Star Trek is struggling to find its moment – and it might need to face up to a hard truth

There’s a scene late in the 1991 movie Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country where old warhorses Kirk and Spock wonder whether they’ve outlived their own usefulness.

The film itself is a Cold War allegory that sees the once-adversarial Klingons brokering for peace, a situation that leaves the Enterprise crewmates confronting a galaxy that may no longer need them.

It’s a sobering moment in a story that serves as a swan song for the original team. But it’s also a question that echoes today, not just for Kirk but for Star Trek itself.

The underwhelming performance of latest offshoot Starfleet Academy in early Nielsen ratings, and the fact that no new series is currently in production, suggest a once-dominant sci-fi brand is struggling to capture the public imagination. Streaming fragmentation muddies the numbers, but the cultural temperature feels far cooler than in previous eras.

A show that once defined television science fiction now feels strangely peripheral. But this could be more than just franchise fatigue. It may be that Star Trek’s worldview is simply out of step with the political mood. Because historically, the franchise tends to flourish at one particular kind of time: moments when the United States feels confident about the future.

Just consider when Star Trek has previously thrived. It arrived amid the optimism of JFK’s “reach for the stars” rhetoric. It soared again with The Next Generation during Reagan’s “Morning in America” resurgence of the late 1980s and the post-Cold War triumphalism of Clinton’s 1990s. In short, Star Trek chimes when America believes the future belongs to it.

Contrast that with the periods when it’s struggled. In the 1970s, distrust of institutions runs high after the Watergate scandal – and Star Trek exists mostly in reruns until the films revive it.

Once we hit the 2000s and George W Bush’s war on terror, Trek again stumbles with the lacklustre Enterprise, which is axed after four seasons. There’s a sense here that when the prevailing culture becomes anxious or cynical, the show’s utopian tone can feel naïve and irrelevant.

The exception is '90s spin-off Deep Space Nine, the one show willing to test Star Trek’s ideals rather than just celebrate them. With later seasons set during a time of war, Captain Benjamin Sisko is seen questioning the extent to which the Federation ought to sacrifice its principles to survive.

There’s real moral ambiguity here, but with DS9 airing alongside the Next Generation and later Voyager, the optimistic core of Star Trek was being protected elsewhere. DS9 could push boundaries because it wasn’t the shop window. Today, there’s no such protective glass.

All of which brings us to 2026 and Donald Trump’s more aggressive posture on the world stage. With opinion polarised and faith in governments waning, Starfleet’s assumptions – cooperation, decency, consensus – feel increasingly distant from political reality.

It may sound churlish to point this out in the year when Star Trek is marking its 60th anniversary, but none of the recent series (Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Starfleet Academy) have left a deep cultural footprint. Might this be because the Federation looks suspiciously like a benevolent superpower extending its reach across the galaxy – liberal internationalism with warp drive? At a time when US influence is contested, that metaphor leaves us with a prickle of unease.

There’s a paradox at the heart of this. Yes, Star Trek can feel like an imperialist project, but it’s also aspirational. It shows what humanity might become. But optimism works best when it feels attainable. In moments where we feel jaded and sceptical, a perfect future can feel less like hope and more like denial.

And so, just as the original Enterprise crew realised it was time to hand over the future in the Undiscovered Country, Star Trek perhaps ought to come to the realisation that it needs a pause.

The franchise has survived dormant periods before and then returned when the public was ready to believe in its values once more. Perhaps the most Trek thing the brand could do right now is wait patiently for the future to catch up with it again.

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