36 Years Later, Firefly Beat Star Trek At Its Own Game

Star Trek was decades ahead of its time. During a particularly fraught period in the political landscape, amidst the Civil Rights Movement and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Red Scare, Gene Roddenberry imagined a utopian future in which all the peoples of Earth had come together to explore the cosmos as one unified front. Star Trek had Russians and Americans on the same crew; it put a Black woman in a position of power and treated her as an equal to her crewmates. All these years later, that utopia still eludes us, but it’s a vision we can still look up to, and aspire to.