All of the Star Treks

Last week I finally hit a goal I first set for myself back in 2006, when I watched the final episode of Star Trek: Voyager. That means that I've now watched almost all Trek, with the exception of Short Treks and the Section 31 movie - which I suppose means my title for this post is somewhat misleading, but bear with me.

When I decided that watching every Trek show and movie was a worthwhile goal (yes, I know, I know), we were a couple of years off from the end of Enterprise, which was the last, somewhat labored gasp of what I like to call Trek's imperial phase: that period from 1987 to about 2004 that saw the launch of The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager and Enterprise, as well as four movies starring the TNG cast. Not only did Trek finally get a measure of critical and ratings recognition, but every one of those shows lasted longer than the Original Series (and Enterprise was the first Trek show to be cancelled since TOS).

When I made that goal, I'd only seen a few episodes of TOS here and there, none of the Animated Series, large parts of TNG but never in any systematic way, seasons 3-6 of DS9, and parts of the first two seasons of Voyager. I'd also seen all 6 of the original cast movies and three of the four TNG movies (Nemesis might not have come out yet). The Kelvin Timeline movies hadn't come out yet, and we were still more than a decade away from new Trek TV shows.

A big part of my decision to try to watch all Trek was that I'd just started a new job after graduating from journalism school, and I'd made a friend at work who was just as into Trek and all the other 90s SF shows that I'd loved. My new friend Paul lent me DVD box sets of Deep Space 9, Babylon 5 and the X-Files (as well as the West Wing), and when I discovered that someone in my building was stealing my mailed-in DVDs of DS9, Paul graciously allowed me to send them to his place and then brought them with him to work.

(No lie: this incident led me to rule out subsequent flatshares if they didn't have a personal letterbox in the front door, for fear of my rental DVDs getting nicked again)

Another coworker helped me catch up with a couple more seasons of TNG and the first two seasons of Voyager, and other shows I caught bit by bit, by renting from Sofa Cinema, which was the UK version of Netflix back then. But I wasn't very focused on my goal in those days: I watched all of TNG and Enterprise, but my attempts to watch TOS, DS9 and Voyager petered out - in part because TOS is quite slow and uneven, and Voyager takes a while to get better, if not ever properly good. I can't remember why I lost the thread of DS9 at that time, but on that attempt I only managed to get to the end of Season 4.

One thing that helped me stay focused on the TOS watch was the Mission Log podcast, which I've spoken about here. I remember seeing their first episode pop up on the Nerdist Podcast Network in 2012, so I listened to it eagerly even though I hadn't watched the Cage (TOS's first pilot). By 2013 I was watching more of season 1 of TOS and dutifully listening to Mission Log after each episode - but I took so long with it that in the interim I moved to the US and had to switch my DVD and streaming queue over to Netflix.

Now, I was a partisan of Netflix's DVD rental service up until the end, but I have to admit that once I was able to stream Netflix on a TV (first through the smart TV itself, then through an Amazon Fire TV and finally through Apple TV), it made it easier to keep up with Trek shows. I also determined that I was taking too long with too many shows - I'd finish a season of something, jump to another show entirely, and then by the time I went back to the first show I'd forgotten what I'd already seen of it.

So with that in mind, I finally decided to polish off DS9, all in one go. I took a few months, but it was the only show I was watching, and it was so good that I didn't feel the need to check out other shows in that time.

(I suspect that Kids These Days might have more trouble conceiving of a world with only one streaming service, Netflix, than of a world where Netflix mailed you DVDs)

With the end of DS9, I decided it was finally time to tackle Voyager, but I didn't do it in a very methodical way. It's so long ago now that I can't remember when I started it, but I must have given it a proper try after 2018, because that's when I worked with another colleague who also loved Trek, and assured me that Voyager picked up after Kes left and Seven of Nine joined the cast.

Getting a girlfriend put a little kibosh on the Voyager watch-through, especially because we were effectively living together during the pandemic and she didn't like Trek (she liked Star Wars, though). The other thing that slowed me down was Voyager's move from Netflix to Paramount Plus, along with the rest of the shows. I subsequently signed up for Paramount, and when I broke up with the GF, I had more time to watch whatever I wanted. I duly resumed Voyager, reserving it for lunch on Sundays.

That all still took years, of course. I finished season 7 of Voyager in June of 2025, and determined that I'd finished season 6 in June of 2024, with a similar amount of time since I finished season 5. It doesn't help that Voyager is still, for me, the weakest of the pre-2017 Trek shows - making it my only show, seven days a week, is probably more than I could handle.

And of course, yes, it took me so long to watch all these shows that Trek underwent a renaissance in the interim (two of them, technically). It's notable that in the time it's taken me to watch all of Voyager, I've also watched all 5 seasons of Discovery, 3 of Picard, 5 of Lower Decks, 2 of Prodigy, and the 2 so far of Strange New Worlds. 

So what does all this Trek amount to? I've watched the good (large chunks of TNG, almost all of DS9, large bits of TOS, Lower Decks and SNW), and I've watched the less entertaining (Voyager, Enterprise, Disco, those other bits of TOS and TNG). I've even watched TAS, which looks pretty abysmal but features the odd grown-up storyline, like a young Spock mercy killing his beloved pet to spare it a painful death, and the Devil telling children that they shouldn't let authority figures tell them who to be friends with. I'm not even joking!

My favorite period of Trek remains the imperial phase, specifically season 3 of TNG to the end of DS9. A lot of modern Trek is very good, but even the best of it sometimes feels too beholden to the past, as if they're worried that viewers won't like shows if they don't call back to every minute detail from the last 60 years of shows. This nostalgia works better on Lower Decks, which subjects every era of Trek to this treatment, and mines all that continuity for good-natured laughs; and while I love SNW, it sometimes feels too beholden to fan service as well. But it's still miles better than Star Trek Into Darkness, the second JJ Abrams-helmed Kelvin Timeline film, which does... not a great job of revisiting The Wrath of Khan.

And unfortunately, even when Trek does try to break free of the past, it feels very self-conscious. Look, Discovery is, hands down, my least favorite Trek, but I applaud it for making a clean break with the past at the end of season 2 and jumping forward over 900 years, so that it's nominally not beholden even to the TNG era. And yet, the show still fails to hold my attention as much as I'd like - its attempts to discuss hot-button social issues feel inorganic and labored, we never learn enough about the non-Michael Burnham characters to really like them, and the plots just don't feel that urgent. Even Prodigy, which grew into a fine show by the end of season 1, sometimes feels like it's laboring under the burden of showing that it's a Trek show.

This isn't to say that 90s Trek is perfect. Seasons 1 and 2 of TNG are absolutely terrible, with only one episode of note (Measure of a Man) to redeem them. DS9 can be slow at the start, and even up to the final season isn't completely immune from subjecting to us to some duff episodes. And for a supposed showcase of futuristic values, 90s Trek can be pretty disappointingly regressive: early TNG episodes like Code of Honor are rightly held up as grossly racist, while Harry Kim, Voyager's Asian cast member (the first since TOS's Sulu), always seems to get belittled and forgotten compared with the boorish white character, Tom Paris.

But the best summation I've heard of Trek (I believe from Mission Log) is that it's "competence porn", i.e. a show about smart people working together to solve problems. This squares with Gene Roddenberry's original vision, and his oft-quoted disparagement of "ancient aliens" hokum: he used to say that of course humans built the pyramids, because they're clever and they work hard. This spirit suffuses the best of Trek, and it's why Lower Decks and SNW and Prodigy have landed the best for me among the most recent entries.

It's worth noting that I've finished Voyager at an odd time for Trek in general. We're only a few weeks off from the premiere of SNW's third season, but Paramount has also announced that the show will be ending with season 5, which will be an abbreviated 6 episodes, rather than SNW's usual 10. Given the long lead times for the show, that could take a while yet, but it means that Trek is going from having 5 series on the air to just one, the Starfleet Academy show that's meant to emerge at some point.

Trek hasn't been immune to the toxic fandom that plagues other nerd-world properties, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars. It's also suffered, in my opinion, from over-production on the TV shows, meaning that Paramount had to cancel them all to save money as it looks for a buyer; that over-production, in turn, has meant that the Trek creative teams relied too much on visual effects and action scenes, and not always enough on the interpersonal relationships among the members of each ensemble cast that made Trek so good (at least in the 80s and 90s).

I want Academy to do well, but I also kind of wonder if it wouldn't be good for Trek to have a little break again for a year or two. It'd be nice to see it come back with something important to say, rather than always trying to recapture the magic of TOS - a quest that goes back all the way to 1995, when Voyager launched. My friend Paul, the one who lent me those DS9 and X-Files and Babylon 5 DVDs almost 20 years ago, hasn't really warmed to the latest generations of Trek, because he'd like to see another time jump like the one between TOS and TNG - one where there are reminders of the past, but where the shows aren't in thrall to it.

I'd like to see that new, third generation myself. And I'd like it to bring the best of both worlds with it: the actual recognition of non-white, non-male, non-hetero characters that New Trek does so well, with the episodic but still interconnected storytelling that Old Trek did nicely.

And if it goes away for another long period, well: today I restarted Enterprise. As long as it's available somewhere on streaming, we'll always have Trek to inspire us.

RIP Brian Wilson

Usually I'm a little quicker at getting these obituary posts up, but a number of things got in the way, and I also found myself having to consider what I could say about Brian Wilson or about The Beach Boys in general. I'm not that big of a fan: my direct experience is with Pet Sounds, as well as some of the songs that have filtered through into the wider culture, like the early surf-rock songs or Kokomo. 

I'm also aware of Brian Wilson's influence on other artists, REM being a prime example. In their singles collection, In Time, several members of REM talk about how their love for Pet Sounds and later Brian Wilson work influenced songs like At My Most Beautiful.

I'll also be blunt: for the longest time I associated liking The Beach Boys with a certain type of middle-of-the-road white dude. I then met a super-racist white dude in college who was into them, which colored my opinion of the band. It wasn't until I got into the Beatles that I learned about how influential Pet Sounds and other Brian Wilson works were on them. And it helped that a friend of mine, who was also into the Beatles, could paint a better picture of The Beach Boys (hi, Matt!).

So a couple of years later, spurred by those experiences and by reading panegyrics about it on Pitchfork, I picked up Pet Sounds. I'll say that it's not my favorite album of all time, but it's a good listen - my favorite is Sloop John B, but there's a certain spirit pervading the entire album, from the first note of Wouldn't It Be Nice to the sonic landscape at the end of Caroline, No.

From there I heard about the lost album, Smile, but I never got as far as that, even when Brian Wilson came out of seclusion in 2004 to release something approximating what he'd envisaged the original album to be. I got more traction with Surf's Up, which is another step in that darker, more mature direction that Wilson dreamed of when he came up with Pet Sounds.

Reading this piece in the Guardian, it's easy to see why Wilson gets name-checked by so many other artists. In collaboration with Van Dyke Parks and others, he went deeper than the surf-rock style that the band was famous for and pulled in influences from all over American music. Indeed, listening to Parks's album Song Cycle feels like the bits of Surf's Up and Smile that I have heard, while also reflecting folk and classical idioms. BTW I should point out that Van Dyke Parks remains the only artist I've ever met after a gig, and the only one I've ever high-fived, after having asked him whether Aaron Copland really smacked him on the ass. Nice guy.

Anyway, I don't know as much about Brian Wilson's work as I ought to, but I greatly appreciate what I do know. And I think I'll take a break from my British music project to listen to Smile and Surf's Up, because I should know more about them in general.

A Quick One on the No Kings Protests

I went to the protests against Trump's military parade and general agenda this afternoon, because I thought it was important to be part of it, rather than sniping from social media and whatever. I also just wanted to see what it would be like: we've had some protests in Palo Alto and Mountain View and Los Altos in the last couple of years, but never anything too big.

Honestly, I wasn't sure what to expect, but this was by far the biggest protest I've seen in the Peninsula, even if it was pretty small compared to the march against the Iraq War I attended in London back in 2003. It certainly beat the protest I joined briefly in 2017 in response to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, as well as the various protests calling for an end to the war in Gaza more recently. The one protest I've seen lately that was comparable - but still nowhere near as big - was the one at all the Tesla showrooms a couple of months ago, which protested Elon Musk's DOGE activities.

For this one, I went with my dad to stand along a stretch of El Camino in Mountain View, and we were among the hundreds of folks holding flags and signs and eliciting honks of approval (usually) from people driving past. It was all pretty calm, with just about everyone who joined in being pretty chill and good-humored about it. Most of the drivers along El Camino, as I mentioned, were supportive, but one guy did shout something incomprehensible as he drove past, and another guy rode by on his bike in a MAGA hat. But the only organized counter-protest was a couple (literally two) anti-abortion rights protesters across the street from the main group.

This was good, because I was a little worried about agents provocateurs causing fights or looting, or about crazy assholes driving their cars into the crowds. I was also a little apprehensive about my dad and his partner walking around and potentially getting targeted by Nazi thugs, but it looks, as I say, like everyone was pretty chill.

I'll also admit, it was kind of moving to join in with the crowd and see people standing up for constitutionality and rule of law: a friend of mine suggested that the folks protesting down here tend to be self-ingratiating and disingenuous, which is hard to argue with, given how many older white folks there were. But he also appreciated that they were actually out there, whether or not they're in it for the long haul. And notably, while the crowd where I was skewed heavily older and whiter, there was definitely a range of ethnicities and age groups represented.

That was more true as I left the protest and drove into Palo Alto, to see what things were like there. The protesters were still out along El Camino until Los Altos, and then petered out until I got to the Stanford Campus, where the protest had taken route on all four corners of the intersection there. That crowd also seemed to venture further into the heart of Palo Alto, down Embarcadero, which was even more impressive: Palo Alto doesn't really seem like it'd be into the protests, but folks came out.

In terms of what's next, who knows? Things will happen regardless of what a bunch of people in the Peninsula do, but as I say, it's nice that they came out for this. At the very least, it'll give our elected representatives, both in Sacramento and in Washington, an idea that people want them do something about this mess of an administration. Though with the handcuffing of elected officials like Senator Alex Padilla, I think they've gotten the message on their own.