Over-share Sci-fi Geekery (just thought I should warn you)

[jrprongs]

Okay, so I have a confession that I never thought I'd make: I have a deep, abiding (and possibly unholy) love for the new Star Trek movie.  I'm about a generation too young to have watched TOS when it was new, and it seems like whenever I see reruns of it, there's about a 50% chance of Tribbles, but I've never really gotten into the first Trek that

Comments

[silvering14]

Hey, it's okay to like TOS! I mean, yeah, if I hadn't been rendered into a quivering ball of nausea by 15 minutes into the movie I would have liked it too. (I have VR sickness. I have never been able to play first-person shooter games, and home movies make me ill. Decades of camera stabilization techniques were cast aside in the making of the new Star Trek movie, and I'm one of the apparently few people who really, really can't handle that. I'm kind of ticked about it still! I understand the vibrating camera bit for the explody battle parts, but sitting at a bar table?! XP) Someday I may try to re-watch it, and being forewarned, I will carefully not watch any of the action sequences so I won't get sick.

I have to admit that I'm a weird Trekkie myself. I've never seen all of ANY of the Star Trek series. I think I've watched, in order of amount of series seen, Voyager, DS9, Next Gen, TOS, and Enterprise. The reason I got into Star Trek at all was because my mother had practically every TOS novel ever published. So I managed to get into

[jrprongs]

See? Yes, it's things like that--and it wouldn't have even taken much to make it believable. Kirk's smart and good at twisting out of unwanted situations, conceivably he could get out of the brig if he were determined to do so. One throwaway line, that's all it would have taken--Trekkies are good at suspending our disbelief, we do it all the time! The lack, of course, means we come up with our own reasons for why things happened that way, but still. Galaxy-class sized plot holes.

[eaterofnoodles]

You and I will have to talk about DS9! Speaking as someone who has seen every episode of every series (except Enterprise, which I and most other hard-core Trekkies have decided doesn't count), most of them multiple times, I have to say that I consider DS9 the best-crafted, darkest, wittiest, and most involving of all the series. And I say this as someone who would willingly carry Patrick Stewart's babies.

I hear your objections to TOS; having grown up on it, all the schmaltzy soft-lit closeups and Kirk's speaking pattern strike me as adorable eccentricities rather than annoyances. However, if you want to see more TOS without too much of the above, try the following episodes:

1) Amok Time -- Spock goes emotionally bonkers. Great show for the Kirk/Spock friendship. (Also, This Side of Paradise, in which we get to see Spock freely in love.)
2) The City on the Edge of Forever -- a little bit of a Kirk lovey episode, but so well done you mightn't be annoyed by it!
3) Arena -- there's a lot of Kirk talking, but he's smart and resourceful

[jrprongs]

4) Yeah, she pulled a knife on Sulu and threatened the whole bridge (and is so badass that none of the guys tried to jump her or wrestle the knife away as she backed into the transporter).

As for DS9, I think I might've just been the wrong age-bracket at the time. I really wasn't into the darker bits and the action wasn't actiony enough at the time. Being about a decade older now, I would probably get a lot more out of it.