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May 16, 2005
They Lost Me At NextGen
Lileks is made of sterner stuff. Actually, NextGen did have some good bits once it got past the need to remake a bunch of TOS episodes, and DS9 had some quite good moments too. It's just that the good moments were buried in a mass of dreck: the individual stories were largely uninteresting; the series premises were largely a load of liberal tripe; the external events driving the story arcs (to the extent they existed) were forced and artificial and the characters were flat and meaningless. Ironically, the acting was the best thing about NextGen, and I can't find a single good thing to say about Voyager. I only watched the first episode of Enterprise.
The original Star Trek, and many of the movies it spawned, were fantastic. Not because of their effects or their "relevance", but because the characters were worth caring about, and the stories brought up ideas that are worth thinking about. TOS was a very human show, and the later series were at best homages to the original, and frequently only parodies.
Good speculative fiction on TV can be done: Babylon 5, Farscape, Space: Above and Beyond, Dr. Who, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, the original Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica. But for me Star Trek lost its vitality not with the recent end of Enterprise, but with Star Trek VI, which as far as I can tell was the last useful thing that Roddenberry's creation ever produced.
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