Don’t hurt the Trekkies – we can’t take it right now
The Seattle Times has really annoyed me with their big, lead article in the Northwest Life section today entitled End of “Star Trek” era? Just boldly GO, already!
The article was apparently written by the one person on the Times staff that they could find who had watched any Star Trek at all. And he only likes the original series and some of the animated stuff, and a few of the movies. And only the movies that Nicholas Meyer had any involvement in. Mark Rahner is his name, and he is just mean. Does the end of Enterprise really necessitate telling all Trek fans that they have outlived their usefulness (my interpretation)?
First of all, he wants more conflict. Conflict? The man apparently never watched Deep Space Nine. He summed it up in one word: yawn. It was truly aggravating to a real Trekkie to read his tripe. He didn’t like the constant social-work aspect of Star Trek. Okay, I can follow him there, but that was the fun of things after Gene Roddenberry died – other people got to play with stories and show that yes, people can still be scum in the 24th century. And not just the obligatory bad guys or the aliens. Where has this guy been? I can show him half-a-dozen episodes from DS9 right off the top of my head that would deliver enough strife to make current politics look tame. Murder? Intrigue? Conspiracy? Got it all for you, Mark.
Anyway, what he thinks, in the end, really doesn’t matter. Enterprise is going away just when it was getting really good. They spent too much time on this Temporal Cold War crap, and also had too many Next Generation-related episodes (Borg and Ferengi) early on. The Xindi conflict was interesting, because it allowed this timeline to create its own mythology and conflict, but it led into the major continuity issue of “Why have we never heard of this before?” This season, having finally worked out the kinks and having great writers firmly grounded in the original series lore, we started seeing more Andorians, Tellarites, Vulcans being less holier-than-thou, and even a couple of green Orion girls for fun. Although I will say one thing about that – Kirk never let a woman turn his head enough to endanger his ship, Archer! We had good stories, Klingons without foreheads, and then – gone. Paramount wasn’t making enough cash, so UPN will become a more trashy version of the WB full-time.
As a Trekkie since childhood, I will miss it a lot. But the Webmaster and I are hunting on eBay for the DVD collections (region 1, please, and no bootlegs from China), so I know that Star Trek will never completely go away. But it’s like watching something that kept me young with a sense of fun and wonder disappear into a void. Do I really have to grow up now?
Heck no! There are books! 🙂
Subscribe to my feed