And there was great rejoicing amongst the Tribes of Nerdia: a new Star Trek show has been announced for 2017. Two things are certain.
‐It will be unfavorably compared to the original series, which was awesome and perfect, except for that one episode. Well, those two. Okay, 17 of them. All right, the whole third season, except for that one.
‐If the show remade the original series, note for note, show for show, it would be the object of dork scorn on every sci-fi website. Let me get this straight: They go to a planet where Apollo lives? The actual Greek god Apollo, and he stops the Enterprise by holding it with his giant god hand? Is that the same solar system where Lincoln appears floating in space in a chair? Is it next door to the planet that is run entirely by Damon Runyon gangsters who based their government on a history book left behind by other explorers?
No, wait, don’t tell me — Apollo’s planet was just a few light years away from the planet that not only had the exact same continental plates as Earth, it had cities that looked like the backlot where they shot Westerns. Why? Because of Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development, I guess. That’s why this other planet had their own version of the Roman Empire, which they called the Roman Empire, and — miracle of miracles! — they had jettisoned Latin for English. Remember that one? Spock found it odd that they were Sun Worshippers, betraying his own pig-headed, pointy-eared, green-blooded ignorance of the Sol Invictus cult in Nero’s time. But hey, at least no one was walking around overacting about how the tattered shreds of the E Plebnista applied not only to Yanks, but to Commies as well. It must! Otherwise it means nothing! Do you understand?
RELATED: Live Long and Prosper: Leonard Nimoy Was Not Spock, Except When He Was
Yeah. No one would accept a remake. These days no one would accept the original, if it was new. Yet it’s still a touchstone, an urtext. Why?
Because it was awesome and perfect. Except for, well, you know.
One of the most unnerving memories of my early days was sitting in front of Grandma’s color TV out at the farm, watching this terrifying show about a man who was about to be crushed by a tombstone with his name on it. Later I realized I’d seen the first episode of Star Trek ever broadcast, and that gives me some cred here. I watched it as it ran, but came to know the show in endless afternoon reruns on TV in Fargo. The third or fourth series of reruns had a different time slot, and it interfered with my paper route; it was frustrating to leave the show in the middle to go sling the daily Forum, even though I knew what happened. Nomad was tricked into destroying itself by Kirk, causing it first to start smoking — the sure sign of a computer that cannot process contradictory information — before it was beamed into space, where it blew up. The computer that ran the Landru program and relaxed its grip so the townsfolk could go hootin’ and hollerin’ and fornicatin’ every so often? It would smoke, and blow up. The giant single-celled organism that would suck the life out the entire galaxy if it wasn’t stopped? Kirk would find a way to defeat it, providing Bones kept shooting him full of meth to keep him on his feet.
RELATED: Star Trek Loses Its Muse, Spock
I had them all memorized. The plots mattered less than the moments. Scotty’s getting an invader hammered on green liquor; Spock’s reacting to the news that he had not, in fact, beaten his commanding officer and friend to death in a sex ritual; Bones’s declaring that he was a doctor, not an escalator; Scotty’s muttering “ach” as he jammed the sonic screwdriver in the Jeffries Tube to fix the transporter in “The Doomsday Machine” — same sets, same music, same brash ’60s lighting, same predictable pace with the inevitable ending where everyone stood on the bridge and laughed or offered a haunting rhetorical musing. What of Lazarus, indeed.
The original episodes seem like a row of exquisitely chiseled stone slabs compared to everything that came afterwards.
Perhaps you had to be there. A recent series in the AV Club brought fresh eyes to the whole series, watching it from the perspective of a Millennial who’d never seen an episode, and any honest Trek fan will admit the observations were mostly right. Brilliance and dreck; adventure and tedium. But the original episodes seem like a row of exquisitely chiseled stone slabs compared to everything that came afterwards. Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise — each show is like a vast pot of porridge. You watch the opening sequence of any original Trek show, you know which one it is. This is impossible with the others; there are simply too many.
When Star Trek went off the air, there was a campaign to bring it back — hey, it worked for the third season. But it was dead dead now, and we knew it. Reruns let us memorize every episode. If you’d told my 16-year-old self that someday there would be another Star Trek, and it would run for seven years, and there would be two more series that ran for seven years each and another that ran for four, I would have been so very grateful. Oh but there’s more, my young past self. A movie.
They’re going to make a Star Trek movie?
Yes. Well, actually, twelve of them. So far. Apparently there are script issues with the 13th, but they’ll get over it. It’ll probably come out around the time they release the newest Star Trek series, which will be beamed to your house from orbital platforms, and viewable on wafer-thin voice-activated hand-held screens. Okay, that’s it, gotta go.
Wait! Wait! Is there a space station in your future?
Yeeeesss, but don’t think 2001. No Howard Johnson’s.
Have we been to Mars?
Funny you should ask! That’s the most popular movie in my time. Okay, I’m off.
#share#
About those subsequent series: Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) was PC and careful, with lots of great stories, but most of it now looks like a big beige-and-puce ’80s hotel cruising around and being diplomatic. Again, exceptions. Star Trek: Deep Space 9, the post–Cold War analogy show, had the strongest cast and the finest story arcs. Plus, war, and lots of it. Dipping into Star Trek: Voyager reruns surprises you, because it really wasn’t as bad as you decided it was six years after it ended. And don’t get me started on Star Trek: Enterprise, because its last season was some of the finest Trek ever made. (Except for that one show.) I’ll even defend the last two reboot movies, because I remember enjoying them while I watched them — and surely that counts for something.
You can’t envy the show’s writers, who will pull out their hair trying to figure out how they can make a Kirk-like captain without offending everyone who wants a different box ticked off.
But what’s left to do? What’s left to say? You can’t envy the show’s writers, who will pull out their hair trying to figure out how they can make a Kirk-like captain without offending everyone who wants a different box ticked off. You can’t help but cringe when you think of the ways modern concerns will seep into the plots. The original Trek dealt with overpopulation, racism, war, class differences, and of course the peril of bipedal lizard men. TNG had a ridiculous environmental-panic episode in which warp drives were polluting the galaxy, and everyone had to drive Warp 5 from here on. (This was abandoned as quickly as possible.) Enterprise dealt with xenophobia and Earth-for-Earthlings, although to be fair, after seeing Florida carved in half by a space-based death-beam, people might have wondered about the wisdom of letting the rest of the universe know we were here and insufficiently defended.
Early Trek is often praised for the way it tackled Important Issues. Perhaps the next installment will be enjoyed because it doesn’t.
— James Lileks is a columnist for National Review Online.