By Adam Hunault
I’ve had the conversation several times. I tell someone I’m a Trekkie and they say, “You ARE?!” Like they’re shocked as all heck. “Yeah, sure,” I say, “Star Trek, great show, love it.” They shake their head.
Ten minutes later the same person is telling me about their favorite episodes. Because that person is a Trekkie too.
It’s amazing, really. Even after I tell them I like Star Trek they put on a show of being surprised and repulsed, as if even though I admitted I’m a Trekkie I might take it back and try to make fun of them. Then a few minutes later they decide it’s safe and, often in a hushed voice in case someone overhears them, they talk my ear off. It comes out all in a rush because I’m the only other Trekkie they know. That’s ’cause all their other Trekkie friends are in the closet too. Being a Trekkie is not the kind of thing you admit.
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| Star Trek: Not lame at all! |
You don’t admit it because we all know that Star Trek isn’t mainstream, right? It’s Cassavetes, not Spielberg. It has a small cult following. There’s a tiny group of really committed people that watch it. It’s no X-Files, that’s for sure. Back in the ’90s The X-Files was the biggest, baddest genre show there ever was. It transcended sci-fi and picked up a huge mainstream audience. So awesome is its continued popularity that, after a lackluster final season and six years off the air, 20th Century Fox dropped $30 million to make a new X-Files movie last summer!
But, wait a second…
Star Trek has a new movie coming out too. And, Trekkies? Paramount gave J. J. Abrams $150 million to make it. Either Paramount producers are gambling that the small Trekkie cult is so obsessed they’ll buy five times more movie tickets than the larger X-Files audience, or those producers know there’s a huge, committed, MAINSTREAM audience out there that wants to see some freakin’ Star Trek.
I mean, JEEZ! A hundred and fifty million bucks! Either everybody you know is a Trekkie or somebody in Hollywood sure thinks they are.
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| Spock (Zachary Quinto) in the new Star Trek movie |
If you look at the popular genre franchises that people aren’t too ashamed to admit they like, you’ll see even more proof. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was so popular it was recently resurrected as a comic book from Dark Horse, the third largest comic book publisher in America. Big deal. Star Trek comics have been published for decades by DC, Marvel, IDW, Key and Malibu, among others. Battlestar Galactica and Stargate SG-1 are capitalizing on their success with made-for-TV and straight-to-DVD movies. Firefly got the full cinematic treatment. The X-Files got two theatrical releases. So? Not counting the new movie, Star Trek has been in movie theaters TEN TIMES, and nine of the movies were huge financial successes. Lost, the most popular genre show currently on television, is going to call it quits after its sixth season. Star Trek ran for 28 seasons and nobody seriously believes that it won’t be back on television some day. And if you check the résumés of those other shows you’ll see that none of them have a cartoon, a dozen video games, the largest series of novels ever written, a Las Vegas theme park and a Save Our Show campaign that actually saved the freakin’ show!
Star Trek isn’t “cult”. It isn’t a niche market. It is mainstream and it is big time. Its fans are legion.
Star Trek is about hope. It came out of the ’60s, an era of hope, and back then it was on the cutting edge of the geek chic. In a recent Entertainment Weekly article J. J. Abrams said that he intend to make his Star Trek every bit as epic, optimistic and uplifting as The Dark Knight was epic, pessimistic and depressing. According to Zachary Quinto, the new film’s Mr. Spock, the movie is thematically the perfect entertainment for Barack Obama’s America. Obama said, “I grew up on Star Trek, I believe in the final frontier,” in a speech last March. We’ve come full circle. We’ve weathered a jaded, cynical era and now, look!, change is the new watch word, hope is cool! It’s 1966 all over again.
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| Chekov (Anton Yelchin), Kirk (Chris Pine), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Bones (Karl Urban), Sulu (John Cho) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) in Star Trek the movie |
Trekkies, you’ve survived the dark ages and the zeitgeist is back on your side! Get with the image adjustment, already! You aren’t a little, underground fan movement. As far as geeky fandom goes, the only thing bigger than Star Trek is professional sports. If you geek out for tribbles, it’s time to come out of the closet. It’s time to take your shameful stash of season box sets out of that cupboard you keep them in and display them proudly on the shelf with your other DVDs. Cut out the self-loathing and pitch in to give Trekkies a more friendly face. You are NOT a few hundred overweight nerds with Coke bottle glasses and poor hygiene who can discuss inverse tachyon beams and your favorite Kazon sects for hours but can’t hang in there for twenty seconds when you’re talking to a cute girl. You ARE tens of millions of cool, healthy, totally normal people. Odds are that if you aren’t a cute girl yourself you know one. Odds are she’s a Trekkie too. You like Star Trek the way you like any number of other TV shows (though maybe a teensy weensy bit more) and you shouldn’t give a flying fig who knows it.
I mean, for God’s sake, Trekkies, look at who’s President! The world has changed. There’s so much hope in the air that people are dancing in the streets, hugging complete strangers! This May, a major movie studio is spending $150 million to take you out on a really, really fancy date and praying to God they’re good enough to impress you. Behave like you’re worth every penny of that money and a whole lot more. It’s high time. You’ve arrived, my friends. Act like it!
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Adam Hunault is a playwright and published short fiction writer who occasionally writes about Star Trek for Pink Raygun ’cause he’s a geek and he can’t help himself.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
Thanks very much, J. I should have added a smilie near my CAPITAL LETTERS. I wasn't really shouting at you.
Also, now the reply-to dialogue box doesn't seem to work
testing the reply-to dialogue
Jack – try clearing your browser's cache. What browser are you using? Reply-to seems to work fine here in Firefox.
Adam – What you've mentioned is the ideals of Star Trek, yet the reality (And yes, I see the irony in talking about the reality of Star Trek…) is quite different.
I would love to live in a world where there is no want & everyone was taken care of. You say >"The end of all poverty and want has not caused people to become lazy parasites, as conservatives would have it, but empowered them to throw off materialism" < All well & good, except that's just the way the writers wrote it. In reality, I live less than 8 miles away from where, in the early '90's, there was rioting, looting & general destruction in 'protest' of the NYS Governor's idea of making able-bodied welfare recipients work for it.
You say Trek has thrown off the yoke of materialism – Again a lofty ideal, but the reality… TOS never even tried to perpetrate that myth, using 'credits' as the currency – TNG, in it's poorly written way, tried to present it, but couldn't pull it off. (Just what WERE the stakes at all those poker games?) DS9 clearly showed it's Starfleet members gleefully engaging in commerce, and even Voyager, cut off from the rest, used replicator rations as currency among the crew.
I pretty much adhere to the cultural/religious tolerances myself, so I'm not going to try to dispute those.
The "Starfleet is not a military organization" is, of course, the biggest crock that they try to pull. And if you think that the Federation doesn't use the threat of military response to keep other races in line, you haven't watched closely enough *any* TNG episodes involving the Khardassians.
The US military, when not engaged in battling the forces of evil, is one of the biggest humanitarian aid suppliers in the world (and usually while we ARE battling the forces of evil, as well!)
You site Jean Luc's negotiations 'skills'. The weakest captain of the lot, he's the last one I'd want negotiating anything, and the last I'd want watching my back in a fight. In his 1st official act as captain, when faced with a threat, he ran away & when that didn't work, he surrendered. But, that's what happens when you put a Frenchman in charge. Give me Sisko or Janeway any day.
Federation policy has always reflected the best of American ideals – Say what you want, it's true. Created by an American, subjected to American studio/network scrutiny & written by Americans, it's a philosophy I've tried to share. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
I don't think you could label me a conservative, per se. Probably more of a libertarian, or somewhere in between. Most of my comments are to get Space Cowboy's goat. But he's starting to ignore them…
Also using firefox… And now it's working…
Thanks very much for your insight. I'm sorry I labeled you as a
conservative and challenged you with some conservative social beliefs
when you're really a libertarian. I made an assumption based on your
dislike of liberals and I was wrong. And I absolutely agree with your
assessment that some of the stuff in Star Trek works that way just
because "that's the way the writers wrote it," I was more wondering
how conservative (or libertarian) Star Trek fans felt about the
Federation. I've always assumed that they must consider Federation
values very naive, which would make it hard to watch a show that's
mainly about how enlightened humans have become because they've
adopted those values.
As for the Federation's distaste when it comes to proportional
military response, it is consistantly present in the series. It shows
up for the first time in "Arena," where the Gorn destroy a Federation
outpost and Kirk decides over the course of the episode of forego
retaliation in favor of settling the root grievance diplomatically.
There must be dozens of episodes of TNG where Federation citizens are
killed and the Federation responds by trying to communicate rather
than counter-attack — "The Vengeance Factor", "Ensign Ro", "Silicon
Avatar" and "I, Borg" are only a few examples. On DS9, the Dominion
destroy several Federation starships in the years leading up to the
Dominion War, destroy all of the Alpha Quadrant powers' outposts in
the Gamma Quadrant in "The Jem'Hadar", bomb a Federation conference on
Earth in "Homefront", wipe out the Maquis who are formerly Federation
citizens in "Blaze of Glory" and destroy several starships in
Federation space before the Dominion War, according to "In the Cards."
The Federation doesn't strike back until all hopes of a diplomatic
solution evaporate.
You mentioned the relationship with the Cardassians in TNG as a
counter-example. While it isn't naive, the Federation certainly isn't
hawkish. The Cardassians rearmed their border in "The Wounded" and
the Federation helped them capture the only Starfleet captain willing
to use force to stop them. The Cardassians destroyed a Federation
outpost posing as Bajorans in "Ensign Ro" and the Federation did not
respond militarily. The Cardassians then sent an invasion fleet to
seize a Federation sector in "Chain of Command" and the Federation let
them off with a slap on the wrist and signed a new treaty with them
the next year in "Journey's End." The Federation definitely takes the
high road, even when blood has been spilled.
@ Adam:
Sorry it took so long to reply; that damn pesky 'real life' keeps getting in the way…
We could keep going back and forth siting counter examples, you sited several excellent ones, but I agree for the most part. The Federation does try to take the high road, but is not always able to do so was my point & when not able to do so, Starfleet is quite the military organization.