Introduction to Circuses and Bread

 Recently I have rediscovered my love of Star Trek and some of my thoughts on the subject are ones I wish to remember. Ergo, I’m going to attempt to keep a blog for the first time in my life. 

Star Trek was definitely a part of my childhood. My father watched it when it was on TV and even had a tape of his favorite episode, Bread and Circuses. I must state here that though Next Generation was the show that was current when I was growing up, I only watched a few of its episodes. I grew up with The Original Series and it is still what I know best. I can still remember enjoying the episodes I watched because they had action or cute Tribbles in them or they had cool things happen. The characters were interesting and I enjoyed learning more about them. I doubt I saw more than one season’s worth of episodes but I enjoyed the ones I saw. 

And then Star Wars entered my life in my teen years. I watched the movies, read the novels, and even bought the manga. I can still quote most of the original trilogy dialogue and it is through my interest in the universe that I met my husband. Star Wars was my teen years; Luke Skywalker’s struggle to rebuild the Jedi, Solo’s missteps into being a not only a good man but a great one, and Leia’s struggle to bring about a righteous rebellion. It was space battles, gunslingers, and sword fights – everything I loved wrapped up into one. And while yes, there are deeper things one can draw from the Star War’s universe, for me it has always been some of my favorite escapist reading and watching selections.

During this time, I had little to do with Star Trek. I watched a bit of Deep Space Nine and liked what I saw better than I had Next Gen, but the only true connection I had with Star Trek was a comic book series I came upon by accident. The series was Star Trek: Early Voyages by Marvel and the seventeen volume series detailed a few of the missions of Captain Pike and his crew. I vastly enjoyed the series and was sorry to see it end. It is mostly because of the sudden ending of this series that I refuse to collect comic books like this and wait until they are reprinted in graphic novel form. I think that had this continued, I might have rediscovered Star Trek earlier. Instead I went through my college years watching Star Wars until I had to put them away I knew them too well and quit reading the novels when they killed off Chewbacca and destroyed the Republic my heroes had fought so hard to bring into existence. 

Last year, thanks to Netflix and its complete collection of The Original Series, I finally sat down and rewatched (and in some cases watched for the first time) the show I looked back on so fondly but hadn’t actually seen in years. And discovered that I didn’t feel I was rediscovering something so much as watching something for the first time. This was not the shows I’d watched when I was young. The action scenes were there but were minor when compared to what the actors were

discussing and the ideas being battered around. This thought-provoking show couldn’t be the fun adventure of my childhood. The characters that were interesting as a child were suddenly at times wise, stupid, peace-loving, anger-filled: in a word, human. Every episode made me think, forced me to consider something in a way I hadn’t before. Even ones I’d seen a dozen times were new and like nothing I’d ever seen before. Where had this been all my life?

The thing is, Star Trek had been right in front of me the entire time, and I’d never seen it as more than that show from my childhood. Well, I’m looking now and I in most instances am really intrigued by what I’m seeing. The best way to sum up what I’ve been experiencing is that The Original Series has gone from being a Circus (exciting and ‘Razzle Dazzle’) to Bread (something substantial and ‘nutritious’) for me. 

In the following posts, I hope to talk about the various forms I’ve discovered Star Trek in and talk about the ones I like and the ones I think could have been better. In them, I hope to remember this interesting experience of discovering the layers of a very interesting show.