Much post-modern Trek has left me cold.

This isn’t really Star Trek’s fault, as such. Though known as being more erudite than most franchises, it has inevitably surrendered to the endless reboots, prequels, and ironic regurgitations of classic source material that defines and sustains today’s pop-culture industry.

Franco Berardi wrote about the “slow cancellation of the future”, and boy has it been cancelled over the past forty-odd years. He explained:

“I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War.”

As a postwar show that deals in an optimistic vision of the future – and, let’s be honest, a pretty explicitly luxury space communist one – this issue of neoliberalism crushing one’s sense of heading towards a better, more utopian future presents a particular issue for Star Trek.

Berardi’s was an idea picked up by Mark Fisher, who expanded on this idea for his book Ghosts of My Life. In it, he wrote:

“In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate any more.”

He was writing ten years ago, but if anything it feels like this is a phenomenon that has accelerated, intensified, and congealed.

Star Trek, though ostensibly about the future, was always, like much of the best science fiction, a mediation on the present. From the Cold War, to Civil Rights, to what it means to be human, Trek brought big and difficult topics to the mainstream.

It was sometimes clumsy, and frequently it got things wrong. But it was trying, and sometimes that’s enough.

Since the rebooted movies, Trek acts like there’s no present to articulate any more. Instead, what we’re left with is knowing nods to what once was. So the rebooted character of Chekov is based around what people are expected to already know about the classic character, Chekov.

Which, in the films, was mainly that he had a funny accent.

The prequels, like Star Trek: Discovery, are even more Fisherian. Watching it is easy, and empty. If the future’s been cancelled, going over old ground is an understandable choice, particularly if you have nothing to say and a large budget to say it with.

When we finally were given a series beyond where the universe was left – fascinatingly poised – at the end of Deep Space Nine, it was, unfortunately, the execrable Picard.

A show that makes Star Trek: Enterprise seem like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Picard was wall to wall fan service, explosions, unimaginative swearing, and the now doddery producer-star playing the character as how he thought he should be, not how he was in TNG. apparently no one was prepared to step in and give the famous old fella some direction.

Watching it reminded me of the infamous South Park episode about the Crystal Skull Indiana Jones movie.

The world of 24th century Picard is like the neoliberal present: the same cityscapes, the same clothes, the same ethos. Heck, if it wasn’t for the whole spaceships thing, it would be hard to view the Picard universe as the future at all.

So this brings me back to Lower Decks, which is the natural end point of all this. Cartoons don’t age: as long as the actors are still alive and willing, you can bring anyone back. And the show is meant to be a comedy, so nothing even has to make sense, particularly, as long as it’s funny.

It is set just after TNG, and based around the idea of one of its most celebrated episodes: following the non-bridge-crew drones.

The ones who don’t get to do all the cool and glamorous stuff. The Arnold Rimmers of the Enterprise, keeping the replicators working and clearing out the spunk from the Holodeck, but dreaming of better things.

It’s a great set-up, but unfortunately and predictably Lower Decks falls, repeatedly, into the “hey, remember…????” content outlined above.

As an animation, and a comedy at that, the show allows itself a billion nods and winks. It is utterly in thrall to the TNG/DS9/VOY universe, and can barely contain its delight that it is allowed to play in this vast sandpit. The characters are us: people who grew up watching these shows, and thus unrealistically excited to meet, say, Tom Paris.

And then something weird happened.

The show got good.

It still lives in its box, which means that this show is mainly there for nostalgia, and to parody what Trek has already gone before, boldly or otherwise. But at some point halfway through the second season, the show became braver.

It started to take its characters as seriously as its jokes. The universe it abides in – five or so years after the end of DS9 – is fleshed out slightly. The ship, with its B-level status and “second contact” style missions, starts to make sense. And now the crew aren’t being turned into zombies or plants every other episode, we’ve even seen some plot development.

Which meant that, by the time the DS9 fan-service episode came around, there was something there.

Not enough, but something. And Hear All, Trust Nothing, is more a DS9 episode than a Lower Decks episode. Heck, it even centres around a Quark plot that is utterly consistent with his character and, though unsurprising in the least, is at least satisfying and believable within what we know of the world that has been constructed.

And when they’re not treating the station like Disney Land, the Lower Decks characters are given something to work with too.

Tbere’s a moment, early in the episode, where Kira pauses, and gazes out at the wormhole. Sisko is still with the prophets; his baseball is still at his desk.

There is nothing new to say, and that isn’t the point of this show, or of our time. But I can’t pretend it wasn’t nice to linger somewhere real, just for half an hour – for old time’s sake, and, perhaps, for the hope of a future yet to come.