Adam Kotsko, Late Star Trek (2025)

Adam Kotsko is a philosopher of, I guess, at least some repute, but I know him best for two things. One, he wrote a really sharp piece about the college literacy crisis, one that I actually assign in my 101 classes and students tend to respond to really well. Second, he is a prolific poster on Reddit, usually on the "Daystrom Insitute" subreddit, which is devoted to highly detailed analysis of Star Trek. (You might think this would be my jam, but after about a year of subscribing I left the sub because 1) they are too much focused on producing convoluted in-universe theories, and 2) they don't allow jokes!)

Thus he is the kind of person some call an "aca-fan." As an academic and a fan myself, I have read a lot of aca-fan work and seen a lot of aca-fan presentations at conferences... and to be honest, I mostly hate it. In my experience, there are largely two kinds of bad aca-fan work. The first are ones who are good fans but bad academics. Lots of enthusiasm for, say, Doctor Who, but little academic rigor; their fannish instincts overwhelm the analysis. Too many fandom comments or jokes, a lack of real engagement with the text in question. I once saw a presentation at a conference and when I asked a question applying one thing the presenter had said to a different aspect of the text, the answer was basically, "Well, it's just a tv show. It's for fun!" I mean, if that's your attitude, why are you here to begin with. (Literally while I was writing this post a friend texted me to complain she was at a talk that was "just heart eyes as a talk.")

But there's another type of bad aca-fan in my opinion, the one who is not actually a very good fan. They've watched some Doctor Who, but they seem unaware that there's a whole rich universe of fan discourse, they are unfamiliar with the production history or whatever; they just bring their academic framework of choice to the text but don't really engage with its nuances because they don't know it. To me, this one is almost worst, because why are you even doing this if you don't really know the thing you're analyzing? (A good example of both of these problems is the book Doctor Who in Time and Space, which I read and reviewed about a decade ago.)

Late Star Trek: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era
by Adam Kotsko

Published: 2025
Read: July 2025

I am pleased to say that Kotsko has produced a book that is characteristic of neither approach. Late Star Trek is a monograph about Star Trek that takes inventively as its unit of analysis the period from 2001 to the present: Enterprise, the novels produced while there were no shows on the air, the reboot film trilogy, and the streaming shows from Paramount+. Kotsko's argument is that this is the era where the people making Star Trek "made Star Trek that is about its status as Star Trek, rather than simply doing what people like about Star Trek" (27). The shows (and books and comics) became self-conscious in a way that sometimes paid off... but often did not.

Kotsko's approach is a careful one overall; he is attentive to both the details of the texts themselves and the nuances of their production. He knows his stuff as a fan (for the most part), but he also is never blinded by his fanboyism. I thought his analysis was overall quite strong—which might be to say, he usually says things that I agreed with! I was struck by his observation that basically every post-2001 incarnation of Star Trek has been about terrorism to some degree, a choice that made sense in 2001 but maybe not so much that we should still be making it twenty years later. I felt like there is probably more for some future writer to dig into here—is it an expression of our contemporary lack of belief in utopian futures? or an expression of the old Jameson canard about the end of the world vs. the end of capitalism? or frustration with the continuation of the surveillance state long past its supposed rationale?

His consideration of Enterprise is a good one, pointing out the ways in which the show was kind of misconceived, but kind of worked sometimes, and ultimately had to be reinvented two times across its four-year run. Many people think that the fourth season redeemed the show, and though he kinds of leans in this direction, he also points out its failings, such as the fact that it basically stopped pretending to even care about its characters, just turning them into observers for moments of fan service.

I did find the weakest part was his analysis of the so-called "novelverse," the interconnected web of novels that ran from 2001 to the debut of Picard in 2020 continuing the twenty-fourth-century shows beyond their screen end point. This is probably because he clearly is a fan of what they did, whereas I (as I have chronicled exhaustively in a series of posts on this blog) have largely been skeptical, if not exhausted, by many of the choices the so-called "Destiny-era novels" have made; I would argue they commit many of the same mistakes he later identifies in Picard, just differently.  In particular, it seems to me that the novels are just as suffused by the un-Star Trekky cynicism he criticizes Picard for (I write this in the middle of reading Available Light, where far too many characters seem to think carrying out coups against democratically elected leaders is just one of those things), but he doesn't discuss that.

I think probably Kotsko just has a different register of enjoyment than me when it comes to storyworlds—I think he's more into the building of continuity as an end in itself. Not to the extent of some fans, but you can definitely see it in the three "novelverse" authors he singles out for praise: Kirsten Beyer, Christopher L. Bennett, and David Mack. Beyer I can't really comment on (I only read the first of her "Voyager relaunch" novels and decided it wasn't for me, and it does seem like Kotsko considers it the weakest), but Bennett and Mack are probably my least favorite of the regular writers of the Destiny-era books, both having in my opinion a poor command of characterization. Still, though, I appreciate his detailed attention to the novels, and that it comes from a place of consideration and love; it was this part of the book that made me wonder what kind of "aca-fan" work I might pitch if I were to build a glass house for others to throw stones at.

He makes good points about the so-called "Kelvin timeline" films, especially their weirdly repetitive structure and self-referentiality (each one is about Starfleet needing to get back to doing Starfleet things... instead, you know, just making a movie about doing Starfleet things), and he rightly explains why Star Trek Beyond is the best one. I really liked his analysis of how the Kelvin comics (which I haven't gotten to yet except for Countdown, Nero, and Spock: Reflections) tried to make the flawed conception of the reboot films work as a basis for ongoing stories. I am doubtful there are more invested academic analyses of Star Trek comics out there than this!

I liked the whole book, as you can tell, but I found Kotsko's takes on Discovery and Picard particularly potent. Like me, he sees the first season of Discovery as its strongest despite its missteps; he sees the third season onward as competent but ultimately boring. Similarly, he thinks the original premise of Picard was its most interesting even though the way the first season ended was disastrous, and though everyone likes to dump on season two of Picard, I was gratified for his detailed takedown of the flaws of season three. As he says, each season of Picard is basically a new show that seemingly demonstrates contempt for the previous seasons of the show.

There are some small flaws, such as details gotten wrong: he calls Pocket editor Marco Palmieri "Mark," says there were three cancelled Kelvin timeline novels but there were actually four. The most egregious factual error is that the timeline in appendix 2 is completely useless because it gives all the twenty-fourth-century shows twenty-third-century dates and thus intermixes them with the original series. 

Probably the thing that bothered me most is that Kotsko's experience of Star Trek fandom is primarily based on Reddit, and reflects some of its idiosyncrasies seemingly without recognizing that they are idiosyncrasies, such as his use of the terms "alpha canon" and "beta canon," terms that really aren't used elsewhere, and which are misleading, since "beta canon" is definitionally actually not canonical! Obviously I'm biased, but the TrekBBS is mentioned/cited only a couple times (including a thread I myself participated in), but I think it has a more production-focused user base that would have counterbalanced the more lore-focused user base of Reddit. (And given him more insight into some areas he is interested in, such the reception of Enterprise season three. That said, I appreciate that a detailed discussion of Enterprise's famous season three episode "The Interregnum" is included in a scholarly work!)

Overall, this is an incisive piece of criticism; Kotsko is an academic and a fan, and in the best sense of both words. It gave me some good stuff to chew on, I zipped through it in just a day and a half, and I'm curious to check out some of the work he cites as well.

The Title Fonts and Logos of Star Trek, Part II: Television and Film, 1987-2003

Continued from last week's discussion of the original tv show and films, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager...

The return of Star Trek to the small screen with 1987's premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation brought with it a new logo with a new font... the most 1980stastic of fonts:

I know people who hate this typeface for its period-ness with the burning passion of a thousand suns; I've never had a strong opinion on it because, like the fonts for the original, it's been the font of Star Trek: The Next Generation as long as I can remember. That's just how the TNG logo looks, how could it look otherwise? (More on that in, uh, part IV, I think.) It doesn't even look very 1980s to me, to be honest. In the process of researching this post, however, I came across a fan-made font that retro-engineers what a non-italicized version of it would look like.

Defamiliarize it like that, and suddenly my reaction is, "Wow! That is so 1980s... and kinda bad." (In fairness to the real font, I should point out that this guy 80s it up a bit: the real one doesn't have the gap in the S, for example, and he makes the corner of the A more square than it ought to be. Also in fairness to the real font, they knew not to use the gaps in the subtitle.)

The TNG font was never used on any other Star Trek productions.

(Weirdly, though, just days after publishing this, I was reading DC Cybernetic Summer #1 (Sept. 2020), when I suddenly recognized the A in the cover blurb... it randomly uses the TNG font for its blurb! That's the subtitle version, so it doesn't have the horizontal gap in it, but once you notice the A, it's obvious. How random.)

---

When The Next Generation went to the big screen with 1994's Star Trek Generations, "Serpentine" was the font of choice for the words "Star Trek" on the poster. This is the first time that a Star Trek used an off-the-shelf font for a logo instead of a bespoke one, and it can be seen in a plethora of logos for other tv shows and films, including Lethal Weapon (1987), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and InuYasha (2002). I always think primarily of Babylon 5 (1993) when I see it: 

Babylon 5 also used it to display its credits, so it's a pretty strong association.

The later Next Generation movies largely kept up this trend:

As you can see, the first three all paired Serpentine with a narrow sans serif, and then Nemesis with something Yves Peters calls, "a digitally stretched Handel Gothic-like font." Peters also says, "Serpentine shares the (almost) monoline aspect and the tiny triangular serifs with the original movie lettering, but its squarish structure projects a far less elegant, more brutish image." The subtitle fonts adds to that brutish impression in all four cases. I don't think any of these will ever be my favorite Star Trek logos, but I do like the contrast, especially in the Generations one. (I think I have a lot of nostalgia for that movie-- less the movie itself, and more the marketing, since that was the first Star Trek movie release I was really cognizant of. I had the YA novel, and the MicroMachine set, and a couple action figures.)

As with the original films, the TNG ones used different logos within the actual movies, but in these cases they're completely different, with no fonts in common with the poster logos at all. The first two films used ITC Benguiat, a classy serif font:

I think it's that cross-bar on the "A" that I really like. (Fun fact: ITC Benguiat is actually the font used in the Stranger Things logo!) These logos were not, as far I know, used on any merchandising or tie-ins for the films-- but ITC Benguiat was used as the typeface for the logos on the Star Trek: Destiny novels in 2008, in a style imitating the arrangement of the Generations logo.

Insurrection used a different but pretty similar serif font, ITC Elan, for the "STAR TREK" part of the title, though I like it less:

I don't think ITC Elan has been used elsewhere in Star Trek. The sans serif used for "INSURRECTION" is pretty bland.

Star Trek Nemesis introduced, however, a flat-out abomination for its film logo:

Like, what in hell is that? A backwards "R" and "E"?? Why??? It looks too hard like it's trying to be "kewl"; is this born of the same thought process that gave us the dune buggy chase???? It's a font called "Exocet," which was until 2006 the typeface of the Tazo tea logo.

Watching it in the actual film, which you can do here (the logo begins to appear at 00:34), is even worse. I think they're going for something involving mirroring, a theme that is (like much in the film) half-assed, but I don't think it really works. I was pretty amazed to discover that this title sequence is by Richard Greenberg... the man who also came up with literally the greatest title sequence of all time in Superman: The Movie! I guess they can't all be winners.

This logo has never been used anywhere else.

---

The last pre-CBS All Access television show was Enterprise in 2001 (not Star Trek: Enterprise until, weirdly, the third episode of season three in 2003).

This logo is pretty neat, because the font here is original to Star Trek, even though it had never been used in a logo before. It's actually an adapted version of the font used for the hull markings on most Starfleet vessels since Star Trek: The Motion Picture:

The major change is that it doesn't have the outline that characterizes "Starfleet Bold Extended" (also known as "Millennium Bold Extended"), itself a variant of "Microgramma." I like the callback, and I think it looks good. Enterprise got a lot of crap for omitting the "Star Trek" from the title at first, but really, I think it makes sense, in that could a show called "Enterprise" be anything other than a Star Trek show? The use of the very font the word "Enterprise" had been consistently written in since 1979 only served to confirm that.

(Oddly, though, the actual NX-01 Enterprise in Enterprise did not use this typeface! As part of its retro prequel stylings, Enterprise used "Machine Extended" for Starfleet hull markings, which otherwise was only used in the original 1960s show.)

The downside of the logo, however, is that it's very wide and thus very short; I think it looks kind of teeny on things like book covers because it takes up so little height. Compare it to the narrow letters of the original series, or the stacked forms of the other ones. This was somewhat remedied with the belated introduction of the words "Star Trek" to the series name:

I think this logo is fine, but something in me always thinks they should haven't caved to the haters and added "Star Trek"! (Everything else about the show is still bad, though.)

This is another logo that's largely unique, but as I'll discuss in part IV, the Starfleet Corps of Engineers books worked with something similar, though not quite the same.

On to three weeks later's discussion of Discovery, Picard, and other CBS All Access shows...

The Diversity of Crewmember Surnames in All Five Star Trek Series: A Statistical Analysis

Lt. Singh (TOS, Indian)

Introduction

In my post from last Friday, I argued that the original Star Trek made a marked effort to give characters names with non-British/Irish origins. Not an enormous effort, perhaps, but something of one. Ex Astris Scientia did an analysis of all human characters listed in the 3rd edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia, and concluded that 60% of the surnames names were of British/Irish derivations. The writer of that article argues that "[n]o present-day American phone book has such a low share of non-British/Irish names," and that "[t]he situation is worsening with Enterprise where there seem to exist no humans outside the USA at all."

J.-L. Picard (TNG, French)

In my post, I said, "What I kind of suspect, though, is that the ratio is actually better in the original Star Trek than in the later series." But was this actually true? Were the creators of Star Trek better at depicting a diverse future in the 1960s than they were in the 2000s? (Keeping in mind, of course, that surname origin is presumably a crude measure of diversity.) I decided to crunch the data and figure out for myself.

The Problem with Prequels

In his history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss discusses how the pleasure of sequels is innately different from the pleasure of original works. We can only ever go to Arrakis for the first time once. No subsequent Dune novel cannot capture that feeling. It's not that sequels are necessarily inferior, but just that they do something different than original works. If you want the pleasure of discovering the new, you cannot get it from a sequel, only the pleasure of recognition. (I'm going from memory here because my copy of Aldiss is on campus and I am not.)

That said, I would add that rarely is a sequel good if is precisely apes the original work. The best sequels are often repetition with variation, enough alike the original work to deliver the pleasure of recognition, but different enough to deliver the pleasure of discovery as well, even if less so than the original work.

As far as I remember, Aldiss has nothing to say about prequels, but there are obviously some related issues there. Recently, I watched a video recorded a couple years ago, where Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, creators and executive producers of Enterprise (later known as Star Trek: Enterprise) discuss the series some ten years or so on:

They talk about their reasons for doing a prequel for the fifth Star Trek series, which was feeling that the future of the future was not going to be distinctive enough from the future. I don't think this had to be true, but Rick Berman had worked on Star Trek since season one of The Next Generation in 1987, and been co-executive producer or executive producer of every season of Star Trek since 1988.

By the time Enterprise came around in 2001, Berman had executive-produced twenty seasons of Star Trek in thirteen years.  Brannon Braga came to Star Trek as an intern on Next Generation in 1990. After taking various writer and producer titles on both Next Generation and Voyager, Braga became a co-executive producer on Voyager in 1997, and an executive producer in 1998. Someone else might have been able to envision a new twist on the Star Trek formula by going forward, but they could not.

So they went back. When you go backwards, you get the same thing, only different. And, maybe even better, you get to see how something different becomes the same thing. Ideally, the pleasure of discovery is the discovery of recognition in this case.

I even have a t-shirt with this slogan on it.

Now, it's a long video, and I'm not here to nitpick my way through it or anything, but they spend much of it defending Enterprise, but not always in a compelling way-- the problem of the show is not in its fundamental premise, but in how they went about it. (And in that it probably has the dullest main cast of any Star Trek series.) They talk about how the whole point of Enterprise was to show everything we were accustomed to from the earlier shows as new: phasers are new, warp drive is (kinda) new, beaming is new. But, they say, once these things are shown as new... they kind of stop being new.

It's like, Captain Archer goes, "I've never phasered someone before," he then phasers someone for the first time, and now there's no reason for him to treat a phaser differently than any other weapon. Same for transporters: "Oh no one's ever beamed a human before. Well that worked fine. Let's beam all the time."

In the video, Berman and Braga seem to use this as the reason Enterprise turned out to not be very distinct from the previous Star Trek shows, in a way that indicates they find the answer acceptable. After all, they seem to be saying, how many times could Archer say, "Wow phasers"? But when I watched the video, I found this part really frustrating, because it shouldn't be a shrug, oh well, what could we do? moment. The problem with Enterprise is that too much of it is just like what came later. It's a problem that Enterprise's "phase pistols" were the complete same as the ones on the original show, that they could always rely on the transporter when it mattered, that their "slow" warp drive still moved at the speed of plot. They took the setting of the prequel, and then told a lot of the same dumb Star Trek stories.

But they should have been rethinking and reexamining these core concepts of Star Trek. Their phasers should have been different-- or they shouldn't have had phasers at all, and whatever weapons they used should have actually been different in a way that would affect the storytelling. Like, the ship on Enterprise didn't have shields, but it could "polarize" its hull plating, and they treated this exactly like shields on The Next Generation and the later shows, down to the fact that characters would say nonsensical things like, "hull plating at 34%." Like, what could that even mean, because I can see in the exterior shots that 66% of the hull plating is not missing. Substituting new words into the same old stories is not actually making a prequel.

Enterprise should have been as different from the original Star Trek as The Next Generation was from it. Later in its run, it moved in this direction, with mixed results, but its first two seasons mostly failed to deliver on its premise. Like I said above, Berman had been behind twenty seasons of Star Trek already, and Braga had worked on eleven. They were clearly out of ways to tell Star Trek stories that were the same but different, that combined the pleasures of discovery and of recognition, but moving backwards instead of forward didn't somehow magically give this to them.

Plus the characters were mostly dull, and the actual episodes often misjudged, but that's a whole different blog post.

TIL it's impossible to find a picture of Captain Archer where he doesn't look like a doofus. Sorry, Scott Bakula, you really were excellent in Quantum Leap.