Star Trek

When Star Trek Enterprise, the fifth series of the Star Trek saga, was cancelled before its scheduled run ended, there was an outcry from Star Trek enthusiasts against the action. After all, hadn’t Star Trek, in all of its manifestations, become something of an institution unto itself, complete with its own “history of the future”? I haven’t seen any of the Enterprise episodes, but if anyone thinks that they are being deprived of Star Trek, then they are severely deluded!

When the original Star Trek series, starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, was cancelled after only three seasons in 1968, I truly felt deprived, for I was just getting into the series when it was ended. And there was a period when reruns of this great old series had not yet hit the airwaves. There was no such thing as video or DVD rentals yet, so that period was truly a time of deprivation. What is the situation nowadays regarding Star Trek? If you were to add up all of the hour-long episodes for the five series (Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Voyager, and Star Trek Enterprise), you would come up with a figure around 600 episodes! And all series are being shown around on the various cable/satellite channels. If watching Star Trek was your forty-hour-per-week job, then it would take fifteen weeks watching episodes end-on-end without repetition to go through all of them. And that excludes the ten Star Trek movies, all of the Star Trek books, and even the Star Trek cartoon series!

A few days ago, I saw that Star Trek Voyager was on, so I decided to see what it was like. In this episode, Captain Janeway (played by Kate Mulgrew), encountering a hostile computer, decided to initiate a self-destruct sequence to destroy her ship if the computer couldn’t be “fixed” in time. A few days later, I caught the end of another Voyager episode where the Captain was doing the same thing! First, I thought that I was just seeing the same episode, but no, it was different this time. Which brings me to a conclusion: there is a limit to how many different story ideas can be generated for a specific series with its characters and circumstances. I’d be willing to bet that, if you crossed over from one Star Trek series to another, you would find examples of old stories being recycled to fit the new series and its characters.

When Star Trek originally aired, people had not yet reached the moon. Space exploration was still considered to be the “final frontier” by most, while nowadays the emphasis seems to be more on how we can cushion our lives for ourselves here on Earth. And that includes being able to pretend, through more advanced special effects, that we have conquered space already. After all, compared to Star Trek, Stargate, Star Wars, and Battleship Galactica, real space travel is such a drag to follow, isn’t it? But back in the late sixties, that wasn’t the prevailing feeling.

I plan to watch more of all the Star Trek series, although right now I’m only familiar with the first two (and I still haven’t seen most of Star Trek: The Next Generation). But I am so familiar with the original series that I can forecast what the characters say before they say it! Any possible criticisms notwithstanding, from what I’ve seen, the Star Trek media "federation" has put out an interesting, quality product over the years that is a refreshing departure from the sickening “reality” shows and cop shows that have plagued television so much lately.

Correction: My figures were a little off: there are nearly 700 hour-long Star Trek episodes!