Trekollections V: Two Captains, Three Series

"I don't need to be lectured by you. I was out saving the galaxy when your grandfather was still in diapers."

I saw the trailer for Star Trek: Generations on The Big Breakfast, Channel 4 in the UK (Google it) back in mid-1994 just as The Next Generation was winding down on TV. It was the ultimate Star Trek fan moment - Kirk and Picard both on screen in the same movie at the same time; a visual torch-passing from one captain to the next. This was going to be the cinematic Star Trek moment of the decade, nay ever. The trailer had some random clips from The Next Generation episodes but the main clip was all about that now infamous horse-riding scene.

Back before the internet was the rumour mill it has become today, you had to rely on, amazingly, one to one communication, to find out anything about what was happening if it wasn't in the pages of TV Zone, Starburst or Starlog magazine. I was fortunate that Dad had a guy working for him who was a fan and a member of a club. The preview of the expected movie was pretty shocking - Data having sex with the Duras sisters, Kirk skydiving, the Enterprise-B, a mad scientist and oh...Kirk dies!!!!

Personal library photo

Big stuff. Luckily some of that came to pass, some of it got rewritten and some if it never happened. Back in the day some genius released the novel of the film before Star Trek: Generations arrived on the silver screen. Due to the late reshoots the novel had the original opening segment and the original ending (here, left). Now I really enjoyed the way it all played out in the book accompanied by some nice glossy photos from the adventure. Even though I effectively knew the plot inside out from fan-written news via Dad's work or from the magazine racks in the newsagents I still went to the cinema and enjoyed it. We can easily say it's not the best of the movies but I have a soft spot for it even if the Nexus makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Even at the age of 15 I knew it was a total bats-arse idea but hey, Kirk and Picard were in the same film!!!

I'd taken quite a liking to Star Trek literature and visits into Lincoln would inevitably end - or begin - with a trip into Ottakar's (now Waterstone's) bookshop on the High Street. I bought both Star Trek Memories and Star Trek Movie Memories from there at least and I would suspect that some of the books that arrived on birthdays and Christmases might have found their way off the shelves from the same shop. I really had got to saturation point around the time of Generations and if it had the words Star Trek on it, it was fair game.

At school Steven Bond and myself would indulge in conversations at break about what the film was going to be like and he was even lucky enough to get to see it on a preview night while I had to wait another week to see it - I was utterly jealous of course but there wasn't much I could do. As with Star Trek VI I saw it in Lincoln but at the recently built Odeon. It had been a week or so since theatrical release but there were still two audience members who turned up in full The Next Generation uniform. Kirk's reshot death was ok but someone seemed to have taken all the lights off the Enterprise bridge and stellar cartography had received one heck of a facelift. It wasn't the experience that I'd expected however there was still Deep Space Nine to fulfil my weekly desire for new Star Trek. 

That second season (1993 - 1994) lifted my spirits immensely. The stories seemed sharper; deeper, the characters were settled and being explored well. Necessary Evil showed how different the series could be and how it could use the past to develop its own personality. The Next Generation would never have attempted a three-part story to start the year and even more prominently the show embraced The Original Series more openly than the crew of the Enterprise-D had ever been allowed to. In the space of a handful of episodes we not only got the return of the three Klingons from the 60's series but our first trip back to the mirror universe since approximately the same time. Perhaps this was one of the early things which endeared me to this darker offspring - it wasn't afraid to try something and adjust it as events took hold. There seemed to be a bigger plan which would become more apparent at the end of the year with The Jem'Hadar. Oddly though I would see that finale after The Search. 

My video buying had of course moved from The Next Generation to Deep Space Nine. Volume 22 was the first one I bought for £12.99 from Boots in Sleaford. It was Crossover and The Collaborator and would be watched fairly regularly. The quality of the Deep Space Nine series was superb. Great individual character art, a quote from one of the episodes on the back and then a character biography inside. It was almost as interesting finding out what was featured on the box as it was seeing some new Star Trek. I bought two more volumes from season two which included The Maquis before The Search came out. Reading Starburst, TV Zone and the superior Dreamwatch, there was a big change for the new series as the station was getting a starship all of its own. For two years they'd had to manage with three piddly runabouts but this was a bad-ass out and out warship. The USS Defiant was nothing like we'd seen before and before we move on, there's an important moment in my personal Star Trek history I need to talk about. 

Picture the scene: It's a Saturday. I've been down to Woolworths and picked up volume 3.1 of Deep Space Nine. Actually, I didn't know it was out until I saw it on the shelf and there wasn't even a question as to whether or not it was going to be bought. CIC Video have made some changes to the cover art as well as the numbering system but that's no biggie. Looks pretty decent and it's been a while since my last video purchase.  I get myself home and settle down in front of the TV with Dad to watch the new two-part season opening episode. There's a catch-up from the end of season two (Last time on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine...) which is useful as we've both missed it (wow - they blew up a Galaxy-class starship?!). Dax has new hair, some Romulan had turned up to look after the Defiant's cloaking device, Odo's uniform is a bit different and there was a new security guy called Eddington hanging around. Ok.... Not too bad so far but nothing that's going to make me think this is more than average. Wouldn't you agree?

While I was enjoying Deep Space Nine to this point it I'd found it never hit the mark like The Next Generation consistently had (barring season five's soap opera period). I kept watching - then things changed. About 15 minutes in the Defiant came under attack from a couple of Jem'Hadar warships. Sisko took the ship to battle stations and ordered the crew to engage. With one word and ten seconds of screen time he changed my entire perception of the show and I was from that second onwards a converted Niner. 

"Fire!"

What we all expected was little orangey-red phaser beams to shoot out and the Jem'Hadar ships to be disabled. This was Star Trek and it was about removing threat not blowing stuff up. What we got was a rapid fire Gatling-gun style onslaught like nothing we'd ever seen. This ship was cool. This series was different and I LOVED it. That was it, I was in raptures. This was the BEST Star Trek series ever. It was a great opener and the revelation around the Founders of the Dominion was sorted out a lot quicker than we expected which was a change so we could get on with the nitty gritty of the story a lot sooner without getting wrapped up in a "Who Are They?" story. 

Personal library photo

I also seem to think that it must have been around this time that I won my first Star Trek themed competition which was a copy of The Nitpicker's Guide for Next Generation Trekkers Volume Two. The first one had been a great read and funny at times with some thought-provoking points on the series as well as pointing out some absolute onscreen clangers. Author and fan Phil Farrand later produced a Deep Space Nine volume which covered everything from Emissary through to season four's cliffhanger, Broken Link as well as a book for Classic Series fans however neither of them ever managed to capture the nuances and individuality of the two The Next Generation editions. Phil, if you're reading, you made me watch the show in a very different light! I'd switched to Dreamwatch fairly recently after following the increasingly poor Star Trek magazine called The Final Frontier. It started well but rapidly got thinner and relied on poor quality images to sell copies. Expensive and rubbish by the end of it's short run.

School-wise I was now heading into two years of GCSE courses between 1994 and 1996. The workload was increasing and evenings were being taken over by mounds of paperwork, coursework, revision and the like. It wasn't getting any lighter I can tell you, even to the point where weekends were getting chunks devoured by essays for English or Technology diagrams. Since I had a zero-level social life it didn't really matter and any time that I did have left was devoted to catching up on Stat Trek news or watching a film or episode in a spare hour or two. Whatever hassles I was getting thrown at from school it was always eased by a bit of relaxation with the crew of an Enterprise. Now this might seem to be ultra-geeky but I managed to get myself a lunchtime job helping out in the school library during this time. It meant if I needed somewhere quite to go on lunches when I was "offduty" it was a suitable bolthole but also, importantly, there was a TV.

It wasn't connected to the main aerial so a bit of daytime telly was out of the question (fortunately) but it was hooked up to a video player. Star Trek:Generations made its way onto video sometime in mid to late 1995 and then only onto rental initially. Hard to imagine but there was a massive gap from its appearance in the cinema. Dad's work contact came in useful however as he did a seriously dodgy copy for me within days of it getting into rental shops and it was of excellent quality. This is where the library TV came in very handy.

Since this was the only copy in known existence (of course) Bondy wanted to watch it. Not willing to hand over the copy I brought it into school and over the course of a few lunchtimes we sat and watched the movie. Initially on Day One of the viewing there was myself, Bondy and a couple of our other friends who had "nothing better to do" than watch Star Trek: Generations. At the end of that lunch hour we were joined by a couple of the younger kids from the school Day Two began with our group plus a couple of hangers on...and, well, over the course of three days the viewing circle had expanded up to the point where people were having trouble getting to the shelves. We realised that there might be a secret audience within the school and over the next few weeks we would spend lunchtimes at the library TV showing a variety of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager episodes to the hungry crowd of Star Trek fans amassing from the lower school years. I still recall watching a group of 20 kids jump about a foot in the air at the "Barclay Spider" moment in Genesis. Sadly as we edged into 1996 this was curtailed severely with first up, our mock exams at the start of the year (just after Christmas believe it or not), then the full-blown GCSE exams in May and June. What we didn't realise at this time was what we'd started.

For those of you in the know, you'll have spotted my glaring(ish) omission. Star Trek: Voyager. While it's not the top of my choice list I still believe that it's a valuable asset to the Roddenberry universe. I first heard about the series in a clipping from Starburst magazine as the seventh season of The Next Generation was coming to an end. Judging from the clipping, which now resides in one of my well-thumbed Star Trek scrapbooks I might have been initially distracted by Borg Universe Riker's incredibly fake super-beard before getting to see what the plan was for the third spin-off. The crew as described were actually pretty spot on to what appeared on the screen just a few months later. The Next Generation finished in 1994 and Voyager premiered in 1995. Bondy was immediately a fan and preferred it over Deep Space Nine anyday. This "disagreement" over the better show was good for a lunchtime discussion and the odd bit of Star Trek related banter and didn't stop us from still lapping up any videos the other bought of the series or magazines we found that covered the latest news. I think it was much more fun looking up new information this way than a few taps of the keyboard and allowing the internet to work its magic. Bondy bought (the last I can remember) every volume of Voyager from the pilot through to at least when we left school in June 1998. For a lot of the time I was probably more up to date with this series than I was with my preferred Deep Space Nine.

That third season of Deep Space Nine was immense and it just got better and better. There were a few duffers but I was at the stage where I would be counting down to a VHS release. After The Search I bought Defiant and Fascination (3.5) if only to see Tom Riker in action (should've had a follow up to this episode) and then Past Tense which had both parts on one cassette. Watching the season was sporadic due to the restrictions of a 15/16 year old's cash flow and parental concern that I was spending too much time and money on Star Trek. Of course in my eyes I wasn't and wished they would just let me get on with it. I managed to get hold of just one more video that year, the finale of the season, The Adversary. I sent Mum to Tesco with some cash when she was doing the weekly shop and was probably waiting on the doorstep to get my hands on it. Impatiently I opened the box....and it was The Die is Cast and Explorers on the VHS label. 

The wonderful people of the supermarket world had failed to check what I'd bought (and so had Mum to be fair). Once the shopping was packed away I demanded a return to Tesco for the correct volume in the correct box (they had managed to give us the right case). Presenting the incorrect cassette it took the shop several attempts before they admitted defeat - and about an hour of wasted time. I was not happy especially after counting the days to see the last episode of the year. Mum demanded the store manager who promptly arrived and offered profuse apologies. He disappeared off following a detailed Trekker explanation of what was wrong and returned five minutes later with the correct tape and a refund. I'd secured £12.99 of Deep Space Nine for nothing. Definitely a result in my book.

Now Voyager does come under a lot of fire, most probably from Niners but even from the start it had some great and unique points that made it stand out and differ from its peers. The Doctor was a stoke of genius as a character, the ship's engines folded up, they were somewhere completely new and Caretaker was a great pilot episode (because they started from Deep Space Nine of course). However, Janeway's accent grated on me like nails on a blackboard and don't start me on Neelix, Over seven years I'd soften considerably mind and come to appreciate the show a lot more. When I get round to the full rewatch I'm certain it'll be a very different experience from 20 years ago. The first year of Voyager wasn't without incident however for the most part it was a bland affair with not much happening. It had similarities to Deep Space Nine's inaugural year with an alien of the week and little else to report...apart from the landing of the ship in the season-straddling The 37's (the only other video I bought from that year of Voyager). Now that was a great touch and I heard about it first through Dad. He came home from work one day and dropped that bomb over tea. Definite kudos was due at that time and like the Defiant opening fire in The Search, Part I, this was one of those series defining moments - but it didn't have anywhere near the same effect on my loyalties and got used sparingly over the following six series. At least it became something to look forward to and not relied on.

The year had much more to offer in Trekdom and I'll explain more next time but there were GCSE's always lurking in the background which meant my focus was elsewhere for a good deal of the time. There was also another challenge rearing its head that would align itself with my journey through Trekdom - girls. Surely I could combine the two without any troubles at all? How wrong can one person be....

The Amazing Telepathic Holodeck: TNG's "Schisms"

"Schisms" is just plain weird. 

Admittedly the teleplay is from the mind of Brannon Braga but don't let that put you off. We have the infamous "Ode to Spot", some of the oddest/secretive aliens ever to grace TNG, great use of a fish-eye lens, the most subdued fade-out into the opening titles and virtually no answers. Oh - and I love it. Forgot to mention that but don't let that put you off reading the rest of this blog! 

The pre-titles sequence is one of the great misdirections of the entire TNG run and cleverly I think this is one of this episode's strengths. It's all about build-up, what we don't see but are enticed to imagine. The first few minutes are Data's classic poetry recital including the aforementioned piece for his trans-gendered cat at which Riker falls asleep repeatedly as the android trundles on regardless. Played for comedy it provides no real insight into the story even though it actually sets up the whole episode through Riker's actions - not that youo would know it at the time. In many other episodes the pretitles give us some kind of hint of what to come in a much more obvious fashion to make viewers want to stay tuned. Another example where this occurs would be the season six cliffhanger, "Descent". Anyway, let's skip the plot summary and get back into the weirdness of "Schisms".

Along with "Conspiracy" from 1988, I class this as as one of the two episodes that could have received a televised sequel (or prequel?!). As with the terrific season one episode, the ending leaves it open for a return that sadly never happened. We're left wondering who these subspace creatures are and what their reasons for abducting the crew could have been - research? Experiments? Testing for an invasion attempt? Looks like we'll never get to find out - although if you are a Trek novelist and writing this, I'm willing to assist with some input....

According to Ron Wilkerson, who was responsible for the original story from which Braga developed the teleplay, "Schisms" came about due to the executive producers wanting an enemy that were a big threat to the crew (I asked him about it on Twitter). Indeed, this is a very similar idea to the creatures hinted at early in season one and seen in the brilliant "Conspiracy" which is left with a signal beamed out into the depths of space. Here we have an eerie, clicking, shrouded race that we learn exceptionally little about. We only see one room of their subspace home and learn absolutely nothing about them. Why is this weird? Well, with TNG we usually got to understand the characters who popped up each week; getting to know a little about their motivations, background...something! Here it's an episode shrouded in mystery backed with a wonderful sci-fi concept that the Enterprise crew are being taken in their sleep and being subject to macabre experiements

While we have the investigation into sleep deprivation there's the "B" story regarding a disturbance forming in one of the cargo bays. Eventually these two tales intermix at the conclusion and that's something else a little different about this episode.  Usually there's a distinct "A" story and on occasion a "B" story or even rarely a "C" thread but they stay separate and conclude individually. Also, as opposed to a lot of the other stories I have/will discussed as part of SKOST there isn't any real "theme" to the story. It's not moralistic, there's only one death of a character we never really get to know but "Schisms" is about paranoia, shadows, restlessness and mystery - and all those unanswered questions that remain, well, unanswered.

It's great seeing the crew seeking some kind of explanation for their sleep deprivation and then realising that they are victims of some weird alien race. Worf has a hair-raising encounter with Mr Mott and a pair of scissors, Riker looks shattered for most of the episode (even falling asleep as we drift into the titles), Geordi's VISOR plays up (again) and even Data is affected when he loses an hour and a half for no apparent reason while in the cargo bay.  Soon it's all drawn together and the eeriness gathers several of those affected to the holodeck; now this has to be one of the best pieces of Trek ever - for potentially all the wrong reasons.

 I named this blog "The Amazing Telepathic Holodeck" and by jingo is it awesome in this respect. Troi assembles Riker, Worf, Geordi and one "civilian of the week" (no doubt for budget reasons) to visualise what they have experienced or at least think they have experienced. The end result is a little off from what is seen in the aliens' home environment but that's easily explained away through personal interpretation and recollection. The really clever bit here is the speed at which the holodeck - a device not exactly renowned for its accuracy or safety all the way through TNG ("The Big Goodbye", "Elementary Dear Data","Emergence" et al) -  becomes amazingly intuitive.  The wooden table that is initially created gets swapped out for an inclined one (which is totally different to the original) but the best switch is when the metal table this is in turn changed for IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! It's now much more chair-like than table-like (see below).
I'm guessing this is all for pacing but looking back it's amazingly shoddy that the holodeck works out precisely what table the crew want in about three moves and they then spend the remainder of the time making precision tweaks to the restraint, surgical blade and control panel. OK, I'm being pedantic and it's all easily covered but I still find it funny that the holodeck just helps out, makes its own decisions and produces a near-perfect end result in the space of minutes. 

What we get as a conclusion is a bit mixed although I still enjoyed it. Riker chooses to be the lab rat and get sent back into the rift but surely they would realise he's awake?! The whole point being that they're being taken when they are asleep or at the very least are made unaware that they are being secreted off the Enterprise. The aliens' environment is a bit disappointing but the fact that we find nothing definite about their reasons for their experiments keeps the mystery in place. Riker rescues Rager but that's it. We are left to muse what it was all about and whether of not this is something that will rear its head in the future. In both cases, they didn't but we are still left uneasy.

Here, in "Schisms" we are left to imagine what is going on and how the tests have been conducted (such as Riker's amputation and reattachment). We only glimpse a fraction of Ensign Rager's experience which seems to be something to do with her blood. The instance where the crewman returns with his blood converted to a liquid polymer. It is the possibility that more could have been killed and there was very little to stop them until  their actions were noted by several members of the crew that is haunting here. Even when we do see the aliens they are shrouded in the shadows and greyness of their medical chamber, hooded and wrapped from head to foot. Actually, that's another point - the masks, as seen in the superb Star Trek: The Next Generation 365 book aren't the greatest so the shadows are doing them a favour - as for the shuffly walk...what is that all about? There's no hope for them to stop Riker when he legs it with Rager at the climax.

This is probably one of the more uneasy installments of TNG. The first five minutes really put the audience on the wrong foot before we get into the main story. Perhaps considering the nature of the previous season and the bulk of the episodes around it in season six it's also a little out of place. At this point in its evolution TNG was aiming more towards "intelligent" sci-fi and this does stand out because of the absence of a moral or particular character focus. It's almost as if we're having a break from the heavier story-lines that made up a large part of the later seasons.

My opinion - watch it, enjoy it, but it's not likely to make it into your list of top ten episodes, or top twenty. I haven't watched it for years and so I welcomed it quite lovingly for a second/third viewing after such a long gap since it was last on my TV. Great hooded aliens, magnificent uneasiness, paranoia and probably one of the three best attempts at mild horror TNG ever produced alongside "Conspiracy" and "Genesis". Now who's up for writing the sequel?

Trekollections: The Formative Decade

It was on a black and white TV that I first encountered the crew of the USS Enterprise.

Which episode it was I'm not sure and there's no way I can remember what happened because I suspect I was about two years old and maybe even smaller than that. Moreover it was all my Dad's fault. He is indeed the architect for this facet of my life.  Since the days of the original airings of The Original Series back in t'day he had been a fan and his love of the show passed to me....and grew.  I wouldn't go as far as to say "avid" in relation to his relationship with the series but he has told me in the years since that it was one of his favourite TV shows and to this day we have many a Trek related conversation either about an episode one of us might have caught on TV or a book that I might have added to the Trek library.

However let's get this all properly into perspective.  Flashback a bit here. It's 1979 and two major defining events occurred.  One was my arrival (of course) and the second was the premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. While for me this was a speck on my viewscreen, for Dad it was quite a big thing as this was the first new Star Trek in a decade and the first big screen outing thanks in no small part to the arrival of the Star Wars juggernaut a few years earlier. Some years later Dad let slip that he'd got hold of some stills from the film and had them up at home following it's release.  Unfortunately for the growing Trek fan in me they had been filed under "B" for Bin a number of years before my obsession took control. What TMP did was ensure that his interest in the series didn't wain and he, in turn, passed that love of the original series to me.

The strange thing is that had it not been for George Lucas and his epic trilogy then we probably wouldn't have had the films, TNG, DS9, Voyager or Enterprise.  Would I have become such a big fan?  Probably not as I suspect we would have had Phase II and then that would have been it. So thanks Mr Lucas - my love of Trek may be partially your fault/responsibility!

Anyway; The Motion Picture happened; critically not that great, but it kicked off a whole sequence of events that have become intertwined with my life and continue to be as I enter my 33rd year. Oddly I had an idea to do something life this when I was 18 and it only managed to make three lines of text.  This is already a greater success five paragraphs in.

Right, so, where were we now....

I was born in Lancashire before we moved to Crewe and in a quirk of fate I now live quite close to the same place.  We were there for a couple of years before uprooting for Cornwall in 1984 and this is where my interest truly began.

For a few years it was something I would look forward to on a Wednesday night with dad. It even got to the point where my primary school teacher, Miss Nicholls would remind me it was on at 6pm - and the weeks it wasn't just didn't feel the same.  It now dawns on me that it was an essential part of my routine and my week would be planned around this TV event.  In 2012 I still have to have order and regiment to make sure I cope with life's little "tribble-ations" so to speak.  Back in 1985/6 knowing that a week had come round again and that I would get to see another adventure with Star Trek added more to the structure of my life.  To this day I get lost if part of my morning routine is out of sync let alone the rest of the day.

As I mentioned in my first Trek blog, Star Trek has the distinction of being the first programme I watched at home in colour on a Ferguson telly. We bought it from Dixons on Truro high street and as we were tuning it in at home I caught sight of those familiar titles and distinctive theme tune. It was the second season episode of "The Apple". I still remember Dad being amazed that the turbolift doors were orange! My clearest memory of an episode comes from "The Tholian Web". An installment from the third season it was an absolute stand out so much that today it is still one of my all time favourite Original Series episodes. Why? Well, when you're six or seven and there are some cool non-human aliens, spaceships building a web and Captain Kirk as a ghost it really can get no better. 

At this stage I probably hadn't seen many of the earlier episodes from 1966 or 1967 which is in a way good as the best was literally still to come for me. What other episodes I saw I couldn't tell you but I know that I enjoyed every single one for very different reasons to what I would take from them 30 years on. That's probably one of the major reasons my love affair with this show has been maintained for so long.  Whichever episode I watch I always seem to find something new that I've not experienced before and "The Tholian Web" is no exception. I loved it because of the action and that they went onto another ship that was slowly disappearing in the form of the USS Defiant. There was a genuine threat and the captain was nowhere to be seen (literally). Big shame it took until Star Trek Enterprise to revisit the Tholians, the superb Gorn and the Defiant in probably that series' finest hour(s), "In a Mirror, Darkly Parts I & II" from 2005.

Looking back at this episode now in a different and more middle-aged light I still appreciate the episode for its style, miniature work and especially the character development of the cast as they come to terms with the loss of their captain - good thing they never viewed his final orders, huh?! When it's compared to the rest of the third season it's a brilliant episode along with "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" and also I'm a bit of a sucker for "All Our Yesterdays" with its nifty time travel plot if we're going to be laying all the cards on the table here.  Now let's be clear, I'm not going to preach and moralise that Trek has turned my life around etc etc - this is about how Trek has functioned as part of my life and why I've loved it so much.

Now around the time I was watching the series for the first time, my Dad built the Enterprise. It was the original AMT kit that had remained unchanged since the 1960s' release and it was awesome. I don't recall the construction process or where it resided while we lived in Cornwall but what I still have is the decal sheet that came with it. You could pick to rename it as any of the original Constitution class vessels including the ones featured in "The Tholian Web", "The Ultimate Computer" and "The Doomsday Machine". We of course plumped for the good old Enterprise. Incredibly this kit has survived seven house moves, about 25 years of my life and while the decals are a little time-worn, its credit to AMT and my Dad that it's still in one piece and with the stand (pictured here, left)! Admittedly the deflector dish spike has cracked a few times but otherwise it seems to be bombproof unlike the movie Enterprise which we'll come to in a future piece. When I was younger it was the best thing ever - I had my own USS Enterprise. Cool.

In 1986 I first saw Star Trek II. I would have been about seven and I suspect it was a trimmed version as it was on in an afternoon. From what I can recall so there would have been minimal appearances from close-up shots such as the ceti eels entering Terrell and Chekov's ears. It was amazing and soon became a heavily viewed VHS tape (with adverts thanks to it being a recording from ITV).  With my heightened interest that also meant a trip to the cinema in Truro close to where we lived in Cornwall to see Star Trek IV with my parents and Mark Pascoe (where are you now?!) which was released that year.  This was the first Trek that I saw at the cinema and since 1986 I've seen every one at the flicks as undoubtedly every Trekker reading this also has. Even Nemesis. 

As you will have no doubt noticed that means I skipped a third of the Genesis trilogy (we'll get to that later) but at the tender age of seven as long as there was action, adventure and spaceships I really didn't mind and the little recap at the beginning meant I got to see the Enterprise blow up anyway. 

For a seven year old it was a really enjoyable film and it kept me wrapped for the best part of two hours. Plus we got to see the new Enterprise at the end of the film... even though it was identical to the one they'd blown up in The Search for Spock.The movie refit is the best version of the ship in my opinion so I was quite happy at that result as the model survived for another two encounters. What I now realise about this period is that my liking of Trek was purely at an action/adventure level.  Getting character motivation, plotlines and themes wasn't in my repertoire at this time. Trek was something that I enjoyed that my Dad also enjoyed and it was a common interest that I could talk to him about.

For Christmas 1985 I received one of my first pieces of what is now "memorabilia".  I retrieved it from the loft just the other day and can still remember spending many an afternoon playing the cassette and waiting for the communicator chirp so I could turn the page.  It was of course the Book and Tape The Wrath of Khan (I still have the tapes as well).  The pictures were brilliant.  Full colour and took you all the way through the film.  When we went to Plymouth for a day out in 1986 I had some pocket money saved up and bought The Search for Spock.  At least I got to see some bits of it even if it was just 24 stills!  It seemed for a few years I was jinxed when it came to seeing the third Trek film as you will see!


A year later and I caught my first glimpse of something new to the world of Star Trek.  They were making a new series.  Wow.  Big news.  The only way I found out was by watching Wogan one evening on BBC One and seeing some English guy called Patrick Stewart interviewed about becoming the new captain.  Dad wasn't impressed.  It was going to be rubbish and no-one could better Kirk, Spock and McCoy. " Hell," he said; "there was even a Klingon on the bridge and Kirk would never have allowed that!"  

The ship looked dreadful and the scene they showed from "The Last Outpost" didn't instill any sense that this would be a suitable sequel to the original series - and what was a Ferengi?!  How I remember this I do not know but what it tells me now is how much of an effect, even subliminally, Star Trek has had on me. After the interview I put thoughts of the new show on a back-burner and wouldn't encounter The Next Generation again until 1990 mainly because back in Them Days you had to wait YEARS instead of HOURS for anything to cross the Atlantic.

We moved to Derbyshire in 1989 and life changed a lot for me. It was during the two years that we lived there that I was almost continuously bullied at school.  What stood me out from the rest was that I had the full school uniform including tie. The remainder of the school wore what their families could afford.  I was most definitely Odd Man Out on a daily basis.  

Star Trek was my escape and having no-one liking the showt meant it was even more special and somewhere I could retreat. From the years in Cornwall to those in Derbyshire I was provided with numerous repeats of The Original Series which meant I got to see "The City on the Edge of Forever", "Arena", "Piece of the Action", "Mirror, Mirror" and "Space Seed" among others.  While these are all the classics it was the more action orientated episodes that kept my attention. Phasers, photon torpedoes and lots of explosions always proved a winner. While not a classic, "The Galileo Seven" was a top slice of all these with a splash of a shuttle craft thrown in for good measure. Reading about the fate of the original full size mock up is an incredible story and I recommend you take a look on the web for it. Funny now that when I was younger I didn't appreciate that the were things called seasons and that the run wasn't endless. I just knew that Star Trek was always on on a Wednesday night before I had tea and usually before Dad was home from work.

Either for best or worst no-one in Ilkeston liked Star Trek and it was another sign that I was a real outsider because it wasn't real.  Star Trek was a "dead" series from the 1960s with "rubbish" monsters, spaceships on strings and wasn't a patch on the stuff that was being churned out on a Saturday by ITV.  To be honest even today Star Trek is still in a class of its own (personal opinion) and makes a lot of the programmes we have now look very unimaginative and cheap (Red or Black, X-Factor, The Only Way Is Essex).  It was escapism with some real issues; clearly way "too cerebral"!  I wasn't a supporter of either Nottingham Forest or Liverpool FC and didn't like to spend my lunchtimes beating other kids up which just added to a painful two years of physical and verbal abuse. My "peers" saw it as something that wasn't normal because I didn't conform in interests or appearance. I wasn't allowed to go roaming the streets in the evenings or weekends and spent my time writing, drawing and watching Star Trek. 

Leaving that school and the town was one of the highlights of my early years but before I did I would get my second trip to the cinema, the jinx of The Search for Spock would continue and I finally saw what all the fuss about the French starship captain was...