What We Talk About When We Talk About Star Trek

We're about to enter the next frontier as J.J. Abrams' retro-fitted Star Trek reintroduces that science-fiction, pop-culture warhorse to an even newer generation. As Peter Jackson did eight years ago with Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, and swords & sorcery fantasy, I suspect (hope) that Abrams' New Trek is going to revitalize and bring to a wider audience a genre classic that had slipped into irrelevance and self-parody.

My actual review of Abrams’ Star Trek will follow tomorrow, but before all things Trek kick into maximum warp, I wanted to take a moment to talk a bit about Star Trek. There are some film properties that come with a load of cultural and personal baggage, and as I did with Watchmen in March, I want to unload some of that early so my review of the film itself doesn’t end up running 10,000 words.

How you react to the new Trek film hitting theaters tomorrow is going to depend on your personal relationship with the franchise. Don’t get me wrong—I think most everyone, Trekkie, Trekker, non-Trek-anythinger, is going to love the film. It’s the “why”s that may vary depending on geek mileage. So this is a quick look at What Trek Means to Me and a chance for you to share your own personal history with and feelings about the whole Boldly Go thing.

As a kid, I was heavily into the real-life NASA space program, collecting books on space and building (poorly) Saturn V models. One Saturday afternoon in the mid-'70s, when I must have been around nine or ten years old I went over to my Aunt Ping’s house to hang out with my Cousin Todd. A few years older than I, Todd was a ne’er-do-well geek, the sort of insidious, subversive influence your parents tried to steer you away from. (“Put down that spaceship and go play baseball with the normal kids!”) Todd read Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland (my first brush with Forbidden Texts) and even more excitingly, he built those monster model kits—the ones where Dracula, The Wolfman, and Frankenstein’s Monster had faces and hands that glowed in the dark.

But this Saturday afternoon Todd wasn’t carefully painting the Wolfman’s vest or a tombstone sticking up from a plastic base. Instead he was working on a much larger model, all sleek white plastic and tubular curves. I took one look at that miniature USS Enterprise, still in pieces but so similar to the Apollo models I’d been building, and that was all she wrote.

Todd proceeded to tell me all about Star Trek and how exciting and fun the show’s daily afternoon reruns were—all while putting me to work holding up the ship’s engine struts just so while the airplane glue dried. (To this day, that's one of the hardest things about building an Enterprise model and, I believe, the main impediment to becoming a Star Trek fan.)

I spent the next couple years watching the reruns religiously, carefully leafing through TV Guide each week to see which episodes were coming up. (I’m guessing many older Trek fans can recite some of those TV Guide descriptions, repeated year after year. I distinctly remember “Kirk and the boys come on like gangbusters…” from the blurb for “A Piece of the Action.”)

As with anything in those days, I also went to the books—the first was not a Star Trek novel (though later I read everything James Blish wrote), but instead 1968's The Making of Star Trek by Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry. I carried that thing around, like an increasingly worn and dog-eared bible. In addition to turbo-charging my budding Trek love, it also introduced me to the notion of how TV shows (and by extension, films) were actually created. (And in its footnotes, it mentions that James Tiberius Kirk was born in a small town in Iowa. More on that later.)

Then one day in May of 1977 my mom picked me up from seeing The Rescuers at the Iowa City mall and handed me a new novel she’d bought for me. “I thought you might like this—you’re into that spaceship stuff, right?” I had heard of the title thanks to the television commercials that had been running, but until then I’d completely dismissed it. “Star Wars? Naw, it sounds like just another Star Trek rip-off.”

Still, my reading habits resembled the terrifying Doomsday Machine that destroyed the USS Constitution: a hellish maw that devoured everything that got near it. So I finished the book, begged my mom to take me to the movie, and spent the next five years drawing TIE fighters and X-wings in my school notebooks. To the pre-teen mind, poor stuffy, dated Star Trek with its lackluster special effects never stood a chance next to the zippy new hotness.

The massive success of Star Wars—worldwide, not just in my fevered little brain—led at last to the rebirth of Star Trek in 1979 by way of Robert Wise’s ponderous, epic snorefest Star Trek: The Motionless Picture. I pretended to love it, of course—I remember watching Siskel & Ebert’s At the Movies reviewing it and thinking “What the hell do you two know anyway?! Stupid critics just hate everything! Why can’t you just love it like I do?!?”

But three years later it all came together in what remains to this day (and probably past tomorrow, though we'll see) Trek’s finest moment: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I don’t need to go on at length about Khan in particular—even non-Trek fans know it’s the high-water mark. (It’s no coincidence that Abram’s new film cribs heavily from Khan’s plot.) But for me, Khan came to encapsulate everything I loved about Trek.

Director Nicholas Meyer (a fellow University of Iowa and Daily Iowan alum!) directed Khan—and later Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country—as a sea-faring yarn, a nautical adventure shared by old, close friends. Star Trek and Kirk had often been referred to as Horatio Hornblower in Space and Meyer ran with that notion. He gave his Trek films layers of literary allusions (Spock referencing Sherlock Holmes—a quirk that’s echoed in the new film; Kirk reading A Tale of Two Cities, Khan quoting Ahab, Klingons spouting Shakespeare) and pulled them closer to Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Mautrin novels (the source for the Peter Weir/Russell Crowe Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World adaptation). It was also Meyer who really got the idea of Kirk’s beloved Enterprise as an entity unto herself.

By going with rollicking naval action instead of stultifying navel-gazing, Meyer’s Khan cut through all the 2001 Space Bloat of The Motion Picture. And it got to the true heart of Star Trek: the deep, lasting friendship between Kirk and Spock. In Abram’s new film, the true litmus test of your personal connection to Star Trek is simple: Do you tear up when Old Spock tells New Kirk “I have been and always shall be… your friend.” Newbies to the Trekverse will find it a nice little throwaway moment. The rest of us will bawl our eyes out.

After Khan the Star Trek film franchise had its ups and downs. Three is fine, Four is cute but too landbound for my taste, Five is a glorious mess disappearing up Shatner’s ego, Six with Meyer back at the helm is good but somewhat uneven.

Growing up in a small Iowa farming community, my Trek thing always remained a bit closeted. For a while in the ‘80s and early ‘90s I self-identified as a Trekker, thinking at the time it was cooler than being a “Trekkie,” but who was I kidding? But I never went full-blown Trekkie. I fondly remembered the old series and how instrumental it was in introducing me to the idea of science fiction. And yes, I did once try to sew my own Tribble. (The result looked like a furry oven mitt.) But I never learned to speak Klingon or dressed up in a uniform. (Okay, I did buy a T-shirt decal set that let you iron on a Starfleet emblem.)

I even tried to ignore Star Trek: The Next Generation when it debuted in 1987—by then I’d discovered beer and girls and college parties (where they had both!) and couldn’t be bothered to sit down an watch a TV show, let alone one that aired at odd, shifting hours on the weekly schedule.

However, it did eventually snag me a few years later in grad school and I ended up becoming very enamored of the kinda dorky and dull new version, especially anything having to do with Q or the Borg (or best of all, both). (At the time I bristled when Old-School Trek friends derided ST-NG and its Shakespearean Captain as bloodless and talky compared to Kirk’s two-fisted, hot-headed approach to galactic diplomacy.)

As for the Next Generation films, Generations was exciting and new at the time, but I’ve had no desire whatsoever to revisit it again. And for the offhanded, insignificant way the Star Trek Universe let James T. Kirk, its legendary hero, go out… well, shame on you, Star Trek. Shame on you. First Contact has some outstanding moments and gives Patrick Stewart a chance to strut his RSC stuff. But after that the film franchise wobbled to a slow, painful demise with the woeful Insurrection and Nemesis.

Around this time the small farm town of Riverside, Iowa—neighbor to my hometown of Kalona—found an interesting tourism hook. Kalona had the Amish to attract visitors, but Riverside decided to go in the opposite direction. Since Roddenberry had always said Kirk grew up in Iowa, who’s to say it wasn’t Riverside?

The town contacted Roddenberry and Paramount, got their blessing, and suddenly the signs as you enter Riverside read “Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.” A gleaming 15-foot USS Riverside starship was built (and stands to this day on a trailer bed near the town park) and the annual Trek Fest was launched. Held the last weekend of June every year, it’s pure small-town summer fest—tractor parades, dunk tanks, baked goods, and a street dance.

In 2004, William Shatner finally arrived at his alter ego’s hometown with a film crew from Spike TV to shoot a reality series called Invasion Iowa. The idea was that the Shat would punk the town by pretending to be shooting a really terrible science-fiction movie in Riverside and, Harold Hill-style, rope all the locals into participating. Thing was, most of the folks quickly figured out something wasn’t right and the hoax angle fizzled out.

But there’s a scene in the admittedly silly show where Don Rath, an elderly farmer, meets Shatner and then, excited to be face to face with a real-life Movie Star, takes Bill out to the Riverside Cemetery to introduce him to Don’s deceased wife, Nita. At her graveside, Don tells Nita about Mr. Shatner and sings a song to her. Say what you want about William Shatner as a person and/or an actor—and plenty has been said and mocked—but he treated the moment and Rath with staggering grace, humility, and respect.

At the end of the show, when Shatner and the producers were handing out door prizes to the not-so-hoodwinked townsfolk in order to thank them/apologize for the hoax, Shatner presented Don Rath with a stone bench to be placed by Nita’s graveside, so Don could sit and chat with her and sing to her. I've shamefully watched a lot of reality TV crap, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen a moment that honest and genuinely touching. It’s that William Shatner I hold in my pop-cultural memory, not the “Get a life!” SNL skit.

I never got into Deep Space: Nine—probably unfairly, I judged it as too static, not adventurous enough. I also gave Voyager and Enterprise fair shots, but by then the Star Trek verse just wasn’t doing it for me, or for the rest of the viewing public. Those shows have their defenders, but the problem was that Star Trek had simply wrapped itself in too much self-importance, clinging to its canonical sense of What Trek Had to Be. The franchise didn’t run out of places to go—it still tried to weave epic tales and any Trek fan could have listed off a dozen terrific scenarios for new series. But it ran out of interesting ways to get there. In hindsight, it’s obvious the franchise needed new blood. Or rather, old blood. Star Trek desperately needed Riverside’s favorite future son back.

So why Star Trek? Why does it need to come back and survive into a new century? Yes, I personally love (and miss in the new film) the nautical sea-adventures aspect. And yes, Star Trek has always been about fascinating science-fiction ideas and cool-looking spaceships (and not-so-cool-looking aliens). Gene Roddenberry—more hack hustler than creative genius—may have whipped up Star Trek as action romp with a shiny outer-space spin, but he let a lot of truly talented writers craft the original series's scripts.

But almost in spite of himself, Roddenberry also gave Star Trek an enduring humanist optimism. The idea that, though mired at the time in the heart of the Cold War and the Space Race, the human race could someday unite (there’s a Rooskie on the bridge!) and head out to explore the “Final Frontier” together. At its best, Star Trek in all its varied incarnations has always combined lofty ideals with the hunger for exploration and adventure, to seek out new places where pure heroism can flourish. I loved all that stuff as a kid, and still do.

But after more than 40 years, we finally get back the thing that really makes Star Trek worth keeping. The thing that, as an adult now, I see and cherish. With the return of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, we are finally returning to what Star Trek is really about and why it endures, surviving decades of mockery, weaving in and out of relevance. It’s about friendship. Not old pals, not drinking buddies, not neighbors in suburbia. It’s about an enduring friendship between three very different people, forged over decades in the face of great hardship and amazing experiences.

We have McCoy, the human heart of it—the gruff, irritable Southern gentleman hiding his moral support behind exasperated cynicism. Spock, the “pointy eared alien,” the logical “head.” The thinker who started as a sideshow novelty but eventually become the soul of the franchise (in no small part thanks to the intelligence, dignity, and multiple directing and acting talents of Leonard Nimoy). And finally, James T. Kirk. The fists and the… um, other parts. The hero who spends his entire life rushing toward, not away from, danger and possible death.

This is why Star Trek lasted in popular culture. And if J.J. Abrams and anyone else who eventually helms the new franchise’s flagship films remembers that then we could have another wonderful 40 years with these characters. And I’d be happy to stay on board a while longer.

Other Trek pieces:

Locke Peterseim's Review of Star Trek

Erika Olson's Non-Trekkie Review of Star Trek

Comments

[joules]

echo your sentiments. When I was a little kid in the 70's, I thought Kirk was the clear hero, but as I got older, the more I appreciated Spock (and Leonard Nimoy's nuanced performances) and the way the show needed both characters together to make the show more than just a simple action-adventure series. I fear that J.J. Abrams, not being a life-long Trek fan, may lack this appreciation and he will ruin the Spock part of this new movie. I'm afraid that either Spock will be all teen-angsty, like some leftover character from Abrams' show Felicity, or be too robotic, showing no emotions at all (which we know the real Spock has, deeply buried though they may be). If I am wrong about this, I will be happy, even if the rest of the movie is disappointing.

[Renee F]

Hell, I teared up just reading the words... "I have been, and always will be your friend". Thanks for the trip down memory lane :)

[Sara]

The bench is one of my favorite moments in reality TV as well...
Invasion Iowa is on DVD May 19th!

[Chuck]

Good grief! You just described my life growing up.

[Locke Peterseim]

Chuck, I'm glad to hear I'm not alone -- ah, the Interwebs, bringing all us together over our weird little shared childhood experiences! :)

Joules, it's hard to say about New Spock (Quinto) because he gets such a boost (and a challenge -- which he fully steps up to) from having Nimoy around in the new film to fill in the sense of who and what Spock is.

The New Spock does come off different -- a bit more petulant (by Vulcan standards) and expressive. As I tried to note in my review -- you get some of the little emotional tics here and there that you saw in the Old Spock later in the series or the later films.

Which is probably a good thing -- the original Spock WAS a bit robotic in the early episode of the show, so I don't think I mind Abrams and Quinto starting their version a bit closer toward "human." Their New Spock certainly does not play as teen-angsty, thankfully (though you are right -- the entire film and new cast DOES come off a BIT more like they're on a young adult TV Show, but for now it's forgivable... as long as they don't KEEP acting like that in the next film.)

Anyway, I have to say Quinto did a fine job with New Spock -- and seeing Nimoy again as Old Spock is just wonderfully heart-warming -- he just BREATHES the character so naturally.

[Locke Peterseim]

Sara, I'm genuinely surprised anyone (other than Riverside citizens) even SAW Invasion Iowa! And I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one, four years later, still going on about how touching the bench scene is.

But most of all I'm thrilled to hear it WILL finally be on DVD! So I can see if I've over-inflated the scenes in my memory... (I have a VHS tape of it somewhere, god knows where).

For the rest of you, if you do seek out Invasion Iowa (and I'm sure, with the new Trek here, Mr. Shatner and the show's producers are very much hoping you WILL), be warned--it's NOT really a great reality show. I'm not sure if I just have a soft spot for it because I grew up near there. But what I like about it (other than the moving parts with Mr. Rath) is that it so clearly sets out to be ONE thing (a Punk'd style hoax show) and then, when that fails, it sort of accidentally morphs into something else -- an oddly earnest (and yeah, goofy) look at life in a typical small farm town.

[joules]

OK, having read the review today, I have learned that New Spock is different from the mature, controlled dignified Spock he later becomes. It sounds like he has his own wild rebellious streak. Should be interesting. I can live with a certain amount of the screenwriters ignoring the original mythos (Kirk hooking up with Uhura, for instance), as long as they don't completely rewrite "history". I always did want to know some more back story of the original characters -- maybe there's more backstory in the Trek novels (which I've never read)?

[joules]

One more comment: One of the many reasons I love "The Big Bang Theory" is Sheldon's love for Spock. (Rock/Paper/Scissors/Lizard/Spock!)
When my brother and I were kids, he read the Trek novels, but I've only watched the shows and movies. Can anyone recommend any novels or non-fiction books about Star Trek to round out my education and turn me from a Trekkie to a full-fledged Trekker? Thanks!

[Locke Peterseim]

After the early '80s, I never really read any of the many, MANY Star Trek novels, so I'm not sure about the "semi-canonical" stuff that's been published about the characters' youth -- though I was looking at Star Trek timeline the other day and picked up some clues there.

However, the entire conceit of Abrams' new Trek is that Nero's appearance at the point of Kirk's birth CHANGES all the previous continuity (or rather, creates an ALTERNATE continuity universe for Abrams and future Trek film makers to play with and fill as they please). So Kirk's father George doesn't live to see his son graduate from the Academy, etc. (Though it's a bit unclear -- in the best "it's just a movie" sense -- how George Kirk's earlier death affects things 25 years later like Spock's love life and Scotty's icey assignment.)

But as I mentioned in my review, the period most Trekkies had hoped to see more of -- Kirk, Spock, and McCoy's years at Starfleet Academy -- is almost completely skipped over.

(For years there was talk of a new Trek series that was set at the Academy, allowing more of teen-drama vibe -- you can't help but wonder if, Smallville-style, Paramount still entertains the notion of doing such a TV series to fill in those years and complement the new feature films.)

And yes, the film's New Spock is definitely given a bit of a rebellious streak that frankly suits the character well. In fact one thing I never got to in my over-long review is that the film, certainly geared toward attracting teen viewers, has an ongoing theme of young, rebellious characters showing up their stodgy, out-of-it elders. I don't mind that -- it fits the Trek characters at that stage of their life. But I hope that once the new film is a huge success and a new generation of viewers is hooked, future feature films won't pander QUITE so blatantly to the Extreme Sports Energy Drink Why Generation and let Kirk and Spock start to mature a bit.

[Locke Peterseim]

I agree -- I have a friend who reads EVERY Trek book and on top of that is a sharp-minded literary critic, so I would LOVE to see his list of the Top 10 (or 20) Trek novels to read. (Though I've been iffy on some of his recommendations in the past.)

But by all means, folks, fire away -- let's hear your picks for best fiction or non-fiction Star Trek books!

(and I did watch a bit of The Big Bang Theory and enjoyed it and especially Sheldon -- I haven't seen the Rock/Paper/Lizard/Spock episode, but from what I've heard it sounds hilarious)

[Locke Peterseim]

So after reading Erika's "non-Trekkie" review of the film, I got to thinking -- if someone comes to Abrams' Star Trek completely unfamiliar with the franchise (other than just the general pop-culture echoes everyone knows), and they love it and want to "learn more about it," where do you send them first? What TOS episodes do you point to? What feature films? Do you recommend any of DS9, STNG, Voyager or Enterprise?

Personally, I'd say for starters you give them maybe a half dozen TOS "best of/must see" episodes and then, of course Khan. I'm not sure about the rest of the TOS-cast films -- personally I love Khan and Undiscovered Country (the true "end" of the TOS Star Trek), but Search for Spock is good, and many folks love Voyage Home (probably because it's the most jolly and good-natured and the least geeky -- I have no use for it because heck, the Enterprise isn't even IN the film, except at the end). Definitely not The Motion Picture or The Final Frontier, right? At least not at first...

And what TOS episodes do you recommend? If you were going to say, here are six TOS eps, watch them this weekend and you'll "get it", which ones do you point a newcomer to?

I guess everyone would probably say Ellison's "City on the Edge of Forever," and also "Balance of Terror" (though all of the latter's Romulan continuity is now wiped away by the new film -- the whole point of "Balance of Terror" was that no one in the Federation had ever SEEN a Romulan in person). "Mirror, Mirror" also comes up on a lot of folks' lists.

What else? As a kid I loved "The Doomsday Machine" because it just freaked me out, the idea of this unthinking, unstoppable agent of destruction. (I loved the Borg for the same reason, until STNG and Voyager started slowly making the Borg more human, more communicative and reasonable.)

And of course, "The Trouble With Tribbles," though that functions mainly as a comic lark -- and while Abrams' new Trek certainly includes some of the traditional Star Trek humor (though a bit more slapstick), I don't know if you'd hold "Tribbles" up as representative of what TOS Trek "is", or would you?

"Devil in the Dark" was, I think, one of the very first episodes I ever saw--at least the image of the Horta and Spock's mind-meld remains one of my earliest Trek memories.

"Arena" of course was a favorite as a kid--and one of the Trek moments most often mocked: Kirk fighting the giant rubber-headed Gorn lizard man.

"Space Seed" maybe? For Montalban and for the back story for Khan?

Entertainment Weekly once said (14 years ago):

1. The City on the Edge of Forever
2. Space Seed
3. Mirror, Mirror
4. The Doomsday Machine
5. Amok Time
6. The Devil in the Dark
7. The Trouble with Tribbles
8. This Side of Paradise
9. The Enterprise Incident
10. Journey to Babel

Anyone out there want to chime in? Let's say you're giving a newcomer a TOS starter pack. You can include three movies and six episodes. What would they be?

Or would you (gasp!) skip TOS and send them to STNG, DS9, or even (double gasp!) Voyager or Enterprise?

[JGM]

Welcome back from second helpings.

You pointed me here from the movie thread - and, wow, I'm a bit older than you but I guess we midwestern kids share some DNA, as many of your touchstones are spot-on with mine: the James Blish books, Siskel & Ebert, even the monster models with the glow-in-the-dork (er, *dark*) hands and faces. Then there's our wierdly similar paragraphs on The Doomsday Machine.

On the "starter pack" thing, I have been going through the same thing with my kids. The "remastered" original series episodes popped up on one of the syndicated stations, I set up the replay, and now I can steer them to the ones worth their time. I think you make a mistake, though, staying with the "great" episodes. Half the charm of Old Trek is in the cheese, and we enjoyed "Arena" (slow motion mano-a-Gorn combat and all) and especially the mind-boggling wierdness of "Who Mourns for Adonis" as much as "Space Seed". Throw in any of the Kirk-outsmarts-a-computer episodes. From there to movies II, III, and IV (or "The Wrathful Search for Home", as my friend Mike calls them), and you've got basically everything you need to enjoy the new film to its fullest.

[joules]

I thought about it, and I can't decide which TOS episodes are key - JGM is right - some are wonderfully cheesy (A Piece of the Action), some are important for future reference (Space Seed), some are part of pop culture (The Trouble with Tribbles), some are 1960's trippy (The Way to Eden), some have a message (Let That Be Your Last Battlefield), some are noteworthy for the guest stars (too many to list).

As for the scariest TOS foe - I vote for the creepy flying jellyfish thingies in "Operation -- Annihilate!" Those things freaked me out when I was a kid, and they still do: their gross blister-like appearance, the way they hid on the ceiling, the way they latched onto their victims, and the squeaking sounds they made when wounded. They gave me more nightmares than "Jaws" or "The Exorcist" ever did!

[Locke Peterseim]

JGM and Joules, I fully agree that the cheesy, kinda cringe-worthy episodes are an equally important part of loving Star Trek (and while Kirk's actual hand-to-hand COMBAT with the big rubber Gorn is pretty funny in Arena, the overall episode itself is pretty solid), but my fear is that those are the kinds of episodes that non-Trek fans have been using to mock the series (and its fans) for decades.

If someone new to Trek loves Abrams' new film, I think we'd want to start them off on TOS with some of the really strong episodes in order to avoid scaring them off with the High Cheese. :)

[kwind]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane and all of the Iowa references! (from a non-native re-transplant Iowan)