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March 02, 2005

For a Good Cause?

Yesterday, fan site Save Enterprise announced that anonymous donors had pledged $3 million to save the canceled UPN show.

$3 million?!?

Wow. I've avoided speaking about this before now. I am, or was, a huge Star Trek fan. I loved The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. I own every one of the original movies. Star Trek VI is one of my favorite movies, period. But the people behind Star Trek really ran it into the ground. It shouldn't have been cancelled this year. It should have been cancelled six years ago! Voyager was a horrible mess. Enterprise was simply awful. The new season is marginally better. I would much rather watch Battlestar Galactica. Or for that matter Top Model.

To be fair, I'm really down on today's television shows. There isn't much that impresses me. Smallville has been awful this year. But Star Trek has been awful for a long time. Once upon a time, I watched faithfully, nearly every week. But those days are long gone. Today, I watch an occasional episode, but it's like watching a train wreck. There's something in me that wants to see the whole thing implode.

But along comes some very rich Trekkies who want to fund another season. Stupid. Star Trek is a television show. It is written by the people at Paramount. It is filmed and produced by people at Paramount. The actors are hired by Paramount. And it should be paid for by Paramount!

Star Trek wasn't run into the ground by a bad time slot. It didn't lose popularity because the fans had seen too much. It hasn't been cancelled because it's not profitable enough, or Paramount somehow can't pay for it. Star Trek is DEAD, Jim, because the people in charge produced pure junk and expected people to tune in. They kept producing the same show over and over again, for eighteen years straight, and they expected people not to notice. Are the plots for The Next Generation and Enterprise really any different? No, they aren't. And what may have worked brilliantly 18 years ago, well it's stale and boring now.

I know that Trek fans don't want their beloved show cancelled. For many fans, it's all they know. Trek has been on the air in one form or another for as long as some of them can remember. But it's just a TV show, and it's not a very good one at that. The people who ran this idea into the ground do NOT DESERVE $3 million! They don't deserve any donation of any sort. They have made millions, maybe billions, off of Trek fans. They have sold us movie tickets, DVDs, VHS tapes, t-shirts, models, toy figures, Christmas ornaments, and the list goes on. I once owned a set of 10 Star Trek PLATES! And you know what? Some sucker bought them for a few hundred dollars!!!

And even when the product turned bad, fans remained faithful. They kept watching, because it had to turn around... it just had to. But it didn't.

So people like me stopped supporting the product. I went to see Star Trek 10 in the theaters. It was the TNG cast, after all. But it was horrible. Maybe it wasn't the worst ever, but after they threw up ADMIRAL Janeway on the screen, I couldn't take it anymore. That was the very reason I had stopped watching Star Trek. But the powers that be were blissfully unaware of the stinking pile of poo that the "franchise" had become.

And they're still unaware. If we give them $3 million, we're only supporting a show filled with cliched writing, poor acting, and a horrible premise. They don't need $3 million. They don't deserve $3 million.

If you really want to save Star Trek, don't donate $3 million to save Enterprise. Enterprise is the problem, not the solution. Sometimes something has to die to be reborn. It's time to let Star Trek die.

Don't you think you could come up with something BETTER to do with your $3 million dollars. I can think of a lot of things, and they don't involve giving more money to an already well-paid cast and crew. As if Scott Bakula needs our charity.

Posted by March at March 2, 2005 03:09 PM

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