To Boldly Step Forward (Introduction)

Introduction: Gettin' From There To Here


Star Trek was never really my scene as a kid. I was 2 years old when The Next Generation premiered, and was in no state to be watching it. I remembered seeing part of a rerun of the old 60's Star Trek show once, when I was very young. An alien shot a laser beam at two people and turned them into tiny cubes, then crushed one of them in his hand and said "THIS MAN IS NOW DEAD". It terrified me. Later, when I was about 10 years old, I saw the Star Wars trilogy thanks to an older cousin of mine with a large VHS collection. He eventually moved just next door to us for a time, and after I saw Star Wars I was intrigued by his Star Trek VHS collection. That got me to watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I know a lot of people rag on this movie nowadays for being an ultra slow, agonizing borefest of a film that just fucking drags itself across the screen, but you know what? This shit was fascinating to me as a kid. It had another horrific moment there with the transporter accident scene, but after all the bombast of Star Wars I had never seen anything like this. So it was that I went through those other movies, and fell in a sort of love with the original crew in my own way. The TNG movies were concurrent at this time, and I saw them... but they didn't click with me. In hindsight, I get why. They're far less of a general audience thing. I didn't need to watch a Star Trek episode from 1967 to know that Khan was this larger-than-life space Ahab who wanted to get revenge at any cost against Captain Kirk, but these TNG movies? They just sort of fell flat because I had no investment in this crew. That was my Star Trek limit, and for many years I didn't bother.


Then I picked up TNG around... god, I don't even know how long ago it was now. Late 2016? Let's say that. Here's where I have to give credit where it's due. At well over a hundred episodes, maybe even something like 180 (I've not looked it up), TNG would have taken me ages to blast through. I needed a roadmap. No, more than that. A tour guide. I found my guide to the stars in the author of Eruditorum Press's critical analysis/personal life experience journal of Star Trek. I'd known about them already due to the anime Dirty Pair and their analysis of that series as it related to Star Trek, so I reached out. I asked for a curation of TNG on a season by season basis as I worked my way through, to avoid the bad episodes, the ones with unfortunate implications. I mostly followed my guide's advice, though I did dip into episodes featuring Q and a bunch of the ones that were described as "this is a fan favorite episode but I disagree with it because of ____". It was important for me to get a sense of why Star Trek fandom at large went to bat for those episodes, and I saw the strengths and weaknesses of them. I understood why general consensus would love them, and I found my own love for this show growing. This, more than those movies I saw when I was 10, became my ideal Star Trek. A space utopia spreading across the stars, growing and learning and changing across the vast expanse. Peak Star Trek, in Doctor Who terms for me, is a fusion of the weird (See: The Underwater Menace or, to give a more recent example, It Takes You Away) and the sheer potential of the human race (See: Tom Baker's "indomitable species" speech from The Ark In Space). I don't really have to sum up TNG because the show made itself a narrative bridge between its beginning and ending. The first episode shows our new crew having to prove humanity's worth to Q, the omnipotent alien trickster god who demands the human race retreat from the stars because they're too aggressive and morally bankrupt for it, and puts them on trial to answer for their crimes as a species. The final episode reveals that the trial never ended. The entire show has been about humanity proving itself, showing its best and worst tendencies through good and bad. Utopia wins out. Humanity has bettered itself in its exploration, and so too did I better myself by experiencing it. What a wonderful show.


I could go on. I could write about TNG and sing its praises for thousands of words, but... Well, my guide made an entire book series about that. I don't feel like I could do better than them, and even my personal affirmations would be a hollow duplicate. What I can do, however, is share in my newest adventure. One my guide hasn't quite made it up to yet with their massive project, and one I'm still exploring. I dabbled in Deep Space Nine after TNG, and managed to go back to those TNG movies and find... well, not too much of an opinion change, more of an understanding. I could go on about those, but here's the new voyage I decided to take. Star Trek Enterprise, the prequel Star Trek series that aired from 2001 to 2005. I spent a ludicrous amount of money on the Blu-Ray set of the complete series, and I have been working through it slowly but surely. Here and now, in the middle of season 1, I decided to make a thing out of it. Why not chronicle my journey? I did it with Sailor Moon, and made an entire nine-month journey out of it. Six months to watch it, and then three to write it down. Things will be different this time. For one, I'm not going to write it out like I did with Sailor Moon. Instead, I'll take more of a capsule review approach, going through episode by episode and giving a paragraph or so of thoughts. Roughly. More to the point, I'll actually write things down concurrent with my watching of the episodes. None of this waiting to watch it all and then spending months sitting on my thoughts. You'll get it all when I finish a season, and they'll probably be split up to two posts per season. Maybe three. I don't know how much I'll talk. Well then. Take my hand, won't you? The guided has now become the guide. Let me take you on a journey through the stars, a journey of a utopia not yet fully formed. We cannot boldly go where no one has gone before, as we've gone so far back that even this assertiveness is new to us. These are simple moves that will echo across into the future. Not a Discovery, or a Short Trip.


Come with me. We will boldly step forward, where others will go afterward.


TO BE CONTINUED...