10 Things ThatStar TrekGot Right (That Have Never Been Copied)

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek , and even after five decades there has never been another series like Gene Roddenberry ’s brainchild . We ’ve had plenty of starship show since 1966 , but some things about Trek remained unequalled . Here are 10 Star Trek achievements that nobody else oversee to pull off .

Even the posterior Star Trek serial did n’t really do this , although you have the periodic history by someone like Peter S. Beagle . But it ’s still passably mind - fellate that the author of the original Star Trek let in Theodore Sturgeon , Harlan Ellison , Jerome Bixby , Norman Spinrad , Robert Bloch , Richard Matheson , and others . And a few other famous scientific discipline fiction authors nearly drop a line for Trek as well . Among successful TV display , only The Twilight Zone even comes closely to that phonograph recording . Also notable : Trek was always opened to new writer , include over - the - transom submissions for several eld , and a great deal of television ’s good penman got their start at Star Trek University .

For its fourth dimension , the original Trek was pretty rotatory — the cellular inclusion of Lt . Uhura among the core Bridge work party was such a big deal , Martin Luther King urged Nichelle Nichols to stay on the show . Kirk ’s gang also let in an Asian serviceman and ( at the meridian of the Cold War ) a Russian . And later on Trek series extend to press the envelope : TNG ’s crew include a handicapped applied scientist , for example . And Deep Space Nine and Voyager ’s inclusion of , respectively , an African American military man and a woman as captains felt extremely cutting - edge in the former nineties .

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One of the thing that Star Trek does , which is revolutionary and acquire over time , is to give the men and women of Starfleet limitations that have nothing to do with logistics . It ’s not “ We ca n’t microwave the major planet from orbit because our planet - micro-cook gadget needs another five hr to recharge , ” but rather “ We ca n’t , because we have a dominion against interfere with the development of their culture . ” You could make a drinking biz out of all the times that Kirk ( and even later skipper ) break the Prime Directive , but the fact that so much of the storytelling is about having power but being unwilling to apply it is fascinating . ( And yes , Doctor Who has a wispy and wibbly - wobbly normal against the Doctor changing his own past tense , but that ’s usually portray as almost a physical limitation , rather than a choice to exercise restraint . )

This sorting of go along with the Prime Directive and things like it , but it merit its own item because it ’s such an of import thing . Gene Roddenberry ’s insistence that the great unwashed of the 23rd 100 would have germinate past the rapacity , fanatism , paranoia and prejudices of the 20th century is often criticise as an impediment to right storytelling . And sure , when you see this involve to its extreme in the first two seasons of The Next Generation , it ’s often arduous to watch . But as much as Roddenberry ’s utopian sensibility have in the manner of traditional storytelling , it also forced these show to come up with new — and often fascinating — ways to generate conflicts . Just having a starting distributor point that these characters have an subject mind and want to understand the cultures they encounter feel revolutionary , and is still an aberration in media science fiction .

pot of science fiction indulge in allegories for racism or war or other societal issues . Trek is still renowned for how far it push allegory and thought experiment , week after week . This was not always a well thing : authoritative Star Trek ’s attempts to take on racism and the Vietnam War were sometimes so clumsy as to be almost unbearable . But at the same metre , Star Trek ’s tendency to delve into thought experiments is sometimes uncomfortable in the sound way , and at its best , all of the Trek series would cut into into post where there ’s no loose answer , and the parallels to our present - day world were inescapable .

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Everybody ’s doing shared universes now , and to a large extent this is an attempt to simulate what Marvel and DC accomplished in their comic , decade ago . But on television and in the film , Star Trekwas one of the first series to create a universein which dissimilar ships , and dissimilar gang , felt like they all belonged to the same basic setting without being just “ spin - offs . ” sum in the book - only series like New Frontier , Corps of Engineers , Vanguard , Seekers and so on , and you ’ve got a capacious galaxy . Star Wars always comes back to being about the Skywalkers and their friends , in the chief medium serial , but Star Trek is just about Starfleet , and any Starfleet officer could asterisk in a Star Trek show or film .

The other matter that ’s still largely unique about Star Trek ’s universe is how much we ’ve gotten to know about the Klingons , Romulans , Vulcans and a handful of other race over several decades . Science fable books have dig into alien cultures with incredible saturation and brainstorm , but it ’s rare for movies or television to spend as much time and vim on alien societies as Star Trek has been capable to spend on its gist races . Just the fact that the we ’ve spent 50 years getting to know the Klingons , with some pretty incredible actors making Klingon characters their own , is kind of awing . ( Although I ’m still pissed that Diane Duane’sRihannsu novelsare no long canon . )

Gene Roddenberry and other Trek creators had served in the military , and some of the best Star Trek : TOS episodes are explicitly a commentary on how state of war turns good people into monsters . I did n’t realise for year that the very first Klingon instalment is the one in which the godlike Organians force Kirk to make peace with his enemies , and Kirk is snarling at being abnegate his right wing to attack . And the best TOS sequence , “ The Balance of Terror , ” is a remaking of the war movie The Enemy Below , in which we expend a surprising amount of time mother to acknowledge the Romulan commanding officer and sympathizing with his decision . TNG apportion with military issue like torture and warfare criminal offense with more predisposition than television generally musters , and Deep Space Nine created a discipline of the monetary value of war that stay unequalled .

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Another thing that ’s great about the fact that Star Trek has been around for so long is that we become to see Kirk , Spock and even some of the TNG character get old and modify as mass . In retrospect , some of the most memorable moments in Star Trek ’s history — especially Wrath of Khanand the TNG close “ All undecomposed Things”—are about characters that we ’ve catch to know grappling with getting older and not being the same people they used to be . Until recently , Star Trek never yield in to the enticement to remold its major characters or try out to keep them everlastingly untried .

The “ big dumb object in infinite ” genre is a mainstay of science fiction Good Book , and we occasionally get an eyefull of it in movie like 2001 . But Star Trek was relentless in its imperativeness on mark its heroes against huge phenomenon that they could n’t in full interpret — there are vast infinite amoebas , giant satellite - killers , monolithic holes in spacetime , and much more . We tend to bemock the later Star Trek shows for their endless plot about spacetime anomaly and other technobabble item , but the fact that so many of the stories throughout Trek ’s history have been driven by “ there ’s something huge and unusual , and we do n’t know what it is ” is kind of awe-inspiring when you think about it . And here ’s where I have to give prop to J.J. Abrams ’ first Trek film for using real - life images of Saturn from the Cassini Space Probe for its most arrestingly beautiful images .

Top image : Star Trek : Ships of the Line calendar 2016(and Star Trek : Vanguard : Storming Heaven by David Mack ) . Enterprise / Saturn image from Star Trek 2009via Roddenberry Productions ( Lenticular Print ) .

Photo: Jae C. Hong