‘Star Trek’ endures for the next generation, and the next, and the next
By SAM CORBIN
At 76, Fran Friedrich knows the words to every episode of the original “Star Trek.” In fact, she’s pretty sure she could recite them by heart if she had to. “I say the lines with them, ’cause I’ve seen them a zillion times,” Friedrich said, referring to the nightly reruns of the original series on cable, which she watches in addition to streaming the other “Star Trek” series during the day. “I can’t live without it. It’s just part of my life.”
That’s how Friedrich’s son, Robert, remembers it, too. A “Star Trek” fan “by birth,” he described a childhood spent listening to his mother and his aunt quote different phrases from the show back and forth at each other, or speak them in unison. “Sometimes I’d catch it, and sometimes I didn’t,” Robert Friedrich said. “And if I didn’t catch it, I knew it was from ‘Star Trek.’ It was always from ‘Star Trek.’”
As of 2026, the 60-year-old science fiction franchise boasts a fandom of carbon units — sorry, humans — that spans at least three generations. What began, in 1966, as a five-year space mission on the USS Enterprise to “boldly go where no man has gone before” now represents an anthology of space travel across more than 25 series and films in parts of two centuries. Where once it was James T. Kirk or bust, it’s not unusual to find fans who prefer other captains, like Picard, Janeway or Sisko. There are so many series to keep track of that fans often communicate using country code-like abbreviations for each installment: TOS (the original series), TNG (“The Next Generation”), DS9 (“Deep Space Nine”), ENT (“Enterprise”) and so on.
Outside the Trekiverse, disparities in generational slang, politics and social mores are practically a foregone conclusion. But “Star Trek” functions as connective tissue between fans past and present. Some of that tissue is just shared references: There will always be captain’s logs, timelines by stardate, warp factors one through 10, phasers and photon torpedoes and, every now and then, a doctor who insists, “I’m a doctor, not a ____!” The Vulcan salute has become a general symbol of geek-recognize-geek, but real Trekkies (or Trekkers, as some prefer) know that “Live long and prosper” is only half the message; the recipient is meant to say “Peace and long life” in response.
But the series’s staying power, and the ease with which each generation finds its way into them, is an indication that fans of all ages share not only language, but values, in common.
Seeing his mother so comfortably “geeking out over stuff” also gave him license to chase a geekdom of his own: comic books. Now, at 50, he delights in being able to normalize geekdom for his 10-year-old daughter. “Kids are going to always look over with interest, you know?” he said. “‘Hey, what’s my mom doing? What’s my dad doing?’ And so the seed gets planted yet again.”
In some families, the planting of that seed isn’t so subtle. Kirk James Damato, a comedy writer based in Los Angeles, was named after the captain of the USS Enterprise, with Captain Kirk’s first and last names reversed in order to make the association especially clear. “My parents very much valued the relationship between Kirk/Spock/McCoy,” Damato wrote in a message. In a sense, he noted, he got off easy: “They wanted to name my older brother Spock, but fortunately rethought that decision.”
In a feat of nominative determinism, Damato fell in love with “Star Trek,” attending fan conventions and developing his own relationship to the show. It occurred to him that, even though his parents had never explicitly discussed the show’s progressive themes with him or his brother, he now sees how those values were woven into his upbringing. “The idea of, like, Spock being of mixed race never really occurred to me as a kid,” he said, noting that his parents certainly hadn’t pointed it out. (Damato is Filipino American.) But looking back, “the themes of being mixed, and with other characters who were of two worlds, definitely had an impact on me, even if I wasn’t consciously aware of it.”
By dint of its basic humanist principles, “Star Trek” generally leans left of center on political issues. It imagines a future without a scarcity mindset, where respect for others’ cultures and societies is implied in every interaction — essentially, a future in which everyone lives long and prospers. A friend and longtime fan I spoke to described the show as “the most hopeful futurism we have.”
In theory, the desire for a future utopia should be easy to agree on. But Jorge Oyola, a 38-year-old webcast producer based in New York, had a falling out with his older brother over differing visions of what that utopia should look like. Oyola’s brother, now 50, used to love “Star Trek” but has, over the past decade, come to view it as a kind of heavy-handed agitprop. When the recent “Discovery” series introduced a female first officer who has a conventionally masculine name (Michael), as well as a nonbinary character who uses they/them pronouns, Oyola’s brother reacted with exasperation. “You know, it’s, ‘How dare you come out with pronouns in my space show!’” Oyola said. It struck him as especially odd, he added, because “You’re watching ‘Star Trek,’ like, the original woke thing.”
And it’s true: These choices are no different from the one “Star Trek” producers made in 1968 when they showed an interracial kiss on television while civil rights were under debate. In its principles, its language and even its weekly Thursday episode schedule, “Star Trek” has remained remarkably consistent (so consistent, in fact, that some fans blame the brief change to Friday night for the original series’s cancellation). On a deeper level, though, there’s a sense that the show captures timeless ideals about cooperation, friendship and cross-cultural respect, and that, as with restagings of Shakespeare, no amount of returning to parts of the series exhausts the possibilities of what one can take from it.
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