Death of a subculture

In Where No Geek Has Gone Before Douglas Kern celebrates the 40 year run of Star Trek, which came to a close Friday night with the final eposide of Star Trek Enterprise:

The last new Enterprise airs tonight, and soon Star Trek will be, in a sense, dead -- but we should all have such a rollicking afterlife. Forget the five-year mission; Star Trek has succeeded in its forty-year mission to be the most all-encompassing multimedia geek experience ever. Star Trek doesn't need new episodes, or new anything else. Between hundred of episodes, novels, comic books, video games, role-playing games, conventions, cartoons, and movies, Star Trek has achieved cultural immortality.

Yes, Orson Scott Card, it was inferior science fiction, but so what? Star Trek was family. You don't stop loving your kids just because someone else's kids are smarter and better looking. Star Trek didn't just offer the illimitable joys of William Shatner tumbling out of his chair every time the camera shook, or yet another sermon from the pen of Gene Roddenberry about how organized religion is a childish superstition. It offered a world. It offered a place that dreamers could call their own; a place where wonky, right-leaning dreams of rugged space exploration and pioneering could sit comfortably next to hippy-dippy dreams of world peace and universal brotherhood. It was a kind of home, and home is no place for shrewd critical judgments.

Star Trek offered us middle-class midwestern types a chance at full-body geeky immersion when nothing else did. Now pay attention to yer Grandpappy Kern, you young Gen Y whippersnappers. In the bad old days, when nickels cost dimes, ladies wore petticoats, and high-speed modems ran at 800 bits per second, geeky pursuits were the love that dared not speak its name. In those days, we didn't have "graphic novels." Admitting that you read comic books was like admitting that you read Playboy for the pictures. Video games? If you spent twenty hours a week on the same game, your parents had you institutionalized. Dungeons and Dragons? For Satanists. Tolkien? For Folklore Studies majors who looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy and homely girls who liked unicorns.

I am old enough to remember the first episodes of the original series, and as a nine year old was at the right age to be taken in by the sense of wonder and adventure that Star Trek engendered. You got a sense from the original series that the crew of the Enterprise really was going "where no man has gone before". The earliest episodes were the best, especially "Where No Man has Gone Before", which was the second pilot, and the first with William Shatner at the helm. In the earliest episodes, the plots and characters were truer to the concept. In "Where No Man.." Spock's lack of human emotion, and reliance on logic contrasted with Kirk's humanity, as Kirk struggled with the decision to strand Gary Mitchell on a deserted planet. Spock knew that Mitchell's ESP powers would multiply exponentially to the point where he would be too strong to stop unless he be killed immediately, and had no compunction against carrying out the execution which he knew was the right decision. The contrast between Kirk's and Spock's reactions to the dilemma gave a sense of how an environment where humans interacted with alien races could be very different than we are used to.

Sadly, over the years Star Trek was a victim of its own success. With each new series, the characters became more one-dimensional, the plotlines more repetitive and predictable, and the sense of wonder less evident. "The Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine" were well written and watchable, if not as appealing as the original series. "Voyager" brought nothing new to the franchise. "Enterprise" was unwatchable. As the producers increasingly relied on special effects and sexually attractive female crewmembers to hold the interest of viewers, the original premise of the series, the spirit of pioneers driving "covered wagons to the stars", was lost.

Of course, my opinions may reflect more my advancing years and my declining interest in the Sci-Fi genre in general, but the declining audience base confirmed that the Star Trek franchise has run its course. Sci-Fi cannot thrive in an atmosphere of familiarity and routine. The next successful Sci-Fi franchise will have to re-write the rules, just as Star Trek did 40 years ago.