[Shotimes] OT for the Star Trek geeks

[Hartberger, Jason M. ATAN]

Hmmm. Perhaps I over-reacted a bit. I agree, I guess to each his/her own,
and it'll certainly be a story for the grandkids.

There are a few reasons I grew out of it. First and foremost, the show lost
a big part of itself when Gene Roddenberry died. He had a vision for the
show that nobody else has really been able to match. Nobody has really been
able to introduce any radical concepts like Gene did (inter-racial romance
on TV, ethnic characters with major parts, etc). Most of the things that
seem commonplace on TV now were revolutionary when Gene did them first, and
nobody's been able to reproduce that. The episodes, the plots and the
messages behind them haven't been the same either. Back in the day (boy, it
seems wierd for me to say that), every episode, or almost every episode, had
a tangible moral or story behind it, and every episode was almost its own
saga. In TOS, we had "the enemy within", a classic examination of the two
halves in all of us; "balance of terror", the episode which introduces the
Romulans, my personal favorite race; "the conscience of the king", wherin
Kodos the Executioner is introduced and has a personal history with kirk not
only in that episode but in books far thereafter; one of the most famous TOS
episodes, "the Galileo Seven", a character study of everybody's favorite
character, Spock; "the menagerie", which truly *is* a saga, it's even in two
parts!; "space seed", which has the introduction of Khan, and is the basis
for one of the better ST movies, "the wrath of khan"; and the best, and best
known (in my opinion) episode, "city on the edge of forever", whose plot
need not be explained. The next two seasons weren't so great, but a notable
episode was "the trouble with tribbles", another episode that *everybody*
knows. Hell, people that don't even know what Star Trek is know what
tribbles are. There are also the not-so-good episodes... the only one
readily available to my memory is "spock's brain"... just a bad, bad
episode.

For ST:TNG, we have, for starters, the introduction of the Borg, everybody's
favorite race. why? cos resistance is futile... We have Q, played by John
Delancie (who I have had the great personal pleasure of meeting... great
guy, he is), we have Deanna's mom. Need I say more? We have Worf, the
bad-assest person ever, we have "best of both worlds", TNG's Magnum Opus, we
had Data, my personal favorite character, and all of it was believable in a
way because all of these explored emotions that we have every day,
situations that, while few of us really encounter, most of us can readily
identify with.

(more in next post)