cymbaljack

So, last night was the season finale of Star Trek: Reprise (theme: “boldly going where we have gone many, many times before”) in the form of two complete episodes. (Oh, boy!) (I believe the episode titles were "Hoshi is a wimp" and "We're so boring, our final episode is about some other show.") Even though I gave up on this show sometime back in its first season, I thought it might be interesting to see how they ended it. And the answer is: pretty much like they started it. I laughed out loud two or three times, my wife said she wanted to “hurl” because of the female characters, and on the whole it didn’t make any sense or particularly seem very important.

This leaves us with the question: is Star Trek forever dead on big and small screens? (It will probably go on forever in the form of conventions, online “sims,” memorabilia, etc.)

At the moment, my answer is: that’s the best we can hope for.

I am not a Trekker fanatic. I’ve never been to a convention. I don’t own any Star Fleet uniforms, or any collectible merchandise.

But my credentials as a fan are in order. When I was a little kid, and the original series was the only Star Trek, on in reruns, I would sprint up our long driveway every day so that I wouldn’t miss more than I had to. (Show started at 4:00; I got off the bus about 4:12. To this day if I see the opening of an original series episode I will think I haven’t seen it, until we get about 15 minutes in.)

I watched Next Gen fairly faithfully for most of its run, and was very devoted to Deep Space Nine, or as it is more formally known, “The best Trek ever.” I tried to watch Voyager, off and on, despite its many problems. (Toward the end we called it “The Doctor and Seven show.”) And I gave Reprise a chance for a while. I’ve seen all the movies and can recite most of The Wrath of Khan.

So why am I hoping that we’ve seen the last movie and the last TV show? Because for several years now, they have been running it into the ground, and without hope of something changing, I’d rather see no further damage done.

The movies had their moments. II was great, VI was solid. I can say good things about Generations and even First Contact. But since then it’s been increasingly clear that the movies are just about being cash machines with superficial plot lines. They completely avoid all the complexity that made the late Next Gen / complete DS9 era great.

The TV shows have been worse. You can just see what happened when they switched from syndication (NG and DS9) to being on Paramount’s own network (Voyager and Enterprise). The plots get dumbed down. Women get treated as inferior and mostly as sex objects. We steal from ourselves and don’t do anything too edgy. And people yawn and turn to something else. And the network comes in and says, “People aren’t watching! We need more sex! And fistfights!”

So unless someone can wrest control of the franchise away from the money-grubbing Hollywood-mindset execs at Paramount, it’s better if there is no more Star Trek. We still have the good ones on DVD. Serenity is coming soon, and even if that doesn’t lead to a new Firefly series, it’ll remind people what’s possible, and someday there will be another sci-fi series worth watching on television.