#34 The New Age Generation, part 2
Delving further into the mystic currents of the 24th century.
III
In part 1 of this essay, I argue that a strain of New Age thinking can be found running through the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I link this mystical tendency to the liberal zeitgeist of the Eighties. I offer a breakdown of the season one episode “Where No One Has Gone Before” to illustrate my argument.
Now of course, a single episode does not a show’s sensibility make. If “Where No One Has Gone Before” were the only evidence of a New Age outlook on TNG I would not have bothered to write this essay (though I might well have written a different one on TNG). The other episodes worth mentioning in this regard I’ll come to in a moment. For now I want to consider composer Ron Jones’s flamboyent, synth-heavy music. Now synths, of course, feature heavily in most New Age music—especially synths with a distinctly Eighties flavour. In fact it’s precisely that mood, that vibe, that the first few (very synthetic) notes of the TNG title sequence evoke. That whole sequence, as the reader probably knows, is an Eighties update on the Sixties series’ opening titles. “Its five-year mission…” and “Where no man has gone before” make way for “Its continuing mission…” and “Where no one has gone before”. I don’t know if composer Ron Jones created the synth intro—that instantly recognisable phrase which segues into an orchestral theme equally memorable. This latter, by the way, was originally written by Jerry Goldsmith for Star Trek: the Motion Picture. But whether or not Jones honed that opening melody, it does gesture towards the same imaginative universe evoked by his TNG background music.
For me both versions of that opening phrase—The Original Series’ and TNG’s—are suggestive of the vastness and the enigmatic quality of space. In both cases what is evoked is Mystery. Of course the mood differs slightly between them. With TOS there’s a distinctly retro, perhaps naïve quality. With TNG it’s very Eighties: New Age / vaporwave.
Later Trek series went for different effects. Perhaps, by the Nineties, Mystery was felt to be a little naïve. Whatever the case, the spin-off shows obviously needed to find their own identities. Deep Space Nine’s main theme evokes Majesty. Voyager’s, Grandeur. As for the Enterprise main theme, the less said about that the better. Except for the odd episode or two, I have not watched Star Trek: Discovery or other ‘NuTrek’ films or series.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Some Private Diagonal to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.