Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, which first aired in 1966, drew inspiration from a century-old strand of technological utopianism in American science fiction. Writers like Looking Backward author Edward Bellamy had long envisioned improvements in communications and transportation as a way out of the economic injustices and blighted environments of the Industrial Revolution and a means toward perfecting society. Star Trek was nothing if not optimistic about technology; each week, the captain and crew trusted their lives to the miracles of modern science. True, there were hints of something darker (the uppity computer gods that Kirk disconnected, for instance), but in the end, Scotty and his engineers set things right.

Enterprise, which debuted this fall on UPN as the newest entry in the Star Trek franchise, has a fundamentally different vision. Its crew copes with bleeding-edge technologies: they don't trust the transporter not to scramble their molecular data, the torpedoes miss their targets, the shields are on the fritz and the computers make crappy food. Starfleet is now a paternalistic bureaucracy. In short, the message is, we have seen the future and it doesn't work.