10 Times Star Trek Dared To Be Different

In 1977, Star Wars blasted into theatres. Two years later, Star Trek opted for its trademark cerebral approach, plodding its way onto the big screen. Star Trek: The Motion Picture earned a list of unflattering nicknames — 'The Motionless Picture' and 'Where Nomad Had Gone Before' amongst them. Star Trek had not dared to be different enough in the new world of lightsabres and high-energy space battles.

"[When Persis Khambatta is not on screen], the film teeters toward being a crashing bore," noted American film critic Gene Siskel at the time, according to The Art of Star Trek. Reviews were generally mixed to bad. The Motion Picture was a box office success, but expensive to produce. Now, things had to change.

Paramount placed the blame on Gene Roddenberry for the perceived failings of the first film. They didn't like his 'stop the Kennedy assassination' idea for the second. Harve Bennett was brought in as executive producer for Star Trek II, and Nicholas Meyer as director (and unofficial script re-writer). Meyer hadn't even seen Star Trek before. The result was what is, for many, the best of the Trek movies… and uniforms!

Those who persistently bemoan 'that kids' show' of the 2020s might do well to remember that Star Trek: The Animated Series was Saturday morning television in the 1970s. It won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Entertainment – Children's Series. The Animated Series was always for adults, too.

"It was a show for the entire family and anybody who was really a fan of the original live show," Filmation co-founder Lou Scheimer noted on Drawn to the Final Frontier: The Making of Star Trek: The Animated Series. Brought back to the present of Star Trek: Prodigy, 'is it for kids or is it for adults?' is a false dilemma. How about asking, 'is it any good'?

Daring to get animated for all ages is in Star Trek's pink DNA. Prodigy sought out a younger demographic — a laudable goal — but "the stakes [were] real for an older audience," as co-creator Dan Hageman told  TrekMovie in 2021. The arguably riskier move was kidding around with the franchise for adults.

Star Trek: Lower Decks was the animated comedy for grown-ups we didn't know we needed and were sad to see gone. On the other end of the comedy spectrum, and whatever the target demographic, the Very Short Treks were, quite simply, infantile.

It is an odd thing to think in retrospect, but Star Trek: The Next Generation was daring when it first began. No Kirk? No Spock? No Bones? No thanks! A new century, a new starship, a French captain played by an Englishman, and a Klingon on the bridge. This was different all right! The new Star Trek was also to be sold direct to syndication, a bold financial first for the franchise, and one that would pay off.

"There was an actual protest about The Next Generation [by fans of The Original…]," Larry Nemecek noted on The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek episode Queue for Q. Not even Patrick Stewart's LA agent, Steve Dontanville, thought the new series stood a chance. As Stewart recalled in Making It So: A Memoir, Dontanville told him before filming began that,

It is my opinion that you'll be lucky to make it through the first season. I don't think anyone can replicate the success of the original Star Trek. You'll be lucky to make it to Thanksgiving, to be honest.

It seemed everyone was forecasting a turkey. Looking back at the overall quality of seasons one and two, they were half right. But if no one had dared to do Star Trek again differently, we wouldn't have got three through seven and all that spun off.

The next series in the pantheon was different by definition. To trek, you have to travel.  Deep Space Nine dared to stay put where no one had stayed put before. Setting up shop — and shops — aboard a space station, it asked the famous wagon train, and the stars, to come to it. The end of the line was the next frontier.

In the beginning especially, 'new life' sought out, or just happened upon, the Station. Tosk was the first alien from the Gamma Quadrant, followed by the Hunters. The first diplomatic delegation — the Wadi — made the trip through the wormhole. Sisko and crew didn't have to move from home in Move Along Home.

Count to three… runabouts, dropped off by the Enterprise in Emissary. In rivers and numbers that followed, the Danube-class was all they had until the start of season three. Star Trek without a starship was then Starfleet with its first unofficial warship.

Different yet still, the Defiant had its own cloaking device on loan from the Romulan Star Empire. "Our people are scientists and explorers — they don't go sneaking around," Gene Roddenberry once said on the topic. To paraphrase from Chula, 'you ain't see nothin' yet!'

"Star Trek is strangely by the book in this regard," Kate Mulgrew, who had fought for the inclusion of a gay character on Star Trek: Voyager to no avail, told Out In America in 2002. Indeed, until very recently, Trek had only ever allegorised over any LGBT themes. The script, like the book, was always already heterosexual. But, at least in places, Trek did dare to try.

With all the will in the world, you can't be bolder than the network executives around you. A happily, openly gay character on television in the 1960s would have been next to unthinkable. Most of the metaphor in The Original Series had to be what the viewer could read and write in to Kirk SLASH Spock.

By the late 1980s/1990s, the inclusion of an openly LGBT character would have been bold enough to make a big difference, but big enough to cause a fuss. Episodes such as The Host and The Outcast edged in the right direction but still couched their discussion of sexuality and gender identity in layers of alien analogy. In Rejoined, the franchise got its first same-sex kiss, though it was still wrapped up in repression, and grounded in a heterosexual relationship.

Later, in Stigma, Star Trek: Enterprise broached the topic of HIV/AIDS and homophobia via intolerant Vulcans and those of them who would mind-meld. Whilst successful as a discussion of discrimination, the episode kept its queerly coded character — Yuris — in the margins in favour of a story about T'Pol.

The real difference to show any difference came only in 2017 with Stamets and Culber, Rapp and Cruz, out and proud.

Serialisation is a relatively new phenomenon in television. Before streaming, before DVR, and even with VCR, miss an episode, miss an arc (unless you caught the marathon or the omnibus). For Star Trek of the 1990s, serialisation was practically a dirty word. As Star Trek: Deep Space Nine executive producer Ira Steven Behr noted on the DVD extra The Birth of the Dominion and Beyond:

The Adversary was the first one where we really knew that we were going to be starting to get the 'S-word' — serialised — [whispers] just a tad, in spite of all the finger-wagging and knowing we weren't supposed to.

You couldn't blame the higher-ups for being wary. Trek had found great success in syndication, which thrived on being able to show episodes in whatever order it pleased. Deep Space Nine really did have to dare to be different to do even a partially serialised narrative arc. With the Dominion War, it also did its arc more darkly than any Trek before it.

Deep Space Nine broke the mould. Star Trek: Enterprise said, 'take your serialisation and hold my tambourine'. The Xindi arc was a thematic 180 with dystopian overtones, and the first time Star Trek had explored a single narrative over an entire season. Star Trek: Discovery — the first direct to streaming — would make serialisation a standard. In live action, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds then dared to differ from its genitor through a return to largely episodic form.

2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: Voyager's debut. 30 years — albeit with a few gaps — is equally about how long it took Star Trek to get its first female series lead. Trek had shown women in high-level command positions before. Captain Janeway, firmly in the chair on a course for home in Caretaker, was nothing short of "television history," as Kate Mulgrew herself recalled in 'Captain's Chat' ahead of Star Trek: The Cruise this year.

"It took a lot of courage for them to hire a woman. I think that right up until the end they were very dubious about it," Mulgrew had also noted to Metrosource back in 2002. To break the 'boys' club,' in the 1990s in particular, did sadly require a good deal of daring.

Behind the scenes, Voyager also challenged the male-dominated status quo, hiring the brilliant Jeri Taylor as co-creator and executive producer. "We'll have a female point of view in the room, and it won't be the two guys being the creative forces behind the first female captain," fellow exec. Michael Piller explained in The Fifty Year Mission: The Next 25 Years.

Captain, and Admiral, Janeway would become a role model for women, and plenty of men alike, most notably in the sciences. "Of everything that it's changed, my little influence on women in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] has been the single most gratifying," concluded Mulgrew in 'Captain's Chat'. That is the stuff that statues are made on!

Star Trek: Discovery was Star Trek's return to the small screen. Its very existence was daring — and about time — after too many years. Eschewing the ensemble, it favoured a singular viewpoint character — exploration by, and of, Michael Burnham. That was an entirely novel approach for Star Trek. There were drawbacks. We still know very little about some of Discovery's other characters, even after five seasons. There were a lot of positives, too.

As Burnham, Sonequa Martin-Green became the first black female lead in a Star Trek show, a bold continuation of Trek's core values of diversity and inclusion. As Martin-Green told The Independent in 2017,

My casting says that the sky is the limit for all of us. […] I think it sends a message to any minority group that's been disenfranchised. We all benefit when we can see a picture of ourselves in a position of leadership, and I think that goes not just for women and people in minority groups — but for everyone to see that this is possible.

Burnham had quite the journey, too. From an initial low as "Starfleet's first mutineer," she traversed the centuries, gave hope back to the future, saved the galaxy (again) more than once, and became a captain (another first for Star Trek), later admiral. There were a couple of Terrans and an evil AI in there as well. We can only hope that Martin-Green gets to continue to break ground as Captain Burnham in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

Little has been more divisive in Star Trek than Article 13, Section 31 of the Starfleet Charter. Re-read it, you'll find "a few lines that make allowances for bending the rules during times of extraordinary threat". Agree, disagree, abhor, no one could argue that Section 31 — the organisation — didn't dare to differ from Roddenberry's utopia.

We all know the refrain. The galaxy's actually a really bad place. Only cold, hard pragmatism will protect those 'saints in paradise' from all their naïveté. Roddenberry had dared to believe humanity wouldn't continue to stoop so low. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's fundamental error, though certainly different in its attempt, was to think that realism need be a foundation for fiction, especially one set aboard an alien space station.

Extreme measures should also call for extreme times. The issue with groups like Section 31 is that all times are times of war. Agent Harris said it himself to Captain Archer in Divergence:

Archer: "What threat?"

Harris: "Take your pick. Earth's got a lot of enemies."

From the beginning, Section 31 only had to justify its existence by the imagined threat of its non-existence.

Of course, Star Trek: Section 31, the Long Trek, dared to be different in a wholly different kind of way. Misnamed after the organisation, it largely followed the ex-Emperor instead.

"Why are we singing?" Pike and crew asked themselves the direct question. The answer was as much of a nonsense as it had to be — quantum uncertainty from a subspace fold. Most unusual, so peculiar. The McGuffin mattered, but less than the music. The point? In Subspace Rhapsody, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds continued to dare to bend and blend genres as much as it did those dulcet tones.

Star Trek had done singing before. Star Trek had done dancing before. In The Original Series, Nichelle Nichols delighted audiences with her sublime voice in The Conscience of the King, for example. Via its EMH, Voyager had more opera than you could shake your vibrato at. Doctor Crusher was then The Next Generation's very own tap-dancing physician.

Subspace Rhapsody was all-singing, all-dancing. There was precedent for that in other properties — Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Once More, with Feeling, as one amongst others. Full-on musical was brand new for Star Trek. Even the main titles were redone a cappella. Love it or loathe it, a Star Trek smash hit or not, to attempt a musical in the first place took a lot of… baritones! And the more said — or sung — about that hilarious Kling-Pop segment the better!