After nearly 50 years, Star
Trek is still transporting us. But which Star Trek? There have been so many, and we all have our own
favorites. It’s not just generational, either — it’s personal. Here’s a handy*
guide to what your favorite version of Star
Trek says about you.
Top image: TrekCore/Madame Tussauds
The differences between the Star Trek versions go beyond the
different captains — there are also the different crews and ships (or
space station). And a different attitude to exploration.
So here we boldly go…
The Original Series
You love to go out every night and get into trouble. You
like your Saurian brandy strong and your whiskey straight from the bottle.
Sometimes you can’t quite remember what happened the next day, and there are cameraphone
videos of you acting “out of character” — almost as if you were
duplicated by the transporter or affected by a weird goop or hit with bliss
spores. But you always manage to laugh it off. You’re loyal to your friends,
but nobody can tell you what to do. You hate authority figures, especially old
dudes. You like to get kind of baked and talk about philosophy and the nature
of social evolution, but you’re also really good at your job when everything’s
about to blow up. Most of all, you want to help people sort out their messed-up
shit — you’re the person that everyone calls when they want to do an
intervention on someone.
The Animated Series
You’re an explorer, but you never get into too much hot
water. You like to hang out and watch TV with your cat and your friends, just
as much as going out on the town. You don’t really drink as much as you used
to, and your friends are always worried that you’re kind of regressing to
childhood. You do a lot of drugs, but mostly just hallucinogens. You don’t
really have a problem with authority, and you kind of like it when your grandpa
stops by — but you mostly just like hanging out with your friends. And your
cat.
The Original Cast Movies
Your life is one long series of losing things — and then
getting them back, but losing other things in the process. Someone steals your
car, and by the time you get your car back, you’ve lost your phone. You can’t
ever quite manage to win without losing. You like being in charge, but you hate
having too much responsibility, and you wish you could just stay a middle
manager forever. You like to laugh — but it’s a wry, slightly bitter chuckle,
not a belly laugh. Haters are always giving you a hard time, because they don’t
understand how awesome you are or because they blame you for stuff that
happened when you weren’t even there. Even when a hot naked android turns up in
your shower, you can’t really get too excited about it.
The Next Generation
You’re constantly trying to reach consensus with everybody,
and it kind of drives people nuts but they also love you for it. Even when
there’s no actual conflict or there’s just a small misunderstanding, you’re
like, “let’s have a rap session. Let’s have a house meeting. Let’s go into
the break room and have some oatmeal bars and hash things out.” You just
like having lots of meetings and making sure everybody is really friends. You
also like to go hiking a lot, and hanging out at the mall. You like to play
squash, and the mall has a squash court, which is just awesome. Also, you try
to eat at every restaurant in the mall food court, because you want to be open
to experiencing different cultures. You like chocolate a LOT. Also, you love
culture, like Shakespeare. And landscape
paintings. You like to hug everyone, and make sure all your friends like
each other. So you can all hang out at the mall. You have a problem with
bullies, especially bullies who try to force everyone to conform, or try to
make everything about money.
Deep Space Nine
You kind of hate everyone. Maybe you were picked on a lot
when you were younger, or maybe your parents were immigrants who fled from
persecution and then faced discrimination in their new home. Whatever the
reason, you have a dim view of human nature and you don’t want to take part in
anyone’s house meetings. You’re obsessed with conspiracy theories that the CIA created
AIDS, and the NSA is watching you in the shower. And you like to experiment
with religion, especially like Kabbalah or anything New Age that involves lots
of cool visions that THEY don’t want you to see. But you also believe a strong
military is needed (because of your dim view of human nature) and support
getting tough with Russia
and North Korea.
You regard war as a natural extension of politics. You and your friends are
constantly getting drunk and getting into fights and then making up and getting
drunk again. You all cry together, a lot.
The TNG Movies
Nobody understands how cool you and your friends are, even
though you try to explain it to people a lot. You guys are so awesome — you
dress up as 18th century sailors, you go out to the desert and ride around in
yourdune buggy for hours, you sit
around shaving each other. Your coworkers and random acquaintances get tired of
hearing about all the cool things you and your friends did on the weekend, but
that just means you haven’t fully explained how cool it all was yet. Sometimes
people try to copy you and imitate your style, but you’re too cool for them. You
and your cool friends hate all those posers who try to be the most beautiful or
have the best gear — but they don’t have a cool dune buggy like you do. You
ride around in your dune buggy for hours and hours and hours. Maybe this year
you’ll go to Burning Man, or Coachella. You’ve heard those are pretty chill.
And you could bring your dune buggy.
Voyager
Life is constantly presenting you with unfamiliar situations
and weird people, and you don’t really like it — you just want to go home.
You’re paranoid that foreigners will try and steal your car or take your job,
but you also make a huge effort to be nice to everyone and try to understand their
point of view, even though you know it’ll never work out. You like to nurture
people and help bring out the best in them, but you’re never entirely sure if
they want your mentorship or if they’re just putting up with you. In general,
you can’t tell if people like you, and it makes you nervous — if people
disagree with you, you’ll change your opinion until the maximum number of
people agree. You like to be theatrical, entering a room with a hearty laugh or
possibly a showtune, but then you don’t really know how to keep the larger-than-life
vibe going once you’re actually in the room. You just want to go home! But then
you also like to go on weird vacations, like that time you spent a month living
in an Irish village and trying to seduce anyone with an Irish accent.
The New Frontier
Your life is basically one big soap opera, and people have a
hard time keeping track of who’s sleeping with whom in your social circle. Your
partner’s mom is trying to control everything in your life, and meanwhile you’re
constantly getting dragged into weird office politics at work. You want to be a
footloose and fancy free explorer, swinging a nice sword, but instead you’re
more like the one stable person in a world full of lunatics, and you find
yourself settling down and getting married instead of going out and being a
wild and crazy person.
Enterprise
Everything is too frustrating and annoying. You see yourself
as a great pioneer and explorer, going out and conquering new frontiers and
breaking new ground in the name of discovery and exploration and stuff. But
you’re always getting dragged into people’s confusing and nonsensical quarrels
instead. Like for a year or two, this guy at work wanted to drag you into his
interdepartmental battle with some shadowy figure who worked in another
building, and you never even figured out what that was all about. Every time
you’re all set to make some cool discoveries, at work or on the weekends,
someone calls a safety drill or convenes another boring meeting about not
misusing office supplies, or calls you to come over right away because a grown
man swallowed a hundred Lego bricks. You packed a really neat lunch to go out
exploring in the wilderness, but instead you’re trying to help a 40-year-old
barf up Lego. You want to escape from this dead-end life, but you don’t know
how.
Starfleet Corps of Engineers and Vanguard
You love to fix things— anything, any time. You will come over to your friend’s place in the
middle of the night if his or her toaster is toasting too much on one side and
not on the other. You live for weird mysteries, too — like, if there’s a
glitch that nobody can explain, or a weird green slime in the fridge that
nobody can identify, you will put everything else on hold to figure it out.
The J.J. Abrams movies
You’re a diamond in the rough, baby. You just haven’t
achieved your full potential yet, but as soon as you do, people will totally
fall all over themselves to admire you. You’re still figuring out who you are
and what you’re about, but you already know deep down that you’re the best, at
everything. Because you already know you’re the best, you tend to blow things
off while you go wind-surfing or hang-gliding or skateboarding — you love
extreme sports! In general, you tend to wait until things get really really bad,
and then you jump in and come up with some miraculous solution that shouldn’t
work but does. You have a huge temper and tend to get into brawls with friends,
colleagues, strangers and small poodles — but then you hug and make up, and
the whole misunderstanding just brings people that much closer to the eventual
realization that you’re the best. The Best. Now who wants to go do some extreme
sports?
* Note: This guide
will not actually be handy. At all.
