Gene Roddenberry, who left us on October 24th, 1991, had several successes as a freelance TV scriptwriter. He was involved in several hit series, including Highway Patrol, which I used to watch as a teenager, Have Gun Will Travel, which I saw as a university student and, of course, for the series that will forever be associated with his name, Star Trek, and the later series, Star Trek, the Next Generation.
The show was not a brilliant success, and NBC planned to close it after its second season, but a determined campaign by devoted ‘trekkies’ led them to air a third season. It was hailed as TV’s first ‘adult’ (meaning non-childish) science fiction series, and the surprise was that its hero, William Shatner’s Captain Kirk, was overshadowed by Leonard Nimoy’s emotion-free Vulcan, Mr Spock. Indeed, Roddenberry wrote to SF author Isaac Asimov to seek advice on how to counter this. Asimov suggested having Kirk and Spock work together as a team "to get people to think of Kirk when they think of Spock."
The optimism of the Star Trek universe was part of its appeal. Humanity was headed out to the stars not to conquer and exploit, but to explore and to make friends. Its introduction became famous.
“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!”
Fans forgave the polystyrene rocks and the obviously-humans-in-costume that represented aliens, and loved Star Trek’s technology. They loved phasers (set to stun), tricorders and transporters. This was ever more true for the sequel series, The Next Generation, that featured holodecks and replicators.
In Star Trek, the Next Generation, the replicators satisfied material needs, so the series could concentrate on the character development of the main players. Humankind had apparently broken free of superstition (including, apparently, religion, which was remarkable for a show written principally for a US audience). Racism and nationalism had been superseded by an affinity with all life-forms. Conflicts, potential and actual, were resolved for the most part by peaceful diplomacy, though there was the occasional steel behind the apple pie - “Let’s speak to them in a language everybody understands. Arm photon torpedoes!”
The series pictured a better future that people yearned for, one in which people would no longer strive for material gain, but for honour, and one characterized by constant outward reaching to learn new things. The final frontier calls to mind Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 Frontier in American History thesis. In Star Trek it is the space frontier that shapes humanity’s values.
There have been big-budget motion pictures, spin-off series that still continue, and annual conventions at which trekkies pay homage to their heroes. Overwhelmingly, though, it is the optimism that lingers. The vision of a better, calmer, but still challenging future draws us today as it did then, inspiring in many people the idea that if we want badly enough to have it happen, we can make it happen, make it so.