12 Most INSANE Star Trek Theories

The Original Series of Star Trek has, in many ways, aged like a fine wine (albeit a fine wine stored in a cheap wooden box that somebody glued some flashing lights to). As classic as the sets and costumes are, they look less 23rd century chic and more like something cobbled together from the leftover materials of an underfunded theatre's Christmas Panto.

While we can all suspend our disbelief to a certain extent, higher-budget prequel series like Enterprise and Discovery make TOS's lo-tech aesthetic impossible to ignore. It's a similar criticism that's often aimed at the Star Wars prequels: why do shows set between ten and one-hundred years earlier look so much more futuristic?

One popular theory is that TOS is not showing us the actual events of the USS Enterprise, but a group of actors within the world of Star Trek re-enacting the "real" Captain Kirk's logs. This would explain why everyone in the wider world knows about Kirk and Co.'s exploits, yet TOS looks so different to everything that came after The Next Generation: Starfleet members are, naturally, big fans of this low-budget show about an accident-prone Federation crew.

Some fans even extend this theory to every show and movie set within the universe, claiming that nothing we are seeing is real, and every show is just actors performing dramatisations of the real Federation ships' logs.

You know, if you simply replace the words "the real Federation ships' logs" with "fictional scripts", these theorists could really be onto something.