Inner space

Now it's the '90s and three new Star Treks have graced the galaxy: The Next Generation (a continuation of the original five-year mission), Deep Space Nine (space-station politics), and Voyager (stranded in a distant quadrant of the galaxy and trying to get home). The tech talk and plot lines have been updated; we get stories about wormholes and cosmic strings and quantum singularities. But the Roddenberry sensibility remains. These shows aren't really about outer space at all. They're about the exploration of inner space.

Consider some of the original series's most popular episodes. "The Trouble with Tribbles," a near-universal favorite that focused on soft, fluffy creatures who could reproduce practically at will, was a mystery/comedy with all the menace of Murder, She Wrote. "The City on the Edge of Forever" took our heroes back to 1930s New York City, where they met Joan Collins as a social worker who has to die or else history will change and the Nazis will win World War II. "Shore Leave" has everybody's fondest dreams -- and worst nightmares -- coming true. Even the monsters are cuddly: the silicon being of "The Devil in the Dark" turns out to be a pussycat, and the salt vampire in "Man Trap" is just trying to get an occasional square meal.

The Next Generation took a while to get up to warp speed; early episodes like "The Naked Now" and "Unnatural Selection" were obvious ripoffs of original-series plots. For me the escape-velocity point arrived about the time Commander Riker grew a beard and discovered his sense of humor: riverboat gambler in "The Royale" (where he and Data and Worf get trapped in a dime-store novel), space jockey in "Peak Performance" (the one with the insufferable Strategema-playing Zakdorn observer), unflappable negotiator in "The Price" (where he calls the bluff of a glib Betazoid empath). With his combination of passion and principle (and those hot licks on the trombone), Riker attracted some disturbing later episodes too, like "Schisms" (abducted by aliens and didn't even know it) and "Frame of Mind" (what might be the best TNG of all: he can't tell reality from illusion -- and neither can we).

Some of the other sharp efforts focused on personal relations: Geordi getting romantic with holodeck colleague Dr. Leah Brahms in "Booby Trap" and then coming to terms with the real-life version in "Galaxy's Child"; Crusher watching the Trill symbiont she'd grown to love move to a female body in "The Host" (TNG's only brush with lesbianism); Data watching his girlfriend walk out on him in "In Theory"; Geordi just barely hanging onto his humanity (after doing the series's best Sherlock Holmes imitation) in "Identity Crisis." There were a few dizzying ideas as well: getting caught in a time loop in "Cause and Effect" (the Enterprise explodes before the opening credits even roll); a temporal rift revealing a different-time-line Enterprise that's getting hammered by the Klingons in "Yesterday's Enterprise"; a quantum fissure that produces 285,000 Enterprises (and marries off Worf to Troi) in "Parallels"; the ship's computer creating a runaway holodeck train in "Emergence."

And, yes, there were a fair share of bad TNG episodes (most of them victimizing Troi or Wesley Crusher), so it's no surprise that now both DS9 and Voyager are desperately seeking original plots. DS9 has given us Jadzia Dax in a forbidden love for a former Trill spouse in "Rejoined" and Miles O'Brien (Colm Meaney, from TNG) suffering a horrific form of mind torture in "Hard Time." Voyager has come up with at least one gem in "Lifesigns," where the holographic Doctor falls for a Phage-ridden Vidiian patient (you can see it this Sunday at 9 on Channel 38).

But we don't really watch Star Trek for plots. (Even back in the '70s, Space: 1999 had better stories -- try "Space Brain," or "The Troubled Spirit.") We watch it because we care about the characters. We watch it because it provides an alternative (and mind-bogglingly detailed -- you can peruse the just-released blueprints for the Next Generation Enterprise while listening to your Conversational Klingon audio tape) universe that we can lose ourselves in -- a universe free of sex killings, church burnings, and political debates. Sure, the scientific accuracy is spotty, but what other popular shows make any attempt to explain the mysteries of the universe? However sporadically Star Trek's descendants take us where we want to go, they put us in good company. Why else do we watch TV?