Trekkie Confessional

I've been revisiting Star Trek recently, following the realization that I could rent all the special features DVDs from my local public library. The Star Trek franchise is dear to me, even though it went a little off the rails toward the end. As I've been watching special features and the occasional episode, I've been contemplating things like "What went right for the character of Julian Bashir that went wrong for the character of Wesley Crusher?" and other fannish notions. I love behind-the-scenes stuff so this has been great fun for me.

It's been said many times before, but it's nice to see a future where humanity figures out the whole civilization thing and solves issues of disease and hunger. I'm a utopian at heart; I feel that it should be possible to get everyone to coexist happily if you can just kick a few close-minded people in the seat of the pants and get them to pay attention to themselves and to the world. I know, in my realist's ego, that people are too stuck in their own narrow reality tunnels to even agree on what utopia is, let along create it, but my intuition says otherwise, and it may be because Trek has defined my idea of the future.

My favorite people on Trek are the outsiders, the Stranger in a Strange Land types - Spock, Data, and Odo. Alienation sums up how I relate to most human beings, so naturally I identify with the aliens, and appreciate that they are given their place in Trek and allowed to be weird, free of judgment. And when they face some kind of threat, or discrimination, or accusation of inanimacy, their friends stand up for them. Friends who are more normal but no less open-minded.

Probably the only scifi show that strikes closer to my heart is Doctor Who, but I'll save that for another time.

Ps. Various dictionaries, via Google, are telling me that "inanimacy" is not a word, but I don't like the sound of "inanimateness."