BrazenFirefly
Last Activity:
Oct 6, 2017
Joined:
Jul 29, 2017
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Birthday:
January 23
Occupation:
Writer

BrazenFirefly

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BrazenFirefly was last seen:
Oct 6, 2017
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  • About

    Birthday:
    January 23
    Occupation:
    Writer
    Interests:
    • Star Trek: The Original Series
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation
    • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
    • Star Trek: Voyager
    • Star Trek: Enterprise
    • Star Trek Movies
    To introduce me here I'm reposting what I put in the welcome thread. Hope that's ok. It kind of says it all. :)

    I've been a Star Trek fan all my life, but am only recently stepping out into the world to talk to others who love the show. I have to admit I'm coming out of the shadows now partially because of the news surrounding the upcoming Star Trek Discovery, much of which I find very disheartening. That said, I'm excited to find a place to talk with other people about the show, in all its iterations.

    When I was a kid, TOS, was in reruns on Friday and Saturday nights and I never missed it. Starting with Wrath of Khan, I went to every movie as they came out (missed the original, because I was still too little to be paying much attention) and I originally poo-pooed TNT when it emerged on the scene.

    I didn't watch a complete episode of TNG until the night the final episode aired for the first time. I thought, what the hell, I'll try it - and it blew my mind. Watched that series through end to end and fell in love with it as well, really seeing it as the natural evolution of what Roddenberry had been attempting in the 60s.

    In latter years I've watched all the other series in their entirety. And I've enjoyed them all, to differing extents, though my favorites have remained TOS and TNG.

    I've been incredibly excited by the prospect of Discovery coming out - until I've begun to realize just how far afield they appear to be going. It's not that the look is more Star Wars than Star Trek. It's not even that they appear to be abandoning even marginal respect for any timeline or "cannon." For me, it's that they appear to be abandoning the very thing that has always distinguished Star Trek from other SciFi series - it's optimistic view of humanity's future.

    While there are certainly favorite story-lines, plot points, characters, character relationships that I personally would love to see respected, if not adhered to, that isn't nearly as important to me as adhering to Gene Roddenberry's view of humanity as having moved past the darker elements of our collective nature to a place where we are driven, in unity, by the desire to push forward and explore the universe in search of connection and knowledge.

    There are two things Alex Kurtzman recently said of Discovery and how much it deviates from that principle at comicon that threw me. The first was that ""We live in very different times. Every day we look at the news ant it is hard." The second was his comment that "Star Trek has always been a mirror to the time it reflected." I would actually argue that the opposite is actually true.

    Star Trek emerged on television right in the midst of the Cold War, the Vietnam war, and the civil rights movement. It ran through 1969, an insanely tumultuous time during which the Kent State Riots occurred, huge anti war protest movements took place, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were shot. I'm pretty comfortable saying that every day people watched the news back then it was hard too.

    But Rodenberry, who had experienced war himself as a bomber pilot in WWII, determined that instead of holding a mirror up to the times, he would instead show the world just how unbelievably awesome our future could be.

    TOS included Starfleet members who were Russian, despite the incredible fears generated by the ongoing Cold War, Japanese, despite the still existing stigmas from WWII, and African American, in the throws of the Civil rights movement. Instead of mirroring the times, he attempted to show people a future that we could move towards, that could operate as a beacon, where people of all races strove together to make the best moral decisions they could under extraordinary circumstances. The conflicts may have been drawn from current events, but they showed humanity collectively trying to wrestle with them.

    There are tons and tons and tons of harsh and gritty sci-fi tales. I love many of them. But in an extraordinary and very meaningful way, Star Trek has always been different. Whether it was TOS, TNG, Voyager, DOS or even Enterprise, the vision of humanity trying to be its best - that beacon to a brighter future - has always been at its heart. I think if Star Trek loses that, it's not really Star Trek anymore.

    Thanks for reading. I look forward to getting to know you guys!