Salon is running an entertainingly bitchy, yet insightful article on Star Trek, and specifically on this touring exhibit of Star Trek paraphernalia, currently in orbit around London.

They really knew about the future in the ‘60s. They really cared about it. It was, of course, a time when people still believed in it, a time when “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” was not necessarily a self-consciously retro slogan. Perhaps that is why the original series, with its female crew members (albeit in submissive jobs) and racial harmony (ditto — except for Spock, the Jewish Vulcan), was rather more adventurous and progressive for its time than its spayed spinoffs.

It’s easy to laugh at the costumes, the sets, the dialogue, and, absolutely, the acting —

[Shatner] was (and is) an outrageous ham, applying the “skills” he developed performing in Canada's Shakespearean theater (“I combine English technique with American virility”) as indiscriminately to “Star Trek” scripts as LBJ did Agent Orange to the jungles of Southeast Asia...

— but there’s no denying that the original Star Trek had an originality — a kind of honesty, even — that has been lacking lately, not only in all the follow-on shows, however polished, but in pretty much all the pop-science-fiction that has made it to the screen, large or small. (Yes, even Babylon 5.)

Since Star Trek (and Star Wars, too, of course) surveyed the territory, the film and TV industries have been largely content to stay within that territory, and put up strip malls and office parks and tract houses on it, too. But despite all their faults, the crew of NCC-1701 really were going where no man had gone before.