Star Trek

Ma and I have successfully navigated our way through the entire Star Trek original series. I was sure there would be oodles of them based on the following Star Trek has garnered over the past decades. There aren't.

I'm going to miss it. It was refreshing to watch entertainment that also spoke to the political and societal issues of the day, many of which are still pertinent. Each episode was not only a creative look into the possibilities our galaxy offers us, but also a dialogue about freedom, human rights, feminism, religion, humanity, the distribution of labor and wealth, unhealthy pursuits of science, the nature of good vs evil, and most of all, our potential as humans.

Why is this a secret. Do trekkies not see the dialogue? Do they see it but not care? I hadn't the faintest idea that philosophical ideals were so central to Star Trek.

Also, Spock. Love him.

Next up: Star Trek The Next Generation. I don't know if I should allow myself to hope. The title is promising. The original addressed the issues of the sixties. Fingers crossed the next generation refers to the next generation of people in our time as well as the next generation of space travelers.

I also need to rewatch the newer movies. Did they have deeper themes and I missed them? The themes were so obvious in the original series episodes. Maybe they made them more subtle and all I expected to see was an action movie so that's all I saw. I'll need to do some research. It's hard to say this early in my study, but preliminary hypotheses suggest a bowl of popcorn will be essential to my investigation.

PS I still almost can't believe I watched a save the whales movie. Who knew saving the whales and futuristic space travel could be mushed together? That's an impressive bit of creative writing. I highly recommend. It also offered up my favorite line of the original series: "A little too much LDS." I know exactly what that feels like.

PPS It was also a reminder of how quickly our knowledge changes and grows. They travel the galaxy in Star Trek, but they didn't yet know that the center of the galaxy is not where they might potentially find God, but is instead a supermassive black hole. Coming near it would not give them an opportunity to see a before unknown world but would instead cause spaghettification.

PPPS I love that astronomy is so straightforward. Supermassive. Super cluster. Spaghettification. No need for hoity toity, meaningless names here.

PPPPS The very concept of spaghettification blows my mind. Whoever theorized and then proved spaghettification must have been one super cool dude.