Okay, thought I would come out swinging on a timeless pop culture debate. Yes, Star Trek is better than Star Wars. This seems rather obvious to me, but I’ll put up with opposing arguments if for no other reason than to humor my adversaries.

How do I prove this? Well, to the extent one of these debates can be proven, I would point to consistency. Star Trek as a franchise has consistently produced quality entertainment since the original series in the 1960s. No one denies it’s had low points (Star Trek V, the kookier time travel episodes, Nemesis), but the fact is that most episodes of Star Trek are watchable, even enjoyable.

Star Wars is a franchise based on three great movies from 1977 to 1983, followed by a fifteen-year hiatus, culminating in twenty-five years of soul crushing mediocrity. Yes, there have been some bright spots (the Clone Wars cartoon, Rogue One, the first two seasons of the Mandalorian), but for the most part it’s a mess of stilted dialogue, thinly veiled racial stereotypes, and rehashing old tropes and characters from the original series.

Why is this? Star Trek is logical (“Logical,” says Spock. “Fascinating.”) Star Wars is romantic. (“Feel, don’t think,” says Obi-Wan. “Trust your instincts.”) The Original Trilogy of Star Wars was like a whirlwind romance and every addition to the franchise since then is an attempt to get back that same feeling you got the first time you saw Luke blow up the Death Star. A typical episode of Star Trek by contrast is about a group of competent and likeable people, whom you’ve seen enough to grow fond of, encounter a new phenomenon, and work together to solve it.

This becomes evident when each franchise tries to do what the other does well. Star Trek is capable of being emotional and pulling it off. Think Spock’s death in Wrath of Khan or Jean-Luc Picard coming face to face with the Borg in First Contact after being assimilated and trashing his own ready room. A logical person can show emotion in a situation where it’s warranted, like a funeral or at the birth of a child. An emotional person can rarely be logical. When Star Wars tried to be logical in the prequels, we got psuedo-scientific mumbo jumbo about midichlorians and overwrought soliloquies about how democracy dies.

You also have to look at how each series treats religion and science. Star Wars famously borrows from eastern mysticism to create the religious worldview of the Jedi. Star Wars does that well, but in Deep Space Nine, Star Trek proved it could speak about the religious dimension of life in its exploration of Bajoran and Klingon spirituality. Looking at it from the other end, Star Trek famously tried to get the science right to the best of their ability, having scientific and technical advisers on staff to help out the writing. By contrast, Star Wars can’t even be consistent with its in universe rules. In the Last Jedi, it’s a major plot point that the First Order just now learned how to tract a ship that goes into hyperdrive. This is odd because in the first movie, and I mean the very first movie, Princess Leia points out that the Millenium Falcon is likely being tracked after they escape the Death Star. She turns out to be right, which means that unless Yavin was really close to Aldoran, the Empire had no problem tracking people in hyper-drive.

I should quickly point out that Star Trek is better in that its heroes are generally more iconic than the villain. It’s actually a pretty solid claim to say that Darth Vader is the center of Star Wars. Taking the prequels and the OT as one series, the main character is Anakin Skywalker, who appears in all six films. Star Trek has a few iconic villains like Khan Noonien Singh or Gul Ducat, but rarely do they outshine the regular cast.

On a political level, Star Trek asks much more profound questions than Star Wars from the perspective of a liberal democracy. Star Wars’ original trilogy has us root for the underdog rebels, which is an easy thing to do. The prequels pondered why democracies die and came across as heavy handed and dumb. The sequel trilogy didn’t even bother, but just had StarKiller Base blow away the New Republic and let the Resistance replace the Rebellion and the First Order replace the Empire, and ta-da, instant nostalgia.

Star Trek, however, takes place in a world where the good guys are the Empire. The United Federation of Planets is a superpower in the galaxy and the main characters have to regularly look in the mirror and ask if they are still the heroes. In Deep Space Nine, a Maquis double-agent points out to Captain Sisco that the Federation actually is a little like the Borg, that they too assimilate other worlds in their own way.

Star Wars is about overthrowing the Empire, and once they’ve done that, they have nowhere to go and so they just go back to the well and create some new Empire. Star Trek asks a more jarring question of how can we be a good empire, which is a more relevant and profound question from the prospective of the United States and western democracies in general. How do you keep power from corrupting you? Star Wars had that question in front of them in the sequel series and they punted.

Finally, Star Trek faces the central problem of science fiction and takes it head on. Science fiction addresses how humanity and technology interact. The problem is that human beings create technology to make our lives better, and we largely succeed in doing that. As a result, in terms of human living standards, the future is likely to be much better than the present, much like how the present is much better than the past. It’s not just technology. The number of wars in the world is actually at an all-time low. Why is this a problem? For humanity, it isn’t, but for a science fiction writer, it is a problem because any good story depends on the existence of conflict. If the world of the future is likely to be better, where does the conflict come from?

The typical response is to turn technology into a bad thing. Think of the Fallout world showing us the aftermath of a nuclear war, where apparently people are not able to get bodies out of the street even three hundred years after the bombs fell. Others show us a world ruled by evil corporations, like the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in Alien. Star Wars has the dystopian Empire, which uses technology to blow up planets. But this doesn’t tract with the real impact technology has on our lives, which is mostly positive. Sure, some people use technology for evil, like the Nazis using Zyklon B to perpetrate the Holocaust or Kim Jong Un threatening the world with nuclear weapons, but for the most part, technology has extended our life spans and made us infinitely wealthier. The typical use of technology is represented by anti-biotics, not Sarin gas.

Star Trek gets this right. The world of the United Federation of Planets is a better world than the world we live in, yet somehow they still face adversity. The difference is that Starfleet engages in chosen suffering. They come into conflict with the Klingons and the Romulans because they are exploring the galaxy by their own free will. That’s more like what the future will probably look like.

So, that is why Star Trek is better than Star Wars. Star Trek is so good, I might have borrowed a few of its concepts to write my own book, which is here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLSVRZN5