Tony’s Rant

As reported here, Memory Alpha News, another Star Trek seems to be on the way.

For as long as I can remember, Star Trek has been a part of my life - granted, when it was first run, I was barely old enough to even remember it, but still, while I was young, it played an important part of my life, and how I saw the possible future. I was going to school for radio and TV broadcasting for a while, and during that time, I saw a trade mag with a property for sale for pilot and 13 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation - I was hopeful when I saw that. Little did I know at the time what it would eventually mean.

It did get picked up, and did it ever make a difference in the world of Star Trek - in fact, it changed everything we knew about the Star Trek universe, and the possible future we grew up with. It was a fun and exciting time for Trekkies everywhere as we saw new properties like DS9, and Voyager come to life. But unfortunately, one thing we didn’t see was the consistency we had grown used to seeing when Gene had been at the helm. Increasingly, we saw our beloved property being driven further and further down hill - everything getting more and more diluted as you could no longer depend on what you knew as being “canon” in the next episode. Finally, at the end of this wonderful and glorious run…we end up with “Enterprise” - a title that doesn’t even have the words “Star Trek” in the name. A sad series that ends up going off the air without even a whimper from trekkies, because it’s so “out there” from our universe we had grown to love.

So now there’s another Star Trek on the way, and, THANK GOD, Rick Berman has nothing to do with it! Maybe we can finally see a Star Trek that brings us back to the core of what Gene Rodenberry meant for it to be - about the people - the characters, and how they had learned to work together in the future to strive for peace. I know that no movie would be anything without an adversary, it’s needed, but it’s about how these people, who had learned to live on a planet without fighting long enough to establish a world that no longer knew hunger or poverty to the point where they could achieve things far greater than any one civilization could possibly managed on their own. Gene’s vision was that when we learn to work together, we could achieve great things - this, and the enduring human spirit were cornerstones to the future Gene gave us. The human NEED to explore, and strive, were important in the messages he gave us in the original series. I’m sure that if Gene saw how the prime directive was thrashed and ignored so many times in the newer series, he would have stormed the sets screaming. The way that the “prime directive” - the one rule a starfleet captain could NEVER violate, was reduced to a guideline. Granted, I understand Voyager - when you are that far from home, in an environment that the federation could never have intended a starfleet captain to have to govern a ship, much less with a crew made up of starfleet officers and rebel officers working together - but even then, Janeway managed to keep the prime directive in mind as much as she could while still looking out for the well being of the people placed in her charge. Other than that, the new sets of series, at times, managed to make starfleet - the shining example of what we would HOPE to achieve in a perfect society - look like our current corrupt and self-gratifying governments.

I hope that this new movie inspires more Star Trek. I hope that without Rick Berman at the helm, that it inspires Paramount to develop more Star Trek that brings back the original ideals that Gene Roddenberry meant for starfleet to have. Because A future without Star Trek…well, that’s just a future as dismal as the future that Rick Berman devolved Gene Roddenberry’s vision into…let’s hope that new blood brings back old ideals.

T
:yahoo: