THE WALKING DEAD's Get-Up-And-Go Done Got Up & Went

On THE WALKING DEAD tonight, a few of the writers came back from their month-long vacation to author up "Go Getters," and while their plotting is still plodding and their filler still fulsome, there is at least some work going into their end of the show for a change. Not in the graveside melodrama moments[1] and certainly not in the insipid "romantic" scenes between Coral and Enid, about which no one could possible care, but this ep engineered, however, clunkily, a substantial change--a power-shift at the Hilltop community. Maggie, who is suffering a problematic pregnancy, has taken over.

The Hilltoppers essentially commissioned the Alexandrians to wipe out the Saviors, which didn't work out as planned. Now, the Saviors are displeased by this. They launch an attack--I suppose one could sort of call it that--in the dead of night. Maggie and Sasha awaken, look out the window and the community's gate is open, a car parked inside with loud musing coming out of it and there are several large bonfires suddenly burning inside the walls. Zombies are pouring through the open gate and this leads to a big zombie-killing action scene in which Maggie acts as a sort of field general. Hey, if she's going to take over, she has to prove she's up for leadership, right? Heaven forbid she be written as a competent leader character all along, so this quality in her didn't have to be established in this crude way. She gets to drive a tractor over the welded-up car. Isn't that sweet?

Staging this scene absent the use of magic--which the Saviors have been known to use--is impossible. The Saviors didn't crash the gate--that would have been heard and the gate would be damaged. They didn't drive up in that car with the music playing either--we hear its sound-system kick in and it's already parked inside the gate. The car is also welded shut and inaccessible, this done so no one can turn off the music, welding that would have to be done in the blink of an eye, after turning on said music. There are four large bonfires, and piling up the material for them would have taken time as well, and the Saviors also locked/sealed the Hilltoppers in their living quarters too![2] Negan's men not only somehow managed to get inside the gate without being seen but spent a substantial amount of time working on this prank inside the compound while no one noticed and then successfully made their retreat before anyone realized anything was happening, presumably teleporting away, as they certainly didn't go through the midst of the zombies pouring through the gate. With an active conflict, no one was on watch to sound an alarm? No one at the gate? No guards making rounds? And while the idea of the music and the bonfires seems to be to draw into the compound a horde of zombies, TWD established last season that zombies don't just come to fire but walk right into it, burning themselves to a crisp, which renders both the Saviors' plan--to unleash these zombies on the population--and the big action scene wherein the Hilltoppers go out and fight off the critters entirely gratuitous and spectacularly idiotic. Just stand back and let them do themselves in. But that wouldn't allow Maggie to prove herself on that tractor with those kewl fires as a background.

The next day, the Saviors show up in force. Well, as much of a force as they've managed so far this season--about 25 people, with some editing trying to make it look like more. Here, I'll give the creators props for at least trying. Negan's lack of a visible force of any real size has been a plot problem throughout the season. At one point, Maggie tries to cheat them up, saying of them, "there are a lot, maybe hundreds." Or maybe not.

The Saviors carry out a retaliatory looting of Hilltop. Gregory, the community's cowardly leader, has Maggie and Sasha hide in a closet. They end up in a different closet than he intended--Jesus correctly anticipates Gregory would spinelessly try to betray our heroines and moves them--but it doesn't make any sense that this ruse works, regardless of the closet. The Saviors are picking the community apart, filling four big panel trucks and a pick-up with booty. They don't look in the closets?

By the end, Maggie is in de facto command and Sasha, who has it in her head to kill Negan, dispatches Jesus to learn the location of the Saviors' main base. Jesus sneaks on to one of the Saviors' trucks and--what a remarkable coincidence!--it happens to be the same one on which Coral has stowed away, himself intending to try to find and kill Negan! Last week saw Rosita asking Eugene to make her a bullet for a gun she'd found. Resistance percolates among the underlings while Rick, their always-inspiring leader, is out trying to find supplies for Negan. With only three eps left before the midseason break--yeah, that much has already gone by--will the remaining writers return from their vacation or will those who came back this week rejoin them? I'm sure everyone is just as excited to learn that answer to that as I!

--j.

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[1] As this is the first ep that returned to Maggie after Glenn's destruction, I'll give the show credit for not spending an inordinate amount of time on teary faces and showing the characters despairingly rehashing what viewers have already seen. That's absolutely S.O.P. with TWD and I'm glad the writers decided not to proceed in that direction.

[2] To get outside, Sasha and Maggie have to climb out through the roof of their trailer, while Jesus and some others had to climb out the second-story window of the big house. How in the world did the Saviors manage this? There are no visible obstructions to the doors. Sasha descends from the roof right in front of one of the trailer doors, Jesus kicks away a zombie that was clawing at the door of another and we get a shot of the door of the main house--there is no obstruction there either. Doors to residences that can't be opened from the inside and to which the Saviors--but not the residents--have keys? Jesus had to climb out that second-story window, though there was a door leading out to the landing there, which we're meant to believe was locked as well. The Saviors scaled the walls in order to somehow lock the second-story door? The entire scenario is impossible without the aid of magic, including a spell to seal the doors.

Email: jriddlecult@gmail.com
Twitter: @jriddlecult

THE WALKING DEAD's Service Without A Smile

So far, the 7th season of THE WALKING DEAD has achieved Mazzara-era levels of filler. The sole substantive plot-point of the opener was a few minutes that should have been covered in the season 6 finale, instead stretched until it burned through an entire episode. Week #2 introduced the Kingdom but most of the running-time was again spent on entirely extraneous material. The third was entirely extraneous; viewers can simply skip the whole affair without having missed a thing. Tonight's installment returned to the show's main cast with a 90-minute episode but if anyone thought the extra half-hour would mean the writers would finally have to actually write something, they haven't been watching TWD long enough. "Service" turned out to be yet another one-line plot: Negan's first visit to the Safe Zone.

When he first appeared, I got a kick out of Jeffrey Dean Morgan and his reveling-in-his-own-ruthlessness rendition of Negan. Unfortunately, it seems the TWD creative team did as well. Apparently so pleased with having found something that actually worked for a change, the writers have managed, in only a few eps, to turn an initially entertaining villain into a one-trick pony who has already worn out his welcome. The Negan Routine: Negan shows up, offers through a smile a way-over-the-top, villainous, mocking monologue in which he seems very entertained with himself, gets in the face of anyone evincing any defiance and threatens them until they back down, repeat. In only three eps in which he's so far appeared, the character has run through this same routine perhaps a dozen times, half of which were in tonight's show. Negan is likely to be a regular cast-member right to the end of this series and he's already a tired cartoon.[*]

It doesn't help matters that all of his men who have been given any sort of attention have behaved in a similar manner. They get in people's faces, posture and act menacing while offending the dignity of their victim but without any of their boss's flair. We've been getting essentially this same scene from them since they first appeared last season. We got it several times last week. We got it several times tonight. TWD has, of course, been chronically recycling itself for a long time now. In the Mazzara era, the show would routinely repeat the same scene over and over again. These eps don't just take things back to those bad ol' days, the repetition here is much more concentrated--not only the same beat but the same moment recycled over and over again in the same ep, ep after ep, while little else is going on

TWD's Idiot Plot problems were again front and center. Rick, knowing Negan and his men are coming to rip them off, has days to prepare but doesn't do the first thing to hide any guns or supplies in advance of the visit; he doesn't have any plan at all. Is Rick an inspiring leader or what?[1] His total capitulation to Negan is also a bit of a narrative hole. Last season, it was implied that Negan has a substantial force but his men proved to be a bunch of dimwits whom Rick and co. easily defeated in every encounter. How lousy at villainy do you have to be to get repeatedly trounced by the zombie apocalypse version of F Troop? Even when Negan finally caught our heroes, he only had maybe 30 or 40 men on hand and talked about the extraordinary resources this constituted. Tonight, Negan turned up with about 20 of them. There's no reason at all why the Alexandrians, who were exceptionally well armed, couldn't wipe them out as well, taking the head of the serpent in the process. Rick spoke of Negan having overwhelming numbers. Such numbers are nowhere in evidence.[2] While Negan's thugs are stealing things, Coral displays his intelligence and experience by drawing a gun on one of them and making threats. As a consequence, Negan decides to cart off all of their guns. And, it turns out, our brilliant heroes keep a complete list of their firearms holdings that the villain can use to make sure he got all of them![**]

Some other items: Michonne is shown practicing with a rifle. She's lousy at it and repeatedly misses the zombie at which she's aiming but manages to accidentally nail a deer in the distant forest! It appears to be throat-shot but obediently lies down and dies right where it was hit, the way real deer do when shot. Negan lieutenant Dwight has apparently cracked the secret of the teleportation abilities so often displayed by TWD's zombies. When he makes off with Daryl's motorcycle, he cranks it, moves out of the immediate frame and vanishes into thin air, the sound of the bike's engine abruptly ceasing and his retreat nowhere in site when the camera angle immediately cuts to show the road on which he allegedly left.

As badly written as this review feels--and sorry, folks, it's been an awful week and I just ain't feelin' it tonight--it's still award-worthy by comparison. Lebeau, if you're out there, you gotta' bring this one home!

--j.

---

[*] UPUDATE (14 Nov., 2016) - While a fan of Morgan's Negan, "mjwm44," one of my readers on the Internet Movie Database Walking Dead board, came up with an apt comparison: "...I admit [TWD] does present Negan rather like the sadist version of a 60's Batman villain."

[1] Father Gabriel, one of the least useful members of the cast, opts to fake Beth's death, digging and filling in a phony grave. Neither he nor anyone else thinks to bury any guns or supplies in that empty grave.

[2] This may be a consequence of budgetary restrictions but seeing as how everything is now premised on it--this allegedly overwhelming force that is nowhere in evidence--it is a problem.

[**] UPDATE (14 Nov., 2016) - Negan's men displayed these same teleportation abilities, along with clairvoyance, in the season 6 finale, when the things they do are entirely impossible absent these superpowers. Perhaps they're more formidable than I give them credit for being.

Email: jriddlecult@gmail.com
Twitter: @jriddlecult

The Cellulite On THE WALKING DEAD

"The Cell," tonight's installment of THE WALKING DEAD, was just another filler episode. It didn't manage to get back to the main cast (again) or the Safe Zone cast (which hasn't appeared at all yet this season) and there was nothing of the Carol/Morgan/Kingdom subplot that was allowed to pointlessly consume last week's ep. Lacking any sort of competent pace or plot progression, it burned through an entire hour with nothing but Daryl as Negan's prisoner, mostly locked in the cell of the title and learning how Negan's people are loyal and fearful of their boss--stuff viewers already knew. Even Negan's trademark sadism was pretty reserved and ho-humm. The second bottle ep in only three eps so far this season, it seemed packed with an unusually high number of commercials, though it always seems that way when nothing is happening.

There isn't much to say about the ep beyond that. At one point, the door to Daryl's cell is left unlocked, he discovers it and having apparently never seen the 10,000 or so previous tv shows and movies in which this same device has been used, he goes right out and tries to escape. It goes about as well for him as it did for the previous 9,999 who tried. In a development I'm sure left every viewer speechless with shock, Daryl ultimately refused to give in to Negan. Nothing that happened here progressed the story so much as an inch. The unbreakable hero Daryl remains the unbreakable hero Daryl (and only has two lines of dialogue in the entire ep centered on him), Dwight remains the conflicted villain's henchman, we get hit over the head again with the fact that Negan rules by fear--is there any chance anyone, even TWD's fans, isn't clear on that one yet? While Daryl is trapped in his cell, Negan's men pipe in the same loud pop tune in an endless loop to torment him. It inadvertently offers a perfect metaphor for this ep, which viewers could freely skip without having missed a thing.

Next week promises a return to the main cast for a 90-minute ep, meaning all the material a competently edited series would have intercut with the previous two eps is going to be jammed into one overly long one in which, in all likelihood, very little will happen.

--j.

Email: jriddlecult@gmail.com
Twitter: @jriddlecult

Jedi Nightmares

The Power of the Dark Side Dept.

THE WALKING DEAD's Well Runneth Dry

The most interesting reaction to last week's season 7 premiere of THE WALKING DEAD is the absolute horror and disgust with which many fans of the series greeted the violence and sadism of the episode. So extreme was this in some quarters that people were declaring they'd never watch it again because of what they'd just seen. Arnold Blumberg, who does the excellent "Doctor of the Dead" podcast, announced that he would no longer be reviewing TWD on his show.[1] I'm a horror fan from way back. My experience with the genre comes primarily from literature and film, as well as my own often-fertile imagination--sources featuring much more extreme content. I'm rarely bothered by the level of brutality allowed within the fairly restrictive constraints of television. With TWD, I even tend to welcome violence, as I did last week, because it at least means something is happening, on a show on which that's rarely ever the case. Anecdotally, these stronger reactions--people saying they're going to quit the series over it or are ready to do so--are a minority but there was a lot of this kind of talk. The "why" of this is the part that's interesting.

One of the ways tv TWD alters the comic source material beyond recognition is in watering down any sort of unpleasant content. I've written about it here for years. The series isn't aimed at horror fans; it's essentially a soap opera aimed at a general middle American audience, with most of the horror and survival elements--the core of the comic story--toned down to virtual non-existence. Last week's killing of Glenn, on the other hand, was lifted straight out of the comic, a virtual panel-by-panel reproduction with none of the usual attenuation. The violence in the comic is off the scale compared to anything in the tv series. By the time the comics got around to killing Glenn, even our heroes had committed these sorts of atrocities. When, for example, they caught the cannibals, the ones who formed the basis for the tv series' Terminus group, they didn't cleanly dispose of them as they did on the show; they spent the rest of that night slowly torturing them to death in the same ways those cannibals had tortured their own victims. When the Governor fell into Michonne's clutches, she'd tortured him for an extended period, scooping out one of his eyeballs with a spoon, chopping off one of his arms, pulling out his fingernails, nailing his cock and balls to the floor and generally getting Medieval on his ass with a wide assortment of creatively-employed household tools. Michonne was extracting revenge on the Governor for having sexually tortured her on a recurring basis but that material was also removed from the tv show, where, in the comparable scene to those sexual assaults, GINO merely demanded Maggie remove her shirt in his presence. Conforming to the usual twisted American prejudices, things having to do with sexuality are a strict no-no on TWD, things that blend it with violence particularly so. While, in the last two eps, the series duplicated Negan's comic dialogue almost word-for-word (minus his frequent "fuck"s), it left all of his profuse sexual taunting on the cutting-room floor. The reaction against the violence is both an indication of just how far from the book (and from what it should have been) the series has gone and a commentary on the audience it has drawn.

Part of the reason for the upset is obvious: Glenn was a beloved character. Shows can't just go around destroying characters who have developed a fan base--general television audiences won't stand for it. Whenever the TWD writers make the decision to exterminate one of their long-established principals, they almost always spend some time demonizing that character to the point that viewers are glad to see him go. Glenn's death was telegraphed well in advance--something else the writers always do--but the writers never turned him into an unlikable asshole. Barely mentioned in any of the angry commentary about last week's ep is the fact that Abraham too was killed. Part of that is because the writers showed him behaving abominably toward Rosita, his longtime girlfriend and a beloved character whom he abandoned on a whim for another woman.

It's also a matter of context. Creatively speaking, TWD is now in its third stuck-around-way-too-long season. This far down the road, the series' bad habits have really been weighing on the audience. The writing openly insults viewers, the series' repetitiousness is becoming mind-numbing, its becoming more and more dependent upon shock tactics and cheap stunts--it just isn't offering its audience much to counter its negatives. And now, on top of this, it poured on the sort of violence and sadism that a lot of its general-audience viewers find actively distasteful.

Another factor is no doubt the long delay between last season and this. Viewers waded through a terrible season last year just to get to the finale, when Negan was to finally arrive and run riot. And then Negan showed up and didn't. This robbed that moment of any dramatic weight, adding to the impression that the series was in decline. Compounding this, last week's ep appeared six months after the previous one and was a bottle episode that delivered nothing except that violence and sadism, offering nothing else to viewers who are put off by such content.

I don't know how substantial any damage to the viewership wrought by this may prove to be[2] or if "The Well," tonight's installment, will be able to affect any sort of repair job. It repeats another of TWD's bad habits, entirely abandoning the main storyline in order to burn through an ep with a b-plot. It introduces "King" Ezekiel, an amusing character from the comic,[3] and his "Kingdom." It's much lighter in tone.

TWD's magical healing makes a return here. At the end of the previous season, Carol was in a really bad way. Some of the Kingdomites find her and Morgan, take them back to their community and she sleeps for two days. Upon awakening, Morgan suggests she'll be sufficiently recovered to allow her to leave in maybe a week. On TWD, it seems, it only takes 9 days to recover from three gunshot wounds. And then Carol is on her feet and ready to leave in what appears to be less time than even that.

TWD simply doesn't do character development. Radical character changes are, instead, suddenly imposed by the writers, depending on what story they want to write, with no organic transition. Last season, the writing staff assassinated Carol, suddenly making the great uber-confident and uber-capable woman they'd established into a violence-averse weakling who just wants to go off by herself and... something. It never made any sense, which makes this ep's effort to milk it, by having Ezekiel try to restore some of... her will to live, I guess?... fall entirely flat, dramatically speaking. Carol can't be written to hold up her end of any such conversation. She can't enunciate what's on her mind because there's nothing on it--her present state of mind is an arbitrary imposition by the writers. She doesn't need Ezekiel's melodramatic speeches about life and hope. She just needed the writers to leave her alone.

"The Well" seems like a needlessly dull way to introduce the Kingdom. The ep's only other significant development was in establishing that this community, too, is under the thumb of Negan and his thugs. It isn't a terrible ep, certainly not by TWD standards. It's just one that doesn't offer much. It doesn't have characters being beaten to death,[4] so perhaps those who were whining about last week will find it soothes their anatomy.

--j.

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[1] Blumberg intends to fully explain his decision in his next podcast. Meanwhile, he's just released a good installment dealing with the great zombie flicks of 1985.

[2] After many TWD fans were very mouthy at the end of last season about how they were done with the show, last week's season opener drew the second-biggest rating in the series' history. Shockingly, it would seem many TWD viewers are entirely full of shit. I do expect a pretty big big drop-off for tonight's installment though.

[3] Ezekiel is here played by an actor much younger than the character in the comic.

[4] Unless you want to count the brutal massacre of a Bob Dylan classic that happens at one point.

Email: jriddlecult@gmail.com
Twitter: @jriddlecult

The Day Will Come When THE WALKING DEAD Won't Be

THE WALKING DEAD kicked off its 7th season tonight with what should have been the ep that ended the last. Instead, season 6 wrapped on a pretty dire 90-minute snoozefest absent any real pay-off. Tonight, "There Will Come A Day When You Won't Be" turned out to be pretty dull too, but at least it brought a little diverting violence and sadism to the party.

This was essentially an episode-long continuation of Negan's already-long monologue from the end of that previous installment--before its last few minutes, there probably weren't four lines of dialogue by anyone else. It was a bottle episode--mostly just Negan and Rick in two locations, with everyone else as merely window-dressing. Such eps are done by tv series for budgetary reasons. Typically substandard by design, they're usually tucked away somewhere in the middle of a season where they'll draw the least amount of grumbling from viewers. I've never seen a show open a season with one. That seems a fairly bizarre innovation.

It's tempting to simply dismiss this one as just another example of TWD's writers stretching minimum effort to the maximum running time but the point of the ep--to show the psychological breaking of Rick--could have justified this if it was particularly interesting. The reason it isn't--and the reason that particular bit of business could probably never work with TWD now--is that we've already seen Rick psychologically broken. And seen it. And seen it. Not only has it already been done to death, it always brings out the most unbearable variant Rick, the sniveling, stuttering, glassy-eyed pussy, the one you just wish someone would put our of your misery. TWD has been doing little more than recycling itself for a while now. This doesn't just recycle an old beat, it's recycling a particularly bad one. Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan makes for a great villain but it's all wasted when this is the point.

I'm interested to see how this ep will do in the ratings. Its big (and, in fact, sole) draw--finding out who Negan killed--is also the thing that seemed to alienate a particularly loud contingent of its fanbase, who, when Negan's victim wasn't revealed last season, took to their machines to howl their rage across the digital moors and swear they were done with TWD forever. The show threw a bit of a curveball tonight by killing both of the characters whose deaths it telegraphed last season, rather than allowing one of them to be a red herring. By delaying the reveal on who was murdered for nearly six months, it robbed those deaths of any dramatic impact they would have had if the killings had been shown at the end of last season when people were watching it week after week. I noted this at the time, as did Lebeau over at Le Blog, but it isn't as if this wasn't really obvious to everyone except TWD's writers. In this ep, the victims didn't get to do anything, barely got to say anything--Negan just walks up to them, after six months, and beats them to death. I've long expressed my contempt for a series that uses as one of its main draws the question of who will be killed next. Using this as a faux-cliffhanger was, I suppose, the next logical step in this effort to milk the deaths. Wouldn't it be great to instead have a TWD that had as its draw, say, great storytelling?

But that's a repeat beat of my own and TWD ain't listenin' anyhow.

--j.

Email: jriddlecult@gmail.com
Twitter: @jriddlecult

STAR TREK & I: Some Personal Reminiscences

Golden Anniversary Dept. - Fifty years ago today--8 Sept. 1966--STAR TREK made its television debut on NBC. A poorly chosen premiere ep ("The Man Trap"), it nevertheless went on to draw a large and loyal fanbase that unfortunately never really showed up in its ratings. After three seasons, it was canceled, sold into syndication and then rose to become the most successful property ever launched on television, eventually spawning a merchandising empire, an animated series, a string of hit movies that go on to this day and four mostly shitty (but mostly successful) sequel series.

Unlike so many "successful" projects, STAR TREK earned its success. It really is one of the greatest things ever produced for television and that's why it has endured.[1] It certainly became one of my favorite things. It has been with me from the beginning. The show was a big success in syndication before I was born and it occupies some of my earliest conscious memories. Somewhere, I have a spiral-bound notebook with drawings I made when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old; one of them is my crude--ever so crude--rendition of a critter that appeared in "The Galileo Seven" (the 16th episode of the series, for any cultural illiterates out there). I remember my delight as the movies began to appear. One of the ads for STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE had Spock blasted with some sort of energy bolt--I was very keen on stuff like that at that age and the image stuck with me. I only started to see the flicks on home video some years later. I saw THE WRATH OF KHAN, which is the single-best Trek adventure ever created, before I saw THE MOTION PICTURE, which wasn't.

When I was young, there was a local Chattanooga UHF channel, WDSI 61, that had been broadcasting religious programming for some years and basically wasn't worth the trouble of all that cranking of the dial necessary to tune it in. But someone there was--or became--a Trekkie and when he wanted WDSI to become an actual tv channel instead of an obnoxious blot on the airwaves, he picked up STAR TREK. More than that, WDSI made the show a sort of flagship for a few years--ran it all the time, ran marathons on various occasions and eventually began sponsoring a Star Trek convention in Chattanooga that, in a run of years, brought George Takei, Walter Koenig, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols and Jimmy Doohan to town. I never got to go to any of them, damn it.

When STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION came around, good ol' channel 61 was the one to carry it. I was probably more excited for that show than I'd been for any of the movies before it. On the night it debuted--a Saturday--I remember the hours leading up to it seeming like days. I killed the time reading "The Star Trek Compendium"--a favorite of mine at the time--or just pacing around. Yeah, I had it bad. Then finally, it appeared! And it turned out to be a godawful trainwreck, only my second major experience with the phenomenon people describe as "seeing my childhood raped." That particular case of pedophilia went on for years and the less said about it the better.

And anyway, we still had the movies when we needed an injection of real Trek. Even William Shatner's significantly less-than-spectacular STAR TREK V (which continued the tradition of subpar odd-numbered Trek flicks) was eons better than anything TNG ever did. But all good things must come to an end and the noble starship Enterprise finally reached its terminus on the 25th anniversary of the series with the release of the 6th feature, THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. The cast wrapped it up with one more solid adventure and flew off into the void.

The movies that came later were strictly Trek-in-name-only. The TNG cast took them over, every new installment seemed to be competing with the last for the title of Worst Movie To Bear The Trek Name and by the end, the audience had dwindled to nothing and the run was killed, providing TNG with its one noteworthy contribution to the franchise.

When the current Trek run was percolating, I was vaguely intrigued by the idea of returning to the original characters in their younger days. Harve Bennett had come up with the idea for STAR TREK IV but it hadn't been used at the time. I'd grown older and more cynical about such things. It's a huge-budget studio tentpole picture--I figured they'd just fuck it up, the way they do everything else. I didn't follow its production or even pay it much mind, really. I went to see it one night with a friend shortly after it debuted because it was the most interesting thing showing at the time. And going into it practically blind, I had one of the two best theatrical film experiences of my life. Involving a movie, anyway. J.J. Abrams got a lot of criticism later, assertions that he'd reduced Trek to a simple action movie, that he'd eschewed too much of the intellectual content and so forth and I even agree with a lot of that (and other) criticism but goddamn, that was a GREAT movie! It got into my head and my heart and down deep into all that Star Trek stuff that had been encoded on my DNA from my earliest memories and brought it all rushing back to the surface, lubing all the rough edges I'd accumulated with age and overawing my cynicism with pure joy. I was bouncing in my seat through the whole thing and by the end, when the film did the riff on the closing credits of the show, I was cheering and nearly in tears. I'd gotten my Trek back--something I thought had ended years earlier and that I never even dreamed I'd see again.

And maybe I never will again. The follow-up to that picture was entertaining enough but not special--certainly not in that way. I haven't even seen the third one yet. There's a new tv series on the way too; I haven't mustered any real interest in it. Maybe it or other Trek projects will find success.

Whether they make it or fizzle out and die though, the original is still out there, the qualities that have made it endure still shine, its themes still resonate and even as its "strange new worlds" have become familiar to us, it goes on. That five-year mission became a 50-year one today and it goes on. STAR TREK will outlast those who created it. It will outlast me and everyone else reading these words today. Its final frontier isn't to be found in the stars, it's in immortality. May this Enterprise achieve that--if anything spawned on television has ever earned that, it certainly has.

--j.

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[1] I disagree with a lot of its fans on the matter of why it's so great and maybe that disagreement would be worth some time to outline but I've left it aside here. Trek touches different people in different ways. That's part of why it does endure.

Email: jriddlecult@gmail.com
Twitter: @jriddlecult