The endless Star Trek franchise ages in reverse

[TMC]

http://www.avclub.com/article/endles...reverse-241625

Star Trek is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year with a movie in theaters and a new TV show in production. All of this, alongside its seemingly permanent place in the pop-culture landscape, makes it easy to forget that in its original form, Star Trek was cut short. Contemporary replays of the original series practically advertise it after the fact, describing the “five-year mission” of the Starship Enterprise that wound up chronicled over only three seasons’ worth of adventures. Later iterations and spin-offs bolstered Star Trek’s presence on television starting in the late ’80s, but the real, official franchise revival came in 1979, when the original cast got back together for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, kicking off a film series that would endure for decades, logging nearly as many entries as the James Bond series over the same period.

For many Trek fans, the movies amount to bonus material—extra hours with characters they love, with a bigger scope than the TV versions could afford. Plenty of Trekkers feel, perhaps rightly, that Star Trek ultimately belongs on television, where it can explore a variety of stories, tones, and issues while developing its characters in more detail. But I am not most Trek fans; by most measures, I’m not a true Trek fan at all. I’ve seen at least a handful of episodes of most of the TV shows (sorry, Enterprise!), and enjoyed them (Voyager always seemed underappreciated), but I’ve never immersed myself in any of them. I mostly know Star Trek through the movies. And despite the references, deeper continuity, and in-jokes that I don’t always get on first viewing, the Star Trek films do stand reasonably well on their own, both as general entertainment and as humane science fiction.