Geek Syndicate August 2012 | Page 13

remembered show in it’s own right. Oh and it had darker jumpers and more fighting, which probably helped. But no movies for this lot then? No - DS9 and it’s slightly-overlapping follow up, Star Trek Voyager didn’t get to jump to the big screen, and Voyager and ill-fated prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise showed signs of a franchise starting to run out of creative juice. Enterprise in particular managed to alienate a lot of fans by taking liberties with established background whilst failing to use those liberties to reach out to a wider audience in the way TNG had. Other shows were coming along, doing it better, and after only four seasons Enterprise was cancelled, taking Star Trek off the air once again. Yep. J J Abrahms of Lost and Alias fame got to pick up the franchise and make a reboot, which is the fashion of the time, recasting the TOS characters as younger, sexier and fightier, Technically this is all in a parallel universe to the main series - theres some hand-waving in the movie to explain it away - so that all the other series still happened along with all the tie-in toys, lunchboxes and so on, but any future movies can mine out what worked from the TOS series and films without having to obey any sort of master continuity. Geek Syndicate others. Many of these shows define themselves against Star Trek, they certainly can’t ignore it’s presence. Against Star Trek? What does that mean? Well Star Trek is not without its problems and you’ll find a lot of geeks very down on it. Its characters tend to be noble, idealistic and capable, and can come across as arrogant, patronising and smug in their shiny, ultra-tech spaceship of unlimited resources. There is also a tendency for lazy plotting that can be summed up as “oh help! our magic science machine has broken!” followed by “hooray! we have invented a new magic science machine to fix it”. Star Trek has given geekery the word “Technobabble” and not for positive reasons. Anything else? I think thats quite enough for now. Catch you later. Sure. Live Long, and Prosper. Wait, what...? Sounds sensible. That’s a lot of continuity to master. So aside from there being lots of it, why is Star Trek so important? Well, as mentioned, for a long time it was the only real show in town, managing to be both popular and accessible and also managing to talk about “stuff” - TOS using it’s “planet of the week” format to tell SF parables about racism, intolerance, good and evil, all that sort of thing, sometimes subtly, sometimes less so, but it brings with the idea that SF shows can be more than mere entertainment in a way that its predecessors like say, Lost in Space, didn’t. TNG starts a boom in SF programming by networks that brings us Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica (rebooted by Ron Moore), Farscape and Firefly, amongst Awwww. But han g on, wasn’t there another film? A shiny one, with lots of lens flare? Images © Paramount Pictures Matt Farr 13