Boldly Going 3

One thing that I neglected to mention is that while I was at Syracuse University, there was a short-lived animated series based on the original Star Trek, featuring the original crew and Enterprise. I believe the reason I neglected to mention it is that it made that little of an impression on me. I had seen all the episodes, but none were sufficiently memorable and all I remember was it introduced a lion-like species, the Kzinti that had been created by SF author Larry Niven.

The next show in the franchise premiered in 1993, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9). Unlike the previous incarnations, this one differed in that it took place primarily on a space station. There would be far less planet-hopping than before. And the officer in command was a Starfleet commander, not a captain, one Ben Sisko (Avery Brooks). His second-in-command was a former Bajoran freedom fighter, Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor). The premise was that the Bajorans had taken over a former Cardassian space station that the Federation renamed DS9. Command was shared. One of the regulars was a Ferengi bar-owner, a lovable rogue named Quark (Armen Shimerman) who was constantly getting into and out of scrapes with the station’s security officer, a mysterious shape-shifter named Odo (Rene Auberjonois). The station’s location gives the Bajorans control of the first known stable wormhole into a different, heretofore un-encountered quadrant of the galaxy. The wormhole is also the habitation of beings the Bajorans believe are deities and who have an remarkable affinity for Sisko. Finally, the science officer is a beautiful young woman, Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) a joined Trill, a humanoid with an implanted symbiotic life-form that has many generations of memories, including as an old man who helped guide a young Ben Sisko.

I should mention that Avery Brooks played one of my all-time favorite TV and fictional characters. On the series “Spenser for Hire,” based on Robert B. Parker’s Spenser detective novels, he played Hawk. Hawk is Spenser’s best friend, a frighteningly large and deadly African-American with a shaved head, perpetual sunglasses and a goatee and mustache. He was a truly sinister person but with a heart of gold. Bear this description in mind.

By this time I was in what I consider one of the darker parts of my professional life. To supplement a part-time job with the Department of Motor Vehicles, I was working for a retail store. On Halloween we were allowed to come in costume. I went as a Klingon Starfleet officer, complete with phaser and tricorder. I know a picture was taken of me but I’m afraid it is lost to the winds of time. (Honest, or else I’d publish it here.)

TNG helped launch DS9 because Sisko had been first officer on a ship that had been destroyed in the climactic battle when Picard had been made into a Borg. He hates Picard because his wife was killed in the destruction of his ship and Picard believes he is unfit to command the space station. In addition, Miles O’Brien (Colm Meaney) and his wife Keiko (Rosalind Chao) transfer from the Enterprise-D to DS9 where O’Brien becomes the station’s chief engineer.

In many ways, I found DS9 to be the most cerebral in its stories. One first season episode, in particular, “Duet” in which Kira recognizes a former Cardassian war criminal who she comes to pity. It presents an interesting morality play in that after she decides that prosecuting him would only provide one more death, he is stabbed to death by another Bajoran. If Kira did not come to like him, she at least had come to pity him as only an oppressed person can come to pity a fallen oppressor. It was this kind of writing that kept DS9 fresh and on the cutting edge of the franchise.

Eventually, in 1994, at the end of its seventh season, all good things had to an end. And the final two-part episode was named “All Good Things…” The series ends where it began with Q (John DeLancie) putting humanity on trial with Picard as chief defendant. Of course all works out well in the end with Picard saving humanity, with a hand from Q.

As TNG was coming to an end, a new movie was being prepared that would answer a number of questions. How did Captain Kirk come to die? Did Picard and Kirk ever meet? Where did the Enterprise-D’s enigmatic bartender Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) come from? What the hell was the Enterprise-B? Star Trek: Generations answered all these questions and more. It also brought to a close the original cast movies and opened the curtain on TNG movies. The bad guy is also memorable for being played by the chief Droog in “A Clockwork Orange,” Malcolm McDowell. It also raised one of those Trek imponderables. If the “energy ribbon,” which is so central to the story, appears periodically, why have we never heard of it before? It also saw the destruction of the Enterprise-D.

So those of us who were the true believers in the Trek franchise had to soldier on with just DS9 and periodic movies to content us. Well, not entirely just that. A certain OC/PR individual, your gentle writer namely, had gotten deeply into the book indexing project. In addition, there was a growing number of Trek-based computer games, all of which I just HAD to buy. And then of course there were the assorted magazines, guide-books, supplements, role-playing games, action figures, and a host of other stuff to collect. Collecting, “Aaaahhhhh,” as Homer Simpson would say about donuts. And that’s when it occurred to me that there were also Trek comic books. Yes siree! Sign me up. (This paragraph is also to remind you, lest you think I’m just writing a history of Star Trek, that this blog is basically all about, well, me.)

DS9 produced the formative elements that set up the fourth series in the franchise, Star Trek: Voyager (VGR). We were introduced to the Maquis, a group of outlaw freedom fighters who were still fighting the Cardassians. They were named for the French underground in World War II. Their existence would be crucial to establishing the back-story for VGR.

The next movie, Star Trek: First Contact, entailed some of the Trek franchise’s most popular elements: time travel and the Borg. It was up to Picard, Riker et al on the new Enterprise-E to go back in time and prevent the Borg from altering Earth’s history. Notable was the introduction of an “individual” in the Borg collective, the queen (Alice Kriege) who Picard had encountered when he was a Borg. Also notable was the reappearance of Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell) who invented warp drive. Previously we had seen a much younger appearing Cochrane in the original series episode “Metamorphosis.” I found this movie full of a lot of fun action scenes and one memorable quote from Worf after killing a Borg, “Assimilate this!”

Meanwhile, in the world of DS9, a change was occurring that would set this series apart from all others. Gene Roddenberry never wanted to have Starfleet engaged in a long war but that is just what it had thrust upon it by the Dominion, the reclusive race of shape-shifters who, it turns out, included Odo. As the series’ viewpoint hardened into war, Sisko was both promoted to captain and took on a new appearance. Gone was his hair in preference for a shaved head and he sported a goatee and mustache. Avery Brooks morphed back into Hawk save the sunglasses.

One of the highpoints of DS9 came in its fifth season (1996), the 30th anniversary of the franchise. Using the original series episode “The Trouble With Tribbles,” Sisko, Dax and Worf are written into it and with the magic of time-travel on the series and great special effects in the studio, they interact with the original series characters. Another fun piece for me was the names of two Federation agents who question Sisko about the time travel incident. Their names were Dulmer and Lucsly, and homage to Mulder and Scully from another of my favorite shows, “The X-Files.”

The previous season (1995) had seen the birth of the fourth series, VGR. Although we had seen female captains before (notably Rachel Garrett of the Enterprise-C), this was the first time the commanding officer star of the show was a woman, Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew). Thanks to the back-story established in DS9 about the Maquis, the starship Voyager and a Maquis ship they are chasing in a part of space called the Badlands, are both transported into the Delta Quadrant of the galaxy. They are forced to sacrifice the Maquis ship and combine crews which leads to some interesting interpersonal conflicts. Janeway’s first officer becomes the former Maquis captain, Chakotay (Robert Beltran), a descendant of Native Americans with an elaborate tattoo on his face. The ship had not received a medical officer so the Emergency Medical Hologram program a/k/a The Doctor (Robert Picardo) is forced to be the full-time physician. (I often wonder if Picardo was concerned about being type-cast as a doctor because he had played Dr. Richard Richard on another of my favorite shows, “China Beach.”) Of course there was a lovable rogue crewmember, Lieutenant Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill), his naïve young pal, Ensign Harry Kim (Garrett Wong) and a half-Klingon, half human former Maquis engineering genius with a huge chip on her shoulder, B’Elanna Torres (Roxann Dawson).

In a sense, VGR was a return to the “Wagon Train in space concept” as their entire raison d’etre was attempting to return to the Alpha Quadrant, 70,000 light years distant. Each week was, pretty much, a meeting with new races, encountered on their “trek” back home. I liked VGR, especially the really cool new special effects and CGI. And I liked the fact that a woman was finally getting her due as the featured captain. It came only thirty years after the pilot episode, “The Cage” which was cut and broadcast as the two part episode “The Menagerie.” In it, the second in command of the Enterprise was a woman. (That female, identified only as “Number One,” was played by Majel Barrett Roddenberry a/k/a Mrs. Gene Roddenberry. Subsequently she played Nurse Chapel (original series), Deanna Troi’s mom, Lwaxana Troi (TNG and DS9) and the voice of the computer in the series and movies after the original series.) Before the show premiered in 1966, one of the changes made was making sure that the first officer was a male. After all, who could believe women were capable of commanding a starship? And with that bit of sarcasm, I will close for today.

Stay tuned for the final installment of Boldly Going