To Boldly Go II

Continued from my previous post.

blog-voyager-01 Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek universe has been around for a lot longer than Star Wars, and there’s certainly a lot more material too. There’s been six TV series with a couple running for seven seasons each, and ten feature movies with an eleventh about to see theatrical release. When you’ve got that much published material, it must be sheer nuts keeping canon and that stories you’re telling don’t contradict each other too much!

And if that wasn’t enough material for fans to get into, there’re also persistent comparisons between Star Trek and Star Wars. One of the most popular ones is who’d win in a ship to ship fight: Enterprise or a Star Destroyer (people seem to agree though that Picard’s Enterprise will wipe the floor with the Star Destroyer – ignore this note if you’re not a fan of both series LOL). Heck, I even bought editions of those heavy Trek encyclopedias just to make sense of the who, what and where in the 40+ year old universe.

From the late 90s onwards, I started following episodes of Star Trek: TNG and Voyager whenever I could. Unfortunately, many episodes were broadcast late in the night on TV, and at that point I wasn’t watching much of broadcast TV anymore.

However, when DVD compilations of the series started seeing distribution from 2000 onwards, that was my golden opportunity to watch what I’ve been missing in the last 10 years. I started with the early seasons of TNG. This was before the time of computer-generated effects, and ok so some of the stories with Picard’s crew were hokey. But watch them I did, and they did get better.

blog-voyager-03Of the series though, it was Star Trek: Voyager that left the biggest impressions on me. It wasn’t just the whole Borg and “Resistance is futile” thing. At that point in the late 90s, it was the only Trek series with reasonably good visuals (Deep Space 9 was on par).

I followed ST: Voyager piecemeal in Singapore… until I was in Perth from 2003 to 2006 where I watched the series in more consistent fashion as the TV channels were broadcasting rerun episodes every night. This series, alongside The Simpsons, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series, and Stargate SG-1 which I’ll blog about sometime, were my constant companions during those years of research and thesis writing. By the time I returned home for good in 2006, I was carrying with me several box sets of ST: Voyager that I’d bought in Australia.

It’s 4 years later now, and I’ve started rewatching the Voyager episodes all again, with Ling in tow. They do look just a mite cheesy and some of the stories are just as turkey as they were. And Ling notices Seven-of-Nine’s amazing, er, figure. Her character was rumored to get introduced by the series writers to continue appealing to that viewer demographic LOL.

But the majority of the episodes are still well and good, and there’s plenty of medical and biological mumbo jumbo that Ling understands (and I don’t!).

And the funniest thing? Even Ling is hooked now LOL.:)

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