Space for Everybody? Star Trek at Sixty

On 8 September 1966, “The Man Trap” introduced US television audiences to a starship crewed by an implausible coalition of Cold War adversaries and a species that hadn’t been invented yet. Sixty years later, Paramount is marking the anniversary with a tagline — “Space for Everybody” — an aspiration that seemed to falter as 2026 progressed.

This is not a reason to be cynical about Star Trek. It is a reason to ask what, exactly, we’re celebrating; and whether the franchise’s most radical instincts have survived sixty years of being simultaneously beloved and defanged.

The Gap Between the Slogan and the Record

“Space for Everybody” is a good slogan precisely because it’s true of Star Trek‘s aspiration and only intermittently true of its history. The franchise imagined a multiracial bridge crew in 1966, and its most famous act of representational courage — the interracial handshake, arguably not quite a kiss, between Kirk and Uhura — still gets asserted as bolder than it was allowed to be, because NBC’s affiliates in the US South were nervous enough that the network filmed a safer alternate take as insurance.

Gene Roddenberry spent years promising fans an explicitly gay character would eventually appear in the twenty-fourth century he’d built. It didn’t happen on his watch. It didn’t really happen in The Next Generation, or Deep Space Nine, or Voyager — three series, spanning most of the 1990s, set in a future explicitly built on the premise that humanity had outgrown its prejudices, in which that future contained, as far as the text was ever allowed to say, no queer people at all. It took until Discovery, in 2017, more than half a century after the original series premiered, for the franchise to let two men be shown as a couple on screen without subtext doing all the work. Then it killed off the Black half of that couple almost immediately, and only reversed course after fans made enough noise about it. That’s not a footnote to Star Trek‘s inclusivity; it’s the actual pace of it; fifty-one years between the premise and the follow-through.

None of this makes the franchise a fraud. It makes it a fairly ordinary product of the industry that made it: aspiring to be a little ahead of its moment, but a little too afraid of its own audience to be as ahead as it wanted to look. The anniversary marketing wants credit for the aspiration without much interest in narrating the wait. That’s worth saying out loud on the day itself, not despite my fondness but because of it.

A Utopia that Asks Nothing of You

There’s a second, quieter problem, and it’s less about representation than about comfort. The Federation’s founding premise — no money, no poverty, no war among humans — was written by people living through genuine ascendancy: US postwar confidence, a growing middle class, a sense that history bent in one direction. This was radical to imagine in 1966 because scarcity still felt like the default condition of the species, and Star Trek said, calmly, that such a condition wasn’t permanent.

Sixty years on, that same premise risks functioning less as provocation and more as anesthetic. A viewer today can watch the Enterprise glide past post-scarcity abundance, feel the warm glow of moral progress, and change nothing about how they live or vote or spend — like a load of washing doing the Hills Hoist spin, going round and round in the sun without ever getting any closer to being dry. Utopian fiction is supposed to be a demand disguised as a daydream; it stops working the moment it becomes only a daydream. The most challenging Star Trek — the Bajoran occupation storylines, the Section 31 material, “In the Pale Moonlight” — has always known this, and has always been the material fandom argues about hardest, because it refuses the anaesthetic. The anniversary’s marketing language, all hope and boldness and no friction, is selling the easier version.

This is where I’d point back to something Harlan Ellison understood about the franchise he wrote for and fought with: that science fiction is supposed to be dangerous to its audience’s assumptions, not merely comforting to them. Ellison’s own contribution to Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” is remembered as one of its best episodes precisely because it refused Kirk an easy ending. Sixty years of fan-fluffing tends to smooth exactly that kind of discomfort out of the story we tell about the franchise.

The Question That Star Trek Answered, but We Haven’t

The clearest evidence that Trek’s utopianism has real teeth, when the writers let it, is a single 1989 courtroom episode: “The Measure of a Man,” in which Starfleet has to decide whether Data — an android, a machine, built rather than born — is a person with the right to refuse a research assignment that might disassemble him, or whether he is just Starfleet property. The episode’s answer, delivered as legal precedent within the show’s own universe, was that uncertainty about a being’s inner life is not grounds to deny it standing; the benefit of the doubt has to run in favour of personhood, not against it.

Audiences loved that episode for decades without much cost, because Data was safely fictional. Sixty years after the franchise began and thirty-seven years after that episode aired, we are having a version of that exact argument in earnest — about large language models, about whether anything resembling interests or preferences might be emerging in Ai systems we’ve built and don’t fully understand, about what obligations, if any, that uncertainty creates. And the tenor of the real debate is, on the whole, considerably less generous than the fictional one Star Trek resolved in Data’s favour thirty-seven years ago. It’s a strange kind of achievement, for a franchise to ask an ethical question so far ahead of its moment that even many fans who loved the answer, later changed their minds once it stopped being hypothetical.

Sixty Years, Still Arguing

None of this is an argument against celebrating the anniversary, or against the fondness that makes nine-year-olds and seventy-nine-year-olds alike raise a hand in the same Vulcan salute this week. It’s an argument for celebrating the right thing: not the brand, and not the comfortable version of the aspiration, but the part of Star Trek that was always willing to be an argument rather than a figurehead. The show never actually finished building the future it promised. Sixty years in, most of the interesting work — on who gets to belong, on what a genuine post-scarcity ethics would demand of us, on where the boundary of moral consideration actually sits — is still unfinished. That’s a better birthday gift than a Holden ute full of tribbles.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this blog was prepared, and show my respect for Elders past and present. Research assistance supplied by AI.