Boom Shaka Wow Wow

 See, there I was gone forever and now I'm back in black and smokin' crack, telling you how much I love 'Star Trek - Enterprise'.  I am TOS4LYF and face it, be real:  NextGen sucked.  It sucked so hard that I despaired for the franchise.  Deep Space Nine was Peyton Place In Outer Space, yawn.  (Voyager? Now there we go!  Roddenberry would have been so proud! Excellent in every respect, but we didn't get it on our old tired cable while it was still new, so I only caught the occasional episode. I need to be Captain Janeway's bed bitch NOW.  I'll help Seven of Nine stay warm too. I'm having one of my dyke days, bear with me.)  The rest got lost in the shuffle when our tiny little town went through the traumatic changeover from cable to fuck you, we're taking down the receiver farm.

Now Mr. Internet is providing us with all the stuff I missed, and I am so incredibly pleased with the way that Enterprise is playing out.  Scott Bakula is every inch a Roddenberry captain.  It took T'pol three episodes to get the 'Vulcan' thing down - eps 1 and 2, she was just a snooty bitch.  By ep 3 she was In Charge and feeling nothing (but my hand on that ass.)  

The reason I take my Trek so seriously is that I had a shitty childhood. My parents didn't deserve the name, so I, like lots of kids from dysfunctional families, took on a T.V. family as my own.

I certainly didn't want what the Brady's had (except Marsha) and Mission Impossible was tuff, but there weren't any aliens or spaceships. The Prisoner was just 'sit with your mouth hanging open having your mind blown UK awesomeness.'  The Avengers was sooooooo smooth, but sadly, our Ms. Peel did end up needing to be rescued quite a bit by the always witty and resourceful Mr. Steed (I'da ridden that around the pasture!) 

In Star Trek (I was eight years old, remember, and desperate for role models) I found a place where women didn't need constant rescuing, intelligence was prized, men were compassionate, and 'doing the right thing' was explored and questioned.  Aliens could be good.  There was science, and space ships, and aliens, and kung fu, and robots, and Mr. Spock. There was Miss Uhura, who could take care of herself in a fight AND translate garbled transmissions.  There was the whole damn crew, and the way they interacted and made each other grow and change, which in the 1960's just didn't happen on television.  Rob Petrie was the same stumbling doofus he was at the end of the Dick Van Dyke Show as he was in the first episode.  It was like that then.  Lowest common denominator, with commercials. But Trek didn't do that.

I sob like a child at the end of the movie 'Star Trek: Into Darkness' because of the dedication to Mr. Nimoy.  I'm misting up now. I saw so much of what I was going through in his struggles as Mr. Spock aboard the Enterprise... different, smart, not catching social cues, belonging to two different races that didn't respect each other very much (I'm half Native and half white) and trying to find his way with each and every interaction; worrying about his responses, and then feeling guilty for worrying, and going down that emotional rabbit hole. He too had l'tak terai, my youth was one long march through Vulcan's Forge attaining kahs wan,  I too longed for kolinhar and was denied it. HE WASN'T AFRAID TO BE SMART.  He did not dumb himself down for his crewmembers.  It was incumbent upon them to understand him, not the other way around.

All that sounds dorky.  I'm a dork.  That's what we do.

Now I don't go to conventions, I'm not a superfan, I don't show up and camp out on the pavement waiting for a new movie to premier.  But I know who felt like family, and little eight-year-old me made a damn good decision, I think.  A little girl with the charge to 'go boldly where no man has gone before' is a little girl who will do just that thing.  And I did.