Boldly Going 4

Of course the Federation and their Klingon allies prevailed over the Dominion and their Cardassian lackeys in the war that consumed the last couple seasons of DS9. In the final season was what has to rank as my favorite episode, “Badda-Bing Badda-Bang,” an “Ocean’s Eleven” Rat Pack-type caper that takes place in the holodeck world of Vic Fontaine (James Darren). Like the EMH on VGR, Vic was a self-aware holodeck character who bore more than a little resemblance to Frank Sinatra. At the end, he and Sisko perform a duet and we learn that, more or less, Avery Brooks can sing.

I found the ending of DS9 profoundly disturbing. Although we had to wait until Star Trek: Generations to learn Captain Kirk’s fate, at least it gave some closure. In Sisko’s case, we have none. I suspect this was intentional on the part of the producers. Although he and the wormhole entities prevailed over the dark forces arrayed against them, the corporeal Sisko disappeared. Like Sisko’s son and his recently wed second wife, we are left to wonder if Ben Sisko will ever return as a human.

The next installment of the TNG movies, Star Trek: Insurrection premiered the same year DS9 ended. It was starting to become clear that the TNG franchise was beginning to wear thin. The story seemed contrived. For me, it is memorable only in that, for the first time, we see the Captain’s Yacht detach from a starship and Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) has cybernetic eyes and no longer needs to resort to his VISOR to see.

By its fifth season, VGR had already encountered the Borg and the Ferengi, even in the Delta Quadrant. In that fifth season, a new cast member was introduced, Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), a human Borg severed from the collective and “civilized” back into humanity. Aside from opening some interesting plot lines, Jeri Ryan’s presence (and the costumes in which she was clad) introduced a blatant sex appeal to the show. This, of course, did nothing but help its ratings. (Sorry. I’m still a Deanna Troi/Marina Sirtis partisan but Jeri Ryan is very easy to look at. And if you’re looking for her, she is now a regular on the TV series “Leverage.”)

Also by this time, after having read through several hundred Trek novels from all four series plus alternate timelines and books written for a juvenile audience, OC/PR boy had amassed a data base which, when printed, ran to hundreds of pages. There were at least four new novels each month that had to be read, indexed and input. The sheer size and scope of the project had become unwieldy. And worse than that, it had become a job. I found myself dreading having to go through the process. It was having a negative impact on my ability to read or do anything else. In other words, it was time to stop and let it go. The day I told my wife of my decision, she said that I might want to back it up, just in case. I said that I had already wiped the files from my hard drive, thus making the decision irrevocable.

One outgrowth of that project related to an on-line group I discovered and joined, the Klingon Imperial Diplomatic Corps (http:// www.klingon.org/). I had taken all the entries that related to Klingons and all things Klingon and contributed it to them. Thus, I was awarded the title Lore Master. To be honest, I haven’t visited the site in years but I believe my contribution is still part of it.

We all knew that Janeway and Voyager would eventually find their way home and it would probably come at the conclusion of the seventh season. By that time Tom Paris and B’Elanna Torres were married and any distinction that may have existed between Starfleet and Maquis crewmembers was a thing of the past. As grand as it was to see Voyager return to the Alpha Quadrant and home, my sense was that the writing was beginning to wear thin and there was a sense of, “Where does the franchise go from here?”

The answer to that question was that it goes back to the past. The final year of VGR saw the premier of what was called Enterprise but eventually was renamed Star Trek: Enterprise. It was based around the original warp-capable starship named Enterprise and commanded by Captain Robert April (Scott Bakula). Having learned a lesson from Seven of Nine’s sexy appearance, there was a female Vulcan liaison named T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) whose costumes and shape rivaled Seven’s.

My excitement about the show quickly began evaporating right from the start. Please recall that as OC as I was about all things Trek, I was well aware of existing “canon.” I could live with the way the Vulcans were portrayed in their attempt to logically “guide” the ignorant humans and their first starship crew. But in the first episode, we encounter Klingons on Earth! And not the human-looking Klingons that humans first dealt with in the original series, but the ones with bumpy foreheads with long hair first seen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And it only got worse from there. The Andorians were encountered in ways that seemed to fly in the face of established canon. This almost conscious choice of altering the back-story to make writing more convenient bothered me. There was also a plotline about a temporal civil war taking place in the 27th century with an agent from the 31st century. There were episodes where Earth’s past had been altered and the victorious Germans were occupying parts of the United States in World War II. Suffice it to say, it was a mess. I suspect it bothered other fans of the franchise. And don’t even get me started on the theme song, the first Trek anything with a theme that had words and was sung. The show only lasted four seasons and, honestly, is the only Trek TV series that I have no interest in watching in syndication.

The TNG movie franchise also ended with a whimper with the 2002 release of Star Trek: Nemesis. Picard and the Enterprise-E crew become involved in a coup d’etat on Romulus led by a person named Shinzon (Tom Hardy) who turns out to be a clone of Picard….Well, it’s a pretty contrived, forgettable plot. For me the saddest thing was that Data is killed at the end of the movie. Its one saving grace was that we finally get to see Will Riker and Deanna Troi get married and that Riker finally has command of his own ship. I saw this movie at a late showing with my friend Tom. All he talks about is how throughout the movie I kept sputtering and muttering about how canon was being changed and/or ignored. I have it on DVD, because I have all the Trek movies on DVD but it’s one of those movies that may simply sit there on the shelf collecting dust.

And that brings us to 2009. After a four-year hiatus, we were given what, even I hope is the last Trek movie, simply called Star Trek. I almost want to consider this one not part of the franchise and that it shares only the title with the series. Expressing my own opinion, let me say that I have come to loathe ALL movies that are “based” on old TV series. Movies such as “The Wild, Wild West,” “The Avengers,” “Miami Vice” or “Charlie’s Angels” to name a few, take the original characters and create entirely new relationships, stories and back-stories. What may have worked on the small screen in hour-long bites sticks in the throat as major motion pictures. The 2009 Star Trek suffers from all these sins and just shreds canon, making no pretense of maintaining anything resembling the established timeline of the original characters. It’s a fun movie to watch as a stand-alone movie with no reference to the Trek franchise. The special effects and CGI are top notch and Simon Pegg (“Shaun of the Dead”) is great as Scotty. But calling it Star Trek, to me, is akin to heresy and blasphemy.

So here we have come to the end of my memories of the Star Trek universe. What remains of all the stuff I collected? Almost nothing. If you recall, my wife and I have been trying to lighten our load. Some of the Trek stuff was sold on eBay, but very little. Trek is very passé and there’s too much of it available to even get a nibble. Much of the collectible stuff went in a mass at one of our tag sales. The books (about 6 cartons of them) have been donated to Goodwill. The comic books are awaiting the decision of a friend as to whether he wants them. (I gave the Star Trek and X-Files Barbie and Ken sets to his wife with the agreement that if I ever asked for them back I could have them. But I don’t think that will happen. She collects Barbies so she’s giving them a good home.) And I still occasionally pick up a new novel when I see it on the shelf at Borders or Barnes & Noble and look at it out of sheer curiosity. But other than the DVDs, there is nothing left of what had been a big part of my life. (No, Mark, let’s be honest and call it what it was: an obsession.)

Do I miss it? Yes and no. I miss that feeling of picking up something new and exciting about the franchise. I miss the expectation of seeing how the plots developed and how my “friends” in Starfleet adapted and overcame. But I believe I have moved on. I watch the movies “Trekkies” and “Trekkies 2” and marvel at how close I had come to the people in those movies. Do I still have a fond place for Trek in my heart? Of course I do. But I no longer hold it in a passionate embrace. To be a bit trite, I love it but I’m no longer in love with it. But that doesn’t mean that I still don’t enjoy yelling out the title of an episode within the first few seconds of its beginning.

To all of you who stuck with me throughout this four-day mission, “Live long and prosper.”