I was a child when the original Star Trek series aired, so young that my parents refused to let me stay up and watch, in spite of the fact that all of my friends, in fact, EVERY OTHER CHILD in my hometown, was allowed to view what was clearly a perspective-shattering television series. I was scarred for life.

Actually, although that is how I remember it, I’m sure it is not true. I imagine there were one or two others whose parents enforced required bedtimes and homework before TV. I’m sure mine didn’t MEAN to scar me for life, although they knew of my love of science fiction and fantasy that started with Miss Pickerell on the Moon and meandered over the next two decades through questionably age-appropriate* books by Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Alexander Key, Madeleine L’Engle, Piers Anthony, Lester del Rey, Ursula LeGuin, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Isaac Asimov, among others.

But I digress. My point, and there is usually a point somewhere, is that my parents were horribly unfair and created a huge gap in my cultural literacy that has plagued me for my entire adult life. Of course, eventually I saw all the episodes of the original Star Trek in televised repeats — numerous times and in random order — and a few of the early Star Trek movies. By the time the sequels started, I was a young working mother scarring my own son through my parenting decisions, too busy watching his favorite shows to stay caught up. (He knew LeVar Burton as the host of Reading Rainbow, not Chief Engineer on The Next Generation nor, as I did, as Kunta Kinte in Roots.) The problem became particularly obvious when I watched Picard early in the quarantine. Although it was clearly a well-done program, with production values more like a movie than television and an enthralling storyline with complex, well-developed characters, I had trouble following the plot. Too many things happened that made no sense to me because I hadn’t watched The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, or Star Trek: Voyager. Houston, we have a problem.

When the history of 2020 and COVID-19 is written, it will be one partly of loss and suffering, but it will also be one of great accomplishments. (The big story may be the class distinctions that determined whether people were able to weather the pandemic mostly at home, largely protected from the worst of the devastating virus although not from their own stupidity, or were forced to venture out to work, often in low-paying jobs with little or no protection of their health, in order to support their families. And there is a third group, who stayed home because their jobs vanished in a puff of COVID-19 smoke. But again I digress.) People write “modestly” online of their accomplishments during quarantine, from authoring the great American novel to mastering a new language, becoming more fit or learning to play an instrument.

I, on the other hand, watched Star Trek. I tried to start with the original series, but it was so much cheesier and misogynistic than I remembered. I just couldn’t sit through it. Instead I started with The Next Generation, Season 1, Episode 1, which originally aired on September 28, 1987. This was just before I started a 30-year career at the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (literally just about two weeks before), when my son, now rapidly approaching 40, was only 4, and I still had a husband, who I lost in a transporter accident soon afterward (or somewhere). This wasn’t really “binge watching.” I sometimes watched a couple of episodes a day, but often went several days without watching any at all, so it took a while. I made it through TNG (as we insiders call it) and am now nearly finished with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9), which in real life overlapped slightly with The Next Generation. It appears now that the quarantine will last long enough, at least for those of us who are somewhere behind 23 million people on the vaccination list, for me to make it through Star Trek: Voyager. I also look forward to Star Trek: Enterprise, which I’ve been anticipating eagerly as I’ve been a fan of Scott Bakula since Quantum Leap, and Star Trek: Discovery, another prequel that just started streaming its third season. Discovery takes place in a mirror universe, or something like that. I’ll have to watch it before I can explain. And the second season of Picard is about to start, although I may have to watch the first season again to see if it makes more sense before I start Season 2. There are also enough related series, books, websites, movies, articles and Star Trek minutia to keep me busy for a long time. And so many science fiction and fantasy novels have been written since my teenage years. During the quarantine, I’ve read the Wayfarer series (Becky Chambers) and the Murderbot Diaries  (Martha Wells). I may not binge watch, but I definitely binge read.

Whole books have been written about what we can learn from Star Trek, so I won’t boldly go there. However, there are a few points I’d like to make. The people behind the series did an amazing job imagining what the technology of the future would look like, but their timing was about 300 years off. We’ve already moved past the flip phones and mobile computers that seemed impossible 50 years ago. If you’d asked me back then if there would ever be something like replicators, I would have scoffed. But today many businesses and even high school and college technology labs have 3-D printers. I’m not sure they can yet replicate Raktajino, the Klingon tea everyone drinks on Deep Space Nine, but they are making inexpensive and usable medical grade masks and prosthetic devices. 

As the series progressed, individuals and teams were frequently zapped back into the past but seemed to become less and less concerned about taking actions that would change the course of history. Haven’t these people ever read about the Butterfly Effect in Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder? Sometimes, it seemed characters were deliberately changing the outcome to something more in line with their wishes. My favorite episode, however, was “Trials and Tribble-ations” (DS9 S5 E6), which at least gave lip service to the need to limit interaction between the past and present. The DS9 crew chases a disgraced Kingon spy onto the original Enterprise and Sisko ends up being investigated for his role in altering the timeline. The plot wasn’t one of the series’ best, but the merging of film from an original Star Trek episode with live action footage of the DS9 actors was truly amazing. 

It is surprising how often things that happen in the Star Trek universe mirror social issues we see today, whether it is punishing people who belong to a non-gendered species but decide to be traditionally “male” or “female” (“The Outcast,” TNG S5 E17) or living with a pandemic (“Babel,” DS9 S1 E4; “The Quickening,” DS9 S4 E24). My favorite quote from any episode was from “A Man Alone” (DS9 S1 E3), when Keiko O’Brien wants to open a school and asks Jake if he misses his earlier classroom experiences. “No — I guess.” Jake waffles with the same spirit of contradiction children exhibit during today’s remote learning. "Studying alone on the computer, it kind of gets boring sometimes.” I thought that was so profound I wrote it down.

One of the interesting things about streaming television series, computer in hand, so long after they originally aired is that you need not wonder about anything. I’ve spent a lot of time searching the Internet for explanations of what is going on or trying to find an explanatory reference to a detail I missed. It is, of course, sad to see how many of the actors have died since the making of their respective series, including creator and producer Gene Roddenberry; nearly all the writers and actors from the original Star Trek; Rene Auberjonois and Aron Eisenberg from Deep Space Nine; and Majel Barrett, who appeared in the pilot for the original series, in the original series itself as Nurse Chapel, as Lwaxana Troi in both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and as the voice of the computer across the Star Trek universe. 

Well, I must put on my red shirt and get back to my episodes. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Our common enemy, BTW, is not a virus but people’s self-centeredness and distrust of science. Damn it, Jim.* I’m not a scientist but I know science has the answers. We just may not ask it the right questions.

*My parents may have censored the television, but they did not believe there was such a thing as age inappropriate books. I could read whatever I wanted, but I’d better be prepared to discuss it.

**McCoy never said “Damn it.” It was, after all, still the 60s.