The end of an era

[nightengalesknd]

Star Trek is ending.

Some might say it ended a while ago. I might not argue. Of course, I'm the girl who traces the fall of the Roman Empire back to that day Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

I admit I've been a lackluster Trekie of late. I've been watching Enterprise, when it's on, more or less. I can't be home and have Star Trek available and not watch. “Watch” in this case as defined by being in the same room as an “On” television set. I can name the main characters. I couldn't pick most of them out of a line-up. I know the seemingly ever-cheerful doctor-du-series is Denobulin, but I couldn't tell you a single thing about his culture of origin, or even how to spell it. There's a Vulcan. She’s female. She’s logical, mostly. I haven't put the time in to follow the show more closely. I've been busy. That's no excuse. The show no longer draws me in to follow closely, to watch and rewatch each episode, to recite arcane facts about the characters, the cultures, the episodes. Maybe it has drawn in others? But I surely won't be missing Enterprise, in and of itself, when it airs its last episode over the next few weeks.

I'll be missing Star Trek, the phenomenon. Because while it's been dying for awhile, the loss of Enterprise will likely drive nails into the coffin. So long as it was on, I could stretch out the delusion that I still had something. And until rather recently, I did have Voyager and DS9 episodes on late-night rerun.

Star Trek wasn't supposed to happen to me. I hated science fiction. Loathed it. Every example to which I had hitherto forth been exposed. ET gave me nightmares for years. Asimov disturbed me. That Bradbury story which I had to read over and over, year after year, the one where they lock the little girl, Margot, in the closet on Venus The Day The Sun Came Out for an hour, that one has haunted me now for over twenty years. And science fiction was outer space. Space was why the Challenger exploded. Space held no pleasure for me after that.

It was 1997, the summer before my senior year of high school, and I was clicking the channel button on the remote control of the upstairs television, where I had been watching PBS or Cosby reruns or something. And suddenly LeVar Burton from Reading Rainbow was there, and I stopped to see what it was all about. And was more drawn in by the specifics of what I saw than the connotations that science fiction had previously held. I watched for half an hour, then went downstairs to join my family for Jeopardy. I watched half-episodes for weeks. If someone came into the room, I changed the channel. Eventually I abandoned Jeopardy all together, so that I could finally see how an episode ended. I muttered about what I had been watching instead. I was a closet Trekie.

I didn't think my parents would understand, and when they eventually found out, they didn't. It wasn't that they disapproved of Star Trek, per se. They didn't know enough about it to have an informed opinion either way. But they couldn't reconcile it to me and what I usually chose to watch. I couldn't explain it, so I just kept watching.

Quickly I grasped Trek as metaphor. It was in the future, but it was about the past, and the present. It featured aliens, but it was about humans and our cultures. I was a history buff, and although I didn't know it at the time, a future anthropology buff as well. I latched on to the Message. And I did my best to model my leadership of my high school Tech Crew to Captain Picard's example.

I set tasks for myself. One day I decided to focus on the unusual sunglasses worn by LeVar Burton, who I now knew to call Geordi LaForge. Were they sunglasses at all? To protect his eyes? Like telescopes, to give him supersonic vision for the good of the ship? Were they assistive technology? Of course the disabilities geek in me became more and more interested in Geordi as his character unfolded through the marathon reruns. And the Geordi character has possibly the best line ever spoken about disability.

Asked if he resented his VISOR or being blind: “Well, no, since they’re both part of me and I really like who I am, there is no reason for me to resent either one.”

Thank you Geordi. (and thank you, Gene Rodenberry in general and whoever wrote that episode in particular)

Another day I promised myself I would figure out what a "Klingon" was. How Troi’s empathy (Empathy?) worked. And then I planted myself nose to nose with our poorly-receiving set, trying to discern the differences and meanings of the little dots the officers wore on their collars.

It was surprisingly easy for me to follow, the lions share of the episodes. I was used to being completely lost on television dramas, where all the characters to me looked the same. Murder She Wrote always had half a dozen guys who I couldn't tell apart, and the sitting with my family, trying to follow a plot with all those Caucasian males in business suits was wearying. Here was a show which only had three of them. One wore yellow, and had a very distinct manner of speaking. One wore red and was tall, and I more or less ignored him. And the other one who wore red spoke as a Shakespearean. It was almost as good as having their names pinned on!

One day I discovered that this show was still making new episodes, and I began to watch those as well. I bounced through time, in good Trekian fashion, between the "current" season and the six previous ones on re-run. Riker grew and lost a beard. Deanna changed her clothing - I can't dignify most of what she wore with the term "uniform," I'm afraid. I learned what an empath was and shared metaphorical chocolate with her. Wesley grew and shrank and moved onto other planes of existence. I adored early Wesley, seeing bits of my precocious but poorly socialized self in him.

Then I found that the original Star Trek series which my dad had spoken vaguely about was still on, if you turned the TV down really quiet because at 11 PM everyone else was trying to sleep. I decided Riker was meant to be Kirk - I never cared for either of them overmuch. Spock was something special. I didn't understand much else until later, like the significance of . Keep in mind this was before the internet, before I had the Nitpicker's guide or read any of the novels, before I had even ever spoken to another knowledgeable human about the Trekiverse.

My first ever conversation about Trek occurred at the dinner for the MA state science fair that spring. They had an Outer Space theme, which translated into lots of glow-in-the-dark stars and some strobe lights. Now, strobe lights make me dizzy or worse. I have been known, on strobe light exposure, to just stand and stare off into space blankly for 10 minutes until someone blocked my view and spoke to me by name. On this particular occasion, I was mostly dizzy. I pulled myself to my feet and wobbled across to a bench I'd spotted on an adjoining patio, and closed my eyes, trying to regain equilibrium. I heard a voice asking if I was all right, and opened my eyes to see a Starfleet officer. Disoriented though I was, (or maybe the disorientation led to such a suspension of disbelief) I had the presence of mind to count the pips on his collar and address him as "Commander." He turned out to be a faculty-chaperon. I eventually managed to have a conversation with him where I registered on this fact.

I came out of the Star Trek closet pretty soon after arriving at college. First with meganpowell, then with other denizens of the_backsmoker, and by the end of the year, I was in Doublestar.

Voyager premiered my sophomore year. We watched it at eight and the Doublestar movie at nine. We claimed Kathryn Janeway as a Mawrter straight away. We liked the Doctor, even if all the curmudgeon had already been done by Bones McCoy. We thought Chakotay was pretty much every Native American stereotype wrapped into one. We thought the premise was corny, but the early execution not too bad, although not without plot-holes the size of a Borg cube. Some of us were looking at the show through Next Gen spectacles, some Classic, some both. Some knew DS9, which I had only sporadically been able to watch. Voyager moved to Wednesdays opposite Scottish Dance, a conflict for many of us, and Doublestar didn't watch it en masse any more. I finally saw the last episodes this past fall. I'm almost ashamed to admit I rather enjoyed them.

In three years I moved from Science-fiction-phobe to a Doublestar officer. I began to read. All those books which my club-mates had cut their eyeteeth upon, I met for the first time in college. I tried Anne McCaffrey. I borrowed John Varley. I explored Michael Crichton. Hell Week had brought me to fantasy my frosh year, and I nibbled at that genre as well. I skimmed as we shelved. And I slept through a science fiction or fantasy movie a week.

Star Trek connected me with something so much bigger than myself. When Netscape came to campus, I looked upon the world of fandom. I read Star Trek books, most of which are abysmal. I got the Nit-pickers guide. OK, I memorized the Nit-pickers guide. I found people with whom I could discuss Tribbles, and suddenly signy1 and I were writing "MawrFleet Academy (with apologies to everybody.)"

I think I've seen the lions share of the first 4 series by now, and been nominally exposed to most of the movies. There were some perfectly awful moments. A lot of wasted potential. Deanna Troi, for instance. A chocoholic Empath with a simply lovely voice, trained in psychology. Great premise. No professionalism. I mean, if I collapsed across my bosses desk saying "I feel Pain!" with any frequency, how long do you think my job would last? The need for every female alien (or estranged human) to fall for Riker, and for every male to fall for Troi or Crusher grew tedious. The biology made me want to cringe at times.



But I have loved Star Trek. It has been such an integral, if often background, part of the last eleven years of my life. Without it, would I have ever found a home in the the_backsmoker? Without the backsmoker, would I ever have known ericaceous or plasticsturgeon and deino? Without Doublestar, would I ever have had a sustained conversation shrewreader or jedibl? The social ripples may be so profound as to be unfathomable – I may never have found gallian or, later, eredien, fiddledragon batshua and taneliashke and lywen. What of gaudior and rushthatspeaks? syonakeleste? weirdquark? rabidfangurl? What of swil? Of meanfreepath and crystalpyramid and wayman and eclectic_boy? Would I have a friend’s list? Would I have an LJ? Would I have ever gotten onto IM? Would I have ever gotten and held down a teaching job and be planning a career in medicine? Who and where would I be?

A butterfly flaps its wings, and a warp hole opens. Star Trek isn’t what it used to be, but it has meant so much to me. Star Trek, you shall be missed.

Comments

[weirdquark]

Yeah.

Star Trek was the show I watched with my dad growing up -- along with the MGM musicals and classic movies. Although I think I was introduced to Star Trek when I was in fourth grade and we had a Star Trek unit -- we built engineering in the space between the three classrooms that made up the fourth grade and we watched some of the more classic episodes. I don't remember why anymore. But mostly it was a bonding with dad thing, like when he read the Hobbit to all of us cousins one summer we were at the beach and I was the only one that stuck around to hear the end.

I never got into Voyager or DS9 and when Enterprise started we were really enthusiastic about the premise until we saw what they did with it and stopped after an episode or two. It's a shame though, I hear it got good at the end before it got cancelled.

I miss not having Star Trek in my life though. But it is time for it to take a break. And hopefully they'll find new ways to bring to life some of the things we loved about it again.