These are the voyages...
Space — the final frontier...
A long-running science-fiction franchise which is one of the most recognizable and influential fiction universes in television history, with five television series and eleven movies spanning three generations of characters and four decades of television.
The setting in every series is about an Earth-based intergalactic government called
The Federation and their fleet of starships, which form
Starfleet. Every series dealt with a particular crew, mostly of various ships named
Enterprise. As originally envisioned by
Gene Roddenberry, the science fiction nature of the series was just a method to address many social issues of the time that could not have been done in a normal drama. As such, it was not above being
Anvilicious or engaging in thinly-veiled social satire, but considering its origin during the 60's
Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped.
As a
long-running and highly popular franchise,
Star Trek is one of largest
Trope Makers on television, especially the original series, and it remains one of the canonical examples of
Sci Fi in the minds of the general public. Especially compared to most other "hard" sci-fi, it was, for the most part,
way on the happy end of the
Sliding Scale Of Idealism Vs Cynicism. But it still found some sort of balance between a Dystopia and a
Crystal Spires And Togas future... in general it is a future you hope will come true. All series have sought to show that while you may think the world is falling apart and there is no chance of global unity, all this crap will eventually work itself out.
In the mainstream it is likely most famous for its geeky fans, "trekkies," who are
stereotyped as
male Basement Dwellers who have
never had sex and speak
Klingon (this has
almost no basis in fact
). Either that or it's confused with
Star Wars.
Television Series in the franchise include:
- Star Trek The Original Series "TOS" (1966 - 1969) Set from 2266-2269 — The one everyone has heard of. Originally just Star Trek, it suffered in the ratings, but gained a devoted fanbase. Un Cancelled after the second season, and then Cancelled again at the end of the third. It really picked up steam in syndication, which was about the time demographics came into play - and the Real Life moon landing happened a week after its last episode aired. Nowadays, it looks incredibly cheesy and dated, but the show's writing was above average, the cast had great chemistry and the characters themselves were very memorable, to the point of creating three new archetypes: The Kirk, The Spock, and The McCoy.
- Star Trek The Animated Series "TAS" (1973 - 1975) The timeline was unidentified — Used most of the original cast (and a few additions) to provide voices for the animated versions of their characters. The quality of the show was hit and miss, with some being mediocre cartoon fare while others (epecially those penned by TOS writer D.C. Fontana) were excellent. 22 episodes were produced, but the series got the franchise's first Emmy award. The official canonicity of this series has gone back and forth, but at least some elements have bled over into the rest of the franchise (most notably, identifying the "T" in James T. Kirk to stand for "Tiberius").
- Star Trek The Next Generation "TNG" (1987 - 1994) Set from 2364-2371 — The best known one after the original. Takes place in the 24th century on the Enterprise-D, with the same mission of exploration as the original. Introduced the holodeck, defined the Klingons as being a society of honor and war, and really hit it home with creating the cybernetic alien race, the Borg. Is one of the most well respected television shows of all time and the only syndicated show to ever be nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series.
- Star Trek Deep Space Nine "DS9" (1993 - 1999) Set from 2369-2376 — Takes place concurrently with the end of Next Generation and the lion's share of Voyager. Set on a former Cardassian space station (Formerly Terok Nor, renamed Deep Space Nine) in a politically unstable part of space near the planet Bajor, with exclusive access to a rare stable wormhole that leads from the Alpha to the Gamma Quadrant. Babylon Five a la Star Trek, featuring (from Season 3 onwards) a massive interstellar war between the Federation, Cardassians, Klingons, Romulans and the Dominion.
- Star Trek Voyager "VOY" (1995 - 2001) Set from 2371-2378 — While searching for a group of rogue Starfleet people called the Maquis, both the title ship and a Maquis ship are flung across the galaxy and stranded in the Delta Quadrant, 70,000 light years and seventy-five years' travel from home (Lost In Space a la Star Trek). Had the first main character female captain in the franchise. Infamous for the Villain Decay of the Borg, the obscene levels of Techno Babble, and mashing the Reset Button after roughly every other episode. This is arguably the height of theme music for the series though, considering...
- Star Trek Enterprise "ENT" (2001 - 2005) Set from 2151-2155 — Prequel to the original series, first of the spinoff series to not go all seven seasons. A hundred years or so before Kirk, humans are just getting their space legs and the Applied Phlebotinum is not so nigh-magical. Featured two retools, first with Season Three introducing an ambitious but lackluster season-spanning Story Arc (Twenty Four a la Star Trek) and the fourth and final season using several 2-3 episode story-arcs. Both were an attempt to add more interest to a very mild and relatively boring "Temporal Cold War" arc of the first two seasons. Infamous for the asinine pop song in the opening credits and for not lasting the desired seven seasons.
In addition to these,
Star Trek: Phase II was a series concept designed as the cornerstone of a Paramount Pictures-based network in 1976. A continuation of the original series and featuring a second five-year mission, it would have introduced a number of new characters in conjunction with the original crew. When the network project died and the insane success of
Star Wars made sci-fi films profitable again, Paramount elaborated the series pilot into
The Movie, which ultimately led to a whole new line of movies:
Many of the concepts from
Phase II made their way into
Star Trek The Next Generation and the series itself is considered
deuterocanon - not "true" canon, because it never made it to the screen, but allowed in
Broad Strokes to fill a gap in Trek chronology (notice the fictional length of time between
The Motion Picture and
The Wrath of Khan).
In total, to watch every minute of "canon" Star Trek (series and movies) would require
22 days, 19 hours and 3 minutes of your time, and that doesn't include 8 hours and 4 minutes of the Animated Series. Of Science Fiction franchises, only
Doctor Who and its various canon spinoffs are even within a week.
After the high ratings
of Star Trek The Next Generation, Star Trek began to decline in ratings through
Deep Space 9 and
Voyager before finally hitting bottom in
Enterprise. Many people have tried to figure out the reasons why (with some more
cynical than others), but a common phrase passed around was "Franchise Fatigue" - at least one
Star Trek series had been on television for eighteen years. New and fresh stories were harder to find and
Enterprise wasn't able to hold on to viewers. The fact that rival science fiction shows like
Babylon 5 and
Stargate SG-1 were finally able to be successful on their own put Trek in serious competition for the first time as well.
Star Trek was considered ground-breaking for its time, due to Roddenberry's bright and optimistic vision of the future; amongst other things, he fought hard for a diverse and racially-integrated cast, resulting in only two white American males amongst seven characters and a
black woman in a position of authority... not to mention what was widely (mis)reported as the first black-on-white on-screen kiss (It was the first fictional depiction, but Sammy Davis Jr. and Nancy Sinatra shared a brief peck on TV earlier). Its influence is such that two pioneering
Real Life spacecraft (the prototype for the Space Shuttle and the first ship in Virgin Galactic's space-tourism fleet) have been named after the Starship
Enterprise. With all this notoriety,
Star Trek has also been the target of more satires than one can count, particularly
Galaxy Quest, which has jokingly been declared "the best
Star Trek movie ever made" and the
CSI episode "A Space Oddity".
Also notable:
Star Trek: Phase II (formerly
Star Trek: New Voyages), a non-profit
Fan Film series with new, unknown actors playing Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the original crew.
Better Than It Sounds, due to the talent and enthusiasm of the cast and the involvement of actors and other personnel from the original series, including Walter Koenig (Chekov) and George Takei (Sulu) appearing as older versions of their characters.
Oh, and it also happens to be the most
Trope Overdosed series in
TV Tropes history, beating out
Doctor Who by a few hundred pages.
Tropes common across all series (See all the tropes with an asterisk below? Star Trek is the Trope Namer for all of them.)'
- Arc Number (47, from the middle of Next Generation on)
- Badass Army: The Klingons wish they were these but they are more of a subversion.
- Beam Me Up Scotty*
- Boldly Coming*
- Blunt Metaphors Trauma (Data, Spock, and most Vulcans)
- Captains Log*
- The Chains Of Commanding
- Classically Trained Extra (Patrick Stewart, most famously. He even said that he considered it training for his role as Picard. But the franchise is famous for casting many stage actors over regular TV guest actors.)
- Clip Show (The two-part TOS episode The Menagerie showed us most of the original pilot episode The Cage)
- Clothes Make The Legend (The black and primary color uniform scheme. Only the original series films and Enterprise didn't follow this.)
- Cool But Inefficient
- Collectible Card Game
- Coming In Hot (In Star Trek V)
- Command Roster (Star Trek is likely the Trope Maker or at least set the standard of how this trope is used.)
- Cool Gate
- Creator Worship (Gene Roddenberry himself. Rick Berman, Ronald Moore and J. J. Abrams are a bit lower on the hierarchy. Brannon Braga is, unfortunately, often villainized for what happened with Voyager.)
- Crowning Music Of Awesome (The theme songs for TOS and TNG are iconic. DS 9 and VOY's music were decidedly more epic and considered the high point of the series, despite not being nearly as well-known. ENT's is much-reviled.)
- Deflector Shields
- Destructo Nookie (Klingons)
- Dropped A Bridge On Him*
- Due To The Dead (A good number of funeral customs, at that.)
- Dying Alone
- Emotions Vs Stoicism (Romulans vs. Vulcans)
- Everything Sensor (EVERY scanner is like this)
- Exposition Beam - Vulcan Mind Melds are essentially this, along with a host of other Applied Phlebotinum uses.
- Fan Of The Past (Too many to name)
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture (While not fantasy, most of the major alien species have some connection to Real World counterparts)
- Earth Starfleet- United States of America
- The Federation- United Nations (The nature of the Federation was established better in The Next Generation as an alliance instead of a single government system. Which also explains why humans are the primary officers on Starfleet ships.)
- Vulcans- Great Britain (Not a perfect match-up, but Enterprise depicted them as a regional superpower who eventually lose much of their realm of control as Earth increases theirs.)
- Klingons- Soviet Russia (Agressive people who... hell, just watch Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country.)
- Klingons also had some similarity to post-Soviet Russia in The Next Generation in terms of politics. But as part of Gene Roddenberry's plan to not make them evil and a race of "black hats", they turned into... vikings.
- Romulans- Communist China (Secretive government who you aren't quite sure what they're up to.)
- Starting in The Next Generation, the Romulans also started to become a bit like Iran, for similar reasons.
- Cardassians- Nazi Germany (Mostly in regards to their Occupation of Bajor. But in some regards it is what would have happened if WW 2 was a stalemate instead of an allied victory.)
- Bajorans- Jewish/ Palestinian (Specifically the very religious people suffering through an oppressive military force. Though Cardassians are certainly never, ever Israeli)
- Orions- The Mafia/ Criminal Underground
- Nausicaans- Gang Leaders
- Faster Than Light Travel (Rather hard to imagine the series without it)
- The Federation*
- First Installment Wins - How most people remember Star Trek. "That's the one with *Vulcan handsignal*, right?"
- Forgot The Call
- Good Old Ways
- Government Drug Enforcement (used a couple of times in TNG and DS 9, also used in the movie Insurrection)
- Green Eggs - Romulan Ale is blue.
- Green Skinned Space Babe*
- Half Human Hybrid* (Spock, Deanna Troi, B'Elanna Torres)
- Hes Dead Jim*
- Highly Conspicuous Uniform
- Holodeck Malfunction*
- Hologram
- HoYay - In fact, Kirk/Spock (or Spirk) is the original Slash pairing.
- Wait, wouldn't it be Ko—oh.
- If You Taunt Him You Will Be Just Like Him
- Im A Doctor Not A Trope*
- Inertial Dampening*
- Jabba Table Manners (The Klingons of the Star Trek universe universally gulp and slurp down food like slobs. In their case, it is to show how tough and free of pretentious "good manners" and straightforward and honest their society is, not to show how "evil" they are.)
- Jeannie Cut
- The Khan*
- The Kirk*
- Kirks Rock*
- Kirk Summation*
- The Kobayashi Maru*
- Life Imitates Art (take the sliding doors, for one thing.)
- Letter Motif
- Logic Bomb (Though there were precedents in pulp SF, Kirk did this to no fewer than three computers.)
- Long Runners (the second longest running sci-fi show in the world, beaten only by Doctor Who - and Star Trek has more total hours (as stated earlier.)
- Love Is In The Air (Several episodes in the different series.)
- Lower Deck Episode*
- Ludd Was Right, by means of Space Amish
- Made Of Phlebotinum
- Magical Security Cam (Happens so often and so early in the setting that it can be considered a technological standard. At this point, anything else would be a deviation from canon.)
- Magnetic Plot Device (The various starships. The Holodeck. The Bajoran wormhole in DS 9. The Temporal Cold War in Enterprise.)
- The Man Behind The Monsters
- Mary Suetopia Roddenberry's vision for Trek, but especially the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Needless to say, the series finally found its legs after he was removed from any serious degree of creative control.
- The Mc Coy*
- Military Maverick (almost expected of Starfleet captains, it would seem. Picard, for all he's careful, deliberate, and knows the regulations backwards, forwards, and sideways, has many moments of this, and the others even more. One gets the impression that, away from central planets and main trade routes, the captain is the Federation, with all the discretion and responsibility that implies.)
- Considering that the original concept for the series was Hornblower in deep space, and that ship captains during the Wooden Ships And Iron Men era usually were their respective country's highest representative in any area where they were stationed...
- Janeway in Voyager once made a comment about how strongly she had to hold onto Starfleet regulations so far from home, but also admired the gung-ho attitude of earlier Starfleet captains ("I would have loved to ride shotgun at least once with a group of officers like that!").
- Mirror Universe*
- More Hero Than Thou
- Negative Space Wedgie (from a well-known parody.)
- The Neutral Zone* (The Cardassian and the Romulan ones are the most known; a Klingon one exists during the movies.)
- Never Give The Captain A Straight Answer
- Now Do It Again Backwards
- Officer And A Gentleman and/or Cultured Warrior (To some degree, almost all Starfleet personnel are one or the other of these. Even the Closer To Earth types have scientific and literary interests. Many enemies are Wicked Cultured as well.)
- Pardon My Klingon*
- Perfect Pacifist People (Several species in the various works exhibit this trope)
- Planet Of Hats
- Prime Directive*
- Proud Warrior Race Guy (The original series had the Klingons as being mostly warlike with few redeeming traits. Gene Roddenberry didn't like them being the "Black Hats" of the saga so in The Next Generation he made a Klingon a regular cast member and quickly established the "honor" aspect to their society.)
- Ray Gun (phasers and disruptors.)
- Red Shirt*
- The Roddenberry Line*
- Rubber Forehead Aliens*
- Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale
- Shout Out To Shakespeare
- Slow Electricity (The console displays always go on/off in sequence around the bridge. If there's a shipwide outage, expect an outside shot of windows lighting up/going out one at a time.)
- Space Whale Aesop*
- The Spock*
- Spock Speak*
- Standard Sci Fi Setting (Trekkies might imagine Star Trek created the standard, but the Standard Sci Fi Setting has been evolving since Doc Smith wrote the first Lensman stories. The original Star Trek concept was imported almost entirely from Forbidden Planet, with other bits and pieces cribbed from sources like Childhood's End and Stranger In A Strange Land.)
- Standard Time Units (Stardates)
- Star Trek Shake*
- State Sec (Romulans and Cardassians both got their own little versions in the form of the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order respectively. Arguably Starfleet's Section 31. The Ferengi's FCA might also qualify given their cultural bias.)
- Stealth In Space
- Straw Vulcan*
- Subspace Ansible (except when the plot demands its absence)
- Talking Animal (Lt. M'Ress, the felinoid alien from the Animated Series)
- Technobabble (More or less the Trope Codifier. In the script it would be labeled as [TECH] and they had a seperate writer to put in whatever seemed appropriate.)
- Technology Porn
- Teleporter Accident
- Theiss Titillation Theory* (named for the costume designer on The Original Series.)
- The Verse (Widely recognized as quite possibly the most coherent, internally consistent fictional universe ever created)
- Too Much Of A Good Thing
- Unpleasable Fanbase (Stay away from discussion forums about what is or isn't canon if you fear Internet Backdraft!)
- Visual Effects Of Awesome (Watching a later Star Trek episode is almost like watching a movie in television show form. The best examples would likely be The Best of Both Worlds (TNG), The Way of the Warrior (DS 9), Scorpion (VOY) and Twilight (ENT)
- Wagon Train To The Stars*
- We Come In Peace Shoot To Kill (also from a famous parody)
- We Will Not Have Pockets In The Future
- What The Hell Hero (Every Captain. In every series. And not infrequently either. Either them at the crew for their crap, or the crew to themselves for their own crap)
- Will Not Tell A Lie (Vulcans, allegedly - something of an Informed Attribute.)
- The Worf Effect*
- X Meets Y (Hidden by the influence of Trek on later productions, but the original premise was then novel at least for television, and could easily be described as "Horatio Hornblower meets The Outer Limits".)
- You Look Familiar (Numerous times. But in this case putting a different alien makeup helps a lot in distinguishing characters played by the same actor.)
- Mark Lenard waves "Hello".
- Jeffery Combs, Vaughn Armstrong and J. G. Hertzler have set records for portraying no less than five alien species over the course of the "next generation" series of shows.
- From Voyager, Tim Russ (Tuvok) and Robert Duncan McNeill (Tom Paris) both played villains in episodes of The Next Generations. In fact, McNeill was supposed to reprise his role originally, before it was re-writen as Tom Paris. Both are notable because there's practically no makeup involved between the two roles (Russ only gained pointy ears). Ethan Phillips (Neelix) appears as an hologram who tries to talk to the Borg in First Contact.
- Zee Rust (A given for the original series because of general budget restrictions of the time. Caused no shortage of Fan Dumb with Enterprise and the 2009 Star Trek movie because of an attempt to update. Next Generation mostly averts this even though it is over 20 years old now, mostly due to having an excellent visual designer in Michael Okuda.)
