Music in Star Trek From Alexander Courage’s “bright galactic beguine” in The Original Series to Jeff Russo’s churning, Game of Thrones-style theme for Discovery, the music of Star Trek has always embodied the spirit of its time, as much as it l

Five-Year Mission

Oct 3rd, 2022 1h 30m

Half a Decade of Primitive Culture Star Trek’s original five-year mission was brought to a premature end in 1969. But over the ensuing half-century and more, the franchise has continued boldly going to new frontiers. By the 1980s, when a second

Just Following Orders?

Sep 6th, 2022 1h 55m

Cardassian war crimes and The Man in the Glass Booth For many fans of Deep Space Nine, the penultimate installment of Season 1, “Duet,” is also the show’s first classic episode. A bleak exploration of guilt, responsibility, and forgiveness in t

Neurodiversity in Infinite Combinations

Aug 25th, 2022 1h 1m

Autistic representation in Star Trek “Perhaps you’re just different,” Tam Elbrun tells Data in the Next Generation episode “Tin Man.” “Not a sin, you know, though you may have heard otherwise.” Both characters—the emotionally sensitive Betazoid

Identical Strangers

Jul 30th, 2022 1h 44m

Star Trek’s Double Troubles Don’t they say you die if you meet yourself? Our intrepid Starfleet officers had better hope the answer is no, since encounters with doubles, doppelgängers, and duplicates appear to be just part of the job. From the

When Is an Allegory Not an Allegory?

Jul 17th, 2022 1h 12m

Trans representation in Star Trek. In 2022, trans characters in Star Trek have become part of the fabric of humanity’s shared future in space. In addition to Adira and Gray Tal in Discovery, we’ve been treated to the villainess Captain Angel in

Resurrecting Nightmares

Jun 30th, 2022 1h 9m

The Alien franchise and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. In space, no one can hear you scream. But for unlucky Starfleet landing parties, meeting a nightmarish alien menace can prove as traumatic as deadly. For La'an Noonien-Singh, who carries th

Cowboy Diplomats

May 29th, 2022 1h 26m

How Star Trek’s leaders reflect our own. Young, charismatic, and a bit of a ladies’ man, Captain James T. Kirk was cast in the mould of President John F. Kennedy, the beloved US leader who had been killed just three years before Star Trek debut

Servants to Two Masters

May 5th, 2022 56m 53s

Star Trek’s backdoor pilots. The year is 1968. As Star Trek goes off the air for good, a new show—Assignment: Earth—debuts from some of the same creative team. For dedicated Trekkies, the premise is already familiar and the two leads, Gary Seve

What If ...

Apr 5th, 2022 1h 16m

… it wasn’t the Vulcans who made first contact? April 5, 2063. In Star Trek’s imagined history, it was on this date that humanity made first contact with an alien race. The event led to societal transformation on a global scale and ushered in a

Sex and Shooting

Mar 27th, 2022 1h 20m

Captain Picard and Indiana Jones. Wise, measured, and distinctly unromantic, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was conceived from the start as very different from his predecessor, James T. Kirk. But for Patrick Stewart, the lack of physical drama felt cr

A Fantastic Education

Mar 15th, 2022 49m 7s

Lisa Klink on Writing for Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Starting with a short-term position as a writing intern on Deep Space Nine, Lisa Klink rose rapidly through the Star Trek ranks, penning more than a dozen episodes over the course of just t

A Tragic Necessity?

Feb 28th, 2022 1h 23m

How Star Trek tackled the Vietnam War. Every Star Trek series has engaged with the issues of the time, and perhaps none more so than *The Original Series*. Episodes touching on the hippy counterculture and NASA's bold Apollo program grounded th

Doing the Unthinkable

Dec 31st, 2021 1h 29m

Jack Bauer and Jonathan Archer. Premiering just after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Enterprise took another two seasons to fully engage with the radically changed real world in its storytelling. When the s

Best Idea Wins

Dec 12th, 2021 58m 31s

Naren Shankar on a life in science fiction. While Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga took the Star Trek: Next Generation cast to the big screen—not to mention reinventing classic space shows Battlestar Galactica and Cosmos—it was another young w

Living The Dream

Nov 21st, 2021 1h 33m

Live from Destination Star Trek London 2021. After the cancellation of last year’s Destination Star Trek (DST) in London, anticipation for 2021 event, billed as Europe’s largest Trek convention, was greater than ever. A slew of last-minute gue

Boys with Toys

Oct 17th, 2021 1h 12m

James Bond and Julian Bashir. Not many film franchises can boast 25 installments over the course of more than half a century, so for sheer longevity the James Bond cinematic franchise certainly gives Star Trek a run for its money. In some ways

Getting From There to Here

Aug 30th, 2021 55m 3s

Tony Black’s new book: *Star Trek, History and Us* From 1960s hippies in “The Way to Eden” to the War on Terror in Enterprise Season 3, Star Trek has always reflected the cultural moment from which it springs. In his new book, Star Trek, Hi

I Want to Direct NOW!

Jul 19th, 2021 1h 3m

Robert Duncan McNeill on Star Trek's Directors' School. To Star Trek fans, he is Tom Paris, the cocksure pilot of the USS Voyager. But in Hollywood, Robert Duncan McNeill is better known as a different kind of helmsman. From his first day of fi

Under the Sea

Jul 1st, 2021 1h 16m

Twenty Thousand Leagues across the Delta Quadrant. Throughout Star Trek: Voyager’s seven seasons, Tom Paris repeatedly proved his credentials as a mid-20th-century history buff, with his replicated TV set, black-and-white B-movie holonovels, a

Time After Time After Time

May 28th, 2021 1h 27m

How Nicholas Meyer’s other time-travel caper inspired The Voyage Home When Nicholas Meyer was called in to write a new script for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, just weeks before pre-production was due to begin, he must have been struck with a

Room for All Philosophies?

May 8th, 2021 1h 41m

The Scopes Monkey Trial, Inherit the Wind, and DS9’s “In the Hands of the Prophets.” The trial of US high school teacher John Scopes in 1925 was perhaps the definitive 20th-century showdown between religion and science. Indicted for teaching D

Absolute Horror

Apr 15th, 2021 1h 12m

Suspiria and “Cold Fire” Despite being teased in the series premiere, it took Star Trek: Voyager well over a year to actually introduce its female caretaker, a being with the power to send the ship home on a whim. And when the entity did appear

What’s in a Name, Part VII

Apr 1st, 2021 2h 31m

Episode titles since 2009. Concluding our look at Star Trek’s 800-plus episode titles to date, in this episode of Primitive Culture host Duncan Barrett is joined by Tony Black to consider naming strategies for the Kelvin films, Short Treks, Di

And Then I Woke Up and It Was All a Dream

Feb 22nd, 2021 1h 39m

The original reset button. It’s one of the oldest of literary tropes: a sudden, last-minute reveal that an apparent fictional reality is actually doubly invented. From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on, writers have thrilled in pulling the r