Memories Can’t Wait….

I present to you now a series of text messages between myself and my cousin the high school english teacher…. I was simultaneously delighted and dismayed by these messages….

CHSeT (Cousin High School English Teacher): You would be proud; I used and episode of “Star Trek:TNG” in class!

Me: Next time DS9… more thematic english type elements.

CHSeT: We watched the pilot. Our theme for the year is “what does it mean to be human” and we are doing a unit on confilict. What better episode then “Q” putting humanity on trial?

CHSeT: IDK what’s sadder though, that some didn’t like it. Or that many didn’t understand it!

Me: the “BattlestarGalactica” mini series from 2003

Me: I weep for the next generation of students

CHSeT: Was that pun intentional or just a stroke of ironic genius?

Me: Yes.

 

So knowing the audience for this blog, I know that all of you know that the pilot episode was “Encounter at farpoint” and as Renee would say… “the first couple years of TNG are a bit rough”…. In 1987 we were still in the Cold War, little did we know it would be over in 2 years and those early episodes had the same “hope for the future” quality that the orignal Star Trek episodes had… My overriding memory of that episode is one of great underlying tension throughout the episode.   Again overtones of the cold war.

A high school freshman is typically around 14 years old…. which puts them born in 1998 (dear lord I was in college in 1998) high school students today have no concept of the “soviet threat” (not that I did at 14 (which was in 1993, and at that point the cold war was officially over and the major concern was rouge nuclear warheads… my how times haven’t changed)) the boogeyman for todays kids are al-qaeda and sleeper terror cells.  Much diffrent from the supreme soviet threat.

I guess the part that has me most disturbed is TNG marked the start of a mini golden age of sci-fi on TV… Star Trek:TNG/DS9 (and to a much lesser extent Voyager), Babylon 5 (fuck you Curtis, B5 is awesome!), Farscape, Stargate SG:1.  TNG even influenced shows as distant as the new “Battlestar Galactica” (Ronald D. Moore creator and executive producer of the new Battlestar Galactica was a writer for TNG back in the day).  I guess at the end of the day I’m more sad that my beloved sci-fi channel has become the “syfy” channel and now runs shows that are more soap opera then somewhat episodic science fiction…. I’m looking at you ‘Eureka”

I think in the final assessment I can’t fault me cousin for choosing “Encounter at Farpoint” for the course material, but for the record I tend to thing that “Best of both worlds” (parts 1 and 2) are a less obvious and far better example of human conflict and what it means to be human. Mainly because the writing was much better and it has the borg, and honestly who doesn’t like a good borg episode of Star Trek?

Excuse me while I go watch more Dr. Who.