Original Trek Still The Best

It’s been a long time since James Kirk set out on his 5-year mission, and those early voyages may look cheesy, low-budget, or even sexist now. But “the original Star Trek still has a passion and vitality,” writes Andrew O’Hehir of Salon. “It stands out, even after all this time, as something unique in television history.” With the Cold War raging, creator Gene “Roddenberry imagined a radical-progressive, Enlightenment-fueled vision of the human future.”

Sure, Kirk made Hugh Hefner look chaste, and the women all “apparently departed on a five-year space mission directly from their jobs as go-go dancers.” But the sexuality was part of the charm, and the show delivered TV’s first black-white kiss. In a '70s wasteland of cop shows and sitcoms, Trek was something “literary and heavily allegorical, that ladled out political messages by the quart… a tiny oasis of imaginative escape.” (More Star Trek stories.)