Star Trek versus Star Wars

Let me open my big bag of geek here for a sec­ond. I always pre­ferred Star Wars to Star Trek, but Deb­bie is a Trekkie, so when I decid­ed to watch every episode of MST3K, she coun­tered with a request to watch all ten of the Star Trek movies. I groaned, but agreed. Deb­bie was orig­i­nal­ly a fan of The Next Gen­er­a­tion, but watch­ing the movies con­vert­ed her. The orig­i­nal series char­ac­ters are more com­pelling, with more agency, and more inter­est­ing adven­tures than the lat­er films, some of which just seem like stretched tele­vi­sion episodes.

I read some of David Brin’s crit­i­cism of Star Wars around this time as well. It turns out that I’ve grown up enough to real­ly enjoy orig­i­nal series Star Trek. Star Wars is easy for a child to appre­ci­ate, but the Star Trek uni­verse demands a more mature under­stand­ing of the way life works for full appre­ci­a­tion. After watch­ing all of the films, and forc­ing Deb­bie to watch Trekkies and Trekkies 2, I went ahead and start­ed scroung­ing Orig­i­nal Series episodes. So far we’ve seen two; the pilot episode [sans Cap­tain Kirk, but with Spock] and “Where No Man Has Gone Before” in which a cou­ple of the ship­mates basi­cal­ly turn into Jedi/Sith, com­plete with telekine­sis and Force light­ning. In 1966, mind you.

I’m lik­ing that the char­ac­ters have back­sto­ries, have to wres­tle with the emo­tion­al con­se­quences of their deci­sions, and have their inner weak­ness­es thrown at them in every episode. It’s meaty, and kind of makes me want to see the new Star Trek flick com­ing out this sum­mer.