With the Star Trek saga officially crossing the 60-year threshold, there’s no better time to be nostalgic. The franchise has been chock full of ups and downs — for every fantastic season of television, there’s a sequel that sends the finicky fandom into an uproar — but for the pure of heart, there’s something to like in nearly every Trek story. Even the gritty prequel that took a gutsy approach to the earliest days of Starfleet.
Star Trek might purport itself as a forward-focused sci-fi utopia, but the franchise is more obsessed with the past than it’d like to admit. The shows and films are constantly sending their heroes back to the 20th century — that, or referencing the good ol’ days with tributes to Shakespeare or incessant riffs on the Old West. It’s a wonder that the powers that be didn’t conceive of something like Enterprise sooner.
