Why I Love Star Trek

Source: Uploaded by user via Victoria on Pinterest

I fell in love with Star Trek right around the same time that I began this blog. During Christmas break last year, my brother John came home from work one day with an armload of old Star Trek TOS videos that someone had donated to our local thrift store. We'd heard about the uber-geeky show and the backs of the video boxes looked interesting, so we whiled away the long snowy vacation days with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the rest of the Enterprise crew.

As I grew more and more enthusiastic about the series, my family wondered ... why? Why was their intellectual-bordering-on-stuffy daughter/sister suddenly enamored with a cheesy show that primarily consisted of cardboard props and lots of gold rickrack?

Well ... here's why.  :-)

***

- Kirk, Spock, and McCoy represent a classical literary threesome - strength, logic, and emotion - and so they are very easy to identify with. I identify strongly with Spock. Like him, I often feel like a different person inside than outside, and that I am somehow different from people around me; and like Spock, I tend to use my differences as a kind of shield to keep people from coming inside and seeing the real me. Yet, like Spock, my true desire, underneath it all, is to be understood and loved by someone for that "real me" inside my shell. It was Spock who first drew me to Star Trek.

- The Enterprise is such a wonderful collection of all different kinds of people, with all different kinds of jobs, working together on a mission of peace and exploration. It doesn't matter what you can do; there's a place for you on the Enterprise - mechanics, historians, researchers, nurses, technicians, transcriptionists, computer scientists. Thinking about Starfleet is like dreaming of sailing to distant shores, or taking flight. It's another one of those things that keeps me dreaming big and remembering that there are bigger things out there than the mundaneness of daily life.

- I love the very hippie element of this show that dares to show nonviolent characters, Spock and McCoy in particular, as still being strong, masculine, and courageous. Of course there were situations where they had to use force to save lives, but Spock is opposed to violence whenever possible and McCoy refuses to kill or to allow any person to die in his place - I am nonresistant in my beliefs, and I love it that two of my favorite characters share my conviction (well ... sort of).  :-)

- Another reason I love the show is, like Bonanza and other TV shows of the period, it didn't shy away from difficult or unhappy themes. Sure, it got cheesy sometimes, but it also produced some really heartrending moments as it featured stories about love, duty vs. emotions, the limitations of science, the value of all life, acceptance of people who look and act differently than you. There are also running commentaries on 60's politics, if you listen carefully - my sister and I watched "Return of the Archons" last night, in which the Enterprise crew has to bring freedom to a country that allegorically resembles the Soviet Union.

- I love the interactions between the characters on the show. Each of the top three officers has a very different relationship with each of the other two, and their interactions are, by turns, fascinating, touching, frustrating, and comical. Their interactions with the rest of the crew are not shallow, either - it's always neat to watch Spock's logic join forces with Scotty's common sense, or to watch the emotional McCoy clash with stubborn Nurse Chapel. I love personal interactions, and that's primarily what the show is about.

- Star Trek also takes such great care to be scientifically accurate, and to make sci-fi predictions based on things that might actually happen. I can actually interpret Dr. McCoy's medical jargon because it's accurate (the only area of science I feel capable of interpreting). And of course, they use 1960's versions of iPads, memory cards, Bluetooth, biometric identification, and Skype - how awesome is that??

***

I'm sure that I'm identifying myself as hopelessly geeky with this post, but hopefully you won't think worse of me for it.  :-)  It is definitely a little out of my uber-artsy personality to be so enamored with such a science-geek show, but it's so cool that I can't help myself ...

What is your favorite show? Geek out sometime and tell me why you love it! I'd love to know!  :-)

Live long and prosper!!!
~ Vicki