Memory and Truth

Although it has been close to fifty years, I can still remember the first episode of Star Trek I saw. It was called The Man Trap -- later titled by James Blish for his adaptation "The Unreal McCoy." Though I was an avid fan of the series for most of my high school years, as I grew older, I edged away from it. The movies especially made me pause. Most of the spin-offs have also fallen short of their potential for several reasons: flat writing; uninspired plots; mediocre acting. These things might be endemic to the genre of commercial television itself, but that's for some future diatribe; I have other fish to fry right now, specifically the latest movies.

Recently, I checked out of the library 2009's Star Trek (not to be confused with 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture). It is a reboot of the series, meaning the creative staff (producers, directors, writers, actors, and, though largely unacknowledged, viewers) can make what they will of the original story. And what they made of it would induce a Vulcan to weep. My peeves include:

Destruction of the planet Romulus -- the main problem with this thin plot device is that the planet absolutely exists throughout the original TV series (which, shudder-inducing though it may be, I hold as canon and unchangeable) as well as several of the subsequent movies;

Destruction of the planet Vulcan -- see above;

The death of Spock's mother, Amanda -- throughout the original series, much was made of Amanda's influence on her son. The fact that in the movie she was so cavalierly thrown off a cliff in mid-transport says much about the producers lack of understanding of Spock's character. He needs Amanda as a balance against his father. Spock simply would not be Spock without her;

Captain Pike -- in the original pilot for the TV series, Pike captained the Enterprise for several years with a sturdy female Number One as first officer and a laughing Spock as science officer. The accident which confined him to a wheelchair (however updated) happened much later in his career;

Parallel universes -- as an explanation of the discrepancies and of how the "original" Spock could interact with this abomination, the artifice is akin to using dreams to justify all manner of plot shortcomings, and is just as repugnant.

All in all, I felt the new version to be both unnecessary and out-of-touch with all the things that made the original even as moderately compelling as it was at the time. Such cavalier revisionism does, however, bring up a point: Though the past might seem immutable, history is only as solid as social perception and as lasting as the crowd's memory.