Have you ever heard of Top Gear? I hadn’t…until I moved to Ireland. It takes a boring and formulaic TV format and makes it wonderful by testing supercars and putting its hosts through challenges, like driving a 1000 pound (as in price) car across the desert, or having them build their own aqua-cars. Here’s a clip.
The comments on the November 2 post “The Canon” began to get into the idea of a ‘tiered’ Canon. This brought to mind something I read recently about Star Trek (you’ll start to think I’m a bigger fan than the casual one that I am). Apparently they’re filming a new Star Trek movie that takes place sometime before the original series, but well after the Enterprise series. The page I was reading noted that it would address an era never before explored in a ‘canonical’ work. I guess I was always aware of how deeply some people get into Star Trek, but I was never before aware that are different levels of ‘canonicity’ that pertain to various Star Trek ‘texts.’ The series and movies, and I guess some books are considered ‘canonical.’ Other Star Trek books, novels, memorabilia and so on might be edifying reading, but are non-canonical. There is also a body of literature and so on produced by fans on their own called ‘the fanon.’ This is of course purely apocryphal.
I was very interested by how the Star Trek fan base in governing their ‘canon’ has fallen into patters so analogous to the patters the church has used in treating its own Scriptures.
If you’re like me, you grew up with regular doses of Star Trek in its various incarnations feeding your imagination. It was one of the only thoughtful shows on for a lot of those years, and despite the utter cheesiness I still enjoy catching the odd episode when I get a chance. When I was studying literature at University one of Prof noted that he thought Star Trek was a pretty good bell weather for public philosophical and religious tendencies. In the original 60’s series pretty well everything had a scientific rational explanation. In The Next Generation there was some events and characters (Q) that operated outside the realm of human understanding, when DS9 and Voyager came along these became more regular. These were also religious themes, especially around the planet Bajor.
It’s come to my mind that Spock represents what went wrong with the Modernism. There can never be a Spock. Reason and logic don’t work in the way they are often imagined to. I wonder what a post-modern Star Trek would do with a character like Spock?
