What Star Trek Means to Me: Sixty Years of Looking Forward

Miss Sami celebrating 60 years of Star Trek

I don’t remember the first episode of Star Trek ever watched. What I remember is being a kid, sitting there completely fascinated by it. I was definitely too young to understand what Star Trek was actually trying to say. I didn’t understand the politics, the philosophy, the morality, or the bigger ideas hiding underneath the stories.

Honestly, half the time I probably didn’t understand the story at all. But I understood that there was something incredible happening on that screen.

There were starships. Alien worlds. Transporters. Phasers. Holodecks. Computers that seemed impossibly advanced. The Enterprise could travel across the galaxy and encounter something completely new every week.

For a kid who had already fallen in love with Star Wars, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, science fiction, fantasy, Star Trek was another escape into another world, so many worlds. But it was a different kind of escape.

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Star Wars gave me adventure. Indiana Jones gave me exploration. Back to the Future gave me the impossible excitement of messing with time. Star Trek gave me the feeling that there was something bigger out there. Something grand. Something that actually meant something.

As I got older, I kept coming back to Star Trek. I would watch episodes after school. Sometimes I’d have it playing in the background while hanging out with friends. It was just something we did. And eventually, I started understanding it. Not all at once. Not even close.

That’s one of the things I love most about Star Trek. I can watch an episode I’ve seen a dozen times and still notice something I didn’t understand before. 

The story hasn’t changed…

I have.

And after 60 years, Star Trek has grown into such an enormous universe that there is almost inevitably something in it for everyone. There are stories about exploration, war, family, friendship, science, politics, morality, identity, loss, hope and simply trying to figure out what the hell we’re supposed to do next. 

That is why I feel the franchise has lasted. Star Trek changes because we change. The questions we ask today aren’t always the questions we asked 20, 40, or 60 years ago. The franchise keeps finding ways to reflect those questions back at us. And sometimes, it gets surprisingly close to reflecting our future, too.

When I was a kid, the technology on The Next Generation seemed impossibly futuristic. Today, some of those ideas don’t seem quite as impossible. Take the replicator. The idea of telling a machine what you want and having it create the physical object seemed like pure science fiction. Yet here we are, living in a world where 3D printers can take a digital design and turn it into something you can hold in your hand.

We’re obviously not ordering Earl Grey, hot, from the wall of our kitchen yet. But we’re getting closer to the underlying idea. That’s what makes science fiction so powerful. Sometimes it isn’t predicting the future. Sometimes it’s giving us permission to imagine it And maybe that applies to more than technology. If we can look at something like a replicator and say, “Maybe someday,” we can look at the ideals of Star Trek and say the same thing.

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Maybe humanity isn’t going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly become the Federation. Maybe we’ll never completely eliminate war, prejudice, greed or conflict.

But perhaps we can get a little better.

A little more curious.

A little more accepting.

A little more willing to explore what we don’t understand instead of fearing it.

That’s the part of Star Trek that means more to me now.

As a kid, I watched because I wanted to escape ordinary life and visit somewhere bigger. As an adult, I watch because I can see pieces of our own world reflected in that future. And somehow, it still gives me that same feeling.

Wonder.

Maybe that’s what 60 years of Star Trek really means to me. It isn’t just that the franchise has survived for six decades. It’s that I’ve been able to grow up alongside it, even though most of the characters and stories existed before I understood what they meant.

The kid who saw another world every week eventually started seeing reflections of our own. The person who once watched Star Trek simply to escape reality now finds something strangely comforting about returning to it.

Everyone has those shows. For some people, it’s The Office. For others, Friends, Jersey Shore, or whatever show they can put on and immediately feel at home. For me, it’s Star Trek. I can return to it whenever I need to. And maybe that’s because Star Trek has never really been about escaping reality forever. It’s about imagining what reality could become.

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For 60 years, it has asked us to look beyond the world immediately in front of us and imagine something greater on the other side. Sometimes that imagination becomes technology. Sometimes it becomes a new story. Sometimes it simply becomes a better way of looking at another person. And maybe that’s why I’m still watching. The kid who didn’t understand Star Trek understood one thing perfectly:

There was something bigger out there.

Sixty years later, I still believe that. I just understand a little better what that something is.

Live Long and Prosper! 

Hit us up in the comments below and/or on FLZ social media and let us know your favorite Star Trek memories!

Until next time, Thanks for reading.