Happy fortieth anniversary to Star Trek. Sure, it’s featured bad acting, cheap special effects, hackneyed scripts, and the franchise barely survived Rick Berman’s disastrous creative tenure. But then there are episodes like City on the Edge of Forever and The Inner Light; storytelling gems that kindled my lifelong love affair with science fiction. When I my brother and I were kids, we actually attended a summer class at the local university where we watched episodes of the original series and discussed their themes and plot devices. We even got a write-up in the local paper. Somewhere in the archives of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, there’s a picture of a rather geeky-looking me sitting with a bunch of other geeky-looking adolescents. This was soon after I was trached and I was still working through some feelings of resentment about being on a ventilator. But I always looked forward to that class and I think Trek’s implication that the future might be kind of cool resonated with me at the time.
Thanks, Star Trek, for helping me realize that it was okay to let my geek flag fly.
