Future Imperfect w/ Ted McCoy

Dear friends, this is Future Imperfect, a newsletter about Star Trek and utopian thought. In this first issue I’ll introduce the project and what will come next.

 Star Trek is about the radical belief that the future can be better than the present. It is an alternative history of the future where humanity overcomes capitalism, imperialism, inequality, and poverty. It is set in a universe where characters live and die in the struggle to defend the ideals of a human utopia, sometimes unsuccessfully. And sometimes Star Trek is a science fiction show about space battles and aliens and sex and joy and humour.

 This is a newsletter about all of Star Trek, but particularly the hope for something better and the search for alternatives in our dreams about the future. It will explore Star Trek through a close analysis of the franchise itself and through the lens of the history of utopian thought. It will evaluate what Star Trek can tell us about both the present and the future, the ways that it can be used to critique and understand ourselves. My basic thesis is that Star Trek is part of a long utopian tradition, and understanding them together can enhance our understanding of both worlds, and of all our future worlds.

Future Imperfect will try to accomplish this by talking about both Star Trek and the utopian tradition and finding the places that they intersect. This will include utopians like Thomas More, Charles Fourier, William Morris, Marx and Engels, as well as the areas where utopian theory crosses into literature – including writers like Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Ursula Le Guin, and finally arriving at mid-20th century television science fiction with Gene Roddenberry. Star Trek was and is always the product of multiple imaginations and creative forces, but Roddenberry’s influence and creative input over the franchise is undeniable and fascinating from the perspective of utopian thought. Neither defamation or hagiography are necessary to understand Gene Roddenberry, and I hope to treat him with a critical eye while understanding and appreciating his unique contributions.

In early 2024 I taught a university class called “Star Trek, Law, and Society” in the Legal Studies program at the University of Calgary. On the first day of class I tried to explain to 150 students, most who had never seen the show before, why we were doing this and what we could hope to achieve through the study of Star Trek and utopia.

I told my students about two Star Trek experiences in my life. The first was November 4, 1991 when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered the episode “Unification.” I was home on this Friday night to see what was publicized as the return of Mr. Spock to television. This was a huge deal in the Star Trek world – the return of its most iconic character and the joining of two distinct shows, The Original Series and The Next Generation, bringing together the 1960s and the 1990s.  

In 1991 Leonard Nimoy was producing the sixth Star Trek film and his appearance on The Next Generation (paid at scale) was supposed to help promote the forthcoming movie. It was more significant for the sequel television series. While popular with fans, The Next Generation hadn’t achieved the cultural status of the original Star Trek. It could not yet compete with the adoration of Star Trek’s original cast, approaching their 25th anniversary in 1992. For Star Trek fans, the arrival of Spock, through the virtue of a Vulcan lifespan, on The Next Generation was an event. I was there for it, waiting in my bedroom to see him on a 13-inch TV.

Another Search for Spock

Despite its massive ratings success, “Unification” was not an all-time great episode of The Next Generation. In part this was because the story was stretched into a two-part episode and so the promised appearance by Nimoy didn’t happen until the final shot of the first episode. Instead of an episode staring Spock, “Unification” part 1 was a story about Spock, who had gone missing and was presumed to have defected from the Federation to the Romulan Empire. Captain Picard and Commander Data attempt to unravel the mystery of Spock’s disappearance. The payoff of seeing Spock is teased throughout the first part and heightened by a guest spot from Mark Lennard as Spock’s father, Sarek. This was an interesting and significant guest-spot and crossover to The Original Series, showing Sarek at the end of his life and in pain over his estrangement from his son. Captain Picard eventually bridges the gap between the two by mind-melding with both so that Spock can more fully understand his father.

Jerri Taylor’s script courageously deals with the death of Sarek as a way of raising the emotional stakes of the Spock plot. Bonded to Sarek through a mind-meld, Picard’s mission to find Spock assumes heightened personal importance so that he might share Sarek’s final thoughts with his son. Picard and Data travel undercover to Romulus where they search for Spock. Seemingly cornered and captured by enemy Romulans, Picard breaks his cover and pleads that he is on an urgent mission from the Federation to look for Ambassador Spock. “Indeed,” comes an unmistakable voice from the darkness, “you have found him, Captain Picard.” Spock emerges from the shadows, shot in a classic three-quarter profile with his eyebrow only slightly raised, and the episode ends “To Be Continued...”

That was it – Mr. Spock had returned. A small moment and an earthquake all at once. I can still feel the emotional impact of it, the pop-culture historical significance, the satisfying nostalgia, and the in-world meaning to the Star Trek universe. 

First, Spock represented for many fans what was enduring and lovable about Star Trek. On the 25th anniversary of the show his appearance on television was a salute to its endurance and ascendence to institutional status – so far from the fledgling science-fiction show that was canceled due to low ratings in 1969. Rebirth is an ongoing theme for the franchise. Star Trek came back from the dead several times and so did Spock. Second, within the Star Trek world

“Unification” closed the circle on a disconnect between the Original Series and The Next Generation. It was a unification of two different generations of fans. And most specifically, the episode helped deepen and expand on Spock’s story, begun in the 1960s and continued in the motion pictures throughout the 1980s. It brought Spock forward 75 years and continued his character arc. There were more Spock stories to tell, and the Star Trek universe seemed to get bigger.

Maybe that’s a lot to read into a guest-spot imagined first as good marketing for an upcoming film starring Leonard Nimoy. But there are many indications that everyone involved in the production of “Unification” felt the weight of expectation and history on their shoulders in bringing Spock back to television.

The plot of the “Unification” itself was a credit to the ideological underpinnings of Spock’s character and spoke to his relationship to some of the utopian themes of The Original Series. Captain Spock of Starfleet had become Ambassador Spock of the Federation and had devoted his life, at great personal risk, to the twin causes of pacifism and peace. He worked towards the unification of the warring Vulcans and Romulans in an effort to remake the future in a more peaceful direction. It was a logical and satisfying direction for Spock’s life to take and illustrated his commitment to a utopian ideal of pacifist politics. Nimoy wrote the same philosophy into the story for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a parable about the end of the Cold War and overcoming racial hatred. As one of the final appearances of Nimoy’s Spock in the Star Trek Universe, “Unification” was flawed but intensely satisfying.

 I tried to convey all of this to my students to introduce Star Trek and utopia and the idea of better futures and it was difficult to know if I succeeded. Most of my students had never seen the show before and so maybe the impact of this moment was lost. But I wanted them to take away that I cared about Spock, that I hoped they would too, and to give them reason to start thinking about Star Trek and the idea of utopia.

Deeper Into Star Trek

The second personal anecdote I talked about provided a more dystopian counterpart. During the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic l was completely locked down and homeschooling my five-year-old son. It was wonderful and awful at the same time - a gift to spend so much time with my family but one that had to be glimpsed through the drudgery and endless sameness of each day.

I started watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as an escape from the isolation and anxiety of 2020. Nearly every episode was new to me. When it premiered in 1993, I watched the new series with enormous anticipation and hope but it failed to resonate with me. I was in the tenth grade, getting busy with other interests and obsessions and Deep Space Nine became only occasional viewing for me. I don’t think that I was alone in this and Deep Space Nine remained popular with fans but not the cultural phenomenon of The Next Generation. However, many Star Trek fans rediscovered Deep Space Nine in the streaming era. Deep Space Nine’s popular resurgence also resulted from the more modern habit of binge-watching where the subtleties of character development, the political storytelling, and the complex world-building could be revealed. I binged it, aided by boredom of the pandemic and over the course of a year devoured the entire series. It became my escape from our own collapsing world into another universe. In the world of Deep Space Nine, the utopian ideals of Roddenberry’s Star Trek came under fire. It was a series that accepted that the centre cannot hold, and that another way to understand our own struggles was to imagine the future holding a mirror to them.    

Deep Space Nine gave me a better sense of why utopian thinking matters and what it can offer to the politics and history of the present. Star Trek is generally about imagining a better future, but Deep Space Nine deepened that imagining into a study of the political struggles that such a future would face. Deep Space Nine addressed a future in which fascism, imperialism, capitalism, racism, and all forms of inequality were a continued threat to humanity’s existence and showed characters embroiled in struggle to overcome dystopian threats. The series leaned into the challenge of grappling with a better future, never taking for granted the potential for humanity to veer into a darker timeline. Naturally, many fans contrasted the series unfavourably to The Next Generation for lacking the optimism and idealism of the flagship series in Star Trek. In exploring that future history of the Star Trek universe, the series shows us our struggles in the present and grapples with ways to understand them. This is the essential value of utopian thinking and the place where science fiction meets social theory to assume the same goals.

One important example is the way that Deep Space Nine imagined the future history of Earth and the United States in the events around the Bell Riots. The Bell Riots were supposed to take place in the year 2024 and portrayed in a two-part episode from 1995 called “Past Tense.” The episode showed a San Francisco scarred by deep class division and poverty. Captain Sisko and Dr. Bashir travel back in time to a “Sanctuary District,” really just an enclosed ghetto. Sisko says that by the 2020s every major city in the United States had areas like this, and the intention was to show an American experience that had veered badly into the dystopian. The story was firmly rooted in the politics of the 1990s. In 1994, Los Angeles was openly debating camps to remove the homeless from public view as the rise of neoliberalism and the decline of the welfare state in the United States accelerated poverty in most major cities. 30 years later, Sisko’s prediction about the United States has also come true in the way that every urban area in North America contains encampments of people who have been excluded from employment and housing by an uncaring economy. It’s one example of where the capitalist critique in Deep Space Nine has endured in its relevance because its politics were both prescient and fundamentally correct.

Star Trek Historian

Introducing myself a bit will also help illustrate the approach of this newsletter and the larger project it is connected to. In my academic career I am a historian of the 19th and 20th centuries with a focus on histories of punishment, the law, and working-class people. In one way it is a leap to move from writing about the 19th century to the fictional 23rd and 24th centuries. But on the utopian side of this project, the history of utopian thought stretches from the 1600s to the present, and I am particularly interested in the flourishing of utopian ideas between 1850 and 1950 that really gave birth to the modern era of science fiction generally and specifically to the ideas that underpin so much of the Star Trek universe.

 I also see a direct connection between the study of the past and how we can think about the future. For historians of labour and the working class, writing about the past is a way to explore moments of struggle and possibility in which men and women reached for alternatives to the seemingly inevitable trajectories of capitalism and imperialism. Historians study moments of defeat as carefully as victory because they show us that alternatives are possible and within our grasp, that we can strive to live differently and seek different forms of liberation. Utopian thinking often shares the same goals transposed to the future. We should think about Star Trek in the same way. Yes, it is fiction and capitalist and produced to earn profit. But on multiple levels Star Trek is made of ideas and hopes and it can serve the same purposes for us as thinking about the past or writing about the future from a utopian perspective. Star Trek is a better world imagined, and without imagining something first it can never be achieved. So Future Imperfect takes seriously those dreams about the future, even when they involve a Ferengi dressed up as a woman to win a business deal or a chance encounter with Abraham Lincoln traveling through outer space.

 Future Imperfect will draw primarily on four Star Trek series: The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. The feature films (colloquially Star Trek 1 through 6 and the four Next Generation films) will also factor in. I don’t have a terribly convincing reason why I don’t talk about Enterprise more often beyond the fact that I’m not as familiar with it. The rebooted “Kelvin-verse” films are interesting to me but diverge from the main trajectories of the primary television series’ and so I have less to say about these as well. If you are reading as a Star Trek completist I hope you will forgive the omissions, but any project has to make a few choices and the 900-plus total hours of Star Trek is an enormous volume of source material to discuss! I also love the modern iterations of Star Trek that came after the debut of Discovery in the streaming era, and sometimes these shows are important to the overall picture - the death and rebirth of Data being a very good example.

Star Trek together is a huge universe, and I hope you’ll follow along with this attempt to understand it. My hope with the newsletter is to assemble my thoughts and conclusions in a different way from how I have traditionally worked, to share the process on the way to writing a book. Thank you for reading! 🖖

Main Viewscreen

 In each newsletter I’ll include a few highlights from the Star Trek Universe that stood out to me as I watched for this project or just for fun.

 The Original Series, Season 1 Episode 5, The Naked Time.

 Many regard “The Naked Time” as a top ten episode of The Original Series.

The basic plot is that a contagion is brought back to the Enterprise that causes infected crew members to act drunkenly and revert to their most base emotional reactions. Unfortunately, an Irish crewman becomes drunkenly Irish and imperils the survival of the ship as the rest of the crew fights against the effects of the contagion to save the Enterprise.

 This setup produced two scenes that have endured in fans’ imaginations for fifty years. The first is Hikaru Sulu’s most famous Star Trek moment, his appearance with a fencing lance in a state of aggressive delirium. George Takei could not have poured any more into this short moment - it became the quintessential image of Sulu. It also gave Nichelle Nichols a great shot when Sulu grabs Uhura and says “I’ll save you fair lady,” she replies without missing a beat, “sorry, neither!” An incredible off-the-cuff joke and bit of character development for Uhura in just two words.

 The second scene is Spock experiencing an emotional breakdown after being affected by the contagion. To this point viewers knew only that Spock expressed no emotions, possibly that his alien species had no emotions at all. In I Am Spock, Nimoy talks about recognizing that Spock needed a scene exploring this and he insisted that writer John D.F. Black alter the script to include it. Shot at the end of the day in a single take, Nimoy performed a brilliant solo scene where Spock unveils the pain of his emotional suppression of his human emotions to meet the expectation of his Vulcan half and echoing the pain of his human mother. That Nimoy possessed such a clear view of what his character should and could be is part of the whole story about Spock and this episode laid some of the groundwork for what would come.

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In the next newsletter, I’ll talk more about utopia as a concept and a way of thinking about the future. If you’d like to reply I would love to hear what you think. LLAP.

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Do you like Star Trek comics? Check out the comic I make with Cam Hayden, Star Trek: M33