Here’s an addendum to my previous post: It’s the introductory preview that aired just before “Encounter at Farpoint,” the two-hour premiere episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or, as the announcer dude says it, “Starrrrrrrr Trek!”

See what I mean about the ads making this show look action-packed? Let’s just say this impression was… not entirely accurate. The ratio of long-winded speechifying to fisticuffs and/or phaser fire was pretty broad in “Farpoint.” But it’s just as well, since TNG never did do action very well, in my opinion. I don’t know if the cast or directors weren’t comfortable doing action, or if the show’s tone of benign enlightenment simply wasn’t compatible with it, but TNG was always far better in moments of quiet drama than the sorts of shenanigans that Kirk and company often engaged in.

Still… it’s fun to see this little clip again. I think it conveys some of the excitement that swirled around the premiere, which is so very different from the blase’ or outright hostile attitudes with which the new Star Trek: Discovery is being met…

Facebook has been utterly determined this week to make me feel how swiftly time rushes by as we get older. First, it was regurgitating photos from my trip to Massachusetts last year. Then it was photos from my trip to Scotland two years ago. But today the almighty algorithm has decided to pull out the really big guns by showing me every post everyone in the world has been making about the anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which debuted on this date — are you ready for this? — 30 years ago.

Thirty. Years.

Can it possibly so long? That’s an entire generation in its own right, isn’t it? Longer than the span between the debut of the original Star Trek in 1966 and The Next Generation in 1987. Thirty years ago tonight, I had just turned 18. I was a couple weeks into my first quarter as a college freshman, still feeling very much like a little kid as I wandered around the big grown-up campus of the University of Utah. I was commuting to school in a yellow, four-doored Volkswagen Rabbit, and I was dating a cute brunette girl with bright blue eyes, but not seriously. I remember that she pissed me off by calling right in the middle of the two-hour Next Generation premiere; luckily, I was recording it on my trusty VCR so I could catch up later on the bit I lost while I was talking dirty with her on the phone.

I also remember that I wasn’t terribly impressed with TNG at first.The premiere wasn’t nearly as action-packed as the commercials had made it appear, and none of the cast seemed very comfortable with their roles. In fact, Sir Patrick Stewart was so stiff as the new captain that I mistakenly believed for a time that he was a lousy actor. Or perhaps he was just playing a lousy character. They were all lousy characters in those early days, all prone to shouting while delivering lots and lots of expository dialog that moved the plots along, but did little to deepen the characters themselves. There wasn’t much chemistry between the actors either; the warmth and camaraderie that was such a notable feature of the original 1960s Star Trek was sorely lacking.

Speaking of the original series (TOS, to those of us who are “of the Body”), TNG had a weirdly schizoid relationship with its progenitor until well into its second or possibly even third season, which, as a lifelong fan of the original, I found deeply frustrating. On the one hand, TNG seemed desperate to establish its own identity apart from the adventures of the first Starship Enterprise, which was understandable, but it went so far out of the way to avoid mentioning any characters or events from TOS that the omission called attention to itself, even as the show was cannibalizing story ideas from the original. (The second episode, “The Naked Now,” was an almost beat-for-beat remake of the original series segment “The Naked Time,” which was either really gutsy or really stupid considering that TOS was still in reruns at that time, and there was a good chance everyone had seen “The Naked Time” very recently. Not that true Trekkies didn’t have it memorized anyhow.)

TNG was preachy, too. Oh, lord, was it preachy. Star Trek had always delivered social messages along with the space-opera, of course, but rarely so heavy-handedly as TNG was in that first season. It seemed like every single episode included an aside where someone wondered how humanity had survived the barbarous 20th century, or pointed out how much more evolved human beings were in the 24th century. It was tedious and condescending, and frankly, it got to be a little insulting at times.

Hell, I didn’t even like the Enterprise-D at first. (A note for non-Trekkies: the Enterprise flown by Captain Kirk and company carried the registry number NCC-1701; when it was destroyed in one of the feature films, it was replaced by a new Enterprise — actually the same model with a new paint job — and the letter “A” was added to differentiate it from the earlier one: NCC-1701-A. The TNG Enterprise was supposedly the fifth starship of that name, designated NCC-1701-D.) The ship’s proportions looked all wrong to me. The saucer-shaped primary hull was too long and wide compared to the compact lower section, making it appear both top- and nose-heavy, and the ship’s relatively flat side profile suggested to me that it had been stepped on by some cosmic giant and squashed. The interior sets, meanwhile, were downright boring, all beige carpeting and flat lighting, reminiscent of a nice but sterile hotel lobby, right down to the knick-knacks from Pier One.

I was certain the show wouldn’t last beyond its first season.

And yet, it did last, eventually running seven years, spawning four feature films after that, and unquestionably paving the way for the Star Trek franchise to become the cultural juggernaut it was during the ’90s, and is attempting to become again today. I continued to watch despite my early misgivings, although I’m not sure if it was in the hope that the show would improve, or out of morbid curiosity to see just how badly it was going to flame out. Either way, I endured every episode of that shaky first season. My viewing was a bit more sporadic during the second year, but starting with the third, TNG seemed to have found itself at last… and I finally began to consider myself a fan. In the end, I grew to quite like the crew of Enterprise-D and the actors who played them. There are some individual episodes I would hold up as some of the best television of its era, certainly equal to the best of TOS. (For the record, I’m thinking of “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1,” “Family,” “The Inner Light,” and “Tapestry.”) I shed a tear when the series ended on the perfect emotional gracenote. And I even developed a soft spot for that strangely flattened starship too, enough that it pissed me off when she was destroyed in the TNG cast’s first big-screen outing, Generations.

Even so, to this day I am baffled by those fans who consider TNG superior to TOS. I know there are even people, both fans and “civilians,” for whom TNG is Star Trek. It’s the show that first comes to mind for these people when they hear the words “Star Trek.” Unapologetic old-school Trekkie that I am, that really grates on me. I suppose I can’t blame younger viewers who grew up with TNG the way I did with TOS, but I know people my age who for some reason champion Picard over Kirk, and that just makes no sense to me. Because while I do like TNG, I love TOS. For me, it’s overall far more dynamic, far more fun, far more meaningful, and frankly far more timeless, in spite of the outdated visual effects and miniskirts. (Note that I said “overall”; you can always cherry-pick specific example to prove or disprove my points.) I’ve recently been rewatching TNG and while it’s nice to revisit it again after quite a few years away — I’ve found it holds up pretty well, and in some cases is better than I remember — I just can’t see myself ever enjoying the show over and over to the point of memorization, the way I still enjoy the 1960s Star Trek. For me, it will forever be the spin-off. That’s a term you don’t hear much anymore; in the modern-day franchise model, something like TNG is thought of as a continuation. But in the old days, it was a spin-off, a derivative. It was a very good derivative, and like I said it did find its own voice eventually… but it was still a derivative.

However, time has a way of veiling just about anything with nostalgia, and when I think back three decades to a September night in 1987 and picture myself sitting on the edge of my chair with the VCR remote in my hand (so I could screen commercials out of my recording), my knees bouncing with anticipation, I can’t help but smile. It was such an outlandish idea back then, a whole new Star Trek with a whole new cast, set 70 years after the first Star Trek. I think the only thing my 18-year-old self would’ve found more unlikely would be more Star Wars movies, or a sequel to Blade Runner…

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Continuing my silly annual tradition of wishing a happy birthday to William Shatner, a Canadian actor of some note who occupies an inordinate amount of my imagination and childhood memories. He’s turning 86 years young today… and my perennial wish to buy him a drink remains in effect.

And yes, I did gank this image from Salt Lake Comic Con, which has hosted the inimitable Shat twice now. Many happy returns, Bill…

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[Ed. Note: Today marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek. A condensed form of this entry also appears as part of a group tribute at Echo Base.]

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t a fan of Star Trek… and by “Star Trek,” I mean the original series, TOS, 1966-69, Shatner and Nimoy, velour shirts and styrofoam rocks, the first and still, as far as I’m concerned, the best of all the myriad Trek-related properties. To my eye, every subsequent iteration since the original has been a mere spin-off, derivative by definition, while the rebooted film series that began in 2009 is nothing more than a caricature…. and not a very good one at that.

The show actually ended three months before I was born, but it continued to air in syndicated re-runs more or less constantly during my childhood and early teens. According to my mother, she liked watching it while she did the household chores and I just soaked it in from my playpen. But while I may have begun as a captive audience, I had become a full-blown convert by the time I reached school age. Consider:

• One of the first conversations I remember having with someone of the opposite sex was the time I told a little girl in my kindergarten class all about this cool cat named Spock. (Weirdly enough, we’re still friends…)
• Our kitchen floor was covered in ancient linoleum that featured good-sized circles as part of the pattern. I used to stand on those circles, make a buzzing noise, and then run to a different spot of the house or out into the yard where I would freeze and “rematerialize,” as if I was being beamed there by Scotty.
• Of course I played with the Mego action figures of the day, as well as various other tie-in toys—I still have ’em all, too!—but my favorite Star Trek toy was a little tin case that held tiny files for cleaning my dad’s acetylene torch. He spotted me one day flipping the case open and shut while saying, “Kirk to Enterprise,” so he took the cleaners out and gave me the case. I carried it in my back pocket for years, even after I’d outgrown pretending to “call my ship.”
• On Saturday mornings, I’d prepare to watch the cartoon adventures of the Enterprise crew—voiced by the original live-action cast, so it felt like “real” Star Trek to me—by setting up Lego bricks on a TV tray to create my own “helm console,” which I “operated” all during the show.
• My bedroom walls were plastered with Star Trek posters — this was one of them — from elementary school until well after I started developing, ahem, other interests.
• And I fueled my young imagination by reading and re-reading the novelizations by James Blish and the utterly insane comic book series published by Gold Key. The characters and even the Enterprise were all off-model, the stories often felt like they came from some other series altogether, but in those days, we took whatever Star Trek we could get, and we liked it!

This was all during the early ’70s. My focus changed a bit with the coming of that other well-known space franchise in 1977, and Star Trek itself changed a lot when the crew made the leap to the big screen in 1979 with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and then again in 1987 when The Next Generation turned the whole thing into a franchise. I loved those, too, and a lot of other sci-fi and fantasy properties as well. But my first love, the touchstone that I have returned to again and again throughout my life, has always been TOS.

When I was a kid, I was simply drawn to the action, the bright color scheme and occasionally wacky cinematography, the swashbuckling characters, and the eerie atmosphere. (In terms of tone, TOS has a lot more in common with The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits than it does with the Treks that followed; space used to be weird and kind of scary. None of the other iterations of Star Trek has gotten that quite right, which is a shame.) But as I grew older, I came to realize how much Star Trek had shaped my personal morality, as well as my understanding of human nature and what we ought to be striving for. Not some perfect utopia where there is no interpersonal conflict and humanity is free to smugly muse about what animals we used to be back in the bad old days of the 20th century (cough-TNG-cough), but rather a better society than the one we have now, in which human beings are as flawed and fragile as ever, but they’re at least trying to improve. And more importantly, they have the potential to improve, and in fact are improving.

I’m not in denial about the fact that Star Trek is a 50-year-old TV show with all the dated production values that suggests. I know that most people today, especially younger people, look at an episode like “Arena” and see only a guy in a primitive rubber suit with a zipper up the back. I see that too, and I’m not incapable of chuckling about it (in a laughing-with-them-not-at-them kind of way, of course). But I also see much more than that. I see an immensely optimistic parable in which Captain Kirk, cast in the role of an Everyman representing all of humanity, comes right up to the brink of killing a defeated opponent… and then stops himself. He realizes “the other,” the bad guy, had his reasons, too, for doing what he did… that in someone else’s story, the reptilian Gorn is the hero. And in that moment, Kirk makes the conscious, enlightened choice to spare his enemy. To rise above his own reptilian-brained nature. And in so doing, creates an opportunity for a more peaceful future instead of merely “winning.”

Star Trek, the original, true Star Trek, wasn’t what people today think it was. It wasn’t all “Fire phasers!” and stuff-blows-up and nookie with the green woman of the week. And it irritates the hell out of me that the show has been largely reduced to that in the public consciousness (as evidenced by those reboot movies I mentioned, which superficially resemble TOS but miss the deeper philosophies of the original). If I had to choose an episode that best exemplifies to me what Star Trek was really all about, “Arena” is a good one. A better example is called “Devil in the Dark.” In this one, miners living deep underground on an alien world find themselves being stalked and murdered by some kind of creature that burrows through solid rock and burns its victims to a crisp. Unable to defend themselves from this threat, the miners call for help, and the Enterprise responds. In the course of hunting for the creature, Kirk finds himself alone, face to face with the completely inhuman thing. His instincts — and his orders — are to kill it on sight, but his intellect tells him there’s something more going on than it appears. So he has Spock make telepathic contact with the beast… and learns that it isn’t some mindlessly evil killer; it’s intelligent and sensitive, but desperate, a mother who’s been protecting a horde of eggs that the miners, in their ignorance, have been destroying. With that epiphany, negotiations are made, and in the end, both species learn to coexist, to each other’s mutual benefit. In a nutshell, that is Star Trek… a classic monster-of-the-week set-up that subverts your expectations and ends on a positive note about empathy, diversity, acceptance, and finding a way other than killing… when you can. The monster costume may be cheesy, the dialog might be melodramatic, but these things don’t matter to me so much as the message of the story.

That message, indeed all the messages found in this old television show about exploring the human condition through stories about exploring space, are as relevant and as necessary to hear now in the awful 2000s as they were in the turbulent 1960s. When the headlines are filled with human beings behaving at their very worst, their most selfish, their most barbaric, or their most ignorant, I cling to what Star Trek taught me: that society and people in general not only can but will get better. That’s powerful stuff, and it’s a rarity on today’s pop-cultural landscape, which tends to be dominated by grimly nihilistic “realism” that may make for fine drama, but is ultimately — to me — depressing and enervating.

Star Trek isn’t just an exercise in nostalgia for me; it’s my gospel. It gives me hope when I need it the most.

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Today we continue my silly annual tradition of wishing a happy birthday to William Shatner, a Canadian actor of some note who played my first childhood hero in an obscure old television series with which the readers of this blog may or may not be familiar.

At the age of 85, Shatner is — or at least presents himself as — more active and engaged with life than I am at slightly more than half that many years old. I envy him that. And yet…

It’s dangerous to make assumptions about the emotional state of a person you don’t know, especially one who pretends to be other people for a living. But I have to say that Bill Shatner seems really sad to me these days. (As in, he feels sad, not that he is sad, you smart-alecks.) He strikes me as a lonely man coming into the final stretch of his life with the dawning realization that he’s missed out on something deeply important. While the rest of his Star Trek costars have appeared to enjoy a lively camaraderie with one another over the years and have taken genuine pleasure in being part of such a cultural landmark, Shatner, for whatever reason, has held himself aloof from all of it until very recently, and even now his convention appearances tend to be… awkward. (Full disclosure: I’ve met him twice in convention settings and found him far more cordial than his reputation would suggest, but he’s still not at all comfortable interacting with fans, a tremendous contrast to all the other Trek alumni I’ve encountered.) By his own admission, his only real friend among the Trek cast was Leonard Nimoy. And now Leonard is gone… and in his recent book about his friend, Shatner reveals they weren’t even speaking at the time of Nimoy’s death. That little tidbit really breaks my heart.

I keep thinking of a line delivered by his alter ego in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier — easily the worst of the original-cast Trek features, but one that nevertheless has its moments. In one of those moments, following yet another narrow escape, Captain Kirk tells Spock and Bones that he wasn’t afraid because the two of them, his closest friends, were with him. “I’ve always known that I would die alone,” he says. The boundary between the character and the actor often seems pretty thin anyhow, but now that Leonard and Deforest Kelly, who played Bones, and Jimmy Doohan, who was Scotty, are gone… with Nichelle Nichols diminished from a stroke and Walter Koenig not looking very well at all when I met him last fall… well, I wonder if Bill ever thinks about that line and gets a cold sensation in the pit of his stomach, and regrets the choices he made when he was younger.

I’m just speculating, and maybe I’m even projecting some subconscious fear of my own onto a man I only feel like I know. I’ve got no grounds and no right to have any of these ideas on behalf of another person who wouldn’t know me from Adam. Besides, George Takei will probably outlive all of us.

And yet… these are the impressions I get whenever I see The Shat these days. I hope I’m wrong.

In closing, I’ll just repeat what I wrote for this occasion last year:

If I could, I’d buy him a drink. And I would be honored to raise a glass with him…

To absent friends.

To life going on.

May you have many more happy returns, Bill.