I never really jelled with Star Trek. The SF of my childhood was always Star Wars and Buck Rodgers and Baker-era Dr Who, which eschewed the exploration narrative neatly captured in Trek’s boldly go approach to narrative. They were narratives that seemed faster-paced, so Trek always seemed slow, and I lived in places where SF fans were rare, so I never found a community to get me over the initial reluctance to dive in to Trek.
When you start off with a reluctance to engage with Star Trek, it’s hard to get over it because Star Trek is omnipresent. In the same way that Tolkien’s fingerprints are prominently smudged over all forms of fantasy, Star Trek is the runaway cultural phenomenon that identifies SF in television land. For decades, “more like Trek” was regarded as a strength in a TV show, even when it wasn’t dramatically appropriate.
If you made your show more like Trek, the SF fans would show up. Market-share without any effort. Throw in an analogue to Star Fleet, Vulcans, Holodecks, and Klingons, and you could focus on getting the elusive casual fans without thinking about how to do anything new that would excite the SF faithful. It became rare that I’d find shows that really spoke to me, for a while. Even the shows I came to watch regularly, like Babylon 5, had more to do with friends pitching it as “they’re doing something interesting with the writing” than “it’s great SF.”
The one exception to my Trek-aversion was Deep Space Nine. I watched the final two seasons years ago, when I was ill and bedridden and there was a video store next to the doctor’s surgery. I hired out every episode they have on video cassette to fill the hours when I was going to be on the couch and unable to move. I was won over by by the episode Far Beyond the Stars, and the fact that I’d finished watching all the Babylon 5 videos the store had in stock.
I enjoyed those seasons, but I never felt the need to go back and fill in the seasons before it. First, because the store didn’t stock those videos. Second, because I had the feeling it would be more like Star Trek than I wanted.
Earlier this week I started watching DS9 from the beginning. Watching Benjamin Sisko with hair, and without a beard. All the flashes of the things I’ll eventually like in the series, mixed in with the Trek tropes I’m not that big a fan of. It’s an interesting look at how a series evolves, which is giving me thoughts when it comes to the thesis.
