Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away, SP (Sancho to my Quixote) and I convinced ourselves the world deserved a real Star Trek style communicator. Not content with ordinary lives, we declared, with the audacity only Dunning and Kruger could underwrite that between my vague grasp of circuitry and her misplaced faith in my vague grasp of circuitry, we had everything we needed.

SP (Loki to my Thor, Sam to my Frodo) spoke as though imagination were sufficient currency, and in our economy, it was. We poured into YouTube tutorials, datasheets we skimmed but barely understood, and arguments about whether to prototype in cheap plastic or just dream harder.

The project died, predictably, on the altar of prohibitive costs and moq requirements. Components priced like crown jewels, shipping charges that implied each capacitor was chauffeured individually across continents, and our wallets which, alas, lacked warp capability. Reality has a way of red-shirting dreams before they reach the second act.

And yet when I rewatch The Next Generation or Voyager, SP (Bart to my Lisa, Spock to my Kirk, Dwight to my Michael) and I realize why the younger generations won’t ever see it as we did. What stunned us as children, PADDs, touchscreens, talking computers have already bled into their world as tablets, voice assistants, universal translators, and even tricorder-lite apps masquerading as “health trackers.” To them, Trek’s future is just present-day clutter. Even though the plots themselves hold up, clever, moral puzzles, sharp dilemmas but what that futurism gave was something rarer. That extra layer of wonder and hope that acted as a backdrop to everything else. The intoxicating suggestion that the universe might just bend wide enough for you to dream bigger than you ever dared, that in the future humanity will evolve to a point past our baser instincts.

But we still watch, because buried in the technobabble (shields at twenty percent!) and recycled set pieces is the poetry of myth. Shaka, when the walls fell. Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra.

Footnote 1: SP (Schmitt to my Nick) expressed strong reservations about the comparison, filing an immediate objection on the grounds that she is, in her own estimation, better cast as a Dumbledore to my Harry, a Yoda to my Luke, or a Gandalf to my Frodo. The author, exercising editorial privilege, has preserved the original phrasing. History, after all, is recorded by those who write it; the rest are consigned to footnotes, sometimes literally. The author also notes that this statement was delivered while ducking to avoid a retaliatory strike.