> who can only appreciate Star Trek via the T.O.S. years.
I can't blame you for thinking that, who is going to really read and take time to consider what someone on a chat board has to say.
I appreciated good stories and characters. Star Trek was among the best, though it is dated now and out of time. There was a lot of dog episodes of the original series, but there were some really good ones that inspired the imagination.
There were two I remember from other series. One was ... I am going from memory here, ST:TNG
the flute, where Picard was kidnapped off the Enterprise by the space probe of a long dead civilization that was apparently advanced enough to simulate a whole lifetime with them as they died in virtual reality. That was a wonderful story.
On Enterprise there was an episode where some diplomats were being transported by the Enterprise, and they had a person of a third gender, or he/she/it was treated like a third gender by the rest of the society. Trip got to know her and began to help her develop her mentality so that she was not happy with her lot in life, and it led to her demise. That was amazing writing with an amazing plot.
It is these kind of mind stretching stories that I have interest in, not so much the series for the series' sake. For Voyager, or Deep Space 9 and so far for the new one on CBS I have seen nothing that comes close to that.
It is my belief that Star Trek was taken off the air because it was too politically subversive. The idea that a TV show could inspire viewers to stretch their conception of citizenship and human's place in the universe was too threatening to our political status quo, so it was taken off the air. Then when it came back, they just made sure that it was so watered down and meaningless that it was no threat.
An example of the story of Lokai and Bele the aliens who were black on white, but they had to discriminate against the people who were black on the wrong side ... was maybe not the perfect episode, but the idea was formidable, like a lot of the original series. Hope that explains my criticisms of Star Trek better.
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