Favorite BBS Post of the day:

How many As in Kaaaaahn!

I come back from my crazy life and this is what I find

Ricardo Montalban is dead.

You heard me.

The immortal Kahn, the genetic superman, the legend himself.

"To the last, I will grapple with thee. From hell's heart, I spit my last breath at thee."

A good line. And his last on Star Trek.

The first encounter between Kirk and Kahn in Star Trek II.

Star Trek 1x22 Space Seed Remastered Trailer

WWKD?

Manny Coto just said something (okay, last August said something) about how they did the third season of Enterprise that makes a lot of sense to me. Essentially, that if you do a big story, you put it  in a three-parter. Oh, if Brannon had only thought of that when he made "Macrocosm".

Anyway, it's kind of exciting to hear that someone had it figured out, at least for the one year.

In other news, I saw Frost/Nixon last night, and it really touched a chord with me especially in regard to my own first encounter with Brannon Braga and people's reaction to my question and my take on his answer. It was important to many that someone in power acknowledge their responsibility for what happened, and I think that Brannon has done that. Too late in the game to change what's happened, but at least he did it. I've managed to switch from intense anger to a grudging admiration for the man, and that's in large part due to his repeated appearances at conventions, allowing us to rake him over the coals. As he deserved at one point, although I'm not sure he does now. At some point, doesn't he get to be absolved of that guilt? Star Trek has an overall message of forgiveness, after all. What would Kirk do?

Reconcieving Preconceptions

What if?

What if, for all it's faults, Enterprise explains why everyone seems to hate Spock in the first season of TOS?

What if for just an instant in The Man Trap, Kirk resembles Chris Pine.

What if Spock teaches Kirk to play chess in the new movie?

What if it had come out today and I hadn't been able to get there and I'd been stranded in the snow and couldn't see it?

Maybe some things are for the better.

I've been trying

I've been trying to think what to say.

Yesterday was my cousin's seventh birthday, and I didn't allow myself to dwell. Now I don't have that excuse and, yeah.

Sad.

So I decided to let Majel do the talking for me.

"Star Trek will live because - look around you."

"Star Trek is Gene Roddenberry's. No one else's."

Those were the only quotable things she said at our one encounter. Rod did a lot of talking for her. I think it annoyed her.

The woman had spunk.

Actually, it wasn't our only encounter. I was in the vendor's room and there she was, right next to me, in a wheelchair.

She looked right at me, just for a second. For a moment I was in the gaze of someone who was not just an actress or the wife of a producer but a symbol. And she knew it. I don't know what she saw in me. No words were exchanged. It was over in a second and she was gone.

But I felt, in that moment, something we all should know, that the thing that has comforted her through the last twenty years of Gene's demise and death was knowing that his legacy will continue. She was a symbol of his legacy, and now she is dead and we are left to carry on without her. In that second, she unspeakingly charged me and all those like me - not by words or actions, but by the simple act of her being - with the duty and responsibility and honor of carrying on that legacy in her name, as she has carried it in Gene's. She didn't need to speak more at that convention. It has all been said. Her feelings, her thoughts, and her desire for the future of Trek have been made clear. The torch has been passed, her approval of J.J.'s movie has been firmly stamped by a computer voice, and today a thousand, a million, a hundred million fans cry out the words with which our lives began -

"There's still something out there."

Countdown

Just a reminder: in 160 days, the trailers will give way to the movie.

So now all that remains is to decide how I'm going to spend those 160 days.

I work in retail, so my life is basically over for the next six weeks. But after... is after. After that's all over (by which I mean Christmas), I'll be working on something entirely different.

Watching all the TOS, TAS, and the first seven Trek movies in preparation for whatever it is that's gonna be happening here in just a few short days. Precisely 160 of them.

For the record, that's less than six months. Less than five even. Practically no time at all.

New Trailer! New Trailer!

163 days left, folks, and what do we have here?

Booya.

Check it out, Nimoy's in it!

That's a new order to things. Yeah.

I think I have it figured out.

So, J.J. can't work within canon, but he didn't want to violate it either. So what he did was he changed the rules. Very TWOK. Anyway, He goes back to before the beginning of TOS and alters something, throwing the entire thing into an alternate universe where anything can happen.

Cool.

Or maybe I'm wrong. That could be too.

Fringe

I'm falling head over heels in love with Fringe.

No, it has no relation to Dawson's Creek, although, Joshua Jackson... My oh my. No, it's something entirely different. It's season 7 of The X-Files in a shiny new wrapper (you know, before there were Super Soldiers). It's wonderful, it's awesome, and it's pure Abrams all the way. And funny! And there's a cow, and a mad scientist, and... well, I just love it madly.

I'm gonna stop now, because I'm starting to sound insane.

Watch Fringe.

So I was on Facebook today...

And there, playing in an ad, was the trailer, with a little note: "Star Trek, May 2009".

It's nice to be loved.

Spoiler Alert

Kirk can drive a stick.

But in "A Piece of the Action," did stick shifts work the exact same way?

Huh?
Huh?

Yeah, I thought so.

Future Tense

I'm not a fan of the Temporal Cold War thingy. Or time travel eps in general. Or most of Enterprise.

But there's one thing I love: Archer's suspicion that the body they find in "Future Tense" is Zefram Cochrane. For starters, because he's wrong. It's not. And also, because he thought of it. Mostly it seems like the style of Enterprise was to rewrite history, maybe leaving it open at the end of the ep as to whether it was Cochrane or not. (We, of course, saw "Metamorphosis" and know it wasn't.)

But I love this, because it's the kind of continuity that was so often missing from Enterprise.

Well, the trailer's out.

I expected fireworks, or maybe a giant flashing neon sign.

I kinda got the fireworks. Or well, the spoiler with the spoiler and then the kid doing the spoiler and then there was the thing where Chris Pine was spoiler and then they also had a great shot of spoiler and showed Spock wearing a spoiler but I still don't know where Kirk gets the spoiler and then Scotty said spoiler and it didn't spoiler but of course it's too soon to be sure. And there was a great shot of the Bridge, it looked very spoiler but of course then they showed the spoiler with Kirk and Spock and that looked very spoiler so I just don't know anymore what I think, but there's this awesome half-second of Bruce Greenwood as spoiler and...

Anyway, let's put it this way:

This movie's gonna be felt around the Trekkie world.

Oh, and...

They're making toys of the new movie. Footnote in history. Treat it as such.

Besides which...

So, the prez is a big geek.

Or rather, the president-elect. Whatever. He's a geek.

Proof?

He's creating the post of Chief Technology Officer. He likes Star Trek. That's right, we elected a Trekkie. He can speak techspeak. He wants to give us all broadband. He wants to allow people to use the internet to access the white house - and there's a really funny picture

Yeah. Geek.

Okay, I stole all this from Wired but they have a point. And I'd been wondering.

There's a story Nichelle Nichols likes to tell.

It goes something like this:

I'd read each subsequent rewrite...and there was a... consistent pattern being formed. You know, I'd see the first draft, the white pages, and see what Uhura had to do this week, and maybe it was a halfway-decent scene or two, sometimes more, and then invariably the next draft would come in on blue pages and I'd find that Uhura's presence in the show had been cut way down. Teh pink pages came next and she'd suffer some more cuts, then the yellow, more cuts, and it finally got to the point where I had really had it. I mean I just decided that I don't even need to read the FUCKING SCRIPT! I mean, I know how to say "Hailing frequencies open," and Uhura's participation in the final version of any given script was rarely more taxing than that... I went to Gene and complained.

"Why is this happening?" I ask him. And Gene does his best to explain his point of view, and he's talking about staying true to the show, but my now I'm really angry and it actually gets to the point where I say to him, "That's it. I quit. I'm leaving."

And Gene looks at me across the desk and says, "Don't do this."

"I have to," I tell him.

[That evening, at an NAACP function] I'm sitting at my table and I was chatting and saying hello to people when all of a sudden a man comes up to me and says, "Miss Nichols, I'm sorry to bother you, but there's someone over here who would really like to meet you, and I said, "Well...uh, I guess that's okay," at which point he leads me up to a table that's surrounded by a lot of people, and he says to me, "I must tell you, the man that wants to meet you is a big fan, a really great fan."

And now I'm thinking to myslef, "Well, that's nice," and suddely the man that's let me through the crowd sort of squeezes in through the people around the table, and the next thing I know, the crowd sort of parts down the middle, and sitting there smiling at me is Dr. Martin Luther King.

So now I'm immediately thrilled. I mean, Dr. King is a fan? of MINE? And we exchanged greetings, and he told me how much he enjoyed Star Trek, and about how happy he was that I was part of the cast.


The rest was history. Dr. King convinced Nichelle to remain on the show and not only did it make her career, her presence on the bridge of the Enterprise influenced the lives of millions - both African-American and women - who saw her leadership role on that ship as a symbol of hope for themselves.

I don't know if Barack Obama is a Trekkie, but you can bet he's had influences. And you can bet some of them are Trekkies. Even if he's never seen a single episode (which would be a crying shame, and not just because David Wu thinks there are Klingons in the White house) we can still see his election as a part of that same legacy of hope - and this time it's not even an actor on a starship 300 years in the future.

Last Tuesday we brought Star Trek into the here and now.

A Thought

I've been watching Alias for a while, and something came into my brain recently. J.J. Abrams, whatever his flaws, does not milk stuff. Lost and Felicity both came with time stamps on them - both less than seven years. With Alias, he might be accused of milking the show, but I think Lost has proved that he good and learned that lesson.

Trek has a history of being milked, stretching clear back to the days of Gene Roddenberry. It's nice to think that this time, maybe that won't happen.

Some reviews and stuff.

Okay, so Kevin Smith's seen Trek, and he told us something about the environment in which he saw it - and about how Chris Pine so totally rocks.

Thank God.

It's spoiler-free because he signed a nondiscolsure agreement.

Greg Grunberg's probably in it - he's in everything else J.J. does - but he won't talk about it either. I bet he's not a redshirt. Some have speculated that he may be the computer voice. How very The Happening of you, J.J.

Simon Pegg's friend Edgar saw it too. Here's what he had to say. I hope he wasn't including First Contact in that "trio of prequels".

Also, just for the record, MAY IS SPRING. Deal with it people. God, that's been driving me nuts for months now.

They all look so pale...

I think the title says it all. Doesn't the 23rd Century believe in sun?

The Pictures

The're out there, but I'm not going to post them. They're on trekmovie.

It's funny. A poster is one thing, or a teaser trailer. But these are real shots from the actual movie, and when I look at them, I see -

Spock.

Kirk.

McCoy.

Sulu.

Uhura.

Scotty.

They're real, they're here, and in whatever context they were ever - they're alive, folks. Whatever happens with the movie, they've done what they set out to do - it looks like Trek.