1:04 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2002
I have been a Trekkie ("Trekker" always sounded kinda stupid to me, and the arguments over it even more so) since the tender age of, oh, probably eight or nine. I didn't know to call myself one at first, but by my formative teen years, I was truly and deeply invested in the culture.
I bought the books, memorized the facts, collected the figurines, memorabilia, and costume items, owned both a Data and a Picard life-sized cardboard stand-up, prided myself on being able to identify over 90% of the NextGen episodes by name, plot, and major guest stars within the first sixty seconds of the show, and was totally, head-over-heels in love with the whole phenomenon. If I missed an episode, I cried. (And believe me, I virtually never missed an episode.)
I'm really, really, really a Trekkie. And I'm not ashamed of it either. My love for Trek is deep and abiding. In my personal afterlife, I've decided, I'll meet all the people I've loved -- and that includes my Star Trek loves: Data. Picard. Troi. Geordi. Q. Odo. Kira. Bashir. O'Brien. Quark. Garak. Weyoun. And countless others -- not just the crews of the NCC 1707-D and Deep Spacestation 9, but people they met along the way, too -- enemies, friends, and even just acquaintances. It includes, in a way, all of Trek.
Growing up, as we're all aware, can be a tough business. You hit 11 or 12 and suddenly it seems like the whole world's gone crazy, and everything is fucked, man. Your body's weird, and so are your friends, your parents, your school -- basically the whole universe. And for many, or maybe most, of us, it also brings an awareness -- or rather, a heightened awareness -- that we're, well, different. We don't get this game, and we don't understand the rules. For whatever reasons, we just don't quite fit.
I can't claim to have had the worst adolescence in the world, by a long shot. But I also maybe didn't have the best. I've always been rather less socially ept than perhaps would have befitted me, and that, coupled with a growing realization of weird and puzzling sexuality issues, and body image problems that grew to be an overwhelming obsession by 15 or 16, I can't say it was really the best time in my life.
And so, like any other teenager, it was a time in my life when I desperately needed something to hold on to. Family, religion, schoolwork, computer games, and books were all things that helped some, but another was Star Trek, and I really believe that Star Trek is a lot of the reason why my adolescence wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been.
The crews of the Enterprise and DS9, with their weekly adventures, their interpersonal problems and solutions and developments, their romances and flirtations, adventures and escapes, were family to me. They probably substituted, in large part, for the friends I didn't know how to make, and the confident person I didn't know how to be. They were beautiful, engaging, and yet still approachable. And I loved them with all my heart. I still do.
I'll never stop loving them. Of course not. But along the way, as I grew older and so did the Star Trek franchise, things began to change. Because though I never stopped loving Star Trek, I'm afraid Star Trek stopped loving me.
You can see it coming towards the end of DS9.
I still maintain, and will maintain to my dying day, that DS9 was the finest series Star Trek ever produced. Virtually all of the scripts were at least good, and many were frankly brilliant -- in my opinion, some probably rank among the best television ever made. The characters were deep, nuanced, troublingly and brilliantly human. Many of the actors contributed enormous talent, and the ones with somewhat less were well written enough and well-supported enough that the ensemble effect was absolutely dazzling.
Towards the end of the series, however, although the writing remained top-notch, and the acting was, if anything, better, a subtle shift began to occur. DS9, you see, wasn't pulling in the ratings. Not ratings like NextGen had enjoyed, anyway. And Voyager, the semi-troubled, sunnier little sister launched midway through the series, wasn't pulling them in like NextGen had either. And that, the business behind Star Trek thought, was bad news.
Never mind that the dedicated fan base was a strong as it had ever been -- and richer and more buy-happy than ever before, along with the rest of the economy. Never mind that no television series has ever enjoyed so stalwartly loyal and involved a following as the Treks have. Never mind that the fan base is such that Trekkies aren't just viewers, they're almost participants: incredibly vocal, intelligent, and in fact loving (and not to mention, extraordinarily diverse in terms of the usually strictly segregated world of tv viewership).
Unfortunately, I'm not sure the makers of Star Trek have ever understood those things about Trekkies. To many of them, people who make their livings in the very real, very gritty world of television production, the phenomenon of Trekdom seems almost embarrassing in a way. How deluded must we be, to have this ridiculous loyalty? We know it isn't real, right? I mean, in Shatner's famous words, why don't we get a life?
See, Trekkies don't operate the way t.v. viewers, in terms of convention, are supposed to operate. We're too loyal, and loyal not to the things within the show, but to the concept itself, something pretty unheard of (or at least, undocumented) in other viewership. Trekkies place their loyalty and love within the Trek Universe itself, not with Kirk or Picard or phasers or starships, and that's something that has remained, I think, almost baffling to many people involved with the marketing, direction, and development of the show.
Making television is a frantic, demanding, even hellish business. Increasingly, it demands split-second responses to every perceived shift in demographic, and as the world of information grows exponentially, so do the possible channels of entertainment -- and the demands on t.v. execs to get their viewers, get 'em fast, and get 'em good. These days, a new sitcom is usually developed, not from a concept-based or writing-based perspective, but from a marketing-based one: "we want to hit these exact people in this exact way and this is the research to say we can do it."
Yeah, that's not so different from how it's always been, but these days it's a lot quicker, a lot more targeted, and a lot more fractured. The pressure is on, and five hundred different channels are all competing to sell the same fractions of the population the same thing, and get it done before anybody else does. In today's digital-cable, internet-tie-in, flashy crawler and pop-up ridden marketplace, a slow-developing concept-based series like Star Trek might not have ever been made. Or if it had been, it wouldn't have looked at all like NextGen, developed a scant sixteen years ago.
Because a think-based, all-round series like NextGen or DS9 or even early Voyager doesn't look like it would fly, not by current standards. Who does it think it's selling to? Where are the predictable ratings-catchers? Who does it think it's trying to grab? Are we going for blockbuster status here or niche? It's unclear. Virtually no exec would accept that Trek did have across-the-board appeal, without looking like a traditional blockbuster. It's too broad. It's not hitting hard enough and fast enough. It's asking teens to think, for fuck's sake. It'll never work.
And to many minds, it didn't. Or at least, by the third season of Voyager and the end of DS9, it didn't look like it was working, because it wasn't Jurassic Park, and it wasn't Murder She Wrote either, and since there's obviously nothing in between billions-earning shoot-em-up and old-lady-pleasing niche filler (which is sooo 1982, anyway), Trek had problems. They thought.
And so the minds behind Star Trek began to rethink it -- to rebrand, as current jargon puts it. The problem, they decided, was that Star Trek wasn't appealing enough to it's core demographic, and everybody knew who that was: hormone-driven, socially disastrous, dorky, jerky, pimpled teenage boys. We've all seen Trekkies, right? We know what they're like and we know what they want. What made the original series, after all? Babes, guns, explosions and fancy toys. There we go. Problem solved, ratings rescued. Back. On. Track.
All this thinking shit -- the boundary-expanding inclusion of power-weilding females and minorities, the episodes focusing on real social questions (more than most t.v. ever does) -- that was for the birds. We all knew who watched Trek, and we all know that wasn't what they wanted. There's no "babe" in "Equal Rights."
You may have noticed by this point that I don't seem at first glance to fit into this concept. That's because I don't. I was a loyal a viewer as Trek had, but I am not, and never was, a pimply, testosterone-driven boy. And neither are my Trekkie friends, my Trekkie family, or my Trekkie coworkers and teachers. Curiously enough, it doesn't seem like I know a single Trekkie who fits that stereotype, actually. Sure, I knew people like that in high school and college, but they didn't watch Trek. They watched Baywatch. And likelihood was, they weren't going to watch Trek even if it started trying to out Baywatch Baywatch -- or if they did watch it, they wouldn't really have any loyalty to it or its products.
But I was not the Trekkie television marketing had in mind, and so slowly at first, and then with increasing and depressing rapidity Trek began to count me out. DS9's final "war" arc, though still astonishingly good, became much more battle-focused than I'd ever been interested in, and some of the outstanding character development that makes DS9 my favorite Star Trek fell by the wayside. And the final episode, unfortunately, still seems to me to be a travesty. What were they doing splitting them up like that? Was it pure malice?
Even more depressing, the at first promising Voyager quickly became "The Seven of Nine Show starring Jeri Ryan's Amaaaaazing Breasts!" Trek's always had scantily and tightly-clad women -- and frankly, feminist though I am, I'd never minded too much -- but never before had their costumes and their curves become the entire focus of the show. At least, not in the post Original Series Treks I love (and not even so much in the Original Series, if it comes to that). Never before had female characters so patently been reduced to stereotype naughty girls or good girls, their purpose to excite, rather than compel. And never before had the guns and the babes and the explosions so begun to dominate the plots.
The well-written, believable, thought-provoking scripts I'd so loved began to be scarcer and scarcer, and allowed only as side dishes to a main dish of sultry looks and unbelievable (and unnecessary) gunplay. Janeway went from a very human captain to a token bitch/mother figure, Seven from a interesting character (though I never really forgave her for booting Kes out so heartlessly) to a nearly characterless bad-girl turned reluctant good-girl, and the other characters, save the Doctor, who was supposed to represent the semi-autist geek-boy in all his alter-ego glory, faded out almost entirely. B'Elanna was safely married off to the perhaps frighteningly quasi-fay Paris; Kim became the almost-forgotten Token Asian, useful only for boring plot-furthering; Neelix, who'd been Trek's first essentially married main character, was first stripped of all character and then unceremoniously dumped on some random planet; Tuvok, having failed to capture that geek-boy-alter-ego aura, and having maybe turned out looking a little too much like a sex symbol to seem safe, dropped out entirely (except when he went ballistic and all Vulcan-rageful. That's okay.); Chakotay became an absolutely empty cardboard-like stand-in for a Seven love interest; and that was that.
I tried to keep watching, but the scripts kept getting worse and worse, the treatment of Seven and Janeway more and more stereotyped and offensive to me, and eventually, I had to stop. It was clear that I no longer belonged in this picture.
I know, I'm being a little too harsh. The rebranding couldn't erase all the good things about Trek, and there were definitely good bits to Voyager. Now and then, the old character development would reappear, and Jeri Ryan is a very good actress, despite the skin-tight suit and bad-girl rasp (though I would never count on her to carry an entire show). And though I haven't watched much of Enterprise, because I knew from the start the concept wasn't going to be for me (hey guys! We'll have this badass captain! And he'll like, not fucking care about the prime directive and all that ethical shit because it hasn't been invented yet! And we'll have this babe! Like Seven of Nine but...uh...a Vulcan! And even thinner. Yeah, Jeri's too fat for us, man.) I know the show isn't as bad as many things on t.v. It can at least remind you of how things used to be. And some of the same people are still producing and writing for the show. Some of the old universe is undoubtedly still there.
But it hurt so much to see the things and people -- the universe -- I'd cared about disappearing, little by little. It hurt to see them all hurtling away from me at warp nine. Trek no longer wanted -- Trek didn't even realize it had – my kind of viewer. Trek believed that it was the skin-deep elements of the old series that had made a hit, and by god, Trek was going to bring them back and make them better. Bring on the space-babes, boys. It's been too long.
I knew, and I know, that they're wrong. Those weren't the things that made the old series a hit at all, and they certainly weren't what built the Trek Universe itself, what made it such an appealing place for all of us who chose to make our home there. If we had just wanted babes and guns, there were a thousand other outlets we could have chosen. But we chose Trek. Because of something deeper. A sense of a world-view that was comforting, inspiring even.
Maybe it was something like what my parents must have felt watching the moon landing -- the idea that humankind, whatever its flaws and its stupidities, had something incredible, some spirit that reached beyond earth, beyond the moon even, to the stars. A sense that the thing that eventually redeems us, if anything does, is our need to understand, our unceasing questioning, our continuing mission: to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. That was what made Trek, and that was what we all, pitiful, geeky hands stretched upward to the heavens, so desperately needed to understand.
And so, here I am. December 2002 and 22 years old now. I've grown up some, and I've found new loves to supplement my love for Star Trek. Yes, I have in fact, gotten a life.
And though I'm still angry at what I felt as a betrayal by the people I'd given my heart to, I've learned to get past some of that. I don't feel like spitting when I see a picture of Seven of Nine anymore, though I also don't watch Enterprise.
And of course I'm going to see Nemesis on Friday. I wouldn't miss it for anything. And some of the people involved in the making of that movie will have known they would be speaking to me -- the actors, maybe, who've been to conventions and see the love with which they're approached (Trekkies are, in general, a gentle bunch. I think a lot of first-time conventioneers are probably surprised by that); some of the production staff, who've worked with Trek a long time; and some of the writers, who understand enough of humanity to know it's always more than you expect.
But I also know that a lot of them won't have been thinking of me at all. The film's marketing has gone to great lengths to make it not-Trek, and it's no secret that Paramount generally believes Trek's at its tail-end. I'm not sure that Enterprise will finish out its seven seasons, and the tag-line of Nemesis, as every Trekkie knows, is "A generation's final journey begins."
Personally, I think if Trek's at the end of its rope, the changes made to it are to blame. Ignoring the people who really care about your product in favor of courting people who don't isn't really a recipe for success. And it makes me really angry, and it makes me really sad.
Trek will live on, of course. Fandoms almost never die -- and this one won't, not for a long time. But there won't be any new births either. And though I've scrupulously avoided any spoilers, and don't know the plot of Nemesis beyond what I've seen in previews, I have my suspicions that this movie's going to be very painful for me. (Data, you know, could lay a serious claim for being my first true love. I haven't seen any spoilers at all, like I say, but oh, I have these terrible fears about him. Not just fears, really. I know. Even though I don't want to admit it, and though I don't exactly know how I know it, I know. God, I hate this.)
I have a feeling this is the very final chapter to my love affair with Star Trek. I've seen it coming from a long way off now. It's maybe time, at long last, for them to ride off into the sunset. And oh, how I will miss them and how I do miss them.
I hate that idea, that this is the end, that it's come after so much I don't agree with and don't like. Because, see, angry though I may be, I still love Star Trek just like I used to. I watch the re-runs, I talk with friends, I even still buy products some times. And I still dream about all those people, just like I used to. Trek as a franchise may have fallen out of love with me, but I have never fallen out of love with the universe and the people I knew as Trek.
In Trek, though, there's always a sequel, or at least an epilogue, and here's mine: no matter what, the Trek I've known, the people I've known are still a part of me, and a part I'm proud of. However I feel about the movie, and whether or not there's any more after that, the people I carry with me won't ever really change, since they're a part of my personal imaginative landscape, and I love them. For real, for life, I love them.
That's the beauty of a relationship with a television series. Even if eventually it ends, or it disappoints, the good memories are still yours, because you control your viewership. You control, in the end, what you got from it, and who you are after it. I guess, in that way, it's like any relationship in life.
So, I guess, all there's left to say is this: Live long and prosper, my loves. You're always with me, in the end, boldly going where no one has gone before.
I have been a Trekkie ("Trekker" always sounded kinda stupid to me, and the arguments over it even more so) since the tender age of, oh, probably eight or nine. I didn't know to call myself one at first, but by my formative teen years, I was truly and deeply invested in the culture.
I bought the books, memorized the facts, collected the figurines, memorabilia, and costume items, owned both a Data and a Picard life-sized cardboard stand-up, prided myself on being able to identify over 90% of the NextGen episodes by name, plot, and major guest stars within the first sixty seconds of the show, and was totally, head-over-heels in love with the whole phenomenon. If I missed an episode, I cried. (And believe me, I virtually never missed an episode.)
I'm really, really, really a Trekkie. And I'm not ashamed of it either. My love for Trek is deep and abiding. In my personal afterlife, I've decided, I'll meet all the people I've loved -- and that includes my Star Trek loves: Data. Picard. Troi. Geordi. Q. Odo. Kira. Bashir. O'Brien. Quark. Garak. Weyoun. And countless others -- not just the crews of the NCC 1707-D and Deep Spacestation 9, but people they met along the way, too -- enemies, friends, and even just acquaintances. It includes, in a way, all of Trek.
Growing up, as we're all aware, can be a tough business. You hit 11 or 12 and suddenly it seems like the whole world's gone crazy, and everything is fucked, man. Your body's weird, and so are your friends, your parents, your school -- basically the whole universe. And for many, or maybe most, of us, it also brings an awareness -- or rather, a heightened awareness -- that we're, well, different. We don't get this game, and we don't understand the rules. For whatever reasons, we just don't quite fit.
I can't claim to have had the worst adolescence in the world, by a long shot. But I also maybe didn't have the best. I've always been rather less socially ept than perhaps would have befitted me, and that, coupled with a growing realization of weird and puzzling sexuality issues, and body image problems that grew to be an overwhelming obsession by 15 or 16, I can't say it was really the best time in my life.
And so, like any other teenager, it was a time in my life when I desperately needed something to hold on to. Family, religion, schoolwork, computer games, and books were all things that helped some, but another was Star Trek, and I really believe that Star Trek is a lot of the reason why my adolescence wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been.
The crews of the Enterprise and DS9, with their weekly adventures, their interpersonal problems and solutions and developments, their romances and flirtations, adventures and escapes, were family to me. They probably substituted, in large part, for the friends I didn't know how to make, and the confident person I didn't know how to be. They were beautiful, engaging, and yet still approachable. And I loved them with all my heart. I still do.
I'll never stop loving them. Of course not. But along the way, as I grew older and so did the Star Trek franchise, things began to change. Because though I never stopped loving Star Trek, I'm afraid Star Trek stopped loving me.
You can see it coming towards the end of DS9.
I still maintain, and will maintain to my dying day, that DS9 was the finest series Star Trek ever produced. Virtually all of the scripts were at least good, and many were frankly brilliant -- in my opinion, some probably rank among the best television ever made. The characters were deep, nuanced, troublingly and brilliantly human. Many of the actors contributed enormous talent, and the ones with somewhat less were well written enough and well-supported enough that the ensemble effect was absolutely dazzling.
Towards the end of the series, however, although the writing remained top-notch, and the acting was, if anything, better, a subtle shift began to occur. DS9, you see, wasn't pulling in the ratings. Not ratings like NextGen had enjoyed, anyway. And Voyager, the semi-troubled, sunnier little sister launched midway through the series, wasn't pulling them in like NextGen had either. And that, the business behind Star Trek thought, was bad news.
Never mind that the dedicated fan base was a strong as it had ever been -- and richer and more buy-happy than ever before, along with the rest of the economy. Never mind that no television series has ever enjoyed so stalwartly loyal and involved a following as the Treks have. Never mind that the fan base is such that Trekkies aren't just viewers, they're almost participants: incredibly vocal, intelligent, and in fact loving (and not to mention, extraordinarily diverse in terms of the usually strictly segregated world of tv viewership).
Unfortunately, I'm not sure the makers of Star Trek have ever understood those things about Trekkies. To many of them, people who make their livings in the very real, very gritty world of television production, the phenomenon of Trekdom seems almost embarrassing in a way. How deluded must we be, to have this ridiculous loyalty? We know it isn't real, right? I mean, in Shatner's famous words, why don't we get a life?
See, Trekkies don't operate the way t.v. viewers, in terms of convention, are supposed to operate. We're too loyal, and loyal not to the things within the show, but to the concept itself, something pretty unheard of (or at least, undocumented) in other viewership. Trekkies place their loyalty and love within the Trek Universe itself, not with Kirk or Picard or phasers or starships, and that's something that has remained, I think, almost baffling to many people involved with the marketing, direction, and development of the show.
Making television is a frantic, demanding, even hellish business. Increasingly, it demands split-second responses to every perceived shift in demographic, and as the world of information grows exponentially, so do the possible channels of entertainment -- and the demands on t.v. execs to get their viewers, get 'em fast, and get 'em good. These days, a new sitcom is usually developed, not from a concept-based or writing-based perspective, but from a marketing-based one: "we want to hit these exact people in this exact way and this is the research to say we can do it."
Yeah, that's not so different from how it's always been, but these days it's a lot quicker, a lot more targeted, and a lot more fractured. The pressure is on, and five hundred different channels are all competing to sell the same fractions of the population the same thing, and get it done before anybody else does. In today's digital-cable, internet-tie-in, flashy crawler and pop-up ridden marketplace, a slow-developing concept-based series like Star Trek might not have ever been made. Or if it had been, it wouldn't have looked at all like NextGen, developed a scant sixteen years ago.
Because a think-based, all-round series like NextGen or DS9 or even early Voyager doesn't look like it would fly, not by current standards. Who does it think it's selling to? Where are the predictable ratings-catchers? Who does it think it's trying to grab? Are we going for blockbuster status here or niche? It's unclear. Virtually no exec would accept that Trek did have across-the-board appeal, without looking like a traditional blockbuster. It's too broad. It's not hitting hard enough and fast enough. It's asking teens to think, for fuck's sake. It'll never work.
And to many minds, it didn't. Or at least, by the third season of Voyager and the end of DS9, it didn't look like it was working, because it wasn't Jurassic Park, and it wasn't Murder She Wrote either, and since there's obviously nothing in between billions-earning shoot-em-up and old-lady-pleasing niche filler (which is sooo 1982, anyway), Trek had problems. They thought.
And so the minds behind Star Trek began to rethink it -- to rebrand, as current jargon puts it. The problem, they decided, was that Star Trek wasn't appealing enough to it's core demographic, and everybody knew who that was: hormone-driven, socially disastrous, dorky, jerky, pimpled teenage boys. We've all seen Trekkies, right? We know what they're like and we know what they want. What made the original series, after all? Babes, guns, explosions and fancy toys. There we go. Problem solved, ratings rescued. Back. On. Track.
All this thinking shit -- the boundary-expanding inclusion of power-weilding females and minorities, the episodes focusing on real social questions (more than most t.v. ever does) -- that was for the birds. We all knew who watched Trek, and we all know that wasn't what they wanted. There's no "babe" in "Equal Rights."
You may have noticed by this point that I don't seem at first glance to fit into this concept. That's because I don't. I was a loyal a viewer as Trek had, but I am not, and never was, a pimply, testosterone-driven boy. And neither are my Trekkie friends, my Trekkie family, or my Trekkie coworkers and teachers. Curiously enough, it doesn't seem like I know a single Trekkie who fits that stereotype, actually. Sure, I knew people like that in high school and college, but they didn't watch Trek. They watched Baywatch. And likelihood was, they weren't going to watch Trek even if it started trying to out Baywatch Baywatch -- or if they did watch it, they wouldn't really have any loyalty to it or its products.
But I was not the Trekkie television marketing had in mind, and so slowly at first, and then with increasing and depressing rapidity Trek began to count me out. DS9's final "war" arc, though still astonishingly good, became much more battle-focused than I'd ever been interested in, and some of the outstanding character development that makes DS9 my favorite Star Trek fell by the wayside. And the final episode, unfortunately, still seems to me to be a travesty. What were they doing splitting them up like that? Was it pure malice?
Even more depressing, the at first promising Voyager quickly became "The Seven of Nine Show starring Jeri Ryan's Amaaaaazing Breasts!" Trek's always had scantily and tightly-clad women -- and frankly, feminist though I am, I'd never minded too much -- but never before had their costumes and their curves become the entire focus of the show. At least, not in the post Original Series Treks I love (and not even so much in the Original Series, if it comes to that). Never before had female characters so patently been reduced to stereotype naughty girls or good girls, their purpose to excite, rather than compel. And never before had the guns and the babes and the explosions so begun to dominate the plots.
The well-written, believable, thought-provoking scripts I'd so loved began to be scarcer and scarcer, and allowed only as side dishes to a main dish of sultry looks and unbelievable (and unnecessary) gunplay. Janeway went from a very human captain to a token bitch/mother figure, Seven from a interesting character (though I never really forgave her for booting Kes out so heartlessly) to a nearly characterless bad-girl turned reluctant good-girl, and the other characters, save the Doctor, who was supposed to represent the semi-autist geek-boy in all his alter-ego glory, faded out almost entirely. B'Elanna was safely married off to the perhaps frighteningly quasi-fay Paris; Kim became the almost-forgotten Token Asian, useful only for boring plot-furthering; Neelix, who'd been Trek's first essentially married main character, was first stripped of all character and then unceremoniously dumped on some random planet; Tuvok, having failed to capture that geek-boy-alter-ego aura, and having maybe turned out looking a little too much like a sex symbol to seem safe, dropped out entirely (except when he went ballistic and all Vulcan-rageful. That's okay.); Chakotay became an absolutely empty cardboard-like stand-in for a Seven love interest; and that was that.
I tried to keep watching, but the scripts kept getting worse and worse, the treatment of Seven and Janeway more and more stereotyped and offensive to me, and eventually, I had to stop. It was clear that I no longer belonged in this picture.
I know, I'm being a little too harsh. The rebranding couldn't erase all the good things about Trek, and there were definitely good bits to Voyager. Now and then, the old character development would reappear, and Jeri Ryan is a very good actress, despite the skin-tight suit and bad-girl rasp (though I would never count on her to carry an entire show). And though I haven't watched much of Enterprise, because I knew from the start the concept wasn't going to be for me (hey guys! We'll have this badass captain! And he'll like, not fucking care about the prime directive and all that ethical shit because it hasn't been invented yet! And we'll have this babe! Like Seven of Nine but...uh...a Vulcan! And even thinner. Yeah, Jeri's too fat for us, man.) I know the show isn't as bad as many things on t.v. It can at least remind you of how things used to be. And some of the same people are still producing and writing for the show. Some of the old universe is undoubtedly still there.
But it hurt so much to see the things and people -- the universe -- I'd cared about disappearing, little by little. It hurt to see them all hurtling away from me at warp nine. Trek no longer wanted -- Trek didn't even realize it had – my kind of viewer. Trek believed that it was the skin-deep elements of the old series that had made a hit, and by god, Trek was going to bring them back and make them better. Bring on the space-babes, boys. It's been too long.
I knew, and I know, that they're wrong. Those weren't the things that made the old series a hit at all, and they certainly weren't what built the Trek Universe itself, what made it such an appealing place for all of us who chose to make our home there. If we had just wanted babes and guns, there were a thousand other outlets we could have chosen. But we chose Trek. Because of something deeper. A sense of a world-view that was comforting, inspiring even.
Maybe it was something like what my parents must have felt watching the moon landing -- the idea that humankind, whatever its flaws and its stupidities, had something incredible, some spirit that reached beyond earth, beyond the moon even, to the stars. A sense that the thing that eventually redeems us, if anything does, is our need to understand, our unceasing questioning, our continuing mission: to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. That was what made Trek, and that was what we all, pitiful, geeky hands stretched upward to the heavens, so desperately needed to understand.
And so, here I am. December 2002 and 22 years old now. I've grown up some, and I've found new loves to supplement my love for Star Trek. Yes, I have in fact, gotten a life.
And though I'm still angry at what I felt as a betrayal by the people I'd given my heart to, I've learned to get past some of that. I don't feel like spitting when I see a picture of Seven of Nine anymore, though I also don't watch Enterprise.
And of course I'm going to see Nemesis on Friday. I wouldn't miss it for anything. And some of the people involved in the making of that movie will have known they would be speaking to me -- the actors, maybe, who've been to conventions and see the love with which they're approached (Trekkies are, in general, a gentle bunch. I think a lot of first-time conventioneers are probably surprised by that); some of the production staff, who've worked with Trek a long time; and some of the writers, who understand enough of humanity to know it's always more than you expect.
But I also know that a lot of them won't have been thinking of me at all. The film's marketing has gone to great lengths to make it not-Trek, and it's no secret that Paramount generally believes Trek's at its tail-end. I'm not sure that Enterprise will finish out its seven seasons, and the tag-line of Nemesis, as every Trekkie knows, is "A generation's final journey begins."
Personally, I think if Trek's at the end of its rope, the changes made to it are to blame. Ignoring the people who really care about your product in favor of courting people who don't isn't really a recipe for success. And it makes me really angry, and it makes me really sad.
Trek will live on, of course. Fandoms almost never die -- and this one won't, not for a long time. But there won't be any new births either. And though I've scrupulously avoided any spoilers, and don't know the plot of Nemesis beyond what I've seen in previews, I have my suspicions that this movie's going to be very painful for me. (Data, you know, could lay a serious claim for being my first true love. I haven't seen any spoilers at all, like I say, but oh, I have these terrible fears about him. Not just fears, really. I know. Even though I don't want to admit it, and though I don't exactly know how I know it, I know. God, I hate this.)
I have a feeling this is the very final chapter to my love affair with Star Trek. I've seen it coming from a long way off now. It's maybe time, at long last, for them to ride off into the sunset. And oh, how I will miss them and how I do miss them.
I hate that idea, that this is the end, that it's come after so much I don't agree with and don't like. Because, see, angry though I may be, I still love Star Trek just like I used to. I watch the re-runs, I talk with friends, I even still buy products some times. And I still dream about all those people, just like I used to. Trek as a franchise may have fallen out of love with me, but I have never fallen out of love with the universe and the people I knew as Trek.
In Trek, though, there's always a sequel, or at least an epilogue, and here's mine: no matter what, the Trek I've known, the people I've known are still a part of me, and a part I'm proud of. However I feel about the movie, and whether or not there's any more after that, the people I carry with me won't ever really change, since they're a part of my personal imaginative landscape, and I love them. For real, for life, I love them.
That's the beauty of a relationship with a television series. Even if eventually it ends, or it disappoints, the good memories are still yours, because you control your viewership. You control, in the end, what you got from it, and who you are after it. I guess, in that way, it's like any relationship in life.
So, I guess, all there's left to say is this: Live long and prosper, my loves. You're always with me, in the end, boldly going where no one has gone before.
Labels: anger, bodies, feminism, nerd power, representation, tv
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