"Star Trek is a language nearly everyone speaks."

 

For 50 years, Star Trek and its themes of optimism, equality and heroism have inspired people worldwide. 

Star Trek presents a positive future - a utopia without poverty or war. In that future, all of humanity has set aside their differences and joined together in an extraordinary task: to explore the stars, meeting every challenge with bravery and thoughtfulness. 

What began as a low-budget science fiction television show with modest ratings expanded into a franchise spanning seven television series, thirteen movies, and thousands of novels, comics and games. Star Trek has made a profound impact on our society.  Star Trek's ideas and memes are now so deeply embedded in the fabric of our popular culture that even people who have never seen it can name key characters and recite its catch phrases. Star Trek inspires art, science, architecture, music and literature. Star Trek is a language nearly everyone speaks.  

Brooks Peck, Curator - Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds

I recently discovered that, in honour of Star Trek’s 50th anniversary, the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle is hosting a retrospective exhibition on the Star Trek phenomenon, and its impact on the world. Accompanied (and chauffeured) by my tolerant* girlfriend Karli, we headed down to Washington state last weekend to take a look.

After checking into our hotel, we made our way to Frank Gehry’s multi-coloured architectural masterpiece, and forked over thirty bucks US each for admission to the museum in general and the Star Trek portion specifically.  Once inside, we passed on the opportunity for a $60 autograph from Brent Spiner** (or a $30 selfie) and made our way directly into the exhibition.

 

To be honest, I feel that if you’ve seen one display of artifacts from a franchise, you’ve pretty much seen all of them – I guess I’ve become jaded in my old age. It’s also a relatively small exhibition, considering the long history of the show and its spinoffs.

 

That being said, the exhibits are comprehensive, well arranged and well explained. There’s a good mix of photo ops and interactivity: a full range of starship filming models, a duplicate of Kirk’s command chair (and the original), an excellent touch-screen starship database, props and costumes from all parts of the franchise, a Borg regeneration alcove, a horizontal duplicate of a Jefferies Tube***, and a transporter set where visitors can act out a scene. (Sadly, we were stumped by the “KHAAAAAAAAN!” simulator - as were a lot of other people, as far as we could tell.)

There are some odd little surprises. The Borg cube, which I always thought was computer generated, turned out to be an astonishingly detailed model, and the signs of forcible disassembly with a blunt object are quite obvious in the seams of the bridge set pieces from the original series. (Although it was interesting to see the navigation console from the captain's perspective.)  

There also is a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek humour to the exhibition. The display booths are set against a background of fake orange rocks, very much in the style of those made famous by the original series, and random solitary tribbles punctuate the displays: perched on top of a divider, or nestled underneath the navigation console. 

Karli was completely taken aback by the unexpected prospect of Data’s severed head looking up at her through a sheet of plexiglass from a pit in the floor – I wonder how Brent Spiner felt about that particular nod to the Next Generation episode Time's Arrow?

The real key to the exhibition lies in the display on the upper level, which examines Star Trek's effect on society in general. The most impressive thing about Star Trek is its legacy - no other piece of popular entertainment has had the same kind of a sustained cultural impact that Star Trek has.

The mezzanine displays focus on that impact: artistic, scientific, architectural, and musical, and includes a multi-screen video presentation that examines the real-life influence that Star Trek had upon the world.  Scientists, astronauts, writers and actors discuss the manner in which the goals and ideals presented by Star Trek made a difference in people's lives.

As with all good science fiction, Star Trek shows us the future but comments on the present. The original series in particular offered the world a future in which many of the problems that plagued the Sixties no longer existed. Sequels and spinoffs have continued to look at contemporary problems to a greater or lesser extent, and Gene Roddenberry's original vision of a better world has show remarkable longevity.

(Although, let's be honest, it's difficult to place the Picardigan on the same level as Martin Luther King's request to Nichelle Nichols that she stay on the show in order to continue as a role model for black people.)

For me, the most interesting thing about Exploring New Worlds was not the exhibition itself, but the people attending it. There were fans taking pinup photos in the Jefferies tube, and people snapping pictures of a baby **** in the reproduction of Kirk's command chair - presumably the Next Generation of fan.

There were fans in costumes, fans in uniforms, fans in pointed ears, and one fan wearing a steampunk Star Trek gown. They posed as regenerating Borg, stood in line to stand in as actors in a transporter scene, and I saw one woman literally bounce up and down with joy when she saw the bridge set from the original series.

To quote a certain half-Vulcan science officer: "Fascinating."

- Sid

* And lovely.

** Denise Crosby was also on site for photo ops, but I 'm just more of a Data fan.  It was an interesting combination, though, considering that their characters were “intimate” in The Naked Now, an appropriately titled first season episode of The Next Generation.

*** I honestly had no idea that Jefferies Tubes were a mystery to the population at large, but apparently this is where we cross the line from well-known information - like phasers and transporters - into esoterica. Jefferies Tubes were the little tunnels used by engineering crewmembers to access various bits of the Enterprise’s infrastructure. If you ever saw Scotty lying in a cramped little space working desperately to fix something (usually the transporter) while smoke and sparks filled the foreground, he was in a Jefferies Tube. They’re named after Matt Jefferies, who designed the original U.S.S. Enterprise.

**** And then rushing to save him as he began to slowly topple over to one side.  Did Shatner ever do that?