My First Star Trek

By Lisa Fary

My dad brought home our first brand new BetaMax player in 1982 (maybe 1983). My six year old heart wanted so badly for The Wizard of Oz to be the first movie played on it, but Mom and Dad had another idea. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

I can’t remember if my parents let me stay up and watch ST II or if I snuck out of my room and peeked at the TV from that spot at the mouth of the hallway where a stray bit of wall jutted out just enough to hide me. If someone saw me, it was easy to say I was going to the bathroom, which was just across the hall.

OK, it was totally the latter. I was a pretty devious six-year old. Sorry you had to find out this way, Dad.

Really, I just wanted to see what the big deal was about. Mom and Dad were never this excited about a movie! Nothing good, anyway. Cinderella? Mom had sighed all the way through that one. And The Wizard of Oz? Same thing. Sighs. Eye rolls. So what if it was the fifth time in a week I watched it? It was still good.

So, what kind of movie that wasn’t a cartoon and didn’t have songs and magic shoes were Mom and Dad so excited to see? I had to know.

I peered at the TV from my hiding place. Chad, who was ten, was allowed to say up and watch. The movie started and it was just old people in funny clothes talking. There was a space ship and some space stuff, then a desert.

This movie was boring and stupid. A few more minutes, then I’d go back to my room and do something interesting, like color, until I heard Mom come down the hallway to check on me.

Then came Khan’s scary earwig monster pet thingies. He was putting them inside his prisoners’ helmets, trapping them with the earwig monsters, they were climbing into ears. My own ears started itching, my cheek tickled like something was crawling on it.

I screamed.

Mom, Dad and Chad turned around on the couch, staring at me.

“I’m going to the bathroom!” I shrieked, and darted across the hallway to the bathroom. . .

. . . where there was the biggest Daddy Long Legs spider I’d ever seen straddling the sink. Not in the sink – straddling it. It’s body slung over the drain while each of its legs sat on the upper edge of the sink.

I screamed again, whipped around and bolted, running into the doorjamb on the way out.

“Daddy!” I yelled. “Spider! On the sink!” I pointed, in case he needed directions.

“Jesus, Lisa!” he said, walking into the bathroom. “It can’t be that – $h!t! JoAnn! Pause the movie!”

I’m still not sure how I got out of being punished for that shenanigan. Well, maybe I was, years later when I got dragged against my will to see Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, under the false pretenses that it was a double feature of ST III and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. With The Search for Spock showing first, of course.

By then, I’d seen some Star Trek episodes on TV and wasn’t impressed. Still thought it was boring and stupid and, after what happened last time, watching another Trek movie was the last thing on my list of fun stuff to do. But, we had just moved to a new neighborhood and didn’t know anyone yet who could watch me for a few hours. So, I went to the theater and sat through it with the knowledge that my reward would be Indiana Jones.

Then the movie was over, the lights went up and people started leaving. Including us.

“Mom?” I said. “What about the double feature?”

“It’s late,” she said. “We’re going home.”

(This was a point of contention between me and Mom for the next twenty years. I accused her of willfully lying to me and she denied that she’d ever told me there was a double feature.)

I pouted all the way home, hating Star Trek more than ever. Mom and Dad were troopers, though, and insisted that when I was a grown up, I’d like Star Trek.

Yeah, right. I was never EVER going to like Star Trek.

I’m so excited about the new Star Trek movie coming out on Friday that, all this week, I’ll be subjecting you to my misty ST memories, including conventions, costumes, late night arguments at Denny’s, and alienating myself in the faculty lounge. Check back tomorrow when Mom leverages my childhood interest in whales to get me to sit through yet another ST movie.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.

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