One Man’s Year In the Final Frontier
William Lengeman terms himself a casual fan of the first Star Trek series. So what made him decide to watch all Star Trek’s TV episodes and all the movies in a single year? In this guest post for SFUniverse, William asks himself that same question. You can touch base with William and see if he’s driven himself crazy yet at www.mystartrekyear.com.
It occurred to me - it was just a couple days ago - that I’ve set a rather enormous task for myself. Not that I didn’t realize that last month, when I began my quest - to watch every Star Trek TV episode (about 730 of them) and every Star Trek movie (11) and to do it all in one year. The knowledge that I was about 80 episodes along was small comfort. That leaves some 650 more - and all the movies - to get through in just over ten months. It all seems more daunting now than it did when I started, odd as that may seem.
What drove me to embark on a project that hovers somewhere between pointless and ridiculous?
Not sure. I guess it just seemed like an interesting thing to do. Kind of like the chicken standing there, contemplating the other side of the road. It’s not like I’m a rabid Star Trek fan who was looking for an excuse to watch all of the episodes again. If the truth be told, until this nonsense began I’d never seen any of the series, aside from the first one, which I used to watch quite
religiously.
What have I learned from my experiences thus far? Up to this point I’ve been using a digital video recorder to capture whatever episodes are currently airing on TV (and excise those time-consuming commercials). That means TOS (TV Land), Voyager (Spike) and Enterprise (Sci-Fi). I have yet to see
The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine, but I’m keeping busy even without them. What I’ve learned so far is pretty much what I sort of knew.
There are a handful of Star Trek episodes, be they TOS, Voyager or Enterprise, that are so awful that they make one want to weep and gnash one’s teeth. Or maybe it’s just me. Then there are a whole bunch that, in my ever so humble opinion, are not bad but neither are they particularly good. At the other end of the spectrum are another handful of episodes that are actually quite good.
Not that I’ve had a lot of opportunities to reflect on the awfulness or brilliance of each episode. I’ve been trying to work through two episodes a night, every night, but I’ve already fallen a bit behind. If I’m to pull this thing off I’ll need to pick up the pace. Which is what I need to do, rather than to keep prattling on about the whole thing. Back to the geek mines.
Tags: , Deep Space Nine, Enterprise, Star Trek, VoyagerRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Star Trek
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