Star Trek

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If you aren't already hearing the theme song you might not belong here.

"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!"

– James T. Kirk, third captain of the starship USS Enterprise

Star Trek is a multimedia science-fiction series and one of the cornerstones of nerdy media properties, and one of the few to crossover into mainstream popularity (alongside Star Wars, Doctor Who and a few others). It's also one of the longest-running science fiction franchises, as it began when the the first episode of The Original Series aired in 1966, and since then has had over 50 years of geek history spanning several generations. Needless to say, it's had a huge influence on all things sci-fi, and, by extension, /tg/.

Originally, Star Trek was noblebright beyond noblebright and, in many ways, was the polar opposite of Warhammer 40K's grimdark. The more recent reboot films, however, have taken a much, much more grimdark tone, which is delightfully skubtastic.

Games

There's been plenty of tabletop games and vidya gaems featuring Star Trek without being merchandising bullshit (see: themed Monopoly sets), including one of the earliest action multiplayer wargame: Netrek.

• Star Trek: Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier (1978) The very first Trek tabletop RPG. Written by, I shit you not, Michael Scott. Groggy (grokky?) as all hell, and due for an OSR.
• Star Fleet Battles (SFB) (1979-) The crunchiest starship combat game you're ever going to find outside of a computer. Based on the original series and not any of the later series, for licensing reasons. Takes some liberties with the setting, which (combined with the aforementioned licensing) is why "Star Trek" isn't actually in the title. It's had its own video game spinoff in the form of Starfleet Command. The series died when the last company owned by Interplay broke up in the early 2000s.
• Star Trek: The Role Playing Game (1982-1989) Made by FASA, essentially Traveller-lite, or a happier, shinier Rogue Trader. Hasn't aged terribly well, what with having been made when the only canonical Star Trek materials to work with were the original and animated series, the first four films, and a couple of now non-canon novels. If you try to dust it off, expect tons of conflict with the rest of the show. Died as they were trying to update it for TNG, because Paramount's corporate suits (surprise, surprise) had no idea what an RPG actually entailed and were worried about violence, and getting their cut, and... oh you know the drill by now. Welcome to the 80's.
• Star Trek: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator (1983) FASA designed this, so it feels like Battletech but not as good.
• Prime Directive (1993-2008) The most successful tabletop RPG line (but that's not saying much), it's actually still in print. Produced by Amarillo Design Bureau, so again no direct name-dropping of "Star Trek." Lasted as long as it did by constantly evolving, in Borg-like fashion, to adapt to the current zeitgeist. Has had 4 editions, with the second using GURPS, the third using d20, and the fourth d20 Modern.
• Star Trek CCG (1994-2007, 2011-2014, 2013-2015, 2018-) There's been a few of these, most notably the games released by Decipher, but never globally popular. They also suffered from game balance problems from fans wanting their fave character, but needing extra rules for their quirks. There's also the problem of putting numbers to character stats, such as one game that asserted that Picard having about twice the integrity of a Klingon pig. Later versions are "deck-building" games to try to cash in on the popularity of Dominion and Thunderstone. And now virtual CCGs are the order of the day.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation Role Playing Game (1998-1999) The next attempt, made by Last Unicorn Games. Won an award for best new game, which makes it a complete shame that no one has ever played it.
• Star Trek Red Alert (2000) A Diskwars game themed to Star Trek.
• Star Trek Roleplaying Game (2002-2005) When Decipher had the CCG license, they decided, "What the hell, let's make an RPG, too." It, like so many of its predecessors, died unnoticed and unmourned.
• Star Trek Online (2010-) An MMO. Decent gameplay mechanics, especially starship combat. Storyline leaves something to be desired, especially when the ostensibly peaceful Federation trades shots at least once with every other faction in the galaxy.
• Call To Arms: Star Trek (2011) Mongoose's license for Babylon 5 expired, so they collaborated with Amarillo Design Bureau (the Star Fleet Battles guys), re-themed the game to Star Trek along with improving the system to make it more nifty. Less micro-management than SFB, and ships get some cinematic feats.
• Star Trek: Expeditions (2011) Ignore the tie-ins to the movie, Reiner Knizia designed this. Explore the gameboard, flip over missions, try to have the proper crew to get victory points.
• Star Trek: Fleet Captains (2011) Tile flipping, exploring, and spaceships fighting over resources
• Star Trek: Attack Wing (2013-) WizKids license the flightpath system from Fantasy Flight Games and adds Star Trek to the mix, Skub ensues. The game has been consistently plagued with balance issues, to the point that the rules errata is more than ten times longer than the actual rules. The actual current rules for things like the Borg special movement and fighter squadrons are completely different than the rules as written.
• Star Trek Adventures (2017-) The latest attempt at an RPG, by Modiphius, coming out soon to tentative praise. It also comes with a whole range of miniatures of the various crews from the show.

So why should I care?

Because between them, these six TV series and their assorted spinoff movies, books, etc. can provide inspiration for any sci-fi game you could care to run. If you want light-hearted action, look at the sort of things that happened in TOS or DS9 to get the crew into some dangerous situation. If you want a charismatic villain, look at Gul Dukat or the Borg Queen. If you want moral issues and debates, look at the shit that happened to Voyager and remove all the transparent deck-stacking and cheesy moralizing (or you could read any decent SF book/watch a Twilight Zone episode written in the previous 50 years, if you don't need your source material to be served at a 2nd grade level). Like Tolkien is to fantasy it's a prime gateway drug to science fiction and especially science fiction which is more than "action movie IN SPACE!"

Not to mention in any sci-fi RPG with remotely free-form rules you're likely to encounter Star Trek fanboys, so you might as well know what they're talking about. The unholy spawn of a Trekkie and a Furry is known as a Chakat, and you should fear it.

At its best Star Trek is thoughtful, optimistic futurism with a positive human element and brings you to strange new worlds in the grand tradition of speculative fiction which is accessible to even the layman. At its worst Star Trek is arrogant, smug, hypocritical, preachy, dull, sloppy and prone to the strawman fallacy.

Setting

Here's the Cliff's Notes on Star Trek. A couple of general warnings; firstly, Star Trek likes to really take its "racial themes" bits just a little too far. Second, despite this, it's rare for an entire race to be completely irredeemable the way many fictional aliens are: there are heroic and sympathetic characters from nearly every race listed below, able to put more-positive spins on their racial themes. Thirdly, aside from very occasional appearances by aliens who are so bizarre that humankind can barely comprehend them, all of the aliens look like dudes with rubber masks on (because they are). In real life, this was because there was no budget for anything else, but in-universe it's been explained by some kind of Precursor race who seeded all of the planets with their broadly humanoid DNA, and every race evolved slightly differently from there. There isn't much fluff on what these precursors were like, and some of it was contradictory, and Gene Roddenberry didn't like the idea (although he still had to work with the rubber forehead stuff). The good news for fa/tg/uys who like homebrew is that this makes it fairly easy to write d20 system rules for all of the races - after all, most D&D races are just humans with rubber masks on...

A Composite Creation

This is a general note that one should consider: Star Trek was created in pretty much the opposite way as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien worked out a bunch of linguistic stuff and general history of Arda in his spare time, then decided to use that as the basis for some stories that he eventually gave to some publishers which in the end sold quite well.

Roddenberry by contrast pitched a very broad general idea (it's the future, things are good, we got guys some on a ship exploring space; a "wagon train to the stars") to the networks who eventually took it up on it and had him work with a variety of writers and actors who added to this rough skeleton of an idea in a process that would continue on to this day.

This is not to knock either approach, but both have their advantages and disadvantages. In regards to Star Trek, a franchise which relies mostly on an episode of the week format that's been going on for more than half a century this means that the canon is a fucking mess. There were numerous people at the helm and many of them had often very different ideas about what should be done that were just thrown out to see what stuck, many of which were contradictory and some of which we'd frankly rather forget. In general fans and fluff writers have been spending a whole lot of time trying to straighten out things and much of the lore is basically a rough consensus of what people like and what fits in with it. Later series got more systematic about this, but there are still points of contention and a lot of flat out contradictions due to its scattershot nature.

Factions

The Federation

Starfleet's ships of the Line (primary timeline)

Might as well talk about that main faction. The United Federation of Planets is what the Tau think they are. Its backstory is that in the distant future of the 1990s, übermensch created by genetic engineering began conquering the Earth. The normies fought back and won through sheer numbers, cryogenically freezing the Augments and kicking them out of Earth, but the damage and mass political unrest of World War III got half the planet nuked. This was why genetic engineering was banned. Fortunately, in 2063, a drunken asshole heroic visionary named Zefram Cochrane created humanity's first warp drive (though it functioned based on the principle that gravity bends space-time, and was therefore more akin to an Alcubierre drive than anything that's dependent on the Warp) and made first contact with the Vulcans. The Vulcans eventually helped humanity rebuild and overcome poverty, disease, war and hunger. With its Earthly problems solved, man turned to the stars and found out its three closest neighbors were racist xenophobic dicks trying to murder each other. Since any war between them would've swept up puny little Earth and gotten it glassed, humans decided to force their neighbors to sit down and talk things out. Incredibly, it worked, and the United Federation of Planets was born.

The Federation is a commie noblebright hippieland society with a strong democratic government (pretty much Roddenberry's idea of utopia). As a result, Federation citizens work not because they have to, but because they want to. However, despite their advanced technology, transhumanism, that is intentionally making SPESS MEHREENS and mutants like the infamous antagonist Khan Noonien Singh, is illegal.

The Federation's Navy is almost always called Starfleet. It's a mix between a military, a coast guard and a space agency, and usually rates scientific research as a higher priority than defense. One of its quirks is that it doesn't subscribe to the "bigger is better" policy used in most sci-fi, and even by most of the other Star Trek factions. If the Federation does make a large ship, it's because they want it to have a daycare, swimming pool and ice cream bar. If they want a warship, they'll take a little gunship half the size of a modern day destroyer and pack it with enough antimatter nukes and guns to exterminate a solar system. In some cases, especially when dealing with ships from several centuries into the future, the ship is bigger on the inside than on the outside allowing it to hide a vast array of powerful armaments, space-bending equipment, and even whole planetary landscapes. They can get away with this because they out-tech almost everyone else by a country mile. The reason for the series' infamous "technobabble" is that even they don't know everything their tech can do! their technology is always evolving, and they know it so well that they can often use it in ways that even the original in-show design schematics did not intend.

In theory, Starfleet follows a rule called the "Prime Directive", which says that you're not allowed to interfere with low-tech races ("low-tech" being defined as "not having invented the warp drive", since warp technology apparently follows naturally from the laws of physics) or else things like turning the locals into Nazis might happen. The Original Series talked about this rule all the time, and Captain Kirk threw it aside whenever there was a sexy alien babe in sight. From TNG onward, it tended to instead be brought up whenever a hack writer needed a reason for the heroes to not instantly resolve a given problem with their superior technology or a way of making our heroes look like assholes for following it rigidly (yes, we could save this species from extinction but that would be interfering with the cosmic plan!), though there were a few good episodes that took it seriously.

Some of the more important member races are:

• Humans: You know 'em, you love 'em. Comprise seemingly 90% of Starfleet for reasons in no way related to the cost of makeup/CGI.
• Vulcan: The Original Space Elves, very emotional, especially during "pon'farr" (see below), who followed the teachings of an enlightened sage and embraced logic and rationalism after their emotions nearly led to them wiping themselves out. They are what the average race of fantasy elves think they are, except on Enterprise because the writers wanted to artificially inject tension into the show (some of that was retconned to be a Romulan plot). Occasionally enter a state called "pon'farr," where they need to either fuck something half to death, kill it with the nearest sharp object, or die of a brain aneurysm to let out all that pent-up emotional tension. Fa/tg/uys may recognize this as the sensation they feel every time Games Workshop puts out a new army book. Pretty bro-tier overall.
• Andorians: Blue dudes with antennae and constant fits of passion, the polar opposite of Vulcans and there one time foes. Pretty much fa/tg/uys, right down to the romantic streak, in the technical sense. Also, they live underground on a diet of meatbread and rage. Most of what defined them happened in Enterprise as they rarely showed up in the TNG-era, and even then did so as set dressing, allegedly because one of the showrunners hated their antennae and banned anyone from using them.
• Tellarites: Space Dorfs; like insulting everyone and arguing a lot (no, really, petty insults are considered a polite gesture in Tellarite culture), mostly because the very first tellarite ever shown in the series got in an argument with Spock's dad and now it's their whole racial thing. “Sarek said something in a scene once that was meant to demonstrate that he was stand-offish and kinda rude, but we like Sarek so it's now the defining attribute of this species.” It's all in good fun you understand, your confidence in your ideas and actions should be sturdy enough to withstand honest assessment and critique.
• Betazoids: Invariably attractive humanoid aliens with telepathic powers. Half-betazoid, half-humans apparently only have "empathic" powers, so they are well-regarded by Starfleet captains for their ability to point out the obvious and fill out the tight bodygloves that make up the Starfleet uniform in a pleasing manner, especially since theirs seem to come in a custom cut for reasons entirely unrelated to Roddenberry's erection. Their homeworld is like dropping a really hippie college and Space Vegas into a blender.
• Trill: Originally a one-off race introduced as a sapient parasite that possesses and controls a barely, or even unintelligent humanoid host, they were radically reworked in Deep Space Nine, right down to losing their rubber foreheads in favor of spots. Now, the host is itself an intelligent humanoid, and some, but not all, of their kind are able to willingly merge with a symbiont (because someone can't spell) that allows them to access a mixture of the memories and personalities of all previous hosts, though in a way that, theoretically, enhances the host's personality rather than destroying it or subsuming it. Then, when they die, they can pass on the symbiont to another host, theoretically one they mentored. Also, because the makeup artist didn't want to ruin the leads' good looks on DS9, they went from having a rubber forehead to some spots.

The Klingon Empire

A Bat'Leth (sword of honor), one of several types of Klingon bladed weapons. Frequently mocked IRL for being a poorly designed weapon.

"It is a good day to die!"

The Federation's main rival and (movie era and afterwards) the quintessential Star Trek race of lumpy foreheaded aliens. Originally they were a rough analogue to the Russians (though they took some elements from communist China) in a rough cold war allegory with the Federation (even though the Federation are as commie as they come, though admittedly much of that came around in the TNG era). Their defining feature was that they were militaristic and imperialistic while the Federation was scholarly and respected liberty. This gradually moved more and more into them becoming Imperial Japan/Vikings In SPESSS obsessed with honor, fighting and dying honorably in battle while worshiping at the altar of warrior Jesus, even as they turned from the Federation's bitter enemies into that friend who's fun to be around when he's not getting into drunken bar fights. You see shades of it in during the movie era and it became more and more prominent through TNG, culminating in DS9. Do not make the mistake of thinking that Klingons are nothing more than barbaric savages however; with Worf being part of the crew, and with DS9 dealing with Klingon politics an awful lot we can see Klingon society as it truly is. Even so they do often wander into self parody territory.

The Klingons, in their current iteration, are a feudal society ruled by a council made up of the most powerful families. Klingon society holds very little value on things such as currency and material gain (which results in the Klingon empire having a very simplistic understanding of economics), believing that anything you acquire without some form of blood, sweat and/or tears on your part is a pathetic and dishonorable way of going about things, much the same way many cultures used to hurl abuse at merchants and bankers. Another thing to keep in mind is that a Klingon's reputation is literally everything. This can be easily seen in the episode "The House Of Quark" where dying honorably can literally change the outcome of an entire noble house, later when the Grand Council is visibly disgusted at D'Ghor. No respectable Klingon uses money to defeat his opponents. And no respectable Klingon would be so eager to perform an execution of an unarmed Ferengi in what was supposed to be an honorable duel. Klingons are still capable of being cunning and crafty however, and having a high diplomacy score is viewed as honorable as they still have examples of cunning and clever heroes tricking boorish and stupid monsters.

Klingons often carry swords into battle in an age of energy beam guns. In-universe, this is less suicidal than it sounds in the context of boarding actions and tight starship corridors. The Bat'leth is actually a rather shitty weapon. The Mek'leth is noted to be better in most situations. They use the same Disruptor weapons as the Romulans, and at one point used similar starship designs. While is explained as the result of a temporary and unholy alliance, given the eventual animosity between the two races, it was just an excuse to reuse props on a limited budget.

The Klingons are tied with the Vulcans and the Borg as being the most prominent and recognizable non-human species in Star Trek. Beloved of the Internet and the general public, to the point that there are published books like "A Klingon Christmas" in the world. The Klingons have their own constructed language. If you are ever worrying that you might not be a nerd, learning Klingon will solve that problem for you. Please note that this is in general considered by experts to be pathognomonic of autism. You have not experienced Shakespeare until you hear it in the original Klingon.

The Romulan Star Empire

"It's always chess with the Romulans"

You know those Vulcans? Well a few thousand years ago, as their planet was ravaged by war, some of them turned to intense emotional control and logic to tame their murderous passions, while most others left the planet altogether, founding a colony on the planet Romulus and dubbing themselves Romulans. Since said planet shares a name with a mythical figure known for founding a city which built a vast empire, and they had warp drive while those around them did not, you probably know that they turned to building an empire of their own. They hold the second place of prominence as immediate rivals to the Federation. Comically, they actually have better emotional control than the average Vulcan, since they gene-engineered most of their problems away years ago, and don't have to deal with the emotional blowback from pon'farr. The downside is that they lost some of their cousins' niftier powers, like mind reading and being able to transfer their soul into another person for safekeeping. Although Star Trek Online also revealed that their trip to Romulus was a terrible ordeal, and their gene-engineering was taking during that time resulting in them losing most emotions save for bitterness of being "forced out".

The difference between the Klingons and the Romulans is basically the difference between Gork and Mork, or Khorne and Tzeentch. Klingons will fight you up front with simple brute force. Romulans are sneakier guys, preferring to fight you when you're not looking with spies, cloaked ships and complex plots behind the scenes and playing the long game. There is a lot of political infighting among them, though where the Klingons would duel to the death Romulans would seek to discredit their rivals, have them die in unfortunate "accidents" or disappear. This difference has left both Romulans and Klingons with a big hate-boner for each other, to the Romulans the Klingons are crude brutish barbarians and to the Klingons the Romulans are a pack of scheming cowardly weaklings.

Like the Klingons, they served as a rough Cold War allegory. In this case, they were rough analogs to Communist China (as seen by 1960s Americans), a distant horde of inscrutable and potentially dangerous Orientals who generally were unseen and projecting vague menace, but when encountered face-to-face could pack quite a punch indeed: the first major Interstellar War that Star Trek Earth fought was with the Romulans, which was fought entirely in space with neither side ever seeing the other face to face. Afterwards they set up a North Korea. From the Original Series onward, they frequently squabble and bicker with the Federation, before joining forces with them to fight the Dominion in Deep Space Nine and having their government devastated in Nemesis. Finally, Romulus itself got caught in a supernova as part of the Ambramsverse's backstory.

The Ferengi Alliance

A typical ferengi engaged in typical ferengi activities

"A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all."-Eighteenth Rule of Acquisition

Introduced in TNG's early days as the villains for the series, and what /pol/ thinks Jews are. Some Jewish people have actually complained about their being subliminally Jewish and thus anti-Semetic, specifically mentioning that they were moneyhungry, lascivious, and ugly, and their large ear lobes were stand-ins for the sterotypical Jewish nose (more on that here, we're not shitting you), based on an old medieval stereotype that was enforced to prevent them owning land or assets. The idea was to make a caricature of capitalism as a contrast with the techno-communist Federation. This might have worked if these were not TNG's early days. Instead they overshot the mark by a light year or so, on top of other bad decisions, and you got a race of short (Gene wanted to make an evil short race as big evil races were overplayed), big-eared, goblin-like losers about as threatening as a grumpy pug. Over the first and second seasons they tried to make these guys threatening, but they fell flat on their face every time. Eventually the writers just said "fuck it" and the Ferengi got demoted to comic relief species, and their status as terrible enemies was demoted to propaganda designed to scare the Federation while the Ferengi government tried to figure out what to make of a species that rejected the acquisition of wealth as a goal. The Ferengi had some good moments in the later seasons of TNG, but most of the best stuff that fleshed them out came from DS9, which had an awesome Ferengi bartender named Quark as a major character. For an idea of what the Ferengi might have been like if the writers had their shit together, look up the Druuge of Star Control II or the Magog Cartel from Oddworld.

Ferengi religion is only hinted upon in DS9, but what is seen implies a simplistic system based on financial success. Ferengi all follow a rulebook/canon known as the Rules of Acquisition, which can be described as Ayn Rand IN SPACE and condensed into the form of Confucius' Analects. There are 285 of these, each a short piece of advice on how to stay in the black. Examples include "Peace is good for business," "War is good for business," "Never have sex with the boss's daughter," and "Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack." The first, and most important, of these is "Once you have their money, you never give it back." Sometimes, the Ferengi Randian spirituality extends into outright interpretations of the afterlife: according to some, the afterlife consists of the Divine Treasury and the Vault of Eternal Destitution, which are respectively analogous to Heaven and Hell. Entrance into one or the other depends on one's business ventures at the time of death; those that were turning a profit are allowed to enter the Divine Treasury, and the rest are damned to the Vault.

Ferengi government is ruled over by a Grand Nagus, a mix between a popechief rabbi and a CEO, and he basically treats his civilization like some sort of company, with citizens regarded as workers. Directly below him is the Ferengi Commerce Authority, a quasi-religious organization dedicated to ensuring that correct business practices were followed and correct moral behavior was shown (including keeping the proles in line), although to the Ferengi, these are one and the same. The agents of the FCA are the Liquidators, who are essentially Inquisitors crossed with IRS auditors on steroids. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Ferengi females have no rights and are mentioned as not even being allowed to wear clothes, which leads to boorish behavior on the part of Ferengi towards just about any species. Of course, we see female Ferengi on the show who push that envelope, but it seems that overall "regressive" does not even begin to describe the gender relationships in their culture. Quark's mother, a social climber who marries the head of their government, begins pushing through a women's rights movement during DS9, which proves more successful as time goes on.

The Borg Collective

The Borg have assimilated and improved your die. It always rolls six. Crap your pants, 'cause resistance is futile.

"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture shall adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

– The Borg's opening hail. This is not a boast or a brag, it's them simply explaining you how things are going to go down.

"One other thing. You may encounter Enterprise crew members who've already been assimilated. Don't hesitate to fire. Believe me, you'll be doing them a favour."

– Picard going full grimdark.

The Ferengi were utter failures as serious villains, so they needed something to fill that gap. Thus they made the Borg, an aggressive hive-minded collective of hyper-adaptive, regenerating cyborgs that assimilates entire species into itself in its attempt to improve and evolve. Shit, that's like coming up with Warforged while trying to replace Kender.

In many ways, the Borg are the truest dark reflection of the Federation, and despite their name, they're not Swedish. While the Feds want you to join their little club on your own, to "add your culture to the galactic community," the Prime Directive means they will ultimately accept you turning them down, even if you have shit they really want. The Borg say "fuck that" and just absorb you. While the Federation believes everyone should work together for the greater good, they still have a very strong sense of individualism and a culture of personal accomplishment (unless your individual belief happens to run counter to the Federation's principles anyway, in which case you're just WRONG because the Federation is the best). The Borg pool all their minds together into a massive collective consciousness in the pursuit of group perfection, becoming an almost-literal personification of techno-capital. The Federation is all about beauty and tranquility and all that hippie stuff, and their tech is eco-friendly and dolphin-safe. Borg strip mine entire planets and drain entire oceans in the name of growth and efficiency.

Your standard Borg cube is a huge multi-kilometer metal box (yes, bigger than most Imperial Navy cruisers) able to go up against an entire Federation warfleet and win. That's right, one of their ships could threaten the entire Federation and Exterminatus Earth. When done right, they are a cold, calculating, nigh-unstoppable force, a threat to all life that wants to retain free and distinct personalities (although they will ignore a single person if not on an assimilation mission, as what they really want is to absorb whole civilizations). Apparently, in Picard's nightmare in First Contact, the Borg assimilation process includes a surgical drill through the eye. While awake. Of all the stuff to come out of the TNG Era they are undoubtedly the most well recognized in mass pop culture.

Unfortunately the got a bad downgrade during Voyager (the Borg Queen blew up cubes full of tens of thousands of drones because a few of them have been severed from the Hive Mind), but even there they were frequently not to be messed with. One amusing thing to note for people that haven't watched TNG: the Borg were actually only in six episodes (and three were breakaway drones) and one movie, yet they're arguably the franchise's most famous pure villains aside from Khan. Goes to show how good they were when written properly. Then in Voyager they get their shit completely pushed in when they discover a new race of extradimensional aliens which they label Species 8472, which were immune to being assimilated, and had to ask the Federation for help in dealing with them.

The Cardassian Union

Introduced in TNG, they are third fiddle to the Klingons and the Romulans. If the Klingons are hypothetically-honorable techno-barbarian warriors and the Romulans are an empire of civilized and refined but sly and ruthless expansionists, the Cardassians are essentially scaly fascists re-enacting 1984 IN SPACE. Their trials announce the outcome at the beginning, and the defense attorney is executed if he wins. Also, THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!

Originally a race of peaceable, spiritual artists called the Hebitians (ironically not dissimilar to the Bajorans), modern Cardassia was born in hunger and desperation when their homeworld began to suffer simultaneous mass famine, pandemic, resource depletion, and ecological collapse. A military junta seized power, figuratively and literally auctioned off the soul of their culture through liquidating all the planet's art and religious artifacts into cold hard cash, and turned the Cardassians into the opportunistic imperialists they are today.

Despite being a whole lot weaker than the Federation, the Cardassians manage to hold their own, partly because what they lack in resources and raw power is made up for by a combination of intense cunning and high charisma stats. Compared to the equally deceptive Romulans, the Cardies are more likely to flash you a smile while tickling your ribs with a knife. They'll use any tool they can to gain the upper hand and while that often means unpleasant and terminal sessions in dark rooms, strip mined planets and the enslavement of entire species, they'll gladly become your bestest buddy if it would achieve their goals. Their intelligence service, the Obsidian Order, is also one of the most ruthlessly efficient organizations in the entire sector, managing to outscale the Romulan Tal Shiar when it comes to producing magnificent bastards and manipulating the politics of entire worlds to their advantage. Unlike the Romulans or the Klingons, they don't tolerate the sort of literal infighting that is rampant in both those states, that shit only serves to weaken GLORIOUS CARDASSIA and needs to be stamped out with ruthless efficiency. Exposing that someone who just happens to be your enemy as being a dangerous subversive is just a benefit, although this can result in both sides of a conflict shouting "For Cardassia!" as they charge each other. Sort of how Democrats and Republicans are both for America, yet oppose each other.

Cardassia has a very fluid hierarchical government, similar to the political realities of post-Stalin but pre-Collaspe Soviet Russia. Broadly speaking, there are three different facets of the government: the Central Command (which holds all the power) the Obsidian Order (who holds the least amount of power, but controls the most puppets) and the Detapa Council (similar to the High Lords of Terra and just as worthless). Cardassian society holds a very strict view of family, placing family just below the needs of the State.

The State holds a semi-divine mythical status in the eyes of its citizens, with it being viewed as impossible for the State to ever make mistakes. The ideal Cardassian life was one of complete loyalty and servitude to the State and family, with the "repetitive epic," detailing how generations of Cardassians go on to serve both in exactly the same way over and over seen as the height of their culture. The Cardassian government is assumed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent by pretty much every Cardassian, with all Cadassians gladly giving of themselves to the State. Such was this level of belief that when Picard was tortured by the Obsidian order, the torturer saw nothing wrong with bringing his daughter to work because he was working for the State, and therefore the torture of Picard could never be disturbing or wrong. That's why their trials announce their sentences at the beginning and execute the defense attorney if he wins; their "trials" are more excuses to show off the power and infallibility of the State to the masses than actually determine guilt or innocence.

As far as plot significant activities went, they had a war with the Federation a few years before TNG which ended in the creation of a Demilitarized Zone between the two powers and (significant to Deep Space Nine) abandoning the previously occupied planet of Bajor they had exploited for resources. After a disastrous war with the Klingons led to a popular revolution and overthrow of the existing government, one leader seized power, declared himself absolute leader, and joined the Dominion towards the end of DS9, which was some serious bad news for the DS9 crew.

The Bajoran Republic

The Bajorans are a species native to the Planet Bajor. They were, until shortly before the events of Deep Space Nine, under a brutal occupation by the Cardassians who strip mined their planet. They had a fighting resistance which veered in and out of being considered terrorists and all in all were often represented as Palestinians IN SPEHSS. After that, they got their independence, although they're thinking about joining the Federation. The Bajorans have one system and are technologically backwards; the Federation is technically breaking the Prime Directive by interacting with them, but as they've spent years under the oppression of a warp-capable species, they can probably handle it. Also DS9 proves that ancient Bajorans managed to travel at warp speeds to Cardassia using solar sails and an enormous amount of luck, which technically makes them a warp-capable species. The only reason why they are significant in terms of the politics of Star Trek is that they have a wormhole near their planet, which has some timey-wimey aliens living it that they worship as gods, and serves as the only way to get to or from the Gamma Quadrant that won't take decades, making it strategically priceless. Hilariously, this was discovered almost immediately after the Cardassians thought they'd extracted everything of value from the Bajorans and peace'd out, certain that the system was no longer worth the PR hit they were taking from it, only to get burned by some harsh seller's remorse. Also, their species has the oldest civilization (roughly a half-million years) of any major Star Trek race, and the wormhole aliens have gifted them some cool shit, like the Orb of Time.

The big thing that makes the Bajorans unique is that they actually have a serious religion going on -the human race is depicted as mostly non-religious. They're also probably one of the most accurate depictions of any highly religious alien race in a sci-fi franchise, because they are divided between the majority who interpret their religion as peace and love, and a small but loud minority of bastards who interpret it as condoning acts of terrorism. A blatant attempt to simulate Israelis for criticism, although that can apply to many religions nowadays.

The Dominion

A vast empire which exists on the other side of the galaxy in the Gamma Quadrant. The Dominion is ruled over by a species of liquid shapeshifters called The Founders. They have at their disposal a military composed of two genetically engineered species that worship the Founders as gods: the short and articulate Vorta who serve as ambassadors, bureaucrats, and political commisars and the big brutal Jem'hadar, who are vat grown, drug addicted, cannon fodder. These oversee a large number of vassal races, including (as of later seasons of DS9) the Cardassians.

The Founders were once (according to them anyway) a peaceful, kind civilization of explorers who wished to see the galaxy, explore strange new worlds, and seek out new forms of life. Unfortunately, they did this in the wrong neighborhood, and quickly ran into species who did not tolerate others. The fact that the Founders were shapeshifters capable of mimicking almost anyone did not help either. Paranoia, mutual mistrust, and some very bad things eventually led to the Founders deciding "fuck this" and moving their planet into a nebula so nobody would bother them. So more or less, a grimmer, darker, counterpart to the Federation, but with spookier Real Aliens.

The Founders are obsessed with order and are both extremely racist and xenophobic, and believe that all alien life is inherently untrustworthy and evil, and the best thing to do is conquer/enslave them before they do the same to them. They don't care about the rights of "Solids", and will happily ignore any sense of decency when convenient. This can be seen when The Dominion runs a simulation of the Dominion dominating the Alpha Quadrant. When O'Brien is assaulted by a Jem'Hadar and severely beaten to the point of needing emergency teleportation to medical (the crime being "disrespectful"), the Founders (disguised as Federation Officers) do not press charges, and when Sisko comes barging in demanding answers, dismiss him with little concern about their own soldiers brutalizing citizens. Their overall ideology could be thought of as Thomas Hobbes IN SPACE: people are inherently evil and the only way to make a better world is to impose order upon them through brute force from a position of absolute, unquestioned power.

The Founders, when not wandering around in various forms, tend to spend their time in a massive ocean literally made up of countless billions of Founders, something which is referred to as the Great Link. According to the Founders, this allows them to share information with each other and come to peaceful decisions. This is rapidly proved to be bullshit; when a separated-at-birth one of their own merged into the Great Link to share his memories of the Federation as peaceful and tolerant space hippies, not only did the Founders ignore his memories, but actively fucked with his mind in an attempt to turn him into a sleeper agent. And even if it weren't, it shows their hypocrisy through their willingness to share freedom and liberty among themselves while depriving all their various slaves and conquered peoples of the same.

The Founders are massive dicks, even to their own people. Failure among Jem'Hadar is rewarded with slow and painful death from deprivation of the drug they're created to need and their lifespans are incredibly short. To be even bigger dicks, the Vorta have no sense of taste and can't appreciate beauty. Not to make them better diplomats, but because they were raised from a primitive stone-age ape tribe, and the Founders think they shouldn't be ever allowed to forget that. (On the plus side, they did give the Vorta an immunity to poison that would make Mortarion himself jealous. Observe.) This may also stem from their own neuroses: the Founders themselves have almost no bodily needs at all and require no nourishment, so they design their slaves to be like them. Notably, Vorta tend to come in packs of clones; a new one is activated when an old one dies, and they retain some memories and personality between "lives," further hammering home how expendable they are to their makers.

And both races are literally engineered to love their makers for what they have done to them and worship and revere them as gods.

Species 8472

The one and only race in the galaxy even the Borg don't want to fuck with. Introduced in Voyager, Species 8472 are three-legged creatures that live in a space called Fluid Space. It's similar to the Eye of Terror for the fact that it connects to an alternate dimension and everyone will be ripped apart upon entering.

When the Borg first came around to try and assimilate them they were completely obliterated in a war in which 4 million Borg were killed in the first few days at the cost of almost no members of Species 8472. This war was such a roflstomp that the Borg were forced to call on the Federation for help. The Federation being the better people swallowed their pride and decided to help their sworn enemies, but were dicks and sent only one ship.

Species 8472 fought with fast moving, small ships and devastating beam weapons so the small ship of the Federation could keep up with them and helped the Borg force the species back into Fluid Space. The Federation were the villains on this one. That said, they eventually came to an accord with Species 8472, preventing further wars between the denizens of Fluid Space, except in lots and lots of video games that want to use a fresh antagonist.

That and that in Star Trek Online, they look like the fucking Predator.

The Q

A race of beings which are so advanced they are basically gods that look onto the Federation judgmentally from time to time with a more playful one of their ranks, who's not above fucking with individual humans from time time. They are mostly a TNG thing and mostly works by grace of John de Lancie's acting chops and charisma with Patrick Stewart, as de Lancie played the character Q, an all-powerful epic troll (no, not the fantasy kind) who's occasionally Tzeentchian games sometimes appeared to be for his own amusement and sometimes to somehow act as education or event protection to the human race. Various subplots involving the Q species range from somewhat thought provoking to mildly entertaining to ridiculous and banal, but the classic episodes that highlighted the charisma and chemistry of the two actors were often quite excellent.

The Mirror Universe

Not so much of a faction as an alternate setting, this is a parallel universe in which things have gone differently at some point in Earth's History. What is the Point of Divergence never exactly specified though there are some vague Nazisque stuff involved, but what is clear is that where the main universe is Noblebright the Mirror Universe is Grimdark. Instead of a peace loving Federation searching for knowledge for it's own sake and built on the idea of understanding and cooperation Earth gave rise to the Terran Empire which seeks out new life and civilizations to conquer and enslave, as it had done with the Klingons. Pretty much it's the PG-13 version of the Imperium of Man with a bit more Grimderp. Junior officers get promoted by killing their superiors, those that fail at that get thrown in the agony booth for their troubles and Emperors get the job by usurping the incumbent. In general everyone in the Mirror Universe is a selfish asshole version of themselves and following comic book logic the uniforms for the female characters are more revealing. Occasionally people can cross over from one universe to the next due to technobabble and cause mischief in either realm.

Originally it was a one off TOS setting for an episode of the week, but it was brought back in a few novels and some romps in Deep Space Nine in which the Terran Empire had fallen. In Enterprise's fourth season it got a two parter that was pretty good and would have been an annual thing if the show had been renewed, this one having little crossover with the main universe (a ship from TOS ended up in the Mirror Universe and is salvaged after all it's crew have died). We also went there in Disco. Voyager never did the mirror universe, but instead got a homage episode with some alien historians in the far future getting the details wrong like historians tend to.

The Star Trek Crew

Whether the focus of the show is exploration, manning a space station in an important locale or trying to get home, all Star Trek series have a basic set up of casting and focus: namely on a collection of people who are usually the senior most officers on the ship. If you decide to make a Star Trek inspired game take this into consideration.

• The Captain: Big cheese. Makes the hard decisions. Needs to be able to talk, think or fight out of situations as needed. The third option fetishist finding the balance between empathy and reason. (Two least skubby examples: Kirk and Picard, but the skub will fly hard if you say one is better than the other, sufficed to say that people like both of them alot but for different reasons)
• The First Officer: Second in command and trusted advisor. Added after the original series, where the role was combined with and split between two others. (Two least skubby examples: Riker and Kira)
• The Science Officer: Got high Int stats. Can analyze the situation and work out solutions. The voice of reason. Almost never human. (Two least skubby examples: Data and Spock)
• The Engineer: Hard working technically minded guy who gets shit done. (Two least skubby examples: Scotty and Geordi)
• The Doctor: Ship's healer with a secondary scientific role. The voice of empathy, whether prickly or serene. (Two least skubby examples: Bones and the EMH Doctor)
• The Security Officer: Rough and tumble no-nonsense sort whose job it is to keep these guys alive when diplomacy fails, which it often does. Often has to juggle providing ship's security with working the tactical station on the bridge in a crisis. (Two least skubby examples: Worf and Odo)
• The Helmsman: Got mad spacecraft piloting skills, either full-sized starships, shuttles, or fighters. (Two least skubby examples: Sulu and Tom Paris)
• The Other Guy: A crewmember whose role doesn't cleanly map onto other positions, a role often restricted to a single show. Example positions include communications officer, ship's councilor, transporter chief, and linguist. (Two Least skubby examples: Uhura and Troi)
• The Outsider: Someone who is a passenger and regular cast member, but exists outside the organization, looking in and commenting. Usually works a side-job, like tailor, bartender, or cook. Either a beloved fan-favorite or utterly despised, there is no middle ground. (Two Least skubby examples: Guinan and Quark)

Some of these hats may be worn by more than one character, some may be worn by no one at all. This is especially true in the original series, which had a smaller cast overall, and which put less emphasis on an ensemble and more on the main trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The usual roles and character dynamics were instead set down by The Next Generation, which later series generally copied.

The Shows

The Original Series

Created in 1966 by legendary sci-fi spiritual liege and money-grubbing sexist lounge lizard Gene Roddenberry and pitched as a "Wagon Train to the stars", it's a pulpy adventure sci-fi, full of fistfights, sword fights, and hammy speeches. (The guns never work.)

The USS Enterprise is tasked by the Federation to go on a five year mission to explore space: the final frontier, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations and boldly go where no man has gone before, though due to budget constraints, her crew often finds that man has in fact gone there before. Or at least something that looks exactly like a man but is actually an Alien; most episodes split the difference. James T. Kirk sleeps with hot alien babes who either die tragically or leave tearfully at the end of the episode, but it's 'k because he's too in love with the Enterprise to ever love a mere woman more. Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy are cold and logical and rash and emotional respectively, and their constant friction must be resulting in the best make-up sex in the world, Mr. Sulu and Lieutenant Uhura wait in vain for focus episodes that never come, Ensign Chekhov suffers horribly to the approval of American Cold War audiences, and Scotty gets shit done. Uniforms, while iconic, tend to look a bit civilian though. Miniskirts are apparently mandated attire for the ship's fan-servicey female "yeomen" and others, because 1966. The civilian nature of the attire (including, one must assume, the miniskirts, but they had a visual appeal all their own) were apparently an intentional design decision by Roddenberry who didn't want uniforms to look military. Further specialness on the part of Roddenberry demanded phasers not look like guns, instead looking like nothing in particular at all (although looking back at them today they look sort of like TV remotes, which would be invented much later), and also (probably the only sensible decision in this category) ships that didn't look like rockets, giving ships their distinctive and iconic saucer-engineering-nacelles look that still stands out today.

The Original Series frequently ran out of budget and entire episodes were filmed using spare costumes belonging to the production company, resulting in a series of extremely goofy excuses to go to planets full of gangsters or Nazis. This is often copied by shows who don't realize it was done out of pure expediency, and nowadays this "Planet of Hats" gimmick is practically a box to check off when doing sci-fi adventure. The lack of budget also resulted in one of the more memorable inventions; unable to budget for a sequence showing the Enterprise or a shuttle landing on a new planet every week, the writers instead decided to invent the transporter to "beam" the crew down to planets or between starships. Also worth noting: despite its mediocre critical reception, ratings and eventual cancellation, not to forget the uneven quality of many episodes, especially in the Roddenberry-less third season where poor Fred Freiberger had to come onto a show he didn't understand and try to get better ratings with less money, TOS had a hell of a cultural impact thanks to syndication and it has been said that since it entered syndication in 1969, there hasn't been a 24-hour period without some TV station, in some country, playing Star Trek. Cancellation of The Original Series is now considered one of the worst decisions in TV history, and while much of its silly 60's campiness is now laughable, it often still manages to teach relevant and important lessons today.

Fun fact: the Enterprise and each of her 11 sister ships have enough firepower to Exterminatus a planet by themselves, after getting issued an order called General Order 24. This however is likely a time-consuming task. According to a later DS9 episode, it takes a fleet of 20 warships 1 hour of sustained bombardment to destroy a planets crust and 5 hours of sustained bombardment to destroy a planet down to its mantle. These 20 ships were also in service 100 years after the Enterprise so they were also more powerful. Kirk has the distinction of being the only known captain to issue a General Order 24, because a planet was too much into wargames (he changed his mind after they dropped wargaming).

The Animated Series

The often forgotten middle child. More or less "seasons 4-5" of TOS with the same writing staff and actors, sans poor Walter Koenig. He was replaced by a weird camel person. He learned this at a convention, from a fan, while he was trying to announce he'd be writing an episode, which Gene promptly demanded he rewrite over and over. Classy.

Being animated allowed the staff to get a lot more creative with the alien designs and plots, and the writing and acting remain... well, top notch is a stretch, but certainly at the same levels as The Original Series, with the occasional low point. Not nearly as bad as you're probably picturing from the name, although still limited by the low budget and primitive, cheap animation techniques of the television era it was aired in. Notably some sci-fi novelists were brought in to write some episodes, such as Larry Niven, and at least one episode, "Yesteryear," is considered such a pivotal moment in Spock's development that even people who hate the series enough to consider it all non-canon often make an exception just for that one.

Also, since the series now has no excuse for throwing in lots of Space Puritans and Space Wizards, it of course continued to do so to derptastic results, because by this point it had become traditional. The presence of a straight-up furry on the bridge, however, is downright unacceptable.

The Next Generation

Here's where it starts getting a little deeper and a little darker, although with a lot of left-wing political subtext turned up to 11. The USS Enterprise-D (the original and C were destroyed in action while A and B were retired) is, like its predecessor, tasked with going where no-one has gone before, but this time around the problems are less likely to be solved in a single episode. Jean-Luc Picard is the captain and he plots and negotiates his way to victory; Mr. Data is cold and unemotional, though not by choice - as an android, he'd very much like to change that; Riker takes over the captain's "sleep with alien babes" duties since Picard is married to the job; Worf the Klingon gets beaten up by monsters to show how tough the monsters are, meaning that Worf winds up looking incredibly weak by the end of the show's run and doesn't regain his badassery until his run on DS9; Dr. Beverly Crusher is good old Bones minus his temper; Dr. Pulaski is Bones plus temper; Counsellor Troy is so badly written she becomes a running joke; and Geordi LaForge gets shit done. Only two things need to be said about helmsman Wesley Crusher: he was Gene Wesley Roddenberry's shitty self-insert fanfic character, and his sueness got to the point that even his actor started to hate him within the first season of the show.

Due to the massive success of The Original Series in syndication (and Paramount being pissed off by broadcast networks treating their most valuable IP like any other show), TNG was aired through syndication from the beginning. Although the first two seasons were laughably bad, the quality began to improve dramatically after an increasingly cocaine-addled Gene Roddenberry got too sick to keep ruining it and his partner-in-crime Maurice Hurley was thrown out on his ass, a moment often pinpointed via looking for when Riker grew a beard. The later seasons are widely considered to represent the apex of the franchise's episodic formula on the small screen (although DS9 gave it a run for its money with a more serialized approach); sadly, this series only got one good movie.

Deep Space Nine

Unlike all the other series so far, Deep Space Nine primarily takes place in a fixed location - the titular space station Deep Space Nine, out near the borders of Federation Space. Said space station is near Bajor, which was recently freed from Cardassian occupation, and a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy which allows all sorts of of crazy shit to go down. If the other shows are a wagon train, this one's a border fort.

Benjamin Sisko is the captain, declared Emissary by the nearby Bajorans for making contact with the wormhole aliens they worship, and he successfully hybridizes the blow-the-shit-out-of-whatever-you-can't-punch Kirk approach with the talk-in-a-very-dignified-way-about-the-philosophy-of-the-thing-and-win-by-rhetoric Picard maneuver, in his ultimately-successful quest to become the baddest motherfucker in space, then literally becomes a space god. Kira the Bajoran ex-terrorist noble freedom fighter (who are we kidding she calls herself a terrorist) struggles to free and rebuild her people while coming to terms with the moral ambiguities of situations she prefers to see in black-and-white, Dr. Bashir works to find his character for several seasons before becoming a highlight, Dax gets often written poorly and has to switch bodies doing it, Odo IS Liquid Space Cop, Quark runs his bar and heckles the Federation, Garak pretends to be a tailor while definitely not being a super-spy and dropping killer lines, and Miles O'Brien gets shit done. Also, Worf wanders in halfway through, and actually gets to punch things instead of just getting punched by them. It's also a lot more political than other series (though TNG and Voyager have their moments) and the last series to have Gene Roddenberry's involvement (with less enthusiasm, in fact often much to the benefit of this particular series thematically, although Roddenberry's complete departure did not necessarily bode well for the franchise in general.)

It's the closest the canon series ever get to Grimdark, especially when the Dominion show up. The show has aged remarkably well and the terrorist/freedom fighter debate was repeatedly explored in a very mature and honest way. DS9 is the most serialized of all Trek shows and could be considered a forerunner to the golden age of television with its long story arcs and deep character development. Overall, DS9 has to be considered the most consistently good Trek show thanks to the excellent writing and fantastic performances from a truly wonderful ensemble cast. At least until the final season, when the writers who made it good were pulled to try and fail to make good movies, heralding the failure that was Voyager. The finale episodes were mostly okay and tied up the story semi-satisfyingly, though a few die-hard subplots fell flat.

It wasn't without its controversies however. The show was airing around the same time as another thematically similar sci-fi show, Babylon 5. Not only that but characters also shared similarities, as did the episodes. Interestingly, beginning of both series, introduction of characters and airing of similar episodes were often too close to each other for one show to copy the other but this did not stop massive Rage and fanboy wars from starting between fans of the two series accusing one another of plagiarism and having an inferior product. Happily, as time went on and both shows evolved, these hurt feelings have mostly faded.

How good is Deep Space Nine? Every Star Trek series and even the reboot movies have pretty much ripped off ideas and concepts established during the series. Famously, within the "Trekker/Trekie" fan community, there's a little cell of fans who like it better than most other Star Trek; these fans are typically called "Niners."

Voyager

Voyager is... decent. There is no debate on how it outshines Enterprise. The plot centers around the USS Voyager, a smallish ship which gets teleported over to the other side of the galaxy, and the plot of the series as a whole centers on its efforts to get back home, with the primary obstacle being the consistently terrible decisions of its own captain. Think Gilligan's Island on a starship.

Like TNG and DS9 it's a character-driven drama just as often as it is a sci-fi adventure romp, although it only has one half-decent character, called "The Doctor" (No relation.); he's the solid-light hologram representative of the ship's emergency medical computer, who has to take on actual medical duties when their chief medical officer was conveniently killed in the pilot episode. Other than this, Chakotay is a peace-loving and spiritually rich indian freedom fighter terrorist who was written with the help of a special cherokee consultant so native his name was Jamake Highwater and it turned out later on that he was actually jewish and didn't know dick about native cultures so he made everything up resulting in Chakotay basically being a borderline racist caricature of what you think indians are like. Akoochimoya. Tom Paris is an annoying jerk and is counterbalanced by Harry Kim who is the ideal boy-scout, making him only half as annoying and twice as boring. B'elanna Torres tries to perpetuate a lineage of dudes getting shit done but ends up blankly reciting her technobabble, having second degree plasma burns and – worst of all – systematically fails to get shit done whenever the warp core goes nuts. Tuvok tries hard to be as cool as Spock but ends up being a lame version of the n°1 Vulcan who uses logic to justify everything and makes it short for "you are wrong, I am right because I said so." Kes is passed as a fragile and nice character but it takes a couple of episodes to realize that having a short lifespan does not change the facts: when you can boil someone to death from the inside of their body, drain life from everything around you to become stronger and do anything you want without knowing how, just by thinking of it, you are a goddamn Mary Sue. From the fourth season onwards the only character the writers seemed to care about are Seven of Nine, a human woman who recently escaped from Borg control and kept all of her cyborg enhancements but regained her free will; another Mary Sue, to be sure, but she's hot, and the other characters are much worse, so that's not really a bad thing. (Fortunately, the one good character on the show, namely The Doctor AKA the EMH, still received a lot of attention from the writers and almost single-handedly made the show watchable). There was also Neelix, who was the apparent inspiration for Jar-Jar Binks, and any sane crew would have pushed him out of an airlock on the first episode. Fans who stuck with the show despite its glaring failings were given one final slap in the face with the controversial shit final season, in which the producers decided "screw steadily crafting a satisfying conclusion to a story which we have wasted for most of the last seven years anyway; lets just ignore it until the final episode and then throw in some shit about trans-warp conduits and time travel, bitches love time travel!" If you did not care about any of the characters or the subplots or time travel making sense (the writers sure didn't), then the final episode was explosions (and the Borg got a major setback, just don't think about the setup too hard).

The Doctor never once stopped being totally fucking awesome though (enough so to even earn a cameo in First Contact), and the great acting from the cast carries the series from being horrific to watchable. Just goes to show that no matter how good your actors are, they can't make diamonds out of shit.

Hopes that the franchise had sunk to a new low from which it could surely only get better were about to be proved wrong in spectacular fashion...

Enterprise

A bald, foolish and (according to some) successful attempt to create a series even worse than Voyager was, from the minute the Nickelback-tier theme tune started the fans knew in their hearts it was fucking doomed. So bad that even the most devoted Trekkies gave up on it, in just four seasons this series almost single-handedly killed off the Trek franchise (which is actually quite impressive, in a perverse sort of way).

It's a prequel to the rest, taking place on the first Enterprise, before the Federation was founded, and Earth was an independent power- so there's a lot of primitive versions of things from other series. At least the uniforms were pretty cool in an Air Force sort of way, although when that's the best thing you can say about a series, that tells you all you need to know about its quality (or lack thereof). Captained by that guy from Quantum Leap Jonathon Archer, in hindsight the fact that they had to rename him from their original choice of Jeffrey Archer to avoid confusion with the disgraced British MP and author of the same name probably cursed the series with bad karma before it had even begun shooting. In an unusual twist for a Trek series, his first officer isn't a terrorist noble freedom fighter, however she does share a trait with her Voyager predecessor in that the actress who portrayed her frequently criticized the show's writers in interviews. Other than that, well, Hoshi Sato screams a lot, Travis Mayweather was so dull even the writers forgot he existed, Malcolm Reed has an accent, Dr Phlox is a weird creepy alien with weird creepy alien moral (and gets surprisingly interesting when given enough screentime, which hardly happened), and Trip also has an accent and gets shit done.

Was retooled twice, the third season tries to be 24 IN SPACE (stop some guys the Xindi from blowing up Earth) while the 4th season is a massive apology about the last three seasons that tries to fix all the problems they had, and as a result, the only season that's close to being good.

Amusingly the final episode is set on the holodeck of the Enterprise-D and leaves us with the firm impression that the producers would have much rather have just continued making The Next Generation; considering the mediocre quality of the TNG movies we got instead, this probably would have worked out better for all involved (Or not since Voyager was that; its first episode was even numbered 901, as in Season 9 Episode 1).

Yet despite all this bad directing, subpar plots, and frankly boring episodes, Enterprise still manages to be moderately enjoyable with occasional moments of awesomeness if you can suffer through a fair few awful spots and aggressive mediocrity almost everywhere else. The focus on founding Federation races like the Andorans was refreshing and the technology level, being somewhere between the original series and the real world present-day, was quite interesting. We also got to see the Vulcans portrayed as arrogant, superior dicks. Which makes a lot more sense than the way they're usually portrayed as fairly submissive towards humans because they are, obviously and objectively, the superior race. The Klingons certainly still considered themselves to be honorable but the show made it clear that the Klingon notion of honor is rarely analogous to the human concept which was interesting as all hell to watch. There have been a few small nods to it in discovery and the abrams movies.

And let's be fucking honest, /tg/ loves 40k and the Xindi arc was about as grimdark as shit gets. And that was awesome.

Also makes a neat pairing with Voyager in that they really mess with the Prime Directive and question the Federation.

Renegades

Kickstarter Trek. It's basically comprised of a good Star Trek movie, a mediocre Star Trek season, and a shitty Star Trek fanfic, with all sharing equal screentime. The makers submitted their pilot made-for-TV movie to CBS trying to get it made into a legit on-the-air series (and by god it shows). They said they can still make a season, just not one on TV. Pretty much has good and bad in equal measure. Some characters are actually interesting (about time we saw more of the Breen!) while others are pure Mary Sues (including a male Seven of Nine with a built-in Borg-gun/personal shield/fully-functional hand). Some of the ideas are interesting while others are boring or already-been-done. The CGI is all Hollywood-quality, but the practical effects are okay at best.

Most of all, the biggest thing this needs/needed is time. It's obvious that they made this without knowing that they were going to be able to make a TV show or not, and tried to cram the sort of build-up and intrigue we saw in DS9 into a span of 90 minutes. For now though, it's decidedly meh.

Discovery

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A LOAD OF SOCIAL JUSTICE SHIT! Ahem, let's start again, shall we?

A new "prequel" series set 10 years before The Original Series. Run exclusively on CBS' paid streaming service (unless you live outside the US and Canada, in which case you can get it on Netflix) to try and drum up sign-ups and revenue, it features a mix of Enterprise and Abramstrek aesthetics despite supposedly taking place in parallel to the TOS "The Cage" pilot while having technology superior to late DS9 and introducing mushroom-based space travel that would imply all later events and warp travel would be outdated. The trailer has attracted a lot of concern over the fact that Klingons have been completely redesigned to look like slit-nosed ogres wearing ancient Egyptian cosplay, and rumors that the Klingons shown were primitives who had been trapped in stasis proved to be unfounded, so there is no excuse. Not having a cold war to posture about, the new villains are based off of Trump-inspired xenophobia by the admission of the authors. Also the lead character is Spock's human sister that he never mentioned before, aka the exact origin of the Mary Sue which is just fucking depressing. Want a new Star Trek episode about racism and immigration? Try the now-banned Star Trek Continues. Want Star Trek with humor, keep an eye out for the upcoming Star Trek: Lower Decks; want a pseudo-Star Trek show about other modern issues? Try The Orville below; that's right, American Dad In Space may right now be a better Star Trek than an actual Star Trek series.

Initial reviews have been... well, it's shit. The writing is overly convoluted, the massive injection of grimdark into pre-TOS continuity is anathema to the hardcore fans (the human characters are often the ones doing the nastiest shit, including trying to kill a Klingon party by planting an explosive on the corpse of one of their comrades for when they came to collect the dead) and the Klingons are so flat and devoid of characterization that they might as well be Larry the Cable Guy lookalikes wearing Trump hats, which is a massive disappointment for a series that promised to put a spotlight on Klingon culture but ended up retconning all the characterization that happened in TNG and DS9. It may get better with time (remember that it took two seasons for TNG to get really good) but given the release schedule (split between 2017 and 2018 with a long break) it may come too late for the fanbase to care. Currently it's cause for more fans to lose their shit over whether it's good or not than the Abrams movies, which is a new record of Trek Skub. Releasing the show on CBS All Access instead of cable or broadcast TV makes it seem that executives don't really give a shit if the show succeeds or fails, bringing up the question of whether they're deliberately putting Star Trek: Discovery in a no-win scenario where, no matter what happens, the executives have an excuse to cancel Star Trek altogether.

Other stupid decisions are: not bringing back Bruce Greenwood and Zachary Quinto as Captain Pike and (at this time a likely a Lieutenant Commander) Spock. Who wouldn't mind taking a pay cut to bring the characters to the small screen. Their ages wouldn't have mattered either if CBS and Paramount weren't such cheapskates. As they don't even care enough to shell out cash for the CGI technology that Marvel Studios uses to make their actors appear younger during flashback scenes. There's also allegations that large chunks of plot were stolen from previews of an in development indie game.

Naturally, nobody is ever going to let this series live down its unfortunate initials.

Picard

Set to be a continuation of the original timeline, featuring old man Picard with Patrick Stewart reprising the role. Stay tuned. Hopes are not high, but at the very least Patrick Stewart's presence should make it watchable if nothing else.

Homages

Being a longrunner with a wide audience, Star Trek has gained enough acclaim to have numerous references. In a few cases entire works get made to homage Star Trek. Here are some of the examples.

Galaxy Quest

A sci-fi/comedy film released in 1999, directed by Dean Parisot. It parodies science fiction films and series, but particularly Star Trek and its fandom. The film stars big name actors including Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver and the late great Alan Rickman. The plot revolves around the cast of a defunct cult television series called Galaxy Quest (for example, Tim Allen played the Kirk/Shatner expy and the late Alan Rickman played the Spock/Nimoy expy). They're also suffering fatigue that mirrors the experiences of the actual Star Trek actors (Rickman's character is typecast with his Galaxy Quest character and laments it, similar to how these things happened to the late Leonard Nimoy).

The cast are suddenly visited by actual aliens, who believe the series to be an accurate documentary (it helps that the aliens have no concept of fiction and only the most bare bones idea of lying) and seek their help. They take the actors with them, who find themselves involved in a very real, and dangerous, intergalactic conflict, and unlike the show where it all wrapped up quickly they struggle to learn about and relate to the aliens. Can these actors find greatness within themselves, and possibly personal redemption? (Spoiler: yes, and it is incredible.)

Built around the basic premise of "What if the cast of Star Trek ended up on a real spaceship and had to actually do the shit they did in the show?" Featuring a veritable all-star cast of talented comedians and character actors, this is one of the best parodies ever made, and an affectionate love-letter to the franchise as a whole.

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning

Another parody, parodying not only Star Trek but Babylon 5 as well. The seventh in a series fan movies released in 2005, it's about Captain Pirk builds a starship called CPP Kickstart, allies with Russia and takes over the world. He wants to take over more planets but the ships of his P-Fleet aren't fast enough to travel outside the Solar system. A maggot hole opens and it leads to an alternate reality. Pirk wants to take over the Earth of this reality, which leads to an awesome space battle between the P-Fleet and the fleet of the space station Babel 13 led by Johnny Sherrypie. The movie features some of the best special effects ever put in a sci-fi movie, which is pretty impressive, considering that this is an amateur film with a very low budget and was rendered in five years in someone's bedroom. The film is spoken in Finnish but subtitles are available for a wide variety of languages, including Klingon. They also made a role-playing game based on it, where your character becomes more incompetent as he levels up.

The Orville

A comedy drama television series homage to Star Trek that's pretty much to Star Trek what Family Guy is to The Simpsons, even being created by and starring Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy infamy-- No wait, come back! The guy's a huge Trekkie and he felt that too many shows nowadays were up in their ass with grimdark, so he pitched the show the execs to make a loving comedic sendup of The Next Generation. Many of the executive producers are actually Trek alumni or notable industry Trekkies, such the guy who wrote the Futurama Trek parody episode, and the episodes aired so far have featured the same kind of themes that you would expect from a new Trek series. First airing in 2017, the series is about the strung-out not-Picard protagonist Captain Edward Mercer, played by MacFarlane himself, of the eponymous not-Enterprise spaceship "The Orville". His ex-wife is the first officer with the pilot episode about them reconciling for the sake of getting shit done. The crew of the not-Enterprise includes the not-T'Pol alien security officer Alara, gay beefy not-Worf alien Bortus, asshole not-Lore android Isaac, and John LaMarr and Gordon Malloy - an even more ridiculous parody of Harry Kim and Tom Paris. They explore the galaxy while fighting bad guys such as UV-allergic not-Idrians reptilians called Krill.

The show's reception is quite mixed. While the audience loved it and critics hated it upon release, the initial surge from the "honeymoon period" has mellowed, ultimately leaving both divided between adoration and hatred. Seth's signature style of humor is evident, for better or worse, combined with dramatic elements and sci-fi material. The Orville also contains some commentary on real world issues, and while less preachy than Discovery on some subjects, it's just as bad or even worse on other subjects (for one, the show's preachiness on atheism exceeds even Star Trek's). Some commend the show as a breath of fresh air in an overly stagnant genre with good special effects and a few splashes of genius - the titular ship is named after one of the Wright Brothers and one episode discussed the pitfalls of social currency. Others denounce it as derivative (The Orville is piggybacking on Star Trek's fanbase and on top of the above, several episodes' plots are copy-pasted from other works - The Orville's "Majority Rule" and "Mad Idolatry" are pretty much Black Mirror's "Nosedive" and Star Trek's "Who Watches the Watchers?") with sophomoric messages, clumsy pop-culture references and hit-or-miss writing. Other criticisms include MacFarlane's stunt-casting of himself as the main character being the height of vanity and his interactions with his ex-wife character are uncomfortable to watch from the word "go." Some think both its supporters and detractors have a point. Trekkies are equally divided on the show, with many butthurt over Discovery endorsing the Orville, a small group liking both and others disliking The Orville.

In the second season Alara/not-T'Pol was written out of the show (which may come back to haunt them as she's one of the more well-received characters) while being replaced with a suspiciously similar substitute, Issac/not-Lore turns good at the last minute and the Krill become the "lesser villains that need to team up with the good guys to fight worse villains" cliche. The cast seems to be gelling better, the writers have a better idea of what the show should be and the humor works in service of the stories rather than being shoved in haphazardly, yet the same criticisms still remain. As always, stay tuned for how this turns out.

Films

As a general rule, the even-numbered ones aren't complete shit.

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture: AKA: The Slow Motion Picture, or the Motionless Picture. A giant space whatsit is flying towards Earth, the mostly-retired crew has to go figure out what's going on and stop it. Old school sci-fi geeks like the ideas, but terrible pace and interminable special effects that were clearly meant to capitalize on 2001: A Space Odyssey while failing to understand what people like about that movie kill them dead for everyone else. Besides the uniform worn by Kirk, the uniforms also look like pajamas. So no wonder they were changed only a movie later. Features an entirely bald female alien who is so good at sex that she has to swear an oath not to get it on with the crew. Really. This is canon.
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: As Kirk starts to feel his age, a one-off villain from the show makes a dramatic reapperance: KKKHHHAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!!!! Widely considered the best of all the films, and the only one considered a straight up great film, no qualifiers. If you haven't seen it, see it. So good many later movies in the franchise just try to rip it off instead of finding their own identities. Interesting fact: due to time constraints, actors of Kirk and Khan weren't available at the same time. So the entire script was written so that Kirk and Khan never need to meet face-to-face. But you'd never notice if it weren't pointed out to you. Roddenberry screeched autistically and objected to some of the actions of his characters, including Kirk shooting a brain eating space parasite rather than "keeping it for study." The fact that his strongest objections came to the most win of the films says a great deal about his deprecating value to the franchise around the TNG era.
• Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Where is Spock? He's on Genesis. ALL AHEAD FULL! Not really bad, just mediocre and run of the mill compared to the superior films that surround it. It was also saddled with the misfortune of undoing some of the previous film's more-daring decisions, and having its only daring decision reversed a film later. If you had to say that any film broke the "odd numbers suck" rule, it would be this one.
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: The crew of the Enterpise travels back in time to save the whales. No, literally and unironically. Scott tries to talk to a computer through the mouse, Spock nerve-pinches a punk on a bus in San Francisco, and somehow it works, creating something perhaps not quite in the genre intended but a classic in sci-fi dramedy. The Voyage Home is a zany comedy romp beloved by the general public and fandom alike, leaving only the most intractable fanbois to bitch and moan. Nimoy directed this one but there was a contract stipulation that Shatner would get whatever Nimoy got, thus leading to...
• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: The epitome of the "odd-numbered Star Trek films suck" rule. Lies! There is no Star Trek V! It was not called The Final Frontier! It was not directed by Kirk's egotistical actor and did not have a plot that could literally be summarized as "Kirk is betrayed by his incompetent crew, yet goes on to fight God and win!" The films mysteriously moved from four to six and we are all improved because of this!
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: The Space Cold War ends amidst searing mystery and drama. The sendoff for the original cast, except Kirk who got a worse send-off a movie later. Gene Roddenberry watched it, hated it, and was going to seek legal advice but died a week later. And good riddance to that, because it's a pretty sweet political thriller if your hippie-panties don't get into a twist at the thought that the Federation isn't a perfect place full of perfect people.
• Star Trek Generations: Malcolm McDowell blows up planets to get into a magic space ribbon to live forever, no it does not make any more sense in context. An already-weak story hamstrung by its obsession with being daring and unconventional rather than good. Also, Kirk dies on the bridge in the most face-palming manner possible.
• Star Trek First Contact: The TNG crew face off with the Borg to ensure the future happens. Lots of action, a script that sparks with energy and snark, and some quite effective performances make this the only good TNG movie. It sadly is also the only appearance of the Defiant on screen, doing a pretty decent job of fighting the Borg before the Enterprise E saves the day of course. The Borg Queen was also introduced here before Voyager, ruining what could have been a good idea.
• Star Trek Insurrection: If you thought the Na'vi were a bunch of badly-written Mary Sues, you ain't seen nothing yet! B-b-b-baby you ain't seen n-n-n-nothing yet! Also, Riker shaves his beard, and that's basically a war crime. Aged from terrible to forgettably bad thanks to that one scene of Picard and Data singing HMS Pinafore going memetic.
• Star Trek Nemesis: The last stand of the TNG cast, ending not with a bang but a whimper. It also required amending the even=good/odd=bad rule to "Galaxy Quest counts as a Star Trek film so this one is also odd."
• Star Trek (2009): Alternate timeline "reboot" (sideboot?) with the original crew, albeit with new younger actors. Timey-wimey shit happens and old prime timeline Spock (reprised by old Leonard Nemoy) is hurled back in time along with a bunch of Romulan assholes. The dickbag Romulans begin fucking shit up, slightly altering history in a way that ensures gratuitous lens flare. Skubtastic, but at least watchable, which is more than most odd-numbered films can muster. If you still even count it as odd, without the Galaxy Quest-amendment.
• Star Trek Into Darkness: Some edgy shit. The second of the alternate timeline Trek films. Terrorism, conspiracy and flapdoodle. Even more skubtastic, but generally considered worse than its predecessor, partially because (like Nemesis) it tries to be a remake of The Wrath of Khan and having Kirk at his most punchable.
• Star Trek Beyond: Controversial, but more in a question of whether it's decent or quite good. Lots of good character stuff and a decent story revolving around a race of mysterious space pirates trying to conquer a colony, but the action photography is poorly-lit shaky-cam horseshit and the sound work is awful. If it's the last "Kelvin Timeline" movie, as it seems it will be, at least it ended on a good note.

Novels

Like most long time franchises Star Trek has a massive line of books. Unlike most they're basically just fanfics as nothing but the show and the movies is canon so the writers can do whatever they want. This changed after Nemesis since they might never have another show or movie in the "Prime" universe, so the writers got their shit together and wrote a group of books as a tight community very close to the shows. The relaunch novels are a continuation of the show they're about. Also there's the Titan book series which is about Riker and Troi getting their own ship, which happens to be staffed by every race in the Federation including living rocks, space dinosaurs that smell like toast and a space cyborg ostrich.

During yet another novel continuity (Star Trek: Destiny), the Borg go nuts and eat Pluto... yeah... and then they finally get sick of the Federation somehow managing to not get assimilated all the time, so they finally just send every last cube they have with orders to Exterminatus the absolute SHIT out of the entire Alpha Quadrant. Pretty much every important character from TNG, DS9, and Voyager has to team up to stop them, and even then the Federation still gets its shit kicked in and winds up having to rely on a vaguely ridiculous deus ex machina to win, and billions of people still die and dozens of planets are blown to shit. It was pretty insane.

Then all the Federation's main enemies get together to form an anti-Federation and start poking the bear, all the while telling their allies that they're somehow warmongering dicks, Section 31 gets its cover blown in a big way, and Riker gets promoted to Admiral. Also, a lot of the newer TNG novels have been devoted to following up on one-shot aliens from the show, like the guys that sent out the probe that made Barclay super-smart and those fish monks that were abducting crewmembers for experiments. Now that the Picard show is coming out, though, this will all presumably be chucked in the dustbin.

Video Games

Star Trek Online

Star Trek Online is the free-to-play online game built by Cryptic Studios and run by Perfect World. With an official license CBS, recurring characters voiced by various Trek alumni, and recently a license to include references to the reboot chronology (officially known as the "Kelvin Timeline"), it's the closest existing thing to an "official" continuation of the "Prime" timeline, and contains history and fluff extending nearly 40 years from the end of Star Trek: Nemesis.

Taking place in the 25th century (around the year 2409-2410), the Hobus supernova (the event that kicked Nero and Spock into the past during Star Trek 2009) has devastated the Romulans, and its near-collapse and fragmentation causes tensions between a resurgent Klingon Empire and the Federation. The tensions blow up into a war, with members of a new, nicer, breakaway Romulan Republic playing both sides in exchange for development aid.

The game contains deep cuts from all over Trek lore, and answers questions about what happened to various key characters, including Data (took over the Enterprise-E, then retired), the Enterprise (now an even bigger ship run by Andorian captain Shon), and the Voyager crew (it took Harry Kim 30 years to make Captain lol). Raises barely-shown, unnamed, and otherwise obscure races to new prominence as big bad foes, including the Iconians (ancient aliens with god complexes who mutated into energy beings, currently live in dyson spheres and were only defeated by predestination paradox), Tzenkethi (4-armed halo guys whose weak points are the FRONT of their shields), and Na'kuhl (the alien nazis from Enterprise as time-traveling terrorists who blame the Federation for a throwaway event that happened in TNG's beach episode).

Ostensibly free to play, but don't let that fool you... the not-so-microtransactions are the only reason the lights stay on.

Starfleet Command

Starfleet Command was a series real time space battle games by Interplay based on the much older tabletop game Star Fleet Battles. It came out in 1999 and was followed by several sequels and expansions. Gameplay was much like Battlefleet Gothic, but with the player only controlling one ship. SFC remains Interplay's best selling game, topping even Baldur's Gate.

Armada

A series of low effort RTS's churned out by Activision in 2000. Tried to take on both Homeworld and Age of Empires, both of which have recently gotten HD remakes and Armada hasn't so that should tell you all you need to know. However, for one of the first 3D model space RTS's it was surprisingly easy to mod, resulting in many ship mod packs being made for it.

Would you like to know more?

And oh Lordy, is there more...

• Main Memory Alpha: A Star Trek wiki
• Main Memory Beta: The flip-side of Memory Alpha for the less than official stuff
• SF Debris: opinionated episode reviews, has some non Trek stuff as well