Star Trek and Me, Then and Now

Thanks to my mother, our family is actually mixed-religion: part Jewish, part Trekkie.

We do not criticize the original series in our house; we do not point out its logical flaws, cringe at its old-fashioned attempts at equality, or imitate William Shatner’s staccato delivery. In Spock we trust.

Because Mom is such a passionate Star Trek fan (she even has a life-size poster of Mr. Spock… which Dad and I bought her when the local comic-book store decided to get rid of it, FINE), my sister and I watched the first six Star Trek movies at an early age, although we were introduced to them in order of least scary to most scary (4, 6, 1, 5, 3, 2) rather than chronologically.

We weren’t allowed to watch TNG because it gave one of us (ahem, the younger one) nightmares. The other series weren’t on regularly enough to watch, though I read their episode synopses in the Star Trek 30th Anniversary TV Guide and found novelisations of pilots and TOS first season.

When I was a teenager, CityTV started airing Voyager and Deep Space Nine, and I taped them to watch the next afternoon after school.

I’ve never stopped loving Star Trek through the years, but my reasons why have changed. With the passing of Leonard Nimoy earlier this spring (z”l), I thought of how the character he played, Mr. Spock, drew both Mom and me into the Star Trek fandom. His outsider status and struggle with expressing (or not expressing) his feelings evoked my empathy; his heroism, his intelligence, and his friendships with the other main characters showed me that my story could be like that too.

But as I age, I no longer empathize with Spock as keenly as I did as a preteen and adolescent. Emotionally, I’ve matured: keeping all my feelings bottled up under a stiff Vulcan upper lip and regarding logic as the supreme arbiter of good decisions no longer resonate with me.

In fact, my favourite characters in all four series (Enterprise, like the 8th and 9th seasons of The X Files, is banished to the Elephant Graveyard of “franchises that continued past their sell-by date) have shifted over the years.

Here’s how.

The Original Series
Original favourite: Mr. Spock
New favourite: Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy

Don’t get me wrong: Spock has been, and always shall be, my image of Star Trek. But as I mentioned above, what Spock represents is more engaging to younger me than it is now.

Now, I want to look out from between my pointed ears to take interest in others. Bones interests me not just because his pessimistic humour is funny nor just because his ideology often clashes with Spock’s, eliciting new ideas from both men nor even just because together, he and Spock are the only ones who can rein in Jim Kirk.

I like to watch how he encounters the unknown because he’s so mid-twentieth-century: distrustful of new technologies and aliens who don’t look or behave like him. He’s grumpy and suspicious of change, but underneath, he still cares deeply for people, any people, as we see in his bedside manner. Despite the intentions of his creators, Bones is rather xenophobic and sexist, but we get to watch him learn, to expand his vocabulary about the sentient condition and do the right thing besides.

I want to like other characters, like Uhura and Sulu and Chekov as much as McCoy and Spock, because I like the performers who play them and think they deserve more time, but I find that they just don’t get much to do in the original series.

The Next Generation
Original favourite: Lt.-Cmdr. Data
New favourite: Lt.-Cmdr. Worf

Everyone likes Data, the android who wants to be human. Just like Spock, he still holds a place in my heart, especially given Brent Spiner’s brilliant comedic and dramatic takes on the character. (If you think of what Data’s lines must look like on the script, it’s clear that in unskilled hands, Data had the potential to be the most super-boring character ever. Instead, he’s the liveliest, and his friendship with Geordi LaForge feels true and touching.)

Data was pretty much the only character I always wanted to see when I was nine, but these days, I’ve come to appreciate others.

I found Worf boring when I was a child. I didn’t sympathize with his hyper-masculine ideals (the “proud warrior race” aspect of which is particularly problematic given that actor Michael Dorn is one of the few leads of colour in the series), and I didn’t find his struggles to integrate his Klingon heritage into his Federation life all that engaging.

Now, I’m interested in Worf because, first, he seems to be the only member of the crew who actually makes reasonable suggestions, but also because as he develops as a character, he’s the bridge crew member who’s allowed to interrogate macho notions of masculinity and explore what it means to be colonized by a dominant culture with conflicting values. The Klingon Empire plotlines that annoyed me as a child are more meaningful to me as an adult because now I understand that the Federation’s cheerful imposition of its own supposedly objective moral values on the societies it bests in war is not speculation; the optimistic and painless equity of the aftermath is. I live on colonized territory in a colonizing culture, and even if Worf’s story reflects the colonists’ understanding of what it means to be culturally colonized, I’m interested in the way it works out.

Deep Space Nine
Original favourite: Constable Odo
New favourites: Colonel Kira Nerys, Captain Benjamin Sisko

Are you sensing a pattern here? Shapeshifting constable Odo with his gruff no-nonsense demeanour appealed to me for much the same reasons as Spock and Data: he was the character who explored what it meant not to be “normal” or have good emotional self-knowledge. His unrequited but not-creepy crush on Kira was sweet.

I still find him intriguing, especially the story arc that had his character go from lone shapeshifter in a world built for one-form creatures to grappling with finding his Founder heritage and unlearning limitations he’d been taking for granted, to integrating his people’s knowledge with his own experience and becoming a force for positive change.

As a young fan, I didn’t appreciate the nuance and diversity that went into the rest of the characters. Now, however, I love that each of the main characters has a story as rich as Odo’s. In particular, Captain Sisko struggles with ethical dilemmas balancing his Federation duties with the necessary diplomatic expediencies while moving past grief to raise his son. Kira Nerys comes to realize that letting go of the past isn’t the same as forgetting it; she learns to trust others so they can all move toward a positive future that still acknowledges what happened to her people.

Man, I need to watch this series again.

Voyager
Original favourites: The Doctor, Neelix (shut up, I was, like, fourteen)
New favourites: Captain Kathryn Janeway, B’Elanna Torres

He was funny, OK? Neelix was funny.

I’ll be honest: Voyager is not my favourite show. I don’t find any of the characters as compelling as those from other series. But if there are two I’d like to get to know better, they’re Janeway and Torres.

When I watched as a teenager, I ignored Torres because all she got to do was complain about things and/or make out with Paris. Now, I want to re-watch to see how the show handled portraying a macho and powerful female character.

Likewise, Janeway was never as fully written a character as her male captain counterparts. But she had a tough job to do, integrating Maquis fighters into her crew on a (seemingly) hopeless mission to get home. Unlike Kirk or Picard, she had to manager the morale of the crew with her executive goals and responsibility toward her command.