Harvard University

All right, I’m going to do it. I’m going to write an essay about Star Trek. I hope you haven’t read many Star Trek essays before this one. They tend to be formulaic, lauding Trek’s vision of a brighter, better future, its daring in employing a multiethnic cast, its inspiring mission “to boldly go”... I think all that stuff is cool too, but everything about it has already been said, and I don’t want to add to the mountain of pages already written on those subjects. I’ll attempt to come up with something marginally more original by discussing a different facet of Trek, one that has had a larger…