Okay, I'm up to five blog posts now, and I think I'm ready to give the internet a "hot take." The real difference between Star Trek and Star Wars is that Star Trek is about something and Star Wars is not.
Before you bust out the pitchforks, I'm not saying Star Wars doesn't have stories or plots or characters. I'm not saying the Empire isn't an allegory for fascist governments or that its movies, books, and shows are lacking in emotion. I'm saying that it's not about BIG IMPORTANT THINGS the way Star Trek is about BIG IMPORTANT THINGS.
Now, asking the real question: Is Star Wars cool? Absolutely it's cool. It's the coolest sci-fi franchise in history. Is Star Trek cool? No.
Star Trek is not cool.
And Star Trek can't be cool. It ruins the whole premise.
The newer Star Trek shows and movies think they're cool, and that's nice for them. But being uncool is what makes Star Trek great.
When I was a kid, I remember my parents watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on TV and being baffled - and beyond bored - that a science fiction show would spend any amount of time sitting around a conference table debating the merits of alien morality. That seemed like such a waste of the genre. And Next Gen dedicates many hours of television to sitting around that conference table.
For a kid, Star Wars is better in every way. It has laser swords, space dogfights, slimy monsters, magic, and a robot dad that will invite you to conquer the galaxy with him. It offers nothing in the way of a believable galactic government or economy, but it will get you to pick up a broom and make "VMM, VMM" noises with your mouth while swinging it around the garage.
Star Trek, on the other hand, will spend 45 minutes lecturing you on why racism is bad. It will have its characters reel back in horror as they realize it was humans who were the monsters all along.
At its worst, Star Trek comes off as clumsy and heavy-handed, drawing ragged parallels between rubber monsters and issues like homelessness, unregulated capitalism, sexism, gender dynamics, freedom of speech, religion, etc. But even at its worst, Star Trek is not about the fantasy of living among the stars, it's about the reality of how we treat each other.
Okay, granted, sometimes it's about horny Scottish ghosts that live in lamps, but mostly it's about how we treat each other.
No iteration of Star Trek is flawless. There are simply too many episodes and films beholden to too many minds and masters to achieve perfection. But in its finest incarnations, we get a glimpse of what a truly enlightened future looks like. We see cooperation in the face of conflict; we see diverse peoples sitting down around conference tables working out their issues. Star Trek shows us a future where compromise is not a dirty word, because the galaxy is far too vast and weird for us to agree on everything.
I love me some gritty sci-fi. I love a rainy, Blade Runner-y future where the planet's a greasy wasteland and everything sucks because people suck now and why shouldn’t they suck five minutes from now? But I also love me some Star Trek. Because it dares to ask a very uncool question: What if we make it?
What if we don't fuck up the future? What if the future is better than the present because we all decided, as a society, that it's better to respect each other and be kind to each other? What if we fix the biggest problems on Earth, so now we get to explore the stars? Not because we have to, but because we choose to, and together.
Star Trek means more to me the older I get. Star Wars means less. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy Jedis or Wookies or babies Yoda; I think all that stuff is neat. It’s cool.
The future seldom looks cool on Star Trek, but it is functional. I would like my daughters to live in a functional future. I’d like that for all of us, so that we might live long and prosper.