Star Trek Fifty-five Years Later

     As I watched the show over the years, I took no offense at its flaws. A friend described shows like Star Trek as "camp" where the flaws fit together. Everybody speaks English all over the galaxy. The transporter breaks all the time, but it almost never kills anybody. Things break a lot, but the ship somehow stays together. The United Federation of Planets is hundreds of "humanoid" life forms, but the crew of the Enterprise is almost all Earth-human.

     The Earth-centric view of the show I accepted because the audience of the show was entirely Earthbound. It was clear the view of the Star-Trek universe was expanding and changing, especially during the first season. It was the "United Spaceship Enterprise" and then, later, became the "United Starship Enterprise." Somehow I got the impression that Earth was one of many planets in the Federation, not special in any way, but there were continuous references to Earth and Earth history seems central to the Enterprise culture.

     The story that I came away with from the television show is that the diverse human crew came from many places, most of them had never been on Earth itself, but they kept their Earth-nation heritages. Checkov was Russian, Scotty was Scottish, Uhura was Swahili, and Riley was Irish, so Spock being Vulcan (or "Vulcanian" as they said sometimes) fit right in. As I watch the show again, I notice the Earth references are more pointed, but I see little evidence that the Enterprise crew members were from Earth any more than most of the so-called Irish people on our planet today lived in Ireland, or even visited there. As I recall, the Earth scenes on the show are from the Twentieth-Century, not the Twenty-Third.

     The laws of physics are suspect, good television if not good science. In one battle the Enterprise is hit and shows on screen as tilting to one side as a damaged ship on the water when, in fact, there is no up or down in space. Time travel, accelerated Scalosians, and gravity waves make interesting plots for a young, eager, space-scifi-happy audience. For example, when Gary Seven is working on the nuclear bomb in what looks like a Saturn V rocket there is the sound of geiger-counter clicking. (Viewers from my generation get a seriously-heightened sense of urgency and fear hearing that sound. There is even a fake-geiger-counter iPhone application that clicks faster with higher readings when a thumb is placed on the lower-left part of the screen.)

     Alien planets clearly have severe shortages of fabric evidenced by the sparse outfits worn by their beautiful women. I visited a Star Trek exhibit at the Smithsonian and noted how revealing those outfits were, a sneaky way past television censorship in those days.

     The bad guys were bad without explanation. Just as the Japanese and American Indians were generic bad guys in John Wayne movies, Klingons and Romulans were warlike races who hated us and that was the end of it.

     Captain James T. Kirk may have worked for galactic peace, but he was an able warrior when he needed to be. The Enterprise was armed with phasers and photon torpedos and the crew knew how to use them in battle. Captain Kirk also knew his way around women, lots of them, Earth-based human and alien, all good looking. We're never sure he had sex with them, but it sure seems that way on the show.

     Finally, there was the "Prime Directive" not to interfere with another culture's development. Somehow they found a way to rationalize violating it just about every time they met another culture, also part of the Star-Trek mystique. It's also funny that other planets followed Earth's history not just in generality but so specifically that one planet mixed ancient Rome and modern television. (The Chicago gangsters and Nazi Germany were brought by Federation visitors violating the Prime Directive.)

     The technology was funny. They could travel at warp speeds, sensors could identify two humanoids on a planet, but they still relied on human ears recognizing a voice as identification and the timers were rolling digits like my twentieth-century-automobile odometer. I understand the transporter was invented so the show producers wouldn't have to spend the time and effort to do ship landings with people disembarking and boarding.

     I loved the show then and I love it today.

     As I see the flaws and foibles, the incomplete portrayals of settings and cultures, I choose to embrace Star Trek as a television show painting with a broad brush. It's fun to watch with personal tension and intriguing settings and technology. "Warp five" and "beam me up" and "phasers on stun" have become part of our culture.

     There are sequels and spin-offs. I explain it, "The Next Generation kept the ship, Deep Space Nine kept Star Fleet, and Baywatch kept the outfits." I have come to appreciate and to admire The Next Generation (TNG) after dragging myself through the first two seasons. I feel the second, fourth, and sixth movies do a wonderful job of keeping Star Trek alive while I found all the subsequent movies, TNG and "reboot," disappointing.

     Star Trek Continues was an effort to recreate the original television show without adding anything, not a sequel, not a full-length motion picture, just more episodes of the show. I feel they did a wonderful job. My only complaint, which I make vigorously, is they only made eleven new episodes when I was hoping for at least another eighty to match the original. Star Trek Continues kept the spirit of the show, including its flaws and foibles, not a sequel, not a spinoff, but more of the original.

     There is a so-called "remastering" of the original show. I keep copies of both original and remastered Star Trek. I find the remastered visual effects more satisfying, no insult to the original versions where they did so well with what they had in 1966. In my opinion after watching them once, whoever remastered it took nothing from the original spirit and spunk of the show. What looked good on a twenty-one-inch black-and-white television set, and maybe on a nineteen-inch color set a decade later, isn't as good as today's computer-generating images (CGI) on a larger screen with higher resolution. (They took away Sulu's rolling-odometer chronometer and replaced it with digital digits, probably the right thing to do, but, alas, I felt a certain sadness seeing that change.)

     I resist appending "the Original Series" (TOS) to the name of the show. There are sequels and spin-offs with their own names. (As another example, I have a pair of 1957-vintage Quad ElectroStatic Loudspeakers (ESLs) in my living room. There was a newer Quad loudspeaker called ESL-63 for 1963, the year it was supposed to come on the market. I don't call mine ESL-57 like some do, just ESL. The first Star-Wars movie was Star Wars which was later subtitled "A New Hope," but I still call it Star Wars just like it was in the theater in 1977. Similarly, I prefer to call the original show Star Trek just as it appeared in the newspaper TV page in 1966.)

     My favorite episodes are "City on the Edge of Forever," "Amok Time," and "The Trouble with Tribbles," in that order and my least-favorite episodes are "The Lights of Zatar" and "The Omega Glory." While those choices are obvious to me, other Trekkies make quite-different choices of their favorites, which speaks for the richness and depth of the show.

     In summary, the show was what it was, it is what it is, and I don't want to change it. The remaster was totally respectful of whatever it was and is, but I resist any attempt to change anything else. The James Blish books and Star Trek Continues both respected Star Trek for what it was and is. I'm proud to be a Trekkie for fifty-five years.

     There were full-length movies several sequel television shows, a terrific spoof, so-called "reboot" movies, and a recent, online version where the original show continues,

     I have a personal connection with the show. My mother grew up in Montréal and went to high school with Bill Shatner. After she graduated from McGill University and moved to the United States for her graduate studies, my grandmother remained friends with Ann Shatner who was appropriately proud of her TV-star son. (Alas, when I met William Shatner at a meet-and-greet he remembered neither my mother nor my grandmother.)

     In 1977 a blockbuster movie Star Wars appeared with long lines for a month. (I waited for the lines to go away and then went to see the movie, which was terrific. The only movie I waited in line to see when it first came out was "2001: A Space Odyssey.") Star Wars became a huge phenomenon threatening to obliterate all other space movies and television shows, but Star Trek and Star Wars have managed delightfully to coexist as part of our entertainment culture. I see them as complementary rather than competing with each other.

     Star Trek was what it was and is what it is. It shares the cultural stage with Star Wars and 2001 and the Alien movies just fine.

     Just before the turn of the Twenty-First century a wonderful movie came out, the Star Trek equivalent of the Star Wars spoof Spaceballs. It was called GalaxyQuest with Tim Allen as Shatner and Kirk, Alan Rickman as Nimoy and Spock, and Sigourney Weaver as Nichols and Uhura, but with different names. The actors on a long-gone television show GalaxyQuest find themselves taken by aliens called Thermians who saw the show to defend them against their own enemy Sarris. Seeing the small, toy model ship on the show, the Thermians build a full-size, full-power version of the NSEA Protector.

     Without ever mentioning Star Trek or any characters in Star Trek the movie brings much of the joy of the original show and adds its own delightful humor. Yes, I highly recommend it. There is a sequence on a planet's surface filmed at Goblin Valley State Park in Utah, an intriguing and incredibly-beautiful place.

     I have a full, longer piece on why I didn't like the so-called "reboot" movies. The short version is it seemed a desperate attempt in the Quest for More Money out of the Star Trek name.

     I was especially "bummed" at how shallow these two movies were. It seems somebody who never saw Star Trek got two or three sentences about each main character in the show and wrote a script with no real understanding. It would have been wonderful to have a real prequel about the different places and times these individuals came from and how they came together on the Enterprise. Oh, well.

     From my own web page on the reboot movies: I remember Bill Cosby, in one of his early "childhood" routines, talking about the best monster film ever. It had the mummy, Frankenstein, the wolfman, "everybody was in it." The frightened children in Cosby's monologue hid under the seats so long "our backs were covered with black Jujyfruits" (or something like that). What a wonderful way to portray the mind of a child going to scary movies in the theater! In fact, each of these monsters has his own lore and mythology separated by centuries and continents, so they would never meet each other in real life. Only the monster-fan child would think a movie with all three (and maybe a few more, like Dracula) was a good movie. As an adult movie viewer, I expect more dramatic unity from my movie experiences, some allegiance to the original mythology.

     All the episodes are available online and they are a joy to watch. It takes a few minutes to get used to difference faces playing the same old characters with all their spunk and sizzle.

     My only lament is they stopped after just eleven episodes. After building all those sets and getting such a good cast, not to mention accumulating a community of fans, it would have been great if they had continued their continuation for another eighty episodes.