[CaptainCrunch]

Its really kind of sad when you think about it. Star Trek could be considered a Cultural Icon in a lot of ways.

Starting on cheap wooden sets in the late 60's it redefined television, and gave people in a dire time a hope for the future.

(personally it was all about the green chicks for me)

The original series took a wink at itself and featured a strong and dynamic cast, and no matter what was going on backstage, they seemed to enjoy being in front of the camera.

The original series spawned 6 movies that did well at the box office (even though number 5 stunk like feet), and spawned the Next Generation, a show that I watched but wasn't fond of. It featured more diplomacy then exploration, and seemed to stumble and lose its way as it became the Data and Picard show, as the other characters basically became card board props. But it did create a villian unlike any other villian on T.V., the borg, a cybernetic race that functioned as a collective. What set them aside was the fact that they weren't evil, but singleminded in thier approach to improving life.

The next generation spawned DS9, which I was a fan of because it featured a darker more unstable Federation with flawed people and politics, and they went back to featuring a strong ensemble cast as opposed to featuring one or two characters. But the thing that set it apart for me was that the sets looked lived in, they were grubby, and looked like they barely functioned as opposed to the carpeted new car smell of the next generation.

In the mean time the Next Generation spawned 4 more movies that were absoulutly terrible, sadly missing strong writing and featuring pathetic villians that probably had trouble not zipping thier members into thier flys. Leaving a particular sour note in my mind was the dreck that was Nemisis, a poor execution of a even worse storyline.

DS9 gave way to Voyager, a show that had a good concept and a decent cast, but introduced a new concept to the concept, the hot chick in the tight jumpsuit. Again bad writing and implasible stories gave another body blow to the longest running franchise in T.V., and when they got desparate they gutted the Borg, making them into a tin pot error prone Marx brother society, whos catch phrase instead of being "You will be assimiliated" should have been "We are the Borg, pull some lame ass 4th grade scheme out and we'll fall for it"

Finally we get to enterprise, a show that is handicapped by the fact that people had been oversaturated by Trek, and were expecting to see the same lame time traveling mirror universe, everyone is flawed but us plot lines that had punched out the Trek Universe since NG came on the screen. You could verbally hear groans (or nerds doing something gross) everytime the now canon hot chick in spandex walked onto the screen. In the end, you just couldn't care anymore.

Sadly Enterprise did have something in common with the original series. When the original series was moved to Friday nights because of a scheduling conflict with laugh in Roddenberry threw up his arms and declared it to be the graveyard for bad T.V. shows. its kinda ironic that Enterprise ends its run on a Friday Night.

Whats even more scary is that there is a rumor of a new Star Trek movie being written as we speak, can we expect a return to the bad villians, impossible technical solutions out of nowhere, and stupid subplots revolving around a cast member falling in love with an alien who should not have the same genitalia, or a return to the fun explorations or a limitless universe, featuring a ensemble crew that almost seems to be winking at the camera.

Time will tell, but I'm hoping that they take the negatives of the NG, Voyager, Enterprise and all of the next gen movies and beam it into the Stars.

Wow what a rant