"Sokath, his eyes uncovered!"We joined our father & became hardcore Trekkies. No matter what else was happening in our lives, we always made time to enjoy Star Trek together, as a family. Or, at least as the men of our family; my sister likes Star Trek, but never as intensely as my brother or me, & our mother, alas, disdains almost all science fiction as "weird." Dearly as I love her, this has ever been an unbridgeable gulf between us. The high water mark of Star Trek would have to have been 1994: The Next Generation drew to a close after seven seasons, more popular than ever; the cast were about to make the jump to the big screen in Star Trek Generations; Deep Space Nine, the first series created after the death of Gene Roddenberry, was going strong & improving all the time; & Voyager, the second post-Roddenberry series, set to debut the next year, seemed full of promise & limitless potential, & had yet to disappoint. I graduated high school & entered college in 1997; Star Trek was still flying high & there was no end in sight. The final dialogue from The Next Generation, uttered by Captain Picard at the end of the brilliant series finale "All Good Things...," captured the Zeitgeist:
"...and the sky's the limit."
The twenty-first century has not been kind to Star Trek. The third Next Generation movie, Star Trek: Insurrection debuted in 1998, & Deep Space Nine's magnificent run wrapped in 1999. The last two years of Voyager, 1999-2001, were as awful & uninteresting as any of the preceding five seasons, but the show's colossal deficiencies were highlighted now that it was the only game in town. The fifth live-action show, Enterprise, was interesting, but it never lived up to its potential, failed to excite audience excitement, & was cancelled after only four seasons, whereas The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, & Voyager had all run for seven. (U.P.N., the very network that Voyager had launched & on which Enterprise had aired, soon folded up/merged with it's new-network rival, The W.B., to form The C.W.) Though the production quality on Enterprise was second-to-none, the beneficiary of twenty-one previous seasons of Star Trek in the preceding fourteen years, the writing staff was drawn Voyager rather than from Deep Space Nine & as a result Enterprise from the same stifling lack of character development & lackluster plotting that had marred all seven stultifying years of Voyager. The fourth & final Next Generation movie, 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis, was a profound misfire, a film every bit as poorly plotted & misdirected as Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, but without that film's redeeming character moments. (For all The Final Frontier's problems, & they are legion, the character moments between Kirk, Spock, & McCoy are the best in all of the original-cast movies. There is no similarly redeeming content in the misbegotten Nemesis.)
After Nemesis bombed in 2002 & Enterprise fizzled out in 2005, the "soulless minions of orthodoxy," the suits at Paramount Pictures, sold Star Trek's soul to the devil, in the person of J. J. Abrams. Abrams & his minions "rebooted" Star Trek with a brand new movie in 2009 that jettisoned all the intellectual, philosophical, & moral underpinnings of Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future in favor of fast cuts, lens flare, breathless action sequences, & movies that are highly profitable & utterly forgettable. There have now been three "Kelvin-verse" (an appropriately Trekkie/nerdy name for the alternate Abrams timeline) feature films, each as brainless & thinly-plotted as the last. In press for the latest, 2016's Star Trek Beyond, the actor Chris Pine, who plays Captain Kirk, stated his opinion that "smart Star Trek" just wouldn't work today, that audience tastes have changed. Abhorrent as these comments are, I cannot contest their characterization of the dimwitted nature of the current films. In my own parlance, I have started to speak of a difference 'twixt Roddenberry's "Smart Trek" & Abrams & co.'s "Dumb Trek."
A new television series, the aforementioned Star Trek: Discovery, is to debut next year. We know very little: the show is to be set in the "Prime timeline" (Smart Trek), will be a prequel set approximately ten years before The Original Series, & the main character will not be the eponymous starship's captain, breaking precedent with all the other T.V. series. The mastermind of Discovery is Bryan Fuller, the creator of Wonderfalls (terrific) & Hannibal (terrible), etc., who has extensive Star Trek experience, writing for both Deep Space Nine (terrific) & Voyager (terrible). There have been troubling things said by Fuller about the forthcoming Discovery, but one of the most enduring elements of Star Trek is an unwavering belief in a future better & brighter than the present. After twelve years in the wilderness, there will once again be first-run Star Trek on television (well, streaming online); that alone is cause for optimism.
The centerpiece of my family's celebration of Star Trek's fiftieth anniversary was our attendance at the annual convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. We'd been to Star Trek conventions before, but not since the '90s, & we'd never crossed state lines to do so. I'm not the most social fellow, & my brother is even more introverted than me, but there is something truly gratifying in being surrounded by persons, even strangers, who understand a life's passion more readily than even close kith & kin. We might not have had anything in common with the fellow cosplaying as a Klingon other than a love for Star Trek, but that was enough for the two glorious days that we haunted the halls of the Rio Suites Hotel's convention center. No matter what else is happening in our lives, we are still able to bond, even within the family, over the shared affection for & appreciation of Star Trek.
The first broadcast episode of Star Trek, "The Man Trap," aired on 8 September 1966, fifty years ago today.
Smart Trek
Star Trek (The Original Series) (1966-1969)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered (1991)
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)
Star Trek Generations (1994)
Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999)
Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)
Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005)
Star Trek: Discovery (2017)
Dumb Trek
Star Trek (2009)
Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)
Star Trek Beyond (2016)
Objective PORCUPINE
Earlier today, I posted the following to my FaceSpace "wall:"
I logged into the FaceSpace today in contravention of PORCUPINE protocol, because I was told all of the "buttons" (like, love, crying, etc.) were "Star Trek" themed, in commemoration of today's fiftieth anniversary of the first television broadcast of a "Star Trek" episode, "The Man Trap." The bit about the "Star Trek"-themed buttons turned out to be a giant lie. It's not the FaceSpace's fault that I was lied to, but I am making it the FaceSpace's problem, insofar as my PORCUPINE resolved is strengthened anew.The less time I spend on the FaceSpace, the more the little time I do spend seems utterly wasted. To this point, the PORCUPINE protocols look likely to become our new standard operating procedure.
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