Star Trudge

[emo_snal]

The Original Series   Hark! Last night I achieved a cultural accomplishment 66 hours in the making! I have watched the entire Star Trek Original Series. As a fan of science fiction I'd felt for awhile like it was something I should do. I fondly remember watching The Next Generation in the 90s. Since that time I haven't been as fond of the later

Comments

[lookfar]

Oh, man, I have so many Old Lady Comments about your run through the original Star Trek. Yes indeedy, it is slow moving. But please picture me, age 10, throwing meself down on the living room carpet in my PJs, Thursday night at 7, saying "Shut up, shut up!" to my younger brothers, and watching the series as it came out. I'd never seen anything so...world building, on TV before. Probably the moral dilemmas and human chauvanism were about right for a kid that age - it certainly wasn't complex, in that sense - but mostly it was the sense of entering into a different place and time. Also, dude, that shaking-the-camera-and-throwing-styrofoam-boulders was state of the art storytelling at the time. It looked fine to us.

But you've got Spock all wrong! He was the desire of every neurotic middle school girl because he suffered with his half-human, half-Vulcan weirdness, his inability to fit in or to speak his feelings. I mean, basically, he WAS a middle schooler. Every time he was, you know, fighting his human side that wanted to show

[emo_snal]

Haha oh maybe I should have stated that I can appreciate compared to it's contemporary alternatives I'm sure it was great, I mean neither I nor anyone else is about to rewatch whatever it was competing against so there you go. I can't fault them for their styrofoam boulders and actually marveled at the effects sometimes knowing what they were working with (they did a surprisingly good ship flying through space for not having CGI and all that!)

Ahh yes Spock does have that going for him. But I still think it's a testament to his acting. Another actor could easily have made that character not even appeal to high school girls.

Interesting to know about Shatner being a jackass, the chest-puffingly way he comes across on screen makes that really not surprising!

[lookfar]

Also, your travel writer book - I once read the famous The Ginger Man by JP Donlevy, and although I understood that he was meant to be an unlikeable character, I found him so unlikeable that I couldn't stand the book. So, there's that.

[emo_snal]

Oh which reminds me another book I'd meant to write a review on, focusing on the theme of unlikeable characters is David Donachie's John Pearce series, which is another one of those series following characters in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars a la Master and Commander and Horatio Hornblower ... but what's interesting in this case is I found the protagonist very unlikable but I don't think they author actually intended that. After careful analysis and consideration of what made it clear the author didn't realize how unlikeable his character was I hit on the fact that in the series all the other characters who are good like his character and only bad evil characters dislike his character. I think if he had known his character was in fact bad and dislikable himself he wouldn't have it quite like that. Generlaly his protagonist is an argumentative asshole. He wrote him to be likably "rebellious" but he comes it too strong and just seems disagreeable

[lookfar]

Honor, gentlemen, was a big deal!