A Taste of Armageddon: Navigating Star Trek’s Post-Catastrophe Era

Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash

By Stephen Lee Naish

Post-apocalyptic narratives often take place deep into the future and depict an environment that is barren, resource deprived and ruled by monstrous warlords. The protagonists are often scrappy survivors who find shelter in the dust-laden ruins of old buildings destroyed long-ago and attempt to confront the barbarism of this harsh world. One need only look towards films such as Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Snowpiercer (2013), The Road (2009) and The Matrix (1999) to conjure up images of a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape that has been obliterated by natural disasters, or atomic war. None of these examples offer a desirable future. They are depressing and unbearable for those that survive. Yet, there is one post-apocalyptic narrative that does offer a vision of the future that is bright, egalitarian and where all the decay and environmental damage have seemingly been repaired and restored: the Star Trek franchise. 

The narratives of Star Trek, told in the films, television shows, comics, novels, and video games, are so immersed within the post-scarcity, post-capitalist utopianism that it presents these concepts with minimal acknowledgement or wonderment. Because of this, it is easy to overlook the significant labor, societal struggles, and personal traumas that contributed to this exquisite future. It is hard to comprehend that the environment is actually post-apocalyptic. 

How did the citizens of Star Trek arrive at this utopia? While the in-universe historical timeline is fragmentary and often contractionary, the narrative divergence from our own reality begins sometime in the early 1990s when the planet was thrown into a gruesome Eugenics War involving scientifically enhanced superhuman dictators who demanded allegiance from millions over vast swaths of land. Khan Noonien Singh, the most infamous ruler, oversaw an empire that spanned all of Asia and the Middle East. This war resulted in a death toll of up to 30–35 million people. The superhumans eventually fled the planet. This event was soon overshadowed by World War III, a nuclear conflict that destroyed most major cities, wiped out 30% of humanity (roughly 2.4 billion people), and caused massive ecological destruction to the planet. The war lasted from 2026 (oh, no!) to 2053. Both these almost back-to-back conflicts can be considered the disaster period in Earth’s history. Life was never going to be the same again.

The "post-atomic horror" of World War III left a traumatized population scavenging for scarce resources amidst nuclear fallout and decaying societal structures. This era, which I refer to as “post-catastrophe”, is only scarcely captured within the timeline and only rendered on screen via time travel plotlines. To explain a little, post-catastrophe sits in the liminal space between the recent disaster event and the more distant post-apocalyptic future. The era captures the struggle of survival after the event and the forging of a new societal structure that will prevail for good or ill.

For example, In Star Trek: First Contact (1996) the crew of the twenty-fourth century USS Enterprise, led by Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Will Ryker (Johnathin Frakes) go back in time to the year 2063, a decade after the war ended, and therefore a decade into Star Trek’s post-catastrophe era, to combat the deadly Borg’s scheme to interrupt the first warp flight that will lead to an encounter with aliens and set the humanity on the road to forming the prosperous United Federation of Planets. The Enterprise crew encounter the world-weary Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell), a war survivor who builds the first warp ship using repurposed nuclear technology. Cochrane is not an enigmatic visionary as imagined by the future visitors. He is a scruffy drunk whose only goal is to attain wealth and status among the poverty-stricken remnants of North American society.

With the assistance of the Enterprise crew, the warp flight encounters an advanced alien race (the Vulcans) and sets a roadmap towards a unified Earth abolishing poverty, disease, and war within just a few decades. This prosperity leads to the founding of Starfleet (Earth’s exploratory fleet), and the eventual forming of the United Federation of Planets (a galactic United Nations) with other species across the galaxy.

The next century or so of innovation, progress, and discovery is left to the viewer's imagination. We get a snippet that things were not always optimistic for humanity even after first contact was made.  “Encounter at Farpoint” the two-part pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation introduces the mischievous Q (John de Lancie), a god-like entity that puts Picard and his crew on trial in a mock 2079 courtroom that consists of armed soldiers sniffing stimulating drugs, a rowdy mob baying for blood, and a so-called Chief Justice (portrayed by Q) who denounces and demonizes humanity’s past barbarity and future enlightenment. This illustrates that just fifteen years after first contact with alien life bits of the planet were still a chaotic, fractured mess. No utopia can be built overnight. The push and pull of conflicting ideologies and visions for the future play out in the post-catastrophe until one overcomes them all.

The narrative picks up again in the year 2151 with the Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005) which sees humanity embarking on the first space exploration missions under the banner of United Earth Starfleet and with the assistance of the Vulcans. From here we witness the encounter and development of alliances with other species and the creation of diplomatic protocols (the Prime Directive) that eventually lead to the enlightened crew members of the Star Trek: Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation taking the reins a century or so later. From here we can assume that the enlightened denizens of Earth succeeded against the more ruthless factions and the post-apocalyptic structures that prevail are positive ones that bring about equality and scientific discovery.   

However, while global societies united among themselves and later with species from other planets, they would still be left with a ravished and depleted planet to contend with. This is not the case. When the various crews return to Earth for assignment or shore leave, the planet is depicted in pristine condition. The gleaming buildings, such as Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, coexist with Earth’s restored and teeming ecosystems. With the cessation, or exhaustion, of fossil fuels, the Earth’s atmosphere is now artificially regulated via a ‘Weather Modification Net.’ This equivalent of a global air conditioning unit moderates extreme temperatures and eliminates the impacts of past resource extraction in the atmosphere, ensuring the skies remain clear and sunny, and the air cool and crisp.

This is a simplistic retelling that overlooks some other media such as novels (Eugenics Wars trilogy by Greg Cox) and videogames that take place in the post-catastrophe era, but it demonstrates that the past citizens of Earth faced many grim events that killed billions, destroyed cities and critical infrastructure, and brought the population to the near point of extinction. Rather than descending into a bleak and authoritarian society which might be witnessed in a typical post-apocalyptic narrative, humanity strived through its post-catastrophe era. They utilized the technology of the past wars to redeem themselves, repair the planet, and seek alliances with alien civilizations to help with the restoration.

The most significant lessons from Star Trek may not stem from interstellar travel, the cool technology, and contact with new lifeforms, but from the “contextual milieu” in which these stories all take place.

Our recent history has thankfully not involved a global Eugenics War, but the possibility of a wider conflict remains a state of anxiety under current circumstances. War is not the only predicament we may face. This century alone we have faced economic crashes, pandemics, ever increasing environmental disasters, the introduction of artificial intelligence, and the rise of authoritarianism. As we stand on the precipice of our own catastrophe, we should contemplate how to achieve a radiant future witnessed throughout Star Trek, but without the extraordinary loss of life and the loss of the planet.

An ending to the world is forthcoming; how it arrives and what it consists of depends on our ability to own the future we have created. The hope is that we can still take action now to prevent the worst atrocities while we have the means to steer toward a brighter future. If our current era of instability indicates that we have already arrived at a disaster point of polycrisis, then we must occupy a post-catastrophe mindset to ensure a livable, and positive post-apocalyptic future.

Stephen Lee Naish is a British/Canadian writer and author of several books of film criticism and pop culture analysis. His writing has appeared in Aquarium Drunkard, Film International, Culture Matters, The Quietus, Cineaction, and Dirty Movies. He lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.