More Survivor plus some Star Trek..

Last night as I drove home from work I listened to a local radio talk show. The hosts were discussing the upcoming season of Survivor in which four racially segregated tribes will square off against one another. The host--in a moment of sheer stupidity--said "it was just about the most despicable thing he's ever heard of".

Moron. Idiot. It a @#$%! TV show, for heavens sake. This is the kind of over-the-top nonsense the media--and in this case--television viewers are engaging in with what should be a non-issue. I might add there is some inconsistency here from folks critical of CBS for this move. Ever watch a television comedy over, say, the last thirty years? Ever notice how many of those half-hour sitcoms are mixed racially?

Not so many, huh?

So I ask what the Hell is the big deal and why is this any different?

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When I was fifteen, I started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I became a huge fan of the entire Trek universe from the classic series to The Next Generation and even on up through Voyager and Enterprise. I rarely missed an episode, I worshipped Spock and even recorded over four hundred--four hundred!--episodes of Star Trek.

I was obsessed with it.

I was an idiot. Star Trek is truly an awful concept set up in an awful universe with awful characters and horrendous storylines. With the exception of three or four seasons of Deep Space Nine, Star Trek is completely unwatchable to me now. How could I have been so foolish as to get sucked in to the idiocy that is Trek? Why couldn't I see the destrutive moral relativism and backward socialist values shown on The Next Generation back then? How could I have stomached the anti-capitalism (re: anti-freedom) screed so prevalent on Deep Space Nine? What about the silly techno-babble and pseudo-science? I'm actually nauseated by the fact that I used to love Trek.

Do you know what showed me the light? It wasn't my conversion to conservatism that saved me (I was still in denial even then), it was real science fiction that saved me. It was shows like Lost and Babylon 5 and Firefly and, especially, the new Battlestar Galactica that showed me the light. After watching the first few episodes of Galactica, I suddenly realized how infantile, how juvenile Star Trek really was. I mean, Galactica is real. Not true, mind you, because its obviously a science fiction show. But real in the sense that this is how real people act. This is how real people handle impossible circumstances. This is what people would really be like in the future. Same thing goes for Firefly and Babylon 5. It's no coincidence that Ronald D. Moore, Galactica's producer, created the only watchable trek series in Deep Space Nine. Now free of the ridiculous restraints of the Star Trek universe, Moore has made what is possibly the best science fiction television series ever. His ideas are challenging. He takes on modern issues in a real way, not a superficial, cowardly way like Trek almost always has done.

You want controversial issues handled intelligently? Galactica tackles abortion and comes to the conclusion--surprising for television--that because of humanity's dire circumstances, abortion makes little sense and is thusly outlawed. They're saying, yeah, when things are going great and our society is in no danger of becoming extinct, we can afford liberal silliness. But when the crap hits the can and you're out of toilet paper, only good ol' pragmatic classic conservatism will save the day. Meanwhile Trek's take is stunningly stupid. The crew of the Enterprise finds out that a bunch of colonists have secretly and without permission cloned them (the crew) and what do they do? They simply and stupidly murder the fully grown clones!

That's just one example.

So, to sum up this, uh, rant: Galactica good. Star Trek bad.

Go blacks!