Music in Star Trek From Alexander Courage’s “bright galactic beguine” in The Original Series to Jeff Russo’s churning, Game of Thrones-style theme for Discovery, the music of Star Trek has always embodied the spirit of its time, as much as it looks to the future. Rick Berman famously sacked composer Ron Jones from The Next Generation because he fel…

Half a Decade of Primitive Culture Star Trek’s original five-year mission was brought to a premature end in 1969. But over the ensuing half-century and more, the franchise has continued boldly going to new frontiers. By the 1980s, when a second generation of fans came to seek out fresh adventures, the voyage had become a continuing mission … with n…

Cardassian war crimes and The Man in the Glass Booth For many fans of Deep Space Nine, the penultimate installment of Season 1, “Duet,” is also the show’s first classic episode. A bleak exploration of guilt, responsibility, and forgiveness in the aftermath of war, it’s a story that could scarcely have been told on any other Star Trek series. One of…

Autistic representation in Star Trek “Perhaps you’re just different,” Tam Elbrun tells Data in the Next Generation episode “Tin Man.” “Not a sin, you know, though you may have heard otherwise.” Both characters—the emotionally sensitive Betazoid and the supposedly emotionless android—have been seen by fans as allegories of a particular kind of diffe…

Star Trek’s Double Troubles Don’t they say you die if you meet yourself? Our intrepid Starfleet officers had better hope the answer is no, since encounters with doubles, doppelgängers, and duplicates appear to be just part of the job. From the two Kirks in “The Enemy Within” to Lower Decks’s twinned Boimlers, Star Trek has offered up a host of alt …

Trans representation in Star Trek. In 2022, trans characters in Star Trek have become part of the fabric of humanity’s shared future in space. In addition to Adira and Gray Tal in Discovery, we’ve been treated to the villainess Captain Angel in Strange New Worlds and even an explicitly non-binary character, the Medusan Zero, in Prodigy. But a few d…

The Alien franchise and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. In space, no one can hear you scream. But for unlucky Starfleet landing parties, meeting a nightmarish alien menace can prove as traumatic as deadly. For La'an Noonien-Singh, who carries the burden of having survived captivity in a Gorn breeding colony during childhood, another encounter with t…

How Star Trek’s leaders reflect our own. Young, charismatic, and a bit of a ladies’ man, Captain James T. Kirk was cast in the mould of President John F. Kennedy, the beloved US leader who had been killed just three years before Star Trek debuted. But over the course of more than half a century, Star Trek’s captains have often echoed the great poli…

Star Trek’s backdoor pilots. The year is 1968. As Star Trek goes off the air for good, a new show—Assignment: Earth—debuts from some of the same creative team. For dedicated Trekkies, the premise is already familiar and the two leads, Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln, have a head start garnering fans of their own. That, at least, is what might have b…

… it wasn’t the Vulcans who made first contact? April 5, 2063. In Star Trek’s imagined history, it was on this date that humanity made first contact with an alien race. The event led to societal transformation on a global scale and ushered in a bright future. But what if it wasn’t the Vulcans who happened to be passing by that day? What if first co…

Captain Picard and Indiana Jones. Wise, measured, and distinctly unromantic, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was conceived from the start as very different from his predecessor, James T. Kirk. But for Patrick Stewart, the lack of physical drama felt creatively unsatisfying. In October 1988, he wrote a letter to Gene Roddenberry outlining his desire for Pic…

Lisa Klink on Writing for Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Starting with a short-term position as a writing intern on Deep Space Nine, Lisa Klink rose rapidly through the Star Trek ranks, penning more than a dozen episodes over the course of just three years. In episodes such as “Resistance” and “Sacred Ground,” she proved her skill at handling charact…

How Star Trek tackled the Vietnam War. Every Star Trek series has engaged with the issues of the time, and perhaps none more so than *The Original Series*. Episodes touching on the hippy counterculture and NASA's bold Apollo program grounded the show as much in the 1960s as the 2260s. But perhaps no contemporary subject loomed over TOS more so than…

Jack Bauer and Jonathan Archer. Premiering just after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Enterprise took another two seasons to fully engage with the radically changed real world in its storytelling. When the show did reveal its own 9/11 story in the third season, it followed in the wake of another intensely serial…

Naren Shankar on a life in science fiction. While Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga took the Star Trek: Next Generation cast to the big screen—not to mention reinventing classic space shows Battlestar Galactica and Cosmos—it was another young writer from the TNG stable, Naren Shankar, who would contribute to the most science-fiction TV in his post-…

Live from Destination Star Trek London 2021. After the cancellation of last year’s Destination Star Trek (DST) in London, anticipation for 2021 event, billed as Europe’s largest Trek convention, was greater than ever. A slew of last-minute guest dropouts—combined with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—didn’t stop thousands of Trekkies from descendin…

James Bond and Julian Bashir. Not many film franchises can boast 25 installments over the course of more than half a century, so for sheer longevity the James Bond cinematic franchise certainly gives Star Trek a run for its money. In some ways, the old-fashioned brutal masculine ethos of Bond feels very much out of place in the utopian Trek future,…

Tony Black’s new book: *Star Trek, History and Us* From 1960s hippies in “The Way to Eden” to the War on Terror in Enterprise Season 3, Star Trek has always reflected the cultural moment from which it springs. In his new book, Star Trek, History and Us, Tony Black brings the Primitive Culture approach to print, taking a long view of the past half-c…

Robert Duncan McNeill on Star Trek's Directors' School. To Star Trek fans, he is Tom Paris, the cocksure pilot of the USS Voyager. But in Hollywood, Robert Duncan McNeill is better known as a different kind of helmsman. From his first day of filming on the Voyager pilot "Caretaker," McNeill declared his intention to take a shot at the director's ch…

Twenty Thousand Leagues across the Delta Quadrant. Throughout Star Trek: Voyager’s seven seasons, Tom Paris repeatedly proved his credentials as a mid-20th-century history buff, with his replicated TV set, black-and-white B-movie holonovels, and even his own 3D cinema. But in the fifth-season episode “Thirty Days,” he reveals a boyhood fascination …

How Nicholas Meyer’s other time-travel caper inspired The Voyage Home When Nicholas Meyer was called in to write a new script for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, just weeks before pre-production was due to begin, he must have been struck with a bad case of déjà vu. Leonard Nimoy explained that the story outline he would be working from involved the …

The Scopes Monkey Trial, Inherit the Wind, and DS9’s “In the Hands of the Prophets.” The trial of US high school teacher John Scopes in 1925 was perhaps the definitive 20th-century showdown between religion and science. Indicted for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution in defiance of creationist state law, Scopes turned the small town of Dayton, T…

Suspiria and “Cold Fire” Despite being teased in the series premiere, it took Star Trek: Voyager well over a year to actually introduce its female caretaker, a being with the power to send the ship home on a whim. And when the entity did appear, in the second-season episode “Cold Fire,” she turned out to have a surprising and distinctly sinister na…

Episode titles since 2009. Concluding our look at Star Trek’s 800-plus episode titles to date, in this episode of Primitive Culture host Duncan Barrett is joined by Tony Black to consider naming strategies for the Kelvin films, Short Treks, Discovery, Picard, and Lower Decks. What exactly lies “beyond” the final frontier? Can magic really make the …

The original reset button. It’s one of the oldest of literary tropes: a sudden, last-minute reveal that an apparent fictional reality is actually doubly invented. From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on, writers have thrilled in pulling the rug out from under readers and characters alike, allowing carefully constructed scenarios to collapse like a…

Episode titles in Voyager and Enterprise. Does hubris always lead to nemesis? What can you see in a mirror, darkly? And how do you know when you’ve finally reached the endgame? In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett is joined by Tony Black to continue our look at Star Trek episode titles as we wrap up Voyager, Enterprise, and the…

Milestone Episodes of Star Trek. For most TV shows, making it to the one-hundredth episode is a significant achievement. In the Star Trek franchise, only the three 1990s spinoffs—The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager were able to reach this milestone. But collectively, more than half a century since Gene Roddenberry’s original show debu…

A Marxist analysis of “Bar Association,” with Will Nguyen. From lowly dogsbody to Grand Nagus of the Ferengi Alliance, Quark’s brother Rom went on quite a journey during Deep Space Nine’s seven seasons. Perhaps the most pivotal moment for the character came in the episode “Bar Association,” in which Rom outrages Ferengi custom by setting up a union…

Episode titles up to “What You Leave Behind” When is a scorpion not just a scorpion? What wrongs are darker than death or night? And what happens when you cross a dark frontier to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? In this episode of Primitive Culture, we continue our trek through Star Trek’s episode titles as host Duncan Barrett is joined…

Dan Davidson on how “Captive Pursuit” saved his life. For many fans, Star Trek has been a force for good in their lives—but few can say with certainty that they wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for their favorite show. In this episode of Primitive Culture, a supplement to the previous episode’s look at suicide in Star Trek, host Duncan Barrett sh…

For Starfleet officers, saving lives is perhaps the most important part of the job, even more so than exploring the galaxy and making contact with new civilizations. So when a character such as Quinn, the Q in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Death Wish,” chooses to end their own life, it invariably comes as a shock—just as, in our own lives, the de…

Episode titles from “The Search” to *Star Trek: First Contact*. As we continue our voyage through Star Trek’s episode titles, host Duncan Barrett is joined in this episode of Primitive Culture by Lee Hutchison for a look at some more episode titles from Deep Space Nine and Voyager. What exactly is the way of a warrior? How hard is it to fit through…

McCarthy, The Crucible, and “The Drumhead” In 1953, Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible used the Salem witch trials of 1692–93 as an allegory for the contemporary persecution of alleged communists by US Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Four decades later, the Star Trek: Next Generation episode “The Drumhead” drew on b…

Episode titles from “Emissary” to “All Good Things … “ As we continue our voyage through Star Trek’s episode titles, host Duncan Barrett is joined in this episode of Primitive Culture by Lee Hutchison for a look at the tail end of The Next Generation and the early years of Deep Space Nine. What happens when wishes become horses? To whose own self m…

Frankenstein and the Star Trek universe. Originally published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s groundbreaking gothic novel Frankenstein has been a major influence on many works of dystopian science fiction—so much so that many critics argue she invented the genre. Star Trek itself has borrowed from the literary masterpiece—as well as it’s most famous film a…

Episode titles in The Animated Series and The Next Generation. As we continue our look at Star Trek episode titles, host Duncan Barrett is joined in this episode of Primitive Culture by Tony Black for a look at the naming strategies of The Animated Series and The Next Generation. Did Michael Piller really put an end to the era of the poetic, evocat…

Talking Horror with Brannon Braga. In space, no one can hear you scream. And while the well-lit corridors of a Federation starship may seem worlds away from the grimy darkness of the Nostromo, even Starfleet’s best and brightest are sometimes caught in the grip of a full on horrorfest. Perhaps no one in Star Trek’s history has penned more chilling …

Episode Titles in The Original Series. “What’s in a name?” Juliet demands of Romeo. “That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.” In 1968, the Star Trek episode “By Any Other Name” took more than just its title from Shakespeare—it used Juliet’s words as a jumping-off point to consider what makes us human. But it was also char…

Trekonomics, with Manu Saadia. “The economics of the future are somewhat different,” Captain Jean-Luc Picard tells Lily Sloane in Star Trek: First Contact. “You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.” But the “primitive” 21st-century human is instinctively appalled: “No money? You mean you don’t get paid?” To some viewers, the post-scarcity …

DS9’s “Meridian” and the 1954 Hollywood musical that inspired it. Perhaps more so than any other Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine leaned heavily for inspiration on the world of 20th-century film. But not every futuristic retooling of a classic movie could reach the heights of “Badda-Bing Badda-Bang,” which we discussed in our previous episode. Per…

Ocean’s 11 (1960) and “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang.” Long before George Clooney assembled his star-studded gang of high-rolling thieves, the original Danny Ocean—Frank Sinatra—successfully knocked off five casinos in a single night in the original 1960 Ocean’s 11. With help from Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and the rest of the Rat Pack, Sinatra brought…

Cold War Détente and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. When Nicholas Meyer returned to the Star Trek cinematic universe with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, he produced one of the franchise’s most flagrant—and successful—examples of “ripped from the headlines” storytelling, reimagining the collapse of the USSR in space. Gorbachev beca…

Voyager’s “Critical Care” and the current global pandemic. A healthcare system struggling with inadequate resources. Patients dying, untreated, as politicians and administrators grapple with a humanitarian crisis. In some ways, the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Critical Care” seems eerily prescient. Originally intended as classic Trek-style social co…

Picard Season 1, Part II. Ancient utopias? Lovecraftian monsters? A quixotic quest, where the windmills may be giants after all? The second half of Picard’s first season continues to draw on a rich well of inspiration. In this episode of Primitive Culture, host Duncan Barrett is once again joined by Tony Black to continue their discussion of the hi…

Picard Season 1, Part I. With a Pulitzer Prize-winning author at the helm, it’s perhaps no surprise that the first season of Star Trek: Picard should be one of the richest in Star Trek history, at least in terms of literary, cultural, and historical allusions. From Miguel de Cervantes’s classic novel Don Quixote to the Dunkirk evacuation of World W…

Nicholas Meyer interview: On writing Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes. To Star Trek fans, Nicholas Meyer is one of the most highly regarded writers to have played in Gene Roddenberry’s sandbox. As someone with only a passing familiarity with the original 1960s TV series, his outsider’s perspective was invaluable when it came to working on Star Trek II…

Nicholas Meyer interview: On writing Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes. To Star Trek fans, Nicholas Meyer is one of the most highly regarded writers to have played in Gene Roddenberry’s sandbox. As someone with only a passing familiarity with the original 1960s TV series, his outsider’s perspective was invaluable when it came to working on Star Trek II…

Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes. “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Sherlock Holmes’s famous maxim is one that any self-respecting Starfleet science officer could live by. So it should come as no surprise that Star Trek’s two most-celebrated rational minds—Spock and Data—should both draw comp…

The Legacy of The Original Series. Of all Star Trek’s live-action iterations, it was The Original Series that was cut short the soonest, managing just three seasons and 79 episodes before succumbing to the axe of cancelation. But as Star Trek was reborn time and again over the ensuing 50 years, those 79 episodes have remained a touchstone for the a…

The Eugenics Wars, with Greg Cox. For a high-tech futuristic utopia, the United Federation of Planets can seem surprisingly cautious when it comes to new technologies. Time and again, Star Trek has played out the science fiction staple of technology run amok. In some cases, the response we have seen has been a kind of retrenchment, a refusal to mak…