A Brief Guide to Star Trek

vision of the future, so
Star Trek
lost its way then.’
    Others viewed this controversial
Star Trek
rather differently. Original series story editor and writer D. C. Fontana felt that Roddenberry would appreciate
Deep Space Nine
’s war-based tales, due to his experience of World War II. ‘I think Gene would have liked it ultimately even with the darker themes’, she told TrekMovie.com in 2007. ‘Let’s face it, Gene lived and fought through World War II and those were pretty dark days so he has to know they occur. He was around when we were in the middle of the muck of Vietnam. He would like to think that humanity would be better than that, but we made the same mistakes over and over again and until we learned from history. I suspect we are going to keep on doing it.’
    Fan campaigner Bjo Trimble, who’d led the letter-writing campaign to save the original
Star Trek
, agreed with Fontana that Roddenberry would have appreciated the different approach. ‘I feel that Gene might have come to like
Deep Space Nine
, had he lived to see it’, Trimble told trekplace.com. ‘There might have been some changes. The only reason there were not full [space] battles in early
Trek
was lack of funds to pull it off, and lack of technology to show it. Otherwise, [Gene] would certainly have added it; he knew what audiences liked.’
    In 2002, writer–producer Ronald D. Moore (who would go on to revamp the 1970s show
Battlestar Galactica
) expressed the view that
Deep Space Nine
had taken the
Star Trek
concept as far as it could go without breaking it. Interviewed for the documentary
Ending an Era
on the season seven
Deep Space Nine
DVD set, he noted: ‘You have
The Original Series
, which is a landmark – it changes everything about the way science fiction is presented on television, at least space-based science fiction. Then you have [
The
]
Next Generation
that, for all of its legitimate achievements, is still a riff on the original. It’s still another starship and another captain . . . Here comes
Deep Space
[
Nine
] and it says “OK, you think you know what
Star Trek
is? Let’s put it on a space station, and let’s make it darker. Let’s make it a continuing story, and let’s continually challenge your assumptions about what this American icon means.” I think it was the ultimate achievement for the franchise. Personally, I think it’s the best of all of them . . . an amazing piece of work.’

    One specific area that marked
Deep Space Nine
out from all the other television versions of
Star Trek
was its attempted exploration of sexuality within Gene Roddenberry’s universe. While
The Original Series
had been a pioneer in depicting a mixed-race crew almost without comment (and it boasted that Kirk–Uhura kiss), the various iterations of the franchise had been less successful in dealing with sexuality. The original series had Kirk as the intergalactic ladies’ man and occasionally Spock would melt a woman’s heart, but it was a very traditional, almost macho heterosexuality – very much in the image of Roddenberry, whose attitudes to women and sex seemed more suited to the 1950s than the 1960s.
    When the show branched out into its various TV spin-offs, there was a chance to filter the sexuality of these characters from the future through the prism of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, while keeping within the bounds of what was permissible on American television.
Deep Space Nine
was perhaps the most successful of the
Star Trek
series in representing the diversity of human (and alien) sexuality.
    One of the notable achievements of early
Star Trek
fandom was the creation of a genre that came to be known as ‘slash fiction’. The name came from the ‘slash’ between the pairing of Kirk/Spock. Many fans took it upon themselves to read more into the Kirk/Spock relationship than had ever been hinted at on screen. In the early days of fanzines, some were dedicated to amateur fan stories that explored various facets of this non-canonical relationship. This was never recognised on screen, and in general
Star Trek
has been heavily criticised for its relative failure – at a time when the television landscape was becoming ever more diverse – to depict lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) characters or to craft stories dealing with the issues of LGBT rights – a hot topic in real-world society, especially in the 1990s when
Deep Space Nine
was on air. Given that
Star Trek
had always been a show that reflected