This one’s for Jonah. I went to see the new Star Trek this weekend. I’m not a scholar as he is — I know the theme tune, the catchphrases, and have high hopes that, if I ever get time-transported and beamed up to the Enterprise, the dolly birds will have Sixties hairdos. But I enjoyed the movie, and liked the way the new Kirk, Chris Pine, affectionately recreated William Shatner’s body language, when he’s sitting in the captain’s chair (although he gets a lot less did-whatever-planet-we’re-on-move-for-you action than Shatner did).
I see they followed the Casino Royale reboot template, and saved the catchphrase and the theme tune till the end. And then they threw both down the toilet. The theme music is horribly re-orchestrated and sounds very weedy. And “To boldly go where no man has gone before” is now “To boldly go where no-one has gone before . . .”
Surely this must rank as the world’s all-time most pitiful capitulation to political correctness. I don’t know what Leonard Nimoy was paid, but there’s no amount of money that could persuade me to read that line and so dishonor the original. For a start, it isn’t true: As a rule, they’re going where plenty of Romulans and Klingons and whatnot have gone before. It’s virgin soil only for mankind. And, if you want to be “inclusive,” why not just cut to the chase and cravenly go where no man, woman, gay, straight, bi-, trans- or questioning has gone before?
[UPDATE: Okay, I surrender. A gazillion readers say the line was changed for Star Trek: The Next Generation back in 1987. I seem to be the only one who missed it. No person is an island, but evidently my social isolation comes pretty close. So please, no more emails on that.
But on reflection, like Nancy Pelosi on CIA briefings, I’ll double down and dig in deeper: If the Casino Royale reboot was designed to get closer to the tougher Bond of Fleming’s first terse little novel, so the Star Trek back-to-the-beginning story should have had the guts to restore the original line. Two decades of illiterate PC fatuity is more than enough.]