Star Trek at 50, or, Star Trek beyond Star Trek

Star Trek Beyond (Lin US 2016) features (yet again) the apparent destruction of the USS Enterprise, this time at the hands of a swarm of tiny insect-like metallic drones ploughing through its hull. It is a familiar scene. The Enterprise is beaten within an inch of its life in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Meyer US 1982) – costing Spock (Leonard Nimoy) his life in the process – and is then destroyed for real in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Nimoy US 1984). A new Enterprise-B is practically totalled on its maiden voyage in Star Trek: Generations (Carson US 1994), a film that ends with The Next Generation’s (US 1987–94) beloved Enterprise-D crashing into a planet and being permanently scuttled (and in the meantime drops a bridge on Captain Kirk (William Shatner)). By that point we had already seen the explosive end of the Enterprise-C, too, in a famous episode (‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’ (19 Feb 1990)) whose time-travel mechanics innovated a way to kill off Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) a second time. The Enterprise-E manages to survive the TNG film franchise, but Data (Brent Spiner) does not. Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks) more or less dies at the end of Deep Space Nine (US 1993–9), a series that had already killed off series regular Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) while plunging the once-peaceful, once-utopian Federation into a cataclysmic, brutal war with the authoritarian Dominion. Voyager (US 1995–2001) killed off all of its principal characters multiple times in alternate timelines and other dimensions, especially Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) – and on at least two separate occasions (‘Deadlock’ (18 Mar 1996) and ‘Course: Oblivion’ (3 Mar 1999)) pseudoscientifically generated exact duplicates of the entire USS Voyager ship and crew specifically for the purpose of killing them all by the end of the episode. And the course of the prequel series Enterprise (US 2001–5) kills not just series regular Chief Engineer ‘Trip’ Tucker (Connor Trineer), but millions of citizens of 2153-era Florida to boot.

After Enterprise-the-series died (and with it the entire TNG-era production apparatus of Star Trek) the whole Prime Universe did – abandoned to the also-ran status of tie-in novels, comics and games, while the film property

‘My Young Friend…’ ‘It’s father’s day, and I have no real time to finish this, but I wanted all my Trekkie friends and family all around the world to have this. ANTON YELCHIN: 1989–2016’. mrscratch0753.tumblr.com 19 June 2016.

moved on to a ‘reboot’ timeline with younger versions of The Original Series (US 1966–9) actors. The new film universe begins by killing off the Romulus– Remus double planetary system before killing Kirk’s (Chris Pine) parents, Kirk himself (he got better), Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) (he did not), a huge portion of the population of 2259 San Francisco, and, perhaps most famously and most gratuitously, all but a tiny sliver of the entire Vulcan race. For long-time fans of the Star Trek franchise – who already had to accommodate themselves once to the death of their beloved twenty-fourth century with the end of VOY and the move to prequel series in ENT – the rebooting of the entire Trek universe into the Abramsverse felt like a death on multiple levels: not simply the now-inescapable loss of the original actors portraying those roles (most strongly tokened by the death of Leonard Nimoy early in Star Trek Beyond’s preproduction, and then echoed by the death of the actor playing the new Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) in a freak accident shortly before the film’s release),¹ not simply the obsolescing of the decades of characters and stories set during the original timeline, and not simply (let’s just say it) by what Star Trek turning 50 says about how old some of us seem to be getting, but also the death of the ethos of optimistic, utopian futurity that had driven creative works set in the Star Trek...