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...song by Diane Warren (borrowed from - wait for it - Patch Adams) in place of the traditional, lush instrumental opener and, in the holy captain's chair, Scott Bakula (borrowed from - wait for it - Quantum Leap). Not even Jolene Blalock with Vulcan ears could save it. Enterprise became the first Star Trek to be canceled for low ratings. Meanwhile, at the box office, Insurrection made back its $60 million budget, but not by much. Star Trek was always, at heart, a franchise owned by the fans, and it seemed as if the fans were returning it to sender...
...thought it wasn't. I thought it had died in 2004, after the double deathblows of Star Trek: Insurrection (the second-to-last movie; I considered Nemesis just posthumous galvanic twitching) and the uneven last series, Enterprise. Now an 11th Trek film is nearly upon us - it opens May 8 and is helmed by J.J. Abrams, the unstoppable force behind Alias and Lost - and I'm torn between horror, that someone is defibrillating the beloved corpse of Trek one more time, and, in spite of all my better instincts, hope...
...young to see the first series when it aired. Once I was old enough, I didn't want to - after Star Wars, which revealed the stunning truth that spaceships could actually get dirty, Trek looked a little out of date. Nothing gets old fast like the future. (See TIME's 1994 cover story on Star Trek...
...still goofily Utopian - with its sliding doors and ambient lighting and free-flowing synthehol (booze that doesn't give you a hangover), the Enterprise-D looked like a Qantas Club airport lounge - but somehow I didn't care. TNG wasn't dirty and real like Star Wars or degraded and cyberorganic and cosmopolitan like Blade Runner. This was the other future, the one that wasn't ever actually going to happen, but you wished it would. And it was riveting. Unconstrained by plausibility or topicality, TNG was free to be playful and sexy and self-aware and melodramatic and often...
...believe him, Abrams barely saw Star Trek the first time around. He has genially but unapologetically stated that he is neither a Trekkie nor a Trekker - choose your suffix. "The whole point was to try to make this movie for fans of movies, not fans of Star Trek, necessarily," he has said. Star Trek - just Star Trek, straight, no chaser - is Abrams' attempt to reverse-engineer the early years of Kirk and Spock and the rest of the original-series crew. It's like a Stanislavskian exercise, retroactively endowing the characters with a set of childhood memories (rather like...