The Endless Final Frontier: Star Trek from TV's First Golden Age to the Streaming Era

Star Trek has been reborn as a television franchise in the streaming era, with the series Discovery (2017- ), Lower Decks (2020), and the forthcoming Strange New Worlds (2022). The new iterations of the show bear the marks of their age, with their serial structures making them suited to binge-watching, and the multiple call-backs, easter eggs, and complex interconnections relating to other parts of the franchise encouraging the intertextual and transmedial engagement with the broader “property.” Looking at the numerous Trek shows that have graced television screens over the last 55 years turns out to be an effective way of tracing at least two histories: that of the shifting narrative standards and models of spectatorship over the last halfcentury, and that of American science fiction’s varying depictions of the future based on current trajectories. In this class, we’ll look at various episodes from the many Star Trek series as a compendium of sci-fi speculations marked by their time and place—and as a media property conforming to, and sometimes even reflecting upon, the standards of its means of transmission.

This course is particularly recommended for students of the Angewandte Studiengänge.
Patrick S. Brown is an exchange lecturer from the University of Iowa.