This is the first part of a Cranky, Rambling Rant that will run on this blog over the next few days…
I was 14 when the original Star Trek TV series debuted in 1966. I didn't catch the first few episodes but a few of my friends did and loved 'em madly. It was probably around Week Four that I gave it a try and didn't see what the fuss was all about and I'm sorry. I just never warmed to the show or to any component of the massive franchise that it became. I wish I could. It's always nice to have one more thing in your life that brings you joy.
I absolutely do not hate it. I don't feel like I have much hate within me and if I did, I certainly wouldn't waste any of it on a TV show. I'd save 85-90% of it for people who do evil, hurtful things to me and/or others. The rest, of course, would all be directed at cole slaw.
If I have any negative feelings about Star Trek — and I really don't — they have to do with the kind of folks who get genuinely angry when you don't love what they love. One occasionally encounters such people — these days, not so much about Star Trek as maybe Harry Potter and/or Game of Thrones or something else I haven't gotten around to sampling. Back in high school when the original Star Trek was on, I'd have conversations that went sorta/kinda like this…
SOMEONE ELSE: Hey, what did you think of last night?
ME: What happened last night?
SOMEONE ELSE: Trek, of course.
ME: I didn't watch it.
SOMEONE ELSE (out of genuine concern:) What happened? You sick or something? Family emergency?
ME: No, I just don't watch it.
SOMEONE ELSE (a look of shock followed by either mounting hostility or pity:) Don't you understand it's the greatest TV show ever done?
No, I didn't understand that…or why we all had to agree on one. Sometimes, the Someone Else would embark on a holy mission to indoctrinate me to something I couldn't help but love as much as they did…for my own good, of course. I finally got fed up with this but before I did, I ceded to their urgings that I catch this or that "wonderful" episode in reruns.
One girl in my class thought it was humanly impossible — like flapping your arms and flying to Mars impossible — to watch "The Corbomite Maneuver" and not beam forever aboard the Trek Fan Club. I watched it and didn't dislike it. I just didn't like it enough to care if I ever saw another episode. From that point on, she treated me like I was someone to be avoided at all costs. Women have found so many valid reasons to stay far from me that I couldn't understand why anybody would seize on that silly one.
Some time later, I was working on a project Friday evening at a friend's home. The friend announced — like I should have known this — that it was the first night of Season 3 of Star Trek and that at 10 PM, all work would stop on our project because we absolutely had to watch you-know-what. The way he said it, I could tell non-compliance was out of the question. "You'll see how great it is," he said.
It was an episode called "Spock's Brain" and during it, I could see him slowly understanding how someone could not love Star Trek. At its end, he turned off the set, said "Let's just pretend that never happened" and we went back to work.
That was the first time I felt it might be okay to mingle in the circles of comic book and science-fiction fans and not worship that show. Later on, I encountered more folks who were indifferent to it and even some who wasted perfectly usable hatred on it. They're fewer in number now but I still sometimes come upon people who cannot imagine the non-love of that which they adore.
A comic book editor once called and went on for three minutes telling me how I would be thanking him for the rest of our mutual lives because he was about to offer me my dream assignment. Over and over, withholding the name of this dream assignment, he told me, "You're gonna be so excited." I finally said, "Okay, okay. I'll thank you forever. What is it?"
He said he wanted me to write the Star Trek comic book.
Even over the phone, I could hear his stunned expression when I immediately said, "Thanks but you should offer that to someone who loves Star Trek and follows it" and I even tossed out a few nominations. That editor is no longer among the living and he never spoke to me again without telling me he still couldn't believe I'd turned that down. He'd say, "Do you know how many other writers begged me for that job?"
This feels like a good place to end Part One of this Cranky, Rambling Rant. Part Two will be along in a few days and little (if any) of it will be about Star Trek. In case you haven't realized it, this isn't a rant about Star Trek. It's about people who confuse their opinions with inarguable fact and how as I get older, I have less and less time in my life for those discussions. This, even as the Internet makes it harder and harder to avoid them.