Attention nerds! Chris Colgan over at PopMatters recently penned a passionate, nearly 2,000 word rumination on the gradual decline of the utopias in sci-fi television over the last decade. If you aren’t a hardcore sci-fi nerd (like me) I’ll break it down for you in simple terms. In the beginning, there was Star Trek. In this universe, there were no social classes, nobody wished for material wealth and all humankind was steadily devoted to the advancement of all human beings. There were problems, of course: the Romulans were always attacking, the Borg was always trying to assimilate everybody and the damned, plot-friendly Holodeck was always malfunctioning, sticking captain Jean-Luc Picard in the middle of the Old West. But in general, all the humans and most of the aliens got along, with no social strife to speak of.

Colgan points out that most of the sci-fi shows of The Next Generation’s time like Babylon 5 and Stargate followed that utopian model. Mankind might fight external enemies but it never fought amongst itself. That is until Joss Whedon’s Firefly came out in 2002, which, as Colgan says, “was one of the only science fiction shows up to that point that displayed poor, homeless, diseased, and destitute people with any regularity.” In Whedon’s universe, ruthless corporations are always exploiting planets and their natural resources. The government is tyrannical, as evidenced by the wealthy, advanced civilizations near the center of the solar system and the destitute ones near the outskirts. Yes, mankind had learned how to travel the stars, but they hadn’t figured out how to prevent civil war or even feed all of its members.

That lead to Battlestar Galactica, perhaps the most serious in tone of any sci-fi series ever. If you don’t know the plot by now, essentially mankind creates robots called Cylons that eventually become advanced and nuke all of human civilization. From then on, the remaining humans have to make all kind of cold-hearted decisions to survive, from shooting down a ship full of civilians that might be infiltrated by the enemy to shooting traitors out of the airlock. In this future, mankind has essentially screwed itself and is functioning much as its ancient ancestors did, desperately trying to survive on limited resources.

So, is this really the end of the sci-fi utopia? In the booming ’90s and early aughts, it’s easy to see why we would have an abundance of shows portraying a world of limitless technological advances and galaxy-wide peace. In the wake of 9/11 and the recession, however, a wake-up call looking at the hard issues of the day seemed like the right way to go. Hopefully, one day things will be good enough to go back to the time when future mankind’s biggest problem was escaping a world inhabited by holograms of Mark Twain.

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Photo: Marcin Wichary, Flickr, CC