Must-Read: Manu Saadia: The Enduring Lessons of “Star Trek”

Must-Read: The wise Manu Saadia makes the case for his belief that “The Next Generation” rather than “The Original Series” is the real Star Trek:

Manu Saadia: The Enduring Lessons of “Star Trek”:

There are two kinds of science fiction… us[ing] the trappings of the future to explore the present…

…and us[ing] the same sorts of artifice for the opposite purpose—to imagine foreign, even utopian, futures. The original “Star Trek” series was undoubtedly of the first kind. The present saturated it. For a show that purported to “boldly go where no man has gone before,” it was remarkably at home in the familiar, if turbulent, world of the nineteen-sixties…. “Balance of Terror,” for instance, meditated on the futility of the Cold War. “A Private Little War” was an unsubtle dig at America’s involvement in Vietnam. “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” offered a clumsy dramatization of slavery and racial discrimination…. Tellingly, the original series was at its best when its cast engaged in good, old-fashioned time travel….

It is hard to overstate how much of a departure the “Star Trek” franchise’s eighties-and-nineties-straddling incarnation, “The Next Generation,” was…. [It] swung almost entirely toward the second, more cerebral form of science fiction. It had no anchor in the present, nor did it genuflect before America’s frontier myths. “The Next Generation” was wholesale utopia, a thought experiment on how humans would behave under terminally improved material circumstances. Civilization, and the future, had won….

In “The Neutral Zone,” a reverse-time-travel episode, cryogenically preserved twentieth-century humans awake on the Enterprise. One of them, a take-charge Wall Street tycoon, is particularly eager to reclaim his stock portfolio and his status as master of the universe. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things,” Picard tells him—and us, the audience—sternly. “We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy”…