My Problem with Star Trek

When I was little, about five or six, I would spend the night at my grandma's house periodically. I would fall asleep on the couch, wearing a ratty old adult-sized pink t-shirt, under wool covers, watching the TV into the week hours of the night. If I was lucky, after 10 PM this crazy show would come on. Men in colorful uniforms, patrolling the universe, visiting strange new worlds and seeking out new life forms, would come on for an epic full hour. I would usually fall asleep before the show was over, but still, imprinted in my brain, was the glimmer of Star Trek.

That, in a nutshell, is what Star Trek was and always has been to me. Not the crazy science, or the goofy cults, or the guys who speak Klingon and dress as far-future biker gangs in San Diego hotel lobbies. No, for me, Star Trek started and ended with a ship, traveling around, with military discipline and high technology, encountering the unknown.

Granted, as time went on, the show got a little weird. My six-year-old brain grokked that this was a possible future, that this technology was potentially real and that, given extra-terrestrial life forms, we might form alliances and agreements as we ventured into space. However, even a six-year-old scratches her head at episodes like the Squire of Gothos, wherein the Enterprise encounters an alien disguised as an eighteenth-century fop, or the episode where Kirk and Spock become Prohibition-era gangsters. The Enterprise came across ancient Rome, and Nazi Germany, and other variations of various derelict film sets, and it only made sense once I grokked the Hollywood reality that the show's creatives really traversed. Roddenberry actually pitched the idea of re-using existing sets and costumes to the studio; he was that desperate to get the show on the aire.

I didn't quite get the Next Generation. The writing was better, though in retrospect, not by much. That show didn't really get going until the third season. I missed most of Deep Space Nine, which seemed like more of a soap opera in space, and by that time, I was too busy living my own life to care about the lives of imaginary astronauts. Voyager and Enterprise, each attempts to get back to the traveling roots of the show, are complete mysteries to me. All I know are that there was a woman captain, and the guy from Quantum Leap got steady work for a while.

Which brings me to the latest Star Trek movie. I like it. I liked it a lot when I saw it. I thought the new actors were great, the direction solid, the storyline compelling and not lagging anywhere. I liked Leonard Nimoy's swan song as old Spock. That being said, it's a far cry from the Trek I was interested in. I call it "Star Trek: This Time It's Personal".

Let's see:

The villain is motivated to revenge himself on Spock for destroying his planet.

The villain kills Kirk's father at the very time and place Kirk is being born.

Spock in turn watches the villain destroy his home planet, including his mother.

Kirk is avenged! Spock is avenged! In a way, even the villain is avenged.

This is Shakespearean tragedy at it's best, except all this vengeance is painted in a positive light.

Never mind the criticism of a friend of mine, far more of a Trekkie than I. The villain waits around 25 years to enact his plan. Instead of attempting to save his world, he only wants to destroy the man responsible for its end. Even a working-clas space miner would figure out, in that time, that maybe actions geared towards positive preventive outcomes are preferable to negative destructive outcomes.

So, I return to science fiction seeking what took me there in the first place: cool spaceships and a wanderlust for the skies. I will leave the plotting and characterization to other genres.