Star Trek turns 60!

Today is the 60th anniversary of STAR TREK. 

Or as I might think of it, the 30th anniversary of the 30th anniversary of STAR TREK. That's a bit of a brain-breaker for me because it means the DEEP SPACE NINE episode that paid tribute to THE ORIGINAL SERIES, "Trials & Tribble-ations," is now older than the episode it honors ("The Trouble with Tribbles" aired on December 29, 1967) and give or take two months, is now as old as the series it honors.

I'm not ready for DEEP SPACE NINE to be as old to modern viewers as TOS was to me. And yet, here we are.

I bring up the 30th anniversary of STAR TREK in 1996 because it's probably the last great peak in STAR TREK history. UPN made a big deal of the milestone with a 30th anniversary TV special that assembled almost all of the entire casts of the then-existing four TV series. The 5th season of DS9 and the third season of VOYAGER were being broadcast even as STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT was on its way to theaters, where it would become the highest grossing film of the franchise up to that point. And if you were a Trekker around this time, it probably felt like STAR TREK could never be stopped.

Ron Moore, who wrote for TNG and DS9 and co-wrote the first two NEXT GENERATION movies, has often made the case for 1994 as the cultural peak of STAR TREK. That was the year TNG ended, DS9 was on the air, VOYAGER was entering production and GENERATIONS brought together some of the TOS cast with the TNG cast in their first film. To top it off, TIME Magazine put Kirk and Picard on their cover. Moore says he walked into the office with that issue and said, "This is the peak. It's all downhill from here."

And I get that, but 1996 was a peak almost as high. And I might make the case that the following seasons of DS9 and VOYAGER were their creative peaks. DS9 introduced the Dominion War storyline and really embraced serialization, while VOYAGER brought in the Borg and Seven of Nine which really reenergized the show.

If you were around my age, all of these shows and movies undeniably shaped your idea of what STAR TREK should be. I love the TOS gang. Some of their movies are among my favorites. TNG was one of the first instances I remember being aware of specific writers and what they brought to the show, and certainly the cast was excellent even when the show hit blander patches.

But for me, DEEP SPACE NINE will always be the pinnacle of TREK. Some of that definitely has to do with it coming along as my own tastes in entertainment were maturing. The franchise was taking a more complex, morally ambiguous turn right as I was hungry for something besides the black and white morality often found in the other two shows. It felt like TREK was rising to challenge me right at the time when my mind was opening up to that kind of storytelling.

Now DS9 is celebrated for its distinct voice, darker storytelling and moral complexity. It was fascinating that during the relatively peaceful Clinton Administration, we got a Trek series that dealt with wartime ethics and it was completely uncontroversial. No one accused it of being preachy or pandering just because it had a moral point of view. 

That became funny in five or six years time when the corrupt Bush Administration lied to the American people to justify a shameful quagmire of a war. It felt like every wartime moral issue raised by DS9 prepared me to have my own perspective on everything that was going on in the real world. Had DS9 been a few years later, conservatives would have called it "Bush bashing" and "propaganda." But it was prescient in a way that allowed me to define my moral lines before they were tested.

That's not to say DS9 didn't get a lot of bullshit attacks at the time - it did. From people who considered themselves "real" fans of Star Trek. And man, did those guys have a lot of opinions about why DS9 wasn't "real Star Trek" and why it wasn't a good show. 

A sampling:

- STAR TREK is about exploring the galaxy in a starship. This station doesn't go anywhere. It's not what STAR TREK is at all!

- It betrays Gene Roddenberry's vision by showing a darker side to the Federation. STAR TREK is a utopia! There is no dark side to the Federation and if these writers think it should have one, they don't understand STAR TREK!

- You can't tell war stories in STAR TREK! It's against Gene's vision!

- Gene Roddenberry was a secular storyteller! You can't have a show where the main character is a religious icon!

- Casting a black man as the lead is just them hitting us in the face with political correctness.

I want to dwell on that last one for an extra moment. There ABSOLUTELY was a racist backlash to casting Avery Brooks as Commander Sisko. I was there. I saw it. It was real. There are fans today who downplay this when it's brought up, saying that STAR TREK fans have never made racist arguments against shows they didn't like.

And Janeway dealt with the same bullshit over being the first female captain. There's always been an element of racism and misogyny within the fandom itself. I'm not saying it's even a large element, but it's present, and even back then it would launder those bigotries in behind the "This isn't Star Trek/Gene's vision" nonsense.

That's why I can't take anyone seriously when they claim to be the arbiter of what is and isn't Star Trek. Nope, sorry. You have zero authority there. You can feel - as I have about PLENTY of Star Trek - that "This isn't something I enjoy." But that's a subjective assessment. You not liking something doesn't obligate everyone to agree it's bad.

There's something weird in the psychology of people who feel like they OWN Star trek in that they must delegitimize the Trek they don't enjoy. They don't stop at "I didn't like it because it's not what I look for in Star Trek."  They have to go as far as "This isn't legitimate. Everyone who enjoys this isn't a real fan like I am, and the only real Star Trek comes from the exact same process that gave us THE ORIGINAL SERIES."

To that end, I've seen the argument made in more than one place that what's wrong with the current shows is that they're not written by people who read literary science fiction, like TOS was. It's an idea that seems to make sense until you realize that in the 1960s, most science fiction films and TV were mostly still dealing with bug-eyed aliens and those sorts of stories. A few exceptions aside, the majority of intelligent science fiction was literary.

Science Fiction television and movies have come a long way in sixty years. To argue that a Star Trek series is wrong to draw on more modern inspirations is to sound like film theorist Rudolf Arnheim did in his 1932 book FILM AS ART when he believed that synchronized sound would be the ruination of film.

As James T. Kirk once said, "People can be very frightened of change."

I went on my own journey to realizing that if I wasn't enjoying the Star Trek with which I was presented, I could always move on. I had a shaky relationship with VOYAGER... seeing the potential in the premise and the character dynamics and then often disappointed when it seemed content to stay within its box. And then came the 4th season, with the addition of Seven of Nine, who was like a jolt of energy to every scene she was one. It shook up some of the staid dynamics on the ship and we even got some loose serialization.

But once the fifth season rolled around, the show stagnated, as if it had expended its most ambitious ideas and was done challenging itself. I felt vindicated a year later when Ron Moore left after a few weeks on VOYAGER's staff and gave a long interview that dove into all the ways he felt that VOYAGER was in a rut, delving the same Trekian patterns that had been beaten into the ground by over a decade of modern shows.

(The sites that hosted that interview are LONG gone from the internet, but the Wayback Machine helped me recover all six parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6. A wild feature of this is with hindsight, you can almost see him formulating what would because his BATTLESTAR GALACTICA reboot in real time here.)

Of course, today I understand that VOYAGER probably had network pressures placed on it that hindered it from being as daring as DS9. And perhaps some of its audience wouldn't have followed it into more serialized storytelling. I think VOYAGER's familiarity was a virtue for much of the audience that found it. If DS9 upsetting the apple cart was too much for you, VOYAGER was probably comfort food.

I wasn't yet at the point of abandoning shows when I stopped enjoying them... which is so strange to consider in hindsight. I turned up every week out of... duty? Habit? The idea that I HAD to watch it because it was Star Trek? It's funny how the mind works sometimes. I had an even more pronounced version of this relationship with ENTERPRISE.

Actually, that's a funny sidebar. By the time ENTERPRISE premiered, I was very into the idea of breaking into TV writing. There were two Trek reviewers, Jammer and Tim Lynch, who had made a name for themselves so much that they'd both been invited to pitch to Star Trek. I decided that my big break would be to do the same for ENTERPRISE. And so with Season 2, I started by writing reviews of the first few episode and posting them to Usenet.

I lasted four episodes before I stopped. I realized I wasn't getting enough out of the shows as entertainment that I enjoyed the act of assessing them and living in the same creative frustrations week after week. I wasn't getting anything out of wallowing in that repeatedly. That's probably why I'm perplexed that nearly a decade into the newer era of Star Trek, the same voices who hated these shows when they premiered still show up EACH WEEK after a new episode to repeat the same vitriol. 

I never did fully give up on ENTERPRISE, though it was the first Trek series where if I missed an episode, I usually didn't go to any trouble to catch up. I continued to watch through it's ups and downs. Why?

Because it WAS Star Trek!

With the later shows, I've found it easier to engage and disengage depending on my level of enjoyment. A show that's not geared to my tastes no longer does much to upset me. The characters I liked are still there in TOS, TNG and DS9. They live on in not just the produced TV shows and movies but in hundreds of novels and comic books. 

Which is not to say there haven't been new shows or episodes I liked - there definitely have been. Because I know people who've worked on those shows, I understand that so many of the people involved in these shows grew up on the same Trek I did. There are probably more fans working in Star Trek now than there were in the 90s Trek era.

Is everything they're doing to my taste? No, but considering by the tail end of the Rick Berman era of Star Trek, my biggest complaint was that the shows had become staid and stuck in their own habits, I welcome the wild swings. The best Trek has come from pushing at the boundaries of what came before.

Spock once said that "Logic is the beginning of wisdom. Not the end." In that spirt, the adventures of Kirk, Spock and McCoy on the Enterprise were the beginning of Star Trek... but not its end.

May Star Trek always reach for strange new worlds.... and go there boldy.

Some of my Past Star Trek related posts:

Deep Space Nine's wartime morality plays show that good writing is timeless - Part 1, Part 2
16 Great TV Shows, Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Why all three seasons of PICARD were necessary to Jean-Luc Picard's journey after the end of TNG
Peter David and the art of the tie-in novel
Networking screw-ups and Ron Moore

The Five Worst Series Finales

As with yesterday's season finale list, I have decided to confine this list to shows within my lifetime. Like I said yesterday, this is a purely subjective list, and hopefully it will spur some of you to comment with your own picks that I missed.

In retracing all the TV finales I've watched over the years, I've realized there are a lot of final episodes that range from "meh" to "okay." Most shows manage to turn out a sendoff that is at least passable. In the cases where there's greater pressure on a finale to wrap up a major epic, or a more demanding premise, that's usually where you'll see shows fall on their face.

With that in mind, it's not surprising that there are few sitcoms on this list. In a lot of ways the bar is lower for them. Most of the episodes on this list are ones that provoked epic amounts of "Fan rage" upon their original airings.

5) Quantum Leap: "Mirror Image" - I debated if this one was fair, as the creators shot it when the future of their series was in doubt. Still, this was intended as a launching pad into the next season and they had supposedly been warned it could be the final episode. The episode is a bizarre bore that has Sam leaping into his own adult body and finding himself in a strange metaphysical bar on the exact day of his birth. Others in the bar appear to be either leapers or odd echos of previous leaps, along with a bartender who might be the God/Time/Whoever that sends Sam on his leaps. There's a nice moment near the end where Sam uses his one "free leap" to fix things for Al rather than go home, but then the episode concludes with the biggest middle finger to fans it could have had: a caption reading "Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home."

4) Enterprise: "These Are the Voyagers" - Poor Scott Bakula. He's a great actor but is the star of two of the worst finales of all-time. This episode was a slap in the face to the Enterprise cast, as the whole story is framed as a holograph simulation being played by Next Generation's Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Counselor Troi (Marina Sirtis) in a segment that's meant to take place during TNG's seventh season episode "The Pegasus." The regulars play second-fiddle in their own finale with an utterly boring story that pointlessly kills off Engineer Tucker, and then denies the audience any real closure by neglecting to show a historic speech the captain is supposedly fated to give.

3) 7th Heaven: "Goodbye and Thank You" - I didn't watch the show regularly, but I couldn't resist tuning in for this trainwreck. Not only does all the interesting stuff happen off-screen (such as a bride and groom canceling their wedding while at the altar). Not only does the show eat up time with three badly staged, acted and written fantasy scenes that seem to be there only to incorporate Jessica Biel into the show. Not only does the twist that all three Camden couples are pregnant with twins cause eye-rolling of epic proportions. But the ratings for this episode (no doubt from people like me who came to dance on this show's grave) were high enough to motivate the CW to bring the show back for yet another year. The casualty: Everwood.

(I know the mere fact that this wasn't really the end should disqualify it from this list, but it's MY list and it was fully intended as the end right up until the week after it aired. I say it counts.)

2) Star Trek: Voyager: "Endgame" - The entire premise of the show was about a Starfleet ship, stranded decades from home. For seven seasons, we watched as the crew struggled to find a faster way back, even as they pulled together. I could have forgiven the time-travel cheat that sends them home 17 years ahead of schedule, essentially amounting to a deus ex machina. I could have looked past yet another use of the Borg, a once-threatening enemy that Voyager declawed through overuse. I even could have looked past the complete lack of sacrifice or consequence here. What I can't ignore is that the audience waited seven years to see what would happen when the crew made it back - and the show fades to ending credits before Voyager reaches Earth orbit.

And the Worst Finale of All-Time (in my humble opinion)....

1) The X-Files: "The Truth" - The only thing the show got right here was bringing back David Duchovney. To really explain everything wrong with the finale would probably mean discussing what went wrong with this series as a whole. Suffice to say that at least half - if not more - of the episode is taken up with a trial that serves only to lecture to the audience about what they already know of the alien conspiracy. The main character is passive, sitting there while everyone else is stuck rehashing old territory (not unlike the Seinfeld finale, actually.)

Worse, though the episode was advertised as explaining everything, it's clear the writers can't fold all their red herrings into a single coherent conspiracy explanation. The one bit of the conspiracy that never made sense to me was the whole super-soldier plot, which emerged from thin air in season eight. The trial scenes attempt to skirt this, but it's clear those twists can't be made to work with the bees, the black oil, the alien embryos and all the other malarkey we were asked to swallow for nine years.

With "The Truth" as its valedictory address, The X-Files makes an excellent case for why one shouldn't follow a series that's based on a never-ending circle jerk of mysteries and conspiracies - or at the very least, why one shouldn't expect any satisfaction out of the ending. After being burned on this show, I watched the first two seasons of Lost, always on guard that nothing would ever make sense. I finally quit during the third season when I realized that not only was I completely indifferent to the mysteries, but that I actively hated 2/3 of the characters.

I know there are people who would argue that Seinfeld's finale deserves to be on this list. My feeling is that Seinfeld never had anything it needed to resolve. That last episode was surely a disappointment, but it feels so unlike a normal episode that it's easy for me to divorce it from the series. It doesn't taint the rest of the series for me.

What are your picks?