The year is 1987. I am five years old. My little mind is obsessed with the things little girls of the 80s loved: Rainbow Brite, Care Bears, and Jem and the Holograms. Surprisingly, I am also obsessed with Star Trek: The Next Generation. What made me obsessed with TNG you might reasonably ask? Because clearly this was not a children's show. Maybe it was my father's contagious enthusiasm for the show and getting to share that with him, maybe it was being able to stay up and watch an adult show on television, or maybe I liked the uniforms and the pretty lights. I can't honestly be sure what drew me to it. What I can tell you going back and watching those early episodes is that I wasn't absorbing anything of what was really going on. As an adult, I can watch the beginning of TNG with only vague feelings of deja vu. There are a few things I remember with crystal clarity. I clearly remember being upset when they killed Tasha Yar. I remember being in love with Wesley Crusher. Not because he was so cute, I was five for the love of goodness, but because he was the character I could relate to. I loved Wesley, not because of anything Wesley did, but because I knew if I were on a space ship, I would have been like Wesley Crusher. In my defense, I was five and Wesley didn't seem anywhere near as whiny and annoying as he does watching the show now. But, even more than Wesley I loved Geordi LaForge and Data. Geordi may have had something to do with his outstanding eyeware and his soothing voice. Data was clearly just a robot child. Look at the professions of these two men on the Enterprise-- Chief Engineer and Head Science Officer, this will become a trend for me. Almost without fail on every single Star Trek series there is, my two favorite characters will be the Chief Engineer and the Head Science Officer. Who knows, perhaps this was where my lifelong love of math and science started. I think it is safe to say that this is where my lifelong love of science fiction started. The show grew and so did I. More and more I began to understand the stories, learn to love the characters, and gain a growing obsession with the show. As my adolescence started so did Star Trek Deep Space Nine. By this time I am eleven years and old enough to have hormones. My first big actor crush happens with Deep Space Nine. I am absolutely, completely over the moon for Dr. Julian Bashir, not the actor mind you, the character. Yes, the actor is cute and that certainly played a contributing part to it, but it's the intelligence, the enthusiasm and the character's desire to help everyone that I find compelling. Later they will bugger some of this up with genetic enhancement story lines and other dreck but initially I'm hooked. DS9 was different from TNG in a lot of ways that made it the perfect Star Trek for an early adolescent. TNG was generally bright and feel good. DS9 was dark and broody and oh my GOD the ANGST. Whereas on TNG everyone generally got along and was pretty friendly to one another on board the ship, in DS9 they bicker and occasionally backstab. It's a soap opera in space, and a melodramatic one at that. Like I said, perfect for a teenager. I suppose this brings me up to thirteen years old and Voyager coming onto television. I never watched much of Voyager beyond the first season. Mostly what I remember is that Voyager was ground breaking in that both the Captain and the Chief Engineer were women. I remember being very happy that there was a woman on the bridge giving orders and a woman down in engineering fixing the ship. I also remember being really annoyed several years later when they threw in the sexy Borg for ratings. But really, it's Voyager, I can't really get myself too worked up for too long over it. Enterprise came along when I was in college and it was an interesting look at the history of the universe and the beginning of the Federation, but by that time I was so busy studying to be a chemical engineer and being part of my college science fiction committee that I didn't really have the time or energy to properly invest in it. In many ways, I'm sad about this because it looked to have so much promise. In the last seven years, there has been little new Star Trek. There was the outstanding J.J. Abrams reboot of the Original Series. Yes, I know many of my diehard Trekkie compatriots think that that movie is foul and besmirches the name of Star Trek. I find their nerd rage endearing. Maybe it is the fact that I'm also a comic book fan but don't find the idea of a reboot with the same characters abhorrent No, it isn't the same as what came before in TOS, but it isn't meant to be and it would be boring it they tried to duplicate the original Star Trek. In the time that Star Trek has disappeared from weekly television, several other space operas have come to take its place. Some of these shows are even better than Star Trek, like Farscape and Battlestar Galactica. Star Trek is not good science fiction, but it's generally fun science fiction. The thing with Star Trek is that it is typically not deep, the aliens aren't terribly alien in appearance or mannerisms, and very rarely are you actually going to kill someone who isn't wearing a Red Shirt. In short, Star Trek is the fluffy bunny fairytale version of people in spaceships. It's cheesy, everyone gets along for the most part, and at the end of the day you know that the Federation will protect what is right. Star Trek is the comfort food version of TV science fiction. The year is 2011. I am twenty-nine years old, and it has been way too long since there was my preferred brand of comfort food science fiction on television.

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