From the very beginning, Star Trek has been a story of exploration; it’s literally baked into the franchise’s famous opening line, with the promise that the starship Enterprise was boldly going where no one has gone before. These were the early days of the Federation, with the Enterprise on a five-year exploratory mission that meant Captain Kirk and his crew had simply no idea what the “alien of the week” would be like. Entire galactic empires were mysteries; it was a shock to learn the Romulans were related to the Vulcans, for example.
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All this changed as the Star Trek timeline continued, though. By the time of The Next Generation, Picard could simply ask the computer a question and get a primer on the latest alien race. The Alpha Quadrant was well-established, and it took wormholes and Caretaker arrays to introduce truly new, mysterious alien races; Voyager returned to the original series’ theme by blasting Janeway’s starship into a completely different part of the galaxy. But now, in the late 32nd century, we’re back to a more exciting age than ever before.
The Galaxy Has Changed Completely Because of the Burn
To understand the late 32nd century, you have to be familiar with Star Trek: Discovery and the Burn, a catastrophic event that changed the galaxy forever. A time travel plot took the USS Discovery further forward in the timeline than we’d ever seen before, where they discovered galactic civilization had largely collapsed because dilithium – the key to warp travel – had proved dangerously unstable, spontaneously exploding and destroying countless starships and even entire worlds and civilizations. Discovery’s crew eventually managed to explain the Burn, and the Federation is resurgent now.
But Starfleet Academy episode 6 reveals the true consequences of the Burn. The episode sees the War College and Starfleet Academy working together on a joint mission, but the two chancellors begin with a briefing in which they stress how unstable the galaxy still is. These cadets, they explain, will face threats and dangers no previous generation of Starfleet officers faced; they’ll be traveling into once-charted territory where anything can have happened in the last century, and will need to deal with pirates and crime lords who’ve established their own fiefdoms.
This is perhaps the most exciting era in all of Star Trek history. On the one hand, you’re back to the investigative and exploratory style of the original series, where anything can happen; but it’s in a context where technology is incredibly advanced and available to even the most unscrupulous forces. Galactic civilization kept certain kinds of people in check, and those dangerous individuals have flourished over the last century. The scale of the threat becomes abundantly clear in episode 6, because the Federation itself is no longer just targeted by rivals – it’s targeted by common criminals and brutal aliens.
There’s an odd sense in which Star Trek has returned to its core concept. We’re now boldly going where Star Trek itself has never gone before, into an age of chaos with a resurgent Federation attempting to reestablish itself in a dystopian future. That, fundamentally, is the most exciting story Star Trek has ever told.
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