Why Does the Star Trek Franchise Keep Returning to Its Origins?
magining a world like that is hard, but The Next Generation tried and often succeeded. Everyone on the Enterprise wants to be there. There’s little angsting about rank or boring jobs, and therefore conflicts between crew members were minimal (with a few notable exceptions). Instead, the world of plenty in the Federation stands in stark contrast to many of the planets our crew visits. The Prime Directive comes to the fore as a kind of anti-colonialist ideal. In fact, colonialism and post-colonialism are major preoccupations of Deep Space Nine and Voyager in the same way that the Cold War is a focus of the original series and movies. One of Captain Sisko’s main jobs is figuring out how to deal with Bajor, left in ruins by the imperialist Cardassians. And Voyager is about how a crew of anti-imperialist Maquis, freedom fighters against the Cardassians, must learn to get along with Federation lackeys on a ship far away from all their homes.
Essentially, the world of 24th century Trek is one where the Federation’s biggest political problem is trying to figure out how to partner with developing worlds but not colonize them. No wonder the scariest bad guys are the Borg, a group whose entire existence is defined by the ultimate colonial imperative: “You will be assimilated.”
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