By Joshua Tyler
| Published
The best science fiction universes function according to a set of rules, rules which make them what they are.
Battlestar Galactica, for instance, operates in a gritty world based around complex human dynamics and questions of faith and belief.
Star Wars operates like a classic adventure movie. The original movie is often used by instructors as a way to teach students about the best way to structure a classic heroes journey.
In a prior video, which you can find linked to in the description of this one, we dug into the rules of Star Trek. Those rules are what make Star Trek feel like Star Trek, and they include things like a focus on human progress and technological consistency and stories told around groups of people exploring the unknown.
But actual Paramount-owned Star Trek productions aren’t the only things using rules.
Some of the very best Star Trek ever produced isn’t Star Trek at all.
To prove my point, I’d like to start talking about how great Galaxy Quest is, except we get demonetized every time we discuss Galaxy Quest.
Luckily, Galaxy Quest isn’t the only example of something that captures the essence of Star Trek, without being Star Trek.
Some of the best Star Trek isn’t even science fiction!
Activate your warp drive, or power up your quantum flux drive, or just unfurl your sails.
This is the best Star Trek that isn’t Star Trek!
The Last Ship
Inspired by William Brinkley’s novel of the same name, The Last Ship was a 2014 television series focused on the crew of the USS Nathan James, a Navy destroyer left on its own after a global pandemic wipes out all governments and militaries.
The show centers around Captain Tom Chandler, played by Eric Dane, a Captain Kirk-style character leading his crew on a mission to save the world.
In The Last Ship’s first season, when the Nathan James is totally on its own and traveling the world looking for scientific discoveries to cure the plague, the show plays out exactly like a great season of Star Trek.
In subsequent seasons The Last Ship morphs into something else, but that first one is a great modern-day military take on the Star Trek aesthetic and worth watching as a single-season, self-contained story.
Lost In Space
The original Lost in Space debuted on television in 1965, a year before Star Trek. Like Trek, the show follows a small crew on a journey through the galaxy.
The biggest difference between them is in the crew dynamics. Lost in Space focuses primarily on the Robinson family, part of a colonist group that veers off course, emphasizing a survival narrative in unknown environments over exploration.
There was a 90s Lost in Space movie starring Matt LeBlanc, which probably isn’t worth watching, and the original series is now pretty dated.
Luckily, Netflix recently pulled off a pretty fantastic reboot of the series, which captures a lot of what made both Star Trek and the original Lost in Space so great.
Stargate
The 90s Stargate movie launched an entire television franchise based on the adventures of humans traveling through Stargates to visit unknown worlds.
Other than visiting alien worlds, Stargate SG-1 is pretty different from Star Trek. It’s not set in the future and it’s more militaristic.
However, Stargate’s two spinoff shows, Stargate: Atlantis and Stargate Universe, capture a more Star Trek vibe.
Stargate Atlantis is set in a futuristic lost city, which the crew uses as a base for exploration and discovery. It touches on many of the familiar themes that make Star Trek great.
Meanwhile, Stargate Universe follows a group of humans trapped aboard an ancient starship in a far-off galaxy with no way home. The series hits on many of the familiar crew dynamics that Star Trek fans love most.
Fantastic Voyage
Only a few months before Captain Kirk’s arrival on screen in 1966, Disney released a different story of exploration called Fantastic Voyage.
Instead of exploring outer space, it takes the crew of a small ship inside the human body, boldly going where no one has gone before in its own way.
Fantastic Voyage was the technical marvel of its day. The movie’s original trailer heralded it as “a new kind of moviegoing experience,” and for once, that wasn’t hyperbole. It was a fact.
Like Star Trek, Fantastic Voyage stands out as a turning point in sci-fi by exploring a brand new setting that had never been done on this scale before. It still holds up as a technical advancement and a fun adventure.
SeaQuest DSV
The Steven Spielberg sci-fi series SeaQuest DSV first launched in 1993 on NBC with high hopes and with the intention of dovetailing of the popularity of shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.
It takes the Star Trek formula and applies it to a near future where mankind has developed new technologies for exploring underwater.
SeaQuest follows the crew of a futuristic submarine as they explore the ocean depths, and also occasionally get involved in time travel shenanigans or, in a really weird twist, end up on an alien planet.
Roy Scheider stars as the lovable and very Picard-like captain Nathan Hale Bridger. There’s also a talking dolphin named Darwin, a precursor to the Cetacean Ops navigators shown on Star Trek: Lower Decks.
Prometheus
The 2012 Ridley Scott movie Prometheus is a prequel to Alien and part of the Alien franchise. And there aren’t many things less Star Trek than the Alien movies.
Except for this one, which is, in a very weirdly specific way, actually a stealth remake of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
The story of both Prometheus and Star Trek V involves a search for the creator on a journey led by scientists who have abandoned logic in favor of blind faith and belief. Both movies hinge on a critical crew betrayal to move the plot along.
Even Prometheus’ production design resembles The Final Frontier. The planets they visit look like the same place, and we meet both of the movie’s scientist characters digging around in a desert.
And of course, in the end, the gods they find in both movies are murderous jerks. Embrace the eerie similarities by watching The Final Frontier and Prometheus back to back.
The Orville
The Orville is the most Star Trek show to hit television since the cancellation of Enterprise, and that’s a vibe series creator Seth MacFarlane fostered on purpose.
It’s not Star Trek though, so here it sits.
It’s about a crew of explorers wandering their way through the cosmos, encountering the wonders of the universe, and challenging the human spirit. You know, exactly what Star Trek was back when they had the bald guy in charge of the ship. Back when it was still good.
The Orville will scratch the Star Trek itch that hasn’t been satisfied by Paramount’s current Trek offerings and sometimes, especially in season one, it’s also really funny.
Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World
Based on the book series by author Patrick O’Brian, the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World follows Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey, a British naval officer during the Napoleonic Wars. He and his crew are tasked with chasing down a French vessel far more powerful than their own.
That might not sound very Star Trek, but it’s a movie about a ship sailing into the unknown, exploring strange places making scientific discoveries, while also locked in battle with another ship.
Russell Crowe’s Jack Aubrey is a perfect Captain Kirk and Paul Bettany, as the ship’s doctor, plays out as an amalgam of both Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock.
Basically, it’s everything you’ll see in a good Star Trek movie, it happens on a ship powered by the wind, instead of a warp core.
If we were allowed to talk about Galaxy Quest, it might have been number one on this list.
But feel free to chastise us for excluding it anyway.