To Boldly Go

As I have mentioned previously, the two TV shows I absolutely adored when growing up were Doctor Who and Star Trek. With the former having been reborn on our screens in the last few years it's been easy enough to get my son hooked on it but with Star Trek the original series hasn't been on for a while and the spin off shows are shown sporadically on some of the more obscure digital channels and, given the more soapy aspect of the later series, it's more difficult to jump in part way through. Fortunately, Channel 4 has chosen to show all the Star Trek films late on Saturday nights. With the cunning use of video recording I've managed to get Raymond into the series.

Now, as the King in Alice in Wonderland said, one should begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop. However, the first film in the series, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, was a bit dull and I didn't want to risk boring an eight year old who has no idea who the characters were and how they operate in this fantasy universe. In fact, that is a little unfair; the first film is a very clever story but it is ponderously slow and owes more to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris than the original TV series - a character driven action adventure which was, as Gene Roddenberry first sold it to the studios, a Western set in space.

So I started with The Wrath of Khan, the second film in the series; actually a sequel to an original 1960's episode and much more like the original series. Raymond enjoyed it although I don't know whether he picked up the cultural significance of Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Bones and Scotty. In fact he didn't even pick up the fact that Scotty was meant to be Scottish. Oops - I always liked the character and, although the accent is a bit cod Caledonian, who is to say that a Scottish accent wouldn't sound like that in the 23rd Century?

We moved on to films 3 and 4, The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home. The third film gets a bit of stick from some fans; it may suffer a little from mid-trilogy filling but it moves along quite reasonably and fills in a few pages of Star Trek mythology - it also provides the set-up for The Voyage Home which, for totally spurious reasons (no budget), takes place in 1980's San Francisco. This leads to various comic capers including Spock giving a Vulcan pinch to an anti-social bus passenger, Chekov (of all people) being sent to find a "nuclear wessel", and Scotty trying to operate an early PC by saying "hello computer" into a mouse. It's nice to see a franchise like Star Trek take the Mickey out of itself once in a while and The Voyage Home always makes for an enjoyable 90 minutes escapism.

I hadn't seen the 5th Star Trek film The Final Frontier since it was released at the cinema. This was mainly because it was complete pants; I seem to recall that it was called "The Search for God" and involved Spock playing "Row your boat" on a harp. I remembered well. It was pants. The campfire scene was cringe-worthy beyond belief. Apparently it won the Golden Raspberry award for worst film of 1989 so I wasn't alone in this opinion.

The sixth film was a much better affair; although the last with all the original characters. The Undiscovered Country is the first film that heavily weighs into the Trek mythology; the central theme being a suspicious truce between the Federation and Klingons with individuals on both sides determined to undermine the whole venture. I suppose this could be seen as an allegory of the end of the Cold War but the heavy political themes didn't get into the way of a cracking action adventure and also featured a guest performance from David Bowie's wife - spacemen all around.

As a rather nice coincidence, LoveFilm have finally got round to shipping the original series DVDs to us. These had been on our wish list for almost a year so I had nearly given up on them but it turns out that rather than the original episodes, these have been enhanced with CGI effects to paper over the ropier 1960's effects. Normally I would be annoyed by this sort of thing. When George Lucas re-released the Star Wars films he added new scenes and characters to the originals using CGI; and next to the prosthetics, puppetry and models of the originals they looked awful. The original effects in Star Wars were great and it didn't need this kind of tampering. However, with Star Trek, the new effects are subtle. For example they have done new framing shots of the Enterprise orbiting an alien planet but it still looks believable as a 1960's series. They also have the advantage that the show was filmed in colour rather than the low resolution black and white videotape that Doctor Who used at the time.

It is the characters that really made the original Trek such a joy and it is interesting to see how they develop. Spock, in particular, is more inhuman than alien in the early episodes but Leonard Nimoy soon develops a sense of whimsy that makes his character a mirror on his human companions and also builds a fantastic love-hate relationship with the more emotional Dr "Bones" McCoy. However, the one character that still really fascinates me is Janice Rand, played by Grace Lee Whitney. Rand was only in the first series but did have small appearances in the films. However, it wasn't the attraction between her and Kirk that intrigued me but that amazing blonde beehive. How did they manage it? It's not that I haven't seen beehives before but she actually manages to have long hair with it. Quiet what engineering achievement went on there, I don't know, but I'm sure Mr Scott would have been impressed.

We have just watched Generations which, whilst not one of the better films, is a nice introduction to Jean-Luc Picard - one of the most rounded characters the franchise has produced and next Saturday we should have First Contact which, to my mind, was the best of the Trek films - at least until last years "reboot". I'm now just wondering whether to give some of the other spin-off series another try.