"I appreciate their historic commitment to racial diversity and to a vision of the future where things are a lot better than they are now. Also the giant space amoeba. And the planet where everyone is pretending to be gangsters from prohibition-era Chicago."

"I like all the kissing."

Giggle. "Lots of the gender politics is really unimpressive by modern standards, but they did have the first interracial kiss on television, so I forgive them."

"Gender politics?"

"Yeah! There's like - a lot of stuff in Star Trek is meant to make some kind of political point that would have been really obvious and salient to audiences back in the sixties, when it was airing. That's a lot of why the diversity is so impressive, it was airing during the civil rights movement and portraying Uhura as a respected member of the crew, and airing during the Cold War and portraying the Russian Chekov as a respected member of the crew, too. It's making this statement that in the future, we'll be better than we are now, so these people working together won't be noteworthy. And they were right, so when people watch it today, those parts hold up. But our ideas about how women are and should be treated have changed a lot, so some parts are weird and off-putting or ridiculous. Like the claim that women are too emotional to be starship captains, or a lot of less-obvious stuff about the roles they tend to cast women in, or the thing where all the female military officers go around in miniskirts."

"They look good, though."

"They don't actually bother me more than the lack of seatbelts, but it's definitely something that a modern show would do differently. At least if it were trying to do the same kinds of things that Star Trek was trying to do when it aired. In the later Star Trek shows the women all mostly wear pants and look way more plausibly military."

"Huh."

"It's a product of its time. But a fun one that left a lot of really important impressions on stuff that came after."

Then they can watch Star Trek.

They can! Next up is Return of the Archons.

Karen looks very suspicious about two minutes in.

"Korva and Hagan said they went to a planet ruled by some kind of entity called Landru, right?"

"That's about how I remember it."

" - we can finish this in a bit but right now I really wanna go back to the demiplane and try something, is that okay?"

" - course."

She pops them both back to the demiplane and walks over to one of the remaining unoccupied spaces in her demiplane.

" - oh, man, it's not going to work, I don't know how to make a power source."

She frowns.

She attempts to make.... a holodeck with a standard 24th century power generation method attached?

This appears to work.

" - woah. Okay, I take back some of what I said before, I think it is possible that Star Trek is... based on a real place of some kind. And therefore I am not sure how specifically political some of the elements are."

" - huh. Cool."

"I'm not sure if I can at all get this thing to work, or if it actually works at all, but I'm gonna try to find out."

She steps into her holodeck.

"Uh. Computer... list available programs?"

A voice answers her. "Federation holodecks come with six hundred and twenty-seven programs pre-installed. Popular programs include the Standard Combat Simulation Sequence, Eighteenth Century Sailing Vessel, Café des Artistes, Equestrian Adventure - "

"Uh, gimme the eighteenth century sailing vessel?"

- and they're on a ship. It is, from here, totally indistinguishable from being on an actual sailing ship; there's a crew working the sails and birds in the sky and the smell of salt. The wood beneath her feet creaks when she shifts her weight.

" - did you do that?"

"Holodeck did. It's what holodecks do. Uh - sorry, they don't actually have them in the original Star Trek series, these ones are from like a century later, just - this was the first thing I wanted to see if I could make, I guess, when I learned Star Trek technology might be something that just actually worked and that we could make."

"So we're not on a new plane now?"

"Nope, if you walk far enough you'll eventually hit a wall. Although I guess you might not be able to do that, if we're on a ship, and they might have some way of keeping people from accidentally crashing into walls, I guess? But we're still in the holodeck chamber. You can interact with the stuff you see, though, there's some complicated justification about magnetic fields or whatever. It's not solid matter but it acts like it is."