Rob Bricken at io9 answered a question last week about the seeming dearth of optimism in science fiction these days, and he initially responds that “[s]tories need conflict, and having optimistic futures where humanity got their shit together narrows the possibilities of what your protagonist has to struggle against.”

This certainly explains movies like Elysium, Avatar, and the Hunger Games series, but Bricken notes that even the paragon of future optimism, Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek, has gotten the cynical treatment in the reboots:

The original Trek series — and the movies — and to an extent the series following it — were optimistic, that showed us a better future, that gave us hope that humanity might not fuck it all up. And then the new Trek movies completely ditch all that for the same old shit we’ve seen in everything else — violence, disaster porn, and war. I’m not such a Trek fan that this is such a betrayal of Gene Roddenberry’s vision that it keeps me up at night, but I do miss what made Star Trek so unique and charming.

This got me thinking about my personal favorite Trek series, Deep Space Nine. I liked it for the fact that it was darker and grittier than the other Trek series, but I think I realize now that part of what made DS9 so good was that it existed in this broader universe of optimism. To put it in cheesy terms, DS9 was good because it allowed its protagonists to be bad in a universe that was mostly good. If you look at it that way, DS9 may have been the most optimistic Trek show of them all. Continue reading →