Space: the final frontier of politics.
Just four months into his presidential voyage, controversial GOP Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has waded into an even more controversial debate -- Who made the better starship captain on Star Trek, James Tiberius Kirk or Jean-Luc Picard?
Cruz, an original series fan, is unabashedly pro-Kirk -- to the point where he layered some class warfare onto the debate. "Kirk is working class; Picard is an aristocrat," Cruz told the New York Times in an interview Thursday. "Kirk is a passionate fighter for justice; Picard is a cerebral philosopher ... I think it is quite likely that Kirk is a Republican and Picard is a Democrat."
That didn't sit well with a lot of Trek fans -- not least of whom was Captain Kirk himself, aka Cruz' fellow Canadian, William Shatner.
Star Trek wasn't political. I'm not political; I can't even vote in the US. So to put a geocentric label on interstellar characters is silly— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) July 23, 2015
There were certainly political overtones to the original series, however. The show's creator Gene Roddenberry said in many interviews that he was wading in on contemporary issues such as Vietnam and race from a futuristic perspective, as science fiction often does.
The show famously featured television's first interracial kiss, and the recipient of said kiss -- Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura) -- was one of the first black actors to be seen on a network show. Nichols says she was persuaded to stay on at the end of the first season, when she wanted to quit, by no less a luminary than Martin Luther King, Jr.
Throw in the fact that it had a Soviet officer serving on it, and there's little doubt that the original Enterprise crew was seen at the time as being on the left-wing, communitarian end of the political spectrum.