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In the interim between the cancellation of Star Trek in 1969 and its resurrection as a television series with Star Trek: The Next Generation, creator and idolized leader Gene Roddenberry got high on his own supply of mythmaking and adoration.

After Trek vanished from the active airwaves, becoming the fare of syndication with daily reruns of episodes on local stations, the idealized version of the series and its message took hold in the growing and devoted fan base. The idea that Trek showed a future free of the human failings that so troubled our society then and continue to today, particularly bigotry, instead accepting everyone and celebrating their differences. People had been made better over the centuries, despite Kirk having to admonish officers to leave their bigotry in their quarters because there’s no room for it on the bridge, and McCoy’s continual treatment of Spock and his unending comments about the first officer’s heritage would earn him a perpetual hall pass to H.R. in any current corporation. When Roddenberry, after being booted from the film franchise, got the chance to make a TV series again, it was one that reflected what people praised about Trek while ignoring how the original series had actually been written. Every character would love and accept every other character, making drama among the crew something very difficult to write. This newfound “we love everyone” ethos was particularly strong in the empathic half-Betazoid Deanna Troi.

Paramont/CBS Home Video

Troi (Marina Sirtis) acted as the ship’s counselor and adviser, using her racial abilities to know the hidden emotional states of her patients and the people that the ship encountered on its adventures. She was presented as a warm character, accepting and understanding of everyone with a kind heart and word for the people around her and deeply troubled by their pains.

I find the construction quite improbable.

The truth about people is that we all wear masks nearly all the time. People rarely reveal just how much their inner thoughts, emotions, and drives are not reflected in their surface expressions and actions. Now, this would make someone like Troi a very useful agent in ferreting out the truth of a matter, a useful writing and plot device, but think about it from her point of view. She knows just how often everyone around her tells their little “white” lies, just how often men fake interest in a woman’s conversation when their minds are driven by more base desires, just how often people hold each other in contempt while presenting smiles and politeness. I can think of no better recipe for creating a hardened cynic, someone who knows that people are far nastier and crueler than they reveal. How much we are all just animals restrained by social conventions.

And that is a much more interesting character than a Pollyannaish woman wailing about joy and pain.

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Fans watching this week’s episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, where pilot Erica Ortegas is

Credit: Paramount Pictures

marooned on a planetoid with an enemy of the Federation, can be forgiven if they think that the plot was lifted from the 1985 film Enemy Mine. Of course, fans with a more extensive knowledge of televised SF programming might think that film lifted its plot from the final episode of Galactica 80: The Return of Starbuck. This ignores that the 85 film was an adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s 1979 Hugo winning novella of the same name.

If we go beyond the science-fiction genre, we get to what might be the Ur-text of the modern incarnation of this plot, the 1968 feature film, Hell in the Pacific.

Warriors from opposing sides stranded and forced to work together to survive, eventually overcoming their prejudices towards each other, is a powerful metaphor for life in general and it is not surprising that it feels like it has been adapted and readapted as many times as the plot of The Seven Samurai.

Episode 9 of this season, Terrarium, sees Erica Ortegas (Melissa Navia), after taking a shuttle craft into a gravitational anomaly, stranded on the moon of a gas giant only to discover that a Gorn pilot has also crashed here. Ortegas, a survivor of a brutal Gorn assault, has to grow beyond her personal terrors and emotional trauma to join forces with the alien pilot if they are both to survive until Enterprise can locate and rescue them.

Terrarium echoes the original series episode The Galileo Seven as the ship, tasked with delivering vaccines to a plague-stricken colony, faces a ticking clock that will force Pike to abandon the search for their missing officer. It is a nice bit of lore in the episode that the Enterprise is scheduled to rendezvous with the starship Constellation and its captain, Decker. Ortegas’ solution to alerting her crewmates as to the location of her crash also feels borrowed from that original series episode.

While the elements copied over from the original series are detracting from this episode, I still very much enjoyed it. Unlike Hell in the Pacific, The Return of Starbuck, or Enemy Mine, Ortegas’ history and emotional trauma makes this a more personal story and therefore one of greater growth than the other explorations of this concept. That does not diminish the other interpretations; each has their own charm and message about seeing past the surface of another and are worthy of enjoyment, even the Galactica 80 episode.

Credit: Paramount Pictures

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Let me say that in general, and with the exception of a single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Hollow Pursuits,) I detest stories centered on the damned holodeck. In order to make the story have any stakes at all and to avoid the dreaded trope of “it was all a dream,” something has to go disastrously wrong so that the ship is in terrible danger, and the safety features have to fail so disastrously that the troublesome piece of equipment cannot simply be turned off.

Putting a holodeck episode into Strange New Worlds is particularly offensive. The damned thing was new when it would be installed in the Galaxy-class cruisers some 80 years later—so new that Data had to instruct Riker on what the room actually was.

Wait, someone might be screaming: weren’t you the person for whom canon is more like a guideline than a rule? Yes, I said I don’t mind breaking canon to create a good story, but that is a very high bar for a holodeck-centered tale to clear.

So, we have one of my favorite characters, La’an, thrown into a fictionalized setting and plot while the rest of the crew faces death due to the poor engineering of the device. The episode was meant to give us a deeper look into the Spock/La’an relationship, but with a story—the murder mystery—that has no stakes and a B-plot that is predetermined to resolve happily (no way the Enterprise is getting crushed or cooked by a neutron star), the episode is left with absolutely no tension or drama.

Add to that the fact that the story La’an is thrown into takes serious time to puff up the chests of Star Trek writers by proclaiming how special the entire enterprise was for ’60s television, and you have a self-important, narcissistic piece of writing that has all the emotional depth of a dry riverbed.

Don’t get me wrong—Star Trek, in the ’60s particularly, was very important and has had a profound cultural impact, but to take time out of your own script to crow about your own important influence is just downright tacky. It is the job of others to analyze the effect and influence of a piece of art, not the creative artists themselves.

The most enjoyable aspects of episode three of season three were watching Anson Mount have tremendous fun burying himself in yet another role and hearing Jess Bush get to deliver some lines in her native accent. Aside from that, watching the episode was a chore.

Paramount Studios/CBS Home Video

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I become Medicare-aged next year, and so to me Star Trek always means the original series and the original crew. Amid the adding and subtracting of cast and the morphing future history of the United Federation of Planets, one of the constants was the friendly combative relationship between Spock, the reportedly unemotional half-Vulcan, and the ship’s chief admitted sensualist and emotional heart of the crew, Medical Officer Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy. McCoy continually needled Spock over his unemotional nature, his strangely colored green blood, and his distinctive appearance as the alien among humans. Spock usually responded in kind with a simply delivered but devastating remark that any observer could judge as victory in their mutual burn contests. Underneath the jibes and jabs was a foundation of deep respect, loyalty, and friendship, displayed most clearly in “Amok Time” when Spock invited McCoy, along with Kirk, to the very private Vulcan wedding ceremony.

What has fascinated me of late is watching younger people, usually those born in the early 90s, discover and react to the original series episodes and how they interpret Bones’ behavior toward Spock. They see it as inappropriate and borderline racist.

They aren’t entirely wrong.

The fact that Vulcans are fictional gives us some distance from the nature of Bones’ ribbing and cutting remarks, but the truth is that if he said similar things about real people and real races, we would be horrified. Denigrating comments about someone’s appearance or culture are something that is far less acceptable today than sixty years ago.

Growing up with these characters, we understood that there was and is a deep respect and love between them. We knowthat McCoy or Spock would lay down their lives to save the other, and that this surface tension is mere “play fighting.” It is not unlike comments my friends and I have made to each other over the years, but when it slides into observations based on biology, that crosses the line.

It gives me hope that the past is seen this way by the generations replacing us.