[Shotimes] OT for the Star Trek geeks

[bjshov8@comcast.net]

I liked ST and ST:TNG, but could never get into the later spinoffs.  IMO a show is interesting if you like the story lines AND if you find the characters interesting.  Certainly ST and ST:TNG had both elements.  The later spinoffs had less, although I have not been able to give "Enterprise" a fair evaluation.
> 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)
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