Star Trek: First Contact is set in 2063, in the aftermath of World War III, and while everyone’s dress is fairly scrappy looking, the lush pine forests that surround Zefram Cochrane’s laboratory are hardly the result of a nuclear winter.
“Even in First Contact, in a weird way it’s glossed over a little bit.”
“People kind of glossed over and don’t think about it too much,” Volk-Weiss tells us. A lot of sci-fi future histories started to seem pretty silly in an age where Gorbachev was doing adverts for Pizza Hut.
#WHEN DID WORLD WAR 3 START TRIAL#
We see Q dressed up as a World War III soldier, and the crew of the Enterprise put on trial in a post-apocalyptic, lawyer-free trial in the age of “nuclear horror”. That it might not strike until the 1990s or the 21 st century must have seemed as optimistic as anything else in the series.Įven when the Star Trek: The Next Generation pilot aired, only two years before the Berlin Wall came down, nuclear Armageddon was considered such an inevitable part of our future history that it made up a significant portion of the plot of ‘Encounter at Farpoint’. In the sixties a World War III must have seemed like an inevitability – if you give something a sequel people are automatically going to expect a trilogy. Nuclear war was a constant, real and immediate threat, the Cuban Missile Crisis a recent memory. It made sense as a piece of backstory when the show began. Star Trek is, whichever way you cut it, the story of a post-apocalyptic Earth. Even when not referenced directly, we see it reflected in episodes like ‘The Omega Glory’, set in a nuclear wasteland that is mysteriously similar to a post-nuclear Earth, right down to the text of the US Constitution.
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