Trek nowadays is that because nothing like the Eugenics Wars has happened Star Trek has no vision of our present. And that is problematic.

Might I suggest Babylon5? Seems to have been pretty well grounded in out present.

 

[Janx]

star trek was fun, and slightly educational. The morality plays probably informed a good many of us on right and wrong and stuff.

the technology also inspired a good many of us. Countless tech and science people cite Star Trek as an inspiration.

Sure, not all the stories and actions they took made sense from a modern sensibility. But then, why doesn't Batman kill the Joker? Same reason Trek doesn't kill Khan and Archer rescues the Klingons. Because they are trying to be better than taking the deadly option.

I'm a big fan of killing bad guys. Dead bad guys don't strike back. Ender's Game taught us that. But I respect somebody taking the harder road to preserve life, albeit at higher risk.

I'm going to put forward that something is wrong with us and our society, that we don't see anything wrong with every Batman movie resulting in the death of the villain, compared to just about every Batman comic resulting in batman catching the bad guy and taking great pains to establish that Batman doesn't kill.

The same is true of Star Trek and its silly plots. It'd be trivial for the Enterprise to kill every villain of the week. The self-imposed constraints they try to follow are what we aspire to. Aside from stupid writing where they try to avoid breaking the Prime Directive by breaking the Prime Directive.

Anyway, Star trek is great because I like it. I prefer it over Star Wars. I don't think of it as some example of Utopia. Merely a future where we spend more time exploring and solving problems than struggling to screw each other over.

<mention>Kaodi</mention> asked where our present vision is, I suggest that's Firefly and BSG. Those shows are great, but they wallow in our own bad behaviors. I think DS9 was aimed to be the trek equivalent, but BSG in particular fine tuned that in a sci-fi show.

What Trek gave us was a setting where we COULD rise above our petty self-absorbed crap. Being set in the future is the implication that we might not be there now, but we CAN get there. A show with a modern setting like that would be viewed as hokey and unrealistic because the protagonists are self-absorbed like we are. A show set in the future can acknowledge that we USED to be self-absorbed, but we got better.

I think Trek had enough flawed characters to show that this ideal hadn't been fully reached, but that the majority society was decent and not like the degenerates we percieve our current world to be comprised of. A societal evolution still has its throwbacks.

Lastly, what Trek gave us is good memorable characters. TOS got three seasons, and everybody knows who Kirk, Spock, Bones and Scotty is. A fair number of people know who Picard is. The other shows ramp down in "common knowledge" name recognition. There are zillions of novels written in all the Trek series. There's even a Eugenics Wars series.

Trek is popular because it got the formula right.

 

[Umbran]

Does it play on some deep sense of optimism for the future of technology and culture? 'Cause Trek is more than a little silly in both regards.

I will take a bit of an extreme analogy to illustrate a point: Would you judge a Shakespearean play by how it fails to conform to what is considered reasonable in a 21st century police procedural show? No, that would be silly.

You seem to be judging Trek on how it fails to be a modern, gritty-minded, supposedly-realistic show, as if it were an exact simulation or depiction of a possible future. That's not what Trek primarily was, or ever has been. Trek is more a modern take on a "morality play". It is allegory, in which the characters meet personifications of various moral ideals that push them this way and that, in an effort to examine morality. We stack some continuity and longer-term character development in part because that allows us to examine more nuanced positions, and in part because they make the show more "sticky".

Both your points against Kirk and Archer are based in a simple moral point - tactical considerations take a back seat to mercy.

I make no excuses for Janeway.

It became a big thing because, for all that there are plot holes and what seem to our sensibilities to be tactical or strategic errors, we still like morality plays.

 

[Ahnehnois]

What scifi show (or story in any medium) doesn't strain credulity?

We had that scifi vs. fantasy thread a while back and to my mind it's still pretty clear that most of the stuff produced as genre fiction is not remotely plausible and is often lacking even in internal logic.

The biggest reason that Star Trek has been so successful, in my mind, is that it was so ideologically different than everything else at the time it started. Humanism. Optimism. The belief that people will ultimately do the right thing. How many television shows focus on people who are irreligious, free from all the ills of our society, and get along in perfect (or at least decent) harmony? To this day, not many.

And, of course, there's plenty of entertaining characters, intellectual plots, and fun special effects. At its best, it's just good television.

Of course, given the less than harmonious people behind the scenes, and the natural erosion of quality over time, plenty of stupid stuff has been produced under the Trek name as well. Bottom line: all the other TV franchises wish they had as many chances to fail as Trek has.

 

[sabrinathecat]

Roddenbury had a great bit at a convention for how the christian bible would be received by network executives and the kind of feedback it would receive.
And there was an example of how no network/corporate mindset could ever capture what it was that made Trek great into a formula.
This is why Enterprise, Voyager, and Next Gen all ultimately failed to achieve the greatness of the original.

 

[Kaodi]

When I said "present" I meant more "present era" . I should have made it more clear that I was including the near future. I would like to see a show that relates a positive idea of what we could do in the next thirty or fourty years. It does not have to take place during that time, but it does have to say something about it. I do not know if Babylon 5 is quite what I would be looking for in that regard. And while popular in its time, I do not think Babylon 5 really spawned a mainstream following. A new show needs to shoot again for a mainstream following.