Star Trekkin'

Playing in the background: Really loud frickin' thunder. Eep.

Forgot to mention in all the excitement that Joan and I went to see the new Star Trek movie. I was blown away. I mean really seriously impressed. I wouldn't call myself a Trekkie or a Trekker or whatever they wanna be called these days, but I do like the show. I was a little worried about this whole rebooting of the series thing. Well, we can put those worries to rest. There were tons of in-jokes for the fans, non-fans will still appreciate the wry humor and killer story line, and best of all, we end up with two alternative timelines at the end. So, if you wanna reject the movie entirely and say, "Okay, it couldn't have possibly happened that way," fine; there's a timeline for that. Also, if you wanna say, "Okay, the movie was much cooler than the stuff that went before it, well hey, there' s a timeline for that too. You gotta love time travel movies for that sort of thing.

One minor quibble. If Spock went back in time and gave Scotty his own formula for teleporting to a moving starship in warp drive, does the formula actually exist? I mean, Scotty had to write it in order for Spock to know it to come back in time and tell Scotty about it, but if Scotty didn't know about it in the past, then Spock wouldn't have had it in the future so he couldn't have come back into the past to give it to Scotty and ---never mind. My sister's better at stuff like this than I am.

It should not be a spoiler to mention that the story line is about Spock, and I think it's also pretty well known that Leonard Nimoy shows up as a much older Spock. (Vulcans live a long time, you know. Around 180 years, I think.) Spock's mother and father also show up in the movie. I think they were only in one, maybe two original episodes (Trivia moment! Mark Lenard, the actor who played Sarek, also played a Romulan on an earlier episode!). Howsomever, through fan fiction and subsequent serieses and so forth, the story of Sarek and Amanda has been pretty well told by people other than me. There are entire Web sites and archives dedicated to the Sarek and Amanda story. Brief overview: Vulcan meets human, Vulcan loses human, Vulcan goes through hell and Romulans and Klingons and severe warp displacements and cracks in the space time whatever to get human back, marries her and has a kid. I ought to know; I spent most of high school being regaled with Sarek and Amanda tales by my dead friend, Burt.

That's Burt, short for Roberta. She was a Trekkie, or a Trekker, or whatever they like to be called these days. She could do the dialogue from the original episodes along with the characters (which was a lot of fun on the minor eps, like "A Piece of the Action"). I remember she was not all that happy about STNG but gradually got on board when it turned out to be a pretty good show. She missed Deep Space 9 and Voyager because she died in 1996 of a brain aneurysm. (A what? I dunno. Somebody told me what it was but I've kind of forgotten.) She was about 26, was married and had a kid, Thor, who'd be about 14 now.

The whole time I was watching this movie I was thinking how much Burt would have loved it. I got to thinking, are there movies in heaven? Or am I gonna have to wait until I die and then tell her all about it? Yes, technically I'm talking about the Christian Heaven and since I'm a Buddhist, that may or may not apply. Still, I'd like to think she gets to see the movie, even if she has to do it as, I dunno, a third grader in Beijing or something. You spose humans can be reincarnated as Vulcans? That would be great. And don't tell me Vulcans don't exist. Well, okay, you can tell me that. Just don't tell Burt. She'd beg to differ and probably hit you with a nerve pinch.