Trek used to be a vision of an optimistic future, but there is a world of difference between the Amazon reboot and previous adventures of the Enterprise

It is the year 2364, and Jean-Luc Picard – the revered captain of the USS Enterprise – has just come face to face with three humans who have been frozen in time since the late 20th century. By this point in the story – the 1988 finale of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation – he has met Klingons, Romulans, a pool of black goo, but nothing is as alien as these greedy, selfish relics.

This is Star Trek, after all: the pop-culture behemoth built on the idealistic future envisioned in the 60s by its creator Gene Roddenberry. “A lot has changed in the past 300 years,” Picard tells them. “People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.”

Or have we? Revisiting the character 30 years later in Star Trek: Picard, Patrick Stewart’s grand return to the role at the age of 79, it seems the world has not progressed as much as we were led to believe. Set during a time in which the Federation – a union of planets with shared democratic values and interests – has turned isolationist in response to a terror attack, it has proved to be a divisively dark, gritty and morally bleak take on the Star Trek universe. Episode five opens with a beloved character screaming as his eye is ripped out of his skull. In another scene, a Starfleet admiral tells Picard – the great, heroic captain Picard, a man whose voice is built like a beautiful cathedral – to “shut the fuck up”.

The reaction, understandably, has been mixed. Some fans welcome Star Trek being brought up to date with the look and feel of contemporary television. Others maintain that such pessimism is at odds with what makes Star Trek Star Trek. The showrunner Michael Chabon, responding to questions via his Instagram page, defended Picard against the latter claim by saying that “shadow defines light”, that “if nothing can rock the Federation’s perfection, then it’s just a magical land”. It is a sentiment that has been echoed in the past by Alex Kurtzman, the showrunner of the other ongoing series set in the same universe, Star Trek: Discovery. He justified its equally violent, profane and dark sensibility by maintaining that modern Star Trek is simply a reflection of its time.

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We live in an age defined by the post-truth possibilities of social media, the uncertain future of automation, rising inequality, increased rightwing populism, the spectre of climate change and, of course, the fact that we are living through a pandemic with the potential to be the most significant and traumatic period of our history since the second world war. Picard certainly reflects many of these concerns. It is little wonder that some of the most popular science-fiction TV of the last 20 years – from the technophobia of Black Mirror to the post-9/11 anxieties of Battlestar Galactica – is not exactly enthused about the future.

Yet the idea that the grittiness of shows such as Picard makes it mature and relevant, while the ethos of yesteryear Star Trek is now naive or too old-fashioned to survive, feels misjudged. The hope, optimism and sincerity of the original 60s series was in itself a radical act: a way of portraying the future as it should be (a multiracial cast in a time of civil rights struggle; peace and cooperation in a time of nuclear terror), rather than merely wallowing in things as they were.

In the 90s, the darker spin-off show Deep Space Nine pre-empted Picard’s themes by 27 years, asking what happens when the principles of the Federation are compromised by war. The difference was that Deep Space Nine, much like the best of Star Trek, managed to balance its meatier themes of PTSD, faith and wartime atrocities with episodes where everyone got dressed up to visit a holographic version of 60s Las Vegas.

It is this, more than anything else, that is fundamentally lacking from modern Star Trek: a sense of tonal texture, a spirit of curiosity about different worlds and cultures, and the crackling chemistry of a warm and interesting crew. Instead, as is the case with Picard, its new characters have felt like broadly drawn “badasses” at best and, at worst, downright cold and unlikable. The prime example being Michelle Hurd’s new addition Raffi: the wise-cracking ex-Starfleet officer who insists on calling Picard “JL” (instead of Jean-Luc), and can often be seen vaping.

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The limited length of the series, which – like so much streaming TV – plays out almost as one 10-hour story, is also a factor. The benefit of 20-odd-episode seasons in which a crew of characters is faced with a different problem every week lies not only in the soap opera-style comfort of coming to think of a crew as family, but also in the potential to experiment with a variety of different stories and themes. The focus of Picard and Discovery tends to be so narrow that the universe ends up feeling smaller, less alive and less interesting.

And yet the appetite of modern audiences for that bygone era of Star Trek storytelling still exists. Just take the popularity of one of the strangest things on TV: The Orville. Originally trailed as Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy-esque parody of Star Trek-style sci-fi, it has instead revealed itself as a trojan horse for his at-times entirely sincere Star Trek: The Next Generation fan-fiction, featuring MacFarlane cosplaying as the dashing captain of his very own Enterprise. Its aesthetics are similar, its stories are similar, it is clearly based around Roddenberry’s ethos of exploration and optimism. There are even episodes written and directed by 90s Star Trek writers and directors.

As we all cower in our homes for fear of a threat that we cannot see, a dose of optimism about the future would be more appreciated than ever. But, sadly, all we are left with is a choice between Star Trek that doesn’t really feel like Star Trek at all, or a dodgy covers band playing the greatest hits. What a fate for a once-great franchise.