MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (9)

By: Alex Brook Lynn
January 29, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION | 1987–1994

For many, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a soft introduction to what a socialist utopia would look like — right on primetime Saturday night TV in Ronald Reagan’s America.

Three months after Reagan uttered the words “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall,” the show — about a starship from Earth traveling through unexplored space in the 24th century — premiered with a pilot characterizing the 21st century as a source of deep shame for Captain Picard and his crew. The show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, established as canon that the close of the 20th century was not the end of history, but instead the beginning of a century so dark and malicious that a shattered planet would finally find peace under a world government. The Next Generation (TNG) is set in a post-scarcity society in which currency and hunger no longer troubles humankind, now free to explore the universe out of scientific curiosity, carry out diplomatic missions, and occasionally put on renditions of Shakespeare.

I started watching in 1992, when I was 10. Reruns from earlier seasons would play on Sundays, and every night after the 10 o’clock news. The voices on the starship Enterprise were a constant calm for me. (Roddenberry had given his writers a “no melodrama” mandate — no core character could have conflict with another.) Most TNG episodes had a deep philosophical life lesson, or unanswerable quagmire about truth and morality. Does the android Data have a right to personhood or is he Starfleet property? What does ethical non-monogamy look like between lifelong friends? How do you broker peace between two worlds when one of them exploits the other by introducing an opiate-like drug into their society?

Roddenberry had found huge success with the original Star Trek in the 1960s, but he hadn’t had much control over it. A WWII vet and a second-generation LAPD officer turned TV screenwriter, he’d wanted to illustrate a type of fairness and ethical responsibility in a society, even within a militaristically constructed peacekeeping force such as Starfleet. While on the LAPD force, he’d started an association committed to the idea that “professional ethics” could nd must coexist with the practical realities of police work. Perhaps the veteran-turned-cop couldn’t find what he was looking for in real life: people willing to put true justice and their fellow man above the intoxications of greed and power. But what he’d conceived as a cerebral series was dumbed-down into an adventure show with a headstrong Captain Kirk throwing punches and laying broads on every alien planet.

At 42, I can turn on any episode from The Next Generation and know that at some point, in the midst of the dulcet voices and perfect foley, a message of hope will present itself. One day this utopia will be not only possible but practical, and necessary for human survival. It sounds crazy to say that Star Trek: The Next Generation is too prophetic for comfort, but crazy or no, I’m buckling-in to ride out the next 50 years or so in what Roddenberry predicted would be humanity’s darkest hour. I’m sorry that I won’t see us break like a wave against the jagged rocks that deliver our species into a kinder future, but if I eat right I may be around for Earth’s contact with the Vulcans — in 2063.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (9)

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