I vividly remember in 1996 one of the cable TV stations in Germany had a basically year-long celebration of “thirty years of Star Trek”, airing all the movies, premiering new seasons of DS9 and airing the first season of Voyager for the first time (Germany was a year behind every season, probably because of dubbing and other licensing terms). I was teenager then, loving everything about Star Trek.
And last year it kinda hit me like a brick that in just three years time (now two) we can celebrate “sixty years of Star Trek”.
Tbf, TOS is “older” in another way too: it comes from ye olden television times when color was still being added, and CGI wasn’t near the point that it had reached by the time of Voyager. So between those two shows a phase shift had occurred in television, whereas between Voyager and now the types of shifts we have seen have been more like moving from TV signals sent out freely over the airways to having to pay 15 different streaming platforms ON TOP OF your ISP, one for each different season of the show as it gets bought & sold & migrates among them:-(. I wonder how kids today can even begin to image purchasing a device and being able to watch something instantly on it without having to pay for a subscription service, plus hack the ROM to try to get rid of ads being added directly onto the device itself:-|.
No, I just started watching Voyager for the first time! This can’t be true.
(In my defense, Voyager writers are as painfully terrible with science concepts in season 1 as I remembered. But this time, I’m gonna hold my nose and get through it, so I can see the stuff everyone loves so much.)
I don’t really watch trek for scientific accuracy
Dude, in the 5th episode of season 1, they encounter an alien species that has been decimated by an infection with a phage (which is a virus that targets bacteria, not animals, but ok). This species’ solution to their problem is to steal organs from other species and graft them into their own bodies. So after two millennia, they have the tech to overcome organ rejection, but can’t figure out how to deal with a virus.
So they steal Neelix’s LUNGS, and he sits in sickbay with no lungs while they have a whole ass conversation about trying a dangerous experimental surgery to give him holographic lungs. They do this, and at the end of the episode, their solution is to transplant one of Kes’s lungs into Neelix, leaving them both with one lung.
The doctor just says, “Don’t worry you’ll get used to it,” and the whole show moves on like none of this ever happened.
Omg. Airing alongside DS9 in the wake of TNG, I can see why I declined to watch this show when it originally aired. The season 1 writing is just so bad. But I’m gonna tough it out this time.
I was a seven-year old kid when the original Star Trek series was brand new on TV. Even then it seemed like something that would become a cult classic, even though it only stuck around about 3 years on TV.
