When I was a teen, I went to the Star Trek Experience in
Vegas with my family. The greeter took
our tickets, gave us a Vulcan salute, and said, “Live long and prosper.” Without thinking, I returned the gesture and
quoted the lesser known reply, “Peace, and long life.”
My family was staring at me.
I was a little self-conscience, and so explained, “It’s a proper reply.”
They looked at the greeter, who nodded and confirmed, “He’s
right; it is.”
All that to say, Star Trek had no small role in my growing up. I wasn’t really a model guy, but I did some
of them, but the ships that hung over my bed were the Enterprise, a Klingon
Bird of Prey, a Romulan Warbird, Deep Space Nine, etc. My first date ever was to Star Trek VI, and I
probably liked it more than I did the girl.
(That relationship didn’t work out.)
One of the first stories I ever submitted anywhere was a
script to DS9. It wasn’t accepted, but I
do hope to write it out as a fan fiction one day, because the story itself
wasn’t bad at all.
Science fiction, done right, always grabbed my imagination
like nothing else could, not even Fantasy.
Space provides an endless canvas upon which the sub-creator and ply his
art, painting a universe more vast than anyone could possibly explore. Star Trek did it right.
When a ship turns its nose to the second star on the right
and flies at warp speed straight on ’til morning, what she finds when she gets
there is limited only by the storyteller’s ability to explain. It is there that the teller is tested, not
only in his ability to explain the unexplainable, but also in whether he can
convince us to care about the people who go there.
The occasion of the death of Leonard Nimoy last week has me
thinking more of those stories today. My
friends and I often lament the lack of a good space drama since Battlestar
Galactica went off the air, but even there, as great as it was, a show lacks
some of that wonder when the crew doesn’t want to actually get to the second
star on the right. Even DS9, which I
loved, lacked that. That wonder is only
truly and fully attained by series like Star Trek, Next Generation, and Babylon
5. Where there is something incredible
out there, and we want to see it.
But what made Star Trek truly special is how human it was. It was not the story of a ship going off into the sunset, but it was a story of people going there. Well, that’s the point of all of our journeys through Faerie, Tolkien reminds us in “On Fairy-stories.” It’s not all the wonders we see that will never be really seen in real life and never before in even imagination, it is the people we are journeying with. Our concern is of the men who take us there, who brave the road before us on our behalf, those upon whose coattails we have our own adventures.
Star Trek would not have been half so grand without Kirk,
Spock, and McCoy. It didn’t have a
tremendous budget, some of the stories were cheesy, and so on, but here were
men we can relate to, for whom we can cheer.
We respect them, and they respected each other, even as different as
they really were. None was perfect, but
their own strengths covered the weaknesses of the others. There are few works of fiction that have
given us their like. And I’ll note that
as much as I love the rebooted Star Trek films (and I do love them), not even
they have been able to rebuild that friendship.
There was something special in the putting of those three together,
something that does not come about very often.
It is right that these characters have become so iconic, and
it is my hope that they will remain that way even after they are a hundred
years gone. Leonard Nimoy will be
greatly missed, and primarily so because of his character so many decades ago, because
his character, and therefore he himself, welcomed us on a starship ride that
left us in awe, but also left us amongst friends, which is half the reason any
good and fantastical adventure should set our hearts alight and leave us
staring at the stars.
