Thanks to the new "Star Trek" film (those are finger-quotes, by the way) I and many other disinterested parties are forced to put up with reading how "good" (again, finger-quotes) the new scifi actioner is from people raving on Facebook, Twitter and via other media. The thing is, for many folks, folks like me, it's just not possible for any new Trek to be good in the way Trek was when we were growing up on it.
Trekkies usually get slammed for taking the franchise too seriously. The thing is, that's how it was designed--to be taken seriously. The creator of the series, Gene Roddenberry, at one point, decided there were rules and encouraged fans to follow them--he authorized reference manuals, the
Star Trek Encyclopedia and
Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, to name just two of MANY. Gene spoke of certain things being part of the continuity (anything on TV or the big screen and the aforementioned manuals) and others not (the novels). The idea was to make this future as real as possible for fans and as a result many of us ate it up--it was so easy to immerse ourselves in.
But after Gene died, people took over the franchise and, sadly, they just didn't give a crap about those rules. As a result, slowly but surely, those rules started getting broken and eventually came to be ignored entirely--so much so that there was no point in even paying attention or caring.
After a couple years of the rules being broken, I tossed Star Trek aside. Got sick of caring only to have my intelligence insulted.
So, here we are, well over a decade since I was last fired up about new Trek, and everyone is ranting and raving about how great this new Trek is, when any old-school Trekkie worth his salt knows that the movie couldn't possibly follow the rules Trek originally followed. When folks who still care about Trek bring this up, they're made fun of for taking it too seriously.
Well, that's why they got into it in the first place.
Star Trek represented structure in a real world where structure is often hard to find. Stability, guaranteed by moral leaders, interested in saving lives, bringing peace, living and dying with and for principles.
Yeah, when's the last time you saw that in real life??
So, please don't waste your time wondering why Trekkies can't deal with the continuity problems. It's because they were told to care and they did care only to have the powers-that-be betray the trust showed them.
In 1994, I moved to Los Angeles with the goal of one day writing for
Star Trek. I had started to see a drop in quality of the writing and felt I should get in there and try to help. I got as far as a meeting with one of the producers of
Deep Space 9. I handed him a script and it was rejected because it was too similar to an episode they had recently produced (that I had no way of knowing even existed). Two weeks later, the producer left the show removing my access. Needless to say, the show only got worse from there--not by just my estimation, but by everyone's.
Now I'm supposed to go back? Drop my $20 on a movie ticket and popcorn and try to accept that Spock could somehow be young enough to hang with Kirk in his 20s? Or that the Enterprise bridge should glow white like it was designed by Apple? Or accept it all because a time-travel story makes it all go away at the end? Meh...
When I stopped caring about Trek all those years ago, I stopped caring...
Hell, if we wanted to just have fun, we'd watch
Star Wars.
...or something that didn't go on long enough to disappoint.
Have you ever heard of something called "anime"? ^_^
