Trekking to Oblivion

"To boldly go where so many shows have gone, ... into the wastebasket."

I found out about the cancellation of ‘Enterprise’, the latest Star Trek series, in a weird way. I was scanning through my StarTrek.com e-newsletter. There was the usual list of stories. Interview with …, Appearance by …., Enterprise:Cancelled, Web Site revised ….

What? That’s it? A footnote in an e-zine? You’d think they’d make a lot more out of this. Not only is the show going off the air, but unlike the last three renditions, it isn’t to clear the way for something else. No mo’ Trek, at least for awhile.

Now, clearly I’m a Trekker (as distinguished from “Trekkie”, but I’ll explain the critical difference later). Not only that, I’m an original Trekker. I watched the original show during its original run in the ‘60s. This makes me an oddball at Star Trek Conventions (resist the temptation to say what you want to say). The Gospel is that no one watched the original show, that it revived through syndication during the ‘70s. I mentioned that I happened to watch the original show while talking to a friend at the 5th anniversary celebration for “ST:The Next Generation” back in ’92 and stopped conversation in the immediate vicinity. They all just stared at me like I’d just said I was there when Jesus raised the dead.

But a lot of us did watch the show in the ‘60s. We just weren’t counted. At the time, Nielsen only counted the set Dad watched in the living room. All those secondary black and white sets with kids in front of them down in the basement or den didn’t count. After all, who cares what kids watch? (Sounds funny now, don’t it?) I even wrote one of the famous letters to NBC which kept the show on for one more season.

Star Trek died of its own success. The franchise proved that science fiction, if done well enough, could build an audience. This happened just as the explosion of syndication and cable channels carved up the market. Instead of going for whatever would wash across the broadest spectrum, teevee had to create niches, and sci-fi provided that. A mid-‘60s teevee critic wrote that Kirk and Spock belonged on Saturday morning, not Thursday night. TNG earned Paramount money because it was, at one point, the most watched show for men between 19 and 35. Needless to say, now there are a good half dozen sci-fi shows on, and a good dozen since TNG aired. Some were crappy, some were silly, some were very good and died fast (Fox’s ‘Firefly’) but there’s no shortage and no coming shortage of shows. Star Trek, once unique, ended up just another blip on the sensors.

The backdrop since midway between the first season has been the United Federation of Planets, a U.N. in space led by United Earth, the American internationalists’ wet dream. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if somehow Paramount developed episodes, or even a show, on how all this came about? It did, in Enterprise. Unfortunately, it didn’t get around to actually telling this story until this season, apparently too late for the audience. Half that audience failed to return for the second season, and the show’s struggled in the ratings since. After the colossal disappointment of ‘Voyager’, too many base fans had left. (Even ‘Voyager’ was a symptom of success. Paramount wanted a Trek show to anchor its new network and fashioned an uninteresting crew it thought would attract younger viewers.)

Fortunately, there are always reruns and DVD’s. I had to stay home during the week recently to care for a sick Leroy and found that Spike Network carried two DS9 and then two TNG episodes every day. That’s four hours of Trek. I taped most of the second and third seasons of TNG thinking I’d keep them for posterity. What a fool. The reruns are on everywhere, and I can get whole seasons on one DVD. The franchise will live on, even if Captain Archer’s trip to found the Federation gets cut a little short.

As a matter of fact, I have to go watch my tape of last night’s ‘Enterprise’. It might be the one where they explain howcum the Klingons got the funny heads after the original series. I’ve been waiting since 1979, when the first Trek movie came out, to find out this one, even if Worf did say in ‘DS9’s’ Trials and Tribblations’ that it’s something they just don’t talk about.