Of all the holies in the geek realm, Star Trek was a major pillar of geek culture. Before George Lucas combined the works of Frank Herbert, J.R.R. Tokein and Akira Kurosawa to create Star Wars, geeks pored over the original Trek episodes with the fine tooth combs of their intellect, piecing together the facts and events to create a history and time line, a canon that was adhered to strictly. Books and fanfic expanded on the original, three-year run, conventions were created and attended. The minutiae of the Trek universe were obsessively cataloged and dwelled upon by fans the world over. You weren't any kind of a Trek fan if you didn't know that Zefram Cochrane of Alpha Centauri was the inventor of warp drive, that Kirk was from Iowa, that Scotty was an "old Aberdeen pub crawler," that Mark Lenard, who'd played Spock's father Saarek in the second season episode "Journey to Babel," had also played the Romulan commander in the first season episode "Balance of Terror." It was this familiarity that became the foundations of early geek subculture.
But that familiarity is completely gone now. They've turned Trek into something sexy, edgy, flawed and totally unfamiliar, using the brand name to make it something marketable to a new generation. The movie relies on the fact that geeks the world over have made these characters pop culture icons, yet does everything it can to change them from what the geeks know and love. While this isn't the first time in the Trek universe that this has happened, it's a definitive event. The geeks can't blame J.J. Abrams for the breaking of the trust, but they can blame him for making it impossible to go back.
