The time for Star Trek fans' traditional defensiveness is past; just as the Enterprise crew introduced the concept of subjectivity to the collective cybernetic conciousness of the Borg, Trekkers have gone beyond the dim days huddled in tiny conventions, passing tatty false Spock ears between the faithful. The future belongs to us because we've seen it on TV. You can get commemorative plates in the Sunday Mirror magazine, or =A345 Star Trek pens (a special reader offer by the Independent, already), but one thing is certain - whoever you are, wherever you are, you are someone who likes Star Trek. Yes, you are. Of course you are.
It seems strange now to think about our initial reservations about Star Trek: The Next Generation. The series began running on BBC2 on Wednesday nights at 6pm some six years ago, and everybody wondered if these young pretenders could have any relevance in out Trek-needy lives. A Klingon on the ship's bridge? Some bloke with a visor? A bald English Captain? It all seems very strange, very different. A far cry indeed from Captain Kirk's Jewish Mother in space and Spock's complementary rabbinical wisdom.
Next Generation was set 80 years further into the future than classic Trek and a lot had happened in the intervening years: we'd made friends with the Klingons, redesigned the Enterprise and snazzed up the technology to include stuff like the fantastic virtual vistas of the Holodeck. But, perhaps like the Old and New Testaments in your Earth Bible, the new Star Trek was built on that which had come before, respectful of tradition while moving forward to encompass new concerns, new angles and new issues of quantum singularity in a gravitationally-curved universe.
It was initially a radical decision to cast Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Never before had a bald person been a hero in a science fiction show - Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless had established an unbreakable convention of slap-head baddies versus overly-coiffured heroes in the 1930s. More significantly, the Picard role embodied some of the finest values of the European Enlightenment; an 18th-century French creature of high rationalism elegantly mixed with a contemporary awareness of the politics of multiculturalism. And believe me, when you're in space and having to deal with emergent computer-generated lifeforms such as nanites, the intricacies of ritual Klingon swearing, or even learning to love intelligent gaseous entities, your cherished liberal values will be tested to the extreme.
This is a primary issue for Star Trek: a post-capitalist wrestling bout with the antipathies of the liberal conciousness. You maintain equilateral respect for all other cultures no matter how weird, how pointy, or how gaseous. Yet you can't let that respect override concerns of absolute morality (eating people is wrong) or self-preservation. Star Trek offers us the comforting suggestion that frequently you can resolve these ideological contradictions by re-routing the pattern buffer's sub-routines in the transporter.
So Wednesday evenings on BBC2 are going to be sadly empty after this week. Seven seasons and 182 episodes later, The Next Generation went out, heads held high, as one of the US's consistently highest-rated shows moved (as original Star Trek did before it) towards the dollars-on-screen quadrants of movie spin-offs. But this week you will be able to see the final double-length episode 'All Good Things', which to many fans, out-guns even the movie Generations.
I won't spoil things for you, but suffice it to say that the story involves 'Q' (a recurring, capricious, omnipotent character who, incidentally, the gay sci-fi pressure group the Gaylaxians have adopted as one of their own) and a temporal rift of beautifully paradoxical proportions. Best of all, though, we get to see Picard, Ryker and assorted company in 25 years' time - addled, grizzled and tottering but ultimately undiminished. You must watch this. The issues herein are of maximum relevance to all life forms on this planet and, at the end, you'll know who to thank for your very existence. I told you it was cool, didn't I?
So what about the future? Star Trek is a massive entertainment brand and shows no sign of evaporating. Its holy mantle is now carried by the big-screen films (the next movie is due early next year and features those nasty collective Borg types) and in the spin-off shows. Of these, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is cool about half the time while Star Trek: Voyager is as much use to Trek junkies as re-runs of Blake's Seven. We may be caught in a temporal causality loop of diminishing aesthetic returns as far as future Trek spin-offs go.
Many of us are worried by what could sail on the cosmic winds of future Treks. The big movies won't allow for the character studies and development which The Next Generation's neo-soap elements managed so brilliantly. The films may be epic and exciting, but that sense of intimacy developed over seven years with the brave new crew may be lost forever.
But, thinking about our real futures, how will Star Trek's H G Wells meets Ken Livingstone utopian-technologist view of the future fare once we actually get there? Will we catch up with Star Trek or will we overtake it and become large-lobed, spindly creatures with veiny brains who wear spangly purple dresses and refer to ourselves in the third person? It could be just around the corner, you know. And, while they reckon that with todays technology you'd need memory chips stretching 10,000 light years just to work out where to put people's atoms back together in the transporter, who's to say that primitive matter-transmisson kits won't be on every kid's Christmas list in 20 years' time?
But if alien beings ever wanted to reveal themselves publicly to us, I think I know what they'd look like. The Enterprise is on view on television all the time somewhere on this planet. So if the aliens have done their Earth cultural research properly they'll understand its enormous totemistic potential and will rearrange their craft in the shape of Starfleet's flagship so that no one gets frightened. People would just think that it was a really cool idea and give the aliens large respect.
Some would say that this is why Star Trek came into being in the first place; that its creator, Gene Roddenberry, was given a mission to prepare the Earth for new life forms and alien civilisations. Even as his ashes are ejected into space - alongside his fellow visionary Timothy Leary - we'll all be watching the skies for a sensitive, bald Frenchman and cuddly warriors with knobbly foreheads. And we'll know exactly what to say.
Greg Rowland. The Observer. 16 June 1996