Star Trek: Discovery
I just got finished binge watching Season 4
of Star Trek: Discovery. Even the music at the beginning and ending of the show
stirs my soul and puts my imagination in hyperdrive. I’ve always loved Sci-Fi.
As a boy, my mom got me reading science fiction as a way to keep my overactive
brain engaged on boring, rainy days when we couldn’t go outside to play (yeah,
in my generation we did that. There was basically nothing to do in the house.)
I was a strange kid by anyone’s standards. I read the whole set of
Encyclopedia’s Mom bought from a door-to-door salesman. I started with A and
didn’t stop until I got to Z. Then I went to town on works by all the Classic
writers that came with the set. Then, I read the whole Catholic Bible from cover to
cover when I was 12.
But science fiction grabbed my fancy back
then and never let it go. They say that travel broadens your horizons. That’s a
pretty fair statement, and I’ve done my share of that. But nothing broadens and
opens your mind like science fiction. It opened my mind to endless
possibilities at a very young age. And to this day, I never grow tired of
reading science fiction and playing my “what if” game in my head. As most of
you know, I’ve written four of my own science fiction books. People who’ve read
them are always asking me how I come up with some of the ideas I expressed in
them. I’m not always sure. Some of those ideas just seem to pop into my head as
I’m putting words down on paper. I don’t know where those come from. Others
emerge from conversations I’ve had with friends online or just from random
things I’ve read over the years. I also, often have some pretty wild science
fiction dreams.
Star Trek: Discovery is the latest spin-off
from the original Star Trek show on TV. I’m watching it on Amazon Prime. The
first three seasons are all there. And now the fourth season is also on there
up to episode seven so far. For the record, there is almost no comparison
between it and the original. Don’t get me wrong. I loved the original. It was
so mind-blowing in its day. But when I go back and watch those old reruns, it
looks so cheesy now. Discovery supposedly takes place more than a thousand
years in the future of Captain Jean Luc Picard’s day. And the tech on the ship
is almost like magic compared to the old Enterprise. And like Spock would say,
the interactions between the crew members are “fascinating”. It seems that no
matter how far into the future we imagine our heroes to be, they are still caricatures
of us. Captain Kirk and his crew, in the 25th century, were pushing
the boundaries of sexuality and society’s mores just like the hippies of the
1960s were – miniskirts and all. Also, audiences were totally shocked when white
Captain Kirk kissed black Uhura in one episode. And when you watch the original
Star Trek, you notice that although the crew is a mixture of ethnicities (with
a very small handful of aliens thrown in for good measure), the main characters
are white. Whereas, in Star Trek: Discovery, most of the characters are either aliens
or black with only a few white people tossed in. I guess today’s political
correctness carries over for thousands of years into the future, right? You’ll
also notice a few gays, lesbians, and some “I’m not sures” on board this ship. And
I don’t think they got around to swearing in the 25th century (and
it was definitely not allowed on 1960 TV shows) but the Discovery is under no
such restrictions. An “F” bomb or two and then some are sprinkled in loosely,
but they make it sound like what kids do when there are no grownups around. That
has been a common practice in a lot of science fiction right from the beginning.
And I’m pretty sure that librarians never read a lot of those sci-fi books they
had stocked proudly on their shelves back in the sixties.
I’ve discussed before, on my blog, what I
thought the intriguing dynamic was in the original Star Trek series. It was the
interplay between emotional Dr. McCoy, rational, logic-only, Mr. Spock, and
blended/balanced Captain Kirk.
In Discovery, however, the main emphasis
seems to be on love for one another, no matter how different or diverse the
cultures interacting are from one another.
Now remember, I said that science fiction was
very mind opening. For me, it always was. It really allows you to step outside
your own culture and see things from a sometimes very alien perspective. And
then when you look at our very real cultural differences, they don’t seem to be
all that important anymore. Human beings are human beings after all. And we’re
all in the same boat.
But here I have to confess to some cultural bias of my own that made it difficult to watch Star Trek: Discovery at first. The whole gay and lesbian thing was hard for me to watch. My own religious cultural upbringing tells me to not judge the person but never to condone the behavior either. And I do my best not to, in my head. At the same time, I find it very difficult to watch two men hugging and kissing. Now on Captain Janeway’s starship, there were two aliens that were both male who were a married couple, and one of them gave birth to their child. But it never showed them actually kissing one another. I try to be open minded about it. But it’s not easy at all. And no, I don’t like to see two women kissing either. So, in theory, I like the overall theme of this new sci-fi series. I just hope the show doesn’t go too far in pushing at those boundaries. My mind is already open more than most from a lifetime of immersing my psyche into the weird and wonderful world of science fiction. And no matter how old I get, I’m still like a child lost in wonder when I have one of those amazing sci-fi books in my hands. By the way, if you would like an old-fashioned sci-fi adventure story, check out my four books above, and let me know what you think. Any mind opening going on when you read my stories?
