A Paramount Narrative: Exploring Space on the Starship Enterprise

Abstract

At the beginning of every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a voice-over reminds us that the narrative we are about to see belongs not to the various persons, human or otherwise, who populate the show, but to the Enterprise itself. The Enterprise is accordingly privileged in the philosophy and iconography of Star Trek, both for its audience and within the internal logic of the series. Not only does the Enterprise provide the physical space within which most of the series' events occur, but it also creates imaginative, political, and communal spaces that give shape to the fictional world of The Next Generation. Near the end of the series, an episode in which the Enterprise becomes a sentient being makes explicit its ongoing role as a protagonist in the Star Trek saga. In this essay we explore this active, multiple space as it defines and enables the fictions it contains. In many fictional texts, a physical environment does not merely serve as the frame or the background of the narratives that unfold within its boundaries, but as a structuring force within those narratives. From Plato's cave through the Marquis de Sade's boudoir to Defoe's desert island, Sartre's hell, and Conrad's jungle, literary places have had a narrative life of their own, as they have contained tensions, possibilities, and potentialities that help constitute the stories of their inhabitants. In certain genres, particularly science fiction and utopic fiction, the elaboration of a work's physical setting often becomes an important and complex textual project in its own right. The premise of such works is that a particular imagined environment will generate distinctive narrative possibilities. Hence many of the most influential utopic and dystopic texts in our culture, such as 1984, Brave New World, and Blade Runner, begin with a detailed portrayal of a physical space. Various questions about a physical environment can become textually important in these works, including the relative isolation of the space in which the narrative occurs, its climate, its divisions, and its use of communal as opposed to privatized spaces. How convenient is this environment for meeting the needs of its inhabitants? What sorts of technology figure prominently within it, and how dependent is the environment upon this technology? What is its guiding aesthetic? In some science fiction, the question of how to interpret the nature and boundaries of a physical space is itself problematized, thereby taking the primacy of these concerns to a new level. The Enterprise D likewise does more than serve as a container for Star Trek's complex social and political vision through providing an imagined environment. As the show's privileged aesthetic object, it functions to depict and even to determine a fictional world. September 1997 marked the tenth anniversary of the first television appearance of the Enterprise NCC-1701-D. Though its creation had been under discussion for some time, its debut occurred in a cultural context markedly different from that of the Enterprise of the original series.