"Trekonomics" author, Manu Saadia, gives "Star Trek" fans 10 reasons to defend themselves against that other franchise.
1. "Star Trek" is TV, "Star Wars" is primarily feature films
TV has a built-in advantage over movies: there’s just more of it. That doesn’t mean TV is necessarily better. For instance, special effects for cannot be as good as in feature films for budget reasons. But TV, especially scifi TV, allows for a considerably more detailed look at fictional universes.
A movie has only two hours to wow the theater-going audience. It must pack a real punch. The action must move at a brisk pace. The special effects and space battles must be perfect and incredible - production value in other words. The main characters, good and bad, must be clearly defined and immediately recognizable.
TV is different. TV thrives on habit and familiarity. In TV you can take your time to fully explore not only the characters but also the finer details of a particular universe. You do not achieve the same production quality (sets and special effects are expensive) but you have more latitude to develop a more complex world.
Incidentally, that is why a lot of what we know of the Star Wars universe comes out of supplemental material (books, movie novelizations). For instance, bounty hunter villain (and fan favorite) Boba Fett is never even named in the original trilogy. Much more of Star Trek’s canon, as fans call it, appears on the screen.
2. "Star Trek" has better aliens
More TV episodes allow us, the audience and the fans, to get more fully acquainted with the various alien civilizations of Star Trek. The Vulcans, the Klingons, The Romulans, the Ferengis, the Bajorans - all the great Trek aliens - become much more than actors in funny makeup. Their respective beliefs and cultures are stories onto themselves. More than a few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space 9 go far into the lives and struggles of the Klingons. It’s a real springboard for Trek writers’ imagination and virtuosity (special mention to Ron Moore, Trek’s resident Klingon specialist, who went on to create and produce the reboot of Battlestar Galactica).
This is what is referred as “world-building” among scifi and fantasy fans. The depth and quality of Star Trek’s fictional alien civilizations is such that people in the real world have created a full Klingon dictionary and turned it into a living language. You can for instance find a performance of "Hamlet" in Klingon (on Youtube, where else?). Klingons claim it is better than the Bard’s original.
Star Wars has many more aliens but somehow fails to treat them as much more than props or comic relief. I really love Chewbacca - who doesn’t - but the fact that he doesn’t have actual lines of intelligible dialogue make it difficult to know more about him and to understand his people’s culture and his psychology (and no, the infamous Star Wars Christmas wookiee special will not help you one bit). Come to think of it, we are not even sure whether Chewbacca is a male or a female wookiee.
That is an important point: alien characters in Star Wars do not have the same psychological depth than their Trek counterparts. Their ‘otherness’ so to speak is only skin-deep. And rightly so: movies are desperately short, one doesn’t have the time to delve into the secret lives of Wookiees or Jar Jar Binks’ philosophical beliefs.
Star Wars has this:
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And this:
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And this:
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And this:
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3. Resistance is futile: "Star Trek" has better villains
The bad guys in Star Trek are much more interesting than the bad guys in Star Wars. Their culture, their motivations, their politics are deeper and more complex. At times they even come across as not universally bad. We get to know them better and to understand them. This is a direct consequence of TV vs. feature films.
The perfect example is the Cardassians - the former occupiers of planet Bajor in Deep Space 9. Cardassians are authoritarian and militaristic, and share many traits with the Soviet Union. Yet, we encounter Cardassians who are actually torn about their crimes and who are good and decent people.
This is very similar with the fearsome Klingons and the disgusting Ferengis: both alien civilizations change in the course of the show. They improve. They become more complex. We care about them in a way we never get a chance to care about Star Wars’ stormtroopers.
Compare this complexity with the almost cardboard-like quality of the villains in Star Wars. Darth Vader, despite his internal struggle, is very much of a piece. He is the archetype of the movie villain. The Emperor in both trilogies is a conniving, power-hungry maniac while their troops are either hapless robots or mindless clones. Star Wars’ villains are essentially caricatures. This is done for a purpose: it ratchets up the danger and the emotional stakes of the movies.
Even Star Trek’s Borg collective is more complicated and intriguing than the Empire and the Dark Side. The Borg assimilates entire people and outfits them with prosthetic appendages. The Borg drones become connected to the collective consciousness. The Borg is in fact an incredibly complex model for a villain.
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