My Love Affair With Star Trek
By Lore Sjöberg| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Aug, 31, 2006
September marks the 40th anniversary of Star Trek, which started with a show about a shape-shifting creature who seduces, then sucks the salt out of people. This pretty much set the tone for the series, which over the ensuing decades has morphed many times, managing to survive by seducing its audience while quite often sucking.
I've been a Star Trek fan for as long as I can remember, but the original series came and went before I was even born. I hadn't even seen "The Space Seed" -- Ricardo Montalban's debut as Khan Noonien Singh -- when at 12 years old I watched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Luckily you don't need a lot of back story to appreciate slimy brain worms and William Shatner yelling "KHAAAAAN!" It was pure fun for me, undiluted by cynicism.
The same couldn't be said at the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation five years later. Adolescence had snuck up on me, and while I enjoyed the first season more than it probably deserved, I was fully aware of the camp of the first series, much of which survived quite comfortably in the Next Generation.
You only have to witness some of Troi's more pathos-driven moments of empathy, or some of the sillier attempts to create a new species with a few wads of latex, to see it in action. But at the same time, I watched Next Generation most weeks, and talked about it earnestly with my friends.
It was about this time that the War on Irony began. I read more than one essay snarlingly decrying my generation's supposed detached irony. For some reason, nothing annoys some people more than seeing someone wear a T-shirt for a band they don't really like. Insincerity! Moral ambiguity! Consumerist nihilism!
Still, I laughed as much as anyone at the thigh-high skirts and sky-high beehives in the original series. I could do the same crappy Shatner impression that any geek is willing to whip out at the slightest provocation. Did that mean I didn't really like the original series? Was I, horror of horrors, being ironic?
I thought it over, and decided that Star Trek -- in both the original and Next Generation flavors -- was silly and melodramatic, with dubious special effects, laughable science and a lurid obsession with cross-species insemination. I also decided it was genuinely captivating, with iconic but well-rounded characters and stories that spoke more clearly and honestly about the human condition than any number of ostensibly more realistic shows.
There was no separating the two Treks, the vacuous and the visionary. It's no coincidence that one of the most legendary episodes -- "The Trouble with Tribbles" -- was essentially a comic take on the show's established themes.
Given some distance from the moment, I realize this is actually an entirely healthy attitude. It's the attitude we should take about everything in life, and ourselves in particular. Aristotle once said, "Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor: For a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit."
In other words, nothing's so serious that we should let it destroy our sense of humor, and nothing so silly that we should blind ourselves to the truths it might be carrying. And if there's anything Kirk taught me, it's that there's always a third way.
Star Trek is serious and ridiculous, heavy and light, outlandish and undeniable. I keep hearing that they're going to try to revive it in some new form once again. If they can infuse it with that same ineffable duality, then they'll be halfway to getting it right.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,716 ... wn_index_6
